Archive of Our Own ^beta

Wing Fanchu’s possessions were impeccably neat, laid out like tombstones at the foot of his bed: a spare shirt, slacks and a jacket, socks, toothbrush, razor blade, and a loaded Beretta. He combed his beard in the mirror, not really seeing himself as he reviewed every detail of the coming night within his mind. This mission had only one of two outcomes: kill or be killed. In some ways, it didn’t matter which—Wing only cared that it would be over. 

The assassin surveyed his hotel room. In the event of his death, he intended to be buried anonymously. No papers, no laptops, no cards. Nothing that could be traced. Wing Fanchu had died a long time ago, in some ways. The only thing that connected him to his past was inertia. Inertia, and guilt. 

His phone buzzed: the taxi had arrived. Wing loaded the pistol into the holster under his arm and pulled on his jacket. He turned out the light and closed the door tightly behind him. 

It started small. 

His father died, the first time, and Dr. Nero called Wing into his office.

“There is no easy way to say this. There has been an accident. I’m afraid your father is dead.”

Wing remembered surprise, more than anything. Mao Fanchu had a kind of immortality to him, a sort of titanium core that seemed more or less impervious to something as trivial as life. Wing had only noticed it after his mother died. His father, who had asked about his day at school, and made breakfast on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and wrestled on the floor before bed, seemed to peel off like so much velvet, until the antler that remained was sharp and cold, but not wholly unfamiliar. 

But he was dead. He was gone.

Wing’s gaze briefly flicked to the portrait of the mysterious woman who watched over Nero’s office. Does anything last? he wondered. Does it matter?

When it came to death, there was only one thing Wing wanted: the truth. 

“Here will be fine, thank you.” Wing passed a wad of cash through the divider. “Cheers.”

Wing did not look back as he stepped out of the cab. It was a Friday night. Busy. 

Over the years, Wing had pried his English from an accent. In a metropolis like London, it didn’t matter, of course. He could be a foreign businessman seeking out a deal, a researcher living on grant funding, or a tourist in search of love. In England’s busiest city, he could be anyone and everyone. It was a wonderful place to disappear.

When he was young and headstrong, he had dismissed his formal education as an obligation. After all, it didn’t matter what some egotistical school head thought—there were moral issues to consider. His mother had raised him to care about the consequences of his actions. He had learned the rules of a villainous education, but his heart had never truly been in it.

Wing smirked. The last time he had been in London he had shot a visiting dignitary in the head as he slept. Times changed, and young men all died sooner or later.

Wing’s father died a second time. That was harder.

If there was one thing Wing and his father agreed on, it was that they loved Keiko Fanchu. Always.

Wing remembered being small—shorter than the kitchen counters, and tugging at his father’s hip after dinner. 

“She’s still working,” he had groaned. “She works too long!”

Mao had laughed. “Let’s see if we can tempt her away, shall we?”

They peeked into her office. Keiko’s laptop screen fully engrossed her—her glasses hung on the tip of her nose, ready to fall off, but she didn’t seem to notice in the slightest. Her fingers flew across the keyboard, pattering like ceaseless raindrops on pavement. A cold cup of tea sat sentry on her left. 

Wing remembered his father’s quirky smile, the way he made sure his son was watching, sneaking exaggeratedly behind his wife with claw hands, as if to scare her. Wing watched with delighted anticipation—he couldn’t suppress a giggle. But his father did not startle his mother. He set his hands on her back and began to massage the space between her shoulders. Keiko closed her eyes and breathed out slowly, her contentment seeping into her small smile. 

“You’ve been working too long, my darling,” Mao whispered. “Your son is getting worried about you.”

Keiko set her laptop on the desk, shaking herself from her stupor. “Hello, Wing. I’ve been so busy all day, haven’t I?”

Wing glowed at her smile, running into her arms and laughing as she snuggled him close. 

“Can we watch a movie before bed?” Wing begged. “Please?”

Keiko looked at Mao, who nodded indulgently. “Come on, little one. Only a short one, mind you.”

Wing couldn’t stay awake, though. He settled himself in between his parents and slowly, resistantly, drifted off to sleep. He remembered the sound of them laughing, and the smack of a stolen kiss over his head. That was, he thought, the first time he understood what love was. 

