"You have officially been charged with seventeen counts of murder, the murder of a law enforcement officer, evading arrest…"
The judge's voice droned on and on, dry and hopelessly monotone, like someone reading a shopping list they'd grown sick of reciting.
Orion Stone sat perfectly still in the defendant's chair, hands cuffed, posture relaxed as though this were just another routine appointment. The corners of his mouth twitched into something that resembled a smile - quiet, measured, amused.
It was nothing exaggerated or theatrical - just the barest flicker of a man who couldn't quite believe the spectacle around him.
The guards at his sides stiffened every time he shifted his eyes. It was almost flattering.
He didn't blink.
He didn't fidget.
He didn't feign remorse.
Fear was for people who still had something to lose.
Friends.
Family.
Freedom.
Orion had lost that all long before he ever set foot in this courtroom.
'Seventeen,' he thought, calm as a still pond. 'Those are rookie numbers. They haven't even found half.'
The prosecutor finished, and silence swallowed the room whole. The air felt heavy, suffocating, thick with hatred and disgust.
Families glared at him through tears. Journalists leaned forward like vultures smelling blood. Officers sat rigidly, jaws clenched. And mixed among them were the thrill-seekers, the ones fascinated by monsters in human skin.
All those eyes burning into him.
Yet he felt nothing.
The judge cleared their throat. "Dr Orion Stone. You hid among us. You used your position to mask your crimes. You believed you were above the law, slaughtering individuals based on your own twisted moral compass. But when you killed an officer, you crossed a line even you cannot justify."
'I didn't want to kill him,' Orion mused. 'He just made it unavoidable.'
Not that he spoke aloud or bothered trying to justify himself to these people.
The judge continued, voice heavy with theatrics. "As such, you are hereby sentenced to capital punishment by lethal injection."
The gavel struck.
A hollow, final sound echoed around the courtroom.
Two guards immediately grabbed him by the arms.
One muttered, "Sick freak."
Orion heard it clearly, but he simply smiled faintly and let himself be pulled to his feet.
Why waste words on insignificant men? They wouldn't understand him even if he tried.
And he had long since resolved himself for this day; it was bound to come eventually.
As he was escorted out, cameras erupted. Flash after flash burst like small explosions across his vision.
"Do you regret anything?"
"Why did you do it?"
"Any last words for the families of your victims?"
Orion turned just enough for the lenses to catch his face.
"Here's a smile for the cameras," he said casually, winking as he was dragged away.
The internet devoured it within minutes.
Dr Orion Stone.
The Fallen Angel of Medicine.
The Devil with a Stethoscope.
A monster with a charming face and an empty heart.
He didn't mind the monikers - people tend to name things they don't understand or that they fear.
The days leading up to his execution dragged by in a suffocating blur.
Law enforcement had already concluded that Orion wouldn't be cooperative, so they gave up on trying to get answers out of him.
As such, his world had shrunk to a cell barely large enough to stretch his legs. Stone walls pressed in on him, the air stale and unmoving. A single slit of a window let in no sunlight - only a reminder that he wasn't allowed beyond these four walls.
Meals arrived twice a day: grey, tasteless slop shoved through an iron hatch. No voices. No footsteps lingering. No chance to step outside. Just silence and the scrape of metal on stone.
In that cramped stillness, with nothing to distract him and nowhere to look but the ceiling, Orion's thoughts drifted back to memories he thought he'd buried for good.
His father's voice - thick, furious, poisoned by cheap liquor.
The warm blood on his hands after stabbing him in the eye with a kitchen knife.
His mother's choked gasps as her life drained away after she tried to protect him.
The stillness in the room after.
The way silence could scream louder than any cry.
He had been forged in that moment.
Not into a hero.
Not into a martyr.
But into a man who understood control. Pain never scared him after that. Death never disturbed him. Other people trembled before those things; Orion watched them with curiosity.
He'd diagnosed himself years ago, far more accurately than any psychologist ever could.
Orion recognised the patterns early:
Superficial charm, the kind that let him slip into any room and make people think he belonged there.
Cold, calculated actions, every move weighed and measured without the nuisance of guilt.
A hollow space where empathy should have been, though he'd learned how to mimic it well enough to fool most.
Long-term deception that let him maintain whatever mask the moment required.
A taste for risk that pushed him into situations any sane person would've avoided.
