Suju Assassin, Chapter 3
Title: Suju Assassin
Genre: Action. Allegory.
Pairing: Ninja pairings. HanChul, mostly. Mention of others.
Rating: PG-13 for violence.
Disclaimer: The point of this story centers on the fact that you can’t own a human being. I’d find it rather hypocritical if I owned Super Junior and wrote this. Nor to I own Ninja Assassin.
Summary: A Ninja Assassin Parody and a Super Junior Satire. Hankyung escapes the oppressive rule of the Ozunu clan of Ninjas, his brothers slowly but surely following him into exile. It is not necessary for you to suffer through Ninja Assassin to read this.
Ew, studying . . . it might get in the way of the posting thing soon.
---
Chapter 3
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Four
---
Naomi looked up at her apartment. Her apartment looked back at her. If someone were to ask her how a building could do so, she would have to reply that anything so antagonistic had to have the power of sight just so it could glare at whoever it wanted to, because you don’t argue with tons of steel, brick, and window glass.
It constantly lost her keys, locked her out, slammed her fingers in doors and windows, and caused electrical surges to make her electronics explode, from her hairdryer to her iPod to her laptop. It was certainly out to get her.
But what was odd about its gaze today was that it was completely black. You see, when Naomi started learning about ninjas, she started keeping her lights on. Shadows were not her friends.
Ninjas, though . . . ninjas and shadows were tight. Plus, blackouts preceded almost every death she had been investigating for weeks. Couple that with the incident earlier that day, and she could definitively state that she was not going anywhere near the darkened building.
“Miss Fisher?” Naomi jumped when she heard her name, sitting up straight in her seat in front of her computer. “I’m Jeevas Anderson from internal affairs-” the newcomer said, adjusting his glasses.
Naomi watched them darken in the sunlight from her window. Transition lenses. Her eyes narrowed. “What do you need, Mr. Anderson?” she asked icily.
She didn’t entirely hear his response, because irrelevant information began bombarding her mind. Everyone knew that once internal affairs got involved with anything in any part of the plot of anything, then it was shit for the protagonist from there. Did that mean she was the protagonist? She didn’t really think so, since the sidekicks and sometimes the whole department got visited by THE MAN in the movies she usually watched.
And the fact that he was Mr. Anderson and was now wearing sunglasses was just freakishly cool to the point of being actually very creepy.
He continued to talk, and Naomi continued to not listen, staring at how the loose skin under his neck dangled like a turkey as he spoke, and how a red blotch grew and retreated across his neck and face during the duration of his monologue, or how he continued to sweat. For Corey’s sake, she really hoped he didn’t get a visit from Mr. Anderson. He’d never survive, not because he couldn’t go matrix on this man’s ass (he couldn’t, but that was beside the point) but because he was just so . . . gross.
“Do you understand, Miss Fisher?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then turn in all of your case material before you leave today.”
“I have to catalogue some of it still,” she replied flatly.
“Other people can take care of that.”
That was bad form. Naomi knew it was bad form, and knew exactly what happened to evidence that was catalogued in that manner. It was never heard from again, whether because of a government cover up of a fifteen year old pimple-faced intern.
Naomi was starting to wonder if fifteen year old pimple-faced interns were a government conspiracy, too. The boys, especially. They had their own cult with their own rituals and even language (grunting).
They were probably like freemasons. She’d have to ask Corey about that, but maybe he was bound by a vow of secrecy and would report her to the higher ups in the organization . . .
‘Whatever,’ she thought, closing the binder beside her that was filled with the statements she had taken and other case notes and putting it into a box. It wasn’t like she didn’t already have another copy of everything on her USB.
She would go home, not think about conspiracies for a while, and relax.
The relaxing didn’t look like it was going to happen. Certainly not tonight. Maybe never again. Somehow they had found out about her copy and were coming for it.
Naomi was not pleased. Just because she liked to think about huge government conspiracies did not mean she liked to take part in them. In fact, she rather hated the thought of physical activity and driving, and in all the movies she had seen about this sort of stuff, there was a lot of both.
Honestly, about the only thing that could make her go into that apartment now was-
“Hey, Naomi!” one of her neighbors shouted from his lawn chair in the street. “Doesn’t your tropical fish tank need power?”
