Beatrice wakes up to the sound of the door opening and then to the creaking of the wooden floorboards of the stairs descending to her makeshift bedroom in the basement.
Eyes opening, she turns her head away from the stairs, not wanting to show her face to whoever paid her a visit. "Go away." She says, shooing away her unwanted visitor. The last thing she wants right now is to have someone see how pathetic she’s become for doing something she knows is right.
"Why?!"
She doesn’t even need to look to know who it was; she’d recognize that brazen voice anywhere in a heartbeat, in a crowd, in the dark, or even from miles away.
"I told you I can handle it myself. Why can’t you just trust me for once?"
Beatrice scoffs mockingly. "That’s not what I saw last night." She says it with much struggle. Her throat is sore and burning, as if it’s on fire, as if there’s a barbed wire squeezing it close, making it harder for her to speak. She tries to clear her throat by coughing it out, but to no avail; she’s only hurting her ribs more in the process. She ends up groaning in frustration instead.
"Bea…."
She closes her eyes and heaves a sigh. She’s aware that her visitor can fully see her frame from her vantage point, given the way she’s sprawled across her rickety bed, and despite the dim glow of her lampshade.
"Y-your back... It’s… Oh my God!!"
She’s used to pain, but somehow hearing that voice laced with worry hurts more than any of the wounds she currently cradles.
"I’m okay." Beatrice says as she scrambles to cover herself with a blanket; as her last attempt to hide away, to save herself from the unsolicited pity coming her way and to keep her visitor from seeing the totality of the damage she’s wreaked upon herself.
Soft hands stopped her then, halting her movement.
"Ava, I’m okay." She repeats as she tries to rid herself of the hands holding her hostage, but realizes that she can barely even move her limbs without feeling like her whole body is breaking into pieces.
"That’s hardly reassuring, Bea."
Ava, her visitor and probably the only person she values in her so-called miserable life, forces her to turn onto her back, exposing another set of contusions and lacerations she didn’t want her to see.
"Look at you, you’re a wreck." Ava points this out, her voice breaking into a sob. She cradles Beatrice’s head in her hands, checking her fair face for any bruises. Fortunately, her face has been mercifully spared.
"Aren’t we both?" She replies, as she tries to swallow down the agonizing pain of having her back pressed down on the hard mattress. It stings, but she has to pretend it didn’t for her visitor’s sake—for Ava, who, despite living in a world revolving around violence, has never really seen such brutality. It’s already enough to have her on the verge of tears just by seeing her wounds; Ava doesn’t need to know how harrowing it feels more than how it looks.
She then feels Ava’s trembling hands caress every exposed bruise, and she sees Ava’s teary eyes study each of her still-bleeding wounds. Sniffing, Ava whispers, "He’s broken you."
"I’ve been worse." She nonchalantly replies as she tries to sit up. When she couldn’t do even just that without feeling like every bone in her body was snapping, Ava opted to help, as Beatrice continued expressing her sentiment with another off-handed commentary as she added, "And besides, we’re all broken anyway, one way or another."
"That’s different, Beatrice!" Ava blurts out, her voice close to a shout. And when she seemed to realize that she shouldn’t be shouting at an injured person, she sat down, sighed deeply, and added, a little calmer this time, "When you’re trying to be a hero, that’s different."
With all of her strength left, Beatrice reaches out to wipe that lone tear that rolled down Ava’s face. "Saving you once doesn’t automatically make me one, you know." She says, tucking Ava’s brown hairstrands behind her ear.
Ava frowns at her in disbelief and then swats her hand away. "So what have you been doing all this time then?" Ava looks at her, really looks at her, and then adds, "I’m not stupid, Bea. I know how many times you’ve gone out of your way just to safeguard me. You always seemed to be in the right place at the most convenient time whenever I seemed to be in need of some saving. Even when it was someone else helping me, I know you orchestrated it. You told them to. So whether you like it or not, you are becoming my hero every single time you saved my life."
Beatrice has never been grateful for her room’s dull illumination more than at that exact moment. She was able to hide her flushed face and conceal her pleased smile that she can barely suppress due to the fact that Ava had just called her "hers", although it wasn’t in the same context she wished it to be, but it is all possessive just the same.
They’ve known each other since they were kids, Ava was four and Beatrice was eight when they first met. They immediately created a strong bond without Beatrice needing to do much but just be there for Ava whenever she cried, just like any other big sister would, just like how she wanted someone to be there for her whenever she needed someone. They’ve become inseparable since then.
At their young age, along with ten other kids, they didn’t quite understand why they were confined in what seemed to be an abandoned church. None of the adults that were looking after them cared to elucidate their whole situation, and they were only given an understated explanation: "This is your home now. We’re now each other’s family."
And Beatrice, having longed for a family ever since she can remember, took it to heart.
