ITP: Consolidation.

[fracta_anima]

OOC: So we don't wind up spamming the Network Comm and because some people just want to write: comment here to post your nightmares/punishment as you have written them. Please specify if it's a nightmare or a punishment in the subject line.

If it's a punishment, please also put in the subject line if it's viewable and on what day(s).

Remember to add your character's tag to the post.

Thanks guys!

--Random

Comments

Punishment - Day 8 (around 9:30am onwards), viewable. [tl;dr ahoy]

[fractus_animus]

He remembers.

He'd been dying anyway, Thanatos, he'd lost control of the Persona, and it had been slowly choking him. Instead of fighting it, he'd given in and let it kill him, finally, rather than burden anyone else. The events of the Labyrinth have become a blur of pain and people dying, of his own pain, of killing and monsters and flesh-like walls. But slowly, as he opens his eyes, he realizes that he's on Port Island, at home, on the streets. At first, his mind is racing and he's half-conscious, thinking it's the Dark Hour, glad, but concerned. It's night time and there is, after all, blood all around him.

But slowly, as his brain catches up with his eyes, he begins to realize he is hearing things, seeing them, and that... it isn't what he thinks it is.

The blood... where is the blood coming from? There was no fountain or leaking pipes that could have changed around here, were there? And as he listens quietly, his mind begins to slowly realize something. He is hearing the rattling of chains. He is hearing something far worse, too: the faint noises he'd perceived to be the bustle of the city... are in fact the screams and crying of people dying at the hands of the monster some would call a 'Persona' he is leading. He had not noticed it immediately, but he has been slowly moving with the Persona, and at first, the boy you see now, blue hair, gray eyes, had not seen the corpses at his feet. Or behind him. Or in the streets. Or that the blood under his shoes is familiar, and horrifying--but it isn't the Dark Hour's doing. There are no coffins in the street.

Only corpses, everywhere, all around him.

Chidori, dress stained red, her body mangled. Jin, lying much the same way, and then Ken, and then even Koromaru, who by the looks of it had died trying to protect the others from him--

No. He thinks, this can't be it. This is a nightmare. It's not real...

He keeps walking. The screams continue. Like a puppet master being controlled by its own puppet, until finally, he stops for long enough to find a window, as if looking for victims inside. He can't close his eyes, no matter how hard he tries, but he can widen them in horror as he realizes that all along, he's had this... wetness, a sticky sort of feeling.

He realizes now... that it's the blood of his friends, his team, of innocent people around him. That it is not just Thanatos that has been doing this. It has been him. He did it. They were the same thing, after all, weren't they?

Thou art I... Is what it whispers in his head, and all too late he realizes this is his fault, that he's been doing this, as he begins moving again. Someone else, a couple he doesn't know. He strikes them down with the aid of his Persona, again and again and again, each person brutally a viciously assaulted with more than a 'swift' end. The brutality just rises, and as it does, the blood that is on him has no more time to dry than when more stains his white shirt, and he keeps moving in a cold, uncaring sort of way, a trail of corpses and blood in his wake, the Persona following him.

Minutes go by slowly, agonizingly. Half an hour. Then an hour. Then two. He wants to scream, to struggle, to tear away out of this hellish puppetry he seems to be under, but he can't.

Why? Why did I... Why did he kill so many people? I'm no better than him-- He's no better than Takaya, really, is he? He liked it, didn't he, murdering others. As if to add insult to injury, the voice of the God of Death whispers in his mind and yet somehow it echoes everywhere.

"You have taken so many lives," it jeers at him, despite not having a face to smile with, "What is stopping us... from proving that they truly are no better than we? Do you not desire their end? Do you not envy them and wish them a despairing end because they have not suffered?"

He is frightened by the brutality. Afraid. He knows the words of that... abomination, if it could even be CALLED anything else, might just be true. As if in amusement, it lets him scream.

"No! I don't... I never meant... they were all--"

Sadly, the fragmented sentence that Minato manages is not very impressive, and he cannot escape, though he does try. They march on in silence for a bit longer after this. Eventually, the murders, brutality, and magical destruction blur together and so does he; it is hard to tell who is doing what anymore. He's so exhausted, how many hours has it been, how long must he be forced to endure this...?

Then the Persona speaks again. "You always have meant it," it says to him mockingly, and then somehow, it's his own voice he hears, and he's horrified further, just when he thinks it can get no worse. "These people don't deserve to live. I've looked into them... requests for hits like these are making the world a better place." It says, and he shakes his head, fighting it.

"... Those people... were awful. They were abusers and--" He is cut short by the Persona.

"Look at yourself, boy, you belong with me for a reason! There is no difference between you and I!" The voice is cold and cruel, and he realizes he is being pointed toward a broken window (did he cause that? Is all this destruction his doing? Had the murders of his friends and half the city not been ENOUGH?), inside, someone's shop or home, he can no longer tell, but everything is frozen in ice. In the reflection of that ice, he does not see his Persona anymore. To his horror, it begins to dawn on him that at some point, they truly had become the same thing. Perhaps the sword is his own, and not the Persona's; the coffins and chains surround him, and not the Persona at all, but him, with horrible cold eyes and briefly, there is pause as he tries to fight this change, shaking. There are tears, but he cannot make himself stop.

The reflection-self holds the pistol up and mocks him as another innocent, too afraid to say a word or move, is taken by him and shown in the reflective ice as the gun is pointed at them and--

Bang.

"This is what you do!"

He's a monster. He's a monster. He's horrible. He shouldn't exist. He knows it's right. Then, slowly, deliberately, he takes out his sword, as the poor person is not dead yet, and cuts off their head before he continues moving forward. With every step, there are more people running and screaming and trying to get away, and each time, he strikes them down, expression twisted as though he enjoys it, though every reflective surface that he passes shows not that Minato, but one who is crying out and struggling instead, and that this is not what he wants at all. It will continue, even when the Dark Hour appears itself in the nightmareish Port Island, he's luring people out of their coffins just whispering to them and murdering them all terribly as Shadows appear to feed on the corpses brutally.

He is slowly broken. There is nothing left. Death... death and destruction is all he is.

He is a monster.

He cannot stop himself.

He killed Chidori. He killed Jin. He killed Ken and Koromaru. Eventually he even finds Minami and murders her, too. He will kill everyone. He is his Persona. He is the one who is evil, who shouldn't exist.

He is the monster. And so it continues...