Emil watched the dawn that wasn’t a dawn and knew that soon, the shadow would come for him, too.

Is this how Simel had felt all those years ago?

What a fool he’d been, to try to argue with him. To try to take the shadow’s side and justify his slaughter. Did a tiger need an excuse to eat flesh? Even less did the shadow need Emil’s reasoning.

It simply did things. Whether it be by instinct, emotion masquerading as reasoning, or reasoning under the guise of sympathy was irrelevant.

Emil had already decided. There was evil in this world. It stood in the raging fire, it crept in the darkness, and it tainted every smile he’d ever worn. Evil was a friend who said ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I don’t deserve your forgiveness.’ Evil was kind. Evil was funny. Evil was the friend he had always wanted, the second brother he’d never had. Evil had been with him all this time, whispering flattery and laughing at his jokes.

Evil could get better, but wouldn’t.

And Emil was the same. Always had been.

He was the same as him. He was the shadow’s shadow. He’d only been too arrogant to notice that the shadow he cast was doubly dark; his smile twice as crooked; his fall twofold. One for you, one for me.

Outside the window, within the flames of the city, the shadow danced among pirouetting rats. No one was screaming anymore. There wasn’t anyone left to rush out of their house, clutching their child to their breast. No one to witness evil, aside from him.

The city was bright in the darkness, and warm in the middle of the night. The shadow disappeared from sight. But he knew that it had gone into the hospital. There was nowhere left for it to continue its massacre aside from the hospital. So that’s where it went.

Emil listened as the voices of the hospital erupted in shouting before being snuffed out. At first, they were far away. Then, closer, closer. As the shadow approached, missing not even a single patient, the voices faded into nothingness, their lives snuffed out within moments. The last one was just outside his door. But even as that final patient died, he couldn’t hear any footsteps. Not even breathing. Nothing.

Evil was quiet. Evil was pleasant. Evil was a delight to be around.

The door opened. In the darkness, a yellow eye peeked inside.

The shadow entered. “Hey,” it said. “So, I’m back. I’m done. That was… genuinely really exhausting. I mean, seriously. I’m like the mormons out here, moving from house to house… Except instead of bringing them the good news about how to get to heaven, I just get them there straight away!”

Emil smiled.

Evil was funny. Evil found comedy in the tragic.

Evil was not to be trusted.

The shadow froze, its dark shape splattered across the room. “That’s not good. That’s… why are you looking at me in that way? That’s not…” It scuttled across the room. Emil smiled up at it. “Shit. Shit. What happened? I was gone for like twelve hours and now you’re—you’re not even… What is this? What is that expression? I can’t… This doesn’t make any sense. I…” It hissed a breath. “Damn it. Nothing to do about it now. The fire is closing in and I still have to get Rat’s heart… Well, hopefully this will fix things. You’ll be coming along.”

Of course he would. What else could he do?

The shadow lifted him into its arms. He couldn’t quite feel it. Everything was dull and numb. All he felt was a sense of pressure as the shadow carried him out of his room and into the corpse-littered hallway.

The shadow glanced down at him. “Well? Is this…?” Emil smiled up at it. The shadow clicked its tongue. They continued.

“Now that I think about it, you never did visit Rat. Not that I fault you or anything. I wouldn’t want to visit him either, with the way he is now.” The shadow observed him closely, watching for any shift in his easy, simple, quaint smile. It frowned. Grinding its teeth, the shadow sat him down on a chair, propping him up in front of the patient. “Look. Here he is. It’s your friend—Rat! Isn’t it horrible what’s happened to him?”

The patient, his pale face held up by the shadows clawed hands, blubbered and mumbled, smiling dumbly. What a pitiable thing. Emil hoped he would soon be put out of his misery.

The shadow flinched, a desperate, pained expression flashing across its snarling face. “That’s horrible. You’re looking at him the wrong way. He’s your friend, you’re not supposed to look at him like he’s… like he’s… some thing!” It breathed heavily, releasing the patient. Frowning in exertion, the shadow stormed up to him. Grabbing him by the scruff of his collar, it raised him into the air easily, like he was nothing but a sack of potatoes. “Alright. I see how it is. You don’t want to think of him as your friend? Sure. Fine by me. But, one thing you should know… One thing I didn’t want to tell you…” It hesitated. How strange. Evil shouldn’t hesitate. Still holding him, the shadow pointed at the patient. “I did that. He was trying to run away. So, to keep him here as an extra life for you, I made him like that. And—and even worse? I did the same to Jazz. So she wouldn’t tell you about what she’d figured out. It’s horrible, isn’t it? I made it so you couldn’t say goodbye to her properly! And then, I did the same thing to Rat! Simply because I cared more that you lived than that you were happy. Horrible, right? I’m a terrible, irredeemable person, aren’t I? Please. You agree, don’t you?”

