"I'm just saying 'everything happens.'"
At the time, you'd looked at her and seen everything you didn't have and so desperately wanted. You'd seen her pretty face, pretty eyes, pretty hands that held petitions and frozen yogurt and a thousand things that weren't your hands. That would never be your hands. You'd seen her there and felt wanting with a desperate ache, and you'd told her:
"Not to me."
Now, when you remember that day, you look at her and see what she's saying. You don't see her face; you see her as a series of events that have led her up to this point, up to that conversation and that Laundromat. You see her heartbeat as the ticking of a time bomb. You see her as a collection of organs that would someday stop working. Someday very soon, because everything happens.
You look back realize that those two words are the utter truth, and that they may be the only two words that have ever mattered. Everything happens. The universe strings along event after event after event, and you participate in it without even realizing. Everything happens, and it just keeps on happening. After she died, things continued happening. It was the end of her story, but not yours, and things continued happening and you had to go along with them because if you didn't, then that would put you right where she ended up. Where everyone ends up.
You haven't killed again. Not since her. There's still some debate over whether or not you were the one who actually killed her. Not among the general populace, obviously. They're too terrified to see the subtlety surrounding the circumstances of her death. Most of the dissenters are would‑be supervillains who can't crack their way into the ELE and want to knock you out of your spot. The official ruling is that it was your weapon that killed her, and so you are responsible. The blood was bestowed upon your hands like an honor. Some honor. Even if they hadn't crowned you a murderer, it wouldn't have changed anything. You still killed her.
But, no, you haven't killed again. You haven't had to. Everyone is so afraid of you that they'll cower without even the point of a death ray, without even a maniacal laugh. They don't have to know that the idea of scratching out another human life makes your stomach turn because you feel her body in your arms and she's shuddering for breath and her head rolls back and the glint leaves her eyes and then she's gone. She's gone for good and her hands are limp at her sides and they won't hold petitions or frozen yogurt or other hands anymore, and it's your fault.
Hey, everything happens, right? No take-backs, no do-overs, no pencil and eraser. Everything happens and then it's over because something can't un-happen. Everything happens fast because there's no other speed. You're Billy and then you're Dr. Horrible, forever. She's alive and then she's dead. Forever.
Everything happens until it stops happening, and that's the end of that. In that second when the shard of metal hit her chest, everything that had ever happened to her and everything that ever would started rolling together, crashing and colliding until they became one solid mass that stopped her breathing. That was because of you, you know. You halted a human life in its tracks then snapped it out of existence. You stood over the rules of what people should do and what they shouldn't do and you disregarded them. It doesn't matter that you weren't the one to fire; you had made that weapon with the intent to kill, and you did. It should make you feel powerful, like a god, like a monster of wrath and higher judgment. Instead, you feel small and weak.
Everything happens, and for her, everything did happen. Everything that would ever happen to her has already happened, and things won't keep happening to her anymore. She could have found love, started a family, had kids. Even if it hadn't been with you, it could've been with somebody. Or maybe she would have decided that she didn't want all of those things. She could have kept working for her charity. She could have kept helping the homeless. In her own way, she had wanted to save the world, and she probably wouldn't have, you know that. But she could have. Even if she had quit her charity work, sold her soul to some heinous corporation that didn't give a damn about the homeless, everything would have kept happening to her. Not forever, but for a while longer. Until the ticking time bomb in her chest exploded at some date in the far-off future. It wouldn't have been your fault. But it is.
It makes you want to die. You don't; not right now. You let everything happen to you. You sleep a lot. You dream a lot.
In your dreams, the sunlight through the Laundromat windows sparkles in her pretty eyes, and it's right now and she's telling you about her day. All the things that happened to her today. She's smiling, but then she has to leave. She steps down from the top of the washing machine and turns towards the door. Her hair fans out behind her, and the light picks up hints of gold in the red. You stand and run after her. You take her by the wrist.
"Everything happens," you say, a frantic edge in your voice. There's a lump in your throat, a piece of shrapnel, and your lower lashes are wet. You say it again: "Everything happens." She turns back towards you, her time-bomb heart exploding across the front of her shirt in a bloom of deep red. She smiles sadly, shakes her head, and says:
"Not to me."