Max Payne: Payne and Sorrow
Max Payne - Prologue: The Payne I've Caused...
"God...I turned out to be such a damsel in distress..." These were the last words she had ever said to me.
The bullet in her head had completed it's slow-motion journey through her synapses. I felt my chest cave in on my lungs as her final breath escaped her lips. The woman that I had fallen in love with, the woman that showed me that I had a choice. That I could put the gun down, that I didn't have to pull the trigger. She was gone, now. Falling silent to a bed of smoldering ashes, her pulse had faded. Placing my lips to hers, feeling the empty darkness of her body flowing through me. It was a feeling all too familiar.
As I placed my lips against hers, I had a vision of all bad and good that had happened since we've met. It all started with the death of my wife and baby daughter. My apathy for the death of others had become infinite after they were killed. The Cleaners, Vinnie Gognitti, Mike, Kaufman, Alfred Woden, Winterson, Vlad...
Vlad had been Mona's assailant, the one who start all of this, helped in destroying my life, and become so very close to succeeding. When he had pulled the trigger, ending her life once and for all, the bullet in my own head moved a fatal, microscopic distance. The bullet had felt as though it transformed into a bomb, on the verge of exploding. Vlad had been the detenator. Vlad had been my friend, but betrayed me with greed and dealing me inconceivable pain. When I had finally ended Vlad, I felt self-righteous. Justice, revenge, the law, I didn't care what it may have seemed like or rather, what people may have perceived it as to why I did it. When I saw him fall through the roof, hitting the ground, molotov's betraying him, burning his soon to be rotting corpse...I smiled. It was the first time, in years, that I had smiled.
The visions I had received from Mona, after kissing the black hole in her mouth, helped me to see. I saw that I could put the gun down, that I could change my life, that I was never alone in any of this. As I parted my lips from hers, I gaped at her in awe, my hand rubbing her cheek. She was beautiful. A tear streamed down my cheek, the first time I had cried or even shed a tear since my family had been murdered. I looked into her lifeless blue eyes, and I could see through them as if they were open doors to my own future. In this act of seeing, I knew everything would be alright. In this act of seeing, I was reborn.