Gold Fever (m×m) ✔

VI: Elian Phoenix needs to die

《 ASPEN GRISWOLD 》

Father was insistent about one thing: if you want something to happen, you have to make it happen. You've got to find your purpose and then fight for it. No matter how it makes you feel. No matter what it costs you, even if it costs you everything. In other words, my father's main principle of life was to be Thanos, now that I think of it.

He wasn't a very good man, my father. In fact, he was an angry, petty little man with way too much power. His word was our will, and God forbids if anyone had the nerve to talk back to him. He had it all panned out for me: Ask that Brownell girl out.. Soccer is good for your health and all, but it's not a career.. If you start investing today, you will be rich by the time you're thirty.. Do this, do that.. All just a ton of yada yada, if you ask me. But he was right about one thing.

Elian Phoenix needs to die.

I've had plenty of time to come to this comprehension, as I've wandered in the echoing hallways of the mansion. I found the days there alone peaceful at the beginning, not having to listen to father's endless rampages about his useless underlings or how the stock market was crashing, though it was merely a natural part of the market cycle. Only as the weeks went by, and the backup generator started to run out of charge and I had consumed one third of the food stacked in our home, I started to worry. 

I was still waiting for someone else to save the day, thinking that things would get done without my interference. That I could just close my eyes and open them again when everything was back to normal. Dad would be sitting by the kitchen table, all grumpy and opinionated, but still my dad, reading The News & Observer and mom would be scrubbing some non-existent spot in some corner.

Mother would have fainted if she had seen what the mansion had turned into; how the once pristine rooms had turned dusty and grimy over time. The crumbles I had left on the floors, the empty wrappers cluttering her handpicked marble counters. Not to mention the lawn, the object of mother's pride, which had turned over-grown and unkempt, but which I had no intention to mow.

Days, weeks passed by and nothing happened. I was still alone in the mansion, people were still solid gold and everything was the same. No father reading the newspaper or mother obsessively cleaning the kitchen, just the empty, echoing mansion and radio silence. Books can only entertain you to a point, and afterwards it's just you and your thoughts, which keep spiraling down into dark, dark places.

I kept telling myself this: 

Elian Phoenix needs to die. 
And someone else will do it for me.

Someone more equipped to get their hands dirty, someone who wouldn't lose their sleep for the rest of their life after getting those hands stained with blood. Someone who hadn't just turned 21, foremost, someone who wasn't still in college. Some hero who was going to step up, because that's what heroes do. 

Then I remembered what father always said, if you want something to happen you have to make it happen. I was no hero, but maybe no one is actually born a hero. Maybe they were the most unlikely of people, the college undergraduates, the kids who still had no idea what to do with their lives, who just decided to step up and do the dirty work. Who got tired of waiting and made things happen.

The idea of me finally living up to my father's standards after he had passed away, would have been amusing if it hadn't aggravated me so much.

It still took me a week more of mustering up the courage to actually leave the comfort of the mansion, but once I did, I still had a backpack full of canned food, water and snacks. I could only carry a few outfits, hygiene products and other necessities with all the heavy bottles and cans, but I needn't have worried.