Gold and Bloodred Lichtenberg

Hippocratic Oath

The room was dark; the only light source hung overhead beyond sight, illuminating the western-style table. There was nothing on the table save the lone metal cloche serving dish. He was oddly drawn towards it; not questioning the strange, surreal situation. He could feel the anxiety building up in his chest as he drew closer to it. Normally he'd question as to why the lid was shifting and knocking but he never reacted to it; as if that was perfectly normal. It stopped when he got close to it, and he reached out towards it to lift the lid, never even thinking about how...normal his hands looked.

Lifting the lid revealed a...anpan? That was odd. He had been expecting something more, sinister due to how his heart had been beating. He picked it up to look at it; it looked like an average Anpan. He was about to sigh in relief but then the Anpan twitched and split open, and white spiders started crawling out of it. Crying out, he dropped it back onto the tray as the spiders started to crawl on his hand, shaking his hand to get them off. That's when he noticed the red stuff leaking out of the Anpan. Naturally, he assumed it was the Anko leaking out, but when he saw that it had blue and purple veins and dark blood oozing around it, it told him otherwise. Only when it started to scream that familiar terrible scream did he realize what it was; more spiders crawling out of its twisted 'mouth'.

That's when Zenitsu woke up.

The rush of anxiety and adrenaline made him shaky as he sat up, still slightly dissociated from the waking world and the dream one. He wiped his forehead clean from the sweat that was dripping down off of it. What was with these nightmares as of late? This was the first one he remembered, but he wished he hadn't. He sighed as he went to wipe some more irritating sweat off his neck when he realized something, the collar wasn't around his neck. He looked around and felt sick; the wall by his bed, the mattress, and the metal headboard of the bed, all had deep claw marks in them. He looked around again and saw that the collar had been twisted off and discarded to a corner of the room with more claw marks on the floorboards near it. At first, he thought that whatever other unknown nightmares he had must have been intense to cause so much damage, but then a worse thought came to mind:

'They're going to be so mad at me,' he thought to himself as he stood up to get a better look at the damage, 'they'll never believe I didn't do this on purpose!' He picked up the collar; it was completely broken at the lock and where the chain linked up to it. He decided to just tell someone, it would be better to tell them now than have them walk in on it and freak out about it later. He went to the door and knocked on it, trying his best to not breathe in the smell of the wisteria. He heard the Kakushi guarding the door jump from his knocking; not too surprising to him. After all, he wasn't meant to be able to reach the door.

"Um...excuse me," he meekly called out, "uh...my collar kinda...broke? Could you tell...I don't know—and you're gone." he sighed as soon as he told whoever was outside that, they quickly left. All he could do now was wait for whatever and whoever to come. He sat on the bed, wringing his hands nervously. As he waited (which took longer than he thought it would), he looked around surveying the damage. The mattress would have to be replaced, same with the floorboards...maybe even parts of the walls. He was in it deep. Then he finally noticed something very important was missing from the room: Nezuko's box was gone. He didn't get too much of a chance to think too much about it as the door suddenly swung open, making Zenitsu jump. He looked up at Aoi's scowling face. She seemed fairly confident entering the room by herself with no rubber equipment, not like when he had first met her when she seemed to be putting up a brave face.

"What did you do," she asked looking around the room looking absolutely peeved, "you didn't do this on purpose, did you?"

"Of course not," he said feeling tears welling at the edges of his eyes, "I had a bad dream, all right?! I'm sorry, I don't know what happened! I feel bad about it, and now everyone's going to be mad at me and yell at me and—"