Lovely Lady Nagant (IzukuxLadyNagant)

41: Finer Things in Life

"..."

"Mm, you know," Hawks spoke up from the other side of the booth through bites of an American style cheeseburger. "If you're not gonna take a bite out of that food Kaminari I'll take it with me to go. Saves me trouble of having to make something for myself tonight when I get home."

Kaminari diverted his empty gaze from the plate of untouched food in front of him to the hero across. "How are you able to eat right now?"

"It's not that hard, you just lift the food up to your mouth and let your teeth do all the work."

"No that's, that's not what I meant. I just got done sending ten fold the amount of lethal volts through a guy in an alley, left him there, and now I'm sitting here in a restaurant with a plate in front of me with you trying to act like everything is normal."

"Because it is normal, for me at least. You'll get used to it kid don't worry, eventually you become so numb to the idea of death you're not even afraid of it. If anything it's a favor once everything is over and done with."

"Why do I feel so...dead? Like...like I just killed myself instead of somebody else?"

"Well to be honest, you pretty much did." Hawks replied before taking a quick sip from a glass of cola on the side. "Taking the life of another isn't free for people there's always a price to be paid. Whether it be sanity, or kindness, or touch with the world and what's happening around them, somebody always pays something when they take that first life away. Stuff like that is never easy to digest Kaminari it's always slow, it's gonna take time for you to understand and to wake up one morning saying 'Huh. I actually killed somebody.' It'll come sooner than you think."

"And if it doesn't?" The student asked. "What then?"

"You'll go crazy and you'll probably end up doing something stupid to get yourself tangled up in a position you wouldn't want to be tangled in. Which is why it's best if you just don't dwell on those sort of things whatever happened in the alley back there is done now it's over. Why bother thinking about something that's not going to bother you anymore you did exactly what you wanted to do right? You got the guy that's the reason for your troubles."

"I know, I know I have.....I just don't know how I can call myself a hero after doing something like that. I feel, dirty. Like....like there's something thick on my hands it's like there's blood but everytime I look down to my palms the only thing I see is my skin. I feel....I feel like everybody's watching me and they know what I've done.....How do you manage to do this for so long?"

"By understanding that in the end I've been doing the right thing and the right thing only." Hawks answered. "That's all we do Kaminari, we just do the right thing. Some people can disagree with us which is understandable, they're not gonna fall in line and blindly follow with something they don't comprehend but we're not doing this for the opinion of the public. We do this because it's the right thing to do.

Corruption is the very seed of all evil, it's a festering parasite that lingers in all of us. Every single one of us has corruption within whether it's dormant and waiting or always pouncing at the opportunity to make profit off of a chance it's in all of us since the day we were born. In today's society, corrupt heroes and politicians are a detriment to our safety they pull strings just so their pockets can stay fat and their bank accounts fatter. From setting up criminals for the heroes to take them down and place themselves in the spotlight to helping illegal product make it's way through the border for a cut of the profit, they're willing to do anything when it comes to making a check. The amount of times I've seen heroes extort citizens is more times than I'm comfortable in counting, and I'm not even that good at counting to begin with.