I am done pretending
You have failed to find what's left
I will suck you dry again
Same are not worth saving
You are such a pretty mess
I will choke the life within

Now you want to take me down
As if I even care
I am the monster in your head
And I thought you'd learn by now
It seems you haven't yet
I am the venom in your skin
And now your life
Is broken

After the lights go out on you
After your worthless life is through
I will remember how you scream
I can't afford to care
I can't afford to care

I am suffocating
You have failed to pull me in
I will drag you down again
Life is unrelenting
Feeding lies into my head
i will feed the lies you live

Now you want to take me down
As if I even care
I am the monster in your head
And I thought you'd learn by now
It seems you haven't yet
I am the venom in your skin
And now your life
Is broken

After the lights go out on you
After your worthless life is through
I will remember how you scream
I can't afford to care
I can't afford to care


Remorse… That was a word Keiran McKinley refused to even recognize anymore. He had done too many things requiring such a feeling for it to even register in his mind. It didn't matter any longer. Even if he wanted to feel remorse for the things he had done in his past, all he would get is a cold tightening in his chest, as if someone were clenching his very heart with icy fingers.

The shadows didn't approve of his feelings. That was what he told himself. He knew that wasn't exactly true though. The shadows he wielded from the Shadowland were cold, but they didn't do this to him. He was the one that dulled his feelings. He had to if he wanted to survive emotionally.

He wondered though, if things wouldn't have turned out differently for him if he had controlled his anger better. What if he hadn't of struck out like he did? What if he hadn't walked in on his mother being beaten to a bloody pulp by the step father who called him "son" on a daily basis?

What if he had never been born and his father's powers and soul hadn't been ripped from his own body and given to Keiran?

Would things have ended up differently for his mother and younger brother?

At first he told himself that it wouldn't have, that his brother would have been the one to get his father's powers and things would have been nearly the same in outcome. But the more he had watched his younger sibling with protective eyes, the more he realized that the little boy clutching his bloody hands was void of any remnants of the Shadowland. He was pure in a sense.

Keiran was the tainted one. He was the one who caused his father's death and his mother's subsequent marriage to a man who beat her in a drunken stupor.

His taint was the reason he felt no remorse when his eyes went dark from rage and he brutally murdered his makeshift father.

No… That man was never his father.

He was a coward.

But wasn't Keiran the same? He felt fear for his mother and brother so he struck out to erase the fear by destroying the person who created it.

And now he was running from that very act in hopes that he would find some place that would permit him to not fear for their safety.

Keiran the coward.

Keiran the protector.

Keiran the murderer.

All one man. All one being cloaked in darkness.

He was neither good nor evil. He wouldn't choose a side because he knew he couldn't. His only purpose was to protect the only people left that mattered to him. He would take as many lives and save just as many if it meant keeping those two safe.

That is his only purpose now.

He couldn't afford to care about anything else.

Nothing else mattered.

Lights out.