Challenging a Cold Heart

Chapter 26: Power rift

Luc's POV

I waited for Vince to gain consciousness. He kept drifting in and out of restless sleep. When he woke up, he just cried and seemed disoriented. He didn't really answer any questions and preferred to just shake his head as if to say he didn't want to speak. But from the way he was gripping my arm, I could tell he needed me to stay with him, I understood what he was going through because it was very familiar to me.

In my experience, when someone goes through a high level of torture, some humanity in them gets shredded permanently, replacing the void with bitterness or despair. Yet, humans have always been known as very resilient creatures who could forget pain and allow positive energies to replace the pain. Look at women who give birth for instance. They undergo a lot of pain to give birth to a baby and yet they do it over and over again quite willingly. Or look at masochists for instance. They've perfected the art of accepting pain and not letting any bitter feelings cloud their mind for it. It perplexed me to be honest. If I had to give birth and suffer pain, I think I would cause an equivalent or more amount of physical pain to the man who made me pregnant. I guess that made me empathize a bit with my mother who asked my father to stab his eye if he wanted her to carry me to term.

It's probably a very good thing that I wasn't a woman, I thought as I quickly took my mind away from where it was leading. I didn't want to get a reality check of how similar I was to my mother, you could say. She always said we were similar but I disagreed quite vehemently. Yet, on certain occasions I cannot delude myself of that truth. I am demon spawn as my father's family call me.

Anyway, I was waiting to see whether Vincent would become a bitter grouch like me or whether he would cry and look hopeless over it forever. I wonder what he would say if I told him I would give him the heads of everyone who dared to lay a finger on him. Sometimes I think I've lost the respect for human life because of how easily I could promise to kill and implement it. I've desensitized myself from worrying over taking away a life that could be innocent.

If you really want to judge, almost everyone is innocent to some extent. Even a demon like me is needed by the children whom I've picked up over time. Just like that, the demons who tortured Vincent would also probably go back to a warm home with a loving wife and children. They'd touch their wife and children with the same hands that cruelly tortured a human a few hours ago. In the end, we were the same and the one who has to die in the game of survival is based on might. If I die, I'll be hailed as the great villain I was and my children would lose their respect for me. If they died, they'd be hailed a great hero and their children would be proud of their parent, forever ignorant of the monster that their parent was. So, you see, thinking about these things just gives a throbbing headache.

But then why was I even thinking of it? I've stopped thinking about it a long time ago. Ever since I escaped jail when I was fifteen, I've perceived that I was on a battlefield all the time. I don't hesitate to kill, manipulate or step on people who get in my way. For that thinking to develop I had to stop feelings of regret and empathizing with others that my father taught me. Yet when Vincent is around, I can't help but start thinking over the things I didn't want to think about. This is probably what people call going soft or something.

In a way, the fact that I was thinking these thoughts worried me. My situation reminds me of those famous words of Macbeth "I am in blood stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er". There was no going back, stopping or starting over for me. There was only one choice and that was to move forward. Vincent's silly little declaration of winning over my heart is laughable because I wonder if he had even factored in who I was and the path of destruction I was on. It's so ridiculously naïve that sometimes my fingers twitch to split open his head and debug the malfunctioning OS in his brain or even shake his head properly until reality sinks into it. Well, I couldn't really do it though.