Work Text:
-------
Choices
by Spix
--------
"The only things dividing wrong and right, good and bad are the choices we make every single moment in our lives."
That was something my mother used to say years ago when family and home were words with meaning. I always remembered her beliefs even when I lost all of them. Sadly, she never said it would be so difficult in real life to make things right. She was killed when I was young, I wasn´t a child but I was young enough that it was impossible for me to be left alone or to find a new home. I was too young and too old at the same time, later I was also too screwed up.
For most people, life is not something you have to fight for every single day but when you have nothing, you care for nothing and no one. When you are used every single day and then put aside like some old couch, you know you don´t have any value and you never will. You keep running looking for something better, something less ugly at least, until you give up in the searching. Then you become practical, if nobody cares about you then you don´t care about others. With enough time you learn how to care even less. To survive is the only thing remaining in you. Your own survival. Nothing more and nothing less.
Most people think it's easy to bring death to others because they never did it with their own hands, they vote in a trial for death penalty with not so much than a blink of their eyes because it will be somebody else doing the job. They don´t know when you are the one doing the dirty thing you will have to live with it for the rest of your life. Most of us, and I mean somebody like me, broken, alone, afraid... a sinner because we felt there wasn´t another choice; learnt in our youth to bear the weight of our sin because survival was the only thing we had left. I have known people so broken inside that they didn´t remember when and where they lost their soul, they barely can feel something; they are really dangerous. And I have known a few born without souls... they are death itself.
I know I´m a sinner. I killed people. I worked for some really bad guys and killed more people in that time, I´m still doing it. But I always remembered my mother's words, even when they were meaningless in my life, I still remembered the time when they had value. I can´t go back to that time, I burned all the bridges to it years ago; I just can mourn what it was and won´t be anymore. I know I have no right to mourn something I lost because I was a coward, because when good people wanted to help me my doubts and the lack of trust in others gave form to my own decisions... I can´t blame others for everything that got wrong in my life. In spite of everything, to be a murderer, to be a monster it was my choice.
But that´s me.
There are others, that could and should blame the world, if they remembered anything but the rage, if the madness inside all humans, weren´t in them free of all restraint. If they weren´t the total absence of limits and morality made flesh and blood. They are the products of things so horrible that nobody can imagine until it happens to them, because these broken, crazy creatures creates more like them in an eternal and vicious cycle of death, pain and sorrow. The ones strong enough to survive that kind of violence never are the same again. The ones that broke will repeat the cycle. I had kept myself out their way, nobody with a minimum of selfpreservation got near them. If you got near, you´re stupid or suicidal.
I also have known another kind of crazy people, people that believe they can Save the World, with ethics, morals or whatever you call it; so strong that if it´s necessary they could die for what they believe. But they´re also very fragile, and given the right pressures they can end in total desperation. When they lose someone or something that was the base of their Faith they kill themselves... or they fall to darkness. I´m guilty of some of them. They couldn´t pay the price so they failed. I´m not proud but they were in the way of my survival.
I prefer the realistic ones. They see everything that is bad in the world and they wish to make things right, but know the fight is almost impossible to win. They don´t want to but they will coexist with the corruption and the evil while refusing to join them. I killed a few, I scared a lot more. Mostly I envy them, I know if things had been different I could have been like them. Sometimes I hate them because they could make the choices I couldn't.
But now there´s something new, something I never met before. There´s one doing the dirty job the idealistic and the realistic ones can´t do. He´s doing it knowing he´s breaking the Law but he´s not crossing it. He has his own moral, he had a chosen path, a chosen duty and he´s not expecting rewards. The worst part is he´s doing what has to be done even if the price is personally too high. He will pay the price and he will watch others pay it too. Whatever happened to him it didn´t break him, it looks like whatever will happen to him won´t break him. He´s at war with the evil in the world, he will not stop. We can´t stop him, he can´t fight all of us.
The white knights are easily broken, we can win them. The crazy ones are unstoppable so you let others deal with them. The realistic ones you let alone and in general they let you alone too. But he´s something different, unique. He sticks to his beliefs, he can´t be bought, he can´t be scared, he cares for the innocent but we can´t use them against him, and we still can´t kill him.
And he doesn't like us.
I've never said this to anybody before, but I kind of like him. He had been scaring lots of kids off the streets, some had been getting help after just a glance of him, real or not, at the top of a building. The Boss had been in trouble lately, it seems nobody from outside the city wants to do jobs here anymore. He has really bad press, worse than us lately. I know of at least one guy who changed his life after a "meeting" with him, it seems he knew the guy´s name so he was scared shitless and went straight since that night. Maybe it´s just an urban legend, maybe not. This city is crazy enough for that to be true. Sometimes I hate him because he wasn´t there when I was young and still could be saved. Most of the time I like to know he´s out in the night, dividing wrong from right, good from bad, making the choices most of us can´t or don´t want to do.
Someday, I will be meeting him. I think that day I will forget how to fire a gun, I will just sit there and I will wait for the police to arrive. And that will be my choice too.
end