There were overlapping tendencies, of course - traits people loved to bundle into tidy labels:
Disregard for rules.
Deceit sharpened into an art.
A touch of narcissism, though he'd always thought it was simply accuracy.
And that simmering edge of aggression, the kind that flared when provoked.
He certainly had psychopathic tendencies, and he would be an idiot not to see that.
But crazy? No.
He was far from it.
People threw around that word the same way they judged one another for skin tone or accent.
It was lazy, thoughtless, and ignorant.
Orion couldn't care less about what others thought of him.
It simply didn't matter.
'I'm not the broken one,' he often told himself as he stared at the ceiling of his cell. 'It's this world that is broken.'
The week passed, and he tried escaping twice - not out of hope, but boredom.
A fake seizure to catch a guard off guard.
Failed.
Using the metal tray to scrape away at the wall.
Failed miserably.
Solitary confinement followed. An even smaller box. Silent. Airless. There were no vents to crawl through or movie magic.
Just him, his breath, and the faint metallic reflection in the door.
When the guards pulled him out for his last meal, a clipboard awaited him.
"Final request?" the guard asked.
"Cigarettes."
The guard scoffed. "Can't do that."
"Then nothing," Orion said. "Hunger is a temporary inconvenience."
As the man walked away grumbling, Orion leaned back with a quiet exhale. It was funny. Granger always smoked the cheapest, foulest cigarettes imaginable. Orion used to hate that smell and would never put something foul like that in his body.
It was ironic.
Now hours away from his death, all he could think about was the man who put him in this predicament.
His only real mirror in this world - Detective Granger.
The man who saw through his mask.
The man who stripped his life apart piece by piece.
The only other man Orion killed out of emotion.
'I guess I'll be joining you soon, Granger.'
Morning came with a cold draft seeping through the corridor. The guards said nothing as they cuffed him. The click of metal sounded ceremonial - the final punctuation on the life he'd lived.
They brought him down the Last Mile.
Witnesses waited behind a pane of glass. Faces twisted in grief, satisfaction, rage.
Cameras rolled, documenting the death of the man who would be studied alongside the world's other freaks - serial killers.
"Any last words, Doctor?" someone called.
He had a week to think about what he wanted to say in this moment, yet what came out of his mouth surprised even himself. He had always been someone whose actions and speech were premeditated.
But this time, he spoke on a whim, which was completely unlike him.
Orion looked up, calm as ever. "If there's a hell," he said, "I'll crawl out of it, kill the devil himself, and come after every one of you next."
There was a wave of gasps, shouts, and panic.
Seeing them so agitated and frightened by his words, despite being shackled and about to be killed in front of them, Orion couldn't help but be amused.
He began to laugh and stared directly into the large camera lens across the glass as he was strapped down into the chair.
'It's going to be over soon, I might as well put on a show for these idiots.'
The lights hummed softly overhead.
Orion had been asked prior if he wanted to have any religious figure or prayers before his death, but he obviously refused.
If there was a god, which was very much a logical possibility, they had forsaken him, and he didn't feel like praying out to them. They would be meeting soon enough anyway.
As such, without any further procedures, a technician slid the needle into his arm.
Cold chemicals flooded his veins.
His body felt heavier with each second.
His heartbeat slowed.
His vision dimmed.
His fingers refused to respond.
'So this is dying,' he thought. 'Disappointingly dull.'
He'd walked beside death his entire life - saving patients from it, dragging victims into it - and now that he was the one crossing the threshold, it barely stirred anything inside him.
Not regret.
Not guilt.
Just a quiet, instinctive fear rooted deep in the human animal.
The fear stemmed mainly from uncertainty and the prospect of stepping into the unknown.
He had a week before his execution in a cell, and many years of fascination with death, to dwell on it.
Was there an afterlife?
Did people just cease to exist?
Or were people reborn?
There was no way of truly knowing without experiencing it himself, and he was on the verge of doing so.
He acknowledged and accepted his fate without flinching.
No screaming, begging, or theatrics.
Just calm, steady breaths until even that slipped away.
Darkness swallowed the world.
For a moment, Orion thought it was done.
Finished.
Over.
Maybe he could finally have some peace.
But death, it seemed, had other plans.
And for the first time in his life, Orion Stone felt something stir - not fear, not hunger, but anticipation.
Because this wasn't the end for him.
It was just the beginning...