Dom

Chapter Seven | Captain and Doctor.

A child is left as an orphan because of her father's mistake.

In everyone's eyes, his mistake was that he didn't get his car fixed sooner. 

The brakes never stopped when they should've. And thanks to that, a husband lost a wife and son. A daughter lost her mother, father, and grandmother.

There was an even bigger mistake that was made when it happened while the child was 10.

No one supervised her when she arrived at the crime scene.

No one stopped her from wandering.

She walked away from her grandfather after he was bombarded by the police. The child saw their bodies when she shouldn't have. The child saw her parents with broken bones, cut-open flesh, and eyes wide open due to the metal poles in their bodies.

Car fragments were all in their bodies. Glass pierced their face and feet.

She wasn't supposed to see that.

A tender age of 10 shouldn't witness that.

It fucked her up.

It broke her.

It made her lose herself.

And that memory remained with her for as long as she could think of.

It imprinted the misery of life. 

It taught her that nothing can ever be permanent. Not everything can be in one's control. Some things just are snatched away from us. But being snatched in such a merciless way was not what she expected or wanted.

When that small girl watched what happened to her family, having the media all around her as it unfolded, all she could think of was her grandfather while he begged the police for answers and tried to make sense of everything.

The police were crying more than the daughter. They lost their Captain. They lost their leader.

Yet the grandfather tried to comfort them when he should've been crying.

Ava watched him.

Standing so strong yet so broken in front of the police with helpless eyes.

She saw Albert carry that control that everyone needed in their lives.

Seeing him, she wanted to bring the control her father couldn't have.

She wanted to affiliate herself with bringing joy in a place of suffering.

She vowed that she wouldn't ever see him like how her parents died.

And she never wanted to drive a car.

Hence, the oath was made. She would do everything to make her grandfather happy no matter what it took. He lost his family, and he never deserved such a nightmare. So she would provide him with everything.

Even if it meant she would lose herself even more.

She won medals in school to get an amalgam of scholarships. She finished 5 courses outside high school to get into college earlier than others. She helped her grandfather write his thesis on marketing and psychology. She worked in 3 different part-time jobs every summer. 

She abstained herself from drugs, alcohol, men, and everything that could be a distraction until she got into UCLA.

She excelled in the arts of logical deduction and business planning. She completed 10 successful internships, just finishing the last 2 of them. 

She never spent a dime on herself. She taught herself how to cook, how to sew, how to tie her hair. 

She taught herself the periodic table. She taught herself how trigonometry works. She taught herself how to do taxes. How to do all kinds of skills needed in a student.