A bounty hunter's angst. No specific character.

In the beginning, you try to justify your actions, say that they deserved their fate. In the beginning you hate yourself. You wake up at night, sweating, their faces dancing before you like ghosts in the darkness, and their features remain burned into your eyelids when you turn on the lights. In the beginning you run out the door and scream into the sky, begging the stars to tell you whether or not you are really the monster you see when you look in the mirror.

You say, just one more bounty. Then I'll be through. I'll have enough money to start over. I'll leave all this behind. But every job turns into another, and another, and you start to get hooked. The faces start to blur together and you can sleep again at night. You start to live for tougher and tougher jobs, relishing the thrill of the chase and the paycheck at the end. You stop judging your employers, stop trying to pick out the bad from the good.

The months turn into years and you can't remember a time when you didn't kill. Your world becomes a blur of blood and money and shady deals.

People ask you if you were the one who killed so-and-so, and you tell them honestly that you can't remember. Every face, every name, becomes like another: just a target, just another payday.

After a while though, you start to wish you still felt the pain. You wish you could ache with guilt. You wish that your throat could still constrict with fear as you pull the trigger, wish you could still vomit as the blood spatters your face and stains your clothes red.

You want to hurt, because a tortured soul would be better than this cold nothingness that used to be you.

But you take that next job because you have forgotten how to do anything else.