All Things Pure and Good

The hero and villain are separated by twenty feet of ash-dusted soil, littered with the cracked remains of a concrete sidewalk. Around them, the air is clouded, the clouds yellow. The screams have long since faded into bone-chilling silence, and their breaths carry over the roaring wind, echoing in their ears.

“You have already taken away everything they have.”

“It’s not enough.”

“What more could you want?” The hero stands open-mouthed, gaping with teary eyes at the man who razed an entire city and all of its inhabitants to the ground and dared to say it wasn’t enough. So nonchalantly, as if he was merely checking off a list of goals to accomplish, as if he had all the time in the world to take the hero apart piece by piece.

The hero had lived in the city. His family’s bones were probably buried somewhere in the ruins behind him.

“I want you to bow to me. I want New York’s golden boy, the hero of all heroes, to beg for his life, and then I want to kill him.”

The villain’s gloved hands are trembling from where they are shoved in his pockets. The thought of crying quickly crosses his mind, but he hasn’t tasted the salt of his own tears since he was accused of running a knife through his father’s stomach years ago. He’s battled to keep it that way since.

It was always meant to end with the hero. It would be the final step to feeling whole.

“I just wanted to make it right--”

“Oh, you were such a piece of good in this world,” the villain murmured, clenching his hands into fists. “And you told me with your bright little eyes that I could be good again, and you believed it too. Am I to blame for that?”

“B-but--”

“I suppose you weren’t entirely wrong. There was good in me for a while. But I was tired of feeling so… undecided.”

The hero lets him go on, clearly trying to gather strength. It’s no use. He’s hardly keeping himself upright; blood is streaked across his face like warpaint, and his eyes glaze over with pain every time he puts weight on his right leg.

“Every day I would wake up split between these glowing parts of me that were still good and the pieces of darkness that everyone saw. Every day I did something bad, I would think, another one of those shining parts of me is gone and I would ache at the thought of being just another a fallen angel. Just another fuckup destroying his own life.”

It’s admirable, really, how the hero is still trying to ward off the pain. He’s digging his fingernails into his palms, gritting his teeth. He must know he has no chance of survival. He must be selfish enough to beg for his own life, even knowing that the villain won’t let him go anyway. All things pure and good must be ruined.

“Wouldn’t it make you sick, to constantly be reminded of how far you fell from grace?”

The hero looks around him at the ruins of the city. Millions of screams, millions of reminders of how he failed. “I--”

“So when I kill you,” the villain continued, raising his gun, “I will be whole again. Not a single shining little mismatched piece left. No more reminders.”

New York’s golden boy.

The most pure-hearted thing the world had ever seen.

A body on the floor before him, a bullet leaving a patch of blooming red on his chest.

And the villain waits, and waits, for himself to fully accept the darkness, to breathe easy as nothing but pure evil. But there is nothing but pain, lighting through his chest, stabbing him in his lungs, drawing wrecked sobs from his hoarse throat.

Because now instead of light there is guilt, a seed of silver within the black. It burns and burns and burns and there are tears falling on the hero’s body, and it takes him a moment to realize they are his. He tries to draw in air but every inhale sends him wheezing, every exhale a rasping cough. It shouldn’t hurt this much, so why--

He tried. Oh, he tried. But he should have known that nothing could ever be truly whole.

And as he clasps his brother’s hand--the hand that had truly held the knife, that had been drenched in their father’s blood--the city burns behind them.