toplvl | bad rap

The war was brought to my home. It came to my village, then my city, and never left. There was no coming home - because home remains a battlefield, and until we get rid of all the war criminals hiding amongst the chaos and bombed out buildings, it always will be.

I didn't keep track during the war. [No one did, on either side.] Now that a theoretical peace has been declared, it's slowed down some. I would say... [she does a headcount mentally, pausing to try to seperate what happened prior to and after the fairly worthless declaration the war was over; some days blend together, really.] Somewhere inbetween sixty and eighty, in the last year.

I'm not commenting on what you did during the war, since you didn't start it, and had to do what you did to survive. My body count is a whole lot higher, anyway.

But why exactly did you feel the need to kill that many people last year?

You don't have to be sorry--I'm not judging you for your body count. Mine is far, far worse than yours could ever be, simply because you're unlikely to live as long as I've lived.

I just think you're deceiving yourself when you say you're no different from anyone else. Other people don't make the choices we've made.

NATO bombs a city of civilians well outside an active warzone, after peace is declared, and are viewed as heroes for 'protecting the peace'. I kill criminals taking advantage of the refugees and impoverished, and people call me evil.

I killed who I killed because they were killing others, raping them, trafficking them, committing crimes against humanity, threatening to murder people of the 'wrong' ethnic groups and trying to restart a war officially declared over. I killed them because the city is better off without them. God is in Heaven and Russia is far away; no one else is coming to save us. So I will make people fall in line by making it lethal to commit real, true evil against others. If I can't reason with them I'll speak to them in a language they understand: violence.

I make the same choices as others. Except one, I don't target civilians and children, and two, I don't ask everyone to fawn over me for it.

[And that's the part that actually gets under her skin: the way NATO and the WTO and the World Bank want to be viewed as heroes for their actions, want clout and respect and a say in the way governments are run in countries they've only seen from a bomber plane's cockpit. Fuck them. She's actually down in the dirt and darkness, picking targets carefully, making sure there's no collateral damage, keeping the body count to something the city as a whole can survive.]

This all sounds very reasonable to me.

Why do they call you a supervillain?

Allegedly, it's because I kill people. In practice, it's because I undermine the ability of NATO, the UN and the WTO to control my country. If they have a monopoly on violence, then countries are more likely to do whatever they want when those organizations want certain laws passed, trade agreements signed or resources handed over. If the violence stops because I and others like me stopped it, then those organizations have no excuse to bomb the region to 'protect the peace'. They thus lose their power in terms of both public support and bargaining power.

They can't profit off of a country they can't strong-arm their way into. I represent a real threat to their system, but they can't actually explain to people why countries shouldn't be self-governing and why violence inflicted by an individual to stop crime is meaningfully different than what they do.

So they smear me in the press, make up lies about who I kill and why, and try to paint me as a deranged lunatic who's dangerous to everyone around me. It's easier to convince people you're heroic if you conjure up a villain to fight.

I support your efforts. I'm very familiar with that sort of deception on the part of powerful 'authorities'.

Just be careful what you do when you get the upper hand, as I sincerely hope you will. I wasn't, and I actually became a 'supervillain'.

My plan, when I get the upper hand, is to get the former war criminals and current career criminals out of the police force so we can be a properly self-governing country. I should not be out here having to do any of this. One day, I won't be. The end plan is to retire, not to be a supervillain ruling over the land.

But if you have advice on avoiding the way power intoxicates people, I am absolutely willing to listen.

The first mistake I made was letting people call me things like 'Lord' and 'Master'. I hated authority when I started on this path; I wanted to tear it all down, not to become one. But they seemed to like it, and I stopped fighting it, and after that, it wasn't long before I enjoyed it.

The second mistake I made was not paying the most attention to the one friend I have who always knew when I was deceiving myself and letting my ego run roughshod all over the place.

I didn't manage to alienate him, but I didn't take him seriously enough, and I should have gone to him and asked for his opinion more often, because I knew that he'd been trained not to offer it; we both grew up as slaves, but I was a miner and a gladiator, and he was a 'personal assistant' with a side order of bodyguard.

