Always Like This (Léon (The Professional)/Weiß Kreuz), Mathilda&Sakura, G
Title: Always Like This
Author: daegaer
Fandom: Léon (The Professional)/Weiß Kreuz
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Prompt: (44) To gain that worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else. -- Bernadette Devlin.
Summary: Mathilda and Sakura's childhood experiences of assassins were not the same.
Author's Note: Thanks to toscas_kiss for beta-ing! This is a WK AU, in which Sakura has spent more time with Schwarz, and Schuldig has made good on his sarcastic crack about her becoming a hitman. The fic takes its title from an early conversation between Mathilda and Léon:
Mathilda: Is life always this hard, or just when you're a kid?
Léon: Always like this.
There's a proper way to disassemble and clean a gun, and in her dreams Mathilda can still remember how to do it. The pieces lie black and gleaming on the scuffed table top; she admires how they catch the sunlight for a moment, then carefully puts them in their case, piece by piece. Léon looks disapproving but just a little proud too as he slides her glass of milk back over to her.
It feels like home, in a way nothing ever has since.
* * *
Mathilda watched patterns in murder. Not boring, ordinary murders where men killed their wives or girlfriends, not that she wouldn't have minded a little practice in giving vengeance to the bereaved, but murders where someone had clearly hired professional help. She read reports of criminal feuds, and thought of the people who'd been brought in. She read as many papers as she could every day, drawing up charts of connections between prominent deaths in a murderous, bloody game of six degrees. She pored over details of the deaths of financial backers for political campaigns, and wished she could meet the cleaner involved. She wished she could be the cleaner, but knew she had no chance of an introduction to help her on that path.
"Stay in school," Tony said, every time she tried to bring it up. And, when she'd graduated and asked again, "You think he'd have wanted that? Go to college, for Christ's sake. Get married. Be normal."
Mathilda did as she was told, and went to college. She didn't make many friends; a cleaner had to be able to cut ties quickly and easily, and no one believed her when she talked about her life, anyway. Four years later she went to Tony and asked again, in perfect, bookish Italian. He laughed and told her he was glad she didn't sound like Léon any more, and why didn't she get a job as a translator? That'd be a good normal job for a girl with her posh Roman accent. Now, Mathilda sighed, and spread out her charts of places and times of death. She was sick of being normal.
"Excuse me, is this seat taken?"
Mathilda looked up reluctantly at the young Asian woman, and resentfully cleared just enough room for her to set down her coffee. She should have known better than to come to Starbucks so close to lunch, she thought. The other woman cocked her head to glance at the charts as she sat down, and giggled.
Mathilda ignored her.
* * *
There's no right way to avoid unwanted attention. If Sakura isn't fast enough, good enough in her lessons, she won't please Schuldig and he beats her. Crying just encourages him to give her something he thinks warrants tears. If she is a good enough student and pleases him he rewards her with cafes and cheap shops, destroying the outing to the normal world with his every reminder of how she achieved it. She can't decide which outcome is better, and strives to achieve some middle way to spur his strange, rare kindness. If she pleases him too much, or there's nothing good on television, or it's raining out or if he doesn't want to go out in the sun, he tells her to go to bed with him. She never thinks about that if she can.
She never stops feeling lost.
* * *
The other woman wasn't a detective, Sakura thought, stirring her coffee. The notes and charts were too pretty and dainty, written in neat handwriting and colour-coded. She was a fan. She giggled again, and sipped her drink as the woman tried not to pay attention. It was amusing, in a way she knew would once have horrified her.
"What's the pattern, do you think?" she said, impulsively. "Other than them all backing the same candidate, of course."
The woman looked up, her expression defensive and a little outraged, as if no one had the right to interpret her charts but her. Sakura smiled encouragingly.
"I hope you can understand my English," she said. "I've lived in Europe for several years and am more used to speaking German." She nodded at the charts. "The papers say only one of those men were murdered. The other two were a heart attack and a fall."
"Well the papers are wrong," the woman said. "The police say the heart attack was brought on by poison, and as for the fall - maybe he was pushed."
