Words: 1389

After hours, days, a trip to the store to buy some PG Tips, the ten minutes to make a pot, steep it, make a cup and cozy the rest, Quenton was as ready as he was going to get. There was never a good time for deep introspection and directional decisions, but it was important to force oneself to them just the same. He found one of his chairs, looked at the other, and pushed it away, against the wall, centering himself alone in the window, looking out at the warm lights of windows in the dark of the city.

The research, books upon books, studies on studies, lay around his feet again. There was no conclusive proof, ever, that corporal punishment ended crime. To the ‘modern’, first world society, the whole conception of punishment was archaic- tied only to a desire for revenge and therefore discredited. Many were the legislatures that had abolished the death penalty. But the instinct was still there, for all of them, all humans from their earliest of years, to use punishment as not revenge but a means of teaching and curbing antisocial behaviors. Consequences and pain were, at the most personal of levels, the only real motivations for change- one did it when sameness and comfort became more painful than the change. Boundaries could only exist with consequences, and therefore punishments, to enforce them- those walls that created order, allowed the establishment of individuals and self from society and vice versa, that promoted actualization, growth, and in a perfect world...eventually the transcendence and redefinition and re-understanding of those boundaries from new and better levels. Boundaries, at their most basic, were established to promote survival. It was there on the floor, Ernest Thompson Seton’s The Ten Commandments in the Animal World, detailing the most basic boundary laws. They were no more strictly observed then in the questionable morality of the few trillion or so humans on the planet, but they were there. Retribution in nature was automatic, and the reasoning as plain as the reason not to touch fire- those who did not listen and learn were picked off by predators or failed to find sustenance.

Morality is the expression of expediency. The community that permits murder soon ceases to be. What then is the key? The failings of the lex talionis, of the Hammurabi, the Mosaic Code, our own modern laws? It cannot be of retaliation. It cannot be as it was so often then- not intended only to dispose. Crucifixion, stoning, public beheading were so dramatic and painful as intended to deter others from committing the same offense. To go even further, like the punishment by Joab if the Rabbah and the tower of ash was just sadism. Expensive, and the same suffering easily affected by other means.

The mother that slaps a baby’s hands from a fire is using punishment to teach. To slap the face in blind rage serves no purpose but to destroy credibility. To sit and burn him with matches one after another is sadism. These are the lines- three acts using pain, all differently motivated and differently measured. It has to be the difference of Rome’s destruction of Carthage- the massacre used to reestablish boundaries and wholesale clear the groups. No room for retaliation, revenge, re-purposing. It cannot be vengeance. It cannot be personal. It must be pure Law and Consequence.

These men and women who fought for Chaos could be filtered, maybe, into Francois Eugene Vidocq’s little cubby holes of reform, but where was the proof that showed the point in that mercy after so many years? Where were the purified and reformed compared to the thousands that by now were touched by the cancer grown? From Lieutenants to Generals, to Vespa himself who lied to himself and said he saved his family by serving, instead of just dooming them to facing their son/brother/cousin/whatever become something they no longer knew until he came himself to destroy them as well...all the great mass lacked that sense of responsibility for each other's welfare necessary for attaining peace. As the Les Bourgeois de Calais outside of parliament stood apart in meaning, a monarch, powerful enough to be benevolent, there was no crown and no engine of unity that supported this continued foolishness of relying on the pity, empathy and blasted time for the blackened hearts of their enemies to start beating again.

“Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.” Plato’s wisdom, not his own. There was none in Buddingtonite, in those lieutenants’ whose arms he’d broken, in the strange captain who’d strung the civilian up in wires as a trap. There was none in the attackers on the convention. I will be the justice, then, for it is in my heart. Justice cannot be for one side alone. There is no authority to recognize me except need. I will not deny the wrongness in the assumption, but the need is the same. When the time comes, and some Authority is restored, I will stand judgement for what I do, this species of vigilantism and violence. Sometimes, to destroy evil, it takes the equal dark; one that will do what others will not, or cannot do. Fire to burn ahead of flames, an executioner to claim lives against the commandment of god for the sake of others.


The White Moon Court was a court without a Queen and without any crown at all. There were no appointments of the court- no privy council, no high sheriffs, peerage, prime minister, no actual ranked armed forces, no Parliament of any sort, judges, and no stewards. It was functionless, toothless and dead. The name had as much bearing, essentially, on the war as their own names and titles. Likewise, it had about as much strength as any individual magic and lone senshi against the blades and killing blows of their enemies. Worse- Destiny City was just as impotent. The United States Government was impotent. Words echoed again and again in his mind, reordering themselves- I'm Captain Buddingtonite, of the Infiltration branch….this city's practically ours ….

The media for certain had to be in their hold, with the extensive expose on the senshi as terrorists instead of heroes. The cops? The judicial system on the whole? There was no telling how far the ‘infiltration branch’ had gone, but one thing was certain- the Authorities as they were in Destiny City and the Law thereof was compromised. It left him with no faith in the laws of his homeland, of his first life, and there was none at all to be found or had from the ruins of the second. “There is no Law.”

The words were torn out of his throat like feathers out an eagle. They were accompanied by immediate, audible grinding of enamel and bone of his teeth grinding. “It cannot be born.”

“It cannot Be.”

Higher than the courts of justice, the courts of men for men with benches, gavels, wigs, and rigid pomp stand untouched the court of conscience. Lo, it does supersede all other courts. At our best,we are noblest of all; separated from law and justice come the worst and how it shows. How the dead pile body on body and the crimes go unanswered, unchallenged, unpunished but by sallow, empty ideals- as though mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice. It is a lie. Years has this gone on. Years people die and suffer, and pay the price for the failing of those with the power to stand and do something, anything, beside scare tactics, harassment and olive branches of foolish friendship thrown back in their faces over, over over over again.

“Punishment does not eliminate crime, never has, but neither had medicine eliminated disease. But if the cancer is cut out in complete amputation, then better the chances of the body to survive.”

“Grim the mask, but I shall bear it. Never will there be enough rain from the heavens to wash me clean.” And Quenton wept, his face in his hands, silent, shivering, a single chair before the tribunal of the motionless, cold blanket of stars.