If you have even one friend who can smell your scrapwaste at a distance that can be measured in parsecs, cultivate them. If you don't have one, make one. You'll need them.

I've been referred to as Iluzija. It's less a title and more a moniker given to me by the press, and it doesn't necessarily convey any respect, but the way it's said by some people... it's too close to how they say saints' names. Especially when they put 'sir' in front of it.

[Her expression softens, gaze growing distant.] Tadija. He's my - he's the only person I still have in my life from before the wars broke out. He tells me exactly what I don't want to hear and what I inevitably need to hear. Atansa, too. He's been the closest thing I have to a brother since I lost my family. He'll call me out without the same gentleness Tadija has - he's smacked me across the face to get me to listen once or twice. God knows I need it, some days.

I wish I could say I listen to them all the time. I don't. Sometimes, I find myself certain in my own rightness, and it's alarming, then, how much I sound like all the people I'm fighting against.

[She's on a tightrope. The line between monster and savior is razor-thin in war-torn and lawless places like where she's from. It would be very easy to slip down into darker shades of grey. So it's with a deep breath and a heavy heart she admits,] I don't feel guilt, most of the time. Or remorse. It doesn't bother me to hurt people, a lot of the time, and I need reminders from Tadija or Atansa when what I'm doing is 'cruel' or 'excessive'. Otherwise I just... don't see the problem, with a lot of things.

"Listen to them more, and if you sense that they're becoming afraid of you, fix it. Ravage is the only person who has never been afraid of me, so that much at least I've done right."

Megatron leans back. "It's all too easy to start doing the kinds of things the people you hate the most do, especially when you're actively fighting them and you simply don't dare take a non-violent approach, because you know they'll see it as weakness at best.

"Honestly, guilt and remorse are time-wasters. I do feel some degree of remorse, but I remind myself firmly that wallowing in that does not help anyone I've harmed. I was sentenced to the gladiatorial pits for killing my overseer in the mines, and not one of those people I had to kill deserved it, but I wasn't going to let them kill me. A better corrective might be to ask yourself if this behaviour is what you stand for, or what you've always stood against. Also, if you find yourself attracting followers who are the kind of people you'd prefer to kill rather than save, it's time to do some course-correction."

"When I say I don't feel guilt, I mean that. It's as abstract to me as art is. If I didn't have a church to go to that explained the concepts to me I wouldn't have ever realized this was something the rest of the world felt. I had to be taught hurting others is upsetting, killing is wrong and that people usually feel whatever it is that keeps them from doing the things I do. If Tadija weren't around to tell me when I'm behaving immorally or being cruel, I don't know that there's any depth I wouldn't sink to. I need him, church, and sometimes Atansa to tell me when people would normally be feeling grief or anguish or pain or..." She makes a vague gesture with her hands as if to say 'and other stuff' but also convey how lost she is, that she can't even name more examples.

Time-wasting as these things may be, Iskra can still understand that these things are vital to how normal people interact with each other. If she ever wants to understand people enough to accurately see what her city needs and what they want in terms of justice done, she needs to know how they think. She can't. Long before the fighting broke out, long before she knew the word for 'gun', she lacked the ability to feel these things. It's as if something is missing from her, the way some people might be born without a limb or an eye.

"I scared Tadija once. Someone who... hurt him, in ways he would not appreciate me detailing to a stranger, showed up in Novi Sad. He had nightmares. He stopped eating, started sleeping under the bed out of sheer terror, and I guess he thought that I wouldn't go after this man since he was important and wealthy and legally cleared of all wrongdoing. I did. But I made him suffer, first. I wanted him to be as afraid in his last moments as Tadija has been his entire life knowing that kind of evil is out there.

Objectively I understand this was immoral by Christian and Muslim religious standards. Subjectively, I find myself unable to understand what I did wrong. Tadija tried to explain, but..."

