Kiley lay on her back in the sand and stared at the suns. She knew that something was wrong, in that not right sort of way that wrong is. She knew this because the suns kept jumping forward in the sky, and she knew that she wasn't sleeping. Maybe she was passing out. Maybe she wasn't. Maybe the hit to her head had shaken things, broken things. Maybe not.

She really didn't care.

She couldn't believe what had happened. She could not convince her mind that this morning had happened. Every time she tried, the suns would end up leaping forward again. Knives, and Ace, gone? Impossible. She could hardly remember not having the two of them around. Every time she tried to conceive it, the planet just grew too large in her mind, and she drew too small. They… she… they belonged together. They did… didn't they?

Where were they? Why? Why did they have to leave?

She was evil. She had almost killed Knives.

She loved him.

She killed him.

No, she hadn't… he was still alive. But gone.

How could they do this to her? She listened for the thud of her heart in her chest. Surely it was ripped out… no. There it went. Thump-thump, just as always. Like things hadn't changed so utterly. She spent a few moments hating her heart.

It didn't care; just continued to pump blood as usual.

Hmph.

She tried to think about the morning, but her mind skittered away from it again.

The suns jumped. She tried to remember what had happened.

They jumped again. She couldn't see them anymore.

That meant hours had passed.

Hours since she had almost killed him.

She could still feel his heart under her hands, could still feel herself reaching out towards him, ready to still that beat.

Still a killer. Always a killer.

How could she profess to love someone and still be so quick to end their life?

How could she have tried to kill him?

She'd be better off dead.

Maybe… if she never moved again, if she let the desert cover her…

A fitting end. Buried in sand. Left behind like the refuse, the trash she was. Better for the world, to not have her in it.

Too much violence in her soul, like a stain that could never be erased. Too much blood spilled by her hands for her to ever stop. A cycle unending, death upon death upon death. Hers the only stop, the only quit to the horror.

Except even death wasn't an escape. The thought of having to go through something like this all over again… she couldn't handle it.

But she couldn't move, either.

She ached to have this all taken from her. To seek oblivion, to be removed from herself… She wanted to disappear from mind, memory, from ever having been. Things would be better that way. To save people from the misery of ever having to know her, to keep her away from that which her presence would inevitably corrupt.

She was evil. Evil without redemption, without hope of salvation. She had hoped, prayed, desired to change, but she never would. Killer. Forever.

Killer that even other killers shunned.

A Kiley indeed.

Living Death. Again… no, always. A role she took on that seeped into her very soul, assassin. Murderer. Soaked in blood. A weapon of destruction, nothing more. Never more. Only the simplest of things, only the commonest of beings. Death, destruction, all that was left to her. All that was her. All that she would ever be.

She felt grains of sand blowing against her face, each soft patter of silicon against flesh a blow to her soul. She imagined each was the revenge of a victim, and began to flinch when the breeze blew too many against her flesh.

How could she? How could she?

There were so many additions to that question. How could she have been left behind? How could she have almost killed him? How could she love him? How could she disappear into nothingness? How could she have ever believed that she could change?

She bared the question down to its essential three words. How could she. How… a query of process. Could… a word of actionable being. She… a fool, a fool who was nothing.

Nothing. Nothing made sense. She was still so tired… couldn't he have waited? Waited until after she felt better? Why did he have to leave her now? Now, when… now, never… how could he leave?

Did he hate her that much?

Why couldn't he have killed her?

Did he hate her so much that he wanted to leave her alive? To lay here, steeped in misery and depression, self-hate and self-pity?

Did he just not care? How could he not? She was… he thought she was human. He should have killed her.

She was more than half-tempted to follow him and demand her death. But that would be silly and much too overdramatic. Much easier to just lay here and slip under the sands. No fuss, no one need care. Just an anonymous set of bones to be bleached by the sun, emerging in five years or ten to be stripped of desiccated flesh by the wind. A fitting end, to be dried up into nothingness. A life that stole life from others, stolen from this body by the elements. Almost romantic, if you thought about it.

Perhaps she could join her spirit to the wind, to roll howling over a dead world. Where she so aptly belonged. Left alone, unloved, undesired, rushing over the sands that cradled her remains.

The remains of a killer. A despised, pathetic loser who could never change, never grow, never leave her past behind. Death lay entwined with her soul like some noxious vine, its thorns spearing her, making her bleed out violence.

She was a killer.

She was alone.

She deserved it.