[Reaction.]
He's never truly understood. Rage, certainly. He understands the white heat that descends over people. Not personally, because Kit has never felt anger lick all-consuming at the marrow of him but he understands it in a quiet, observational way. Rage makes some kind of sense washing out rationality. He can empathize with that. He often did, stood taping someone's nose, or their knuckles, or their wrist. Trying to put a body back the way it was meant to be. He's heard a lot of explanations, the thinking blotted out by rage like ink, knocked over a blank page. He was open to understanding, to hearing. He heard a lot, the peril of the job. Almost a confessor, but not quite.
He's understood religion. He got taken to church often enough to understand the comfort of it. The ritual of it. Firstly his family's people, who went to the kind of church where the heat crept higher and higher as the pastor talked forgiveness and fire, and then his grandparents' people, whose priest sang liturgies, distant and coldly beautiful. But he doesn't understand devotion.
But this isn't rage. It isn't even madness, not really. Not entirely. And it's not devotion. It's something tangled, something poisonous. There's hatred cradled in the heart of it, a malformation. Kit, in his laboratory, flinches, his spine rigid as he can feel the weight of his own body over the heat, the broken cradle of the man's limbs, he can see the visceral gleam of the man's irises, the terror in them and it spreads like ink through him until the thing is done with him. Like poison, exiting the body. He's left with his knuckles clenched around a bench, the certainty of the memory clear as a bell as his stomach doubles back on itself, twists and the utter incomprehension of what exactly has just happened.