Things changed, though, when she turned ten. She started doing things a ten-year-old was not supposed to be doing. She started learning things a ten-year-old shouldn’t be learning. Her linear perception of her new-found family started falling apart along with the childhood she thought she’d finally get to live.
"Heroes don’t exist in a hell hole like this one, Ava." She points this out as she gestures around their surroundings. She shakes her head and then continues to say, "There’s only evil and lesser evil here. I just so happen to be the latter."
She sees the way Ava’s brows twist into a frown. "Maybe so, but it’s not by choice now, is it? You say you’re the lesser evil? Then so am I. But I know that if we were given a different choice, or if we were given one at all, we wouldn’t be here, not in this place we pretended to call home." Ava then reaches out to hold her hand and squeeze it. "You’re human, Bea. You care, and it’s normal. What’s not normal is caring so much to the point you’d get yourself killed."
"Ava, Ava, Ava." She says, shaking her head. "That’s always going to be your biggest flaw, isn’t it? Mistaking my actions for caring? Have you not learned anything about me all these years? I’m devious and callous, and I don’t do things without planning and without proper execution. I don’t..." She stops midway through her sentence when Ava interjects, "But you do it with heart. You can argue with me all you want, but you weigh things with your heart. You have emotion, Bea. You’re not a robot. You’re not his robot."
Ava squeezes her hand again, a little tighter this time, as she continues, "I know you think that this is the only life we could have. That this is the only way we’re supposed to live, but it isn’t. It shouldn’t be. There's a whole world out there waiting for us to see."
Beatrice pulls her hand back and looks away. She could not stand seeing those ruminative eyes all the while being the bearer of bad tidings. "That’s dangerous, Ava."
"What is?" Ava innocently asks.
Beatrice didn’t see the younger woman’s crestfallen face when she pulled away. "Dreaming." She answers quietly. "It’s a luxury we can never afford. You should know that by now. Isn’t this enough of a reminder for you?" She adds, pertaining to her poignant state.
There’s a pregnant pause that transpires between them, with them intently staring into each other’s eyes, weighing each other’s thoughts, and waiting to see who will break character first.
Beatrice did.
"Dreams? Hah!" She scoffs as she awkwardly shuffles on her bed, putting a bit of her weight on her arm by propping it up behind her back, thinking indifference would dispel whatever dark cloud has descended upon them. "It’s delusional. It’s ridiculous. It’s something people created because they were too afraid to face their reality." Beatrice looks at Ava again and sees her massaging the back of her neck. She sighs heavily as she notices the red speckles around the younger woman’s neck. "Stop it while you can, Ava. Stop dreaming impossible things. It will only make you weak."
It’s not like what Beatrice is saying has no solid basis, no substantial ground, because there is; she’s speaking through experiences Ava was not even aware of, and she’d rather not have the younger woman shatter her positive outlook on life. Though she thinks it’s a little bit late for that now, their father made perfectly sure of that.
Ava sighs and asks her to turn around. She reluctantly did so. She then heard Ava exhale heavily as she ran her fingers along her wounded skin before saying, "Between you and me, I’m not the one who looked like she's not going to see the next daylight."
She feels the younger woman pull at her bandeau. Normally, she wouldn’t let anyone see her without proper clothes. But considering how clammy her shirt was earlier with her own sweat and blood, she disregarded it and decided to stay in her undergarments, thinking that no one would be brave enough to even check on her, and besides, she couldn’t be bothered getting changed with her aching body and all.
"Sorry to burst your bubble, Ava, but the sun’s almost up and I’m still here. I’m still alive." Beatrice remarks, glancing at the small window on the far wall across the stairs.
"Barely. If Mother hadn’t stepped up, you would be dead by now. He would’ve killed you." Ava’s voice breaks into a strangulated sob, and Beatrice knew, even without looking at the younger woman, that she had started crying. "You could have died because of me."
"But he didn’t, though. He can’t. He won’t." She confidently replies as the young woman helps her pull her bandeau off. She then adds, "Father won’t let me die, even if I beg him to."
It’s an undeniable fact, and they both know it.
Working under the cold-hearted and merciless head of a crime syndicate that focuses mainly on eradicating people their paying patron wants to get rid of, they learned that their lives aren’t theirs to live, to keep, or even to take away. They’re alive as long as they're needed and as long as they can serve their purpose.
Beatrice hears the sound of water drops and then feels a warm towel against her beaten-up skin a second later. It stings, but it’s not something she can’t handle.
"We're not irreplaceable, Bea. To him, we’re just a bunch of dispensable peons he can easily replace any day." Ava says. Her warm breath makes Beatrice shiver as it makes contact with her moistened skin.
That may be true; however, Beatrice knew that the probability of her being disposed of was zero to none, as she was their father’s golden child. Their family’s unrivalled executioner—their very own Jack Ketch, but a more structured and methodical Jack Ketch, if you will. Her efficiency and her ability to quickly learn new skills earned her abominable responsibilities she didn’t even ask for. She just woke up one day, and then their father decided to train her to be a killer.
