Revy woke up in her old room, the one she had long before that crummy apartment behind Dutch's equally crummy office. Someone was pounding on the door. She listened to the rhythmic drumming until it became just another background noise, like the drone of cicadas or the whoosh of the air conditioning.
Revy closed her eyes.
"The boss needs you," the door-pounder shouted over the steady pulse of knocks.
There was a time when those words would have propelled her out of bed with eager-beaver anticipation. She would fling on her clothes and sail over to Chang's office on the seventh floor with a big, cheesy grin smeared all over her face.
Today, Revy dropped a hand over the edge of the bed, groped around until she found a boot, and slung it at the door, where it collided with a hollow whack.
The pounding stopped, and the shadow under her door drew back and disappeared. Whoever it was probably knew that she would blast a few rounds through the wood if the boot didn't do the trick.
Revy stuck out her feet until gravity took over and dragged her legs over the side of the mattress. She sat up and fumbled for the pills on the nightstand without bothering to rub the sleep from her eyes first. She could swallow the whole fistful of them without the help of a chaser.
She tugged on the new clothes next. They were a present from Chang. He had outfitted her with all new gear as soon as he had picked her up from the Lagoon office three weeks ago: new double-holster shoulder harness, new pants, new tight-fitted shirt, new shiny pair of boots, all black.
The last time Chang had taken her shopping was right after he had sprung her from prison. After he paid off enough officials to get her released, Chang had the driver take them down to the shopping district where he let Revy pick out a couple of nice things to replace her ragged prison clothes. It was funny; all those years of shoplifting had left her without any knowledge of how to shop. There were so many choices, and everything looked too shiny to be hers. Revy ended up with the same outfit that she had seen on a mannequin: designer jeans with a matching black top. Respectable and normal and more than a little boring, but Revy hadn't cared because someone was being nice to her, really and honestly nice, and when she had left the store in the new outfit matched with a pretty ponytail for her long hair, no one looked at her with open disgust anymore.
"Don't open your mouth, and people might start thinking that you're a good girl," Chang had teased.
Of course, reality had to come barreling in to take that away from her, too. A month's worth of regular meals that she didn't have to pry from a swarm of filthy hands made her new clothes too small. She had to slice them up to keep wearing them. The jeans became cut-off shorts. A midriff baring tank grew out of the modest black shirt.
If Chang had noticed the change, he didn't seem to care. Whenever he looked up at her from his sleek modern desk in that oversized and oh-so-bright office, Revy always felt like he was looking into her instead of at her.
Today was the same. She walked into the office, and the girl she saw reflected back to her in the glassy shine of his sunglasses looked brittle and faraway, like a doll in some distant shop window. Her stomach kneaded the wad of pills inside of her. Chang frowned.
"Can you be ready to go now?" he asked.
She nodded while the killer in her stirred and awoke. It stretched out and filled her. Its fingers slipped into hers. Its heels pressed down into the boots on her feet. It stole the air she breathed.
"Good. Let's move." Chang turned in his sleek swivel chair, stood up, and pulled his omnipresent overcoat around him.
Revy the killer waited impatiently as he crossed the room before following him out the door.
The line of black cars snaked through the throng of traffic in Roanapur's midday bustle. From her window seat, Revy watched the people deliberately look away as they passed. Even the pair of uniformed police officers in the squad car parked down by the open air market bowed their heads as if suddenly absorbed by something on their dashboard.
Only a street kid in a stretched out t-shirt that hung past its bony knees and slipped off one shoulder dared to stare directly at them. Revy watched as the dirt-smeared thing solemnly raised a Polaroid camera to its sallow eye. The bulb flashed. The machine pushed out the developing photo from its thin mouth like a flattened tongue.
Even Revy the killer could remember being that kid- the raw ache of hunger tugging on your insides and the stench of yourself always under your nose.
As bad as the streets had been, prison was worse because, on the inside, you couldn't even swipe something to buy a real meal or a hot shower. Everyone was just like you. Revy had counted over five hundred women and girls all locked down in the same squalid array of bunkers where you had to sleep in standing water during the rainy season. Even a small sentence of five years was enough to kill you by malnutrition or disease.