Shelby found Wing sobbing in a study room, too ashamed to speak and too overcome to form a sentence. He wept into her lap beyond the bell, and she, the perfect delinquent, didn’t flinch once. 

“Don’t tell Otto,” he said at last. “I don’t regret saving him. He’s my friend. He’s my brother.”

“Shhhhhh,” Shelby wrapped him in a hug. “He was your dad. Of course you’re a fucking mess.”

“I haven’t loved him for years.”

“Does it matter? Death is quick, and never simple. Don’t try to make it something it’s not, big guy. You’ll kill yourself trying to turn yourself into a straight line.”

He gulped. “Thank you. For loving me. Like this.”

“You’re an easy guy to love, Wing,” Shelby laughed. “Even like this.”

Soho bustled amid the rain. Families trotted beneath brightly-colored umbrellas. Vapers curled around the bus stops, blowing watermelon breaths up to the sky. Young lovers walked hand-in-hand and followed their curious dogs down the street. Normal people on a normal night. 

Wing didn’t mind the walk. It helped to clear his mind before a kill. 

His phone buzzed. He didn’t keep names in his phone anymore; he just memorized the numbers. Another client, wondering if he would be available to go to Dubai in two weeks, along with a number: $75. The zeroes were implied. He ignored it.

Tonight’s client had also texted. Status update?

Wing responded immediately. In transit.

Wing didn’t really care about the money, but it made things smoother. These days, smoothness was perhaps the only thing he cared about. If he survived the night, he’d take the Dubai job.

He bought a green tea at a coffee shop and drank. His phone buzzed again. Thumbs-up emoji, exploding head emoji. Wing pocketed his phone. It was good to stay busy.

Lucy died next. Otto clung to her words like a psalm, the kind of prayer that becomes a song that becomes a battle march. 

“There always has to be a choice,” he would say, and look to Wing with the firm, quiet certainty of justification. 

“Always, my friend.”

Wing never quite knew how to grieve for Lucy outside of his affirmation of Otto’s grief. Privately, he felt they had died strangers to each other. It unsettled him to think this didn’t bother him. 

Assassination is eleven parts waiting for every one part brutal, unflinching violence. 

He checked his watch. 18:45. The target would be home shortly. 

He walked without an umbrella, absorbed by every raindrop.

Otto’s death changed things. Overnight, Wing became untethered from everything he believed and held dear. He produced more tears and snot than he ever had before—even more than when his mother died, in fact, because he made no effort to muzzle himself. He screamed. It was wonderful to cry. 

“He was my brother,” he said to Shelby. “I loved him.”

It was one of the few times that Shelby never found the right thing to say. “I know.”

In the following year, WIng had more clarity about his life than he’d ever had. He cut ties with G.L.O.V.E. and took control of his inheritance. In the space of a few months, he went from standing on a patch of land in rural Ecuador to running a fully furnished-orphanage, populated by twenty children. He used a lot of words that meant something to him at the time: legacy, honor, mission, memory. It was all for Otto, of course. 

And then… Otto came back. It was nothing short of miraculous. 

Wing ran to his friend and crushed him in the strongest bear hug he had in him, and held him for what might have been hours. It was joy—plain, simple joy. He was alive, and Wing loved him, and in those moments, that truth was completeness in and of itself.

It was a completeness that Wing never could quite shake, even when he lost it all, even when he started killing people. Once he had known joy, and it meant everything.

Half seven. It was time for Wing to finish his walk. He strolled with the casual gait of someone returning home. 

At the end of the road, he saw a large white house. The garden was pristine—if the green flecks edging the pavement were any indication, the hedge had been trimmed earlier in the day, or perhaps the day before. Wing surveyed the location. His exit would be as peaceful as his entrance. He approached murder much like he approached everything else: calmly. Why not? Everything seemed easier in the cold of his rational mind.

Wing walked up to the front door. He already had a key. The client had provided it—apparently, it had taken some finessing. He turned the key in the lock and stepped inside. He went to the alarm system. It was funny, actually. The passcode was his birthday—month and date. Of course, it was just a coincidence. The little Otto Malpense in his mind, the one he had never quite been able to kill, reminded him that there was a 50% chance that 23 people in a random group would share a birthday.

With the alarm silenced, Wing took off his coat and hung it in the back of the cupboard. No sense in dripping all over the floor. He adjusted the Beretta under his jacket, and went to the couch in the living room to wait. 

