I am fucked up. So incredibly fucked up.

I saved you from one person who would corrupt you (and just thinking about it makes my blood boil, thinking of you under someone, trying to scream but being unable to, thinking of you sobbing when he hurt you like I know he did) but then I kept you. Like a selfish boy who'd found a pet he liked on the street, I took you home with me (well, the closest thing I've got to a home) and I decided to keep you for myself. I kept you locked inside that church like a pretty songless bird, not trapped with strength but by reality because, really, where else would you go? We both know that the answer is nowhere, so you might as well be in a cage. And a sick part of me is glad that you can never leave or escape because you are a comfort, and the only comfort I have. Like a selfish, fucked up bastard, I took the only pure, innocent creature left in the world and tried to make you mine.

And the fact that you don't mind is infuriating. You don't seem to mind that the person who rescued you is dirtied, a killer, a scumbag, a monster, you don't seem to care that I could snap one day and then I could kill you or worse. You don't seem to mind at all, and it drives me insane. I wish I could ask you why, but I can't bring myself to because the answer scares me and because how would you answer, anyway? I'm normally so good at reading you, but sometimes there's a look in your eyes that seems probing and curious and affectionate at the same time, and it scares me and makes me hate myself. I've convinced you, the pure, sweet little angel, to care enough about me that there's something so soft and affectionate about your expression when you look at me that it hurts. Badou has suggested, several times, in fact, that you might have a crush on me, and he usually says it by singing something along the lines of "Nill and Heine, sittin' in a tree," and that thought worries me more. It might be natural, I guess, to latch onto the first member of the opposite gender to ever be kind to you, ever, but don't you see that…I'm me? Of course, you've got a million other choices, getting older and curvier and…growing. I've even caught Badou looking at your body with a thoughtful, probing, only a tiny bit lustful way, and that pisses me off, too. You're too good to be stained by anyone at all, but Badou is only slightly less of a monster than I am, so if I'm controlling myself and holding back then he has to, too, dammit.

I'm a monster, a killer, a mad dog. I could snap any day and stain this church a deep, crimson red. Your deep crimson red. I have nightmares of killing all of you, Naoto and Badou and Mihai and everyone but you most of all, and yours is the worst because you're so scared but at the same time your eyes never, ever show any hate at all, any damn hate. You don't hate me even as I plunge my hands, claws, into your stomach to rip out whatever organs may be hiding there. You only look scared. The rest can at least manage to curse and glare at me, but never you. I wish you could hate me. Not just in dreams, either.

You wouldn't approve of these thoughts, and I know it. You'd hit me repeatedly with your thin, bony hands and your expression would be mildly irritated. You'd tell me either by signing it or by writing or just by looking to stop pitying myself and to trust myself not to hurt you. You'd tell me that you have enough faith in me not to be afraid so I should trust myself, too.

Lilly trusted me, too. And we all know how well that turned out.

I walk into the church and you look up from a rather poor looking sowing job in a pew to see me, and your eyes light up in a way that makes me feel both happy and sick. You don't move and I come to you, sitting next to you on the pew. You look over my bloodstained coat covered with bulletholes disapprovingly, and I have to laugh, just a little. Your eyes widen, and you break into a wide, sincere smile.

Yes, I kept you. Because you make me laugh, make me happy, make it easy. You make me believe, if only for a moment, that good things can live, thrive even, in this hellhole of a world. And as selfish as that may be, me keeping you, I'm not quite ready to let you go. So, until then, keep smiling for me.

Okay?