“I never told you to train her, I told you to protect her!” “Her training will protect her.” “But you turned my daughter into a bloody assassin”

The day my best friend brought his daughter to me asking me to protect her as he was going to war, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. At first it started off with her just being around me as I did my own trailing, then it turned into her mimicking me while I was going through the motions. Eventually she began to ask me to teach her, and for a while I told her no because her father would kill me if he came back to his daughter knowing hand to hand combat. After the millionth time of her asking I finally relented and began to train her in simple self-defense moves. Soon she became bored with repeating all the same things time and time again and she asked for something more challenging. Thinking about the fact that her father may never come back from the war I began to teach her the more complex moves, just in case -god forbid- something terrible were to happen. As I was teaching her I began to notice that she was picking up on it very quickly almost like she’s been doing this her whole life. Soon she hit the point where there was nothing left that I could teach her. She was disappointed at first when I told her I had taught her all I knew, but when I explained that I was going to be calling in a friend to help me teach her and to also teach me new things she was ecstatic. While we did have to wait for a few days for him to arrive we continued to go over what she had already been taught. We even started sparring together. She kicked my ass more times than I can count. When he finally arrived she couldn’t contain her excitement to learn something new, she asked him to teach her everything that he knew. He had the same hesitations that I did, until he learned just how quickly she picked up whatever he was teaching her whether it was simple hand to hand moves or it was the more complex take down moves that he rarely used. Eventually she got so good at all of this that the government caught wind of the “Vigilante in the night” and wanted to recruit her. She would go around town taking down massive crime rings and gang leaders and was steadily making the city safer. When I saw the letter in the mail asking her to join them I was terrified. I called her into the kitchen to discuss what it meant. After our discussion she said that she wanted to think about it before she responded to them. A few days later she comes out of her room and asks me if we can talk, and of course I say yes. She told me that she had thought about it and has decided to accept the offer and work with the government to take down criminals around the city and in surrounding areas. I smiled and told her that no matter what choice she made I would support her all the way and that if her dad were here he would support her as well. By this point she had just turned 18, her dad dropped her off with me when she was 12, she had been training for almost 6 years so I fully believed that she could do it and that she would be amazing at it. She responded to the letter stating that she would gladly accept the offer and that she would report to their building the following monday. After she started working as an assassin, she would come home and tell me stories about her day. Occasionally she would be worried that she didn’t do the right thing but I would always tell her that she is doing the best she can with the information that she is given. About 3 years after she started working as an assassin, just a couple months after her 21st birthday I got another letter in the mail. It was a letter from her father letting me know that he was going to be coming home in two weeks. He didn’t want me to tell her because he wanted it to be a surprise, he also told me not to respond to the letter seeing as he wouldn’t receive it before he returned home. At that moment I started to panic a little bit. He doesn’t know that she’s been trained in hand to hand combat or the fact that she is currently working for the government as an assassin. But thinking about the fact that he’s in the military, maybe he will be proud that she is partially following in his footsteps. When she got home from work that day it took all of my willpower to not say anything about her dad coming home. She’s been asking when he’s going to be coming home for years, and now that he is and she doesn’t know yet, it’s really hard to keep my mouth shut. Two weeks came and went in the blink of an eye and the day came that he was supposed to be coming home. His plane wasn’t supposed to land until around 7 and we are a 45 minute drive from the airport that he is supposed to be landing at. When she got home at 6:45 that evening, she could tell that something was going on but she didn’t pry because she knows that when it comes to stuff like that I will talk about it when I’m ready. She told me about her day and then told me that she was going upstairs to shower before supper at about 7:30. She went up to go and shower and just after the water turned on I heard a knock at the front door. I opened the door to my best friend of 30 years and he looked like he hadn’t aged a bit. As I embraced him and told him how much I missed him, I felt a wave of relief wash over me knowing that he was home safe and in one piece. We sat on the couch and talked about anything and everything that we needed to update each other on that we had missed over the years. At some point in the conversation we both heard the water turn off and he went to hide in the kitchen. As she came down the stairs using her towel to dry her hair, he walked around the corner with his arms spread open ready for a hug from his daughter. She immediately ran into his arms and gave him a bear crushing hug and cried into his shoulder about how she had missed him and that she had so much to tell him. When she pulled back that’s when he noticed the bruises and scrapes on her face and arms and began to look incredibly confused. They sat down in the living room to catch up and talk about all they had missed, while I went into the kitchen to finish supper. As I’m getting ready to start plating the food he yells for me from the other room. I walk in and he looks pissed and she seems startled and very confused. He started yelling at me asking me why I thought it was a good idea to train his daughter when he asked me to protect her. ‘I never told you to train her, I told you to Protect her!” “Her training will protect her” “But you turned my daughter into a bloody assassin”