Love is an odd thing. The love of a friend, a mother, a soul mate; all loves are different and mine is more unusual than any. My love is pain, torture, agony, mixed with a small tinge of bliss somewhere in between. But death cannot love, and if it tries it kills not only its target, but all life around it. So this is my punishment for being death and Human, one and the same. Human? That is an odd thought, indeed. I am more than merely Human and yet less than a person ought to be. For a moment I look back at everything I once was; a child with no childhood, a mother with no hatred, a fiancé with no quarrel, a killer with no thought. The last one sticks in my mind, a killer. The only reason I exist is to end another's existence. It is not the path I chose and yet I have willingly traveled it non-the-less. My addiction is not Flash or money, my addiction is murder. My father was correct when he called me death itself, so what right have those around me to change my very substance?
Someone whispers my name, or rather the name of the woman he wishes I was. I look at him, his pale face wrenching what little heart I have. This man, my love, my agony, everything I want but cannot have. He looks frightened and I realize I have seen fear countless times but never before had it swayed me from mortality's intent. I know this is my testing ground and the choice for failure is mine alone. I raise my weapon, the barrel pointing at the man before me and wonder how many times he has stared down the receiving end of a gauss gun. He speaks my name again, though this time it is without pleading. He will not beg before his lady and for that I admire him. Slowly my eyes soak in his slumped and beaten form. Blood cakes his clothing after days of beating and starvation. His body is wracked by the occasional cough, which causes me to cringe despite myself. My own being is sore from much of the same punishment, though I have proved better equipped to handle it, needing only more sleep in order to finish healing.
The door behind me opens and breaks my rambling thoughts. It is only then that I realize my mind has been procrastinating for me, my small amount of love infecting my judgment even without my consent. Keeping my gun in place I glance over my shoulder at the owner of the footsteps. My father stands there, though he does not realize that I know who he really is. I look too much like him for my taste, a thought that makes me sick. It was he who destroyed me before I was ever born, he who set me on this course of destruction. This Nietzschean scum who robbed my mother of her husband, first child, and her freedom! He looks at me, proud of what I have become in his service, what he has made me. He is all too pleased with himself for creating his own Herald of Death. I feel my anger boil and resist the urge to spit on him. I turn my gaze back to the other man, this Kludge whom I love so dearly. I know that in order to live my anger must be cast upon him instead of on the monster behind me whose bodyguards watch from every crack and crevice in the ancient walls. My father mumbles something to me about showing my weaknesses and I turn to him only to realize whom my weakness truly is. It is not the Mudfoot who feebly stands; boring into my soul with his eyes. No, it is the father who exiled hi daughter to Earth because of her half-breed status, the man who took her from one hell to the next, the "superior" that even now gloats over her broken back. Death I may be but slave I am also, this I was born to this man when he enslaved my mother in her harem though she was Human, married, and pregnant with my sister.
My sister...another stray thought, another child born a slave. I remember her; she is free now as I will never be. Images flash through my head; I see friends, family, laughter, and tears. With these in mind I turn from my intended target and aim at the man who is my curse. Love is not my agony, this Nietzschean thief is. He is the cause of my controversy, my hatred, my addiction.
"It ends here," I whisper, my throat dry and parched.
"You can't kill me, I'm the only reason you exist."
I smile at his bold statement, "You forget...I am the external negative, I am death." A few moments pass as I weigh the consequence of my choice.
My heart stops and I
pull the trigger.
