Title: For Hire – Prologue
Rating: PG–13
Summary: She lives her life moment to moment, because she never knows which is going to be her last.
Disclaimer: I do not own Lost. At all. I wish but alas...
Author's Note: For emiliglia, halfdutch, and hkath, who all suggested this same theme. :) Used for au100, prompt #74: dark.



Believe it or not, Sun doesn’t think much about her job. For her, there was no other choice, no other life, but this one. It’s in her blood; literally. It’s been passed down from her father to her, and, she guesses, from his father before him. Tradition. Generation after generation.

She lives her life moment to moment, because she never knows which is going to be her last. She doesn’t have time to struggle with her conscience, living a life like the one that she lives. It’s a waste of time, and, frankly, a waste of money. She’s paid to do a job, to provide a service, just like anyone else.

Yes, that service is unusual but, as mentioned, she doesn’t think about it much. She just does it.

She holds in her hands a file, which she flips through while she sits in the first class seat of an Oceanic Airlines flight to Las Vegas, Nevada. Inside are photographs, taken from quite a distance away by a long lense. Photos of a man exiting his hotel, entering a casino, negotiating with a woman who is very obviously a prostitute. She flips through them, bored. They don’t tell her anything she hadn’t already expected, so she shoves them to the back and takes out a short stack of papers with all the information that she could ever want – or need – about her target.

Janssen, Wayne.

The woman who had hired her, his step-daughter, had given her little to go on, just a description of where he would be and a promise to pay whatever the cost. Usually, Sun didn’t proceed with so little information, but the girl was very obviously desperate and had managed to sway Sun’s sympathy when she had revealed that the man had been abusing her mother over the course of the last twenty years.

Sun’s father had been wary of the job, at first, but had provided her with the access to the necessary information. As it turned out, the man in question was not the girl’s step-father, but her birth father. Whether she knew that or not, Sun could only guess, but the point was moot. It doesn’t really matter who the man is, Sun just likes to have all her ducks in a row.

Wayne Janssen was going to be in Las Vegas for one week. It’s a Wednesday and Sun is already two days behind him. It doesn’t matter, though, because Sun is very good at what she does. She would like to have more time, the job would be more thorough that way, but she has five days, and she knows that will be enough.

Enough to get in, get out, and cover her tracks along the way. If she plans it right (which she always does), she’ll be back on another flight before the week is out.

“Would you like some champagne, miss?” the flight attendent asks. Sun looks up, impassively, unstartled, and smiles as if she hasn’t been meticulously studying the life of a man she has been paid to murder.

“No,” she replies, with a smile. “Thank you.”

TBC...