Metal

78%

The mug lies hot on his fingers, but the coffee itself is slowly cooling. Though it's still half full, Tao doesn't make the effort to take another sip. His teeth are too busy biting down on his lip until he draws a tiny trickle of blood, which he licks up with his tongue. The past is a difficult thing to discuss.

"You still with them?" Tao decides to start. "The agency, I mean."

Yi Xing gives a relaxed nod. "Yeah. And I'm guessing you are too." His hand looks slack as he drinks from his mug.

Tao's head bobs down once. He doesn't know where to go from here.

"So," Thankfully, Yi Xing had always been the one with words. "Who, or what, I'm not judging, were you running from?"

"Yi Fan."

"Oh," Yi Xing stretches the sound. "That one." A pause, a sip. "You know, you never did tell me. After all those years."

"Hm?" Tao tries not to look like he knows exactly what Yi Xing's talking about.

"How you got in. The agency."

The mock smile that rips its way through Tao's face is frightening.

"It's not like I wanted to," Tao spins the the cup around on the table, pushing the handle with his index finger as it makes a hard sound against the smooth surface.

"No one wants in until they are." Yi Xing waits for him to answer the silent question between them.

"My parents," Tao begins, "they died. In a car crash. That's what they told me." He rotates the cup the other way. "All that cliche stuff. I was left with no family, sad little kid I was. Poor me had no one to look to. I was home by myself, doing who the hell knows what, and a man called up our home phone. I answered since no one else could. He told me they died. Some drunk guy driving a damn truck."

"I'm sorry for your loss. And that's real sad and all," Yi Xing crosses his arms in front of his chest, "but where is this all going?"

"Well, that's the thing. That's where it all went from. I didn't have any family to go to, I thought. I got another call after saying no, there were no relatives, but there was a close friend of my father's. They wanted me to go live with them."

Yi Xing nods him along.

"It was all right the first few days. Normal house, normal people. They had a son, two years older than me."

"Guess who..." Yi Xing mutters to himself.

Tao doesn't miss a beat. "Yeah. Yi Fan.

"Then one day, the father of the family, my father's friend, grabbed me and their son by the shoulders and told us we had to go through training. 'Special education', he said. And we were sent away the next day. A private academy, I thought. How nice."

"We were both wrong, weren't we?" Yi Xing muses.

"Beyond words," Tao replies. "But before he told us goodbye, he pulled me over and said to me, 'Your daddy wanted you to follow in his footsteps, Zi Tao. He wanted you to do great things.' So I went with it. I thought I was doing the right thing.

"I didn't see Yi Fan for a long time, but obviously he moved up in ranks quicker than I did. He went through more of the psychological classes. I was trained physically."

"Oh, even I can finish this one," Yi Xing waves the cup in hand. "Huang Zi Tao, assassin class, top student. So good, he graduated early, and two years later, was sent on his first mission at the age of seventeen. Is that where we are now?"

Tao grits his teeth. "Hell, Yi Xing. Hell. They gave me a gun at age six and expected me to kill for a living. What could I do?"

"Nothing. You went through with it."