Later that night, Tammy and Avi are lying in bed. It’s pitch black in the room, but they’re wide awake. Avi is lying on her back, her long raven hair sprawled out over the pillows, and her right hip up slightly to make room for the base of her tail. Tammy is laying on her in a bear hug, his right ear against her chest as he focuses on her steady heartbeat. His fingers are interlocked behind her back, and she’s smiling.

“Hmgh,” Tammy groans as he hugs his wife. “Wine makes it hard to sleep.”

Avi pats his back, “yep, sure does.”

“You’ve never been drunk though?”

“Hm? Oh, yeah, I guess.”

“Sorry if I’m keeping you up.”

“Naaaah,” she says with a bright smile and a rattle of her tail. “I’m happy to stay up with you.”

This is right. This is how it should be. Just Tammy, just Avi, no distractions. No stupid redheads, no music, no dancing, no instruments, not even any assassin business. All is right in Avi’s little world, and she couldn’t be happier.

“Hey, is it… okay? That we’ve killed Sir Kracken?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Well, he was a pretty okay guy, wasn’t he? He was nice, and he got me to perform on a stage. Even you started to like him in the end, right?”

“I guess he was alright. But hey, he was our target, so what could we do? I’m sure a lot of the people we killed were decent or okay guys, but we just never interacted with them.”

“Yeah, that’s true…” His voice is slightly strained. “But, what about Catala?”

Avi’s face goes blank. “What about her?” She avoids any hint of annoyance in her tone.

“She wants to save up a bit of cash, buy her freedom from Sir Kracken, then go of to find her family. But what happens when he dies in a few weeks? She’s a slave, so who takes ownership of her? Sir Krackens wife, maybe? Will she uphold such an arrangement? It’s unusually fair for the Gurant Empire. Are we ruining Catala’s life?”

“Who cares?” There’s a touch of bitterness in her voice.

“I do!” Tammy yells with unexpected frustration.

“Why?!” Avi sits up, pushing Tammy to the side. Her bone-tail genes give her perfect night vision, and Tammy activates his psychic powers, which cause his eyes to glow white and faintly illuminate her face and torso. “Why are you so focused on her? Why do your thoughts keep going back to her?”

Tammy squints, his mind sharp despite the alcohol. “Because aren’t we good people?! The gurant are evil, their empire is evil, and since we fight against them, we’re supposed to be good! But now I’m looking at the people who will be hurt by our actions and… I don’t like it.”

“So, okay,” Avi shifts her position, facing Tammy with her legs crossed, “next time we’ll just not interact with the target. We shouldn’t have even done that this time, but you,” she gently pokes his forehead, “got so caught up with your violin that you got us involved with the guy we’re killing, and the person who’ll be most hurt by his death. So just don’t do that next time.”

Tammy clenches his jaw, “you’re missing the point. The negative results of our actions don’t go away just because we don’t know about them. Sticking our heads in the sand and pretending like we don’t hurt anyone isn’t a solution.”

“There isn’t a solution,” Avi declares. “Does being a good person mean crying every time we go out on a mission because someone besides out target will probably get hurt? Or does being a good person mean feeling bad now, but getting over it since that’s our job?”

Tammy looks down, his bottom lip tight. “I… don’t know.”

That was a bad approach. Tammy’s a sensitive guy and Avi knows him better than anyone. He’s clearly struggling, and Avi needs to be the one to help him. “Hey, hey.” Avi scoots closer, gently holding his hands. “Just don’t think about it. Or, instead, focus on all the good we’re doing! Sir Kracken works for the gurant, right? He’s a retired admiral who’s going back to work because… of the brain drain, right?”

Tammy’s voice is wobbly and unsure, “I’m… amazed you remembered that, to be honest.”

“I can remember things when it matters,” she smiles. “But the guy works for the empire. While the empire is invading some far-off planet, he’s helping them! How many lives are going to be ruined when this guy returns as an admiral? Instead of thinking about the people you’ll never meet who might get hurt by our actions, think about the people you’ll never meet who might benefit from our actions! Erden might have been an okay guy, but at the end of the day, who’s he working for? What regime is he propping up?”

Tammy hunches forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and setting his chin on their cluster of hands. “It’s… true that Sir Kracken works for the gurant. It’s true that, if he’s as skilled as we were led to believe, he’ll probably be effective at cracking down-“

“Krackening down.”

Tammy inhales sharply but keeps going. “-on pirates, rebels, smugglers, and dissident groups. Some of these groups would probably go on to cause harm of their own. However, a lot of people rely on smuggling routes to survive. Plus, rebels and dissidents are generally a moral good when compared to the Gurant Empire’s daily atrocities. So all-in-all, Sir Kracken’s death would probably introduce more good onto this planet, when viewed from a utilitarian lense.”

Avi nods, “it’s just standard utilitarians.”

“So Catala’s suffering… doesn’t outweigh the good it would do.”

“I agree!” She smiles.

“But…”

Avi frowns.

“I still feel bad about it.”

“Isn’t that just weakness?” She snaps. “Your affection for her is getting in the way-” She shakes her head. “Tammy. We can, right now, head outside, sneak into Sir Kracken’s room, and I can inject him with the antidote. Afterwards, we can go back to the tribe, admit we failed, and that’s that. Do you want to?”

Tammy’s brow curls up in distress, and he tightens his lips.

