Luminescent

Warming Up

If Rin were anything but half-demon, he was sure he wouldn't be able to force himself to stay awake nearly as long as he did.

But he couldn't force himself to sleep either. While Yukio was neglecting his brother in favor of doing literally anything else and with no one else around to nag him for it, Rin had developed some not-so-great habits. One of them was staying awake for days at a time. He'd been having vivid nightmares since Satan had possessed Shiro and they'd only gotten worse as the year went on and more bad shit happened. The suspicious amount of sleep he'd been getting before(11 hours a day, wow) was a result of Rin adapting to being unsealed, then he just got the regular seven to eight hours of sleep for a while, and now he got nearly none. Was this how Mephisto felt, always being awake while everyone else slept? Surely his host had to rest at some point, though.

There was a good reason behind the sleep deprivation, so Rin felt no remorse for depriving himself of sleep. Recently, his nightmares had changed. Instead of just reliving the things that haunted him constantly(Shiro's possession and everything that had followed after), Rin was faced with dreams of Satan possessing each of his friends. Blue fire would spout from their bodies as Satan puppeted their bodies to convince him to come to Gehenna, to come home. And each time, Satan would just jump down the line of the human bodies of the half-demon's friends, until whoever was last in line–usually Suguro or Shiemi–would get close enough to reach out and touch him, only for their body to combust from the inside and cover Rin in chunks and viscera of his companions. All the bodies before would do much the same, but the last was always the worst, because Rin swore he could feel the warm blood still soaking into his clothes whenever he woke up from those dreams.

Experiencing that over and over again was not good for someone as pathetically insecure as Rin, so he simply didn't sleep. It helped that he didn't suffer the reprocussions of sleep deprivation that humans did until the last few hours before his body forced him to shut down. And, as an added bonus, it gave him more time to do homework, study for school so he could pass the regular classes and cram classes, and even train with his flames or his sword sometimes.

Rin was painfully aware of his own insecurities, but being aware of them and remedying them were two separate matters and he handy managed the second one quite yet.

If Rin was to face down Satan one day, he couldn't have those insecurities. If Satan caught onto them, he'd pry open Rin's mind and slither in like the serpent in Genesis (unfortunately, Rin had sat through enough sermons to have several of the Bible stories memorized). If Rin's body was strong enough, Satan would destroy everything Rin cared about using his own body. If Rin's body wasn't strong enough, his life and achievements would amount to nothing and Rin would die an incredibly pitiful and horrific death and his possessed body would destroy as much of humanity as possible before turning to ash.

Tonight was turning out to be different from his usual hours of schoolwork and training though–he was startled by Amaimon suddenly staring at him through the window in front of his desk as he'd been staring off into space and absently tugging on his new ear piercings.

He'd missed having them. He had two in each ear and one in his tongue(Mephisto had consented to him getting all the piercings he wanted since he was Rin's current legal guardian, which Rin tried not to think too hard about considering he was kind of sleeping with the guy and that sounded icky). Her never gotten a tongue piercing before, but he had wanted one. It was an interesting sensation, but since they were miniscule wounds, the piercings healed normally. His healing factor didn't seem then a threat, thankfully.

Amaimon had made sure Rin knew just how much he was loving the piercings. Between classes and all throughout lunch, he'd pulled Rin into corners or behind bushes or up in trees to make out messily and leave marks on each other until something called their attention away. Thankfully, Rin's hair was always naturally messy anyways, so no one inquired about sex hair, at least.