Disclaimer: D. Gray-Man characters belong to Katsura Hoshino; I got the plot idea from a one-shot yaoi manga for Hetalia
Claimer: I own the OC Amelia
Warnings: barely any romance; Tyki might be a bit OOC depending on how hard-core of a fan you are; takes place before Tyki meets Allen
Pairings: Tyki X OC
Doll
Mental patient care isn't exactly considered the best in the late 1800's.
Tyki had a feeling as of late that his careless days of wandering Europe as a human with his group of friends was coming to a close. It would seem as though the Millennium Earl has taken to bringing all of his plans into motion at long last, and of course Tyki would have to have a say in the goings on as this all planning came to fruition.
There would be no more traveling the country side with those friends of his on the cars of trains, surviving day by day off money they managed to cheat off of people. He wouldn't be sitting in an open car, listening to the deafening noise of the wheels rolling over the metal of the train tracks. His eyes wouldn't be able to casually take in the sights as he and his crew rode through forests, fields, over rivers and lakes, passing through towns, and people-watching as everyone gathered onto a train to head to wherever they were needed. Not long from now he wouldn't be able to breathe in that lung-coating aroma of the burnt coal smoke as it drifted out of the train's front—like Tyki would care what the front was called.
The curly-haired man whistles to himself as he flicks an old and scratched coin up into the air as he makes his way to his destination, listening to his worn shoes padding against the brick stones of the walkway within this city.
Seeing as the Noah has both a light and dark side, he doesn't see how he could avoid having darkness in his personal life as a human. There's one friend he can't bring with him as he and the crew traveled over Europe. Brief memories flash through his mind as a sort of short story, reminding him of how he met this one friend.
Naturally, he had been traveling trying to find a job, but the child in their group, Eeez, had managed to catch a rather violent case of the stomach flu so they were forced to stop at a barn until the sickly kid got better. Momo and Clark continued on with the trek to see if the next town was hiring for a brief amount of time so there would be food for them as they waited for Eeez to get better. Tyki stayed behind for the boy.
Upon waking up in the morning, the raven-haired Portuguese man saw a woman about his age preparing what looks to be a healthy meal for someone who'd be sick—chicken soup, an orange, some water, and a few other things. Her hair had been pulled back into a low bun in disarray.
"Aren't you going to chase us off your property?" the bespectacled young man inquires.
The woman turned to him, blinking her brown eyes at him blankly. Tyki remembers that she had said she wouldn't do that because her pa always told her to help those in actual need, although she wasn't sure he'd be fond of the idea of her helping take care of someone on their property they had trespassed upon. Due to her oddly placed kindness, Eeez had gotten better rather fast.
She let him keep a jacket that used to belong to her little brother who drowned in a lake nearby.
After that, it was good to know there was a sort of safe haven for the curly-haired man. Tyki had ended up going back to that old farmhouse a few times after doing a few things as a Noah for the Millennium Earl. It was just to repay her for her kindness, and it wasn't until the last time he met her that he found out she'd been moved from the farmhouse by her parents.
They had told Tyki Amelia was retarded. Apparently, she'd been thinking her dolls were real people, and would get violent if any of her dolls were touched. She had good days where she seemed completely normal, and then bad days where she didn't even acknowledge her parents as real human beings but instead thought her dolls of them to be real. They couldn't take any more of it and sent her to a psychiatric center—a fancy way of naming an insane asylum. Tyki put off visiting for a while.
That is, until now.
He figures he might as well check out how Amelia is doing. He owes her that much after she convinced her parents to sometimes eat dinner and stay the night at the farmhouse. She'd taught him a few things about how to milk cows, how to herd goats into other pastures to clean up their dung, and other things. He guesses he always caught her on good days, since she seemed so normal.
Overall he had found out the basics about her personality. Amelia had been almost wary all the time, as if expecting some bad news to come any second. She's smart in her own right regarding farming, and managed to learn to read and do math so she's smart as only a farm girl could be. It seems she doesn't speak unless she knew that what she said would end up being right. She'd make cringes if she found out she had been wrong on any subject and would afterwards grumble to herself.
Amelia was just someone Tyki crossed paths with sometimes due to boredom, and this was no different.
