Steven was a big man. He had once been a varsity hockey player, and even though his college years were long behind him, he had stubbornly clung onto the hulking build that he had once used to muscle his way around the rink before his knee injury destroyed his chances of going pro. Though he wasn't that much taller than me, I always remembered him as being a huge and hulking figure that towered over me constantly, both literally and figuratively.

Even now, with my hood pulled tight over my head and my eyes shut, I could imagine him clearly in my mind's eye. The silhouette of his side-profile staring at me, lit only by the dim glow of the television as he lounged on the loveseat sofa in our living room, his posture somehow both tense and lazy at the same time.

I had my eyes clenched closed, but clenched them even harder when I heard a sound that could be described as a groan or a sigh. I'd never been able to identify it, no matter how many times I'd heard it, but it was easy to decipher in that it was always filled with resentment.

"Great. You again. Don't you have better things to do than being a fucking pain in my ass?"

I felt my chest tense as I gritted my teeth. I didn't know what exact memory the admin was showing me, but I could tell it would be one of the rougher ones. Most of the time Steven just ignored me, and the few times that he decided to acknowledge my existence like this were never pleasant.

"Come on," I said. "Give me a break."

I was a little surprised that the admin was letting me speak, given how annoying it had been about not letting me "interfere" with my memories before this point, but before I could think of a reason why it was letting me talk, Steven's voice interrupted my thoughts.

"Give you a break? Give you a fucking break?" he asked, like he couldn't believe what he was hearing.

And to be fair to him, I couldn't believe what I was hearing either. After taking a moment to realize what was happening, I opened my eyes.

Rather than the dark living room that I imagined, I found myself standing in a void. It was colourless, but it wasn't white. It just wasn't. It was void, empty except for Steven's figure across from me, standing too, at a distance that I couldn't quite judge. I tried to scan the space we were in, surprised by how different it was to the memories that the admin had been showing me up until this point, but while I could move my head and my eyes around, Steven somehow stayed directly in my field of vision, even if I looked up, like I had a picture of him glued directly onto my eyeballs.

"Give you a fucking break," he grumbled, wiping the back of his hand lazily across his lips, like he was wiping something off of them. "That's fucking rich, coming from you."

"Dad?"

The word came out of my mouth subconsciously. More than I hated the word itself, I hated how it sounded. Desperate and scared. I didn't know whether I was scared that this was something more than just a memory, or if I was scared that it wasn't, but I hated the fear that crept into my voice in either case.

If the angry furrow that appeared on Steven's face was any indication, he hated it too. His arm swung towards me in a violent arc. I flinched and covered my head with my hands but nothing struck me.

Steven lifted his hand to his lips, but paused when he realized he wasn't actually drinking anything. He looked at his hands, as if he were surprised to find them empty, even after he had already thrown his imaginary bottle at my head.

"Fucking figures," he said. "Make this fucking dream even more unbearable, why don't you?"

He let out a heavy sigh and fell backwards to lie down on the non-existent floor, but even as he fell, I found myself still facing him directly, like the world had shifted ninety degrees from my perspective so I could continue to look him in the eyes.

Steven seemed just as unhappy about this fact as I was. He grimaced and stuck out his middle finger lethargically towards me.

"Fuck off, why don't you?" he said, waving me away with his finger. "You're finally gone. I'm finally happy again. You don't get to ruin that anymore."

I stared at him for a few seconds before I realized that I was still covering my head with my arms. Waves of embarrassment and anger ran through me as I aggressively shoved my hands down at my sides.

"You're finally happy again?" I repeated. "I don't get to ruin your happiness?"

Steven simply shrugged.

"You heard what I said. Now go away, ghost of christmas past. I'm over the bastard already. Why don't you stop haunting me and just leave me the fuck alone."

I simply stared at him in disbelief for a few long seconds as he closed his eyes. I don't know why what he said bothered me so much. I already knew he hated me, and it wasn't the first time he had told me that he wished I never existed.

But seeing him react like this when I had actually died on Earth was something else.

"Did you even care? Not even just a little bit?" I asked, hating myself for caring about the answer to that question.

"No," Steven said, lifting his hands to his lips, as if trying to summon a bottle of bud light into his hands. "Never."

Though I felt my teeth clench impossibly tight, I didn't cry. It's not like I hadn't expected the answer.

"I hated you, you know," I said. "I still do."

