Seek {Superhero AU} - Ending 2

1: His Reign And His Fall

NPOV

Track: Wires, The Neighborhood

After that, I wasn't the same. When you're small, and the world is so great, and then something bad happens—that kind of thing shatters the way you see the world. Maybe the whole world is like this. Maybe there is no such thing as good guys. Maybe I can never be a superhero, and maybe all that's left in the world is a looming, deadly fate on the horizon.

And then every little thing after that becomes evil, too.

For weeks after the crime, police showed up at my dining room table every time I blinked. My mother always told me to go to my room, then made the officers lemonade and invited them to sit while they talked. I could hear the questions they asked. Does our family have any enemies? Is there anyone out there who might have wanted to hurt my mother? My sisters? Me?

The questions go in circles and circles and circles. Eventually, despite my mother's attempts to protect me from it all, the officers always asked for me, and I had to go sit down at the mahogany table and hold onto a cup of lemonade like a lifeline while they made me relive it.

"What did the men look like?" they asked me about a thousand times.

"They were both large. I couldn't see much of their faces for most of the time that I was hidden, but I remember one of them had a very small nose and the other had a large, crooked nose. There was a scar on the first man's neck, and the other guy's arms were covered in tattoos, but I couldn't really make out any specific design, I was kind of not paying attention to what his tattoos were at the time."

"Right," the woman says. "And do you know what kind of clothes they were wearing?"

And we would go through the whole thing over and over. How many shots did I hear? Were there any logos on their clothing, did they mention any names while they were talking, did they say anything else about their boss?

They questioned me until I ran out of words, and then my mother would send me back to my room while they returned to her, interrogating her about any possible reason that someone might not like us. My mother says no, we are a normal family. She's a single mother caring for her children, and now she's mourning, and she appreciates everything they're doing.

They would thank her, leave, and then come back a few days later to do it all again. Sometimes the questions were different, sometimes they were the same. For the first few weeks, we answered the questions as much as we could, laying out every detail from my memory and providing records of communication with every person who might have some issue with my mother—but none of it amounted to anything. My mother was a well-liked woman; the biggest qualms anyone had with her were never anything more than small grudges over accidentally stolen parking spots at work and taking the last sugar cookie at her friends' holiday party last year.

The police officers stopped showing up so often. When I was ten or eleven, they thought they found a lead, and a police officer standing on my porch rekindled my hopes of finding my sister. Then they sat me down and asked me what the men looked like again, and I felt that hope die again.

The lead took them nowhere.

When I was fourteen, it happened again, but this time I had learned my lesson.

"Can you review what the men were wearing, Nico?" asked a policeman with a squarish face and tiny mustache. "Did it seem expensive?"

"I'm pretty sure they were wearing matching shirts that said 'Fuck you, Officer Ryan,'" I offered tiredly. "Do you have any helpful questions to ask?"

"Niccolò!" my mother scolds as she sets a glass of lemonade in front of the officer.

I roll my eyes. "I've already answered all of these questions. Do you have any new questions for me, or are we done here?"