Catherine the Great
By: The Scribe
In his dreams, things had transpired differently.
He would see her standing before him, hear her insane prattle about how she had done it all for him. Hear her state proudly and without remorse, how with a stroke of a match, she had burned the soul out of his existence by taking away the family he adored. He would not really see or hear her because his mind was filled with horrific images of charred wood and equally charred bodies and she was the centerpiece in the destruction. She would stare at him, confused at why he was not happy, wondering why he could not see that what she had given him a gift that was meant to set him free instead of kill him a thousand times over.
He would listen impassively, letting Ella state her case for her crimes and then he would kill her. He would fire his gun and care not that he was killing a woman because she ceased to have gender or personality when he had learned the truth. All he knew was the fact that she was the enemy, the destroyer of worlds and the murderer of children. She was everything terrible under the sun and when she stood before him with her back against the horizon, he could see the sky behind her was the color of blood. Only when he pulled the trigger and heard the explosion of gases that slammed bullets into her body, did he feel any measure of peace.
Watching her die, watching her blood soaked into the dirt at his feet was the closest he had come to feeling anything as unrestrained as ecstasy for too long. Everything he felt after she murdered his wife and son was merely a shadow of the living, breathing being he had once been. Passion had been drained from his world and though it was slowly filtering into his existence once again, it had not returned with such potency until this moment. This perfect moment, when he saw her lying on the ground, her eyes wide open and bewildered that he had wrought this violence upon her, when she had only acted out of love for him.
"Why?" She would croak, blood spurting from her mouth, the product of her bullet riddled body.
"Because I never loved you," he would whisper in her ear. He was determined that the last thing she would hear from his lips before she passed into the hell that waited her, was his utter loathing. "I could never love you."
She would stare at him, wounded and crushed, realizing in the final moments of her life what a terrible thing she had done but there would be no time to ask for repentance or to say anything that might earn her salvation in some higher place. The light in her eyes would fade before she was able to ask his forgiveness; not that he was going to give it to her anyway. Before the spark faded away completely, he would spit in her face and leave her to die alone in the dirt like the vile creature she was.
Of course it did not happen that way.
All too soon, he would awake up to the realization that she had died knowing none of the things he would have imparted to her before her end. The perfect moment of vengeance was denied him because he had not been the one to finish things between them. Someone else had killed her. Someone else had killed her, leaving Chris Larabee with the knowledge that in the final hand of this game he had been playing with Ella Gaines, she had once again beaten him.
Yet again.