Yeah. That would do it. Naomi stared up at her apartment, frowning as she dug through her purse for a flashlight. She was about to die.
Though she sort of wished she could die by ninja. It would be a sort of ‘I told you so’ to Corey and everyone else that doubted their existence, and it would look really cool on her death certificate. Even if Ninja wasn’t an actual cause of death, it was only because they didn’t know the signs yet, or didn’t know what to call it.
Four flights of stairs and on long monologue about “should I, shouldn’t I” later, Naomi put her key in the lock, and got her wish. Sort of.
The door blew off of its hinges, and her tropical fish were most certainly dead, but you see, they weren’t alone - Naomi Fisher was now an agent killed in action by ninjas.
After the explosion, of course many of Naomi’s friends and neighbors were questioned and all provided possible suspects - her partner, her boyfriend, her fish (they were government experiments, you know) - but only one man actually reported seeing an Asian man walking away from the building soon after the explosion, his jaw set in frustration and determination.
Luckily for the police investigating the agent’s death, the lights miraculously came back on and remembered him, too.
---
To say Han Geng had never been more angry in his entire life would be a scandalous falsehood - there were plenty of times where he was so angry he wanted to slice someone’s face in half and a few times that he acted on those desires.
But as an escaped ninja, those instances were usually matters of survival, and now was certainly one. He stood at the phonebooth on his street, absently slipping coins into the machine as he glanced around, willing his eyes to penetrate the shadows for any hidden assailant.
The night had been an utter failure, and now he was more in danger than ever. Heechul would chide him about it, he was sure - if the woman was going to die anyways, he should have just let her die, and used the hunter’s preoccupation with her escape while he could.
That certainly wasn’t going to happen now.
He glanced back to the keys for a moment, pounding down the numbers, before turning back to the street. He only had to wait for the phone to ring once.
“What is it?” Heechul answered, for once sounding like he didn’t just roll out of bed. Though, as his contact while he was in the process of moving, his job was important enough to warrant more watchfulness.
“I tracked down the woman in Europol who had my picture, but the hunters killed her before I could get to her,” he said simply. He tried to force his mind to calm, his heart to slow down, but all his senses were on edge, and he didn’t particularly feel like arguing with them. Sharpened reflexes and quicker responses could probably save his life in the next ten minutes.
Instead of the expected lecture, Heechul only sighed. “Then get out of there. I’m in Alexandria right now - just don’t ask why - so Siwon and Donghae are closest. I’ll tell them to meet you first; I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“You shouldn’t get anyone else involved,” Han Geng replied. “Their plan was probably to try to flush the rest of you out at the same time.”
“We protect our own,” was all Heechul said, before the line went dead.
Han Geng sighed, hanging up the payphone wearily. He needed to get to a train station and get out of Berlin - their meeting places were never in the cities where they lived. He was certain his pursuers would somehow acquire whatever evidence the agents had about him to preserve their own secrecy, so he would be relatively safe.
They already knew what he looked like.
---
Donghae was nearly asleep on his feet. Nowhere in his memory had any training prepared him for this - the intense boredom that accompanied a purposeless task. And standing behind a counter, serving popcorn and candy and drinks and nachos all day counted as a purposeless task.
When Donghae first escaped, and saw his first movie, he thought it would be a great idea to work at a movie theater. He could watch all the movies he could possibly want to for free, or at least a reduced price. And he was a ninja, so the five-finger discount counted for anything, including clinging to the rafters of the theater and watching the movie upside down.
He had to learn so many languages for this purpose, too. He knew how to give different monetary denominations all across Europe (even before the Euro!), in French, English, German, Italian, Polish, Romania, and just about every one of the languages in the area formerly known as Yugoslavia.
He moved around a lot back then.
But now he was back in France, still selling popcorn to sweaty old men and pimply teenagers and snot-nosed kids and old ladies that liked to tell him how cute he was or how thin he was and that he should eat more.
And he still didn’t get to watch movies for free.
With as much as he moved around, a person might think that he would try different jobs, and he did. He tried a gas station, a video store, an Apple store, an actual fruit stand where they sold apples, and countless other occupations. The customers were the same. The problems were the same. So Donghae decided to continue to work at the theater, on the off chance that he may some day get the chance to actually use his employee discount and watch a movie.
