Reflections.

As he raised his clenched fist, he recalled his observation - that reflections aren't ever accurate; they cannot be.

His fist came crashing down upon the glass, and blood flew, as he tried to make it as accurate as it could be.

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Slow thoughts trickled down his mind, teasing slowly, like the sensation of sweat moving over skin. The prickling feeling that moved to the forefront of his consciousness and made all other thoughts unviable and difficult. Obscuring, irritating, and yet alluring in a strange fashion.

He moved, shifting his weight, as he considered the nature of human character and the many conflicting impulses it engenders within. How every course of action, every choice is an amalgamation of all the different facets of you that drag you off in different directions. About how the many desires that one has can cause such a dilemna that is not easily explained or sorted out, for the many different perspectives which cause a rational mind to come to different conclusions, simply because of the different weights you give to different considerations.

He looked down upon her trussed up form, wondering what to do with her. He traced the curve of her jaw with his knife, and smiled as she strained to move away from the weapon. He smiled at this, and yet inside he felt disgust at his own actions. Remarkable. He loved eliciting reactions to stimuli within himself.

He hated using himself and other people like lab rats. Manipulating them, controlling conditions, opening some doors to make them run into mazes, chasing something elusive, while you watch from above. He loved the sense of power, the way he could determine their actions, decide who gets to live or die. He loved the look of abject terror in his victim's face. He hated the way they screamed. He loved the way he could cut it off. He hated the smell of death. He loved the sight of blood on his hands.

He paused once more, and marvelled once more upon the inherent strangeness of a fragmented brain. About the convoluted nature of man. Of how misleading it was to state that someone was single-minded. How stupid the concept of 'second thoughts' as a specific instance.

We all doubt. We all second guess ourselves. We always hate what we do, and love what we do, all at the same time. There are no absolutes. No images. No identities, just a cacophony of connected images separated bizzarely from each other yet fitting in perfectly to form a visage that truly represented the fractured reflection of a tortured and torn human being. He realised that mirrors were false, for they showed one image and one person; but a person was many, and existed in many places and thoughts at the same time. The real person was a fractured reflection of his broken physical self.

He turned to see himself. He saw it wasn't true. He decided to fix things.

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Three years later, law enforcement finally caught up with him, he was found in a room with a broken mirror, writing apologies on the wall. The victim's face had been cut in a disjointed spider-web pattern, and he was caught laughing and crying alternatingly. He begged forgiveness from the world one second, and tried to kill all of it, or at least the parts of it near him trying to keep him in custody during the other.

The papers found on him were a long psychological treatise upon the variegated nature of human thought, reflected in the many fissures in society.

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He was found dead in his cell three days later, killed by a shard of mirror that had somehow come into his possession. Investigation revealed his left hand had been found attempting to stop the right.