A/N: If you haven't seen the entire DVD (especially the commentaries), you will not understand what's going on here, so you may not want to bother. At any rate, spoilers abound. And, if it's unclear, the man spoken of in the beginning is the unidentified man from the pilot. Standard disclaimers apply.
Shadowed
"He lied to you, Mr. Kolchak." The man says it like one who is telling a child that the sky is blue. They can't explain the reasoning behind it, but know it to be true nonetheless.
I look hard at him, unwilling to believe this of the man I had come to know. The first person I had met who was something like me, born with this strange mark – and, unlike me, knowledgeable about it – and he lied?
"Why would he do that?" I wonder aloud. "He was the one that sent me here…."
"I don't know," the man says in response to my question. "Maybe he couldn't live with the truth. Maybe he didn't want you to have to."
My eyes, which have fallen from him sometime during the course of our conversation, now return to his face with an intensity that seems almost to startle him. "Why should I believe you?" I demand.
"Think about it, Mr. Kolchak," comes the reply. "On the whole, have you ever felt terribly virtuous? Righteous, maybe?" He cracks a slight smirk, as though daring me to lie.
I remember a knife, falling to the floor with a clatter. I remember messages that weren't my own, evil working through me that ultimately killed a man.
I'm thinking about it, and I can't seem to remember righteousness.
My frown deepens, but I say nothing. Like hell I'm going to admit to something like that.
But, at the same time, I can't deny it.
He only says, "Exactly."
The silence that comes on us then is not awkward as much as it is uncomfortable. I hate what this man is telling me, naturally want with everything in me to be able to disbelieve, to have reason to doubt. But I can't. And that changes everything.
"What now?" I finally ask. "What do you do with knowledge like this? What good does it do anybody?"
"With knowledge like this," he answers, "you live. You live your life and you try to live it so what I'm telling you is a lie. I don't know if you can, if any of us can, or if whether fate or destiny or whatever it might be will come to claim us from the light, from the good, however much we struggle against it. I don't know. But it's really the only thing you can do, isn't it?" He looks at me.
Slowly, I nod, then look down at my wrist where, with my watch in my pocket, the mark lies exposed. No longer good, but evil. And now, taunting, almost.
In silence I put my watch back on, contemplating good, evil, and free will. And I know that – whether or not any one of us, the others and I, can ever truly prevail – I will try.
It really is, in the end, the only thing to be done.