A portrait of your father:
The farthest you ever saw your dad into mania was probably when he threw piss on Duke and started running.
Dr. Kondraki, with a small lead, attempts to enter non-sentient object containment by making his way past two armed guards and flashing his ID.
And when he passes you, in all your tactical gear and headset and radio, he doesn’t realize that it’s you at first, and there’s a moment when he whips out his ID that he does recognize you and up until that point in time you think that he’s just doing his job but his grin falters when he sees you, and that’s the point when, instead of letting your father barrel down the R-14 hallway, you run after him. He runs faster from you then he does from Duke, and you manage to get him away from the stairwell and chase him down an adjacent hallway instead, and when his squad commander squeaks over his radio “43, come in for status, 43, over” he pushes the little button to talk and says “I’ve got him, commander, over”, and in a second he does, or thinks he does until his father whips around and lands a poorly-thought-out punch to his visor that rattles it enough to startle him, but it looks like it startles him, too, and you take the opportunity to grab him by the wrist and tranquilize him and Duke is dead in five minutes two hallways over.
There are no casualties. The chase, including the short scuffle they have, takes maybe a minute. The fact that your dad fought back was enough by regulation to back up your choice to bring him down, but your commander can tell that there’s more to it than that when you fill out the paperwork. He doesn’t ask what it is, and it’s best that he doesn’t, because when your dad wakes up and starts ranting on in the twisting way he does in a manic episode the only thing you can think of is you are so fucking lucky that I caught you early. You are so fucking lucky that we can pass this off as a failed decommissioning and not the failed attempt at something more, because they would put you in the psych ward in three minutes if they knew you did it because you were riding a bipolar high into oblivion, you hear me? If they knew you did it because you were impulsive and your thoughts were racing, and you just felt like you could do anything, anything at all, like you were invincible, but you’re not and you are so. Fucking. Lucky. That I didn’t let you go any farther.