"Maybe he was," Sakura agreed, remembering the satisfying expression of shock in the man's eyes as he'd started to go over backwards. She'd only meant to infiltrate the party to check the layout of the house, and had planned to kill the man later, when there weren't so many potential witnesses. He'd made it too easy, with his tastes for hiring Asian waitresses and nasty little predilection for abusing what he saw as voiceless women. He'd done all the work of making sure he wasn't observed following her to the secluded balcony, and it had seemed ungrateful not to take him out there and then. She'd picked up the discarded glasses other guests had left and had slipped back down to the main floor before anyone even knew he was missing. It should worry her, this growing impulsiveness, she knew. Whether killing outside the careful confines of a plan, or striking up conversations with strangers, she was growing less and less careful.
"They all had extensive investments in the same pharmaceutical company," the other woman said, "Which they sold just before its stocks tumbled. The charges of insider trading didn't stick. That's the pattern. It's just a coincidence they have the same political leanings."
Sakura looked at her appraisingly. Her client's son was still in prison, the sacrifice her targets had tossed to the courts. He'd thought it a good time to dispose of his enemies, when they were such conspicuous supporters of one party, and he - since the downfall of his son - such a well known supporter of the other. She'd assumed the police would work it out quickly enough, but clearly it was time to collect her payment and go, if girls in cafés could see the connections.
"It's probably just their politics," she said dismissively. She stood up. "You should get a better hobby."
"It's not a hobby, it's work," the woman said, shifting her attention back to her papers. "I'm going to get to the last one of their little group before the cleaner who got these ones."
Sakura froze.
* * *
"Mathilda, why do you make things up? It's not nice for girls to lie."
Mathilda traces patterns on the new table in the new apartment with her finger. This table is shabbier than the last, the apartment is smaller.
"You told him I was your daughter, and that's not true either," she says. Her voice sounds childish and sulky, even in her own ears.
"It's nicer than saying I'm your . . . your . . ."
She looks up. Léon is scarlet and cannot get the word out. Why can't you love me? she thinks, and knows it's unfair as she thinks it. She's sure he loves her more than almost anyone else has in her short life. It's why she really wants to learn from him. She doesn't want to be a cleaner just for revenge; she wants to be part of a family business.
* * *
"It's true," Mathilda said. "I'm going to get the last guy." She gave the other woman a practiced smile, the one she imagined Léon might have worn if he'd had better taste in movies. The woman was very still, holding her empty cup in a rock steady hand. Mathilda saw something in her eyes, not quite the scorn she'd always seen in school or college if she said anything about her real dreams.
"Now, why would you want to do a thing like that?" the woman said, her voice quiet like the moment before rain, her accent suddenly harsher.
Mathilda shrugged. It felt good to shock someone. "I just want to see someone die and know I killed them. It never gets old."
The woman stood there, totally unmoving, then she shifted, looked suddenly younger and laughed. "You need to get a more natural delivery on that if you want to really sound like a psychopath. You watch too many movies." Still chuckling, she took a step towards the bin to get rid of her cup.
"Actually I spent part of my formative years living with a hitman," Mathilda said, just for the hope of getting that moment back, that moment when she'd known she'd been believed. It was too late, she knew. This was the moment when the laughter turned scornful, when tentative friendships began to dissolve, when she was revealed to others as a liar or madwoman.
The woman sat down opposite her once again, her face fervent.
"Did he have red hair?"
* * *
"Why do you make me do this, Herzchen?"
Sakura picks herself up and stands meekly, head bowed. For long, long moments nothing happens. Then Schuldig rolls his shoulders and stoops to pick up her gun, muttering as he peers at it, ejects the clip and secrets it away. Sakura lets her breath out quietly. It's all right, he's not annoyed any more, the beating is over.
Schuldig turns fast, and backhands her across the face, full-force. Before she can do more than stagger, he's caught her against him, and is smoothing down her hair.
"Let's stop at a cake shop on our way back," he says cheerfully. "I fancy chocolate cake after dinner, how about you?"
"That'd be lovely," she hears herself say. Her voice sounds happy, like the last minutes never happened.
There is, she sometimes thinks, no Sakura left in her any more.
* * *
Her pay was really never in danger, Sakura thought, listening to the woman's clearly well-rehearsed story. She'd never heard of Schwarz, never heard of Schuldig - she was nothing more than a fantasist, dreaming of kindly assassins who gave her milk and marksmanship lessons and who never laid a finger on her inappropriately.
"How old were you?" she said, interrupting the flow of words.