"Well, the feeling's mutual," he said, raising his middle finger towards me once more.

I didn't bother asking why. I knew the answer to that question too. Steven wasn't a man to mince words, or maybe he was. He was a car salesman, so I assumed he could at least pretend to be friendly, but it's not a side of him that I'd ever seen in my life. He certainly didn't hold back his feelings when he told me why he hated me.

I had taken my mother away from him, so in turn, he had taken any semblance of a father away from me.

I was a murderer in his eyes.

And in a sense, he was right, wasn't he?

Even if I didn't count the mother who I never knew, I did kill a handful of people in my second life.

I wasn't just a murderer in name anymore. I wonder if he would feel satisfied by that fact. How would he react if he knew that he had been right all along, about the fact that I would kill so easily, given the chance?

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More than just wondering about it, I knew could find out.

I took a sharp breath, inhaling through gritted teeth, grasping at the mana I had within my body and pushing it into my arms. Immediately, my hands grew hot as colourless flames erupted out of them, the unnatural design melding into the nothingness that surrounded us. I glared at Steven, who still had his eyes closed, oblivious to what was going on in front of him, despite the heat that emanated from my fingertips, and the weight of the dense mana that saturated the air around me.

I raised my hand towards him.

While it was clear that he thought he was in a dream, it was clear to me that we were somehow connected together in a space between our worlds, a space that was real. I took a moment to consider whether I should warn him about what was going to happen, to see the look in his eyes as he died by my hand.

I stared at him for a while, as if waiting to open his eyes on his own, but the shaking of my arm made me unsure of whether I could hold this much mana in my arms for much longer.

I had to do it.

He deserved it.

"Hellfire," I whispered.

"BLAST!" I screamed, not giving myself the chance to rethink what I was doing.

Flames erupted from my palm in a roar of silence, as if the flame engulfed not only the space around me, but the sound that occupied it as well. The colourless light blinded me, and the heat was intense enough that I couldn't help but flinch away from it in reflex, regardless of that fact that I knew it couldn't hurt me.

I don't know how long I kept my flame roaring. It could have been a few seconds. It could have been a few years. I had a feeling that in this space, time didn't function like it was supposed to, if it functioned at all. I could vaguely feel tears rolling down my face though I wasn't sure why.

My flames died down when I reached up to wipe my eyes, and though my vision was blurred, I could still make out Steven's untouched form, and the translucent dialogue box that floated between us.

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I sank to my knees, unsure of whether I felt disappointment or relief. I sucked in shaky breaths through my teeth as I cried silently into my hands.

"Shut the fuck up," Steven grumbled. With his eyes still closed, and his posture relaxed, it didn't seem like he'd even noticed my attempt to kill him. "You're a fucking embarrassment, you know that?"

"I hate you," I said.

"Yeah, yeah," he replied.

"You're my dad. You're supposed to love me."

"I don't see a fucking contract."

"Mom would've hated you."

He paused for a moment. I didn't know why I said that, and I didn't know if I felt satisfied by the way that his eyes opened and twisted into an angry glare.

"You didn't know her," he said.

"And whose fault is that?"

"It's yours."

"You never even told me her name."

"You didn't deserve to know."

"She would've hated the way you treated me."

"Don't you fucking talk about her like you know her, bastard."

"She was my mom."

"And you killed her for it."

I looked at him. I sniffled unconsciously, less out of emotion, and more out of an automatic reaction to the feeling of snot dripping out of my nose. I was surprised to find that I didn't actually care about what he was saying. It was a new feeling for me. As much as I liked to pretend like I could just shrug off his words back when I was alive, I could never truly ignore him, I could only grow numb to him.

But now? It felt a little different.

I sniffled again, and wiped my hands against my eyes and nose. I was surprised to find they came away drier than I might have expected.

"She would've loved me. She would've loved me unconditionally."

The words came out of my mouth without much thought put into them, but it was enough to draw an instant reaction from him.

"Shut the fuck up."

I felt something hit the top of my head. It didn't hurt, even though I felt like it should have. I blinked as I lazily looked up at the glass shards of the broken bottle of bud light that littered my hair. In between us, another translucent dialogue box showed him the same message that it had shown me a few seconds ago, though it didn't seem like he cared enough to read it. His face was red, and his arm was still outstretched, as if the act of throwing the summoned beer bottle had given him a sprain.