Prison had been hell. Revy would still be there, picking lice from her hair for one murder that wasn't her fault, if Chang hadn't decided that letting a gutter-trash street kid piss away time in a Thai jail for his problem was too great of an injustice. Revy never much believed in words like 'justice' and 'honor,' and Chang claimed to agree with her on that point, but he sprang her for no other reason that Revy could discern. He had spent six months greasing the corruption machine to buy her freedom, and it wasn't like he could have predicted back then what she would become. She had been just some worthless backstreet rat then. When he got her out, she couldn't even shoot with both hands.
The line of Triad cars crept through the warehouse district. For one sick moment, the real Revy feared that they would stop in front of Dutch's place, but Revy the killer just stared out the car window with unblinking eyes. She didn't react at all when the lead car turned down a narrow gap between the sprawling buildings made of rusting corrugated metal and salt-eaten screws that lead away from the Lagoon office.
Since Chang had brought her back, Revy always rode in his car. Back in the old days, she used to drool over the honor of getting to ride shotgun for the Boss. She loved to see the jealousy burning up the insides of all the other guys, but now, Revy couldn't find a reason to get all excited about it. It wasn't like Chang ever talked to her while they rode or anything. He just sat there with a cigarette moving back and forth from his mouth to the cracked car window. He looked so much older than she remembered, and he didn't laugh like Dutch. He didn't crack jokes like Benny. He didn't scold her for living on pills and power drinks like Rock. When she was with Chang, Revy still felt lonely as hell.
Those thoughts were stupid, so Revy pushed them from her mind. Chang was Chang; nothing could touch that. This was what she wanted.
The car stopped. She opened the door and stepped into the day's heat.
Men in dark suits spilled out of other cars. Some of them moved immediately to defensive positions. Some headed toward the single, padlocked door in the warehouse while the normal ring of second-stringers made a loose ring around the Boss's car. Revy knew Chang still had absolute control over his personalized pair of handguns, but the code of the Triads demanded certain levels of protection for their leader.
"Kill them all. Make it clean and fast," Chang called out to her from the depths of the car.
"You got it," the killer in her replied.
Revy's stomach had processed her breakfast of pills during the ride over. She felt the tide of artificial energy rising in her blood. Her fingers itched to pull the trigger. She couldn't wait to paint the walls with blood. The darkness behind the door begged for her. Revy knew that no one else could hear its sigh-like song.
When she walked towards it, the Triad elite fell into step behind her.
Tommy Gui spat out a brick-red glob of betel juice. His Smith and Wesson dangled from his right hand.
Handsome Qin tossed his suit jacket on the hood of a Benz and rolled back his shoulders as he moved.
Shin-Shin sucked on his teeth and tittered something in Chinese in his creepy, girl-high, singsong voice.
Revy crossed her arms and drew our her guns. She aimed them both at the door's hinges and fired. The flimsy thing shuddered and collapsed inward. Revy kicked down the tattered remains and ducked into the dark.
Bullets came at her right away, and she answered in kind, even though she had to fire blindly while she waited for her eyes to adjust. She sidestepped the door to get out of the pool of light streaming in from outside.
Shin-Shin slithered in behind her and skittered along the wall to her right. He liked the close kill and the splash of hot blood on his hands. The terrified scream of a woman announced that he had found his first victim.
The insides of the warehouse swam into focus while she reloaded. Revy spotted a dozen or so men with guns crouched behind uneven stacks of crates. Another twenty unarmed guys were showcasing their asses as they ran from her toward the far end of the warehouse. Scores of women and children ran with the guys, and almost all of them looked like they weren't going to make it. A couple were already stumbling on weak legs and face-planting into the concrete. So this was the shipment of human cargo hauled in last night by the Cartel. Some kind of nasty puking disease had infected the lot of them on the long ship-ride over, and now the Colombians were keeping them quarantined until they could figure out what to do with a figurative fuck-ton of bruised fruit. That left a perfect window of opportunity to exact a little payback for what the Colombians had done to the 14K's last drug shipment out of the harbor.
