Summary:
This chapter talks about the ultimate solution Skye finds to bury her remorse.
Comments are greatly appreciated: please, let me know what you think!
Chapter:
Skye was having some relax at a park nearby.
There were several kids playing together: they found some insects on the ground and turned their attention to them.
That simple fact made memories rush back in her mind.
One time, when she was at the orphanage, she had started a cruel game: "Crush the ant!" It consisted in a competition among kids: the one that had crushed most ants would have been the winner!
A nun came to them and prevented them to play anymore that game, explaining:
"Kids, do you know what is the easiest thing in the world?"
"No, sister Bertha" some kid answered.
"It is crushing an ant.
And you know what is the most difficult thing?"
"We don't know"
"Rebuild it."
The kids remained silent as she went on explaining:
"The ants, as well as all other creatures, are alive: you cannot play mash!
They are God's creatures: He made them, with great wisdom, with immense knowledge, with the incredible genius that is only His!
Try to picture the perfection of an ant: its small antennas that receive all odors, its little eyes that see the world, its powerful jaws that break the food to take it to the nest, its body so strong that if it was a man it could lift a truck! And an ant is formed by millions of tiny parts called cells, that work all together, and every cell is incredibly complex, too!
A simple ant is such a masterpiece that mankind, with all its technology and its science, will never succeed in reproducing from scratch!
It's the same with everything else: from the inanimate to the animate, from what men consider trivial to what they admire, from the infinitely small to the infinitely large!
The world has been placed under men's custody. But no man is the master of it!
If you have respect for God, you must also have respect for each of His creatures.
And you know what His most valuable creatures are?"
They shook their little heads.
"Humans.
So the greatest respect and the utmost care should be bestowed to humans, any of them, because they are the beloved sons of God and they have a soul, that will not die with the body, but will continue to exist forever."
Oh, great! She just needed this reminiscence to make her feel worse!
"All rubbish!" she immediately erased the thought.
But then she considered with a pang in her heart that she had probably killed more men than ants…
…
Skye really enjoyed living with Cal.
She discovered in him several qualities and resemblances with the pre-Shield herself: his care for every creature, animal or human; his attention for details; his tendency to poetry; his attraction to beauty…
He was a man that loved and gave value to life.
He was always smiling, always condescending, always comprehending…
He never got angry, he always tried to find solutions instead of underscoring the problems…
… of course, that was possible because he forgot his terrible past and all the horrible things he did, all the lives he stole, all the human beings he murdered…
Yeah, he became a monster… after being subjected to terrible trials, to real tragedies: his wife dissected alive and then thrown away… his daughter snatched away from him while he was otherwise occupied… in assembling his wife back together…
Skye tried to imagine what it could have felt like, for him, to wonder, every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every year, for 26 years, if his daughter was alive, how was she treated, if she was tortured, raped, or beaten, if she was well nourished or starved, educated or left by herself on the streets… 26 years of continuous torture!
It was enough to go crazy!
So Skye started to wonder if she was really better than Cal. She always thought she was, but now she was not sure anymore. She realized she had also judged Ward labeling him as a murderer, as a Nazi, as a traitor… but if she had his life, would she have been better than him, or would she end up exactly making his very choices?
It is always difficult, not to say impossible, to judge fairly someone else, because nobody can have a full comprehension of another person.
Often we do not even know who we are: what would we do in this or that situation? How would we react? Are we conscious of what lives we live? Are we aware of our moral and spiritual condition? Do we ask questions to ourselves?
The Tahiti Protocol allowed Cal to forget all the evil he committed, all the people he murdered, the monster he became, so that he could conduct an almost normal life.
For Skye it was another story.
She remembered.
She remembered everything.
She remembered all the lives she stole, all the blood she spilled.
Only now, in her new almost normal life, she was starting to realize in what kind of downward spiral she had been involved.
Oh, yeah! It started very light: first she was a hacker, a criminal that stole secret information spreading them around the world.
Then she was kidnapped by Shield, who declared to be the protector of the world. And she went with them, starting training, shooting with ICERS, participating in field missions and taking two in the guts, risking her life. That time they managed to save her, and to save one life they took two: the lives of the two soldiers that guarded the Guest House. She should have understood from there that something smelled, that Coulson had two weights and two measures, one for his people, the ones HE judged worthy, and one for the rest of the population, that wasn't bestowed with his paternal glance!
