Embrace Your Fears

Homecoming

Dae and I had been working for Glympse for a month. We'd completed low key contracts such as sabotage and arson. I was surprised to find out that she left the killing for herself. I wasn't sure why she had let us join her, but I just kept quiet about our true intentions of why we were there.

But those intentions faded the longer we worked for her.

We got to know who Glympse and Kasumi Maeda were.

As we worked, we got closer to her to the point where she had me working as her assistant and Dae working in security.

In one month, there had been a total of thirteen attempts on Kasumi's life and Dae stopped all of them.

One day, when Kasumi returned from a meeting, she called me to her office to talk. When I got in, she told me to close the door and lock it. When I did, she stood up from behind her desk, approached me slowly and put her arm around me.

She walked me toward the giant window behind her desk and waved her hand at the city as if she were presenting me with it for the first time.

"Look at this, Brea." She said with slight excitement in her tone. "Imagine how long it took to make this city what it is today. From the Wayne Tower to the fucking Monarch Theatre, this place is filled with marvelous structures. And, along with everything in life, to build those structures there had to be at least one death. Wether it was related to the structure in question or an external factor."

"What do you mean? Like, of course there was at least one person who died while they were working on it. It took years and it was made a long, long time ago, but what do you mean by 'along with everything in life?'" I asked, curious to know about what she had to say. It involved death, so perhaps it may re-motivate me to try and stop her.

"I mean that...no one goes through life without experiencing death. Like the Wayne Tower. During construction someone fell off of a lift and died. The building experienced that. Like humans do when someone they know dies. I heard one of the workers died from cancer. It didn't experience that, but it still was there for it. Like a human that knows someone who died, but wasn't there." She explained to me. I thought I understood what she was trying to say. Humans are like buildings. "Earlier today, Lucius Fox was killed in an elevator that fell from the top of the building to the bottom."

She took her arm off of me and walked toward the window. I noticed her grab her pocket knife and flip it open. I took a small step back and cleared my throat.

"The building-" She began. "Snapped!" She spun around quickly and put the knife to my cheek but quickly contracted her arm and sheathed the knife. "It killed a person. What I'm saying is that death is the basis of life. Whether you're a building or a human, you're always around death. Whether you inflict it upon others or experience it yourself. We are all around death." She sat down in her chair and told me to take a seat in front of her desk. "You know how many people I've killed in Gotham alone?"

"No. Miss Maeda, I'm afraid I don't." I responded as I sat down and leaned back in the chair.

"Two-thousand-seven-hundred-eighty-five. Do you know why I killed all those people?" I shook my head. "They'd all done something bad. Really bad. Do you know what?" I shook my head once more. "They were corrupt. They were criminals. They had all done something wrong. Look at those filing cabinets." She pointed toward some filing cabinets, and when I saw them, I was astounded by how many there were.

"Yeah?" I asked. She stood up and walked toward the cabinets. When she opened them, she called me over. I looked in and saw labeled files. "Are these all of the people you've killed?" I asked, and I saw her smile.

"You're catching on. All these-" She pointed toward the seven cabinets on the left. "Are the ones I've killed, and those-" the pointed toward the cabinets in the left. There had to be at least fifty of them. "Are my future targets."