Chapter 22: Pining For A Purpose
The only audible sound was the ticking of the incredibly ugly clock on the wall. It was annoyingly loud on the best of days, but it wouldn't take much to set off the three killers this morning. After the business with the 216 was rather abruptly and anticlimactically resolved, the Trinity returned to the city and had all been staying in Wolf's apartment since. The three assassins expected to be joining together to tackle the Task Force and make sure the situation in Roanapur was resolved, with the hopes of earning the appreciation of the city's leaders as well. In actuality, their alliance had been incredibly short-lived thanks to Rock's intervention and they had been forced to lay down their arms and return to the city half-cocked. Wolf's motorcycle sat in the corner against the wall while Ashur's had been stowed in the spare room, only just fitting alongside the mix of clutter Wolf stored there. It was a BMW R80G, a gunmetal grey colour and with thick off-road tyres. Andromeda's bike was a Ducati Monster, mostly un-customised save for the Harley Davidson sportster exhausts, and it was a striking metallic red. It had been sandwiched between Wolf's heavily customised BMW R75 and a tattered armchair.
Ashur's eyes went to the clock on the wall before he resumed his brooding. They were all gathered around a small wooden table by the window, but none of them said a word to each other. If the silence didn't raise the tension considerably, the tick-tocking would soon enough. Wolf continued to stare out of the window mindlessly with his feet up on the table and his arms hanging limp beside him. He could almost feel the heat of Ashur's rage to his right, arms folded and eyes sternly fixed on the clock. The others were unsure if he was itching to kill Wolf now that their truce had technically come to an end or if he was just becoming antsy and restless in this apartment. It was unusual that he hadn't simply fled the building one night under cover of darkness, though he must have been feeling quite unsatisfied with how things went out in the jungle. Andromeda, too, hadn't said much since returning but it was quite the unexpected turn of events to be called back to the city for a mission that never really got off the ground in the end. It was one big disappointment.
"I'm going to shoot that fucking clock," Ashur said suddenly, content to allow the silence to continue no longer.
"Go ahead," Wolf said unenthusiastically.
"So, this is us now, is it?" Ashur asked, addressing them both. "Just a couple of pals hanging out. It's a far cry from our little excursion up the Mekong, Wolf."
"What do you expect?" asked Andromeda. She had been laying back in the chair with her hands behind her head and her eyes closed but she sat up straight now that they were talking. "The gig was a bust. Waste of goddamn time. Nothing we can do about it now."
"The whole idea of us going out there was that we were going to do things our way, right? Should have taken Jones and his dumbass friends back with us and figured it out from there. Your Japanese friend left us by the wayside, Wolf."
"That would have been stupid," Wolf said bluntly. "We didn't have a plan. The whole operation started to fall apart the second we got them on their knees because we never knew what to do with them in the first place. You might not like it, but Rock probably saved us a lot of trouble out there. It's better like this."
"Good for him," Andromeda snapped.
"Oh, what, you too?" Wolf asked.
"Forgive me if I'm not exactly thrilled with the situation. I wasn't expecting to hear from you again, Wolf. I had no problem coming out here to give you a hand. But let's be real here, it was a waste of a trip." There was no denying that. She had come a long way to honour an old companionship with who she believed to be the only one of her kind in the world because he needed her help. Instead of following through with the mission and seeing it out to the end, she was introduced to a third of Sif's Omegas and brought on a short and lacklustre manhunt that ended much differently to how she had been expecting.
The continued ticking of the clock was too much for Ashur to endure and he took his gun in his hand, firing a shot into it. The clock exploded into pieces.
"Thanks for that," Wolf said sarcastically, his gaze remaining on the outside.
"What are we doing?" Ashur asked, holstering his gun again.
"You tell me," Wolf responded. "You were the one who wanted me dead, remember? Unless that suddenly changed in the last few days, I'd be expecting a bullet in my head pretty soon. But you haven't taken off or tried to kill me."
"You sound so disappointed," Ashur prodded him, his sense of humour replacing the grumpiness that had been there seconds ago. "You haven't thrown me out either. Something staying your hand, too?"
