In a world of guns and war, where blood seemed to seep into the water. I drank and screams faded into the grandeur of our halls, all I could feel was the air clutching at the numb breathing of my lungs. A pressure in my chest made it harder to breathe for another second.

Cold metal and rubber rested in my fingers, a gradual force pulling me back to sobriety. All I could see was a hazy view of glass shards on a blue cloth, and our family picture beside it. For a second, silence claimed the room and revealed the monstrous truth that lived in my house.

“Put it down!”

With three words my mother broke the momentary peace built in the convoluted mess of my space.

I could only stare at her before collapsing to the floor, feeling the shards bite my back. Her stern voice lulled me towards the softness of her arms, but every breath tasted like the bittersweet hug of her living death.

My father had built what looked like the perfect family: a lifeless mother and a soulless son, all born under the will of an all-consuming head of household protected by the high fences surrounding their house.

My father built our family name in his uniform, a man others greeted with respect and fear. He embodied his role in society as a pillar of our home and our country, with or without his badge.

Most of his comrades and subordinates treated him as a smart, respectable officer of the nation, and some looked at him with fearful eyes, knowing power rested in the palm of his hand—not to mention the authority granted by the man sitting on the throne of war.

“Your father held the gun high up the arrogant leader’s nose, forcing him to speak if he wanted to breathe!”

Uncle was telling one of my father's best stories in the field during dinner time. This had been the time that he led a raid on the revolutionaries' hidden meetings. Mother had been silent the whole time, only nodding to his words.

“I saw him with my bare eyes. He was like a wolf in sheeps den! Holding his revolver with one arm truly is a sight!”

“They had to learn,” my father shortly replied, “Peace is made through the cost of their blood, and justice is served through the payment of ours.”

“In the midst of communist attacks, nothing is taken lightly. Even simple breathing is watched to ensure the safety of the people,” my uncle commented, as if telling me directly than to the whole table.

“But don’t you think you’re being too rash?” One of my uncle’s sarcastic remarks.

“Would you allow a weed to live in a garden of flowers? No, you’d strip the weed before it grows and expands. All the nurtured flowers go to waste if a plant takes what should have been theirs, and if the plant steals from the flowers meant to live.”

“I believe measures should be taken before things could escalate.”

My uncle added, “Well, they did resort to violence when they were questioned. Who points a gun at a commanding officer for a simple question?”

“That’s why I did it. I silenced the noise of the streets for others to sleep in peace.” The spite of his words cut deep through my throat.

The fact that none of the revolutionaries survived left a bitter taste on my mouth. As an act of “self-defense,” my father ordered his men to pay a preventive price for a safer future.

For more than a decade of my childhood, my father lived out this sense of justice in every aspect of our lives. Telling me to straighten my posture when we were around other people, “A powerful stare locks people’s feet from the top of their heads.”

Once during dinner, when uncle brought up a story about the military callout, father once replied with a chilling statement. “Blood is but a coin to the myriad of paper in the bank.”

The worst was when he arrived after dinner with the smell of sweat and blood in his nape, and his cold eyes matched mine. With a few words, he ended my silence.

“In our arms we hold the very instrument for justice, and we wield it with a sense of duty. Weapons are meant to be used by a man in uniform for the sake of justice, rather than to be shot by a man bearing nothing but pride.”

It was an extreme application of his principles: we were meant to uproot danger at its roots, scraping it from existence. Peace held a heavy price to be paid, and in his hands my father wielded one of the greatest payments for peace.

A loaded gun.

When I was young, I never questioned anything my father did. From the way he chose his words to the way he ended sentences, my father did things with pristine precision. There was nothing accidental to him; he knew what he wanted and how to get it, and his effectiveness in keeping peace felt undeniable.

For that, I molded myself to be worthy of the name he had built: one noble, disciplined, unshakable family.

I began wearing his uniform, feeling the badges on his shoulders. Each star on my father’s uniform was evidence of what he had sacrificed to achieve the peace he promised. As I caressed the embossed emblem, I felt the weight on his shoulders—the burden of upholding peace in a place of war.

It took more than a decade for me to reach my father’s wish: to achieve a future of peace and harmony under the rule of the government. In the earlier days of my succession, I succumbed to the gruesome reality of preventive murder.

However, the tall fences and the exquisite halls of our home could not hold the cries of agony from the outside.

Unlike my father, I had been curious to see and hear the commotion coming from the streets beyond the comfort of our house. Men screamed for justice, women pleaded for survival, children bore names for the dead—contradictions to my father’s vision of peace. For a long time I believed I had done what was better for the nation.

As I peeled his badges from the uniform, my skin merged with the stiff fabric.

I paused to reflect. I asked myself whether the gun in my hand held the power to decide the worthiness of the person who would receive its bullet. I wondered whether it was the gun that controlled who fired it, or the hand that pointed it. The gun became an easy answer to the questions I had about my character—it was within reach.

The first time I asked my father about the constant resistance of his vision of justice, he had looked me dead in the eye. It was on the week of celebrating my appointment and promotion in the field.

“Father… why do they keep resisting your vision of justice?” I asked, voice chilled from his tense gaze towards me.

“Because they are blind to order. They mistake discipline for cruelty, and peace for oppression.” His voice heavy, locking his eyes to mine.

“Shouldn’t they see what we’ve built?”

“They are too narrow-minded to foresee what we have done. Never forget that resistance is the proof that justice is working.”

After a few seconds, my father snapped when I asked again. “But…”

“Just look in the mirror and stop asking. Don’t look outside the window. Everything else is noise to your ears. As long as you look at yourself, you’ll never notice the world crying out their false sense of justice.”

“I weeded the garden for you to bloom.”

One look in the mirror made it clear I was indeed his son in flesh and bone.

The sharpness of his jaw and the staleness of his eyes had passed into mine. I saw no soul in them; pupils held no light. Hands calloused from hardened training bore the scars of my present. Time had created me as a vessel to fulfill his plans, and my father had made it so his dream could be achieved. I was a knight in his game of chess, a strategic piece to be used until its end.

But even kings fell when pawns gathered. When the people finally cornered him, their bloodied hands brought an end to his reign.

The irony of his death was tied to the choice of his son — my choice to end a legacy built on blood for a future catered to some above others. Along with the sharpness of my breath, my mother heard my soft whimpers for freedom from my father’s chains.

She did not speak, but her silence carried the weight of generational resignation, sorrow, and perhaps, at last, relief. As she whispered pleas for me to live, all I could do was give her a soft look directly in her eyes. With the last of my strength, I felt the metal again from my fingers— then with a silent movement, pulled the trigger between my fingers.

Boom. It ended.