Chapter Text
Dim light. The boy stumbled through the dark corridors of the Mephistopheles, crashing against the walls, panting, mumbling the names of each of the Sinners against whom doors he collapsed upon and immediately shaking his head. Limping, a fine trace of blood was set behind him. He looked behind once and was marveled, the child lost his breath, now finding beauty even in the crimson trail as he bled out. Just what sort of technique had she used to make cuts so even that their bloodletting seemed intentional and well-paced? That was just the type of woman he was dealing with…
Finally, the boy crashed against the door he was looking for and sighed in relief. He knocked once and waited, then knocked twice as he realized he wouldn’t be able to hold out for any longer. The door opened.
“< Sinclair! >” He was received by a panicked, high-pitched whistle. A red clock head peeked out of their room and looked sideways. “< What happened to you? Are we… are we under attack? >”
“Dante…” Even though the blond began trembling, he had a faint smile on his face. Never had he been so glad to see their mechanical head and listen to the rhythmic tick-tack as they spoke. “I-I swear… I can explain. But for now, m-may… may I come in?”
As a very confused Dante still tried to get a hold of the situation, they looked at Sinclair from head to toe. He would have blushed, if he had any blood left to adorn his cheeks, he knew he must have been quite the sight: ruffled hair, teared up eyes and trembling lips, red marks on his neck, a dark gray bathrobe that was too large to fit him well and opened in his chest, revealing the first of many open wounds that had been marked into his skin.
“I-I know it must look bad, but…” Sinclair started rambling again, but was interrupted, betrayed by his faulting knees.
The manager jumped to catch him and slowly helped him to a chair in their own room. Only now Dante noticed the many darkened spots over the bathrobe in deep red, they wondered how the hell had he been able to walk with that many wounds. As they tried to treat their employee, searching frantically in their drawers for bandages and medicine, the other, restless and letting out painful sighs from time to time, began to speak.
“D-Dante… Sorry for waking you up so late and barging in, I’m… I’m sure you have many questions.”
“< Please save your strength, Sinclair. >” Dante tried to give him a reassuring look, only to realize that wouldn’t really work. “< Just what did all that to you...? >”
“I feel like I owe you an explanation, it’s the least I can do,” Sinclair said. “Y-yeah… It could be said it was me, I think I did this to myself. M-manager Dante. May I show you something if you promise not to judge?”
Dante nodded. Sinclair, slowly and painfully, took off the bathrobe from his shoulders, dropping it to his hip’s length. Dante stood frozen, watching the boy that had become a living work of art. It would be blunt to simply say his body had been covered with wounds, that would ignore the sense of uttermost precision that accompanied the cuts than ran throughout his chest and back, the fine characters marked on his arms, the great signature running from one shoulder blade to the other, picturing the silhouette of a butterfly… no, the only words right to describe would be to state that he had been carved .
And they both knew that there was only one person in the world able to do such a work.
“< Sinclair… >” Dante found themselves wordless. “< Was that… Ryoshu’s..? >”
“Please don’t think it was something done against my will…” the boy cried. “I’m as much a part of… this, as she is. It’s… it’s actually a long story…”
“< I’m willing to listen. >” Dante said.
“W-well…” Sinclair groaned in pain and held his sides, then he laughed nervously. “It kind of began on the last journey to the mirror dungeons that you organized… N-not that I’m saying it’s your fault, Manager! It’s just something that happened along, you remember how… ah… I don’t know how to begin without making it weird...”
“< Get it all out of your chest, Sinclair. >” Dante choose carefully their words, thinking about what to say to make the easily agitated Sinner open up. “< You know you are safe here. You can let it all out if you feel like it, know that I won’t judge. >”
In the end, Dante feared that they might have sounded too much like a therapist… but it seemed to work. Sinclair cleared a couple of tears from his eyes and managed to relax a little after inhaling and exhaling a couple of times. Dante handed Sinclair a towel and he cleaned the sweat off his furrowed brow and tried to soak the blood from some of his wounds. In the dead time, while Sinclair prepared his story, Dante wondered what they’d do tomorrow in order to clean the puddles and traces of blood that were now all over their floor.
Sinclair cleared his throat, lowered his head and raised his eyes to meet with Dante’s head.
“D-do… do you remember we all agreed that it was entirely Hong Lu’s fault? I mean, we already had a plan, you said so yourself, we were not to interact with any abnormality. I still remember it well, door after door in the dungeon, only to stop at the insides of a W Corp wagon. It was so quiet, everything was still and it only made the wait worse because we knew what was coming… which one of us should turn back to the window of the wagon behind their seat to find that the mangled body of the abnormality had always been there… watching us?
Hong Lu sang a jaunty tune when he realized what was behind him, almost breathing over his neck, only separated by the window, the slender arms of the Wayward Passenger slapped against the glass, asking for directions. Y-you even moved your arms in a cross, Dante… but he said regardless of your warning something along the lines of ‘Aha~ I’ve dealt with this one before, please leave it to me~' in that silky, oblivious voice… Hong Lu turned around and smiled at the abnormality, he pointed to the right and after it followed the direction disappeared, then… we waited. Somehow, we knew he had failed, even he pouted ‘Hmph… something felt off, didn’t it?’ seconds before the Passenger ripped its way through the wagon. L-long story short, because you know the rest, we were attacked and the Wayward Passenger tore a series of portals into which we fell and it took a long, long time until we could reunite again, but you remember that much…
I… I guess what I’m trying to tell you is what you don’t know, Dante, and that is that we went through lots of things… we, uhm, I mean Ryoshu and I.”
The young Sinner stopped for a second to catch his breath.
“A-ah… I-I think I really dragged that story… I’m not boring you, right? You’d probably prefer to be sleeping right now instead. But… the more I speak the clearer my thoughts appear to be, I think I’m finally realizing some stuff… Manager… would you mind listening a bit more?
I-I’ll take your silence as approval, if that’s alright… To be honest, I didn’t get to see much, we were all crumpled up inside the wagon the moment the abnormality attacked, it was all so fast. As I tried standing up, a dimensional rift appeared beneath my feet and I fell… it was then that it all turned to white.
In what kind of world did you fall into when the Passenger separated us, Manager? If I remember well, when we found you, Gregor and Ishmael were already at your side. I myself got lost in the middle of a blizzard, when I opened my eyes I found nothing but snow. I was dazed, my heart still pumped adrenaline and I could barely understand that I was not on the wagon with the other Sinners anymore. I saw a blurry silhouette in front of me, so I… uhm… c-called a name. I-it doesn’t matter whose it was!
Wh-what’s important is that they didn’t answer back, the figure simply stared at me. I think I might have hit my head on the fall, my thoughts were muddied, it took me quite some time to get the pieces together. The imposing posture, the light of a fire that briefly ignited over an ashen face, something poked against my chest and pushed me back to the snow when I tried to stand up: it was the edge of a sheathed katana.”
As if reminiscing the cold of the scenario he evoked, the boy rubbed his arms and joined his hands. The story had just begun.