Story [The Crow] Burn in Peace (October Write-by-Theme Challenge)

Author: jedi_of_ennth
Fandom: The Crow (James O'Barr's original comic)
Characters: Eric Draven, mentions of Shelly Webster
Summary: Revenge is only as sweet as you make it.

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i may be human.

i may be a demon.

it really doesn't matter now. doesn't matter, my thoughts spin cold as night and dark as dirt, blood heavy on my hands. i lick it off my fingers, one by one, tasting the last crimson shreds of lives i have taken. lives i have reduced to smears on my fingertips. lives that have embedded themselves in my fingerprints, deaths that have become a part of me. if i trail my hands along the glass of this storefront, i will leave little memorials against the frosted panes.

oh, to taste revenge. i bring the knife to my lips and lick it again, lick off the last of the detritus--it’s not the remnant of a man’s life; no, it’s the remnant of a soulless puppet’s strings. sweet on my tongue, dark on my lips--

i used to lick chocolate off her fingers when she frosted christmas cookies.

i remember her. i remember her all the time.

how could i forget? she trembled with light. the whole world used to fill up with the sunrise, the night used to end when we woke together, her limbs tangled around mine, the sheets tangled around us both.

the night used to end.

it doesn't anymore. it is always night. sometimes i think i see the moon, but it’s always just a street light, and those can be fractured, their light ground out in a crack of shattering glass.

i scrape my fingers along a brick wall, grinding blood and skin into the facade. even in the night, didn't there used to be some sort of illumination? didn't she used to twirl in the moonlight, a sweet dream of pale skin and trailing hair, curves bare and soft and inviting as she swept me up in hazy sensuality? my fingertips belong against her.

my knuckles sting. over and over and over they sting against brick, and when i pull them back and place them on my lips i taste my blood, my life, my death.

her blood, her life, her death.

i used to kiss her knuckles, one by one by one, and they were warm with those little traces of sunlight that emanated from her skin.

my hands are cold without her.

she bled before they killed her. she bled and she cried and i saw, i saw it all, and because of that, because of that i clawed my way back through the earth, i raged beneath the dirt to return, to bring her justice.

the justice of my knife.

and when they’re all dead, when the men who cut her and beat her and tore her soft skin in all the warm places only i was meant to touch, i will crawl back to her, i promise, and i will rest, and she will sleep beside me.

that is, if i am still human.

and if i have become a demon?

then i will burn in hell knowing that those who hurt her burn beside me, and i will burn in peace.

.fin​

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Wow! That's really beautiful and powerful. I love his love for her, and I feel teary at him pain.

And what an amazing last line!