No one answer. Like I said before, every time you kill someone, you have to choose. When you're presented with the situation. Sometimes, it's a split second choice - you don't even think you're making it. You tell yourself you had no time to think.
Other times you have days to think it through ahead of time and you still won't know what you're going to choose until you're there and actually have to choose.
And you'll think that just the choice to kill someone is supposed to be the hardest choice you'll ever have to make, but it's not simply that one. But the choice to kill someone you loved, that is the hardest choice. It is the very hardest choice.
[...] This isn't common knowledge. It's actually something that I lie about. I've even lied about it to someone I love. I'm not really happy with myself about that, and expect that I'll end up telling him the truth after this, but...
I was married once. Back when I was very young. I was the man's bodyguard. There was a raid and he was presumed dead - this presumption lasted long enough that I'd long since finished grieving and had moved on. Years later, I learned that he was being held in a facility. Me being the woman I am, I staged a rescue. They'd been torturing him.
It was too late for me to save him, really. He was too wounded and in a way that was impossible for me to treat. We were out in the middle of nowhere. He was bleeding out.
I often lie and say he bled to death in my arms, when all I could do was watch.
The truth is he begged me to end it, and I did. Because I loved him. Because he needed me to do it. Because it was the merciful thing to do. Because I'm not sure what greater service a wife is supposed to provide her spouse than to be the person who ends their suffering. Because I couldn't stand by and do nothing. For a million other reasons.
... There's no good answer. He didn't suffer. My aim was true, and quick. He didn't spend another hour in pain bleeding from wounds I couldn't treat. He wanted it. He was dying anyway.
But the truth is that I killed my husband. No torturer did that. I did. That's the truth. I still have the bullet.
In the dream world I killed what was left of him, too, at his request.
The second situation I mentioned, I couldn't do it. And I was facing the embodiment of our pending destruction.
Oddly, while there are days I still can't forgive myself for doing what Milo needed me to do, every time I think of my brother and what he became, I curse myself for not being able to pull the trigger. Every. Single. Time.
I don't know if any of this helps. I'm more just giving you alternate perspective at this point.