“Then, next time we go out on a mission, we can get to know our target and his family. We can invite them to dinner, we can talk, really build up a friendship with them to determine if they deserve to die.”

Tammy hangs his head, trembling. That’s obviously not a realistic solution.

Avi sighs softly. She grabs under his arms and pulls him onto her lap, hugging him warmly. She sets her chin on his shoulder, pressing the side of her face against his. Her voice is soft, “Tammy, I can’t feel what you’re feeling, but I’m not blind to what you’re going through. You’re an empathetic person, and I’m not. Maybe it’s because you’re a psychic and you can feel the emotions of others, maybe it’s some weird quirk of me being a bone-tail, or maybe that’s just who we are. But I think… If ‘what’s best’ involved hurting you, nothing in my brain could justify it. Utilitarian ethics, any other philosophical nonsense you could bring up, none of it would matter. So, being an empathetic person, you got to know Sir Kracken and Catala. The way I feel about you is probably, to a far lesser degree, how you feel about them. Even if you understand that hurting them is for the greater good, it’s still hard to actually hurt them. So… I think the response you want from me is something to soothe your guilt.” Avi thinks for a second. “And I can offer no comforting words about that. Even if we don’t kill him, you know that someone else from the tribe will. Catala must have her life uprooted, you just want to not feel guilty about doing it. But we are going to kill Sir Kracken. We are going to uproot Catala’s life. It sucks for them, but that’s how life goes. We live as assassins, he lives as an assassination target, she lives as collateral. If you feel guilty about it, I guess that means you’re still a good person. I mean, your sense of morality is still intact, you’re aware of when you’re doing morally dubious things. Does that… make sense?”

Tammy sits in the comforting embrace of her arms, feeling the warmth and love spread into his back. He gulps hard and gives a few long breaths to steady himself.

“Heh… all you really said was ‘suck it up and stop being a baby’.”

“Well, I used kinder words.”

“…Even still, you’re right. We are assassins, we’re never going to stop being assassins. Even if the cause is righteous, fighting to one day destroy the evil Gurant Empire, there are loads of good people who will get wrapped up in it. There’s no action we can take that both fights against the empire and causes no collateral damage. I still feel bad about Catala, but of course I do, since I’m actually seeing the consequences of our actions. So, I guess… If that really is inevitable, the only thing we can do is try to minimize the suffering that goes along with it.”

“Which we have. We poisoned a single man—our target—when we could have snuck into the kitchen and contaminated the whole food supply. Or blown up the whole ship.”

“Yeah…” Tammy goes quiet, thinking about how the goal of ‘minimizing suffering’ could fit here.

Avi rests her chin atop Tammy’s head. She rocks left, then swings right, dragging Tammy along as they fall to the side, heads on the pillows.

He takes a deep breath, and rests his hands on hers, over his heart. Such a warm, tight hug, enveloping him down to his soul. Her words may have said ‘suck it up’, but her body language, her emotions pouring into him, are saying ‘I’m with you’. It’s really all he can ask.

Tammy sniffs, “I love you, Avi.”

Avi hugs him tighter, “I love you too, Tammy.”

She doesn’t know why, but Avi feels no desire to smile or wag her tail. It’s not that she’s hiding her true feelings; she genuinely doesn’t feel like it. She adores this closeness to her husband but doesn’t like the context around it. Cuddling like this would be better if Tammy were in a good mood.

She thinks hard for a long moment, and sighs. “If… someone broke your leg because they were trying to make someone else jealous, I’d probably kill them.”

Tammy forces a weak smile, “probably?”

“I would kill them.” Avi groans hard. She doesn’t want to admit this but understands she has to. “It was wrong of me to do that.”

“It was.” Tammy thinks for a moment. “But I’ll help you fix it because we’re good people. All the money you make will go to Kizhan and her friends, half the money I make will go to them, while the other half goes to Catala.”

The last part of that sentence is like needles in her skin, but she must bear with it. “Thank you, Tammy.”

Despite apologizing for her actions against Kizhan, there’s still a deep, burning pit of agony in her heart when he mentions the redhead.

The Kizhan incident doesn’t quite elicit guilt, but there’s a vague awareness that she shouldn’t have done it. Not that she should have done it in a way where Tammy wouldn’t find out, but she understands the basic concepts of right and wrong. It was a bad thing to do; she just didn’t care. Bone-tails are hard-wired to not feel any sympathy towards their targets, but she loves Tammy and breaking Kizhan’s leg made Tammy sad. Even if Tammy wouldn’t find out about it, it’s still something Avi shouldn’t do going forward.

But Catala?

Avi hates her.

She wants to kill her.

Not ‘Avi wants Catala to be dead.’

Avi explicitly wants to be the one to kill her. Either crushing her throat, or ripping out her heart, or injecting her with a lethal serum.

The furthest Avi’s mercy can go is that she would make the death quick and painless.

How dare she take Tammy away?

How dare she spend time with Tammy alone?

How dare she be older, taller, and prettier?

“Avi, are you okay? You’re heart’s racing.” He feels her heart thump against his back.

“I’m fine. Nothing to worry about. Go to sleep.”

She breathes slowly. In, and out. In, and out. No matter how much she despises Catala, there’s nothing she can do about it. She can either stew in her bitterness or calm down and trust that Tammy won’t leave her. While she wants to choose the latter, much of her heart is stuck in the former.