Tested
Disclaimer: Characters and Premise are borrowed from the Marvel, I'm not making any money.
Part 3
Backpack secured between her shoulder blades hanging heavily with the weight of the rifle it contained, Belle slipped quietly from the hotel, glad she was almost done with this. Nothing had changed in the charade of a tour and she was sick of quietly accepting all the slights poor little knocked up Becca endured. Four more days, three more sights then they'd get on a boat and sail back to Florida for the tour's grand finale. Belle planned on spending the whole voyage in her room being seasick.
But first there was one little thing she had to do, the whole reason for this two week exercise in misery that was the cause of her and Remy's first real fight as a couple. Belle wanted to think that the fight was just because she'd left for this assignment barely twelve hours after they'd wed. Or maybe because Remy was planning on being annoyingly and sweetly over protective while she was pregnant. The timing had been rotten, Belle knew that, but if she'd let this chance pass her by it might have been months before the next suitable contract came along, then her pregnancy really might have been an issue and she'd have had to wait until the baby was born. Julien had been fourteen when he completed his first Assassination and became a full Guild member rather than just an apprentice.
Two weeks of traveling undercover and the whole reason for all the bother would be done with in a matter of hours. A brisk walk across a strange town, fifteen minute to a half an hour spent sitting in an condemned apartment building, a matter of seconds in which the trigger was pulled and a man died, then another brisk walk with a small detour to get rid of the evidence and it would all be over, it seemed almost anticlimactic now that the day was here.
After walking a little more than three blocks Belle knew she was being followed and thought the day might just turn out more exciting than she'd anticipated. Belle slipped between two men walking in front of her, while their bodies shielded her from view she quickly dodged into an alley and waited for the brisk, tapping footsteps she'd heard behind her since leaving the hotel. Upon hearing them Belle stepped out of the alley and found herself confronting Mindy White.
"What do you want?" Belle demanded defensively.
"Are you all right, Becca?" Mindy asked.
"Why are you following me?" Belle pressed.
"I wasn't following you," Mindy insisted. "But you seem... tense... if there's anything I could do to help?"
"Mindin' your own business be a start," Belle snapped, a trace of her accent slipping into her speech, her fingers brushing over the hilt of the knife hidden in the small of her back.
Mindy backed off.
Belle altered her path to pass through a busy market just to make sure the other woman lost her trail then continued on to her target's appointment with destiny.
****** ****** ******
"She ditched me," Mindy said slumping on her bed in the hotel room she shared with Jane Donis. She flicked off a device on her belt and 'Mindy's bland, unassuming appearance morphed into Vertigo's green and white locks and lithe, seductive figure.
Her purple haired companion glanced up from her laptop. "Don't worry about it, we received an update from Candra's people; she's not getting an abortion, she's just here to kill someone."
"Anyone worth killing?" Vertigo asked curiously.
"They're all worth killing if you're getting paid for it," Archlight replied. "Ten thou for an easy hit. God freelance looks good right now, why do we put up with all of Sinister's stupid rules?"
"The benefit package," Vertigo deadpanned. "The one where he doesn't cut us up for curiosity's sake as long as we stay useful."
"I still say if he wants this kid so bad we should just snatch the chit and let her have it in his labs," Archlight replied.
"Not to his face you don't," Vertigo said.
"Can't he ever do anything straight forward?" Archlight continued ignoring Vertigo.
"He doesn't want to disrupt them," Vertigo sighed. "He nearly had an orgasm when he started playing models of what might happen when you combine their DNA. Sinister doesn't want to do anything that might keep the street rat and the little assassin from having lots of babies."
"So Gambit gets off scot free for blowing the lab, making us chase him all over the country and getting all of us killed at least once," Archlight complained. "I hate it when Sinister plays favorites."
"I can live quite happily without being his favorite," Vertigo said. "Hell, I could be ecstatic about him forgetting I even exist. Do you think Scalphunter and Harpooner are happy where ever Xavier stuck them?"
"Living some goody-two shoes, dull as dirt lives like he had Magneto doing?" Archlight said. "Yeah, probably."
****** ****** ******
Remy watched intently as Henri demonstrated a new technique. A few moments later Henri reset the mock-up of the security system and let Remy try.
The russet haired teen smoothly and perfectly duplicated Henri's actions. The second time through Remy integrated an older lesson into the new scenario and shaved two seconds off Henri's best time for deactivating the alarm. By the fifth repetition he was getting bored with the whole thing.