But people were so stupid! How could they sit in the dark like that, blinded to the shadows by the bright screen in front of them? What if there was a ninja sitting in the darkness beside them, about to kill them? They would stand even less of a chance than they already did!
Donghae found it incredibly odd that things like what happened in Inglorious Bastards didn’t happen more often in real life.
Customers! A break in his monotony with more predictable characters. A group of teenagers walked in, all probably college age, chatting amongst themselves and slowly making their way towards the snack bar. A rail-thin brunette girl approached him first, while her friends continued to talk or stare blankly at the menu, and asked for a bottle of water. An equally thin male attempting to dress like a gangster with his jeans sagging asked for two burgers, an extra-large bowl of nachos, and a family sized popcorn bowl. The girl glared at him. The rest of the teenagers continued in a similar manner - a blond girl wanting a soda, her little brother asking for every candy in the display case, and a Chinese boy that tried to seduce him.
Sure, the Chinese boy didn’t say much of anything (his French was very poor, and he sounded like a tourist), but he was smirking at him the entire time with bedroom eyes while Donghae scooped out his popcorn. It didn’t really phase the ninja behind the counter anymore. All he could say was that at least this one was attractive.
The boy took his popcorn and paid - exact change, how considerate of him - leaving Donghae alone with his thoughts. It occurred to him that he wasn’t that much older than the boy who had come here with his friends, that he should be living that sort of life right now, instead of constantly worrying about someone trying to kill him and all his friends.
They should be hanging out at the movies, having fun and laughing about their days, not strewn across the continents hiding from each other, knowing that if one of them was captured, it would be the end of all of them. In their freedom, they lived a much more structured, controlled existence. They couldn’t afford mistakes.
Thus, he was once again not seeing a movie on his day off. He would be meeting Siwon and Hankyung in Amsterdam, moving to a more secure location as a group to deter pursuit. He supposed the logic behind it was, if one cornered animal was dangerous, what did that make three?
---
“Everyone has been acting weird since the great escape,” Donghae sighed, sitting down in the garden beside his teammate. “Don’t tell me it’s gotten you, too.”
Siwon didn’t reply right away - in fact, he seemed to ignore Donghae completely as he stared at the plants in front of him. Donghae shrugged it off, figuring it was just the newness of individuality - he was probably reveling in his ability to ignore someone.
Donghae knew he did. Actually, he discovered a different talent - tuning people out. They used it before, when they fought to ignore pain or distraction, but now they could use it to ignore whatever they pleased. He tended to use it on Siwon a lot.
While their training was far from complete, getting their names was far better than whatever their previous state had been. They were now placed into teams for training and missions, learning to work together flawlessly. Donghae had been placed with Siwon and Eunhyuk, and their performance always merited respect, but lately Siwon had been lagging.
Everyone had their rough days, of course, especially in training. Not Siwon. He was build like a draft horse, a freaking stallion. He didn’t know what a bad mission looked like or felt like because he always succeeded, or certainly seemed to. That was why the entire situation was incredibly odd.
“How do you think they did it?” Siwon finally asked. He hadn’t moved, or even blinked as he spoke the words, and Donghae wasn’t entirely certain he would hear anything beside his own thoughts in the next few minutes.
So Donghae felt justified in saying what he was about to say. “Seriously, why get so hung up about it? They abandoned us, they broke the ties. Just let them go. The hunters will bring back their corpses soon enough anyways.”
“Do you want to be the one that kills them?” Siwon asked simply. “Traitors or not, they are our brothers.”
“Not anymore,” Donghae snapped, standing up and walking away. “They ran off-”
Siwon stood up after him, his sandals slapping against the stone pathway that wound between the trees. “We should, too,” he said, catching Donghae’s shoulder.
The other man jerked around, his hand slamming into Siwon’s stomach. Donghae watched as his brother crumpled onto the ground in front of him, spitting up blood. “If you can’t beat me, you won’t be able to do anything against the guards. Don’t even think about escaping until then.”
---
Donghae spent the rest of the day training, beating a practice dummy within an inch of its life a hundred times over. This was one of the only ways he could work frustration out of his system - exercising to the point of exhaustion, to where he couldn’t remember his own name, much less whatever it was that was bothering him.
