Makoto's late night musings

While his father kept guard outside the makeshift shelter they made under a half destroyed bridge and the others were asleep a few meter away, he finally had some time to think.

He doesn't really hate Enoshima, he'd come to realize.

One part of him is furious, absolutely livid with rage whenever he thinks about her and the pain and suffering she had brought to him. To his friends. To the world.

He wishes she'd pay for it all, whenever he brings his gaze to the red sky.

He'd like to hurt her, he thinks every time he stares at a new pile of mangled corpses amidst the rubble and the debris.

Another part of him is completely enamoured by her, caught up with every part of her, obsessively admiring every detail with lust and fascination beyond what any sane person should feel. He'd (literally) kiss the floor she walks on, and in her presence his fury would be drowned by adoration and glee akin to those of a devoted worshipper seeing their god descend before their very eyes.

Righteous fury and overwhelming lust clash in his mind in a twisted and highly volatile storm full of contradictory emotions, clouding his judgement (and free will), but one thing is clear to him.

He loved her as much as he wanted her dead suffering.

Except those feelings are not truly his, only a result of her brainwashing tainting his emotions. Whether it was a byproduct of the whole 'rewiring their brains so they become despair fetishists' or another way to feed her narcissism is a mystery left for him to wonder.

(Just like he wonders how much of him was left without being infected)

However, under all of that he couldn't help but pity her.

She said the video would make them see things the way she sees them.

He has only been living like this for -how long? Four months?- and he can confidently say that it is hell, no matter how much his tainted brain writhes in euphoria. To live almost twenty years like that, being constantly assaulted with the compulsion to hurt -to be hurt- in the most brutal, most gruesome way possible in search of a misery that you know is destroying you like nothing else could, yet you just can't get enough of it...

His mind flashes to the first days after everything began, when he hysterically scratched his arms to the point of drawing blood, too caught up with the pain to even care about what he was doing to himself. The only thing that mattered then was getting more.

...And that would be the case if she hasn't lost herself to depravity yet. He knows from Celeste that a cunning mind is not guaranteed to save one from such fate.

(He quickly buried the memories of chilling moans echoing on a dimly lit room deep in his brain, back where he hoped them to never return)

That's just sad.

(And it could very well be another lie)

It doesn't excuse her actions, nor calm his burning anger, but it makes him sympathise with understand her admittedly self-destructive behaviour.

It also doesn't paint a pretty picture for his future.

He's been holding on to what remains of his sanity his humanity and his morals all this time, but it is not an easy task.

Too many times he almost lost himself to the pure ecstasy that assaulted his psyche whenever he admired saw the carnage in the city, mangled remains of humans and animals alike scattered across the streets under the red sky, dried blood splatters and other fluids (he really didn't want to know which ones, he didn't, he didn't... But-) adorning the walls of those buildings still standing and the occasional desperate whimpers of those hiding and the erratic, gleeful (unnaturally so) cackles of those hunting.