"Twelve," the woman said.
Sakura nodded. It was some sort of childish nonsense, she decided, the equivalent to deciding one's real parents were rich and powerful. She was wasting her time.
"The weirdest thing was," the other woman said, "I know it was only a few weeks - it wasn't even a full summer - but it just seems like it lasted forever. It was like there wasn't any past, or any future past wanting to kill those bastards. It was just always - now, if you know what I mean."
Sakura looked at her silently, remembering how time had stretched and seemed never ending, never progressing.
"It's OK, you can laugh now," the woman said. "It's not very believable, I know." She gathered her charts and pens together like a defensive wall.
"I believe you more now than I did a minute ago," Sakura said at last. "He really never beat you?"
The other woman smiled oddly. "It was so much better than being at home," she said.
Sakura searched her face, picturing kindness and encouragement to go along with the weapons lessons. She shivered at the ghostly touch of a hand on her hair, the whispered memory of Schuldig's accent. If this woman wanted to be an assassin so badly, she thought in sudden anger, she should take her on and teach her some real lessons. She recoiled from the image of herself kicking the other woman as she lay helpless, her anger draining away as fast as it had come. Let her have her fantasies, she thought wearily. They were better by far than the reality.
"You should stay away from hitmen," she said. "Your Léon wasn't like most of them. They're mostly bastards."
"You say that like you've met a lot," the woman smiled.
Sakura sighed. "Even the one I really liked killed people for a living," she said heavily. "The ones I didn't like killed and enjoyed it." She looked the woman in the eye. "All the murder weighs you down," she said. "And by then you're at a point where you just can't go back. There are better careers."
"I'll bear that in mind," the woman said, amused as if Sakura were now the one spinning improbable tales.
Sakura nodded and stood. As she stepped past the woman put a hand on her arm.
"Why did you ask if he had red hair?" she said.
"No reason," Sakura said. "I was just teasing you, getting you to tell your story."
"Oh," the woman said, sounding disappointed.
Sakura threw her cup in the rubbish and left. She had a busy schedule and was stupid to have wasted time on sentimental stories. Half a block away she bought some tissues to wipe the tears from her eyes, then strode off quickly. She didn't look back.
Author: daegaer
Fandom: Léon (The Professional)/Weiß Kreuz
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Prompt: (44) To gain that worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else. -- Bernadette Devlin.
Summary: Mathilda and Sakura's childhood experiences of assassins were not the same.
Author's Note: Thanks to toscas_kiss for beta-ing! This is a WK AU, in which Sakura has spent more time with Schwarz, and Schuldig has made good on his sarcastic crack about her becoming a hitman. The fic takes its title from an early conversation between Mathilda and Léon:
Mathilda: Is life always this hard, or just when you're a kid?
Léon: Always like this.
There's a proper way to disassemble and clean a gun, and in her dreams Mathilda can still remember how to do it. The pieces lie black and gleaming on the scuffed table top; she admires how they catch the sunlight for a moment, then carefully puts them in their case, piece by piece. Léon looks disapproving but just a little proud too as he slides her glass of milk back over to her.
It feels like home, in a way nothing ever has since.
* * *
Mathilda watched patterns in murder. Not boring, ordinary murders where men killed their wives or girlfriends, not that she wouldn't have minded a little practice in giving vengeance to the bereaved, but murders where someone had clearly hired professional help. She read reports of criminal feuds, and thought of the people who'd been brought in. She read as many papers as she could every day, drawing up charts of connections between prominent deaths in a murderous, bloody game of six degrees. She pored over details of the deaths of financial backers for political campaigns, and wished she could meet the cleaner involved. She wished she could be the cleaner, but knew she had no chance of an introduction to help her on that path.
"Stay in school," Tony said, every time she tried to bring it up. And, when she'd graduated and asked again, "You think he'd have wanted that? Go to college, for Christ's sake. Get married. Be normal."
Mathilda did as she was told, and went to college. She didn't make many friends; a cleaner had to be able to cut ties quickly and easily, and no one believed her when she talked about her life, anyway. Four years later she went to Tony and asked again, in perfect, bookish Italian. He laughed and told her he was glad she didn't sound like Léon any more, and why didn't she get a job as a translator? That'd be a good normal job for a girl with her posh Roman accent. Now, Mathilda sighed, and spread out her charts of places and times of death. She was sick of being normal.