What happened earlier was just a brutal reminder that even though she’s the family’s most precious commodity, she’s not spared from any punishment that warrants her mistakes.
"It'll take him a long time to find one. And besides, I'd probably thank him then anyway, it’s the only way I could escape this diabolical pit we’ve falsely believed to be our home." Beatrice replies, her words tasting like copper on her tongue as she speaks.
Soft lips replaced the towel that was smoothing along her shoulder then, and she froze, her body stilling at the intimate and unexpected act with her heart beating erratically inside her ribcage.
There was another pause then.
The young woman seemed to have no plan to stop whatever she is currently doing, and neither she nor Beatrice wants her to stop; she doesn’t even want to ask why and what the emotive action was for in fear of spooking the latter and ultimately halting her unforeseen but otherwise tender ministrations.
Ava rests her forehead on her nape and asks, "By dying? Don’t you want to get out of this place alive and in one piece instead, Beatrice?"
And when she seemed not inclined to answer the question, the younger woman rephrased, "Don’t you want to have a normal life, Bea?"
She lost all hope for that years ago, when she took someone's life for the first time. When she ran her sharp dagger along her target’s slender neck and watched as he took his last breath, as the light flickered out from his eyes, as his body ran cold as ice.
And when Beatrice didn’t answer again, another question came uninvited, along with those unanticipated arms encircling her waist. "So what do you suppose will happen to me then? How do you think I’ll survive all of this mayhem without you here grounding me?"
She lets out a shaky breath before answering. "He won't let anything happen to you, Ava. You’re his favorite." She says as she contemplates whether she’s allowed to hold Ava’s hand and give in to the temptation she’s all but tried to subdue.
Ever since they were kids, Ava and Beatrice have always been inextricably linked; they were thick as thieves and always attached at the hips. But as the years go by, even when Beatrice started her training to be a hitman, her aimless infatuation, which started as an altruistic concern and care for the younger woman, has only ever grown deeper, stronger, and impossibly harder to ignore. She tried tucking those feelings away in the far corner of her heart, on the back burner of her mind, concealed in a number of reasons why she’s not allowed to feel anything in a particular way. But Beatrice, with all of her endless efforts, found that she couldn’t stop loving Ava.
"He’d kill everyone first before he’d let anything happen to you." Beatrice adds as she decides to place her hand over Ava’s.
The younger woman’s role in the family as a bagman is simple: run errands, do deliveries, and collect payments from their patrons; no bloodshed is involved, unlike the rest of their family, and although she carries a gun for her own safety, she’s always with someone with more experienced combat skills to keep her safe, so the need to use her gun never arises.
But last night’s errand went wayward when Ava had to do it alone as everyone in the family had their hands full with their own duties and couldn’t accommodate the younger woman on her task. She’s only supposed to deliver a package to a client, after all, it’s a plain and simple task she’s done a hundred times before, but it soon turned bloody when the said client, who admittedly fancies her, tried to rape her.
Beatrice, after learning who Ava was going to deliver to and knowing the fact that the client has already expressed her disgusting interest in the younger woman, left her target to run to Ava’s last pinned location. And as soon as she saw the man hovering on top of Ava and strangling her, Beatrice sprung into action. She fired her gun once, and upon realizing what exactly was happening, she saw red and started stabbing the man to his reasonable death. She only stopped when Ava hugged her and assured her that she was okay and that nothing had happened to her.
Beatrice lost her target and ended up killing a client who hadn’t paid his father yet.
Those actions, despite being done for the benefit of another family member, have cost her a night of battering and some broken bones that might take weeks to heal.
It didn’t matter, though, because no amount of pain can stop Beatrice from doing inexplicable things just to keep Ava safe. She’ll break their family’s rules over and over again if she needs to, if it means it’ll keep the younger woman away from any grievous harm.
"Just like how you’re not going to let anything happen to me too, right?" Ava asks and then kisses the base of her neck.
Beatrice almost moaned right there and then.
And when Ava repeats her question right into her ears, she nods, hoping that Ava understands the words underlying in it. The younger girl probably did so as she asked her to turn to face her again.
She’s reluctant at first, seeing how she’s too bare from her waist up. Ava seemed to discern her hesitation as seconds later Beatrice heard rustling sounds behind her. And true to her summation, when Ava guides her to look at her, the younger woman is equally bare-chested. She took off her shirt and, along with it, her bra.
Beatrice wants to know what’s happening and wants to ask what Ava is doing, but before she could even ask, the younger woman surges forward and seals her lips in a searing kiss.
She was then pushed back onto the rickety bed, and she couldn’t care less about her wounds hitting the rough mattress. It hurts and it stings, but she didn’t care. Ava can hurt her, torture her, break her, and even kill her, but she still won’t care, because Ava is her broken angel and her heaven in hell.