Heroes: Kill Me Again

'Do it,' she said, settling herself on the table. Typically forthright, she had made a medical couch of a dining table.

He lifted the scarf. The paisley whorls looked like teardrops, not the prosaic weavings of a disinterested machine, programmed long before it ever encountered the cotton. Folded into a thick and long rectangle, the scarf resembled a bandage, the tears of colour lined up in orderly ranks. Not that Claire would notice the irony, of course. He smiled a little at that, secretly, where she could not see him. She was vivacious and young and – the word perky ran uneasily through his mind – but he doubted she saw the deepness and double meanings of the world around her. He doubted she saw the order and chaos of ordinary things. Every inch a cheerleader, like a flower newly opened – thoughtless, comically serious, irresistible in her perfection. He thought of daisies, freshly opened to the morning sun – and then brought the cloth down over her mouth and nose.

Instinct made her struggle, just momentarily – but she had amazing self control. She looked up at him, her eyes resolute, giving him the approval to carry on.

He watched her, absorbing the minutiae of her death. The way her pupils dilated, the way her skin became cyanotic as her blood lost the fight to absorb oxygen. The way her eyes finally became glazed and unseeing and reflecting of only the ceiling above her and the lights that blazed hot in their glass spheres. He touched his hand to her chest, feeling the softness of skin and fat and the solidity of her ribs beneath, but no heartbeat at all.

Finally he removed the cloth. He crouched, bringing his face close to hers, noting the dark spider-lines of her eyelashes and the scar-less skin and the almost-iridescence of her pupils. He could see himself reflected there, shown twice over, distorted like a reflection in a spoon. As he came closer he could see his own eyes, dark, reflected in her blue ones.

She shuddered breath into her lungs like a creature breaching from the sea, and focus snapped into her eyes.

'Did you enjoy it?' she asked.

Her eyes were unflinching on his. He was used to his own gaze being direct, not to having it returned with such clarity and certainty.

'It was beautiful, Claire,' he said with the utmost softness, countering her brashness with the heavy weight of his own intensity. Was this, perhaps, how vampires would feel, if such a thing existed? Perhaps he was a modern vampire. Instead of feeding on blood he fed on the beauty of how people worked.

'Do you want to kill me again?'