"Excuse me, is this seat taken?"
Mathilda looked up reluctantly at the young Asian woman, and resentfully cleared just enough room for her to set down her coffee. She should have known better than to come to Starbucks so close to lunch, she thought. The other woman cocked her head to glance at the charts as she sat down, and giggled.
Mathilda ignored her.
* * *
There's no right way to avoid unwanted attention. If Sakura isn't fast enough, good enough in her lessons, she won't please Schuldig and he beats her. Crying just encourages him to give her something he thinks warrants tears. If she is a good enough student and pleases him he rewards her with cafes and cheap shops, destroying the outing to the normal world with his every reminder of how she achieved it. She can't decide which outcome is better, and strives to achieve some middle way to spur his strange, rare kindness. If she pleases him too much, or there's nothing good on television, or it's raining out or if he doesn't want to go out in the sun, he tells her to go to bed with him. She never thinks about that if she can.
She never stops feeling lost.
* * *
The other woman wasn't a detective, Sakura thought, stirring her coffee. The notes and charts were too pretty and dainty, written in neat handwriting and colour-coded. She was a fan. She giggled again, and sipped her drink as the woman tried not to pay attention. It was amusing, in a way she knew would once have horrified her.
"What's the pattern, do you think?" she said, impulsively. "Other than them all backing the same candidate, of course."
The woman looked up, her expression defensive and a little outraged, as if no one had the right to interpret her charts but her. Sakura smiled encouragingly.
"I hope you can understand my English," she said. "I've lived in Europe for several years and am more used to speaking German." She nodded at the charts. "The papers say only one of those men were murdered. The other two were a heart attack and a fall."
"Well the papers are wrong," the woman said. "The police say the heart attack was brought on by poison, and as for the fall - maybe he was pushed."
"Maybe he was," Sakura agreed, remembering the satisfying expression of shock in the man's eyes as he'd started to go over backwards. She'd only meant to infiltrate the party to check the layout of the house, and had planned to kill the man later, when there weren't so many potential witnesses. He'd made it too easy, with his tastes for hiring Asian waitresses and nasty little predilection for abusing what he saw as voiceless women. He'd done all the work of making sure he wasn't observed following her to the secluded balcony, and it had seemed ungrateful not to take him out there and then. She'd picked up the discarded glasses other guests had left and had slipped back down to the main floor before anyone even knew he was missing. It should worry her, this growing impulsiveness, she knew. Whether killing outside the careful confines of a plan, or striking up conversations with strangers, she was growing less and less careful.
"They all had extensive investments in the same pharmaceutical company," the other woman said, "Which they sold just before its stocks tumbled. The charges of insider trading didn't stick. That's the pattern. It's just a coincidence they have the same political leanings."
Sakura looked at her appraisingly. Her client's son was still in prison, the sacrifice her targets had tossed to the courts. He'd thought it a good time to dispose of his enemies, when they were such conspicuous supporters of one party, and he - since the downfall of his son - such a well known supporter of the other. She'd assumed the police would work it out quickly enough, but clearly it was time to collect her payment and go, if girls in cafés could see the connections.
"It's probably just their politics," she said dismissively. She stood up. "You should get a better hobby."
"It's not a hobby, it's work," the woman said, shifting her attention back to her papers. "I'm going to get to the last one of their little group before the cleaner who got these ones."
Sakura froze.
* * *
"Mathilda, why do you make things up? It's not nice for girls to lie."
Mathilda traces patterns on the new table in the new apartment with her finger. This table is shabbier than the last, the apartment is smaller.
"You told him I was your daughter, and that's not true either," she says. Her voice sounds childish and sulky, even in her own ears.
"It's nicer than saying I'm your . . . your . . ."
She looks up. Léon is scarlet and cannot get the word out. Why can't you love me? she thinks, and knows it's unfair as she thinks it. She's sure he loves her more than almost anyone else has in her short life. It's why she really wants to learn from him. She doesn't want to be a cleaner just for revenge; she wants to be part of a family business.
* * *
"It's true," Mathilda said. "I'm going to get the last guy." She gave the other woman a practiced smile, the one she imagined Léon might have worn if he'd had better taste in movies. The woman was very still, holding her empty cup in a rock steady hand. Mathilda saw something in her eyes, not quite the scorn she'd always seen in school or college if she said anything about her real dreams.
