Tales of the Parodyverse

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Messenger
Sun Dec 04, 2005 at 08:57:33 pm EST
Subject
Retirement
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Messenger stands on the edge of a roof with a gun pressed against his chin. The touch of the steel barrel reminds him of his life; cold, empty, void of any joy or hope. At one point he felt that everything would work out, that he was here for a reason and that at the end of the day he could save himself as well as the world. But there’s been too much pain, too much loss, too much regret. He hurts too much to go on. Fuck the world, he figures. Someone else can save it. For every idiot in spandex he puts behind bars, two more takes his place. For every life he saves, he takes one to keep the balance. What’s the point in stopping a drug dealer or a spree-killer, when perfectly legitimate leaders send far more men and women to die with their misbegotten executive decisions? Are we all just disillusioned fools beating up on other disillusioned fools while the real monsters and ills in the world go unchecked? ‘I want to be a savior,’ he thinks, ‘but the walls are crumbling around me and I can’t even save myself.’ He hears a woman’s scream from the streets below. His initial instinct is to put down the gun and intervene.

He ignores it.

People are screaming all over the world, and they go ignored, unheeded. No one cares. He saves one person uptown tonight, and another person dies downtown because he wasn’t there. He used to naively believe that his mission had an end to it. That he could kill all the monsters and save all the lost souls… but there is no end. It never ends. Evil is an idea. You can’t destroy an idea. We pollute this world with our metals, our chemicals, our oil, our blood and it starts to rot, gradually consuming everyone who lives on it. But you try to make the best of it anyway, keeping all the demons at arm’s length and attempting to embrace the one good thing in your life. And then when you finally have a brief period of happiness, it’s stripped away from you. The way to destroy someone is to give them something... only to take it away. Everyone he’s failed to save in this life screams for him late at night. It’s no wonder he can’t sleep. When he does dream, he’s drowning. When he wakes he can’t breathe. He feels the sheets next to him and they’re cold and empty, a faint crease left in his dead lover’s wake.

He can’t confide in anyone, this awful dread inside of him; this ache that gnaws at his very soul. No one could ever understand what he’s seen with those weary eyes. The once-vibrant color in them has faded to the point that they appear empty and void of life. Everyone once had such high hopes for him… the Lair Legion let him join their ranks, with the promise that here was a great new champion of hope and justice. Only problem was that he couldn’t fit in, couldn’t adopt their squeaky-clean sense of morality and optimistic view of humanity. They had an arbitrary way of dealing with their enemies, hoping that by putting a rapist or a killer behind bars they would be done with them for good. The rapists and killers would be out by the next day due to our flawed system… free to rape and kill once again. He tried to stem this problem by killing the fiends who used the revolving doors of our justice system, but the Lair Legion thought this was extreme, so they expelled him and authorized a warrant for his arrest. He was called a rogue, a wild card, a murderer. Not true. He’s the only rational person left on this planet. He sees the decay of society, un-obscured by faulty notions of justice, righteousness and redemption. He sees the greed of the landlord who evicts a family on Christmas. He sees the drunken bum raping the woman in the alley. He sees the desperation of the all-American kid whose life is defined and destroyed by addiction. He sees that same kid plow down a family of four in his SUV because he couldn’t stop drinking. He sees planes full of men, women and children plowing into skyscrapers. He sees new terrorists and monsters being created every day, thanks to a war initiated by a President who exploited the anger, nationalism and fear of his countrymen. There’s no way to stop evil, when it’s embedded in every branch of our government. There’s no way to stop it when foreign countries pass out textbooks to children in their classrooms, telling them how to kill the children in the neighboring country. The price of a soldier’s life equals the price of one barrel of oil. Men condemn one another, trying to prove they’re better, that they lack the weaknesses or shortsightedness of their peers. In reality, everyone is weak. Everyone lacks moral courage. Everyone has insecurities, has skeletons in the closet that they fear will break out at the worst possible time. They try and destroy one another, before they are destroyed. Competition leads to corruption, and a man born good will end up bad, thanks to external forces. The ones who do stay good are misunderstood, smeared, beaten, kicked while they’re down and die young. They couldn’t adapt to this cruel world so they become extinct... 'Story of my life' he thinks. 'And here's the end...'

*BLAM*


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