"I don't care what you boys got up to before I came along," Andromeda interrupted. "All I know is you're giving me a fucking headache with your bickering. Clearly, neither one of you quite has the balls to off the other one right now. I have no idea what it is that got you thirsting for the other's blood so bad in the first place but you've got one thing in common; the bitch that made you what you are. If I had to guess, I'd say seeing her grave made you both stay your hands." Ashur scoffed.
"Don't make me laugh. You think I'm holding back on killing this little dipshit because of some fucking kinship between us? Where we came from doesn't mean shit, not when he's the one who put Sif in the ground. You're one of us, Andromeda. You can't tell me that it doesn't boil your blood that he's still breathing when she's rotting in the ground."
Ashur was passionate and loyal to a fault when it came to Wolf Pack, but those feelings manifested themselves in total delusion. He knew well Andromeda hadn't been loyal like him, how she fled at the first sign of trouble and made an enemy of her old master in doing so. Regardless, though, he still seemed to believe that she should take issue with Wolf's actions, like she owed it to Sif to put an end to her killer.
"I'm not like you," Andromeda told him harshly. "I woke up to what she was and I saw that she never really cared about me. She used me for her own reasons and tossed me aside when I refused to go along with her plans. But you never woke up, did you? You really still believe she actually gave a shit about you. That's pretty fucking pathetic." Wolf immediately came to attention and his eyes darted from the window to Andromeda, then to Ashur as the tension became so palpable it could be cut with a knife.
"You watch your damn mouth, now," Ashur said calmly, but it would have been obvious to a blind man that he was struggling to maintain his cool. He clasped both hands on the desk in front of him. It was a power play, to show that he felt no need to reach for his weapon but to emphasise that he would have no problem doing so. Andromeda would not fall for it. Whatever their differences, their tricks and intimidation tactics would never work on one another. They were just wired too similarly, thanks in large part to Sif.
"Tell me I'm wrong," Andromeda challenged him.
"You're wrong. If she turned on you, she had a damn good reason. We knew what we signed up for. There are no runaways in our world. The second you left, you made an enemy of Wolf Pack."
Wolf took his legs down off the table but remained seated, if unusually quiet.
"Get a grip," Andromeda exclaimed, losing patience. "You're so fucking brainwashed that you can't even see she was controlling you. As far as I'm concerned…Wolf did the world a favour when he killed her. Good riddance." It was like a red rag to a bull when Ashur heard that and his calm and collected persona cracked.
"Pair of fucking ingrates!" he spat. "Just because you couldn't appreciate what you had. She made us what we are, and this is the thanks she gets?! You were not deserving of the Pack." All of a sudden, Wolf's fist came down on the table and the wood where the impact had been cracked. They assumed he was happy to let them argue and get their feelings out in the open, but the sudden display of aggression implied he was very much a part of the argument now.
"You think it was easy for me?!" he asked, facing a confused and upset Ashur. "I was a wolf as well, I know what you're feeling because I felt it too. She was the only thing I had right up until she wasn't. I had to make a choice when it became clear to me what she really was. But don't think for one fucking second that it was easy for me to pull that trigger!" Ashur stood up from his seat and rested the palm of his hand on his gun. Andromeda, sensing that the situation was barrelling towards an all-out firefight, stood as well but she left her gun where it was for the moment while the men verbally mauled one another.
"So it was hard for you, big deal. Not hard enough for you to stop and think about what you were doing. You didn't just kill Sif, you killed the Pack. My whole world came crumbling down around me because of you."
"You weren't the only one who cared about her!" Wolf roared.
For the briefest of moments, it almost looked like Ashur was taken by surprise as he stood there and looked his foe-turned-companion in the face. It was like he was trying to figure out what was truth and what was a lie, but it was clear now the words Wolf were saying had no falseness to them. Andromeda realised she had been holding her breath and she exhaled softly. Now, it was her turn to speak.
