Sniper | JJK ✓

5

She dropped the gun to her side after checking if it was loaded, knowing that if she fucked up any part of this in any way, she'd be lying in a pool of red on the garage's cold cement floor. She made her way over to the door, reaching for the other sneakers that weren't Converses. Too hard to get on and off, as that one rapper said. 

She padded over to the garage door with his gun in one hand and shoes dangling from her pinky. "Don't wanna step in blood," she said to no one in particular as she slipped them on before heading into the garage. She allowed herself to take one last glance towards her boss. Oh, how she hated this man. Now, she would free herself from his stupid games. Now his place in her heart would be empty, and it would be worth any price (plus tax). 

She put one hand on the door and pushed it open, revealing Jeongguk... asleep? Aliana stood in the doorway for a moment. She studied the rise and fall of his chest and his eyelids fluttering. An internal sigh of relief left her body when she knew he was still alive. Why did they even leave him alive, anyway? His hair wasn't even wet, they didn't even waterboard him? If they didn't even torture him, why did they need to kill him anyway?

"You should probably move now," Tonio whispered, offering a slick smile.
He reminded her of her neighbors in Queens, the one place she called home for more than one year. Immediately fire escapes and graffitied bricks flashed in her mind, with the boy next door and his sister's heads sticking through their window 2 floors above the terrace she would lounge on after school, smiling and laughing. Some sort of warm feeling bloomed in her chest, the nostalgia rushing back at an extremely inappropriate time, considering she had to kill the guy in front of her. 

"Yeah. Okay." The gun at her side felt heavy. Dragging her shoulder down and down, like the hell she would most likely be a resident of in 20 minutes. She took a few wary steps in the shoes that somehow fit her perfectly like she was some Kill Bill Cinderella. Aliana reached the end of the steps, watching him sleep for a little more. She tried to ignore the guilt that was replacing the warm nostalgia, but that's a lot harder than it seems. 

Jeongguk woke up after Tonio closed the door a little louder than he should have. 

"Can you guys just kill me or torture me or let me go because the whole lonely kickback in your garage is getting a little old."

She almost smiled. "You got a real big mouth."

He pressed his lips into a thin line. "Alright. I should shut up then."

"Must be a smart guy. You know how to not piss women off. Maybe you're a womanizer." She completed the wide semicircle around his chair, occasionally looking into his eyes. 

"Haven't slept with a woman since—"

"No talking, remember?" She reminded him. 

"Nevermind..." He trailed off. He watched her circle around him again. He understood that she was contemplating something, hopefully not killing him. He watched her gun sway like one of those pendulums or a metronome. 

She kept lapping him, over and over and over again, with Tonio watching her with a faint expression of confusion. She looked at him, she looked at the guy in the chair, she lifted her gun a little, and she dropped it. She can't kill him. She just can't. Every time she looked at him all she saw was her brother. Her stupid brother. The one who took a literal bullet in their Queens apartment, and the one who fell out of the window as she caught his hand before he fell onto the sidewalk below them, the two neighbors above them no longer smiling out the window. Blood would splatter all over her shirt again. The red painting an abstract picture of guilt and shame. 

"Tonio? Can you come down here, I need to ask you something." She stared at him, mustering up the invisible courage. 

He stood beside her, his glance shifting between him and her. "Yeah? What's up?"

She lifted the gun, placing it in front of Jeongguk's head. "I want to show you how to kill a man." She smirked. 

Jeongguk squeezed his eyes shut and balled his right fist. She took a deep breath, faked a smirk, turned her wrist 45º, and shot Tonio between the eyes. He stumbled back, a final look of betrayal as he hit the floor. 

Jeongguk barely opened one eye before relaxing. "You uh, missed?"

She rolled her eyes as she pulled a knife from the back pocket of her sweatpants. "I'll open the garage, you drag his body outside. There's a key in his pocket, get that, sit in the car until I get out there."

Jeongguk fought the urge to rub his wrists and hesitantly staggered toward the corpse on the floor. He rummaged through his pockets before wrapping his fingers around the Mercedes' key fob in his suit front pocket. "Got it." He smiled back at her, seemingly unaffected by the fact that she had just killed someone. 

"If you drive off I will die. But you owe me, so can we at least save each other's life once?"  She reminded him as she hung on the banister, her head turned back like an owl.

"Uh, yeah. Sure. I owe you anyway." He nodded, grabbing Tonio's shoes with a grimace on his face. He shuffled away, leaving Aliana to think. 

She came back into the house and took off her shoes. She dropped onto the couch again, this time beside him. He had changed the channel to some random reality show. Women in high heels were running around and screaming. One even threw a wine glass onto a woman who was sitting and presumably minding her own business. Not too different from her own life, the absurdity. 

"You have plenty of blood on your pants. Do you want to change?"

"No, I'm good." Then a pause. "Thanks."

A faint smile was on the Boss's face, but it disappeared quickly. "Is Tonio taking care of the body?"

"Yes."

He nodded, returning his full attention to the reality show. 

So this was their goodbye. The soundtrack of their last moment together would be women screaming and fighting. This debtor-and-creditor relationship had to end eventually, somehow. 

She got up and walked away. Jesus wept. 

She packed up her bag in the cold guest room upstairs, feeling the floor below her feet vibrate. She looked outside of the window of her room, opened it, and chucked her bag to the ground. She jumped down, managing to not snap her legs. She crept around the side of her house and focused on the car that Jeongguk was most likely sitting in, eyes flitting around the property to make sure some random guard wouldn't approach her. 

She flung the driver's door open and held eye contact with Jeongguk in the passenger seat briefly as if they were having a conversation. Aliana threw her bag into the backseat and barely got her seatbelt on before slamming on the gas, driving both of them away into the unknown.