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When Reina wandered into the kitchen, seeking breakfast, she found Lung sitting at the table and reading a book. An empty bowl sat beside him. He didn’t look up to acknowledge her. Reina passed the table and opened the fridge, procuring a yoghurt cup and a spoon from the cutlery drawer, and paced around the room, eating as she did.
She did a loop around the table, finishing off the cup and coming to a stop behind him. Lung was still annoyingly quiet.
“Good morning ,” Reina sniped.
“Mm,” Lung rumbled.
She scowled. For all her abilities, for all the ways she’d bolstered the gang with her bombs, he still had the audacity to treat her like she was one of the lowly recruits scraped from the high schools. For fuck’s sake, she was practically his second in command.
No matter. Reina padded over to the sitting area, which was a couch and a couple armchairs clustered around a coffee table and flatscreen TV. She would make him listen to her today.
“There’s something I’ve been thinking about,” she announced to the room. She glanced back to see Lung half-turned in her direction. She took that as invitation to continue.
“You know, you’re not invincible,” Reina said, putting the spoon and empty yoghurt container on the coffee table. “Someone could get you. I could get you.”
Lung didn’t respond, but his eyes were pointed at her, as opposed to at his book. Reina stepped up on the couch, wobbling slightly, and put one foot on the armrest, facing him with her hands on her hips.
“Think about it,” she said, lifting her arm and making a gun with her hand, angling it so his head was just above her thumb. She closed one eye; the better to focus. “Sniper on the roof of, say, the apartment complex on tenth and fifth. It’s late and there’s nobody around but you and a couple of goons walkin’ down the street. He takes the shot with eight millimeter bullets, and —” She ‘fired’. “ Psheew. Before you can even regenerate, your grey matter is splattered across the pavement. Sayonara .”
He’d turned his head to look at her, face impassive. “This is how you would kill me?”
“Me?” She put her hand to her chest, eyes wide. “No, no, that’s how the Protectorate kills you. When I kill you and take over the ABB, it’s a lot different.”
Lung dog-eared the page of his book and put it on the table. “Tell me how you would do it.”
Reina grinned. “It’s a mercy kill, really. See, the Protectorate have decided for one reason or another you’re too big for your britches. Too arrogant. So they send in the Triumvirate, and before long you’re pinned to the bottom of the Bay by Alexandria. And you can regenerate, of course, but you’re suffering. Not a good time.”
“Alexandria needs to breathe.”
“Obviously she’s got scuba gear on,” Reina replied seamlessly. “So Alexandria’s got her diving mask on, and your feet are sticking outta the Bay because you’re in overgrown lizard mode, and you’re thrashing and spitting fire, but it’s not doing you much good because the strongest woman in the world has you pinned by the throat in deep water. Kinda hot, actually.” She smirked. “But the point is you’re dying, you’re suffering, and that’s when I take mercy on you and torpedo you.”
“You would give Alexandria the opportunity to leave,” Lung said, raising one eyebrow.
“No, no, no. See, that’s the secret; there’s double warheads in the torpedos, and one of them detaches from the main body and puts an explosive slug right in your head. And that blows and knocks out Alex’s breathing system. Then, the second warhead explodes. Guess what it is.”
There was a long, frustrating silence in which Lung said nothing, only stared at her like he was stupid, or she was stupid. “Tell me.”
An eye-roll. “Fine. It’s a time bomb. In both senses; it doesn’t go off immediately, and it creates a field of slowed time that even the invincible Alexandria can’t fly right through. So she’s stuck, she’s lost her air, and she’s drowning. And when she croaks, I have not only extended mercy to our glorious leader, but I’m the bitch who killed Alexandria.” She flung her arms wide, grinning. “Bulletproof.”
The only response to that was a snort. Reina hopped down from the couch and sauntered over to the table, where she sat opposite him. She crossed her arms, brows raised expectantly. “So?”
Lung raised a singular eyebrow again. “What?”
“I’ve showed my hand, you show me yours. How would you kill me?” She jerked her chin at him.
Lung let out a heavy sigh, one that seemed to fill the room. “You said that a sniper would be how the Protectorate kills me. Then, in the situation you described, Alexandria tries to drown me.”
“Alternate futures,” Reina shrugged. “Maybe the sniper shot is actually from… I dunno, that Coil guy. He’s got mercs. Anyway, how would you kill me?”
His arms were crossed on the table, still watching her with that piercing, dark gaze of his. “It would be because of a failure.”
“Right, right.”
“In anything but the worst of failures, you are too useful to kill. So in this case… you have planted bombs in the headquarters of the Protectorate. Perhaps you have killed a Ward,” Lung mused, “and you have brought the attention of the heroes on us. As well as some of the independents, one or two villain groups.”
She shrugged. “Hey, it’s their fault for putting child soldiers in the line of fire.”
“I must make an example out of you,” Lung continued, heedless of her words, “but I do not let you know this. I let you finish whatever bombs you are making, and I let you explain their use. When you are in your workshop one day, this is when I act.”
Somewhere along the line the atmosphere in the room had gone from teasing in the way only she could tease him, to coldly serious. There was no levity to Lung’s tone, and whether that was because of his slightly stilted English or the home-hitting possibility he presented Reina couldn’t say. She felt tense, like if she moved the moment would shatter like glass and some unnameable consequence would fall on her.
“And what do you do?” she said, slower, more deliberate. “I might be one of the only parahumans who could kill you. I have the weapons, especially when I’m in my workshop, I have the position. If you wanted to sneak up on me, you’d have to be human. Guaranteed I’d know there’s a fuckoff huge dragon trying to get at my shit.”
“I would be human. I walk in your workshop, and you are sitting and tinkering. You do not suspect anything because I come to check on you often. I grab your neck and pull you out of your chair. Away from your bombs.”
“Who’s to say I couldn’t grab my gun?” Reina asked airily.
The tiniest of smiles tugged at the corners of his mouth. “You would grab at my hand on instinct. You are not a fighter, Bakuda, and you are not stronger or faster than me. I would tell you why you failed me, that you took it too far.” A pause.
Reina swallowed. “And then?”
“I would pin you. Choke you, watch as the life left your eyes, and as it did I would burn your face beyond recognition. I would have others drop your corpse on the stairs of the headquarters. It would be a statement. A life for a life.” The words had a sense of finality to them, as if he was describing things to come, rather than things that would never be. “Satisfied?”
Reina didn’t respond.
After a moment of silence, Lung went back to his book. Reina allowed herself a grin. “You know, if I weren’t the biggest dyke in New England, this would be like foreplay.”
“Do not flatter yourself,” Lung rumbled matter-of-factly, crisply turning a page.