Ruination

“I vow to never love, to never care, and to never allow foolish emotions to get in the way of a mission”

It was the first thing they were taught. They repeated the words every day before training. I never meant them, they were simply hollow words. Just another broken vow of a naive girl.

From a very young age, I knew I was the best. To most, it was not obvious, but I saw it. I saw it in the way my instructors would look at each other almost cautiously after target practice. I saw it in the subtle smiles from the leaders of my group. In the envious looks from the other children. Soon after this discovery, I realized I could never give them what they wanted from me. Perhaps I was weak or a coward but even with my black heart, ruined by those who had raised me, I could not bring myself to take the lives of the innocent. We were assassins, angels of death, it was our job, but I just could not bring myself to watch the life drain from their eyes and know I was the cause. 

If I were anyone else, I would have been sent to death long ago. But they continue to give me missions. Missions I do not complete, I barely even look at them before handing them back. Eventually, they are reassigned to someone much less talented and much more willing. It was not a life I wanted, but one I could live with. Everything was fine until he came along. Jaimie. An ordinary name for someone I thought to be extraordinary. I loved him almost immediately. He would take me away from the death and rot and into a world, I had never bothered to really look at before. Who would have known that the sky could be so blue, the trees so green, some were even the same shade of green as his eyes. Depending on the day of course, as they seemed to be constantly changing. Every day I looked at his eyes and wondered what it was like to be so completely alive that even your eyes could not stay the same for too long. So unlike my cold and empty ones. Forever changing, always more to see and learn. I guess that even in the end he was like that. Forever changing. A different face, a different man every time I saw him.

 For a time he was my everything. He was pure and happy and bright, everything that I was not. Everything I never had. Our love was unending, eternal, pure, and bright. I was ready to give everything up for him. Being an assassin was not the life I chose but it was safe. It was still my home and family. I would have left for him. I would have done anything for him. 

I did something I had never dared to do before. I allowed myself to hope, to have expectations. And he met them all. Again, and again. In the way, his face lit up when he saw me. In the way, he leaned in to kiss me when I smiled a real genuine smile as if he could help it. He was everything I wanted. Until he wasn’t. Until he was cruel and dark and twisted. Until he left bruises on my skin and even more on my soul. Until I blamed myself for corrupting such a pure person because it had to be my fault. How else could someone go from smiles and kisses to dark stormy eyes and cruel words? Ever-changing. One moment content and the next hateful. When I finally had the courage to leave him he had looked at me and smiled a cruel smile. “What will you do now? You are ruined.” 

In the end, Jaimie was just ordinary. I was not. I was always meant for much more than him. Much more than ordinary. It had taken freedom and love, and most of all heartbreak for me to see it. But now it was clear. I did not need him. I had myself and eventually, that became enough. When the next mission came I denied it, and the next, and the next. 

Until one day a year later I saw his face again. The boy I had worked so hard to forget. To forget the bruises he left on my body. To forget the fact that I let him because I was blinded by the idea of love. To forget my weakness. But alas everything caught up to you eventually. And here he was. Jaimie. His face set in that grin of his. He was much less intimidating this way. In a tiny box of ink on paper. Next to his picture was his name and various other bits of information deemed important enough to be in his file. I looked up to one of my many bosses. I did not know his name. Or even if he had one.  

I left him there standing with his mouth hung open in shock. As I walked away with that paper in hand I couldn’t bring myself to care what he thought. I walked into the armory and grabbed my daggers. I didn’t need anything else. This was a simple mission. Easy. Ever-changing he may be, but he was just a man. He would bleed like one too.

I spent two days camped outside his apartment. Watching. Observing. Waiting. On the third night, I entered through a window hidden in the darkness. I crept silently through the house and into his bedroom. He lay asleep in the bed we once shared. As I stood over him I allowed myself a moment. One moment, before I took out the dagger and slit his throat.

 If anyone else had been in that apartment they would have seen the small smile that spread across her face as she watched him bleed. They would have heard the words she whispered as he looked up at her with fear in his eyes. 

“I am not ruined. I am ruination.”

He never left, not really. Even after the life drained from his eyes. He was with her here, in her memories. The boy he was or pretended to be. The boy she had loved. He was here whispering little nothings in her ear. Things that would never occur. Instead of the joy it once brought her, it now served as a reminder.

It was her fault, and she knew that. They had warned her every day in training. Those words, once hollow, now repeated in her head again and again. Loving someone meant weakness. She should have known it was inevitable. That he would take advantage like every other ordinary man on this unforgiving earth. In the end, she had been weak. She had let him into her cold, bleak heart, and she had paid the price. She let him make her weak. And she would spend the rest of her life paying for it. Punishing herself.

 As she watched the light drain from each of her victim’s eyes she would remember. Every life she took was a reminder to herself. She made a vow to herself that day. Never to be weak and helpless again. A vow to never love again, and this time she meant it.