His words had failed him. How was he meant to explain torture was wrong? How was anyone supposed to articulate that to someone when to them it seemed a basic fact?

"Do you feel anything at all? One of my officers didn't have any emotions. He didn't feel guilt, but he didn't feel anything else. It seems like you can feel love, though." Megatron thinks for a moment. "For what it's worth, I'd have done the same thing."

"I love Tadija. I loved my parents and I used to cry over them until I made myself sick. As much as it's rare for me, I can absolutely feel anger - I've been assured it's unsettling - and God knows my envy of others is intense at times. It's hard to identify what it is that I'm lacking." She tries to pick the right words, which here means the words she's heard brought up in reference to her by others. "Atansa once explained to me that I lack a conscience. He doesn't think it's necessarily the same thing as being evil, but it does mean I need to be more careful than most not to slip down that path."

Her hands tense and relax, flexing, fists clenching and unclenching in thought. "I was angry when the man that hurt Tadija showed up. Angry that the systems of justice in place had been swayed by money, angry that he hurt someone as kind and loving as Tad is, that anyone would hurt others not to achieve a goal but for demented pleasure. It didn't make sense to me. I hated him and everything he represented and most of all I hate still that even after his death, the damage he did lingers. If anything I wish I'd made that man suffer more."

"It doesn't sound like you have ever been in a situation where you could afford to have a conscience," Megatron observes. "I completely endorse what you did to that man, and what you would have done.

"I don't know if I have a conscience or not. I do feel something like remorse when I look at all of the terrible things that have happened because of my war. Sometimes it does trouble me. But I was never sorry at the time, because I didn't feel there was a better choice. And it probably doesn't trouble me nearly as much as it should. It's the waste of it all that bothers me most.

"After I had to leave the person I loved most to die in a mine explosion, because I couldn't move him and I would have died myself if I'd stayed, nothing much else has ever bothered me. And I can't be sure if I felt guilt even then, because the grief drowned out everything else.

"Whatever a conscience is, and whether or not either one of us has one--I think that you will be all right as long as you listen to the people who do have one. You need them to tell you when you are at risk of going too far, but they need you, too. Because somebody has to be able to do what they can't."

"I was, when I was a kid. Back when the war hadn't started and I lived on a ranch with my parents, I wonder if I was different? It's too far back for me to remember it without bias." Memory was easily modified by time and circumstance, things warped by perspective. "I have a very real disdain for people who harm children. I might have done it had I not known he hurt Tadija. It's a line I don't think people ever have a real reason to cross."

She listens intently. The lack of judgment is refreshing, but so to is the lack of dismissal. He's reflecting on his own life to give her the best advice he can, and she appreciates how hard that is to do. Honesty is both valuable and hard.

And it hits hard, too. Something in her broke when her parents died. It was then that things ceased to mean as much as she was fairly sure they should. Was that the start of it? Had she been born minus a conscience, or had she had something prior to the dual losses that shook her to the core? She can't say. She's not sure anyone can.

"Thank you, for sharing your perspective. A lot of that makes sense, and you've given me a lot to think about. But I have one question, and I think it's worth asking since peace isn't in our sights yet, for my people: what happens if I lose them? What happens if Tadija and Atansa die, and I'm left to my own devices?"

Would that be the thing that makes her into the monster the world thinks she is? Would that extinguish whatever tiny spark of morality dwells within her?

"I don't know, and I'm not sure we can know."

Megatron closes his optics for a moment.

"I can tell you that one of the things that has given me pause is this thought, though: what would Terminus say about this? That was his name."

His voice is almost airless.

"Closest thing I ever had to what you might call a father, but because we don't reproduce like humans do, not exactly like that. Perhaps, if that happened, you could ask yourself what Tadija or Atansa would want. I think if I had asked myself that more often, things might have gone differently.

"But I also know that if Ravage ever died, I'd be gutted, and if the only way I could get the person who did it was to blow up the planet they were hiding on...I might."

bad rap

bad rap

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