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Crimson Tears
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
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Red didn't look good against her skin. She was too pale, too pallid (something Karin considered both the prerogative and the curse of the redhead); the rich crimson shades washed out her fair skin. Red dresses by nature tended to be revealing and provocative, slinky and seductive; Karin wasn't comfortable baring her crescent-riddled skin, wasn't comfortable exposing herself to the stares, the whispers, the silent accusations of assumed perversion.
But in a way, Karin wore red that attached itself more indelibly to her skin than any piece of clothing ever could.
Karin's scars has a tendency of opening up, drenching her skin in scarlet rivulets as she fought to staunch the bleeding and keep up a sense of normalcy in her rapidly destabilizing life.
Karin, who grew up in Hell, was well-versed in sin. She had watched horrifying and fascinating orgies of sin take place and she had seen pride, wrath, gluttony, lust, sloth, envy and avarice take their toll and become the ruin of powerful men. She had seen quite clearly in Orochimaru how pride went before a fall and that that fall could be the last fall of someone's life.
And living in Hell left its mark on her, in more ways than one. She knew violence well and hardly batted her eye at atrocious acts of violence. Whoring and carousing she tolerated with only a slight edge of disgust. Karin could go from soft and smiling to hard of heart and head in a second. Depravity and terror did not faze her; she accepted it as normal and it did not occur to her that others might not. She had never lived any other way.
Lust was the one sin Karin fought to grapple with. Uchiha Sasuke both attracted and repelled her; obsessive lust had come to dominate her life without her consent, turning her stomach inside out even as her heart fluttered and sang. Anyone else would have written it off as just being due to the overactive hormones of an average teenage girl, but Karin was no fool; she knew it wasn't normal. Twisted sexual lust wasn't the accepted emotion of any human being; it was aberrant and debauched, and even Karin, with no sense of normalcy whatsoever, knew it was deviant.
Hell had left its mark on her, Karin knew, and she knew that she had Hell and the Devil to thank for twisting her every emotion into something dark and disgusting.
A sinner could never truly escape the cool, dark, labyrinthine tunnels of Hell, Karin knew as little dark spots came through her shirt and she scrubbed furiously away at her bleeding skin as it wept viscous crimson tears.
She couldn't outrun her lusts or basic human urges, no matter how hard she tried.
But Karin didn't live in Hell anymore. And she never wanted to go back.
Karin hated the color red which adorned her pale white skin. It reminded her too much of sin and the lust she could never escape.
So she only ever wore lavender instead.