Tyki glances up at the gray sky—why's it gray so much?—just before he enters the large five-story brick building. Not only is it tall, but it's also easily spread out to possibly cover a big part of a city block, at the time. A towering black fence protects the looming building—or perhaps protects the world from what's inside. A few patients were wandering around aimlessly on the psychiatric center's grounds. Tyki nods to a few orderlies dressed in head-to-toe white as they lead some patients by the arm.
The Portuguese man goes inside the building, greeted with a living room that had been turned into a sort of waiting room. He briefly wonders what sorry sap had owned the house and then gave it up to turn into an insane asylum. He goes over to the counter where an aged woman glances up at him with a natural hardness to her stare. She probably has a stone cold heart from having to deal with so many mentally challenged people in her years.
"What?" she snaps.
Tyki has to do his best to repress an amused chuckle as he leans against the counter. The older lady cringes, smelling the tobacco on the man's clothes.
"Visitor for Amelia Panheart," he replies.
"Sign in and appropriately fill in everything. She's in room 20-B. You're lucky you chose this day because she seems to be having a good day," the woman mentions, letting those beady eyes glance back down at the paperwork she seems to be filling out for some patient since Tyki could see a name scrawled at the top. He shakes his head and fills out the blanks, and it seems he's the third person to appear today. When he's done, she goes to fetch an orderly.
Tyki follows a man who seems to be a few years older than himself. He heaves a sigh, following the man up the stairs since apparently Amelia is on the second floor—makes sense when he thinks about it. Unlike downstairs, there's no one wandering the halls here. It's silent, besides the muffled shouts and loud moaning coming from upstairs. Hopefully that means the people on this floor are rather mild.
The orderly runs a hand through his shortly cropped hair, if that action could be considered that, as he pulls out keys and manages to find the right one. He opens the door, leaving it opened all the way and he nods at Tyki to go on inside. The young man flicks his head into a tilt as he shrugs his shoulders, going inside while smoothing down his pants.
Right… a good day… Tyki mocks the woman at the desk in his mind.
He takes a seat across from Amelia. She's sitting on a bed. She's wearing a dress which seems old, so it must be one of her dresses she brought with her from her home. She also wears a long white sweater, her hair hanging down loosely over her shoulders instead of in the distinctive messy bun he'd always seen her sporting. Her brown eyes regard Tyki with no recognition whatsoever.
"We don't often get visitors. I'm really surprised, this is like a treat," she says with a friendly-enough tone of voice. She holds out her hand, Tyki putting on a relaxed smile as he shakes it. She asks, "I really don't mean to be rude, but you smell. Do you smoke, or do you chew?"
Tyki leans back in the chair, listening to the squeaking of the wood settling as he shrugs and says he smokes. She nods in understanding, fiddling with a doll on her lap. It looks well-worn around the sides, as if she's lifted it up or hugged it there often enough. A tightly pinned white shirt—what he assumes to be a shirt—is stained and the collar is fringed with a few stains and puffy black pants. On the shirt is what looks like drawn-on suspenders.
"That's really interesting…" she manages to mumble after some silence. Tyki was comfortable with it, but it's possible she isn't seeing as she seems to think she doesn't know him. He tilts his head at her, letting that motion say for her to go on. She looks down at the doll with an almost fond stare as she says, "My friend here is a heavy smoker. I told him a few times he shouldn't smoke so much since he really stinks."
A frown graces itself on the male's face upon hearing this. He remembers the few times Amelia had told him the same thing. He looks at the faceless doll, now deciding the clothes looked all-too familiar to him.
He glances around the room, taking in the bare white walls, floor, and ceiling. Amelia's bed is pushed to the furthest corner from the door, a dresser against the right wall. It looks like it's been made from cheap wood. In the far right corner is a desk with another chair, both made of wood as well. What looks like a journal of some sort sits open on the desk. A few essentials sit on the dresser, a somewhat large mirror there as well. Along the wall are a few charcoal-drawn pictures of a few dolls with familiar clothing but no faces. There's a dark colored chest, though, poking out from underneath Amelia's bed and he assumes that's where her other dolls are.
"I hate to be rude, but… how do I know you?" she asks. He shrugs, briefly craving a cigarette as he answers, "You probably don't remember but we were friends a long while ago, I guess."