“It’s not very healthy.”
Donghae turned to see Eunhyuk sitting on the steps to the training grounds, his gaze steady for once and not searching furiously for the nearest exit. Donghae stepped away from the post - it was little more than splinters at the moment - and wiped the sweat off of his forehead. “What isn’t?”
“Breaking things. You’ll get in trouble with the patriarch.”
Donghae grabbed his shirt from another broken post, and began dabbing the sweat off of his neck. He flopped down onto the steps with a heavy sigh. “Crossing him is bad for anyone’s health,” he muttered. “I don’t get why everyone suddenly wants to do it.”
“I don’t know an everyone who wants to do it,” Eunhyuk replied simply, tapping his foot. For a ninja, he was constantly fidgeting. It was a habit which had been mercilessly broken during training and missions, but only intensified in all other aspects of life.
Donghae reached out and put a hand on the offending foot, but the other immediately started tapping out a fast, steady beat. He groaned and sat up. “Then you obviously aren’t looking for it.”
“Looking for something that causes problems causes more problems. Why do we need to compound our troubles?”
“We’re not compounding anyone’s troubles!” Donghae snapped. Honestly, didn’t anyone get what was going on? Did they understand? They were being ripped apart by traitors who were probably continents away, who probably weren’t even alive anymore. “They are the reason for whatever problems they have. They make the choice to disobey orders and flaunt authority. Why?”
Eunhyuk stared at Donghae for a moment, and the other boy could tell the thought of fleeing this conversation crossed his mind. He leaned away, saying, “If you want me to answer, you’re going to have to say which ‘they’ you’re talking about.”
“You know-”
“No, actually, I don’t,” Eunhyuk interrupted, standing up. He seemed to consider walking off right then and there, but sighed in exasperation. “You would do well to not know either. Getting other people in trouble is more trouble than its worth. Aish, I’m so hungry. . . .”
It occurred to Donghae that Eunhyuk was maybe the most indecisive person he had ever met. The moment the other boy made to walk towards the kitchen, he turned around again and whined, “You’re not the only one whose been doing this! Siwon has been challenging everyone to fights for weeks, now, and he says you’re next, so meet him in the courtyard after dinner, he says.”
---
Donghae glared out of the window as his train screeched into Amsterdam Central Train Station. Even if he had wanted to sleep, there was no way that could have been a possibility.
Well, no. The middle schooler sitting in front of him spent the entire trip drooling on the window, sleeping like the dead. The mother and her toddler sitting next to her, though, were a completely different story.
Normally, Donghae loved kids. They were fun to play with and their antics were amusing to say the least. Donghae did spend most of the ride making faces at the little boy and chatting with the mother - who had some sort of compulsion to talk to every single breathing creature around her - and was perfectly content.
Until the child got a runny nose and a conniving look on his face, a situation that ended with snot all over Donghae’s shirt, and jacket, and backpack. Even that wouldn’t have been so bad, but the woman just kept talking about it, continuously and profusely apologizing while the child continued to grin evilly at him.
The smart thing, Donghae couldn’t help but think, would be to move do a different seat, or a different car completely. That never happened, and that child was just so proud of himself for his plot.
Donghae was now going to get swine flu, or bird flu, or the regular flu, or any number of horrific ailments that first presented with a runny nose and then got progressively worse. Once he got to their base in Amsterdam, he was going to jump in the shower, clothes and all. Hell, he would jump into a public fountain and scrub himself raw if he had to.
For the last thirty minutes of his ride, he prayed that at the very least, it would be raining. This was part of the reason he was glaring out of the window as the train pulled into the station - the sky was a bright blue, with not a single speck of white to be seen.
Midday in Amsterdam Centraal couldn’t have been more crowded. The air under the steel roof should have been cool, but the press of bodies and the absence of any breeze left it stifling and claustrophobic. The people made a shifting maze of bodies and the platforms and moving trains made the walk to the main thoroughfare even more constricting.
Moving in a crowd this large went against Donghae’s nature and training in every possible way. Every person that brushed against him could be a new assailant, prepared to slit his throat the instant he let his guard down.