The orphanage had enemies. In due time, they attacked.

Wing was away at the time. He thought he’d prepared them so well for his absence. Too late, Wing realized that he’d been preparing for the wrong battle. He approached his defense like a swordfight: they would strike, he would parry and lunge in return. 

Hell rained down on the orphanage, not like a blade, but a tsunami. Little heads were separated from little necks. Blood seeped into the floorboards. 

Wing found Shelby’s body near the front of the house, three bullet holes in her stomach. She had defended the building as long as she could. Wing wept. 

“I love you,” he cried. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

The children. The attendants. Shelby.

It was too late.

And he thought, there is a word for it, for this need I have. 

And he thought the word: revenge. 

And though it took years, and though it took more sacrifices than he knew he could make, he got all that he wanted. And once he started killing, he thought, why stop?

The target had a cat. Not in the house, though. The target had been traveling, so the cat was kenneled, or house sat, or whatever it was that people did with their cats when they left. Wing had never had a pet.

There was no name on the bowl. He did not see any toys. It was a strange house—old, as London houses tended to be, and drafty, but as though someone had stuffed a showroom on the ground floor. Everything matched. The art was tasteful but ignorable, completely devoid of personality. There were no photographs. In fact, it was about as clean as he left his own apartment in New York City. 

He was killing another ghost.

Wing reached for his Beretta. Something wasn’t right.

Franz and Nigel died in action, and it was like a slamming door in their lives. There was the grief again—and though Wing never felt like he could traverse his grief in words, he sometimes found synonyms. 

“It’s always going to be like this,” he said to Otto. They hung onto each other’s voices over the phone, he watching the clouds roll in over the stars while Otto dressed for his morning workout. “Learning that something terrible happened. That we’ll never see them again. We’ll always be waiting for sadness.”

“I know. It’s not easy.”

“I don’t want to lose people anymore.”

“There always has to be a choice,” Otto sighed.

“Shut up!” Wing shouted. “You know damn well there never is.”

He hung up, and screamed again. 

Otto sent a text that didn’t really apologize. We’re only human, he said. Wing ignored it. Somehow, that didn’t make any of it better.

The front door clicked as it opened. Wing tensed, ready to face off.

The woman kicked off her heels, set her purse on the hallway table, and walked into the living room. 

“Wing Fanchu, I hope you aren’t sitting in my living room intending to shoot me!”

Wing stared.

He hadn’t really researched his target. Part of him didn’t really care anymore—on some level, he wanted to tempt death. He knew he had stopped caring. But now, he realized, he had been a complete and utter fool.

An American businesswoman in her mid 40s, living alone in London but with no specified worksite. He suddenly thought about the client’s texts. $69? it asked. Interested? The check-in. The entry code.

“Shelby,” he groaned. “Please don’t tell me you ordered a hit on yourself.”

Shelby Trinity drew herself up and folded her arms. “Well, from my end, I thought I was sending a sexy and mysterious booty call.”

Wing restored the safety on his gun and tucked it into its holster again. “You changed your number.”

“I am a senior agent at the foremost villainous coalition in the world,” Shelby said. “I am a woman of many numbers. That’s no excuse for an assassin of your caliber.”

“I—”

“And not only have I hired many assassins, I have been an assassin, so I ought to know.” Shelby looked him up and down, blasting him with a restrained scowl. Wing knew it well enough to know she was genuinely annoyed he had come to the house planning to kill her.

“I don’t have an excuse,” Wing sighed. “I’m sorry.”

“Well, I’m going to go upstairs and take off my clothes,” Shelby said. “And then you can show me how sorry you are.”

The soft thumps of her feet faded as she went up the stairs, leaving Wing along in the sterile sitting room. 

“What are you doing, Wing?” he asked himself aloud. 

He could leave. He was aware of that fact. He could disappear into the night and pretend that the entire night hadn’t happened. He could resume his bland, disconnected life and return the text from the client in Dubai.

It occurred to him for the first time in a long time that he was unhappy. He unlaced his shoes and set them next to the door, then walked up the stairs after Shelby.

Wing would not have been able to explain the reasons he became a killer to his younger self. To that boy, everything had been simple: he made a promise to his mother that he would not kill, and so he didn’t.

He tried to explain it to Otto a few times, when he was a few years into the game.

“You just don’t seem like you anymore,” Otto had said, his words coming haltingly.