He did. He agreed fully. It was terrible. Even more than that—it was evil. Pure evil. Just like he was.

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What the shadow was doing was evil. However, since he was doing it to Emil, who was also evil, it wasn’t evil anymore. It was good.

Hurting evil was always good.

And so, Emil smiled.

The shadow flinched back as though burnt, dropping Emil to the floor. The pressure turned to pain and Emil began to writhe on the floor, moaning listlessly. “Auhh, auhhhh…”

“I—I’m sorry! I’m so sorry, I just…”

Emil glared up at him.

The shadow backed away. “Now it’s right. Now you’re looking at me like that again. Why? I don’t understand. You loved me a moment ago. Is it the physical pain? No. But… why? You’re incomprehensible. Why won’t you make sense…?”

Unlike the shadow, Emil knew that he made a lot of sense. He was perfectly rational. There was no fault in his reasoning. It was the shadow that wouldn’t be consistent. Evil did not change. Evil pretended to change, made a show of changing, and then didn’t. Evil was static. The shadow was acting wrong.

It lifted him up and sat him back down on the chair. “I’m going to get you your heart now,” it said slowly, “and you’re going to sit right there and try to remember whose heart it is I’m getting.”

Emil watched as the shadow extracted the heart from the patient. The shadow seemed to think it was slick, putting the patient in a coma before it began to operate. Maybe it thought Emil wouldn’t notice. The shadow was doing it the wrong way again. It was all wrong.

Once the shadow had the heart in hand, it turned back to him, and uttered a horrible sigh of relief. “Okay. That’s good. Keep feeling that way and this should all turn out just fine. Right? Right.”

Heart in one hand, it took a moment for the shadow to figure out how to carry both the heart and him. In the end, it simply slung him over its shoulder and headed out. Its hand was warm and wet. Its shoulder was cold and sticky. As it walked, the swaying pushed breath out of Emil’s lungs. The hospital was filled with corpses. Once it exited the building, the streets were filled with corpses, too. Dead rats dotted the sidewalks. Various organs and limbs laid strewn here and there.

Emil didn’t really feel anything. He was surprised by himself. He’d always been weak to gore, quick to nausea, but not now. It was the most grisly, horrific sight he’d ever seen, and yet, he didn’t feel any worse than he had as a kid, when he found a dead mouse in his room. He’d merely felt a sense of disgust, and a certain type of indignity at knowing something like that had crawled underneath his bed just to die. How dare it?

He felt that now, too. The air was filled with ash and smoke and final breaths. The houses stank. The whole city seemed to be choking beneath a miasma of cooked meat. It smelled like a rotten barbecue. Meat and heat made for a tasty smell. Of course, he’d never want to try it. He wasn’t like the shadow in that regard. They were both equals in evil, but they still differed, if only slightly.

As the shadow carried him through what was left of the city, Emil tried to recall what it had been called. The names of the streets, and the owners of the houses, and the sellers of the stores. He couldn’t remember any of it. The only witnesses left to the history of this city couldn’t remember anything about it.

How horrible. How evil of them.

The city gate loomed ahead. Corpses had been piled around and atop it. “Give me a second,” the shadow said, putting him down as it began to one-handedly root through the corpses. In the end, it found a lever of some sort, which opened the gates. Heaving Emil back onto his shoulder, the shadow continued its heavy trek.

The air outside was nice and fresh. The early dawn had painted the world in pink and blue, clouds of lofty yellow streaking across the sky in diamond shapes, blown east by the gentle ebb and flow of the wind. The world no longer smelt like rot and death. It was fresh, free, and boundless, bobbing to the rhythm of the shadow’s gait, rocking Emil into a gentle, dreamless sleep.

When he woke up, his ears were filled with the eager rush of a nearby stream. His body felt wet and cold. Opening his eyes, he found the shadow, awkwardly washing his body one-handedly with water from a stream, ensuring that he wouldn’t get sick again. The shadow had cleaned itself as well, no longer covered in gore and viscera. It was clean, with skin and hair and a face to match the eyes. It noticed Emil’s gaze. “Stop that,” it grumbled. “Please stop looking at me like that. I hate it. Can’t you see what I’m holding?”

