#nyfrpgtask

1.

War is raging, and in spite of your reservations, you are thriving in the Hearts. You have become a skilled strategist in your own right. You have become an excellent shot. You have trained yourself to be physically capable of killing, to be intellectually capable of killing; but what you have not quite mastered is being emotionally prepared to take somebody else’s life.

You don’t want to, either. You don’t want to be able to kill without a second thought. You still can’t bring yourself to think that way; can’t bring yourself to bury your faith or your relentless compassion, to turn off your empathy in order to make hurting another human being easier. Even as the fight continues. Even with your entire existence at risk. You believe in the sanctity of life, that life is precious and worth preserving, and that is both your greatest strength and your worst weakness.

Because you have killed in self-defence. You have killed to save your friends and family. You have killed for your cause, and you have killed enough to sometimes feel like for every life that you save, you let another go to waste.

You have killed out of necessity, but never, ever in cold blood.

It is a fine line, a delicate balancing act; to constantly teeter on the edge of your own morality. Yet there is something, something lodged deep inside your very being, that keeps you from crossing lines that you can never come back from. Some might call it integrity. You call it hope.

They are approaching quickly, though; lines that once crossed, you can never come back from. As a strategist, you are used to making choices that have far-reaching consequences… Even devastating, irreversible ones. But the choices you are about to face are far more severe than that. They will not only affect the path that the Hearts will take. They will change who you are.

And although you thrive in the Hearts, you are certain that this is not who you are, nor who you want to be. This is what you do. It’s your job. It’s your duty. You know it, and he knows it, too.

You consider leaving for good, not because he asks; he would never ask. He would never ask you to give anything up, and in a sense, that is exactly why you would. Not only for him, or even for a chance to be with him, but for yourself. For the person that you want to be. That you believe that you are capable of being.

In the end, only two things stop you: your loyalty, which is almost as stubborn as your hope, and another, darker force within. It is there, in the back of your mind; that little voice inside your head that wonders exactly who you think you are to believe that you deserve more than the cards that life has dealt you.

You stay. At least a little while longer.

Years later, you will look back on that choice and wonder what would have happened if you’d done it all differently.

2.

You keep telling yourself that you will go through with one last mission. Then you’re done.

By now, you have done a lot more than kill in self-defence. You are directly responsible for unspeakable tragedies, and there is blood on your hands that you can never, ever wash off. Whether you pulled the trigger yourself, or you simply helped put the pieces in place… Those lives are on your conscience. It keeps you up at night, but then again, most things do. See, you were wrong about that: crossing lines that you can never come back from does not change who you are.

It changes how you see yourself.

If you stop now, if you finally decide to leave it all behind, it will not be for a normal existence; no, it will be for a slightly less destructive one. It will be to prevent yourself from falling further into the mess that you’ve made of your life as opposed to allowing yourself the opportunity to make a difference. After all, if you ever had a shot at that elusive happy ending you once dreamed of chasing, it is long gone by now.

Given your track record, the best you can hope for is redemption. A chance to spend the rest of your life repenting for all of the things that you’ve done wrong. But even as you process the thought, there it is like clockwork, in the back of your mind; that little voice inside your head that wonders if you really deserve a chance to be redeemed.

In the end, there never is one last mission. Only the next one.

3.

You almost tell him that you’re in love with him.

In fact, you’ve almost told him dozens of times. Hundreds. Once when you were suffering from a string of particularly bad night terrors, and he knew that staying with him was the only way that you got a decent night’s sleep. Once when he let you drive him all the way to New Jersey on a whim in your crappy car, and the two of you sat on the beach that you used to go to with your parents, where your only really happy childhood memories came from, and you didn’t care that you were crying, because you never thought that you would have the courage to go back there. There were a handful of times during random mornings, when the mere sight of him with his hair all over the place, all tired and grumpy and reaching for your coffee, filled you with so much affection that it almost hurt not to say anything. Not to mention all the nights on the roof, your roof, when you would stargaze and he would teach you about all the different constellations and all you wanted to do was tell him that your favourite thing about the stars was how he talked about them.

This time, you are at the bookstore helping him paint the walls, when he suddenly splatters paint on you. You spend a few seconds staring at him in indignation before rolling paint directly on him and then sticking your tongue out for good measure. He moves to retaliate, you squeal and start running around the limited space, and thus begins a fierce battle to the death that, needless to say, does not end well for either of you.

