[A/N]: There are severe storm warnings here, so I'm uploading it now since I'm not sure I'll be able to tomorrow morning.
[John POV]
Life always seemed to find a way to make you watch your biggest failures on repeat.
I didn't know if Conquest had come back and managed to cave my skull in, or if my body finally gave up after Limit Break tore me apart from the inside out.
One second, I could feel the cold, shattered concrete of Chicago against my face, my internal organs spilling out of the gaping hole where half my waist used to be.
I vaguely remembered Ship, that poor little puddle of green sludge, nudging my cold cheek. and the next… there was nothing.
No physical pain nor any sensation of touch, smell, warmth, or anything. Just an endless, suffocating dark.
'I… I think I've felt this before?'
And then, a window opened in the void.
It wasn't one of Nakime's Tatami gates. It was like a thick, unbreakable pane of glass suspended in the black, and playing on the other side of it was a movie I never, ever wanted to see again.
My own life.
I was looking at the sprawling, sterile mansion of my childhood. I saw my father, that abusive piece of shit whose only religion was the almighty dollar and the pristine reputation of the 'Fake' family name.
I watched my younger self, barely a teenager, flinching as the man raised his hand at me. I'd turned out to be a massive disappointment. I didn't have the ruthless, cutthroat drive for business that he demanded from his blood.
Not like my older siblings. My older brother was already out there launching crypto wallets and managing hedge funds, while my older sister was busy building her own high-end fashion brand. They were the golden children, doing exactly all that soulless shit our parents wanted.
So, he gave up on me and cast me aside like a defective product on an assembly line.
But with the older two already grown and out of the house, he needed a new project to mold. And he turned all of that suffocating expectation onto my baby sister when she was born.
Angela Fake, or as I liked to call her, little Angy.
I pressed my hands against the invisible glass in the void, a hard lump forming in my throat.
In a flash, the scene behind the glass shifted to better times. Angy, that sweet little angel, sitting on the plush carpet of my bedroom. I saw her bright, innocent smile as I clumsily shuffled a deck of cards, doing simple sleight-of-hand tricks just to hear her laugh.
She clapped her small hands together, her eyes wide with wonder.
"How'd you do that, Johnny?" she asked, looking up at me like I was the most amazing, person in the entire world.
The scene shifted again. I saw myself showing her a brand new, twenty-sided die. I held it up to the light, letting her watch the numbers catch the sun.
"Will you teach me your game?" she asked, tugging on my sleeve. "The one with the dragons?"
She was wearing those blue, oversized pajamas completely covered in yellow stars. She'd picked them out herself during one of the few times we managed to sneak out for a shopping trip, and she refused to wear anything else for a whole week.
[Image Here]
"Because really she liked those stupid pajamas," I stuttered in the dark, my emotional walls starting to crack, seeing her face again.
But the glass didn't care and kept playing.
As Angy grew, my father's obsession deepened. He wanted to mold her into the ruthless prodigy I had failed to be. He forced her to study for hours on end, hiring tutors who directly reported to him, restricting her meals when she didn't perform, and controlling every single second of her life like she was a business investment instead of a child.
For a while, before the expectations completely crushed her, we were an inseparable duo. I was the only person in that massive, empty mansion who treated her like actual family. My older brother and sister were too busy maintaining the family image and expanding their portfolios to even remember our birthdays, and the servants were indifferent, strictly by my father's orders.
And when she faltered, or when she just wanted to be a normal kid... he resorted to violence.
I watched the memory form on the other side of the glass. The one that haunted me every single time I closed my eyes, even across different universes.
We were in the hallway. Angy had tried to sneak into my room to play a game when my father caught her.
He didn't even so much as yell and just reached out and grabbed her roughly by her ponytail.
Angy screamed desperately as he started dragging her violently back toward her study room. Her small hands grabbed at his wrist, trying to pry his fingers loose, but she was too small, too weak.
And as she was dragged away, she looked back at me. Her tear-filled eyes locked onto mine, silently begging her big brother to save her.
And me? I just stood there trembling.
I was so terrified that if I intervened, he would beat me, too. I just saw it without even moving a muscle, like the coward I was… I am.
I slammed my fists against the glass in the void.
"NO!" I screamed, my voice tearing at my throat. "DON'T JUST STAND THERE! MOVE! YOU FUCKING COWARD, DO SOMETHING!"
I beat my fists against the barrier until my knuckles bled phantom blood, pounding and pounding like a man trapped, screaming at the past to change.
But my younger self couldn't hear me. He just stood there, pathetic and weak, letting the only person who ever looked at him with love be dragged into hell.
That was the day her trust in me died.
The glass kept playing. It didn't care that I was breaking down. It just kept showing me everything.
As she grew up, the studying became more intense. The light in her eyes dying bit by bit as she began to drift away from me, the heavy expectations crumbling our relationship until we were practically strangers living under the same roof.
I became a ghost in my own house.
To cope, I turned to the only things that reminded me of her smile. The cards. The dice.
I started chasing that feeling, desperately trying to recreate the rush of those happy days.
I can still remember my first basement poker game in Chinatown. I watched those grown men's faces twist when I won, and something in my brain just rewired itself. It was the only place I felt like I was good at something.
