People always say victory tastes sweet.
Catarina would think otherwise.
It starts with blood, so, so much blood. Flooding the streets, flooding your mouth til the only thing you can taste and breathe and choke on is blood. The iron fills your lungs, returning you to your base state of red, raw blood.
As you choke for air and cough and wheeze, the blood returning to your veins and heart, the metallic taste vanishes, replaced with a cold, bitter sensation filling your tongue. The same cold feeling as you watch the blood drain from the faces of your enemies as you ready your final swing into their readied throats. The same cold feeling as you hear the screams of those too innocent to deserve such a fate but too guilty of the ignorance everyone wields as they turn a blind eye to the truth of the suffering that boils and festers under their very feet. The same cold feeling as you feel the life in the only person you ever called your friend fade from their eyes, the only person who saw you as human after all this time because you have and would continue to do the same, the only person who you haven't abandoned yet simply because they wouldn't let you.
Only then, victory tastes sweet. Sweet, because it's finally all over. You've commited more atrocities than those you've killed in the name of the law, and the only thing you feel is the sweet, sweet remnants of adrenaline. You find yourself laughing, the sound twisted and distorted by your own vice and greed for power. By now, is it really you, behind your mask and layers to hide the real you? Is it the sad, lonely child, the overconfident teen just barely an adult, or the scar ridden person who is indistinguishable from their own shadow? Or is it the power corrupting you, turning those cloudy white eyes into destructive black storms, twisting and swirling around your soul and taking it hostage in the depths of the dark, puppeteering your thoughts and emotions and will so tightly you wonder if you're even being manipulated in the first place.
Victory is sweet. Like dark chocolate. A bitter thing who you learn to love, because what else is there to feel other than the sharp ice cold in your heart?
Date: [The date has been crossed out with ink] Entry #83
I do not believe I am working at a true hospital anymore. So many whispers, so many secrets, so many people lost, I no longer believe this place was ever meant for saving people's lives. I fear it only makes them worse. I can no longer trust Dr. [The name has been crossed out]. The number of syringes seemed to double for each patient, and I can't recognize the medications written in the notes. There's no way they'd be new prescriptions, I would've been told so, and all Google searches go blank. Not to mention the color of them, I doubt I could put into words how unnatural they appear.
On my lunch break, I checked in on my latest patient. Still won't disclose their name, even if this hospital just isn't right. They hadn't woken up from their recent surgery, so I came in to check if they were alright physically at least.
Someone had forgotten to put in an IV.
I can still feel the lack of their heartbeat, even now, with a pen in my hand.
I won't be going back. Not now, not ever. I emailed my notice and plan to spend the rest of my vacation days trying to forget that place ever existed. I don't think I can keep this diary with me anymore. It reminds me too much of that place. Whether to burn it or give it away, I don't know. But maybe it would be better to give it to someone. So that no one else will end up lost in those sterilized halls.
Signing off for the last time, [The name is covered in a blood splatter.]