You look at him lying next to you on the plastic sheeting on the floor, laughing and covered in more paint than has actually managed to make its way onto the walls, and you almost tell him.

I love you. God, I am so in love with you. I am totally, completely, ridiculously, insanely in love with you.

But you don’t, because it is there, in the back of your mind; that little voice inside your head that reminds you that he is good and kind and noble, and you are not, and there is no way that he could ever feel the same way about you after all the things that you have done.

You are lucky to be his friend, and as his friend, you want him to be happy.

That is all that matters to you.

4.

You’re different now. Not in an obvious way, not in a way that you’d even noticed before; because what is distinctly different about you cannot be perceived from the outside. You still look the same. You still wear your hair in a messy bun. You still dress mostly in black, you still read more books than is strictly necessary (or even healthy), you still love Italian gelato and pretentious coffee blends and you’re still obsessed with cheesy 80s pop culture. You’ve always been a little split down the middle that way: the good girl who knows exactly when to be bad.

Except those sides of yourself are completely separate now. In order to survive what you have become, you have managed to perfect the art of compartmentalisation. On one hand, there is the soft, sweet girl with a mildly rebellious streak that you have always been. On the other hand, there are the horrible and vicious things that you are capable of, and that you now have to find new ways to temporarily forget about, if you ever want to look at yourself in the mirror again.

You light a cigarette, and barely acknowledge the strange man whose bed you happen to be in. It’s 3AM and your only thought is that there is no way you’re making the mistake of spending the night again. Slipping into your jeans, you vaguely remember that you used to be a romantic. You used to believe in true love. And you still do, because you still read about it in your beloved fiction and watch it on the silver screen, and you still see it every single day in other people; and you want it for other people, too. You want it for him. Even though it hurts, because you also want him, and you’ve wanted him for years, more than you’ve ever wanted anything.

But you know that you can’t have him, because it is there, in the back of your mind; that little voice inside your head that reminds you that you are a complete disaster, and he should be with someone better.

That’s not what makes you different now, either. You’ve known that ever since you met him. But you also know that feeling what you feel for him used to stop you from doing stupid things like this, things that don’t make you feel a goddamn thing, because they don’t mean anything at all. You used to be willing to wait for the real deal. Even if it never came.

And that is why you are different now. Because you lost hope, the thing that made you you, and this is what you’ve become because of it.

You turn around, and ask the strange man beside you how the hell you let this happen. How you went from being ridiculously faithful to someone that you weren’t even dating to feeling restless each night that you were forced to spend alone. How you went from wanting to get married, wanting to have kids, wanting to move to a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence and becoming a teacher, to wanting… Nothing. Nothing at all.

He says that he doesn’t know.

You don’t know, either.

5.

You’re cleaning out your apartment when you find it. A picture of a 24 year old version of yourself in a dark blue cocktail dress. She’s spinning around, looking over her shoulder; her cheeks are flushed, and her eyes are filled with so much life, so much longing, so much love. You turn it around, recognising the elegant script on the back as your own.

New Years Eve, 2016.

And it kills you a little, the fact that you can tell exactly who was behind the camera from the look on her face alone. It’s written all over her expression, from the sparkle in her brown eyes, to the bright smile on her lips, to the way that she practically beams in the direction of the photographer. And God, it feels like a lifetime ago.

You used to wonder how you let it happen, how you allowed yourself to lose track of who you were, who she was. But you’re older now, if not wiser, and you know. You know what happened.

You gave up on her, and then you punished yourself for it.

You punished yourself for letting her down. You punished yourself for becoming everything that she would have refused to be at the cost of everything that she could have been. You punished yourself for not giving her the future that she deserved. Because she might not have known it then, she might not have believed it then, but she deserved better.

She deserved so much better than becoming you.

---

Alex Cole

38 years old

Alex never suspected his life would change so much so rapidly. He had been with Tessa for maybe a year before they found out she was pregnant. He knew he wasn’t prepared in the slightest for the responsibility of fatherhood, but he was willing enough to take the jump with Tessa, just to see her happy. A daughter was born, Olivia Avalon, and Alex was smitten at first sight. He loves her and Tessa more than anything else, the two of them the brightest things in his life.

Other things haven’t changed, though he knows they should. He couldn’t hide the truth of his work with the Diamonds from Tessa forever, and even though she miraculously has stayed by his side, he knows it’s put a strain on their relationship. Even so, he was lucky enough for her to agree to marry him, finally tying the knot a year ago.