Ward had the misfortune to fall from the first set to the second.
After the Hydra reveal the situation worsened.
During one of his interrogations, Ward said that Hydra would have taken care of quickly of threats, represented, in that occasion, by gifted that refused Hydra itself. And she said, proudly: 'That's the difference between Shield and Hydra', intending that Shield wouldn't behave in that way.
And then?
Then she was ordered to do exactly that: taking care of quickly of a threat, killing a kid, Donnie Gill, whose only sin was to have been brainwashed and to be dangerous due to his powers.
And she did it, without a flinch, without an emotion or a change in her heartbeat: one precise shot between his eyes and Donnie was sinking into the sea…
She should have understood that something wasn't right, there!
She had just killed a kid!
Emotionlessly!
Coldly!
How the hell could have May changed her on such a fundamental level?
For Heavens' sake! She had just killed another human being! A person! A boy, to whom was once given birth, who had been nursed by a mother, fed with baby food, who had cried at night, who was afraid of the dark, that one day began to walk on his own little feet, who had learned to speak, who had rejoiced kisses and embraces, who had gone to school and learned to read and write, who had friends, who had laughed and cried, who had fallen in love, who had hopes for the future!
A future she had stolen!
He was not yet 18 years old!
And she killed him!
Without batting an eyelid!
Being complimented about that!
And from there she didn't even know the number of the people she killed!
For her it had become like a videogame: 100 points for each target eliminated.
Oh, it was so easy to call them "targets", or "enemies", instead of "persons".
Also Ward was an enemy.
And also he was a soldier.
And soldier's duty is to kill.
She was not different from him.
He was a killer.
She was a killer.
He was a traitor.
She was a traitor: yes, a traitor to life!
What a wonderful couple!
Maybe this was the reason she was still so attracted to him… because she saw their resemblance.
She felt so nauseous of herself!
She felt for herself so much hate, so much self-contempt she wanted to scream and rip away her hair!
But there was no way to escape from remorse.
There was no way to mend the consequences of her sins.
The dead were dead and nobody could resurrect them.
…
She was still alone in the park, while she was gloomily pondering these thoughts, remorse biting harshly at her, even if she tried to ignore it.
And you know: sadness is for the devil like honey to the bear…
At a certain point, a woman, a beautiful red-haired woman with blue eyes, sat by her side.
"Hello, Skye!"
Skye looked at her with wide eyes.
"You don't know who I am, but I know who you are", she smiled with a tight grin that did not reach her eyes.
"You are the one that made Raoul to go on a rampage.
And it is not hygienic to make Raoul go on a rampage!"
That name ringed something in Skye's head.
It must have had something to do with that night she did not remember anything about.
"But Raoul is also merciful and has forgiven you."
At those words Skye felt a chill go down her back.
"He wants to meet you. He wants to give you what you want."
"And what do I want?"
"You want ecstasy!"
Skye remained speechless and a thrill of desire shocked her.
He could be the key to oblivion.
He could give her the means to forget herself, to bury all her horrendous crimes… to become nothing.
Finally nothing.
And she was taken by the enthusiasm for nihilism: that would have canceled everything!
Yes! She had found the escape route!
Once she had become nothing, all remorse, all the guilt, all the trouble of living would disappear!
If everything had become nothing, there would be no more difference between evil and good, between life and death, between vice and virtue, between licit and illicit, between fullness and emptiness!
Nothingness would have taken place of everything!
Nothingness would have leveled everything.
And she took the worse decision of her life:
"I want that!"
And in that way, instead of fighting against the dragon of nihilism, she started to bring for it an absurd respect, like to a god. She joined in prayer million of people, and instead of overcoming old values she started simply destroying them without bothering to replace them with new ones.
Nothingness became her god, fed by her pain, remorse, irresponsibility, myopia, and ignorance.
She believed to have discovered the ultimate truth: that nothingness lies behind every thing. Therefore all was vain, useless, aimless, and purposeless.
So, why don't live life playing? Having fun?
Fun became the ultimate rule!
She in an instant adhered to the essence of modern thought, to the vision of the nullity of things, to nihilism without realizing that it stinks of death, of rottenness, of boredom, of despair, of loneliness…
But she didn't care.
Life had no value anymore.