Revy opted to keep her distance from the diseased bunch of terrified slaves. She dashed from pylon to pylon, using the support beams for cover while picking off the guards.
Behind her, she heard someone scream and looked back for long enough to see that Handsome Qin had taken a bullet in the thigh because the vain bastard stayed in the light of the door for too long.
Tommy Gui kicked at him in disgust as he pushed past and started to circle around to the left.
Revy licked her lips and grinned. Fine by her. Shin-Shin had already gone right, and that left her to barrel down the center. They could all meet up at the back and shoot any survivors in the back of the head.
The guns kicked in her hands again and again.
It never lasted long enough.
As soon as they got back to the office, some sort of emergency sucked Chang into another endless, boring meeting. Ever since she came back, Revy had the right to sit in on the talks with the Triad high-ups. She tried to pay attention once, but it left her twitching with boredom. She didn't bother with them anymore.
From what she could tell, the emergency was that a bunch of Triad guys had been jumped by Balalaika's boys, and now they were all dead, dead, dead. If the rumors were true, then this little massacre marked the first time since '93 that Hotel Moscow had killed without provocation or profit, killing for the sake of killing alone. It was the first posted sign of open war.
Revy passed groups of men huddled together like high school girls and whispering about it wasn't safe to go outside anymore. What a fucking joke. They should have seen it coming.
Revy collected the keys to the Jeep, dug up a couple boxes of bullets, and checked out a pager. There were too many chemicals jangling through her bloodstream to let her sleep, and when she wasn't sleeping, the only thing that Revy wanted to do was shoot. She turned the Jeep out of the underground parking lot and headed toward the unmarked dirt road that lead out to Chang's private shooting range.
She had earned her nickname on that field: Two Hands, the rightful protege of the Heavenly King. She liked to think about that perfect moment when Chang had smiled down on her because she had done everything just right.
"Nice work, Two Hands," he had beamed at her.
She would never forget it, not ever.
Of course, getting him to agree to teach her in the first place hadn't been easy.
She had been with him for nearly six weeks, which was just long enough for the worst damage from prison life to heal up and for the intensive round of antibiotics to run its course. She had brushed her hair that morning, and for once, the comb showed only the normal amount of hair loss instead of masses of rangy clumps. She remembered thinking that maybe Chang had a point about the value of fruits and veggies after all, so she hadn't complained about the mango that the cook put on the plate next to her beloved eggs and toast when she came downstairs to eat.
He had joined her at the table then, and Revy nearly lost her appetite because Chang never ate with her in the mornings. He never ate at all in the common room, and his unexpected presence meant nothing good for her. Revy hated herself at that moment. How could she have been so stupid to think that anything worth having would last for her?
"You can't stay. You know that," Chang told her over his steepled knuckles.
"Why not?" Revy challenged.
Chang narrowed his eyes at her over his sunglasses. Revy spooned the last of her eggs onto a nearly whole piece of toast and made an elaborate show of shoving it all into her mouth. She chewed and stared back until he broke down and smiled. Revy grinned back with a mouthful of eggy bits. Chang found her spunk amusing, and she had learned to use it against him.
"You know these aren't my rules. Look around, Revy. The Triads don't keep pets or women," Chang said.
"Well, just remember poor little Rebecca and give her dollar when you pass," Revy snarked. She crossed her arms over her chest and pouted.
"I never said that I was going to dump you back on the streets of Roanapur-" Change countered.
"Yeah, right."
"-even as tempting as you're making that option with your sulking," he continued.
Revy pushed around a mango slice on her plate while Chang watched on with patience.
"Sorry, Boss," she said at last.
"You need to watch that temper. You'll see no end of trouble if you don't," Chang warned.
Revy skewed a stack of mango on her fork and filled up her mouth before she could say anything stupid again. Her cheeks bulged out comically while she attempted to chew.
"What am I going to do with you?" Chang sighed. Instead of smiling again, he took off his shades and rubbed at his eyes.
Revy stopped chewing.
