Ruins (Five Hargreeves)

Three - Commission Life

JULIA WAS LONG SINCE DEAD. She'd started dying the day she joined the Commission, clinging to life for five excruciating years, allowing Jay to drag her along back home. But that night, the night she knew it was for nothing, Julia finally let go and died. She died and left Jay to pick up the pieces of her life.

Jay was everything Julia hated about herself. She was her demons moulded into something that could almost be considered useful. Jay was a husk of what could've been and what came instead. Jay was everything wrong with Julia, that's why she was The Handler's favourite. Jay may have been a demon, but The Handler was the devil herself.

So when Jay came back, stumbling and screaming drunkenly, she was welcomed back with open arms. Jay, to be honest, didn't remember what happened in The Handler's office, she barely remembered calling her, but when she woke up in a new Commission apartment left, her new contact on her desk, she almost cried.

A lifelong contact in the corrections department. Jay would be killing for the rest of her life.

She would've rather died had it been any other job, but the Commission wasn't like any other job there was. At the Commission, Jay could do what she did and do it well, then be gone the next day. A life on the road, never staying in the same city or even the same decade longer than a few days. She'd never have to worry about what came next, what came after, because there would be no after. She would be Jay, she would kill, then she would die. It was perfect.

She flew through the mandatory tests for those rejoining the Commission, being sent out to the field in less than a month. Once out, once killing again, Jay came back into her own.

She stopped a few things, and started doing others. She started hiding her tracks, more than she ever had during her first contract, started glancing over her shoulder more, started drinking like never before as the nightmares only worsened. She stopped cutting corners and bending the rules, she stopped being unprofessional. Honestly, Jay was unprofessional by default, being everything wrong with herself, but not with the Commission. This was her life now, she wouldn't throw that away in favour of easiness.

And she stopped going back to her apartment in the Commission. It wasn't mandatory to go back, it was easy to request her next job from the field through her paperwork, so she did. She stayed in the field, working and killing till she literally dropped. You see, Jay was running, even she knew that. She was running from her feelings, because she knew if she let them in they'd destroy her. Jay was running, and that was easier when you were moving. During her first contact, Jay had mastered shutting off her emotions while working to be more effective, so if she never stopped working, she'd never start feeling. Jay knew this, and so she worked till she couldn't.

She had been in a shootout, nothing unusual, and gotten a bullet lodged in her thigh, again nothing unusual. As always, Jay made it back to her crappy motel and performed some light surgery on herself. But it was bad, she'd already lost a lot of blood and had a bit too much to drink beforehand, so her work was sloppy and it quickly got infected. Jay was in the Commission hospital wing not a week later.

After that, all field agents had to report back to Commission once every six months for a mandatory checkup and week of rest. Jay, having vowed not to disobey the rules and ruin her new life, had to do as she was told. But she was tempted.

Still, one week of comfort twice a year, she could handle that. Jay did as she was told, spending the week drowning her emotions in as much alcohol she could get her hands on. Thankfully, drinking and smoking were allowed in the apartments.

The other fifty weeks came and went, Jay didn't really bother with keeping track of time anymore, it was easier. Most the time she couldn't tell you if a job was yesterday or a month ago, she simply didn't bother. The only way of keeping track of time was herself, her own body and as it changed, seemingly overnight. One day Jay was forty-four, somehow beautiful despite all she'd done, with short dark hair and a pretty face. The next...