Remy wondered if he were starting to show evidence of the promise Essex always claimed to see him. During the last week's stay in Europe with Henri spent getting ready for their big job, everything had just been coming to him so easily. Years of picking pockets had made his hands quick, deft and steady, skills that translated effortlessly into picking locks, over-riding security systems and cracking safes.
His mind was clear and focused. He remembered everything and saw the connections between dis-separate lessons without prompting. He had never been more focused, not even with Essex when he'd studied as if his life depended on it because maybe it had and worse yet if he'd disappointed his teacher he'd been afraid Essex would throw him out.
Of course there was an alternate motive for Remy's intent focus on his studies this time as well: As long as his mind was occupied it didn't stray into forbidden territory. The X-Men, Scott, Logan, those thoughts could easily send him spinning into fury and leave him choking with grief. Essex had always told him the centers of his power and emotions were closely linked. Almost every morning he woke up to blissful denial that was soon shattered by the cold hard light of day and just as often the violent, frightening lapses in his control over his growing powers would send him scrabbling for his crystal. He'd never meditated so regularly or with such determination before in his life.
During the years he spent with Essex the meditation exercise he'd been taught had always been a last resort, something in him had always balked at the thought of cutting himself off from his emotions. He'd learned, first to channel the power his emotions raised into useful or at least harmless avenues. Later he'd learned to channel the emotions themselves until only frustration or helplessness could trigger random explosions and even with those the uncontrolled bursts of power generally carried away enough of the feelings to leave him clear headed and able to plan.
Now he just wanted the hurting to stop. Before Scott he'd never even had a close friend to loose, now he wasn't sure he wanted to risk having another... Except he already had them, and a wife and a child.
He should have killed Julien when the opportunity presented itself... only what if it made someone else feel the way he was feeling?
With a snap Remy yanked his attention back to the task at hand. Boring or not, repetitive or not it was better than thinking. He buried his mind in the intricacies of pressure pads and alarmed glass, looking for anything that might have been missed that would make the exercise more absorbing, letting the sudden surge in his power drain back into his blood.
****** ****** ******
Belle settled herself in a third story apartment across the square and somewhat above the balcony where the local big fish ate his breakfast every morning. In the larger scheme of things he was no one of consequence, corrupt politicians were almost as common as flies. This one had ambitions of moving up the ladder, of becoming a smaller fish in a somewhat bigger pond, he'd have learned quickly enough that he was better off where he was, but the other big fish in the neighboring ponds didn't appreciate his methods of moving up in the world, and so they'd hired her to get rid of him and make an example.
He was a worthless bit of scum, no one that anyone would miss and in under a month he'd be replaced by some other bit of scum and the world would keep on turning. It didn't matter at all.
Belle knew her best friend Delores would have been appalled. She took her studies as a healer and doctor seriously and would never take a life except to protect friends and family. Delores had grown up knowing what her family did, but she didn't let them talk about it in front of her anymore and somehow that made it possible for her to live with the situation. Belle wondered if Remy was going to have to learn to be similarly blind, because she worried that their fight had been less about the timing of her assignment than it had been about what she was going to do while she was gone.
Belle shook back her hair with an irritated twitch of her head, none of that was important right now. This was her first solo job, not the time or place for these thoughts.
She pulled a narrow case from her backpack, snapped open the lid and expertly assembled the high-powered rifle securely packed inside.
At home the Guilds cloaked themselves in anachronisms and mysticism, on the job they were totally modern professionals. It was a misdirection of sorts, anyone who stumbled on the Guild would be unlikely to connect them the high tech, often high profile assassinations they actually were responsible for.
"An' it's nice," Belle thought. "Havin' our own world to come home to." They existed in society as smoke and shadows, not a part of it, barely believed in. It would have been hard not having their own community where people didn't think what they did was wrong. Acknowledging they were set apart with their rituals and lifestyle was better. Maybe that was the problem with Remy. He hadn't grown up in the Guilds, had been hanging out with heroes no less, and look what sort of trouble that got him in. Of course the Thieves always had been odd about killing, worse than Delores in their own way. Thieves didn't kill on the job, period. In a fight they'd do what they felt they had to, when it was personal maybe, never because it would have been convient. Maybe she would have been better off with an Assassin, but she couldn't picture it, she'd been engaged in fierce competition with all the Assassin-boys practically since she could walk, most of them were at least a little scared of her.
"Get your mind on what yo' be doing femme," Belle softly reprimanded herself, sighting through the scope and aiming at the balcony where her target was scheduled to appear. Their employers wanted this one public, Belle had heard her daddy complaining about political assassinations since she'd been old enough to pay attention, now she suddenly understood why. If it had been personal, if they'd just wanted the guy dead she'd have had the freedom to do something quiet, but no this was about politics and it had to be loud, public and messy.
