“Please, please don’t hate me,” was all I could think to say to her, my words raspy as my throat threatened to swell up. “It was the only way I could find to bring hope back into the world.”

She still looked at me, working through everything in her head. I could see the way she considered my words, considering how they impacted everything she had seen until now. What pained me even more is that I could see it in her face exactly when she stopped trusting me, too.

I didn’t blame her. I had spent the last two years pretending to be someone I wasn’t. The whole world thought me to be a hero, when I was really just a sad nobody pretending to save the world so that people would think I was important. I knew I wasn’t important, but maybe if I could convince other people I saved them from certain death, they would portray me as a _somebody_.

“But… how? Why?” she asked. “Why did you say you saved them from that crash in the desert when they actually all _died_? How can you be so terrible to erase their legacies, to not tell their families they’d never be seen again?” 

To be honest, I had forgotten that other people had families, that other people had people waiting for them to come home everyday. “Please...” was all I managed to get out before the tears started streaming. Even as she walked away, I kept explaining the bits and pieces that would come out, in case she decided to come running back. “I thought if I came back saying everything was okay, that they were saved… I didn’t want people to be sad, I didn’t want them hurt. I didn’t want to admit… I didn’t want to admit that I’m a killer, that I killed them by not saving them.”

She was long gone by that point. I didn’t even know who I was talking to anymore. But, as I kept talking, as I realized the one person I cared for now hated me too, I swore to myself that I would never fear my true identity again. If people wanted to see me for who I really was, I would show them. My first act as this new me, I decided, would be to admit what I was scared of: I’m a killer. I’m not a hero, except to Death itself. Since Death was following me around so much already, why not become its recruiter?

My sadness turned to rage, and desire for praise turned into desire to _kill_. I had nothing left to live for, anyway. And I was going to take away the thing that made my heart soft the most: Sophie. The one thing standing in my way of becoming the most powerful villain in the world. 

So, I followed that urge to kill, snuffed out my last ember of humanity, and followed Sophie all the way back to her house, cloaking myself in my shadows that I once used for “good”. 

And waited, and waited.

Until I saw her pretty face for the last time.

_Yes_, Death whispered in my ear. _This one will do nicely_.