This part of Atonement always gets me feeling some kind of way and forms the core of how I think about Keiichi and Rena. Like get you a friend who believes in you as much as Rena does.

June 3rd, 2021

It hurt, that was the main thing. It hurt, and she was scared.

This wasn't Keiichi. This couldn't possibly be Keiichi, the goofy, clumsy city boy that she had come to care for. This was some kind of feral, spitting demon that had taken his place, crawled inside his skin like a cicada in a chrysalis. Its evil poked through in those crazed, cat-slitted eyes, in the incoherent words he yelled and that terrible silvery bludgeon of pain that he rained down on her and Mion.

Mion was dead. Rena knew she was dead, she knew it in the horrible stillness of Mion's warm, wet body beside her, knew it somehow in the way the blood seeped in a red pool across the tatami mat, knew it at a level so deep that it went beyond even instinct. Rena could deny it, could desperately pretend to herself that Mion might be fine if Coach Irie made it here on time, that her stillness was just unconsciousness or a façade, but she knew. There was an absence beside her, a hole torn in her heart that could never be sewn back together, a ghastly separation between her and the friend who had first welcomed her back to Hinamizawa and lit up her life with fun.

Mion was gone.

And Keiichi, Keiichi, this Keiichi that was not Keiichi, he was gone too, in a way. She saw it in his eyes, saw the fear that was like a mirror to her heart, the fear that had seeped out of her body with pale, pale pink slices across her collar and wrists.

She remembered that fear.

Oyashiro-sama, why? What had Keiichi done to make him cursed in this way? He was their friend, he was a true Hinamizawan that would never, ever break the rules. He might have been born an outsider, but he was one of them now, she knew it, could see it in his soul. So why, why had Oyashiro-sama come for him? Why was he cursed?

But her doctor had said that that was not true, said that Oyashiro-sama was not real (blasphemy, blasphemy her mind shrieks, alone in that cold clinical room with someone picking her fragile mind apart), that they were all hallucinations and a persecution complex. That it wasn't real, that what she saw wasn't true.

Poor Keiichi. Was he broken like she was? (Not in body, not in bones that shrieked and grated against themselves in ways that they never should right now, not in whimpering pain and blood.) Was he suffering a persecution complex too?

That was okay. That was okay. Keiichi was her friend, and she would love him for all his faults and sins, just as he would love hers, just as Mion would love theirs.

"Keiichi…" she breathed, through shaky lips and sticky blood. He swerved to look at her with a feral hiss, like a steam engine, and Rena smiled. He sounded like a spooked cat, a hunched little kitty trying to puff itself up and scare the thing that was scaring it.

She smiled with all the love and understanding she could muster, letting him know it was okay, that he was safe, that she would never, ever hurt him. She watched him flinch and raise his bat as she lifted her shaking, twisted arms, and she smiled wider, pitying him, not allowing her surge of fear at the raised bat to cow her. Keiichi was scared now. He needed her help. She couldn't allow herself to be afraid, to think of what it meant that he was now ready to strike her again, that she couldn't defend herself with her broken, bleeding arms. Blood was on her face, too, throbbing painfully from a place on her skull where he had hit her, and the world was spinning, but she wouldn't stop, wouldn't quit.

Keiichi was her friend. She was going to keep her arms open for him no matter what, because she trusted him, she believed in him all the way to the end.

"Its okay, Keiichi." she told him, soft and gentle, kind and understanding, her arms open wide and defenseless, inviting him in for a hug, making it clear beyond thought that she could not harm him, would not harm him if she was able. That she forgave him, that she loved him, that she was here for him, that she was trying to calm him down and welcome him back, push away all those dark fears crowding his mind.

Keiichi screamed and lifted his bat higher, and she did not flinch as it came hurtling down. She would not betray his trust, her promise. There was every chance it would veer, it would swerve, that he would realize at the very last second and break her arm instead, then drop his bat in horror. This was Keiichi. This was her friend. She would keep her hands offered to him until the very end, waiting to pull him out of this hell.

She saw the world in red as he caved in her skull, and her arms only dropped when her body did too, believing to the last.

Perhaps her belief was fulfilled, for it was when he pushed past the red in his own eyes, in a different world, that Keiichi finally saw and understood this moment for what it was, and knew how to save her from a madness of her own.

9.29 PM, USA Central Time