He slipped his sunglasses on, finally walking out into the sun. The architecture of the old city surrounded him - brick and stone towers in Victorian style providing little enough shade. The press of the crowd was lessened out here on the streets, but about the only thing Donghae could do to keep from punching every person that brushed against him in the jugular was think about just how unlikely it would be for a ninja to attack in such a crowded space. With so many witnesses and no easy way to slip into the shadows and escape, no one in their right might would think about attacking him.
He pulled out his cell phone as he stopped by a streetlamp - old school, cast iron, and an island of safety in the flow of commuters. He couldn’t help but glance around as he dialed, but no one was really acting very threateningly. With the way ninjas moved, their mastery of their bodies was evident, and their focus just as plain, and no one fit that description in the vicinity.
Donghae sighed, pushing his paranoia aside, and put the phone to his ear.
Please enjoy the music while your party is reached. Donghae dropped the phone again just as quickly. Knowing Siwon, it would be German Christian Techno or something like that.
He gave it a minute before he finally brought it back up. “Hello!! Kyuhyun, I don’t know how you did it, whatever this is, but if this is another prank-”
“I didn’t know he could hack cell phones now,” Donghae sighed into the phone.
“You could have given me a heart attack!”
“How?”
“Someone answers their phone, they sort of expect an answer.” He might have heard Siwon sigh on the other end, though the hiss he heard could have been attributed to the background noise that cut the next part of the lecture off. “-dying in a gutter somewhere, and you had managed to make one last call. Do you think it couldn’t happen?”
“I’m not dying in a gutter somewhere,” Donghae replied simply, still scanning the crowd.
“Whatever. My train just arrived. Check your texts - Hankyung sent one just before you called. I think he’s here now, too.”
“That’s good. Should we meet at the safe house separately, then?”
“Did you spot anything out of the ordinary?”
Donghae glanced around again, his eyes landing on the Chinese boy from the cinema walking out of the station and down the street. He was wearing a scarf and gloves. That was odd, certainly - Donghae didn’t think it was that cold. But he had been right - tourist. “Just the kid that wants to seduce me. I’ll talk to you later.” Donghae snapped the phone shut and stuck it back in his pocket, walking off down the street.
The walk to the hotel they were staying at should have been uneventful, but after having his feet stepped on and run over by at least three different rolling briefcases, Donghae almost didn’t react when he felt someone jab him in the back of the leg.
Holding back a curse, he rubbed the offending limb, only to draw his hand back in surprise. First, he had hit something cold and thin sticking out of his leg, and second, when he looked at his hand, it was covered in blood. Had someone jabbed him with a needle? Wow. The world was full of freaks.
He limped over to the curb and sat down, pulling the needle out - and realizing too late just how deep it was. About seven inches long, it was a hat pin, and what was before a slow ooze of blood turned into a stream. His hands clamped down on the wound, as his jaw tightened. He was not going to die from this. He would be the laughingstock of the ninja world for centuries.
He whipped his head around again, searching for something, anything. He knew civilians were stupid, but even he didn’t think so little of them. Didn’t anyone notice a freak putting a hatpin with a fucking teapot on it into his leg?!
Donghae knew about this. When he had been living in America, he had seen some episode of a TV show about trying to catch some guy who pinned girls with hatpins before he tracked them down and raped them.
Rape. Donghae glanced around again, though he immediately regretted it as his vision swam.
He did manage to catch sight of the Chinese boy again, this time ahead of him. He glanced back and met Donghae’s eyes for a moment, smiling cheerfully.
Shit.
Shit, shit, shit.
Donghae tried to pull out his cell phone again, but his hand began shaking so badly that he couldn’t dial a number. He managed to get into the root menu and press redial, but his hand stopped working completely, and the phone dropped into the gutter by the street, the back popping open and the battery falling out.
Damn cheap thing. Donghae didn’t know how long he had to wait, but it couldn’t have been more than five minutes. If it had, he would have exsanguinated by now. That didn’t really matter, though. Donghae could, in theory, feel the hand on his shoulder, shaking him - or was he shaking? He looked up, or tried to, but his vision was blurry. All he could see was black hair and generalized features - Siwon? He didn’t know.
“He got me,” Donghae tried to say, but the words didn’t really come out as any more than a garble. “He got me . . .”