[Alex Kralie will not let go. He worked too goddamn hard for this moment. Years of tracking him through videos and tweets and hotel reservations and broken branches and empty houses, all leading here.]
[He'll finish the job this time. He has to.]
[His fingers wrap tighter. The scrapes across his hands doesn't matter. The struggling flesh under his hands doesn't matter. All that matters is--]
---
[Electricity screams through the air, through the circuits woven across Shepard's skeleton. There's an awful static whine, and the air splits in impossible configurations, bands of light and color bright enough to hurt.]
[EYES OPEN]
[The muscles constrict. Every blink is agony.]
[It wants her to watch.]
---
[All that matters is the way the stick-thin body stops convulsing, hands falling limp at its sides. The camera lies a few feet away, its screen cracked and half-disconnected, bare wires straining to hold it together.]
[Maybe, years ago, Alex Kralie would have taken it as a memento. Maybe, years ago, Alex Kralie would have kicked it, sending new cracks spiderwebbing across the screen, or pulled it apart the rest of the way. Maybe he would have turned the lens on himself. Maybe he would have taken the tape.]
[Today, Alex Kralie does not acknowledge it.]
[Instead, he steps away from the unconscious body, its chest barely rising as it draws thin breaths through a crushed windpipe.]
[He reaches into the underbrush and withdraws a cracked block of cement, the remnants of some long-gone construction project.]
---
[EYES]
[OPEN]
---
[Alex Kralie brings the rock down on the body's head four separate times.]
cw: death, alex kralie doing horrible things
[He'll finish the job this time. He has to.]
[His fingers wrap tighter. The scrapes across his hands doesn't matter. The struggling flesh under his hands doesn't matter. All that matters is--]
---
[Electricity screams through the air, through the circuits woven across Shepard's skeleton. There's an awful static whine, and the air splits in impossible configurations, bands of light and color bright enough to hurt.]
[EYES OPEN]
[The muscles constrict. Every blink is agony.]
[It wants her to watch.]
---
[All that matters is the way the stick-thin body stops convulsing, hands falling limp at its sides. The camera lies a few feet away, its screen cracked and half-disconnected, bare wires straining to hold it together.]
[Maybe, years ago, Alex Kralie would have taken it as a memento. Maybe, years ago, Alex Kralie would have kicked it, sending new cracks spiderwebbing across the screen, or pulled it apart the rest of the way. Maybe he would have turned the lens on himself. Maybe he would have taken the tape.]
[Today, Alex Kralie does not acknowledge it.]
[Instead, he steps away from the unconscious body, its chest barely rising as it draws thin breaths through a crushed windpipe.]
[He reaches into the underbrush and withdraws a cracked block of cement, the remnants of some long-gone construction project.]
---
[EYES]
[OPEN]
---
[Alex Kralie brings the rock down on the body's head four separate times.]