Volume 8: Telophase
Issue 12: Hippocratic Oath
Jannette Adrian Churchwell
By Nova
“So you didn’t kill her,” Ramirez said, more like a statement than a question. He didn’t sound disappointed, or particularly thrilled, either—more puzzled than anything else.
I didn’t meet his gaze, but nodded. “I made sure she wasn’t going to be a problem anymore,” I said.
Me and Ramirez sat together—both of us in civilian clothes, though that didn’t mean much for Ramirez who never wore a uniform—on a bench in the park just outside Chapel High. It was a foggy morning and all I could see was a line of palm trees following the path downhill, fading into ghostly silhouettes. Chapel High itself was almost entirely concealed within the fog, its ostentatious spire a mere shadow looming in the mist. Still, despite the damp morning chill, it was a good meeting spot—though a little too cold for my tastes. I shivered slightly, thankful for my fluffy, silver jacket; a gift from Holly.
While our showdown with Red Queen had ended three days ago, I had barely been back in the Bay Area for twelve hours. Most of my time had been split between relief efforts in Redding and hunting down the handful of First Way stragglers who had managed to escape into the forest. Thankfully, the government had decided that no one was getting credit for taking down Red Queen. The official story was that she was critically wounded in the battle, and had been taken into custody. Whatever the government’s motivations, I was thankful for it. I had no desire to be swarmed by journalists and paparazzi eager for an interview with the woman who finally bested the Terror of the West.
Or, for that matter, be hunted down and murdered in my sleep by anyone still loyal to Red Queen.
But it was mere minutes after I’d landed back in SFO that Ramirez reached out and asked to meet, although I insisted I choose the meeting place. He said he would have some news for me, but so far all he’d done was ask me about the battle.
Beside me, Ramirez shifted. I heard the click of a lighter flicking on, and smelled the acrid smoke of a cigarette drifting over to me. “I guess I didn’t know you had it in you to do something like that,” he finally said.
“I-I didn’t kill her,” I retorted. I was, I had to admit, getting a little irritated by his line of questioning.
Ramirez took a slow drag from his cigarette before responding. “No, but you put her into… What, a coma with severe brain damage? From what I’ve heard, even if she wakes up, she’s got locked-in syndrome, and probably has lost some chunk of her brain that made her, well, her. I mean, you basically lobotomiz-”
“I… I know…” I muttered. “But I didn’t have time to think. I just had to do something.”
“But not… kill her?”
I sighed. “Ramirez…”
“Look, Sti-Jannette,” Ramirez said. “I’m not saying you did something wrong. You had every right to use lethal force, especially against her. I’m just… confused. Why did you stop short of killing Red Queen?”
A few moments of silence passed between us. “I-I… don’t know,” I finally admitted. My hands idly toyed with the sleeves of my jacket. “I guess I didn’t do it so I could at least pretend that I swore an oath to ‘do no harm.’”
“I don’t think Hippocrates would think poorly of you. You did a lot more good than harm by taking out Red Queen,” Ramirez said.
“Yeah, yeah, I know…” I said. “Which is why I don’t feel… bad about it.” I didn’t mention that I, quite frankly, wanted to feel bad about it—but Ramirez didn’t need to hear that.
Ramirez breathed a cloud of smoke that floated upwards along the light breeze, joining the fog around us. “I suppose it doesn’t make a difference either way,” he said. “Guess I’m just confused why you wanted to be a hero if you want to live by the Hippocratic Oath. I mean, sometimes you have to kill. It’s an ugly part of the job, but still a part of it.”
“Well, I wanted to be a doctor,” I grumbled. “Then I got my powers and had the bright idea that I could do more good outside the hospital than in it.”
We both went silent as a dog walker passed by, tugging a little beige terrier along on her leash. Gradually, their shapes vanished into the fog.
“R-Ramirez,” I said, once she was out of earshot. “Have you ever killed anyone?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Some criminals and terrorists…” He looked down and took a long drag from his cigarette. “One civilian.”
“O-Oh?” My eyes, wide in surprise, darted to his. But he didn’t meet my gaze.
“It was… years ago, back when I was just a beat cop,” he explained, his voice so low it almost blended with the sound of traffic on the street down the hill. “Me and a few others were in a shootout with some lowlife Yakuza pushers. One of my bullets missed the guy I was actually shooting at and went through the window behind him. Hit some elderly woman who was still in bed…” He took another pause to puff a few times on his cigarette, staring straight ahead as he did. “She died a few minutes later, just before we got to her.”