"Now, why would you want to do a thing like that?" the woman said, her voice quiet like the moment before rain, her accent suddenly harsher.
Mathilda shrugged. It felt good to shock someone. "I just want to see someone die and know I killed them. It never gets old."
The woman stood there, totally unmoving, then she shifted, looked suddenly younger and laughed. "You need to get a more natural delivery on that if you want to really sound like a psychopath. You watch too many movies." Still chuckling, she took a step towards the bin to get rid of her cup.
"Actually I spent part of my formative years living with a hitman," Mathilda said, just for the hope of getting that moment back, that moment when she'd known she'd been believed. It was too late, she knew. This was the moment when the laughter turned scornful, when tentative friendships began to dissolve, when she was revealed to others as a liar or madwoman.
The woman sat down opposite her once again, her face fervent.
"Did he have red hair?"
* * *
"Why do you make me do this, Herzchen?"
Sakura picks herself up and stands meekly, head bowed. For long, long moments nothing happens. Then Schuldig rolls his shoulders and stoops to pick up her gun, muttering as he peers at it, ejects the clip and secrets it away. Sakura lets her breath out quietly. It's all right, he's not annoyed any more, the beating is over.
Schuldig turns fast, and backhands her across the face, full-force. Before she can do more than stagger, he's caught her against him, and is smoothing down her hair.
"Let's stop at a cake shop on our way back," he says cheerfully. "I fancy chocolate cake after dinner, how about you?"
"That'd be lovely," she hears herself say. Her voice sounds happy, like the last minutes never happened.
There is, she sometimes thinks, no Sakura left in her any more.
* * *
Her pay was really never in danger, Sakura thought, listening to the woman's clearly well-rehearsed story. She'd never heard of Schwarz, never heard of Schuldig - she was nothing more than a fantasist, dreaming of kindly assassins who gave her milk and marksmanship lessons and who never laid a finger on her inappropriately.
"How old were you?" she said, interrupting the flow of words.
"Twelve," the woman said.
Sakura nodded. It was some sort of childish nonsense, she decided, the equivalent to deciding one's real parents were rich and powerful. She was wasting her time.
"The weirdest thing was," the other woman said, "I know it was only a few weeks - it wasn't even a full summer - but it just seems like it lasted forever. It was like there wasn't any past, or any future past wanting to kill those bastards. It was just always - now, if you know what I mean."
Sakura looked at her silently, remembering how time had stretched and seemed never ending, never progressing.
"It's OK, you can laugh now," the woman said. "It's not very believable, I know." She gathered her charts and pens together like a defensive wall.
"I believe you more now than I did a minute ago," Sakura said at last. "He really never beat you?"
The other woman smiled oddly. "It was so much better than being at home," she said.
Sakura searched her face, picturing kindness and encouragement to go along with the weapons lessons. She shivered at the ghostly touch of a hand on her hair, the whispered memory of Schuldig's accent. If this woman wanted to be an assassin so badly, she thought in sudden anger, she should take her on and teach her some real lessons. She recoiled from the image of herself kicking the other woman as she lay helpless, her anger draining away as fast as it had come. Let her have her fantasies, she thought wearily. They were better by far than the reality.
"You should stay away from hitmen," she said. "Your Léon wasn't like most of them. They're mostly bastards."
"You say that like you've met a lot," the woman smiled.
Sakura sighed. "Even the one I really liked killed people for a living," she said heavily. "The ones I didn't like killed and enjoyed it." She looked the woman in the eye. "All the murder weighs you down," she said. "And by then you're at a point where you just can't go back. There are better careers."
"I'll bear that in mind," the woman said, amused as if Sakura were now the one spinning improbable tales.
Sakura nodded and stood. As she stepped past the woman put a hand on her arm.
"Why did you ask if he had red hair?" she said.
"No reason," Sakura said. "I was just teasing you, getting you to tell your story."
"Oh," the woman said, sounding disappointed.
Sakura threw her cup in the rubbish and left. She had a busy schedule and was stupid to have wasted time on sentimental stories. Half a block away she bought some tissues to wipe the tears from her eyes, then strode off quickly. She didn't look back.