It is the five year anniversary of Fidelia's death, and the city is mourning. She might have been Baltimore's daughter but on days like these, everyone tries to lay claim to a piece of her. New York succeeds better than some. 

The flag flies at half mast in every borough. There's a moment of silence in the schools and federal offices, and there's going to be some sort of retrospective on the radio this evening, allegedly featuring some exclusive interviews with surviving members of her unit. 

It's all very solemn and sad, and Aegis watches one of his handlers flip through a newspaper with a beaming propaganda picture of Fidelia on the front with narrowed eyes until he speaks, out of turn and unexpected: "Did I kill her?" 

The man puts aside his sheaf of newspaper uncertainly. No, he tells Aegis. You didn't kill her. He does not ask why did you ask? He knows who Aegis once was. He isn't interested in opening a line of questioning, even with someone who wasn't supposed to know how to question.

"She didn't always smile like that," Aegis says, reaching for the paper. It's a step too far and the handler can feel his pulse fluttering like a one-winged bird now, crooked and crazy. He slaps the project's hand away. 

Don't touch that, he orders. Don't think about it. Aegis settles quietly back into the chair and tries to obey, but there are images in his head now: the woman, younger and smaller than she was in the picture, smiling up at him with a look that spelled trouble. (What was a look that spelled trouble?)

No. Don't think of it.

He remembers lying in this chair and begging and begging and begging for her to come, saying a name that is unfamiliar in his mind and cuts like metal: Anna. And sometimes when the pain was a great black wave he could no longer bear, and he had to leave, he saw her and she came to him and unlocked the shackles and put her cold hands on his burning forehead and the hurt fell away like a snake shedding its skin and he stood up to follow her out of the room, out of the facility, away from the cutting tools of the doctors and the blinding agony of the chair and then when he opens his eyes and his cheeks are damp and the handler leaning over him in her white coat smiles and strokes his cheek and says very calmly: your wife is dead, Fidelia is dead, Anna is dead, you killed her on a mission for us, she is never going to save you, and then he remembers he started to scream until he was choking on his own blood.

No. Don't think about it.

He cannot stop thinking about it. He sees her face in his  mind, pale, blood and bruises blooming like big peonies across the arc of her cheekbones, the curve of her lips. Is this another memory, or just something they've put in his head? Everything in him recoils at the image. 

He lunges for the handler, dead-eyed and silent, wrapping his metal hand around the man's throat and squeezing. 

"She's dead?" he rasps. "She's dead?"

She can't be dead. If she's dead, he knows, if this woman is gone, there is no world, so why is he here? 

The man, rapidly turning purple, doesn't muster up an answer. Perhaps he can't. Aegis doesn't care. He snaps his neck and then throws the body to the side and shudders. There are two other handlers in the room. One of them reaches for his gun, another for the intercom.

Very suddenly, there are no handlers in the room. He stalks into the hallway, the newspaper's front page crumpled loosely in his right hand.

S-K43