Title: Union of Souls
Author: john_Egbert
Fandom: Killer7
Character(s): KAEDE Smith, gen
Rating: T for Teen
Length: ~300
Content notes: Death, Descriptions of Violence
Summary: KAEDE Smith is alive. She also has absolutely no clue what's going on.
A/N: I almost called this The Short Second Life of KAEDE Smith, but common sense won out in the end.



The thing about peace is that it can’t last forever.

KAEDE’s staying in a place called the Union Hotel, four floors up and with a view that stretches out over the city and off into the horizon. She’s got miniature shampoos and soaps and towels so soft and fluffy it’s almost blasphemy to use them for something as simple as bathing. She has a gun, a proper, working gun, with a grip that feels solid and reassuring in her hand, and a clip full of bullets.

KAEDE has never been so afraid in her life.

This is worse than running, worse than being a low paid hit woman, worse than taking on jobs she knew were little more than glorified, drawn-out suicide. This is worse than dying, actually, because at least then, with a knife in her side and a hand around her throat, choking the breath out of her, she knew what was going to happen.

(It hurt, yes, but KAEDE can handle pain. What KAEDE cannot handle is uncertainty, and this new hotel with this new boss and these new assassins is unsteady ground.)

“Hello, child,” the man with the white hair and the tommy gun had said, “Would you like another chance?”

And she’d said yes, okay, sure, because what else was she supposed to do? It was that or hang around that alley forever, running her hands around the ring of blue-black bruises around her neck and mouthing gibberish at passerby.

Except now she’s not so sure she’s made the right choice. She’s not sure what she’s doing here or why or how. All she knows is that she’s got a gun in her hand and a neck clear of bruises and the air tastes like death, sweet and red and hot.

(Something’s got to give, and she just hopes it won’t be her.)