"He's right. Believe whatever you want, but you went through the same thing we did. Sif had us believe she was all we had because she made it that way. When she got inside your head, there was no getting her out. It was…hard at first, to cut all ties and forget about her. But I didn't have a choice. And that doesn't mean she wasn't important to me." Ashur quickly exchanged a glance with the two of them before averting his eyes and looking at the floor.
"I know," he admitted. "And I get that. But I never turned on her. I've always been one of hers…even now."
"You're not the only one," Wolf said quietly. He then unzipped his leather biker jacket and draped it across the chair. After that, he pulled the white henley top he had been wearing up over his head and left it down on the table before turning his back to the room and giving the others a look at the tattoo across his upper back, the wolf that had been there for some time. "I made myself the Wolf to get back at her. She made me, after all, so I used that to become who I am only without her digging her claws into me. But I…never really escaped her. It doesn't matter if I'm loyal to her or not, she'll always be a part of me. No amount of running will ever let me escape that." Ashur looked on not with disdain or bloodlust but with understanding, and perhaps a hint of respect as well. While the hostilities between the two men may well have resumed at some point in the future, they were still kindred spirits and Ashur had the capacity to see things from his enemy's point of view, even if that capacity was often clouded by delusion and loyalty.
After a few moments, the assassin grabbed the hand wrap on his left arm and started to remove it. When it lay in a pile on the floor, he balled his hand into a fist and faced the back of it to the others. There was a tattoo there, a tribal design of a spade seen in a deck of cards but with a smaller design in the middle of a wolf skull. He, too, had permanently marked himself to commemorate his time in Wolf Pack. While it was more than likely done out of loyalty, it was entirely possible Ashur, too, was coming to realise how Sif's part in making him who he was may have influenced that decision.
"Strip back who we are on the surface, and I guess we really are the same," he said acceptingly. Wolf turned back around to face the room and the two men looked expectedly at Andromeda. There had been too many similarities and too much symmetry between the three killers. They knew what was coming. She reached for the neck of her crop top and gently pulled it down as far as she needed to reveal the tattoo on her chest. At first glance, it appeared to be a female depiction of the Vitruvian man, a drawing done by Leonardo da Vinci to depict ideal human body proportions. However, the woman's head had unsurprisingly been replaced with that of a wolf and the third Omega was marked as one of Sif's forever along with her two fellow pack members.
"Cut from the same cloth, you could say," Andromeda told them. "Like it or not, we're all that's left. I don't care if you're still loyal to Sif, Ashur. I get it, believe me. No one better. But we're all you've really got left. Isn't that worth something?" Ashur closed his eyes and sighed. It was unclear if he was considering that or if he just didn't want to hear it. This was probably a lot to take. After everything that had happened between him and Wolf, after all the hatred and anger and rage he had poured into his hunt for the Irishman, it was never going to be as simple as putting his past behind him and making peace. There were no happy endings for people like them. Whatever their feelings, the grim fact of the matter was that the situation probably wouldn't change. One way or another, Ashur and Wolf would be locked in battle until one or both of them got themselves killed. The way things had gone lately, they would probably welcome the opportunity.
Ashur snatched up the hand wrap from the ground and put it back on his arm again. He went for the door and grabbed the handle, cracking the door open slightly, but he did not leave right away.
"Where are you going?" Wolf asked. There was no answer for a few seconds.
"I don't know," Ashur replied simply. "Need some air. Might not be back for a while, but I will be back." More silence followed that. Ashur turned on the spot, then, and looked at Wolf. "She was tough as nails. A soldier through and through. Guess she had to learn how to kill somewhere, right? There's…someone in this city you might want to talk to. Both of you, in fact. I can't give any names. I'm sure you'll understand what I mean, in time." Wolf and Andromeda looked at one another, confused and intrigued in equal measure by those words. Ashur prepared to leave again but halted a second time. "You remind me of her, Wolf, you know that? I think, in some strange way, she would have been proud of you if she could see you. I know it doesn't count for much…you're different than you were before, though. In Venezuela. Now, you're something Sif would have approved of, for better or worse. Might be a lesson in there, somewhere." Without another word, Ashur stepped outside and shut the door behind him.