บท 3: Compromised
By the end of the fifth day of surveillance and failed hit attempts, Six was even more baffled why anyone would want to kill Claire Conway. Her life was as simple as one could get.
She worked as a pharmacy technician and was friendly with her coworkers. She came home to her strange cat (whose name turned out to be Daisy) and her houseplants at the end of the day.
Most of her free time was spent watching TV but she also spent a fair amount of time singing to herself or listening to music as she practiced drawing. She didn't appear to be very good at it but who was he to judge? He didn't know anything about art.
All he did know was that Claire frequently groaned and muttered to herself before erasing things and starting over. She referenced a drawing book frequently too so she was probably a beginner trying to learn.
Six hadn't even realized it but he mentally started referring to her as 'Claire' rather than 'the target.' Agents never referred to their prey by name.
It was one of the first things he learned during his training. Referring to a target by name humanized them and that could make them more difficult to kill. He should have paid more attention during that lesson because now he was in deep water.
Claire, who he was assigned to kill, had become a real person to him. The more he watched her the more he realized he couldn't do this.
His pitiful attempts at surveillance to find the best opportunity to kill her were merely excuses. Six wanted to see her again because she puzzled him. He didn't want to kill her at all; he wanted to figure her out.
The problem was that he wouldn't be able to avoid the consequences of keeping her alive forever. When he arrived back at headquarters that night, he got caught. Raven was not at all pleased.
"Six, you still have not ended the target's life and the client is getting impatient. Your mission will be reassigned and you are going to have to undergo retraining. It is obvious that you have been compromised somehow during this assignment.
"Report to Spider immediately; she will take care of your retraining. I am very disappointed in your failure to complete this assignment. I expected better from someone of your caliber and track record. Dismissed."
"Yes, sir," Six said quietly at the end of his lecture.
However, he had absolutely no intention of reporting to Spider. Retraining was supposedly unpleasant and he had no desire to deal with that right now. He had never needed it personally because he always followed orders without question but word got around.
On top of that, it meant that someone else was going to finish off Claire. After watching her for so long, he was seriously questioning the validity of the client's request. Her life was simple and solitary; he could not see a reason why she should die.
Normally he didn't care about people's motives. Requests tended to come in based on greed or hatred and neither of those emotions were ones that Six understood.
The things he felt weren't really that complex. Hunger. Boredom. Exhaustion. Pain. That was about the extent of it until he had met Claire and was able to add curiosity to the list. He did not want the one person he had ever been truly curious about to die.
There was only one thing Six could do if he wanted to save her. He would have to run away from headquarters and protect her from the shadows himself. At least until he figured her out. Once his curiosity was satisfied he would be able to accept his retraining and her inevitable death.
===
Claire scrolled boredly through the listings on Funimation, desperately needing a new show to watch. She had been on a serious anime kick lately but was running out of material. She would start a show and watch for a few episodes without getting seriously invested, forcing her to start the process over again.
What was she doing with her life anyway? She had been completely alone since her mom died when she was sixteen.
Because she left behind a paid-off house and a solid life insurance policy, Claire was able to become legally emancipated and continue living on her own rather than go into foster care. She finished high school, got her associate degree to become a pharmacy technician, and had been working ever since with little variation in her weekly routine.
The one blip on the radar had been adopting Daisy. Shortly after she turned eighteen she decided that she wanted some form of companionship so she went to an animal shelter.
There were plenty of adorable cats and dogs available but she was somehow drawn to the one that was missing both an eye and a leg. When she asked about the cat, the shelter worker was surprised.
Apparently she had been there for nearly three years without being adopted. This particular shelter was a no-kill one. If not for that policy, she would have been one of the first to go because no one wanted her.
Claire scrutinized the cat in the kennel more closely. The missing eye really wasn't that hideous; it sort of looked like she was winking. And the leg stump was all sewn up with fur grown back over it so that wasn't so bad either.
The poor thing looked so defeated, like it knew that nobody wanted it and that it would spend its entire life inside a cage. That clinched it for her. Claire wanted that cat.
Daisy ended up being incredibly affectionate; demanding pets and her owner's lap as much as she possibly could once she got used to being at home. The two of them had been thick as thieves ever since.
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