I remove the dead flowers in the vase and replaced them with fresh ones, daisies this time. I stand up and stare at them, framing the gravestone. My friends always ask my why I bother with the flowers, the man had been my enemy after all. I can't really say why. It's a compulsion. The man had no family and no friends to miss him. I was probably the closest thing to a "friend" he'd had, and all we had done was fight and argue. He hadn't always been that way. Our research shows that he'd had a family once, and friends too; but in one sweep, tragedy took that all away and he had let the bitterness it brought fester. By the time I met him, all that he had been was gone. He had wanted nothing but to destroy the world that had hurt him and taken all that was dear to him. It had been my job to stop him. I didn't hate him, and I don't really believe he hated me personally. I was simply standing in his way. He would have done the same to anyone who had opposed him. He had been right about some things- the unfairness of the world, the cruelty of man, etc- but his methods for dealing with them were wrong. I guess I feel sorry for him. It saddens me that no one is around to miss him for who he was; that the only people who remember him are those who were hurt or destroyed by him. In my mind, I'm not leaving the flowers for the man I killed, I'm leaving them for the man who was hurt by life and had died before I met him.
