When One Dies
There was a grave. That was all he could see. He focused on the grave. His calculating blue eyes stared blankly at the earth, the dull brown earth that lay in a perfect rectangle in front of the headstone, not a blade of grass present amongst the drab colours. There was no mould on the cold marble gravestone, which shone with a stark light in the gathering dark. He knelt down quickly, and saw rather than felt himself place a single yellow rose onto the fresh brown earth. He never missed a detail. She had loved roses.
She had loved roses. She had loved roses and coffee and freshly-mown grass and the smell of gun-polish, and toast in the mornings and trees and clouds and teasing Rude and laughter and the soft click of her gun as she had flicked off the safety catch.
She had loved red hair and sunglasses and business suits and climbing and smiling and witty remarks and her job and people, and being alive. All these things that she had loved that she would never love again.
She had loved so many things.
He didn't know how she could have had this job and still be able to love. But she had. She had loved the sound of paper, of people working. She had loved the silky metal gleam of her gun. She had loved the building. And she had loved the people in it. She had cared for them and screamed when they were shot and cried when they were hurt and fixed their wounds when they were bleeding. And she had always been there when they had killed someone.
Once he had found her by a hospital bed. It shouldn't have been anything special; a pale blue sheet, a faded cream pillow, the dim metal of the machines. It shouldn't have been anyone special. Just another man in a blue suit, another co-worker, another boss. But he hadn't been… and they had all known that. He had been a friend. And yet she was the only one that had cried when he was hurt.
"What are you doing?" he had asked her.
"Watching." She had replied evenly.
"Watching what?"
"The blood."
"Why?"
"So he can know that I love him."
"You love him?"
"As I love you."
"Why?"
To that question she had smiled, her blue eyes sparkling against the bleak white equipment that surrounded them. She didn't need him to specify what he meant. She already knew. 'Why do you love him? Why can you just sit there if you loved him? Why are you a Turk if you can love?'
And he didn't need her to answer, not really. That smile was enough, that sweet, sad, innocent smile shining out from her beautiful face was enough. That smile made him realise that maybe he didn't need to know. Maybe she loved to cope.
He joked to cope, lived each day as though it were game in order to forget the faces. The pale faces that had haunted him before he had learnt to joke, stealing into his dreams and cloaking his sleep in unmentionable fear. The faces of all the people he had killed. The faces of the people who would be killed in the future. The faces of his co-workers… Rude… the people he cared about, dead. All dead. A Turk has many enemies, after all. A Turk never reaches old age, after all.
He had joked to forget the faces. She had loved to remember them.
The faces had haunted them both; the guilt that burnt in their guts from every bullet they had ever fired… yet eventually for him, the guilt had grown less. He had stopped thinking 'what if' and 'but'. People had ceased to be people and become walking talking bullseyes. The joking became less of a way to cope with the faces and more of a way to conceal what he had become. A true Turk. A perfect killing machine.
She had seen through that, of course. She had always been able to pick out the little details, just like him. And yet she had never stopped loving. She had never stopped killing and she had never stopped loving and she had never stopped trusting him.
She was so innocent, and yet so scarred like all of them. She was like a breath of sunlight. And that was why he loved her. Why they had all loved her. Because even though she was a Turk, even though she could kill and even though she could take mothers from their children and even though she could torture without mercy, she had never stopped loving them.
Even the dull brown rectangle of earth and the clean white marble of the gravestone still couldn't quite make him believe that she was gone. One gunshot, that's all it had taken. A single gunshot from a single assassin… they had all been assassins at one point or other, they had just never really understood what it meant… a single gunshot from a single assassin, was all it had taken to snuff out the only true ray of sunlight that any of them had ever felt. No-one had ever loved a Turk. No-one could. No-one except another Turk. No-one except her.
He missed her.
Even though a Turk should never miss anyone, he missed her. Because if anyone had held them all together, had kept them alive and a team through everything, more than him or Rude or even Tseng… it had been her. Her and her soft, unconditional, merciless love. And when that had died, they had all died too. That's what had happened when she died. They had died too.
That's why as he looked down onto the single yellow rose lying on the dull brown earth, he didn't see a flower. He saw warm blue eyes and sunny blond hair and a small, wry, loving smile. It was why, as the rain steadily began to fall onto the white marble… even though a Turk should never love and never cry, he felt a solitary tear trace its way down his cheek to join the rain on the ground. All his jokes were gone, swallowed with the rain into the dull brown earth.
But because he was a Turk, no-one would ever know. He would carry on working and talking and joking and drinking coffee and killing just as he had done since forever, and when he died he would be given a grave and a pure white, blank marble gravestone just like the one he stood before now, and he would be forgotten like the thousands before him. Turk gravestones never had an inscription. They didn't need one. No Rest In Peace, no name, no message. A Turk needed no name. A Turk shouldn't cry, a Turk shouldn't love and a Turk shouldn't miss anyone enough for them to need a name.
He leaned forward and flicked out a pocket knife from somewhere inside his blue suit. His crystal blue eyes were clear again and almost expressionless as he inscribed words onto the gravestone with the knife.
Elena
Flower of the Turks
Thank you
He stood, replacing the knife slowly back into the suit. He found an almost-solace in the roughly carved words… a closure. For a moment he stood still in the rain, looking at the marble gravestone and the yellow rose sparkling with raindrops. He could almost picture her now, spinning with laughter in the rain, her blond hair flying, smiling delightedly at the way the fat raindrops slid down the marble and landed on the flower below. She would've loved the way the rose sparkled in the dim light…
No. She was dead.
Closing his eyes, he turned away from the grave and walked slowly away through the rain.
She was dead. She had been dead for over three months. So had he.