I recoiled from him, my body tense. The water no longer felt warm or soothing; it felt like a prison. The disgust was back, but it was a new kind of disgust, an even more potent kind. It was not for his filth, but for Kairi's pathetic, wasted life.
I looked at Renji, his face still a blank, pathetic slate. He was not a monument to laziness. He was a monument to grief, a mirror to her own self-sabotage. My hands, the hands that had just scrubbed the dirt from his skin, now understood their true purpose.
My job wasn't just to clean up his mess. It was to fix hers.
Yes. Kairi's.
The chaos of this place wasn't just a byproduct of his uselessness. It was a symptom of a deeper, more profound wound. And I, the reluctant architect of this broken vessel, would heal it. But not with kindness. My purpose was not to soothe. It was to sever contagion, to remove the source of the rot.