"I mean it. You can't stay here. I like you, but as a girl, you can't hang the blue lantern. I don't want to turn you out cold, so you need to tell me what you want. Whatever it is, I'll do my best to make that happen," Chang offered.
There were only two things in the world that Revy trusted and, consequently, desired: money and power. Her eyes glittered when she realized what she could ask of the mob king.
Chang leaned back in the chair, rightfully suspicious. "Don't push it. If you ask for something stupid like a million bucks, I'll let the boys dump you in the harbor."
"I want you to teach me how to shoot like you," she said with certainty.
Chang slid his chair away from the table and stood up. "Don't insult me. I told you that you can't stay. I offer you anything that you want, and you ask for this?"
"I'm serious!" Revy cried out. "Why not?"
Chang turned on her then with real anger, and Revy's heart dropped like a stone in the river. "Because you can't learn what I know in five years, or even ten. You are asking to stay when I told you that you can't." Chang shoved his sunglasses back on his face. "We're done here."
Desperation made her brave. Revy grabbed the sleeve of his overcoat before he could reach the door. Chang turned at her touch, and Revy found the barrel of his gun pressed to her throat. Fear froze every muscle but, somehow, her mouth still worked.
"Just give me two months," she breathed. "Just let me try. Please, Boss. I'm not jerking you around."
Chang took his gun from her neck, but the lines of his face did not soften. "Let's say that I believed you. The answer would still be no. Two months is a waste of time. I could tell if you had what it takes in a day."
"Fine. One day," Revy bargained.
Chang pushed out a long breath. "One day. Christ. Bad call, kid. I was prepared to give you twenty grand and a first class ticket to Sydney."
The next morning, Chang had his driver take them out to his secret firing range. He put a .45 in Revy's hands and challenged her to hit ten clay pigeons, each one set to fly from a trapper at varying angles. She missed the first three, hit five in total, and despaired. Then, he made her do it with her left hand. She only hit two.
Chang didn't say anything about it for the rest of the day. He cooly trained her from his lawn chair in the shade: adjusting her stance, tweaking with her grip, offering pointers on her aim. He worked her until the sun set.
On the way back in the Jeep, he lit a cigarette and offered her one, which she took. They smoked as they bounced along the rough road back to the main street. It all felt so much like good-bye that Revy could have cried.
"You know that very few people can hit even one out of ten," Chang said at last.
"So I did good?" Revy blurt out.
Chang sucked hard on his cigarette. "Yeah. Way too fucking good. And you got better as the day went on."
He tipped his head back to the stars. Revy held her breath.
"Two months," he said at last.
Revy whooped so loudly that the driver nearly plowed into a tree in surprise.
After that, Revy trained every day from the first moment that dawn made the world light until dusk swallowed the targets in the gloom. Chang came out to help her when he could, but his work kept him so busy that he eventually broke down and hired a Malaysian gunslinger named Row to tutor her.
Row worked with her for nearly two months. He couldn't help her with the use of both hands at once, but he worked her through most of the problems with her weaker left side. Still, he wasn't the Heavenly King, and Revy found it hard to respect him as much as her master. Revy tried not to complain lest Chang remember that the expiration date on their deal was almost up.
At the end of a normal Saturday's training, Row asked her to try for one more round. When Revy turned away from him to reload, he caught her upside the head with the butt of a rifle. He was on her in an instance with his hand snaking into her shorts.
She came back that night with a split lip and a huge lump just over her right ear. Row didn't come back at all. Chang took her out for pizza and set her up with a personal combat instructor the next morning. Her new trainer was built like a Hollywood hunk and had a thing for Madonna and Filipino boys. Revy liked him well enough, but she liked that Chang had taken over her handgun training at the range even more.
Weeks passed. Six months, then eight.
Revy overheard Chang raise his voice during a meeting behind closed doors. She had been waiting outside of his office to tell him about how she mastered the triple rabbit challenge that he had taught her.
"The girl was born to kill," Revy had heard Chang say in English. "She's an asset. Surely, you can see that."
The conversation slipped back into Chinese so she could understand the rest, but the voices were loud and gruff. Chang had told her that the Triads didn't keep pets or women, but that wasn't exactly true. She had crept back to her room and lain awake all night to come up with her desperate plan to make Chang keep her around for good.
