[He wishes he could have been a fly on the wall for that conversation. He'd love to hear it. He's trying not to think about it, trying to calm down, to condense everything he's feeling into a tiny dense package and swallow it down, because this is important. This matters. Not only for his job, or even mostly for his job, but for the truth.]
[Fingers clenched into fists on his lap, he nods sharply and begins, not looking away from Hawkeye for a second.]
The man in question was the leader of the organized crime family that led — controlled — my city. He spent decades peddling an unusually strong opiate to a city broken by poverty, systematically targeting the weakest people out there. There's no way to calculate the number of people who suffered and died because of his desire for power. To keep his workforce strong, he facilitated those with no other choice but to join his organization — including children — going through an ordeal that either left them with fantastic powers, or dead.
He wanted to be God. He wanted to be invulnerable, so much so that when he found out he had a daughter he had never met, who didn't know he existed either or anything about him, his response was to try to kill her. At fifteen. She'd never been involved with any of this. And when he couldn't kill this girl, he threw all the force of every sick mind at his disposal after her, because he couldn't stand the idea of her surviving.
One of them was a doctor, by the way, who enjoyed torturing patients. [Not Steve, not that time, but that doesn't mean he didn't think of—] He almost destroyed the entire city of Rome, for fun. This is one of the people he threw at a teenage girl for the crime of being related to him.
Before I came here, I didn't know many people who mattered to me. I could count them on one hand. He killed three of them. Two of them, he punched a hole right through. [Giorno balls up his fist and presses it against his solar plexus.] Right through. I can still smell their guts. The third one, he impaled on a fence. My job was to f— to fix them. To keep them safe. And I couldn't.
And that still wasn't good enough for him. He wanted his daughter dead, and he wanted an amount of power that I couldn't let him have. So I took it myself.
[Letting out a sharp exhale, he lays his hands out flat, palms atop his knees, jaw set. Here it is. Here's the problem.]
What I did to him, I didn't know I could do. I didn't know how to undo it after. But I'm not going to sit here and promise you that I regret it, or that I'd undo it now if I could. I don't know the answer to that. What I can tell you is that that man would do all of it again, because he was here in July and so was she, and he did. And just like the first time, Doppio helped.
cw drug trafficking/use/abuse
[He wishes he could have been a fly on the wall for that conversation. He'd love to hear it. He's trying not to think about it, trying to calm down, to condense everything he's feeling into a tiny dense package and swallow it down, because this is important. This matters. Not only for his job, or even mostly for his job, but for the truth.]
[Fingers clenched into fists on his lap, he nods sharply and begins, not looking away from Hawkeye for a second.]
The man in question was the leader of the organized crime family that led — controlled — my city. He spent decades peddling an unusually strong opiate to a city broken by poverty, systematically targeting the weakest people out there. There's no way to calculate the number of people who suffered and died because of his desire for power. To keep his workforce strong, he facilitated those with no other choice but to join his organization — including children — going through an ordeal that either left them with fantastic powers, or dead.
He wanted to be God. He wanted to be invulnerable, so much so that when he found out he had a daughter he had never met, who didn't know he existed either or anything about him, his response was to try to kill her. At fifteen. She'd never been involved with any of this. And when he couldn't kill this girl, he threw all the force of every sick mind at his disposal after her, because he couldn't stand the idea of her surviving.
One of them was a doctor, by the way, who enjoyed torturing patients. [Not Steve, not that time, but that doesn't mean he didn't think of—] He almost destroyed the entire city of Rome, for fun. This is one of the people he threw at a teenage girl for the crime of being related to him.
Before I came here, I didn't know many people who mattered to me. I could count them on one hand. He killed three of them. Two of them, he punched a hole right through. [Giorno balls up his fist and presses it against his solar plexus.] Right through. I can still smell their guts. The third one, he impaled on a fence. My job was to f— to fix them. To keep them safe. And I couldn't.
And that still wasn't good enough for him. He wanted his daughter dead, and he wanted an amount of power that I couldn't let him have. So I took it myself.
[Letting out a sharp exhale, he lays his hands out flat, palms atop his knees, jaw set. Here it is. Here's the problem.]
What I did to him, I didn't know I could do. I didn't know how to undo it after. But I'm not going to sit here and promise you that I regret it, or that I'd undo it now if I could. I don't know the answer to that. What I can tell you is that that man would do all of it again, because he was here in July and so was she, and he did. And just like the first time, Doppio helped.