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Nothing escapes Gin’s notice; that’s part of his forte. All sorts of monsters lurk in the dark, after all.
Though, he likes to think himself completely invulnerable at the Organisation’s home quarters. Even the chemistry lab, with its fluorescent lights too harsh on a night creature like him, should be a sanctuary for the undivided focus on the slow drag of a cigarette. How it burns pleasantly in his lungs, filling him thick and bitter. He doesn’t even want to keep his eyes open. It’s been too long a day, with the wrong people in the wrong place at the right time for his Beretta.
He doesn’t expect a cigarette to be plucked out of his mouth. Ever.
When it happens, he assumes it must have slipped out of his mouth onto the floor. Strange, but gravity would be a more logical explanation than the alternative.
He opens his eyes to see a woman, silently, without so much as a glance back at him, walk over to a sink and put out his cigarette under running water.
No. Not a woman, not in the way that Vermouth is a woman. But rather, despite looking about a head taller than the blonde menace, all spindly long limbs, before him is but a little girl.
One of the Miyano brats. Sherry.
Her back is still to him, and her wavy strawberry-red hair barely spills over her shoulders. A red, ripe strawberry for the big, hungry bear. Gin doesn’t even need his gun, in one stride he could have her under his own weight. He could bash her pretty, little skull in. Snuff her out faster than a mid-mission cigarette. Easy prey for a predator like him.
(From that moment on, though he didn't know it yet, he’d recognise that strawberry hair anywhere. There could be a single strand, made almost invisible by the blood-splattered snow, and somehow, he’d still spot it and recognise it.)
He eyes the Beretta currently laying on the table in front of him, pointedly, until she speaks:
“No smoking in here,” she says, curtly. She carefully wraps the wet cigarette in a paper towel with her dainty, pale hands, and then she throws it into a red trash can, the top spinning at him.
“Says who?”
“Says I.”
He scoffs. “In other words- no such rule if you’re no longer around?”
Sherry shrugs. The little brat shrugs.
And Gin decides that he’ll be the one to kill her, no matter what reason they see for her disposal. He won't simply put a hole in her head with his Beretta: no, that would be too easy. He'll drag it out, and watch as tears glisten her lashes, mouthwatering like dry sherry. Watch as her lips quiver around soft, desperate gasps he’ll simply ignore. He imagines her head severed and sitting in that same, red trash can once he's done with her. Lovely hair to match.
“Sure,” she says, and finally, the brat decides to look at him. “But this lab is full of flammable chemicals. One wrong move, and an explosion takes you out too, you know.”
He doesn’t answer. Only leans back in the chair, still gazing at her. He should stand up and thwart her with his height instead. Remind her of the pecking order. Tear her clothes off and make her shiver, naked and fragile and vulnerable, under the fluorescent lights. No longer so damn haughty and his to do whatever he pleases with.
Mirroring his posture, she leans back against the counter, her white lab coat wrinkling at her hips. Gin notices every crease as if they’re appearing under one of her microscopes.
“I’d say you’re welcome to give it a try,” she says, icy blue eyes piercing his own. She crosses her slender arms, and every bone juts out stubborn and unyielding like herself. “But it’d be a very bad day for you if this lab exploded.”
Had he been a little bit closer, he would have noticed her lower lip trembling almost imperceptibly, but from where he’s sitting, her mannerisms are nothing but short of provocative. No one’s ever defied him and gotten away with it before. Hardly anyone had ever tried, and those who had, had done it out of sheer stupidity.
He knows that Sherry is not stupid. A Miyano child prodigy is not stupid.
Standing up, his fingers brush the cold steel of the weapon, though he does not pick it up yet. Instead, he smirks. “For me, you say?”
She smiles a pale shadow of a smile. And then, she turns away from him again, attending to lab equipment of some sort. As though dismissing him.
“I don’t care if you set this lab on fire with me in it,” she informs him over her shoulder, and her tone is too even. Too detached. “But you on the other hand - you're important to this organisation, aren’t you, Gin?”
He exhales very slowly, gripped by a sudden need to grab her instead of the gun, and he imagines her very cold and very clammy. He imagines her body lifeless, a mere living corpse, so young and already dead inside. The thought disturbs him, above all because it denies him control. Sherry is the only person that Gin cannot control with the threat of life and death and this sudden realisation unnerves him. And it will keep gnawing at him, clawing at him with her slender, little fingers, reaching parts of him still untouched by anything else.
He doesn’t notice the way she tenses when the metal of his Beretta clunks when he picks it up, or the way her breath hitches when he walks past her without another word.
The remnants of his once human heart thumps too wildly in his chest.