“Oh…”
“Ripple was actually the responding hero that day,” he said with a strained half-chuckle. “It was the first time I met her… She’d only been a hero for a month or something; still working with that, uh…” He snapped his fingers. “Archean, that was his name.”
My jaw dropped. “Ripple worked with Archean?”
“Oh, they were a team for years.” Ramirez gave me a wry smile. “Very close.”
“H-Huh,” I said. That explained a lot… But why had she never mentioned him before?
“Still,” Ramirez said, before I could ask any questions about Ripple. His shoulders sagged slightly. “Ripple was pissed at me… Honestly, I was pissed at me, too. Fucking furious I’d been so stupid and careless…”
“What did you do?”
Ramirez took a deep breath, then finally looked back at me. “I wanted to quit, but Maren talked me out of it. We wanted to start a family, and… Well, we couldn’t afford for me to feel sorry for myself.”
Another moment of silence passed between us. “How does… killing make you feel?” I slowly asked, finding myself surprised that I had voiced the question out loud. But Ramirez’s face remained unchanged, and he continued,
“I remember the face of the first man I killed, even though I don’t remember his name anymore. I don’t regret it or anything… But I don’t really think I realized what I had done until it hit me all at once a few weeks later. The rest… Almost the rest, anyways… I don’t remember their faces, or really anything other than the gunshot.”
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As he said it, my mind flashed back to Red Queen. I didn’t know her face beyond the sneering demon mask she had worn. Yet, when my powers reached her brain, I had stared into her bloodshot eyes—I saw the way they had glazed over, fluttering to a half-close… Although not her last moments, it remained seared into my memory. I tried to imagine that, once enough time had passed, I could forget about it—like Ramirez said he had forgotten. But I found that hard to believe.
Ramirez shrugged slightly before continuing. “After you’ve killed someone for the first time, you realize that you haven’t done anything special. All you’ve done is do your part in the grand fucking tradition of people killing people.”
“You said… Almost the rest?” I said, circling back to his initial statement.
Ramirez looked away from me, his cigarette still burning between his fingertips. “That old lady… She didn’t deserve to die. If there’s one face that haunts me, it’s hers, even though I never even saw her alive.”
Neither of us spoke until Ramirez finished his cigarette, dropping the butt to the ground and extinguishing it with a stomp. “Look, Jannette, I don’t know what to tell you,” he said, his voice as gruff as ever. “If you’re having second thoughts about what you did to Red Queen, maybe you should look into another career.” He sighed. “I still think you did a good thing, and I’m not the only one. It’s actually why I wanted to meet with you.”
“W-What do you mean?”
Ramirez bent down and unzipped his backpack, pulling a manila folder from it. “The Feds haven’t executed Red Queen yet. Apparently, they sicced one of their mind readers on her… and scraped whatever they could from what you left of her brain. From what I hear, they’re pretty happy that your handiwork gave them this opportunity.” He lightly slapped the folder with the back of his hand. “This is the report… I got a version containing information ‘relevant to my operations.’ I figured you might find page three particularly interesting…”
I eyed Ramirez quizzically as I grabbed the folder. Usually, I tried to steer clear of anything to do with mind readers—out of a combination of ethical objections and terrified self-preservation—but I had to admit I was curious as to the inner workings of Red Queen’s delusional mind. Opening it revealed pages of almost entirely redacted text. However, on page three I saw an unredacted paragraph. It read:
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Subject mindscape was also queried with “Chapel High,” “Chapel High School,” “Chapel Hill High School,” “Mission District,” and various other terms related to these concepts. █████’s query did not reveal any relevant information, except for a single memory transcribed below:
> Sasquatch: [over the phone] other than we’re running low on… xantho-whatever, I don’t have anything new to report.
> Red Queen: Good. Our brewers in ████████ are also reporting that they will deliver on time. Report to me when the newest batch is ready for delivery.
> Sasquatch: Will do. [rustling on the other line] Wait, sorry boss… But there is something… I heard there was some kind of attack at a local school. Something about a monster eating people-
> Red Queen: [chuckles]
> Sasquatch: Do you know anything about it?
> Red Queen: No, though it sounds like something we could take advantage of. Keep me updated.
With this information, the First Way can be ruled out as having any involvement with the ongoing situation at Chapel Hill High School.
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The rest of the page was redacted. I looked back to Ramirez, who seemed slightly amused as I read the file.
“What is it?” I asked, not sure what he wanted me to see.
“Do you remember when you stumbled onto this whole thing a few months ago? Busting up some First Way and Los Reales turf fight?”