"And that's when shit went bad," Revy muttered to no one. She shook her head. Thinking about the past was pointless. In the present, she just wanted to shoot.
She parked the Jeep and made her favorite area ready in minutes. Drawing her guns, she mashed her boot down on four random buttons. Four clay pigeons took to the sky at the same time, and she made each one explode into rumble. She pressed and fired all afternoon. By the time it was too dark to see, Revy couldn't take a step with crunching broken clay fragments underfoot.
The pills were wearing off, and her exhaustion returned. She must have looked like just another drunk fuck on the drive back. All she wanted to do was pound a protein shake and crawl into bed. The pager had stayed silent all day, but Chang might still have another job lined up when she got back. If that happened, she would have to dose up again. She had stayed up for three days in a row last week, and if the rumors about Hotel Moscow's thirst for blood were good and true, she might need to hit the harder stuff to keep going.
Revy yawned and tried to keep the Jeep on the road.
She had almost turned into the garage when she spotted a familiar classic car parked outside of the Triads' office. Revy slowed down just in time to see Rock, who looked tired as shit, walk out the front door.
Revy leaned on the horn and laughed when he literally jumped in surprise.
"You come by to visit me? That's sweet, Rocky baby," she said too loudly because she knew it wasn't the truth. She had turned her back on Lagoon when Chang asked for her, so that was the end of that. Dutch might not take it personally, but she didn't expect to be welcomed back, even if she wanted to go back, which she didn't, not really.
And Rock? Rock would never get why she did the things that she did. Hell, she didn't understand herself on most days.
Even knowing that, Revy swung the Jeep up by the curb and hopped out with the motor still running.
"C'mon, Rock!" she called out. "You could at least say 'hey'. Did you forget me already?"
Rock paused to squint at her through eyes so black-rimmed with sleep deprivation that he hardly looked human.
"Revy?" he asked at last.
"Yeah, who the fuck else would it be?" Revy shot back.
"How have you been?" Rock asked carefully.
Revy shrugged. "Can't complain." She tipped her head toward the building. "Why are you here?"
"I had a meeting with Chang."
"About a job?"
"Well, no," Rock answered uncomfortably.
Revy smirked. She knew this guy all too well. "So which poor, helpless victim are you trying to save this time?"
He looked at her with that guileless, open face.
"You," he said.
Revy's mind shorted out like bad wiring. For a moment, she couldn't think straight, but then Rock winced like he was afraid that she would hit him. When she realized what he was doing, she thought that punching him right in his stupid mouth sounded like the best idea ever, but she didn't do it. Revy was tired and didn't feel like explaining to the Boss why she decided to start shit in front of his office. She turned back to the Jeep.
"Fuck off, boy scout. Maybe some people don't need your help. Ever stop to think of that?" she snarled over her shoulder.
"Do you ever stop to think that there are people in this world who care about you, Revy?" Rock yelled after her. His voice cracked with fatigue. "Do you have any idea what it felt like to watch you leave?"
Revy spun around. "What the hell? What's the big fucking deal, Rock? I worked for Dutch. Now I work for Chang. I'm a hired killer, baby, and people hire me to kill. It's who I am."
Rock stood his ground. "You're wrong. You're not just some killer. You've never been a killer to me."
"What's that shit supposed to mean?" Revy growled.
Rock looked her right in the eyes. "It means that I love you, Revy, and I am going to make you see that there's another way for you, whether you want it or not."
Revy searched Rock's face for the lie, but she couldn't find it.
And then everything stopped working. Her brain, her heart, her two hands, her tongue: all of it just stopped. Maybe it was the drugs finally giving out. Maybe it was the way that he had said it, lacing that "I love you" with so much pent-up rage that it sounded like an insult. Either way, his words left her frozen in place like a stopped clocked while she watched Rock storm over to Benny's car and drive away.
A/N at unkeptsecret(dot)insanejournal(dot)com(slash!)7663
Oh, and if you think Revy is going to let this one slide, then you don't know Revy. Poor Rock.