Chapter 2

Many considered themselves to be well past the danger after more than ten miles separated them from a neutralized target, but Gin did not count himself among their number. He kept pace with the flow of the street market's crowds, maintaining a distractible air that allowed him to remain entirely aware of his surroundings. He considered the wares of close to a dozen stalls, and carefully selected a fair bit more unbruised fruit than he would have time to eat before his unit pulled him out of this country. He bartered lazily and accepted a higher price than he thought a local would think fair before rejoining the crowd. All the while his coat remained firmly fastened, concealing his Beretta and the fine misting of blood on his shirt.

It was moments like this, that seemed so outwardly mundane, in which he thought of the FBI agents who had handed him that plea deal all those years ago. He wondered if they knew that they hadn't taken a killer off the streets as they intended; they had merely changed who he answered to. He doubted it. The Akai Shuichi he had known wouldn't have offered it to him if he had realized how easy it would make it for someone else to swoop in and arrange for him to disappear the rest of the way.

Officially, 'the man with the codename Gin' was dead to the public, and as far as the Japanese Government and the FBI were concerned he had been extradited to a state in the U.S. without capital punishment, in reward for his cooperation.

Of course, he had never made it there. It was almost intriguing how the different layers within a single government could lie and conceal information from each other so long as they had the authority to do so. All the different agencies and divisions, ranks and clearance levels, they made a great many screens to cover when those with power took what they wanted. Gin would have liked to say he was surprised where he ended up, in a position not unlike where he had started. But he wasn't. It aligned too well with a hard fact he'd faced since childhood; that old truth, upon which his life had been predicated.

The fact of the matter was Gin had a set of skills, and always there were those who would see him use it to their ends. Whether it was because the early shaping of him had left him unsuited for anything else or because the tool they'd shaped him to be was too valuable to be cast aside, the result was the same. Always, there were only two options, to use him, or to break him.

And so a weapon he had remained.

...

Gin made it back to the condo where he had taken up residence without incident. Still, his nerves were strung for action, a tension in his muscles remaining from the mission. He left the bag of fruit he was carrying on the counter, but even as he moved through the space he knew someone else was there

He had seen her out of the corner of his eye. No, even before that he had sensed her. She had been caught in his assassin trained wariness, before his sight confirmed. Perhaps in some combination of all the information his sleeping mind had shifted through and pressed together into an awareness of her. He spoke to that figure in the side of the room, not turning to her.

"Of all the ghosts from the past my mind could conjure, it figures that the one I least want to see is the one that has come to haunt me.

It would have been very like her to ignore the thought he had voiced, to pretend a welcome that was not between them. Instead, she responded to it. It made the first words he heard her say in nearly a decade sound remarkably unlike the woman he had known.

"The very least!" He was too out of practice to tell if she had truly been wounded. He didn't care either way. "Really? I can think of nearly a dozen ghosts from your past that would be more interested in killing you than talking to-

"And would wound me less." He cut her off, finally bothering to focus on her.

She was still trying to look offended, but her eyes gleamed with a little too much mischief to be convincing. Vermouth hadn't aged in ten years, not visibly, or at least not by much. He knew she wouldn't have, but it was still disconcerting. She probably looked noticeably younger than him now. Frozen the same way she had looked when he was just a child. Her skin untouched by the smile lines and wrinkles countless decades of smirking like a hunting cat should have earned her. Gin wondered if he would look older than his unaging father as well, if he were still alive.

Vermouth gave up her indignant pose. "I suppose it would be bad form to whine that you've maintained a healthy respect for my abilities.

"Bad form to forget an enemy," he let his voice go low and dangerous. He had stepped between her and the exit in their brief conversation. Vermouth glanced at the door and sighed at him, letting him know she wasn't particularly threatened by his childish advantage. She should have been. There was no Organization to stand between them; nothing to stop him from killing her as it had so many times before.

"I was hoping for allies, but enemies with a common purpose would suit just as well if it must."

Gin didn't immediately respond, not asking the questions she had set him up to ask. He let the silence extend between them, let the tense way both of them stood on either side of the sitting room punctuate his refusal to go along with this. She wanted him to do something for her, that's where this conversation was leading and they both knew it. Why else track him down after all this time?

He gave in to the inevitable. "So what is it? What's happened?"

"Something that is about to happen, rather. And once it does we'll have a catastrophe to contain."

"If it hasn't happened yet then just stop it before it does and leave me out of it." He was suddenly as tired of Vermouth's games and circling of the point as he had ever been, ten years was too short a time to be ready for more of it.

"I considered that, but I've never reveled in murdering children." He stiffened, if only because she said it as casually as she said everything else. "That's what it would take; kill one little girl and all my problems take care of themselves. But you won't want that and I came here out of consideration for you."

