There’s more to being bad than just being bad. To those who look at it as outsiders, they always think it’s a choice and those that choose that way of life have no hope for anything better. But where would the fun be if everyone followed the rules?

Smoke filled the room as it always did after a gunfight. It was getting irritating. She wondered if maybe they should take up a line of work that didn’t endanger their lungs so much. She caught herself laughing out loud at the idea. She was worried about her lungs in the middle of a gunfight. She was an assassin for heaven’s sake.

The elbow in her side reminded her of what she was supposed to be doing. She nudged him back and aimed her gun at the last target standing. They both did. The victim dropped his gun. It was a useless sign of surrender. Their job was to kill him. He should’ve just paid his debts.

Amber and Tao left the scene of the crime with no worries. They never left their fingerprints behind and never left a trace. They would never be able to keep their job if they did and they would never be as notorious for what they did either.

Tao looked down at her, nudging her with his elbow like he had before, “What were you laughing about back there?”

“I was just wondering if we should pick a job where we didn’t inhale so much smoke. It’s bad for our lungs,” she replied, smiling to herself at the joke again.

He caught on and ended up laughing himself, “Jie jie, just focus next time, okay?”

Amber nodded and waved him off. There was nothing to worry about. At their level of expertise, there were no such things as slip-ups.

~~~

“I changed my mind. I don’t think I want to move,” Amber sat in the window sill, her kitten, Sunset, resting in her lap with Tao’s kitten, Pastry, curled around her shoulders.

Tao walked over, sitting across from her in the big window, balancing their last feline roommate, Kitty, on his head, “You were fine with moving a week ago. Is something wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I just like it here. The kittens do, too,” she sighed, shaking her hair from her eyes as she peered down out of the window at the people passing by, “I’ve gotten used to it.”

“That’s a problem then,” he moved Kitty from his head to his lap, ignoring her meows of protest, “You know we can’t stay in one place for too long, and we’ve been here long enough. Longer than we should have, actually.”

Amber set the kittens down on the window sill in her place as she slid down, stretching her arms above her head. She turned around to look at all the boxes filling the living room of their studio apartment. They’d packed so much already for only having made the choice to move a week ago and having found a place in even lesser time. She already knew that staying would definitely be bad for their line of work, but, for once, she wanted to stay in a place where she felt comfortable and just forget about everything for a while. As an assassin, it seemed that there was no such thing. She looked over at the boy in the window. She felt guilt settling in the pit of her stomach. Reminiscing on when they first met, she realized that she shouldn’t feel as badly as she did, but it couldn’t be helped. He was in the business before her, but when she came along, he got in way too deep to remember what it was like being human. Amber would never tell him, but she blamed herself for it all the time.

Tao had been so eager to get into the assassin business, thinking it was the coolest thing around. He’d make a lot of money and live the easy life, if he could just learn the proper way to kill and not leave tracks. He knew how to hold a gun and, although he’d never killed someone before, he was okay with the idea of putting his life on the line to get the scum out of the way.

When Amber first came along, she already knew the basics of holding a gun and killing a few living things to survive. Being an assassin would just let her get paid while doing what she already knew. Albeit, their meeting was dangerous, with her almost having killed him, but she changed her mind when he saved her from a gunshot to the back with his improving aim.

Brother and sister was the bond that they created in little to no time at all. It wasn’t strange, but as they began relying on each other, becoming freelance assassins was easy. Doing it alone meant there would be no one to watch your back, to confide in, or simply to laugh a free day away with when the world was quiet and the bad guys finally decided to sleep for a while. On the other hand, doing it alone meant never having to split money and never having to worry about someone so close stabbing you in the back when you least expected it. But they both knew better than that. Their bond was a rare one, but an unbreakable one at that.

“I’m beginning to think I’ve done something wrong to you,” Tao’s broken English mixing with his native Chinese.

Amber covered with the back of her hand, laughing softly, “Pick one language to say that whole sentence in, please.” He smiled a little and repeated it in Chinese, at least what he meant to say. She raised a brow at him, bending down briefly to scoop Pastry up in her arms, “Why would say that?”

“You always look like you’re going to cry when you just look at me, whether we’re holding a conversation or not…”

“I just want you to have a normal life.”

“I don’t want one. I like the one that I have now,” he slid down from the sill, walking over to her, “Is this what everything has been about?”

She looked down at the kitten in her arms, smiling to herself as the feline buried her nose in the crook of her elbow, “You could’ve gotten out of this anytime you wanted before I came along.”

“But ‘everything happens for a reason.’ Isn’t that what you always say?”

Amber looked up at him, laughing brokenly, “Is that your way of saying us meeting each other and becoming assassins was bound to happen for some unknown reason?”

Tao smiled and shook his head, casually walking in circles around her to avoid Kitty’s claws as she followed him, pawing at his ankles, “No, I’m saying that, even if it seems like it’s wrong or whatever bad thing you think the life I’m leading is, it’s all happened for a reason.”

She decided to save him from Kitty, but sliding the feline away with her foot, Tao finally getting a chance to stand still, “Do you know what the reason is?”

“Meeting you was the reason everything happened,” he smiled and hugged her, the kitten in her arms meowing angrily at him before leaping down. He stuck his tongue at Pastry before returning his attention to Amber, “You’re the best big sister ever.”

“Tao, you’re an idiot,” she teased, laughing and trying to get out of his hold.

He hugged her tighter, laughing when she whined, “But I’m the good kind of idiot, right?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” she gave in finally hugging him back, “Let’s just get some more stuff packed. We have to be out by the end of the week, don’t we?”

He nodded and let go, heading to the hall closet to grab more things while she went and found an empty box in their pile, meeting him at the end of the hall. They packed up the box and she went back to the living room to get the packing tape.

“Hey, jie jie!”

“Yeah, Pandini?”

“Wo ai ni.”

She smiled bringing back the tape and handing it to him, “Wo ai ni, didi.”

The past didn’t matter as much as she was stressing it. What happened had happened. What mattered was the present and all that was left was to focus on their future.