“Yeah?” It was hard to believe that was only a few months ago…
“The same night the first of those attacks happened at Chapel High… You suggested the First Way might be responsible for the monster.”
“W-Well, we didn’t know what they were up to then…”
Ramirez chuckled. “At least we know it wasn’t them. And, now that they’re out of the picture, we can finally focus on figuring out what’s going on.”
We both looked toward Chapel High, shrouded entirely in fog. “Yesterday they disbanded the First Way taskforce, and I formed a team out of the freed resources to do a deep sweep of the school. They never found anything.”
“It’s… It can’t be a coincidence, right? That these monsters keep showing up there?” I asked.
Ramirez shook his head. “Not a chance. Something’s going on there… and we’ll figure it out.” He looked back to me. “Can I count on you to be there when we find it?”
I nodded. “Yeah,” I said.
There was too much I cared for in that place for me to abandon it.
My phone buzzed in my jacket pocket, signaling that it was time for me to go. “Let me know as soon as you find anything,” I said, rising to my feet.
“Getting back to work so soon?” Ramirez asked.
I shook my head, smiling slightly. “You’re not really the reason I came up to San Francisco today,” I said, starting down toward Chapel High.
Ramirez didn’t ask for an explanation. “Take care of yourself, Jannette,” was all he said.
I stopped and turned back to him. “Thanks,” I replied, taking a moment to look for the right words. “I’ll… be in touch.”
With that, I turned back downhill. My pace quickened as I neared Chapel, the school looming almost ominously out of the fog. However, I barely noticed. My heart hammered away in my chest as I stopped just before the front steps to the building. It was still early enough to be void of most students. I pulled my phone out of my pocket just in time to see a new message arrive. It read,
> | Right behind you
I spun around to see Holly standing a few yards away, a wide smile on her face. She was wearing her work clothes, a black button-up paired with black slacks, and looked to have entirely recovered from her ordeal at the Extinction Refuge. “Jan,” she said, “it’s so good…”
I rushed forward before she could finish, pulling her into a tight embrace. “It’s good to see you…” I muttered, burying my face in her shoulder.
We held each other tight for a few moments too long to be considered merely “friendly.”
“I still have twenty minutes until my shift starts,” Holly said, pulling herself from the hug. “Wanna go for a little walk?”
I nodded. We set off, slowly meandering our way through the Mission District. “You know, Jan,” Holly said, after a few minutes of idle, aimless conversation about Icons and Chapel High School politics. “I mean what I said back there.”
“Back… where?”
“You know… Back up north…” Holly said, vaguely. “You really can tell me anything you want.”
Just like in the field hospital, a big part of me wanted to tell Holly everything. I mean, it was pretty obvious she already knew, but… making it official still terrified me. Just a few months ago, being Stitch was my entire life… “Jannette” just paid rent and shopped for groceries. Now though, I really did have the double-life that every hero was supposed to have. Holly was a bastion of normalcy I couldn’t afford to lose.
Even if I wanted to tell her about everything I saw. Everything I did. I wanted her to tell me that it was okay that I didn’t feel bad for killing Red Queen. I wanted her to tell me that I did a good job.
But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I forced a smile onto my face. “U-Up… north?” I asked, sounding like an idiot.
Holly shook her head and looked away. I wondered for a moment if I had said the wrong thing. After the shock had worn off, did she really want someone as messed up as me in her life?
Then, her hand found mine, her fingers intertwining with my own. As my power rushed up her arm, I could feel her heartbeat intensify as her grip tightened. “Jan,” she murmured, barely audible over the muzak of the city around us.
“Ye… Yeah?” I squeaked.
“W-Wanna…” She pulled me closer. I could feel her breath on my cheek. “Wanna… go get something to eat tonight? Just the two of us…”
I looked at her, her dark eyes locked on mine. Her fingers trembled to the beat of her heart. She had seen nothing but trouble since I had entered her life… But even though I was too fucking stupid to let her into mine, she still wanted to spend time with me. Still wanted me.
And I wanted to be hers.
“O-Of course… Just the two of us…” I responded.
Holly smiled. “I… I…” she started, then stopped turning to look at the city, which continued to move, completely oblivious, around us.
“I have no idea where to take you,” she admitted with a slight giggle.
I laughed. “C-Come on,” I said, “let’s find somewhere that looks good.”
Still giggling, Holly pulled me along and, together, we rushed through Mission, visiting as many restaurants as we could in the few minutes we had together, the entire time our hands clasped together.