‘My salvation,’ Emil thought. ‘My cruel, horrible salvation.’

The shadow lowered his hand, bringing the still beating heart out of view. "Now, hold still. I can still smell some pathogens on you. I prepared a coat for you to wear once I’ve healed you, but as for everything else… I recommend that you avoid pulling anything out of your inventory for like a week or so. Your staff should be okay, but everything else is off-limits. Capiche?”

Emil watched it.

Grimacing, the shadow finished washing him. It pulled him back onto land. They were next to a stream, beside a grassy, beautiful field. Lying on his back, Emil watched the clouds float by. That one looked like a cat. That one looked like a heart. That one looked like a claw.

The shadow loomed over him, eclipsing the sky. It held his salvation in its hand, clutched tightly. “I’m going to operate now,” it said. “It’s going to hurt. But when it’s done, you’ll be fully healed. You’ll be okay. And as for me… I’ll be gone. I’ll disappear, like I’m supposed to. This is probably the last time you’ll ever see me.” It crouched down above him. Its clawed hand moved down his chest, one claw slitting a line across it.

It… hurt.

He breathed.

Something sawed through his bones.

It hurt.

“Don’t move too much or you’ll suffer needlessly.”

Crack, crack, crack, crack. His ribs went away. His skin was pulled away. His muscles were bent away.

It hurt. It hurt. It hurt.

Claws moved through his flesh. Sawing away parts, tearing away others. Opening him up. Harming him. Filling his chest with horrible pain that made it hard to breathe and no matter how much he wriggled and writhed it wouldn’t stop.

It hurt. It hurt! It hurt!

“Auuhhe, aaauuuhhhhh…!”

“Stop,” the shadow said beyond a sheen of red, “don’t… Please don’t make this any harder than it has to be.”

Sawing, tearing, hurting, popping, pulling, hurting, slicing, dicing, hurting, claws in, claws out, arteries going off, warm wet blood pouring down his chest, disgusting and warm and wet, all horrible, and the pain, it hurt, it hurt so badly, he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t move, and no matter what he did he couldn’t fight, he couldn’t run, he couldn’t do anything, he couldn’t even beg for mercy from someone who had been a close as a brother.

And from just beyond his view, he saw that shadow, that horrible, horrible shadow, pull his heart from his chest.

‘No,’ he thought, ‘not that—don’t take… my heart. Without that, I’m…’

The other heart was shoved into his chest. It was cold. But only for a moment. Then, it burned. A fire was lit in his chest. A fire like that of a thousand houses, all going up in flames. Burning like the pits of hell, filled with the souls of innocents who had been at the wrong place at the wrong time. Fire, like justice, fire, like revenge, fire, like…

His arms sprouted from his sides. His legs likewise.

He breathed through new lungs.

He was… he…

He could finally think clearly again. Before him, hunched down like a beggar, leaned halfway over him as though worried sick, stood Kitty. His eyes were moist and reddened. “Moleman,” the younger man breathed. “You’re back, aren’t you?”

Emil touched a hand to his throat, to his chest, to his everything. “Wh… what…?”

Kitty slung his arms around him. “I’m so glad. I… I really missed you.” Before Emil could react, Kitty detached himself again. “Okay… Okay.” His eyes were focused on an invisible message. “I have to go now. I’m sorry for everything. Not that it matters.” His smile widened. “Gosh, am I glad to see you looking at me like that again. I really thought I’d lost you for a moment there.”

“Kitty,” Emil breathed.

Not waiting for him, Kitty stood up. “Right. Right! I’ll be going now. I hope… No, nevermind. Before I go, I just want you to know one thing.” His smile turned melancholic. Tears fell from his eyes like raindrops on a cloudless day. “I want to get better. I really do. And… I’m going to work towards it. I really am. But… If I do get better, for realsies, then…” He wiped his tears. “I don’t mind if you’re not there. You could become so much, Moleman. And I… I can only hope to be worthy of being your shadow. If even that.”

Emil pulled himself to his feet. “Kitty, wait,” he said, but it was too late.

“Goodbye, Moleman. Even if I was never your friend… I always held you dear. That will never change. I love you.”

He reached out for him. “Kitty, I—”

But just like that, he was gone. Petals in the wind.

And for the fifth time that year, Emil hadn’t gotten to say goodbye.