41 To Treasure A Moment
KNOCK! KNOCK!
"Dad? You there?" Gwen asked in a soft voice.
CLICK!
The door to her father's room swung open almost immediately, revealing a concerned George with a bandaged arm.
"Of course I am. It's my house," he said, giving her a small smile while his eyes betrayed his worry. Helen had informed him of Gwen's mood the moment he walked in; she'd headed straight for her room before breaking down. He didn't know why she felt the way she felt, but he was there to help.
That was what fathers were there for.
"Come on in. The room's yours."
Her father's room was exactly how it was the last time she'd seen it. She should've expected it as he practically lived in the police station, coming home only late at night.
She sat on one of the two chairs in the fairly simple room before a small desk on which pictures of her family were neatly arranged. Pictures of her dad carrying her on his wide shoulders as a kid, a family picture on the beautiful beaches of Florida, the day she was gifted her late dog Tom, and a few more.
"You alright?" George said, taking a seat next to her, lightly wincing at his injury. The bullet had taken some flesh with it, which made his arm slightly useless for a while. "You don't look like yourself..."
"Yeah, something came up," Gwen sighed, pushing her blonde locks out of her hair and looking at her dad. "I just have something I need to ask you."
"Ask away, then," George grinned, leaning back on his chair while making sure not to move his injured arm too much.
Gwen's blue eyes lingered on her dad's injury before staring into his kindly eyes.
"Have you ever killed a person?"
"Hmm?!"
The question was so random and so unexpected that it almost gave George figurative whiplash. He'd been expecting Gwen to rant about something that was going on in her life, but this was not a question he thought he'd be answering today.
"Straight to the point, eh?" George raised an eyebrow, clearly uncomfortable at being asked such a question by his daughter. Still, her emotionally exhausted eyes told him that she needed an answer. As for what reason that was exactly, it didn't matter.
"Yes. Yes, I have."
Gwen took in a deep breath.
"How many?"
"Is something wrong, dear?" George asked worriedly. His usual playful and bright daughter wasn't acting herself. He knew of mood swings in teenagers - especially girls, but he had never heard of one where they began asking their parents their kill count.
"Maybe."
"Then talk to me. What's with the questions? What happened?" he asked, a tiny bit confused, his worry growing by the second.
"I just need an answer, Dad. How many people have you killed?" Gwen replied, her eyes briefly betraying her desperation. Her tiny and idealistic world had been shattered today, and she needed to hear something to help her piece it back. She needed something to cling to.
George looked at her for a few more seconds before sighing and giving in.
"I don't keep an exact count as it's not something I like to think about a lot, but in my twelve-year career in this crime-infested city, it's gotten close to a century and a half."
Gwen fought to keep her composure as her father answered her question. Did she really have a mental breakdown over Peter's two kills when her own father had 75 times that number? She always knew that her father had killed people, but what exactly was the difference between her father's kills and Peter's that made her accept one and not the other? Was it because of the law? Willful ignorance?
"Why don't you think about it?" Gwen managed to articulate a sentence without her voice breaking while she attempted to calm her troubled mind. "Is it because you believe killing is unjustifiable?"
"Oh, not at all," George gave her a small smile. "It's because my mind is too busy thinking about who I managed to save."
She raised an eyebrow, her heart beginning to beat in her chest.
"But...is killing the only answer?"
"Not always?"
"So it is sometimes?"
Her father's smile merely widened at the question before it disappeared, his face gaining a tinge of melancholy.
"You remind me so much of myself," he grunted while cradling his injured arm, his eyes clearly going back in time. "That was one of the first questions I asked my supervisor before my first day on the job long before you were born. We had instructions on when to shoot to kill - when the suspect has a gun and so and so forth; something that I thought was a bunch of jargon at the time. And to my surprise, he didn't give me a straight answer, telling me to do what was right and that I would know what to do when the time came.
That very day, we were called in to deal with a hostage situation. It was the usual: Attempted bank robbery done by five trigger-happy amateurs with plastic masks and newly bought guns fueled by a bag of cocaine. We had the bank surrounded while the bastards were stuck inside with a whole bunch of civilians."
Gwen's previously dull eyes now gleamed with attention, hanging onto her father's every word. It took her back to the times when he used to read her bedtime stories after he came back from a tiring day of work, but this was different. He never talked about his life as a policeman, no matter how much she begged him to.
But this time, he didn't seem to mind.
George took a deep breath before he continued, the story clearly uncovering painful memories.
"There were about twenty of us - ten at the front and ten at the back. We were supposed to wait for the negotiation to complete, but John, our....late colleague, managed to pry open one of the windows that led to the employee pantry near the back. After arguing with the Captain for half a minute, five of us crawled through, taking up positions within the building.
The hostages were crouching on the floor while the suspects were pacing back and forth armed with automatic rifles. It was intimidating, but we had perfect shots on all of them - one officer for one guy. Nothing could go wrong. We were just waiting for the signal from the captain to blow their heads with well-placed bullets."
George looked back at Gwen.
"Do you know what happened when we did receive the signal?"
"You...killed them right?" she said, tilting her head, but she'd already figured that that was not how the story would end.