“You might be right,” Wing sighed. “I just feel like I have to do… something. It’s my fault those children are dead. It was my error.”

“You have a lot to be grateful for,” Otto chided. “Most of them escaped safely. The new building looks fantastic from what you’ve said. Shelby is alive.”

“I understand that I seem heartless,” Wing said. “Especially when things are looking up. I just know that there’s more… That I have more responsibility.”

“Okay, big guy. If that’s where you’re at… I don’t understand it. But I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

“Me too.” Wing looked at a letter on his desk. It was from a man he had never met—the nephew of his old teacher, Lao. His former mentor had died. Wing had been asked to go to the funeral. He put the invitation in the shredder.

“Otto, are we still friends?” Wing asked, feeling more as though he were speaking to the metal box in his hand than a man who knew Wing better than he knew himself. 

Otto’s voice hit a higher pitch. “It makes me sad that you would ask me that.”

Shelby was more or less in Wing’s lap—she had her legs wrapped around Wing’s trunk and was sucking his tongue halfway down her throat. Wing drew back, coming up for air.

“God, I missed you,” he said. 

Loving Shelby was like returning to a favorite book—familiar, comforting, and yet somehow full of things Wing had never noticed before. They were getting older. Shelby had spots on her skin and strands of silver in her hair that were as new to her as they were to him. But then, she also had that tattoo on her shoulder: the moon from a tarot deck she liked. He had been with her when she got it, more than twenty years ago. She had never been shy, Shelby, and she didn’t seem to mind baring it all in front of him—wrinkles and sags and scars and all. For the first time in a long time, Wing felt like he didn’t need to be shy, either. Eye to eye, belly to belly. He kissed her shoulders and neck tenderly, cupping her head with his warm hands. She rolled onto her back beneath him, provoking him onward with a wry smile. He obliged her, and she laughed. She laughed, and laughed, and made him laugh, too—a deep belly laugh he had forgotten lived inside him. 

And then, somewhere in the middle, Wing found himself sobbing. He crumpled, hiding his face in his hands. She held him. 

“Shelby,” he whispered. “Have I ruined everything?”

“Shhhh, honey. You could never.”

“You used to be the most important thing in my life. I loved you. What happened?”

“We grew up,” Shelby said. “The girl you fell in love with when you were a teenager hasn’t been here for a long, long time.”

Wing stared at her stomach, pressing his fingers to the scars where the bullets had gone in. Something in him ached to feel them there. “I was so afraid of losing you.”

“And you did. We needed to break up then, to become the people we are now.”

“I hate myself now.”

Shelby wrapped her arms around Wing’s chest, drawing him into her big spoon. “If you could be anyone, who would you be?”

“Yours.”

Shelby laughed again. “I mean, that can be arranged. Anything else?”

“I wish I could help people again,” Wing said. “It’s been so long since I’ve even tried. I’m so—so lost.”

“We all get lost sometimes, Wing. It’s enough that you’re finding your way back.”

“You don’t mind who I am? What I’ve done?”

“Ah, c’mon. You know I’ve always found evil guys a little hot.”

Wing flipped around, so he was facing her. “I love you.”

Shelby stroked his wet cheek with her hand, and Wing was surprised to see a tear tracing her cheek as well. “It’s like I keep telling you, babe. You’re easy to love. Even like this.”

As a child, Wing remembered being held in his mother’s lap. Keiko sat on the grass in loose clothes. She’d left her shoes in the house. She closed her eyes and breathed. Wing was getting a little too old to be cuddled, but so far he hadn’t stopped asking. His mother didn’t seem to mind: in a way, she was in her own world.

“Do you see the world, WIng?” she asked. “Do you really see it?”

“I see it,” Wing said. 

She pointed out the world to him. Crickets, hopping in the grass. Fish flicking through the pond. Bees visiting the trees, blades of grass bending in the breeze, ants crawling up his hand.

“Everything in the world is filled with spirit,” she told him. “These lives are sacred and they are everywhere. Do you understand?”

Wing looked at her, wide-eyed and confused. He was very young.

“Maybe not yet,” his mother sighed. “But someday you will see it. Just know that looking after these little lives, big or small, is one of your special jobs. And, more than anything, you must never take a life. Can you promise me that?”

“Yes, Mom,” he said. And for many years, he did.