@oruphes asked : “it wasn’t your fault.” minato can’t help but smile, if it can even be called that – it’s really nothing more than an upturn of the lips, but it’s the thought that counts, yeah? blood on his hands, on his uniform, hell, even some of it’s on aigis. “it’s nobody’s fault but mine, alright?”
here’s the thing about guilt : you don’t get to choose who carries it. it chooses its own shoulder to lie on. it chooses that itself.
here’s the thing about the dark hour : sometimes, there are still people. sometimes, when you’ve been trained to hunt everything that moves, sometimes the blood that flashes through the air is warm and red and sometimes you are not a hero, or a good person. sometimes you are just a killer.
this is what happens here. a man moves, makes a scream of terror that maybe could be the scream of a shadow, and both you and minato’s heads turn with a flash, and your bullets thud against a car the second after minato’s sword lands in the man’s chest with a solid thunk.
they said the weapons only worked on shadows. but you all knew better.
a silence hangs in the air, so heavy everything feels smothered. if you could taste, you would taste red on you. if you could feel, you would feel salt on your skin. if you could smell, you would smell the warmth of it. if you could do anything but see, but see and hear, see the man falling, and hear his final screams, see the way minato’s face closes up, and the way his voice cracks slightly, maybe you’d be a better person.
you hear it a lot. this is so fucked up, yukari spits, sometimes, hands shaking as she pulls the trigger on the gun pressed against her forehead. this is fucked! junpei howls.
you are fucked up, you think, because however sad you are about the man who died, you are sadder about how awful minato looks in the green light of the dark hour, face smoothed over with a porcelain mask that you want to smash against the ground until it breaks, and hold his face in your hands until he knows its safe to cry around you.
you are fucked up, you think, because if you had been one second earlier, you could have the heavy guilt of murder on your hands, you, the machine, the one who doesn’t matter as much, the one who’s not really alive. you’ve killed before. when you weren’t quite yourself, you sunk bullets into bodies on the command of the higher ups of the kirijo group. your hands are already stained.
you weren’t fast enough to save minato from guilt. so maybe he would have thought the same thing, if you had been fast enough. he doesn’t know that you are already a blood red knife in someone’s back. explaining it to him, explaining your own lack of life, how you don’t really exist, and never really have, and it’s okay for you to be the sacrificial lamb here.
because you are an object, and he is alive. and he is wonderful. and you love him. you love him more than the one on the ground there and his life, whatever it was like. you love him more than you thought you could love anyone or anything.
and the end is coming soon. so this is useless. you are all going to die, and it will be fine. the man’s death will have been meaningless, and so will have your feelings for minato, and the blood, the blood all over the two of you.
and you step forward, move careful, like you’re moving towards a wounded animal ( in many ways, you are ) , and press a hand up against his face, as careful as you can be, as careful as he deserves you to be, and wipe the blood off of him.
“ it was not your fault. ” you say, voice crackling slightly. you don’t know what else to say: someone made us this way, someone turned us into these, someone built us into blood hungry beasts from the ground up for the good fo humanity, or the world, or something.
you love humans, because you were made that way, but you think you love minato arisato more.
it’s not fair, that you are who you are. it’s not fair, that he is who he is either. none of you are in a fair situation. but that’s fine. you are lucky to know him at all, even like this, killers covered in blood, in an hour of the day that does not exist, waiting for a god or a monster or something similar to end the world.
you wish you could cry right now.
you smile instead, soft and as gentle and kind as you can be, and pull back, take his hand between two of yours, wishing, desperately, you could feel it.
“ let’s go back. we will go get cleaned up. i’ll be right there with you, okay? i won’t leave you. i promise. ” you are firm. there is no question. you pull him away from the body on the floor, blood everywhere, and a man’s hopes and dreams and life strewn everywhere like flowers on the floor.
( orpheus doesn’t look back this time. )
