If Tomorrow Starts Without You

No Hero Here

Five years later.

Nana Komore was alive and well - perhaps not all of either, but some of them both. By being alive, she was breathing and talking and walking...and well...well enough to drag herself from bed to work then back to bed by the days' end.

The years had been hard on Nana. That is all this author could cough up about that. She was different now, in all ways. She decided five years ago that if all the world would do to her is treat her like shit, then she'd give it a reason to.

Perhaps it was her early twenties rebellion, and maybe underneath the exoskeleton she had created to house her soft heart, maybe underneath all that she was still just a girl reaching out in the dark. But on the outside, Nana Komore was not Nana Komore, she was now known through the city of Tokyo as an alias of The DeadEye. Because in her current position within Tokyo Manji her signal, her single glance would mean that someone was about to die.

That's the thing about the human form, with all that changes and grows on the outside, so little changes within. The interior make-up of Nana Komore was a fortified shell. She still knew how to watch people, to stand on the sidelines and deduct who was going to go for the kill first. It was her, her and her past; all wrapped up into a neat little package for her commanders to show off like a little lethal trophy during meetings.

Manjiro Sano had built himself into a monster. He was half the friend he used to be to her. Tetta Kisaki was a monster, but Nana believes he was just born that way. Some days Nana believes she was also born to be not much of anything more than a half-good half-bad rendition of another person. That she was shoved into a mould and forced to accommodate herself.

After the years, Nana now did believe there were bad people. That perhaps she was a bad person. These thoughts swindled - typically saved for her sleepless nights where days had worn her down to raw memories. But Kisaki; he was, down to his very core, a bad fucking person. She had known it the second she met him and the years had not turned in his favour.

Nana stood under a haze of flashing coloured lights and thick smoke, watching Manjiro and Kisaki drown themselves in cocaine and half naked women. Basking in their complete ignorance to the fact it was 2am on a Tuesday, and the women around them were sober and milking them of the money they so flimsily jerked out of themselves.

Her eyes darted over to the other right hand of Kisaki, Shuji Hanma. He hadn't taken his eyes off the door the entire night. Which was odd, considering that there were women sprawled open at every single corner of this place, and he hadn't even stolen a single glance at them? Sure, they were strippers, but they were the best strippers money could buy.

Nana's bosses were frequent flyers at a nightclub called the IVE. It was a cesspool of the criminally elite. Gangs, drug manufacturers and sellers, their women wives and concubines in small dresses and designer shoes. For a place that dealt only in dirty money, it was the cleanest prestige a strip club could provide.

Now Nana wasn't one to judge a woman for her profession. She did, however, judge the fact that Mikey and Kisaki were such boys about their money. They were stupid, and those strippers were smart. Nana wasn't as modest as she'd like to be. A small black dress and the usual large trench coat she wore, and some leather gloves so there was no trace of her. Her counterpart, Hanma, wore what he always did. A suit, one glove and a matching trench coat.

Nana felt someone approach. She stayed still and caught sight of a man entering the club from the elevator that connected to the conference rooms below the club.

Seok Taeyang. An extremely well known man amongst the drug scene across Japan and Korea. He was a kingpin in the distribution and manufacture of Methamphetamine. He operated on a much larger scale than the backwater drug dealers Nana grew up around in the red light district. He was the best, the only man to have a drug operation running for 15 straight years. He was renowned, and he was walking around the tables, kissing the hands of women and sharing looks with the men.