Belle couldn't help but worry things between her and Remy would change after this, after she was a fully ranked Guild Assassin, after she pulled the trigger instead of just coming along for the ride. He kept saying how he wanted everything to stay like it had been but she'd didn't think he was talking about them so much, because things weren't the same. Remy wasn't the same.
"Not now," Belle told herself. Then there was movement behind the glass door and suddenly everything in Belladonna's mind crystallized. Her thoughts were as cold, clear, hard, and sharp as cut diamonds. There was nothing but her, the target and the distance between them. She'd spent a lifetime training for this moment. The target opened the door and stepped out on to the balcony, stretching in the warm sunlight before sitting at the table where his servants had set out his breakfast a few minutes earlier.
Belle's gloved finger squeezed gently on the trigger, she watched through the scope as a splotch of red blossomed on the target's chest and he sank to the ground. Then she disassembled the rifle, packed it back in it's case, walked out the back door of the house and to the edge of the sewage canal that ran behind it then tossed the case into the stinking mire. She discard her gloves in an alley several blocks later and headed back to her hotel room to rejoin her tour group just in time to see the local Aztec Pyramid.
Belle felt numb, disconnected from the world as she listened to a the tourists babbling about sore muscles, ancient wonders and what they were having for dinner that night. It didn't seem real, even when the conversation inevitably turned to the assassination earlier that day. They were all properly shocked and horrified and a little worried about repercussions naturally, but they didn't really feel that the death of a local power-monger with big plans for his neighbors had anything to do with them.
Belle wondered if she should be afraid of getting caught, it seemed like borrowing trouble. Everything had gone off without a hitch after all. The man was dead, by her hand, everyone around her would have been horrified of what she'd done. Their disapproval of her pregnancy would have been totally forgotten if they'd known. Teen-pregnancies might be wrong in their eyes but they were a part of the world they lived in, people that coolly, emotionlessly killed others to make their living weren't. If they'd known they would have drawn back from her, stared at her like she was some kind of monster. There would have been none of their pity or condemnation or disapprove, they would have been afraid of her.
Belle wanted to go home, she wanted to hear her father's praise for a job well done and be inducted as a Guild Assassin, to be surrounded by people who knew exactly what she'd done and who approved of it. She planned on avoiding Delores for maybe a week or two just in case there was any awkwardness. She planned on ambushing Remy somewhere dark, secluded but not really private and proving to him that absolutely nothing between them had changed not because of the marriage, or the baby, or the stuff with his X-Men, or because of this.
The next morning Belle was more than ready to move on to the next city on the tour group's itinerary. Every day, every stop would be taking her one step closer to her daddy, her Guild, her lover and her friends.
She was waiting in the lobby with Clarice, Jim and their two boisterous children when the soldiers came. Belle watched them, her expression innocently confused and a little fearful. "A sheltered, young femme from de States shouldn' be overly comfortable wid armed soldiers stormin' her hotel, even if she's done rien to interes' dem," Belle told herself.
The couple from Minnesota gathered their boys close and shrank nervously against the back wall. The unit's field commander quickly scanned the lobby and started straight for Belle.
The young Assassin was so shocked at the failure of her cover that she didn't even react until his handcuffs were already around one wrist, then she twisted in his grasp, a knife falling into her hand with a gesture so smooth it looked like magic. The sharpened steel slid through his Kevlar vest and into his heart with negligible resistance. Belle took the pistol from his dead hand, holding the body before her as a shield and opened fire on the other soldiers. In the background she was dimly aware that Clarice was shrieking, high shocked wails of simple incomprehension as her nice predictable world shattered into a bloody war zone.
Remembering the bulletproof vests Belle aimed high, blowing the brains out of two soldiers caught unaware by the sudden turn of the tables before they could dive for cover. She dropped their commanding officer's body and sprinted for the stairs. Without fear of being anticipated she shot out the lock on the door to the roof. The high road had always been her friend in New Orleans. And ran directly into the arms of another squad of soldiers.
Belle fought using every weapon and dirty trick she knew, but in the end her small, sixteen-year-old body was simply not capable of taking out half a dozen grown men, well trained in violence themselves, in close quarters combat.
Bruised and battered Belle growled threats of bloody retribution as she was forced to the ground, as her arms were twisted behind her and the handcuffs locked in place. One of the men, bleeding heavily from a smashed nose, kicked Belle viciously in the side with his heavy steel-toed boot. She screamed as the pain of something breaking coursed through her body and passed out.
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