Conner had marveled at how the kid met his demise with at least a degree more civility than one might have surmised from his outward demeanor. That in and of itself was somewhat redemptive for him, since very little ever shocked Conner anymore, but it didn’t change the end result.  The world had become a series of monotonous pursuits that carried the endless weight of predictability and threatened to drive him to the edge of insanity in slow, plodding steps.  As a matter of point, he had taken up his latest hobby in an effort to find the threads of fantastic that he suspected were still woven through the fabric of every day.  The fact that the kid, who was actually more along the lines of young adult, had displayed behavior outside of what Conner had expected brought the slightest hint of a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

Although the punk kid – often called thug by society as if it were a title of some renown – hadn’t actually embraced the process, as perhaps his sour disposition and black-clad, death mongering attitude might have suggested at the start, he hadn’t cursed it either.  He had certainly been surprised, an emotion shared by the larger portion of Conner’s victims, but there had also been a small portion of regret and that was the thread that Conner could not help but embrace.  For a solitary moment in time, the idea hung in the air like the scent of flowers at Spring’s first blush, that perhaps the world was not as calculable as Conner had feared.  The fleeting thought faded as quickly as it had appeared when, as he slid the knife further into the punk’s ribcage and angled it upward, the reprobate had the audacity to utter a blood splattering, “why?”