The Sniper
Description
She blinks calmly, watching puffs of heat escape into the winter air. Her fingers tingle from the cold but she likes it. Her cunning eyes shine with hollowness and fierce hatred. Hatred toward her life, hatred toward her job, and hatred toward her world.
She hears a gunshot and a crackle of static in her well-hidden earpiece but she barely flinches. The eyes she use to see are different from the eyes she use to feel. Her eyes that see are already accustomed to death. They're accustomed to the smell of decay, the lingering glow in the eyes of a victim, the fading heartbeat, the lack of motion, and the gradual coolness of a corpse.
She is accustomed to the feelings of loss and guilt that accompany murder, because that is what she is. A murderer.
And yet she still does it all the same because only by taking away the lives of others can she find back her own reason to live.
This is heavily based on a short story titled The Sniper, written by Liam O'Flaherty.
Foreword
From her perch on the rooftop, Chaerin can see everything. She can see all the action and all the lack of action happening below her. There are people murmuring in the darkness, barely lit by the glowing moon.
There are soldiers in the distant town square marching with stern faces and glinting guns. And then there are citizens cowering in the doorways, crying and hugging their loved ones as they watch their homes get burnt and destroyed by people they used to call brothers of one nation.
Chaerin can barely see the situation in the square because she's on the outskirts of town, but the occasional scream and the occasional gunshot and the occasional cry is enough to give her an idea.
She had never liked civil war. Learning about it in school, she couldn't help but question why the brothers of one country would ever decide to hurt and kill. Why the sisters of one culture would ever decide to fight and punish.
Chaerin didn't want to fight. She didn't want to support one half of her country if it only meant opposing the other half. She went to a military academy but her expectations for her career were to support her country as a whole against greater powers of wrong elsewhere in the world.
She didn't want to pick a side but she had to. She made the decision two years ago. For two years she has been spying, shooting, killing. For two years she has cursed her own existence as a brutal murderer, a heartless criminal.
But for two years she has carried on because for two years she has been looking for her beloved.
For two years she has been looking for Sandara Park.
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Super awesome poster made by the amazing MissTangerine!
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