He feels a tad bit uncomfortable as of present. The resemblance of the doll strikes a chord as Amelia's brown eyes glance back down at the doll as if to make sure it actually hasn't gone somewhere. She takes a few moments again before saying, "Sorry I'm rude in not remembering you."
"It's alright. It's expected," he assures her. "Who's that on your lap?"
"This is my friend, and like you I guess he's been my friend since a long while ago, too," she says shyly. "Anyway, this is Tyki Mikk. He used to drop by just a few times, maybe just passing by as he was looking for work. It's an interesting story on how we met, though."
Amelia talks more than Tyki's heard every time he'd visited her. Maybe her insanity had increased as she chatters on about the memories Tyki had brought to mind not too long ago. She could remember all that, and yet she couldn't bother to notice important details that matter.
Perhaps it's because the Portuguese man hasn't had a cigarette in a while—he ran through his last pack in the morning so he's gone a while without a good drag of a cigarette—but hearing the brown-haired woman talk to him about this doll as if it's him doesn't make him all that happy. He believes himself to be memorable—hence the reason many women fawn over him and try to get his attention when he attends aristocratic parties—and this girl is choosing a doll over the real thing.
"He's really clever," she says after her story has been told. She laughs as if she's hearing a joke. "He knows well that I know he's smarter than he acts. He might seem nice and all, but he sort of likes to cheat people out of their money in card games. I think he's good enough to where he doesn't need to cheat, though."
This would be the last time Tyki would visit Amelia.
"Tyki visits more often now. I think it's because I told him I really appreciate his visits the last time we met at my house—it's a farmhouse," she adds. "I actually admitted this to him two weeks ago, but before then he hadn't visited… for a long time."
He remembered when she had told him that, too. Had she actually missed his visits enough that she decided to make a doll out of him and settle with that since the real thing hasn't come until today? He leans forward in his seat, making Amelia glance up at him and putting on a polite smile all over again.
"You forgot to tell me your name."
"My name is Tyki Mikk, and that's a doll on your lap."
Amelia blinks at Tyki stupidly. Her mind almost seems to be in the process of erasing what he just said and trying to rearrange a few words to where she could 'understand' it more easily in her state of mind.
"That's a really curious name if you two have the same name," she says in wonder.
"Amelia… that's a doll on your lap. I can prove it to you," Tyki offers gently.
He reaches forward and takes the doll, the brown-haired woman looking confused as if he just broke some unspoken rule. The male tears the head off of the doll's body, the sound of fabric tearing sounding out in the room. He should probably regret doing this, but he didn't. It was mostly the look in Amelia's eyes that he would regret later on.
The Portuguese man could swear to the high heavens that he saw her pupils shrink in an instant as her face twisted into unspeakable horror. Quickly, tears sprang up and roll down her cheeks, her posture stiff, and her mouth hanging open in a stunned moment of silence probably before she started shouting.
And she did start shouting. She lets out an airy breath, letting out a silent scream. She takes in another lungful of air, and she screeches as if someone stabbed her. Tyki blinks in surprise, standing up in less than a second as Amelia lunges forward, thrashing her fists against him and trying to land a punch, but he easily pushes her fists away.
The orderly is in the room in an instant. He grabs the brown-haired woman around the waist, pulling her away from Tyki, forcing her hands to let go of his shirt and she starts thrashing and screaming at the top of her lungs and sobbing, now trying to get at the doll in two pieces on the floor.
Tyki has no idea why he thought this meeting was supposed to be happy.
He backs up, leaving the room and hearing a few other orderlies stampeding up the stairs. He stays out of their way as he runs his fingers underneath his suspenders and heading out of the building. The woman at the desk was gone, but he puts the sign-out time and leaves. A few of the patients outside stare at the building, hearing the screaming and sobbing from the second floor. A few seem to get antsy.
The raven-haired Noah shakes his head, doing his best to keep that sound from registering in his mind more than it has already as he quickly leaves the building's grounds.
I'd appreciate any reviews given for this one-shot (doubt there'll be any) whether they compliment the story or give constructive criticism.
Other than that, there's not much else to say about this story. I sort of regret making a one-shot like this, though, but it was a good idea at the time.