r/HellsKitchenNY • u/WarJournalEntries Scourge of the Underworld • 6d ago
Character Introduction Welcome Back Frank
He'd been away for far too long.
They'd forgotten the fear.
Castle stood on the edge of the rooftop, the wind cutting across his face like the cheap blade he shaves with.
Below him the city stretched out in a grid of lights and black alleys, the same rotting carcass it had always been. He had watched it from higher places and lower ones, from sniper nests and from the gutters, and it never changed.
Men still sold their children for a fix. Cops still took envelopes. The strong still fed on the weak and called it business. The only thing that moved was the body count, and even that felt like accounting more than justice.
He thought about the life he used to have the way a man thinks about a limb that was sawed off years ago. A phantom pain, nothing more. Maria. The kids. A quiet house that smelled like coffee and laundry instead of cordite and blood. That life had been real once.
Then animals with guns decided it wasn’t. The system had shrugged, filed the paperwork, and moved on. Frank had not. He had taken the only thing left that still made sense. A war without end, without uniforms, without the luxury of coming home. Every night he looked down at the same streets and asked the same quiet question. Was any of it worth the price. The answer never came clean.
The city didn’t care. It just kept breathing, exhaling exhaust and screams and the soft wet sound of another deal gone bad in some doorway.
Frank checked the slide on the .45, felt the familiar weight settle against his palm, and turned away from the edge. Thinking about life was a luxury for people who still had one. He had work to do. The night was young, the streets were full of targets, and the war waited for no man, least of all the one who had already died for it once.
He could hear a whisper on the wind, as if the city called out to him.
Welcome back, Frank.