"Shut the fuck up," he repeated.

"She would have loved me," I repeated.

Another beer bottle hit my head. I felt my lips quirk up slightly at the sight of him using his god-like powers to summon beer bottles. I wasn't sure if I was trying to mock him, or if I was just amused by the idea, but it seemed to succeed at angering him regardless.

"Shut the fuck up," he said.

"She would have believed in me, even if you never did."

I barely knew what I was saying. I had never known a mother, and by extension, I had never felt a mother's love. But the words fell out of my mouth so naturally that I had a hard time denying them.

He got up and started to run at me, arms outstretched, as if trying to strangle me, but no matter how hard he ran, he never got closer.

"She would've protected me from anyone that tried to hurt me. That includes you too."

"You didn't know her," he said. "You killed her."

Though it looked like he was trying to scream it, red-faced and fists clenched, his voice was quiet, like he was much further away than he looked. I could barely hear him. At this point, I didn't know what point he was trying to make. Was he saying that my mother had been a bad person? That she would've treated me the same way that he did? I guess that might have been true. She did marry a guy like him after all. But at this point, that didn't matter much.

"She would have forgiven me for killing her, wouldn't she?" I asked.

He stumbled on nothing, and fell to the floor. He glared at me, but didn't get up.

He said something, but I don't know what. I don't know if I couldn't hear him, or if I simply didn't, but I suppose it didn't matter. He didn't matter to me anymore.

I turned around. Steven disappeared from my field of vision. Without him, I was left alone in this empty void.

Never had I expected the journey to reaching a moral revelation to be this tiring. It didn't feel particularly good, but possibly for the first time in my life, I felt like everything was right.

"I get it," I said. "I'm ready. Take me back."

---

"What's that supposed to mean?" I shrieked more than shouted. My voice scratched violently at the walls of my throat, but the slight pain wasn't enough to stop me from shouting. I was scared, tired, and furious at Jamie for daring to suggest that I wasn't on his side, like my actions to this point somehow hadn't been enough for him.

I glared at him, as if daring him to throw even more bullshit in my face, before I noticed his expression.

His eyes were puffy and sunken, and he stared at me with an intensity that hadn't been there a second ago. It looked like he'd been crying for hours before we started our shouting match, but I somehow hadn't noticed until now.

"What are you looking at me like that for?" I asked, suddenly unnerved by the sudden silence that we had fallen into. I could hear the angry bite in my voice disappearing quickly as I struggled to adjust to the abrupt shift in the emotional atmosphere.

Rather than answering with his words, Jamie fell forward.

I felt myself flinch in place and scramble to catch him on instinct, before I realized he wasn't actually in any danger of falling.

It took me a few seconds to realize what was happening. Jamie stood in front of me, with his chest close to mine, but not quite touching. His hands were placed gently on the backs of my shoulders, but with a timid touch, like he was afraid that I would disintegrate if he applied any pressure whatsoever.

I still didn't know quite what was going on, but I knew an awkward hug when I felt one. I walked half a step forward and wrapped my arms around his back, pushing myself gently into him. Immediately, as if he had been waiting for permission, he buried his face in my shoulder and tightened his arms around me, like he was afraid that I would change my mind and pull away.

He quietly sobbed beside my ear. I tried not to mind the way that his chin and nose were digging uncomfortably into my flesh, and the way that my arms were pinned in an uncomfortable angle against his body. I could only assume it wasn't intentional. It saddened me to think that he probably just wasn't used to this. I considered giving him some words of encouragement, but since I had no idea what had just happened, other than the fact that it was probably something I wouldn't understand, I settled for simply patting him on the back.

He let go of me surprisingly quickly, and was still sobbing quietly when he let go. I considered grabbing him again, to just let him cry as much as he needed, but the grim look of determination on his face stopped me.

"I'm going to go fix this," he said.

I stared at him, stunned by the sudden shift in emotion once more. "What?" I asked.

"I'm going to fix your world," he said, as if that explained anything, but the determined look on his face faltered, as if he had suddenly changed his mind.

He stared at me for a few seconds before turning his eyes downwards.

"Can you come with me?" he asked. "I- I'm scared."

I still had no idea what was going on or what he was even talking about, but there was really only one I could possibly do.

I grabbed his hand, hoping that he wouldn't feel the way that I was shaking too.

"Of course," I said.