Fear and respect are two very different things.
A long time ago, my team and I were keeping an eye on the leader of a rival gang. I don't even remember the gang's name. They lived in a city near our shitty town, and we went there. He spent the whole day at a mall with his family, and we stayed in the parking lot, locked in the SUV, watching him from a distance.
"That rich asshole," said one of the clowns on my team, and honestly, we all thought the same. He and his family had the luxury of spending the day like a normal family, strolling around, eating out, going to the movies, while none of us had ever experienced that, as if we didn't deserve it, as if we weren't as good as him and his family.
That's why we hated to watch him live a life we never had.
"Tell them about all the shit you had to do to buy them that ice cream," said another clown, and they all were also saying stupid shit like:
"You're exactly like us, you asshole,"
Or:
"And that bitch of your wife only wants your money."
Or:
"Would."
Suddenly, the son dropped his ice cream and started throwing a tantrum for whatever reason. The clowns didn't let him get away with it.
"You ungrateful piece of shit."
"All the things I'd given up at your age to have what you have, and you don't even appreciate it, dickhead."
"To have what? A dad?"
"Well, he should ask his mom for a list of all his possible dads."
"No way, that's almost the whole town."
"Even I could be on that list, am I right?"
"Well, I may never have known my dad, but at least he never hit me like he did to you."
"He never dared to; I'd have kicked his ass."
"Sure? Who do you think you are? Dark?"
"Clowns," I told them to shut up. "He's getting away."
The leader and his family got into their car and drove off. A SUV with his bodyguards followed them. There were only three of them, so as not to stand out that much, and none of them noticed that we followed them all the way to their leader's house.
We waited until dawn to get into his house.
All the clowns on my team were practically kids, or at least all were younger than me. Some of them were smoking and drinking to relax and pass the time 'cause we'd already been there for several hours.
But 'cause of those stupid things, they always left the SUV smelling like shit.
"Clowns," I told them. "It's time."
I saw how some of them grabbed their weapons and prayed, others kept smoking and drinking, and most of them were snorting or injecting all sorts of drugs, and I understand perfectly: they were scared. We all knew that most likely one of us was gonna die 'cause people almost always died on missions. That's what we had to live with. We had the advantage 'cause they weren't waiting for us, but a stray bullet, a little bit of distraction, was more than enough to kill someone.
"They stand no chance, they stand no chance," one said to boost his confidence.
"I can handle them all," another one said.
"They all gonna respect me," the last one said.
We got out of the SUV and approached the leader's house. I gathered some magic in my hand and threw it at the bodyguard watching the front door. That idiot didn't even notice and just dropped dead. We ran to the door, I destroyed the lock with a spell, and we went inside. The house was pretty big and had two floors. We split into two groups; a clown and I went upstairs to look for the leader and his family, and the other two clowns stayed downstairs and looked for the other bodyguards.
As soon as we reached the top of the stairs, we heard gunshots. A bodyguard came out of a room across the hall, and I cast a spell on him before he could shoot us. In one of the rooms across the hall, we heard the son crying.
"You get him; I'll get the leader," I told him, and he went into that room. I created a magic bubble that covered me whole and opened the door to the next room. At that moment, the leader shot me until he ran out of bullets, and before he could reload, I cast a spell on his shoulder that knocked him to the floor and made him drop his gun.
He crawled and tried to reach it, but I cast a spell that grabbed him by the neck and lifted him into the air.
"Tell your wife to get out the bathroom," I told him 'cause I could feel a really weak aura hidden there. "And tell her that, if she tries anything, we'll kill the kid."
Then a door beside the bed opened, and from there the wife came out with her raised hands; in one of them she was carrying a gun that she immediately dropped and kicked towards me.
Downstairs I could hear more gunshots and someone coming up the stairs.
"If you try to escape, we'll kill the kid," I tell the wife and got out of the room. At that moment three bodyguards were coming up, and they tried to shoot me as soon as they saw me, but I threw at them a spell so powerful it obliterated them all.
I went back to the room, and the wife was still there, hands over her head. She was trembling with fear. I still had the leader floating in the air 'cause of my spell.
At that moment, the clown I'd told to get the kid came in, dragging him along. The kid saw his mom and ran to her.
"Let's go," I told them. The mom picked up the kid and we left the room. Downstairs someone was screaming and, when we went down, we saw that a clown and a bodyguard were dead. The other clown was screaming; he was lying on the floor clutching his stomach, from which a lot of blood was pouring out.
"I'm dying," he yelled. "Help me."
I approached him and cast a spell that killed him instantly; he was making so much noise that the neighbors, the police, or more bodyguards could notice. Besides, the leader had most likely called for reinforcements, so we had to leave as soon as possible, and that clown was just gonna make us slower.
He was more useful dead than alive.
We left the house, put the leader and his family in the SUV, tied their hands and feet tightly, covered their heads, and took them to one of Darius's safe houses. We tied each of them to a chair and tortured them all. Yes, even the kid.
The leader yelled, but he wasn't saying anything, he just lowered his head so he wouldn't see what we were doing to his family.
The mom cried and begged to leave the kid alone.
And the kid cried and screamed as hard as he could.
And truth be told, we enjoyed every second of it.
I tortured the leader to get all the info I could. I always used a spell that transformed things, and with it I turned a pillow into a ball covered in spikes, which I used to tear and rip off the skin of whoever I was torturing. As soon as they saw their skin falling off in pieces, they started asking me what I wanted to know, but I never asked them anything; I just kept torturing them until they told me everything they knew about everything.
In the end, they always suffered so much that they begged me to kill them once and for all, and there was nothing I enjoyed more. I loved seeing them humiliate themselves before me. I felt so powerful and invincible that I continued torturing them until they finally died.
I felt that by torturing them I was earning respect, making people as important as them and those in my own gang respect me for how badass I was.
I was so fucking stupid back then.
No one respects any gang, any criminal.
They're afraid of us, and that's very different. If they begged us, it was out of fear of dying; if people in the street lowered their heads when they saw us, or gave us things, or stepped aside, it was out of fear, not respect. They didn't respect us. If we disappeared overnight, they couldn't be happier.
And not even those in our own gang respected us, they feared us 'cause those they weren't afraid of were immediately betrayed.
No one respected us, even though we thought they did.
But we were the ones who were most afraid. We were afraid of being betrayed, of being found by the other gangs, of being caught by the police, or not surviving the mission.
We were always afraid, and that's why we enjoyed so much making people afraid of us.
"What the ice cream worth it, you piece of shit?!" the surviving clown yelled at the kid while torturing him.
"This is what you get for being a fucking whore!" he also yelled at the mom.
"Laugh! Why aren't you laughing?! Let's celebrate!" he shouted, and I too had tortured many people like that when I was his age, and I had enjoyed it as much as he did.
We knew that after torturing them, when we hung them on some traffic light to send a message to everyone about what would happen if they messed with the clowns, the fear would return, the fear that the other members of that gang would find us at that moment, or that they would find us and torture us as we had tortured their leader.
That happiness never lasted enough.
That fear always came back.
If you sleep, you die.