A week later, Ronin found himself looking at Joseph's body, perfectly still and seemingly dead, but very very much alive.
Scalpel walked beside him, her tiny, lithe form barely reaching his shoulders, "It's really a shame that the eternal life serum works the way that it does. I would love to asks him what he's thinking."
Ronin nodded and watched Joseph's brain readout spike, having been relatively lulled.
"Do you think I made the right choice with this, Scalpel?"
She shrugged and said, "In a situation like that, what kind of choice is the right choice? If you'd killed him, would it have been justified by his actions?"
Ronin shook his head and said, "I've killed before, and I almost never have any questions about it afterward."
Climbing up onto Joseph's waist, she said, "We've all made...questionable choices...this man...I've met his type before, hell, once upon a time when I was younger, I WAS his type. They don't stop, Ronin. They just keep going and going and going until you're surrounded by the corpses of people you've cared about."
Looking at her curiously he asked, "Do you know the feeling?"
She nodded, her face calm as she said, "When I was young, I loved a girl very much, even though she kept rejecting me. Even then I was an amazing doctor, barely twenty and already going places, or so my family said. I was...obsessed...I needed her more than anything in the world, more than fame, more than wealth...at the time, I felt I needed her more than even food or air."
Touching the helmet, Ronin asked, "What did you do?"
Scalpel sighed and lay her body on the table so she was face to face with Joseph and said, "I killed him...horribly. I dissected him while he was still alive, fully aware of the pain. His screaming...I still remember the sound of it, as though someone had recorded it. In my quiet moments, when I'm not working or researching something...I hear it, hear him begging to stop, screaming that he'd leave and never come back."
Nodding, Ronin said, "You regret it?"
A tear fell from her eye as she said, "Oddly enough...no. I did it then for what I felt were justified reasons, even though I'd never do it again. I think the thing that's most haunting is the memory of what I said as he screamed. I never once acknowledged him, I just recited from memory the parts of his body as I cut them away from him."
"What happened next?" Ronin asked, determined to hear the story through.
Scalpel cleared her eyes and said, "Nobody ever found out of course, but they always wondered. In the back of my mind, I think they knew exactly who'd caused his disappearance, and that concern would prove correct as they came to my house one night.
I'd expected them, of course, though them showing up like an angry mob out of one of those old movies wasn't something I'd thought I'd ever get to see.
I still remember them crying and begging for me to give him back to them, something I couldn't do for obvious reasons.
They stormed my home, trying to burn it down, destroy every trace of me they could find.
As I said, I'd expected them to come, planned for this very scenario, though on a much smaller scale.
As they got further into my home, they triggered my traps, filling the building with poisonous gas.
They, unlike my rival, died rapidly, almost faster than they could realize they were dying. As the sun slowly rose over the horizon, filling my home with crimson light, I began wandering the pile of corpses, only to find the woman I'd thought I'd loved impaled on a sword she'd fallen on in her death throes.
I found that I felt...nothing.
I'd always expected that seeing your loved one die by your hands would be heartbreaking, that it would destroy you, but there was none of that inside me.
Later that day, I made the call to this school and came here the next day.
Within a month, I was recruited by the Bureau."
Ronin nodded and said, "So you're researching bringing back the dead?"
Scalpel sat up again and nodded, saying, "I want to bring my rival back, to apologize. I can't fix what I did, but I can make amends in small ways. My research has saved thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives, but I feel as though my hands are still stained with blood.
Joseph here was on the same exact road I was on...except what would he have done to make amends if he was so stupid he went against you without so much as a plan?"
Ronin looked at her and asked, "What are you saying?"
She climbed off his body and said, "Regardless of why you did it, be it revenge or something else I can't fathom, you incapacitated him and stopped what would have inevitably been a pointless waste of life. My point is, I believe you did the right thing overall, keeping a dangerous person from making more dangerous choices, even if the method was on the extreme side, plus I got to test my eternal life serum, and got some extra data out of it, so it works out pretty well in the end."
Ronin, having only killed during missions asked, "Do you think there was something you could have done differently back then?
Scalpel shook her head and started walking away as she said, "Knowing what I know now? No. For every life I took that night, I have saved thousands more. My hands being stained with blood never stopped me from doing what I needed to do, it just gave me motivation to do better, to be more. Motivation I never had prior to that, and it taught me something important."
Ronin watched her open the door to the hallway and asked, "What did you learn?"
Stopping for a moment, she looked back and said, "I make poor choices when I think I'm in love."
As she left, Ronin turned back to Joseph and watched his vitals and brain readings again, noting that he seemed to be in a lull. Moving to Silas's helmet, he lowered the device's settings to their lowest strength and said, "You deserve to be punished...I wholeheartedly believe that, but I won't damn you to an eternity with your worst nightmares and nothing else."
Joseph's vitals gradually stabilized and his brain readings dropped down to the lowest they'd been, indicating his mind was at rest.