Work Text:
There is blood on your hands, and it smells like your father’s blood, but you know that it is Rin’s. Rin’s blood covers your hands and it smears as you turn on the faucet. You’ve always had such a pedantic imagination, you should have been a genjutsu master.
But you’ve always been best at torturing yourself. And really, that’s fair.
The water is warm on your fingers, and pale-pink-bloodied as it swirls down the drain. The air is full of the scent of your father who is dead and your hands will never ever be clean of the blood of the girl whom you killed.
But you try anyway, you’re compelled to, you scrub and you scrub and you scrub, viciously, mechanically, at blood that is not there, because it is everywhere, has sunk inside you, drenches everything you touch, because it is nowhere, because her heart has ceased to beat, pierced and crushed and burnt by your hand, because her body long, long since stopped producing blood, because she is dead.
There’s blood on your hands and it smells like your father’s. Except no. No, it’s your own blood. You smell your own blood and your hands are rubbed raw and bleeding under the warm water. You let the pain of it ground you, and as you turn the water off, blood smearing over the clean faucet, you wonder how many hours you lost this time to the not-time of guilt and the blood of the dead. Your hands tremble over the sink, and you breathe in a long shaking breath. The smell of blood is terrifying, but if it’s only your own scent, if it's only you that’s bleeding, it’s alright, that’s all right. You listen to the slow, steady drip, drip, drip of blood and water and allow your heartbeat to settle.