"What little girl?" He was nearly at a growl now. If Vermouth had ever been wise she would have taken his warning, but she only continued in her way, self-assured and venomous as always.

"I think you know. You've kept tabs on her since she was born, haven't you?" She read his response from a minute change in his expression and amended. "Or at least since you were able."

The cold read had irritated him, what it meant she knew about his situation in the last decade had irritated him, but all of that paled to his fury at who she meant she had considered killing. That implication brought his body to the very edge of furious action once more, like water just coming to boil.

"Elaine," Vermouth spoke her name aloud, for the sole purpose of confirming her suspicions with his reaction. "Sherry's daughter-"

His already heating anger erupted into action. A jab to her throat cut off her sentence, and she hardly had time to recover from the shock of it before he had spun her back against him into a chokehold. It was a choke to restrict her airway and not the flow of blood; she would not pass out quickly, nor painlessly.

She didn't struggle against him, nor had she utilized any of her many decades of experience in her defense. She had let his attack come, even if perhaps she hadn't anticipated the brutality of it. He found the reflection of her face on the mirror in front of them. She looked entirely too exasperated for someone in her position, the same way she had looked when he'd stepped between her and the door.

She thought she had information still, information he didn't know, that would stop him from ending her.

"- And yours. Some would say," she managed to wheeze out. He let his constricting hold on her throat loosen fractionally, but kept her pinned hard against him. She spoke with her quick inhale of breath. "That's the trouble, they think she's yours and Sherry's."

"It's a lie."

"But still the trouble."

With no small degree of irritation, Gin released her entirely and stepped back. She didn't drop to the floor, only stumbled forward a bit.

There was information she was hoarding then, more to this than she was going to let him know just then. He left her to find her feet again and retrieved a couple of glasses from the kitchen. A wineglass for her, a lowball for himself.

He had just started pouring when Vermouth took her seat at the table. She smiled when she saw the red wine, "Like old times huh?"

"Never could get you to explain a bloody thing until you had a drink in your hand." He said gruffly, still with a fair bit of dagger to his voice.

She shrugged, staring down at the wine she swirled around her glass. It was entirely too feline and graceful a gesture for someone who was being strangled a second ago.

"I can't say I don't prefer this version of your hospitality a lot better."

"And I prefer when you don't threaten me to get my help." Ice snapped in his glass as he poured amber liquid over it.

"I wasn't threatening you..."

Gin glared at her.

"Fine," she conceded. "But I wasn't lying. Elaine's existence creates problems, whether you admit she's your kid or not." The last she added as an aside, more into her glass than to him.

"She's not," he snarled.

Vermouth waved a hand in dismissal of the point, and it was enough to mollify him.

"More importantly," Gin said, "Who's the 'they' you've gotten this wearisome idea from, and why should it matter to them?"

She looked utterly disgusted with him for a moment, as if he had confirmed something horrible about himself that she hadn't believed to that point. "Who do you think? I haven't forgotten the Organization's goals, even if you have. It was formed for a reason. That doesn't go away just because it fell."

"You still mean to go after them. 'The ones who started this.'" It managed to surprise him, even if it shouldn't have. She was one of the long-lived children created in the original experiments. It was her revenge the Organization had meant to take, at least in part. Even if Gin had long suspected Vermouth of having her own agenda more often than not, in that area at least, he suspected her motivations had aligned with the Organization's own.

"You want me to help you do it. To go after them with you." He puzzled out, in a way that wasn't a question so much as a conclusion.

"I've been pursuing them, for the last decade. Alone. I was the only one left to continue the Organization's goals, or so I thought. Foolishly it seems. I thought you would help me if you were still around; I thought that loyalty you once owed meant something to you. Apparently not." It was a cheap tactic, so obvious a blow he stepped well back from it.

Calmly he responded, "It still doesn't add up. You're not here because you found out I'm alive. I suspect you've known that for a while. You've also avoided my question."

Vermouth took a long swallow of wine, then starred toward the door with dead eyes.

"Vermouth."

She gave a quick exhale at that naming that might have been a bitter laugh.

"Vermouth," he tried again. She was trying his patience now. "Why does Elaine's existence cause problems?" He demanded.

"Because it does!" It wasn't the graceful skirting of a topic he could meet with his familiar annoyance at her antics. It was desperate and blunt. It made him consider once more what sort of position she must be in to seek him out. What must she be facing to have thought this was a good idea? He couldn't even contemplate circumstances that would have drawn him to consider the reverse; very little could have brought him to seek her out after ten years.

"She causes problems, and it doesn't matter why because you're going to help me anyway." She was vicious and exacting in the way he had always known she was capable of just below the surface of her ever cutting smile. "I'm not the only threat to that child, but I am your only chance of stopping the others."