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Re: Back at Home...
I am /not/ going to cry.

Kelly's words are the sweetest she's ever heard, mostly because she /understands/ where Melissa is coming from. She didn't take offense about being kept out of the loop and she still loved her anyway.

Wait. Did she...did she say loves me?

A tear slides down Melissa's cheek and she smiles, wiping it away.

"I...I love you, too, Kelly." she says, before continuing on.

"But yeah, King sold my dad out to Fisk to save his own ass. It makes me a special kind of sick that King is second-cousin of mine, because I hate being related to garbage. Anyway, Fisk hired a bunch of outlaw bikers to hit my dad during work. Mom had stopped in to bring him something to eat, which was unusual for her. She was never really domestic." Kelly says, remembering her mother as the woman who taught her that one always made sure to slide a knife blade between the second and third rib, then twist.

"They showed up and sprayed the place with bullets. Dad took a couple, but Mom and a few of his co-workers took the rest. She died at the scene. He never explained she wasn't coming home; our lawyer, Diane, did the honors. Diane's been his lawyer since he'd made enough money to keep her on retainer, and she's handled my finances and things ever since.

Meanwhile, Dad put the hood and boots back on, grabbed his guns and started the Bloody Summer of '03. Anyone who even had a peripheral connection to the Kingpin's operation got splattered all over the pavement. I rarely saw him much, even after Bree showed up wanting to live with us. Bree's mother had taken her and moved to California right after my dad went to prison. She and I got close out of necessity, because Dad was never home, even when he was in the house. He spent three years trashing the New York Underworld for what they'd done to them, but he never went after John King, which was probably his second biggest mistake." Melissa says.

"Because King also sold him out to the demon he'd stolen his gear from. Apparently, said demon didn't die when Dad thought he wasted him. Three days after my sixteenth birthday, while Dad was at work and I was at a friend's house, Kastorax the demon came to set a trap for Dad.

Unfortunately, Bree came home first. I'll never know what he did to her in full, but I guess Dad walked in mid-way through whatever level of hell was giving Bree and they fought.

By the time I got home, Bree was alive, but she wouldn't do anything but scream and cry. Dad was nowhere to be found. He'd left the hood and boots at home, like he always did when he went off to work, so they were there. Diane helped me get Bree into a hospital when it was clear she wasn't going to speak anymore and...the rest you can guess." Melissa says.

"I'm telling you this stuff because super-powered bio-agents are pretty shitty to run into, but what comes after me is likely to be just as bad, if not worse, and I wanted to offer you the chance to walk away now, before...before the /really/ bad things start happening." she finishes.