June 29th, 2020
Darkness does not always equate to evil, just as light does not always bring good. –P.C. Cast
Rika is guilty of some things, less than she expected but more than others would think of her. One of those things, oddly enough, is her rare moments of peace.
The bruise-black darkness she awakens to after dying, scattered with a thousand faint, faded, or sparkling stars in the form of kakera.
Oh, it is a shameful thing to enjoy, but Rika does experience a moment of peace, a moment of relief, just for a split fraction of a second and under all her desperation and anger as she shouts at Hanyuu or the reflections of herself.
In this place, after she has died, she has no one to placate, no one to lie to, no efforts to make or plans to foil. There's just her, alone and dead in the infinity of some sort of blank space. Its relaxing, its releasing, it's a place where she doesn't have to be or to do and for Rika, who lives her life over and over again under the burden of murder and fear of failure, that is a gift beyond price. She doesn't have to fake smiles and cheer and innocent naivete around people she loves and cares for, doesn't have to fake and hide her pain because to show it to them is to invite endless, pointless questions, sometimes suspicion, occasionally murder, and always, always, more stumbling blocks in her path.
In death, for a few moments, Rika is quiet and peaceful in the darkness, and she treasures this time almost as much as she is ashamed of it.
Keiichi reads his murder mysteries in the dark, flashlight under the covers like he sees sometimes in manga, grinning and excited and full of the childish mystique of seeing plot points and clues exposed in wavering beams of battery-fueled flashlight.
His innate curiosity fuels him, the want and the need to know, and he finds himself devouring things that perhaps a child of his age should not be reading, full of gore and glamor and twisted, cruel themes that a child should not perhaps know, the kind of torture, torment, and wicked murders and murderers that are so macabre they're almost hypnotizing, like the tugging vertigo when one stands at the verge of a cliff and looks down.
This knowledge does not harm him, or at least to his knowledge (and the manga that fuels his fear of needles was a tame one by most standards), and those dark books and dark themes lead him on a strange, twisted journey, like a zigzag staircase in some modern painting, going up and down and diagonal and around, threading his way through the ways of murder and mayhem with interest and zeal, learning, learning.
That learning stands him in good stead, giving him perspective, giving him trivia, giving him a plethora of neat facts to impress and awe his friends.
11.44 PM, USA Central Time