He did not long for his last breath because he could not have her, because he felt below her. He was not. Morally he was far above her, as he could accept his guilt while she shunned her own. But he felt an unconquerable emptiness, because he did not want to share a world with people like her. Those she had sicced upon him had accepted her fairy tale without question, when they had been required to look into it. They did not. They’d judged him out of hand. They’d even covered up for her and destroyed what would have called her into question. They lied for her to cover for her, without even realizing that she had lied about more than just insignificant little things. Because they never looked. And they’d all gotten away with it, with their tribalism, with their group think, with their moral corruption, all part of a system of conflicts of interest and base conceit, fake people, with real jobs that they did not really do. 

She had something of an excuse, however, having no mind of her own and having been told, vocally or tacitly, to murder him. She simply obeyed her masters, as she always had. But her dogs had had an obligation to the truth, and they shirked it every way they could, even erasing the evidence. Criminals. They were shit, morally-devoid scum, and he did not want to breathe the same air as facsimiles of people like that. But she also took on a debt with her dishonesty, an obligation to him, because, even though she had been protected by sheer bias, she knew what she had done and how she’d done it. She knew the story sold was spun from half-truths, omissions, and outright fabrications, whether she made them up herself or they were given to her. And she knew that she had deceived him from the start, no matter what rationalizations she invented to absolve herself. But she would not pay. In all her phony piety, she did not have the character to admit her wrongs or make it up to him. She thought she was better than he was. She thought the men she chose were better than he was. She wasn’t and neither were they, stewing in their gilded moral rot. 

So he did not want to continue. He would not cause his own end, as she had tried to make others believe he would to suit her own ego and bolster her own story. But life now held nothing for him — no mystery, no desire, no truth. She had killed it all. It was merely a blur of time now, with no point to it. While they went on with their fake little lives, built upon their lack of honesty and abuse of power, imagining themselves to be holier than though, when they were gutter trash, he had been left with nothing … nothing but the truth, the whole truth, which no one would listen to. And she, jaded by the same delusions, would never allow herself to be a real person, to let go of the guilt that clung to her, no matter how deep her denial. She would not pay her debt.