Jack
Mostly, when people meet the father of the girl they're in love with they're nervous. They wanna make a good impression. So they dress up real nice, ya'see? So that he will think that they're good enough. They smile, they shake his hand. They're on their best behaviour. Not me, though. The day I met the father of the girl I love I didn't put on any kind of fancy display. I didn't shake his hand.
I killed him.
I saw him standing at Alice's feet, the man who had taken everything from me and I was blinded by white-hot rage. It burned through my veins like hellfire and rose up to boil me whole. I don't know how I got there, but the next thing I knew was that my fists were pummelling into the sides of his head. He hadn't seen me coming, so I got a few blissful moments of hatred out before he swung his arm and hit me with a roar of rage. I didn't even feel it, I wasn't sure what I could feel anymore, but it flung me to the other side of the room. That's the thing about me y'see. I'm tall, but I'm scrawny, not all that strong physically, but you don't really need to be. Ever heard the phrase "mind over matter"? Well… it's true. See, if you can get in to someone's mind then everything else doesn't matter. If you get a chance to mess with their head then you'll soon see that they're helpless. They have nothing to do with all of their strength.
I looked up from the corner he'd thrown me into. He looked so smug that he'd managed to throw someone half his age and weight to the other side of a room. I saw that there was murderous light in his eyes, but he didn't know that the very same light I saw inside him was pulsating through me… coursing, sparking, and jolting through my veins. I smiled at him. That confused him. A well placed smile can confuse even the sharpest of minds. And his was as blunt as a spoon. A laugh escaped my throat at how arrogant he could be considering he wasn't going to make it out of this.
"Do you remember…" I clicked a crick in my neck before I stood up, "the day you brought her home?"
My question threw him and he stopped making his way towards me. I scrambled to my feet. "What?" he frowned at me.
"From the hospital," I continued, just to clarify. It was my turn to advance towards him. He was still very unsure where I was going with all of this. He'd soon see. "The day she was born." Being in the same room as him made me feel physically ill. Have you ever been so angry that you felt nauseous? I have, I was that day. It took everything I had not to rip him apart there and then. But that would have been too quick. Too merciful. I glanced down at the knife he was still holding, really quickly so that he wouldn't remember he had it or see my interest in it. He frowned and I could tell that his eyes weren't focusing on me anymore. They were fixed on some distant day in his past. Good. I wanted him to realise the magnitude of what he'd done, what he'd taken away from the world. "Do you remember how it felt to hold her for the first time?"
For a brief moment her father smiled. "She held my thumb," he said quietly and he dropped the knife in order to wrap his own blood-stained hand around his other thumb. I had him now. I knew I had him. And I would enjoy this.
"How small she was…" I continued, bending slowly to pick up the knife from the ground. "How fragile…" Before he could react I reached out and grabbed his face, forcing him to look at the body of his daughter. His beautiful, beautiful daughter. "Now look at her," I said, pressing the blade of my knife to his throat. "Look what you did."
"Alice," he said her name. I kept him in an iron grasp as I readjusted my hold on the blade.
"Which thumb was it she held?" I asked, taking hold of his wrist. He flinched. "Was it this one?" I didn't wait for him to answer me before I sliced it off. The sound of his pain was glorious. I waited for it to stop and for the echo to fade away. He tried to struggle, but I kept him still.
He began to whimper. "Are you going to kill me?" he asked.
Coward.
Can you believe that was all he cared about? Not about what he'd done to his own child, but about what I was going to do to him. So I took great delight in saying, "Yes."
I don't know how people can condemn what I did next. I think they're too quick to get all on their high-horse about stuff like this. Nobody likes to think of themselves as a murderer, but under the right circumstances we've all got it in us. There are those that try to use things like religion or morals as a way to explain how they could not possibly take another human life. That's the sheer arrogance of our species. Only those who can afford morals actually stick to them. 'Cause let me tell you… if you lost everything and you were standing within reach of the person who'd taken it from you, you would do what I did.
It wasn't enough to merely kill him. He'd taken two lives in one day. I needed to make him suffer. I got him on the floor, face down. Then I twisted his head to make him look at his daughter, to look at the damage he'd done to her. Because that's what he would have coming to him. I hit him across the head until he was still, but remained conscious. Then I took the knife and dragged it… slowly… real slowly down his back. I watched the blood pool and him twitch beneath the blade. I thought my hand might shake with the enormity of what I was doing, but I kept my cool. Cool as a cucumber. Matching up what he had done to my Ace, mirroring it exactly.
An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot… a scar for a scar.
Life for a life.
When his back was a shredded as the damage that he had caused I drove the blade right through him and listened to his dying groan. When he was still I stood up, feeling calm for a second. And then I just felt empty. Not like I was hungry or anything, no, not like that. Just like there was nothing inside me anymore.
D'ya know how it feels to see your whole world broken before your very eyes? Do you know what it's like to see it lying in pieces in front of you, bloody and beaten? To see it collapsed. Crushed, dying, dead. Do you know what it's like to lose everything all at once? Huh? Do you? Well I do. I know exactly how it feels and it's a feeling that never leaves you.
I saw my world lying on a filthy, cold, dirty floor. She was bloodied and bruised. Her hair was matted with her own blood, her clothes were as shredded as the flesh on her back. Her face was turned towards the door, but her eyes were closed and her skin was pale white.
I went over to crouch beside her. I reached out a finger to slowly brush her blood-clotted hair from his face. Her skin was still warm to my touch. Something splashed onto her face and I looked up for the source of the leak. Then I realized that it was my own tear. Once I'd acknowledged them, they were hard to stop. I bent down real close to Alice and breathed her in. I tried to choke out her name, but it was difficult to squeeze it past the big lump in my throat. Wouldn't have done much good anyway, it's not like she could hear me. I let her scent fill me up; it was usually such a comfort, but not now. Nothing could do that job now. This was never part of the plan, never part of my promise. I'd promised to protect her and now here she lay… dead in my arms.
I probably would have laid there forever. Until I had died along with her. There wasn't any kind of pain- not disease, illness, starvation or death that was equal to the pain I was in. I would have been far happier if I had died instead of her. I only moved when I heard the sirens coming. I knew at once how this would look. It would look like I'd killed them both. They'd make that assumption immediately and I couldn't live with that. I didn't care what they did to me. I didn't care if they shot me on the spot… but to have everyone think that I was me who drove a knife through Alice?
No.
No, I couldn't deal with that.
The sirens stopped outside and I heard footsteps on the stairs. I raised my head from Alice's hair. I wasn't ready to leave her. I wasn't ready to say goodbye.
How could I possibly say goodbye to my Ace?
I reached into her pocket, where I knew it would be, and pulled out her playing card. One corner of it was seeped in her blood. I took the Joker card from my own pocket and swapped them, so that we would always have a little piece of each other. I kissed her scars one last time. I couldn't bring myself to look at her again. I should have. I should have looked at her one last time, for as long as I possibly could. But I couldn't, I just couldn't.
I fled out of the room and into the hall. They saw me. I know they saw me, but I saw them too. And I saw the guilt in all of their faces. Guilt they didn't even know they had. Why do they never come when you need them? Why do they only care after someone has died? Why? They could have stopped it if they'd come earlier, they could have, I know they could have.
They saw me fleeing, but there was nothing they could do about it. They couldn't catch me. They couldn't shoot me, not with so little to go on. Y'know what they're like, them cops. They take too long to do anything and people get away. They've got guidelines to follow. Rules. It makes 'em indecisive. Useless. Shit.
I looked down at the Ace, the death card, but all I saw was Alice.
I tried to say goodbye, but I couldn't. And I never would.
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