Prompt #19: Oh I am what I am, I do what I want, But I can't hide (Here With Me – Dido)
She calls herself The Man these days, and people speak of her with a note of fear and reverence in their tone. They say she cares about nothing and no one, that she would kill her own child if she was asked to. (No one knows how she pleaded for the life of her child in a concrete cell in Kashmir. On hands and knees in front of a former lover, her eldest sister watching with a mocking smile. "Oh, Irushka, look at what they made you.")
Knives are her weapon of choice; they say it's because she likes the feel of blood on her hands. They say she fears nothing, not even death. (Cuvee laughs as she scratches him. They're in bed; he's made her his again. "My little tiger. You just can't die, can you?")
No one knows she's already dead. (Watching the Wizard of Oz, Sydney asks, "Mommy, how can the Tin Man live without a heart?" He can't, she thinks.)
Sitting in a dark hotel room in Vienna, she thinks, I am the Tin Man. She presses her favourite knife to her arm, holding it there as the blood wells up and drops onto the sheets. She feels nothing, but she's always surprised to realize she still bleeds.
She finds herself thinking of things (people) she shouldn't. A dark-haired child and a man whose smile she loves. Loved.
She is dead to them both; and the best thing to do would be to kill herself so they can truly be free. Except a ghost cannot die, and so she puts the knife down. The next best thing is to forget about them, but she cannot do that either. ("Jack Bristow is a fool," she tells Cuvee. They're in bed again, talking of Rambaldi and power. "I never loved him." Cuvee kisses her. "Of course not. You don't know how to love.")
She hears one day that her husband (because, of course, he'll always be her husband) has been injured by one of her men. Not stopping to think, she summons the guilty party and slits his throat. Then, casually wiping his blood from the blade of her knife, she commands his comrade to get rid of the body. (Alone, she stares at her shaking hands and imagines she's the one who injured Jack. She cries.)
They say she's unhinged, bloodthirsty, power hungry, insane. They say a lot of things. But no one says that she's a woman who just wanted to serve her country, then fell in love, a woman who is trying to survive in the only way she knows how.
No one says she's tired of being dead.