"Rick"
"Let's just say that I took care of it. If you need to know more, I'll tell you."
War is not something that people are naturally capable of handling. Fighting for survival, yes...fighting for a cause, perhaps so...but fighting for the extermination of the enemy, for the defeat of your foes, no they are not. Some may claim that wars can be fought for survival and for a cause, and I will say this is a well-meaning lie they tell themselves so they do not fully confront the horror of what war truly is. Survival is down to the flip of coin in any conflict, and talk of causes often comes when either side wishes to be seen as being in the right. War is the opposite of compassion, patience, mercy and empathy...it is a machine that takes in people and other resources and it produces dead people, broken people, and weapons. This is why a person enters training, but that same person does not emerge from the other end. Only a soldier emerges from the training, because they know that they have to destroy the identity of someone and rebuild it to be what they want. Someone capable of killing without hesitation, someone willing to follow orders immediately, someone who will not feel pity or remorse or sympathy for the enemy. In fact someone who will see the enemy as nothing but a target to be eliminated, and not a person like themselves. If you have to force someone to occupy a shape that you have decided upon, then this is not a natural state of being.
Rick, a false name he has taken on to distance himself from his old life and his family, is a soldier. He knows with a surety bordering on faith but never quite reaching there, that he is not a good man. He is a good soldier, and a wet-work specialist. His skills have been solidified through years of experience, they are second nature to him. Despite his age, he is approaching 50 years old after all, he is still spry enough to do whatever needs to be done. This does not mean he is unaffected, or somehow not broken, as his penchant for alcohol will testify to. One only drinks as much as Rick does to forget or to numb or to render the mind insensible and unable to dwell on things like guilt and regret. Was it the Gulf War which brought him to this state, or his years after his service where he went to work for a man, a member of the navy in high standing. No admiral was he however, strangely all simply referred to him as The General, and the operation conducted underneath his command could not be called legal by any stretch of the imagination. But could they be called real?
By this time his career in the military was over, as was his family life, for he had convinced himself that they were better off without him and had left. He still kept tabs on them, but he remained distant from their lives, believing he was making the correct choice. His work for The General paid well, but the man was abysmal to work for, but it wasn't until he saw the man meeting with another man that Rick decided it was time to leave. This other man can only be described as a government agent, an almost stereotypical Man In Black, but he was strange to Rick. It was almost as if he wasn't human, but merely something that looked human. Rick took the next opportunity presented to him to walk away from his employer and lose himself in the crowds of western Europe, getting passage back to the United States and losing himself there as well for awhile. Eventually his path took him back to familiar territory, Porthaven, the city his family had roots in.
While the city was much the same as he remembered, there were differences, subtle ones which made him wary. It was while he was coming to grips with a number of things that others entered his life. Conrad and Jinx, and the latter of the two had something weighing on his mind, an enemy that needed defeating. Rick's training rose to the signal and the three of them began to look into it all. They even fashioned themselves a name for their little group, and while Rick didn't really care, he had to admit if only to himself that naming a special unit did help foster a feeling of comradery. The fight was not the sort of thing he expected and while there were skirmishes to be had, the majority of it was finding out intel and planning for a precision strike during a key moment of this enemies plans. It succeeded and the enemy was annihilated, but this left a power vacuum and caused the political situation to become even more unstable.
While it is true you can leave the past behind, it is equally true that it can rear it's ugly head when you least expect it. So was the case for Rick, who is not only now in contact with his wife once more, but also his daughter and he knows his son will not be too far behind. The family he abandoned is now being drawn back into his orbit once more, slowly, inexorably drawn back, pushed by an invisible tide. Not only this but it seems that the city is very difficult to leave, so fleeing is no longer an option for him, or for anyone. When I had the chance to speak to them, the chosen protagonists, I warned them that war was inevitable. Mostly I was warning Rick, for out of all of them, as talented as they are and will be, Rick is a soldier and he knows war. It is an old friend who has long haunted his waking and sleeping hours.
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