George smiled sadly once more. "You remember what the supervisor told me?"
"That you would know what to do when the time came?"
"Yeah. The thing is, I didn't," he sighed.
"They were just kids, Gwen. Not much older than you or Peter and I don't think they meant to really harm anybody. I hesitated. My four colleagues didn't."
Gwen held her breath as her father ran his uninjured hand through his hair.
"Four of them died instantly, their heads blown clean off, but the last guy - the man I was supposed to shoot, panicked and randomly let loose a barrage of bullets in every direction, killing ten civilians before my colleagues put him down."
She covered her mouth in horror. Imagining such a scenario made her want to hurl. Even the massacre at the concert, although it did make her sink into depression for a while, didn't shake her up as much as she'd tried her very best to stop it and she wasn't ever in control. But if her father hadn't hesitated, no innocent lives would've been lost. Having that on your shoulders for the rest of your life was probably soul-crushing.
"Yeah, I think of it almost every day," George nodded, seeing Gwen's expression. "You should've seen Captain Castle's rage. I'm sure he'd have shot me if the others didn't restrain him, and if it were not for that blind lawyer who showed up, I wouldn't be here right now."
"So...what's the point?" Gwen said quietly. "That killing is sometimes the right answer?"
"The point is that the question itself is meaningless the moment you have to make a decision," George shook his head. "There is no right answer, Gwen, as right and wrong aren't absolutes. What is absolute, on the other hand, are consequences."
Gwen exhaled. Consequences? What would the consequences be if Peter didn't kill the two super terrorists? What would the consequences be of sparing the superhuman they'd fought today?
"But how'd you know the consequences?"
"You don't. Perhaps if the kid I didn't shoot was paralyzed by fear from his friends being shot, the civilians might not have died, but that didn't happen, did it?" George explained. "That's why there is no absolutely right answer. Just consequences. Thus, for me, the right answer is whatever answer whose possible consequences I can bear."
He looked directly into Gwen's eyes.
"Which is why my answers can lead to me killing people. People who may hurt people once more if spared. Those preventable deaths are consequences that I cannot bear."
"Consequences..." Gwen muttered, light slowly returning into her previously dull and confused pretty blue eyes. While it wasn't the same idealistic one that most were familiar with, it was light all the same. A purpose. It was a foothold that she could hold onto.
A large part of her still wished to refute what her father had said, just like she'd done with Peter. But her father had gently and concisely explained it to her - even going as far as to open up what was probably a particularly traumatizing event in his life.
Who was she to refute such a thing when she'd never been punished for following her moral code? Hell, she hadn't even reached the 6-month anniversary of her vigilantism and should've expected to eventually experience things that smacked her face with reality.
'Is this what people call naivety?' she thought sadly. Perhaps the idea of being a vigilante wasn't all that enticing anymore. Was she even ready for such a thing? She didn't think so. Ironically, Peter, whom she'd lashed out at, seemed more cut out for the job with his decisiveness to solve every problem permanently.
George's mood improved as Gwen's mood did, but he still sensed that she needed another small push in the right direction. She didn't seem to be confused anymore but instead seemed...sad.
He was a police Captain - he'd done this before. Pep talks were his bread and butter.
"You see that uniform?" he said, breaking the silence.
"Hm?" Gwen looked up, her eyes turning to the black shirt near the wardrobe.
"And the badge?" he pointed to the symbol on the shirt.
"What about them?" she asked.
"The moment I wear that uniform and badge, it gives me power over the ordinary citizen, dear," he smiled. "It gives me the power to detain criminals, use my firearm, and temporarily act as an avatar of the Law. But with power comes its own host of problems. The greater the power, the greater the problems."
Gwen's eyes lightly widened. Her father was really opening up to her about his police life.
George continued, his countenance becoming serious. "The problem I'm talking about is responsibility. Responsibility to bear the consequences that others cannot. The responsibility to look at the blood and dirt on your hands, and convince yourself that it was worth it. It was worth doing what you did to save others."
"So....with great power, comes great responsibility?" Gwen asked, the implications making her heart both lighter and heavier. The air itself seemed to hum in approval, as though the universe itself was acknowledging the sentence.
"Couldn't have said it better myself," George grinned.
Gwen's eyebrows twitched. If her father believed a policeman's power required so much responsibility, what about her responsibility? How much responsibility would weigh on her shoulders in return for being able to throw cars around like they were tissue paper? How many consequences would she have to bear?
'How much blood would my hands be stained with?' she thought, her chest tightening.
"Gwen...?" George asked tentatively, but his eyes widened the next moment as Gwen jumped into his arms, carefully avoiding his injury.
His large, uninjured arm engulfed his daughter as he pulled them into a tight hug. He was surprised at first, but he returned the favour with a smile; he'd done his job as a father.
Gwen closed her eyes as she practically disappeared into her father's embrace. Was she ready for so much responsibility? She may think she was, but the truth was that...
"I'm scared," she whispered, the knot in her chest loosening and her mind finally at peace.
What was left was just a father and a daughter sharing a moment.
***
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If you want an answer to the shaky schedule this week, check the announcement chapter in the auxiliary volume. I don't think everyone saw it.