It wasn't a hobby anymore; it became a sickness. An addiction that hollowed me out from the inside.
Then, things got worse. Between the business's massive debts, liquidating the family's assets and a series of bad investments, the family business had all but failed.
The 'Fake' glory of our lineage came crashing down, and we were forced out of everything save for the mansion.
The glass showed me the final memory that finally killed whatever was left of my soul.
I saw Angy at the top of the steep wooden stairs. She looked exhausted and so completely drained of life from the endless tutoring and the suffocating stress.
She took a step when her foot caught on a loose floorboard, and she fell.
The sickening thud of her body hitting the wooden steps echoed in the void.
She lay at the bottom, a pool of blood rapidly expanding from her head.
My younger self, hearing the thud, rushed forward, screaming in horror, begging for someone, anyone, to help.
My mother ran into the hallway, panicking, and grabbed the landline to dial 911.
But then, my father walked in.
He looked down at his bleeding daughter. Yet there was no panic in his eyes. There wasn't even sorrow.
He reached out, grabbed the phone cord, and violently ripped it straight out of the wall.
"What are you doing?!" my mother shrieked, dropping to her knees next to Angy. "She's dying! She needs a hospital!"
"And how are we going to pay for it?" my father snapped, his voice terrifyingly cold.
He looked down at the expanding pool of blood around his own daughter's head like he was reading a negative balance sheet.
"If she lives, she's crippled and we lose everything. But if she dies... her grandfather's trust fund defaults to us, not to mention her life insurance. A payout large enough to pull us out of all this debt and restore the family business to its original glory"
"You're killing her!" my mother sobbed, too broken and terrified of him to fight back.
"I'm saving this family's legacy," he said, literally stepping over his dying daughter's body. "Let her bleed."
He was going to let her bleed to death on a dirty floor for a paycheck.
"Angy?" My younger self's voice came out wrong, too high and thin. "Angy, wake up."
She didn't wake up.
"Angy, come on, this isn't funny. Wake up. Please wake up."
I watched my younger self freeze in shock, completely broken by the inhuman evil of the man who raised us.
That was the moment.
That was the moment I stopped caring about the world. That was the moment I swore, down to my very marrow, that I would never, ever be like him.
It's why I threw myself in front of Machine Head's goons for Titan's wife and kid.
It's why I couldn't just walk away from Fiona.
It's why I let Conquest rip me to pieces to protect a planet that wasn't even mine.
All because I couldn't save Angy.
The memory shattered like a broken mirror, the shards dissolving into the suffocating dark.
I fell onto my hands and knees in the void, gasping for air that didn't exist, the tears streaming down my face unchecked.
The dam finally broke as all that guilt and the self-loathing I'd carried across two entire lifetimes were crushing me into the dirt.
"Johnny?"
The voice was small.
I froze as a pit formed in my stomach, and I slowly forced my head up.
I slowly forced my heavy head up. Standing a few feet away from me in the endless dark, bathed in a soft, ethereal light, was a little girl.
She was wearing oversized blue pajamas covered in yellow stars.
"Angy..." I choked out, my voice barely a whisper.
She tilted her head, her bright, innocent eyes looking at me with confusion. "What are you doing here, Johnny? And... why are you so old?"
I couldn't do it.
I couldn't look her in the eye.
I immediately dropped my gaze to the floor, my shoulders shaking violently.
I was pathetic. I was a Gambling addict who had let her down when she needed me most. Who'd spent years ruining my own life chasing the ghost of her memory through dice and playing cards.
Who died alone in a warehouse playing Russian Roulette because he couldn't live with what he'd become.
"I'm sorry," I sobbed, my voice cracking, refusing to look up. "I'm so sorry, Angy. It's my fault. I was scared. I was so fucking weak... I should have helped you. I should have..."
I heard the soft patter of small feet running.
Before I could even brace myself, she leapt into the air. Small, warm arms wrapped securely around my neck as she buried her face into the crook of my shoulder.
"No need to be sad, Johnny," she whispered, her voice so incredibly gentle, so completely devoid of the anger and resentment I deserved.
"But I—" I tried to protest, to tell her what a piece of shit I was.
"It must have been so hard for you," she interrupted softly, hugging me tighter.
Those words.
Those simple, innocent words tore through every single defense, every wall of cynicism, and every layer of sarcastic apathy I had built up over two lifetimes.
For a split second, my body went completely rigid. I tried to pull away, to reject her forgiveness because I knew, down to my rotten core, that I didn't deserve it. But the sheer, physical warmth radiating from her small frame was too much.
All of it shattered, and I finally broke down.
I wrapped my arms around her small frame, pulling her tightly against my chest, and I wailed. I cried with the raw agony of a little boy who had just lost his sister all over again.
I vented years of repressed trauma, of gambling addictions. I poured it all into the dark.
And as I cried, I felt the heavy, suffocating weight of my past finally, truly begin to lift.
I just held onto her like she'd disappear if I let go, letting the tears fall, finally finding the peace I thought I'd lost forever.
And for the first time since that day in the hallway... I finally felt the heavy, suffocating weight of my past truly begin to lift.
[A/N]:To celebrate finishing ARC-1, I'm also putting a 50% DISCOUNT ACROSS ALL TIERS until June 1st.
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