The Schemer

The Visitor

Clara was staring. She was staring at herself in a mirror, hard. With her grey eyes narrowed, the assassin examined, really took in the way her body looked. What she saw, it did not please her. At all.

She rarely thought about her body as a piece of something beautiful. The inked art on her back, chest and arms was beautiful. Her body was capable of doing amazing things, and it was beautiful to watch it perform. It was beautiful, magnificent in its complexity, its management to survive, to thrive under pressure. But as a physical being, Clara did not believe her body being something of great beauty. No matter what others said. The assassin's attractiveness was achieved unintentionally, as a by-product of everything that she did to maintain her health and fluent body usage.

The saying states that one starts valuing things only when he loses them. Clara used to laugh at it, retorting that it tends to happen only for dreamers, youngsters and the naive ones. But like many things in life, she was proved wrong. It's only the ego that makes one believe humans are like snowflakes - every each of us different from one another. Clara was someone who had the ego of two. Or three. Was she responsible for believing she differed from others that much? No, she wasn't. Her ego, the irrational, arrogant part was.

Her confidence disappeared as soon as she took a really good look at herself in the dirty asylum's mirror, noticing every little detail that was different. Starting with the obvious, the beautiful ship on her left deltoid and part of her chest was ruined, scarred and missing parts of the ink where the skin had been peeled off. Moving her eyes down, she met the void, empty space where a long limb once was. The phantom arm was there, real as ever, but without material to touch. The woman tried to wave with it, to move the arm, but the only thing that changed its place was her shoulder, twitching slightly at the effort. Clara let out a sigh, relaxing the aching side, her steely gaze drawn to the rest of her physique. 

At every stage of her life, Clara's body was forced to change to accommodate various needs. To survive, first, you have to adapt. In her late teens, she had been tall and lean, with a long, slender torso, snake-like limbs, built like a swimmer. Those features helped her move fluently through space, reach her target without a sound. She was barely a shadow on the wall, lithe body deadly and quick. It served her well until it didn't.

Later years, spent at the university, were not as adventurous. Clara gained some weight, filled out and started to actually look a woman and not a child. There was no particular purpose in her life at that moment, except for getting her degree, therefore her body did not resemble anything unusual. And even then, her height ensured that she would always remain somewhat proportionate, even with the additional mass on her. No wonder the majority of men found her physically attractive - the assassin's youth was filled with the opposite sex. 

Then, there was the army. Clara was twenty-seven, a fully grown woman when she departed overseas, started working out, got stronger and developed her musculature. Where once were soft, womanly curves, the muscle took its place, giving her shape a harder, more angular look. Not to the point of being masculine, but enough to announce everyone that she was a force to be careful around. The surgeon became maximally efficient, her body - a perfectly working machine, made to wield a weapon and stand on feet for ten hours straight, carry a comrade from the war field, and send the assaulters six feet under.

Now? Now she did not know what purpose her body did have. Clara was a thirty-four-year-old woman, whose life shattered into pieces, and her body knew that very well. The machine broke down, refusing to cooperate.

It was not the sickly-looking leanness that made Clara anxious. She could deal with it, as long as her flesh did not fall off the bones. No, it was the abstract matter of not being herself that the woman could not tolerate. She was not herself. Her body did not function properly, and it was all due to the fact that her habits, forged in fire and ice in the most unlucky periods of her life and therefore as solid as the hardest diamond, were sabotaged, ripped away.