Work Text:
The morning after the lockdown – that is, the morning he woke up on after sleeping in a bed for the first time since the world belched forth the legions of Hell, his first motion was to brush his hair out of his face.
Half of what he brushed away landed right back on his forehead, stiff from some material that he resolved to get rid of in number two on the agenda (after the already completed sleep), in the longest bath he would ever take.
Then Keisuke realized what matted those strands of hair together was blood. Human blood. There was a ragged noise, as he sucked in a gasp of air and held it, shocked out of easy breathing.
He was still a murderer, after all.
He was immediately consumed on several levels by disgust – disgust that he'd just been relishing modern amenities, after what he'd done – disgust that he'd been tagging along with Atsuro and Midori and Kazuya and Yuzu for days, and them having to face seeing human blood on him every time they glanced his way. There was disgust that he'd fallen that far, of course, and disgust that he had the capability for it at all within him.
He wanted to beg the world for atonement 'till his voice stopped functioning, but he also wanted no one to know about it at all. Forgiveness and to be forgotten, to be scolded and absolved. Paradoxes of emotion spiraling over each other in crazy loops, leaning to opposite sides even as they choked one another.
"The lockdown has made monsters out of a lot of people-"
Kazuya had said this, then stared ponderously at his own hands, as if morbidly curious to see if they grew into something more suitably demonic in example of his words. Kazuya was a good guy, but he had a horrible sense of humor. Maybe that was fitting for someone who now owned the throne of demons.
"-a lot of people. But you came back from it before it was too late, Keisuke."
'You're being too lenient with me,' he'd wanted to say. But a sinner seeking to atone doesn't have rights to question a better's judgment.
It's later in the morning. His hands in a vice on the sink's ceramic edge, he desperately wishes he'd said something anyway. How was he supposed to atone, if he was left wobbling along an ill-defined, soft handed path to forgiveness? He'd just end up going in circles and backsliding like that.
He's not sure what will happen if – well, when, really, he encounters his favorite peer group again. He doesn't want to backslide. He may not possess Yama's power anymore, but he's lost his trust in himself, his trust in notions of the world that had seemed resolute. He eyes an innocuous razor, a troubled thought bubbling. Demons had just been an easy weapon, a 'point and judge' interface. But if he was desperate enough, could anything with a potentially lethal property become his new medium?
Before the lockdown it had been disgust at his inability to effect anything.
Now it was disgust that he might break and go out and effect something.