Maren is not the first Avenger (backintheworld) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-06-23 19:39:00 |
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Entry tags: | captain america |
Who: Maren
What: Narrative: A failed hit (An attempt to set fire to the Fulton Garage)
Where: Fulton Garage
When: Saturday
Warnings/Rating: Nope
Saturday dawned hot and dry. A hundred degrees, and Maren thought it fitting. She had sat up long into the night before, reading every word she could find printed on paper, cracking the spine of every novel she possessed, as if it might be her last chance to do so. And perhaps it was, because the dawn brought something she dreaded with it. The note with the command - Kill her - was set out upon the counter when she ate breakfast, and it was set out upon the bed as she dressed. She carried it in her pocket as she left the Turnberry Towers apartment, and she pressed her fingers to it as she rode the bus to the stop a few blocks away from the garage.
Slung over her shoulder was a backpack, her own personal yoke, and within there was accelerant and matches. Night had not yet fallen, but the hours when Hailey Fulton was at the garage did not include the safety of night among them. She had no choice. She knew better than to think she could avoid the charge of a head of a crime family. Death or death, it seemed, and perhaps it was a fitting choice for the girl so out of her element without the safety of the pages to shield her.
When Maren was recruited in college, she had not expected this life. She was good at personas, at acting, at bearing false witness, at being a million characters from books and stories. She was not good at being herself, because there was no one that existed beneath that facade. She was also not good at killing. No one had taught her to shoot a gun, and no one had taught her where to stick a knife so that death came, and yet here she was, assigned with doing that very thing in order to remain alive herself. It was a comedy of errors, where she stood front and center and waited for the joke to come in the form of the sword against her neck.
She did not check to ensure Hailey was inside, because she was not a trained assassin. She took the hours provided as proof, and she did not realize it was her job to ensure her victim was sequestered within the building she meant to set aflame.
Admittedly, the flames were chosen because of Kellan. He set fires, and he was never caught, and that gave her a false sense of security. She could do this. She could set this blaze and finish this work, and she could walk away having paid her debt. She could succeed, she told herself. Arsonists in novels were not particularly brilliant. They had not graduated on Dean’s List, not as she had. They had not earned full scholarships to a prestigious university. They had not survived hell on earth in a town with no street lights to illuminate the horrors that took place within the houses that slept along its lanes.
She rounded the building, and she sloshed accelerant at the base, all along the edges, as quickly as she could manage. It was sloppy, and ill-planned, but she assumed flames outside would consume anything inside. She had no idea that it was not so easy. The most she did to ensure flames within the garage itself was to pull open the rear office doors and slosh some accelerant on the carpet just inside. It was there that she dropped the match, and then she ran, a scared girl in a yellow dress, her black hair trailing behind her as she melted into the populace of Las Vegas, into the safety of people who gambled and vacationed and lived life. People who felt things, people who did not long for life on a page, where they could simply close the book on the frightening turn their chapter had taken.
She felt a tingle along her spine, like the rake of Death’s scythe, and she turned toward the library, where she hid until the sun dropped beneath the mountains. She penned notes there, and she tucked Kellan’s key into an envelope, and then she read until the librarians sent her home with stern looks at her attempt to hide there into the evening.