Madhouse, Murderhouse

I had never held anyone like this before.

He was just... Gone. Everything in his body, his personality, his heart, even the light in his eyes... Gone. He was just a bunch of organs and muscles held together in the form of a man. He wasn't himself. He was dead.

God, I'm glad there wasn't much blood. He didn't deserve a messy death. He'd regretted everything he'd done since the day he came here, the day he was dragged into this vile murder-house. Everyone he'd been forced to kill he'd apologized to. The first time, the second, the tenth, everyone. He didn't deserve the pain inflicted on them. It wasn't his fault. But... God.

I was too numb to cry now. All I could see was a tactical disadvantage. My mind had been twisted into a sick, survival machine and my emotions deadened. Looking back now, I wish I could have held him a little longer, maybe cleaned up his cut neck a little, give him some honor... Tell him I'd loved him. But all I did was leave him there and run to the others. When I led them back, his body was gone. All that was left of him was bloody handprints dragging towards the now sealed door.

The others, some of them that knew him better-- they knelt at the pool of blood he'd died in. They cried and they screamed and they held each other. Some just kneeled in stony silence, maybe prayer.

If I could have searched deep into my conscience, I would have found a twinge of annoyance that these people couldn't just hold themselves together and move on so we didn't all suffer the same fate. In that moment, I was not human.

Beyond the people I'd killed in my time there, beyond the things I'd been forced to do-- the things I was willing to do to survive... Nothing haunts me such as that exact moment. The moment I turned from the invisible corpse of my soulmate and all I could think of was how the exit only opened when corpses were removed...