The Maelstrom And The Depths Beyond

[So quick reminder for people who didn’t see or remember the first post: the Virtues are bad people brought back to life by unknown forces, and forced to remain alive until they meet a specific, unknown atonement condition related to their original crimes.  Faith is a bad person. She’s meant to be.]

It starts with two crime powerful crime families who have long been at war. 

In life, Faith was the scion of one of these families.  At the age of 22, her college girlfriend was critically injured in a hit meant for her.  This incident started Faith down a path of misplaced hope and a quest for vengeance that would last fifty years, beginning when she murdered her own father, who refused to support her crusade.  After assuming control of his criminal organization, she dedicated all of their resources to two related causes: medical research to keep her only occasionally conscious girlfriend alive, in agony and the constant subject of new experiments, in the vain hope of a fully curative procedure to come, and transforming into a full-fledged private army dedicated to wiping the rival family off the face of the galaxy.

It takes most of Faith’s adult life, but she ultimately succeeds, personally directing an attack that obliterates an entire colony, the last bastion of said family.  When she tells her still  girlfriend she has finally found her justice, said girlfriend roundly denounces her, in scathing takedown that expresses the vast disgust and contempt in which she holds Faith, witnessing the callous person she has become, and the way she has been denied any personal agency for five decades.  Faith does not react well to hearing this.  The nurse on duty later reported there had been screaming, as Faith leveled all kinds of insults, and that eventually a shot went off.  Not much is clear after that because the oxygen apparently ignited, killing them both and damaging the room (indeed, most of the floor) beyond recognition or forensics. 

Like most of the Virtues, Faith awoke without any sense that she was in the wrong.  Her story as above is revealed/explored over a number of issues, in which she is serving various missions for the Director. 

Faith’s Revenge is her final arc, and the culmination of her story.  The Director assigns her to retrieve a fourteen-year-old girl (Hanako) who she presumes to be a runaway, but it turns out she is the opposite—she is searching for her lost family.  Though the girl proves to be a real pain in the ass (not unlike Faith herself), they form a rapport.  In exploring her uncertainty, anticipatory grief and sense of loss, Faith begins to understand why what she did to her own family, and girlfriend, was grotesque. 

They get a major lead and it is believed that Hanako will finally be reunited with her family.  Instead, it’s a trap—they find themselves surrounded by the current incarnation of Faith’s family, the monster she built, who are now using the medical technology she developed to help her girlfriend to enhance their own soldiers.  Hanako sees their corporate logo and completely freaks out, even as Faith is trying to fight them off.  It has triggered a memory from when she was very young, and her house was surrounded and under attack; her father managed to smuggle her out just before the net closed.  Her family is definitely dead, and Hanako is the last surviving member of the family Faith dedicated her life to eradicating.

Upon realizing this, Hanako bolts, suddenly and understandably terrified of Faith, and Faith, who has her hands full fighting, cannot go after her.

The final segment of the story involves Faith racing against her own organization to locate and save Hanako.  She succeeds, but only at the cost of her own life.  The final showdown famously takes place across a series of barges on a water planet; Faith is mortally wounded and sinks into the water, presumably to die.