A/N: Oneshot! My first, to be precise. :) Melchior is torn apart with questions and emotional changes and must deal with them... alone. Some angst :X Inspiration taken from "The Mirror-Blue Night" and a little bit from "All That's Known"; I do not own Melchi (unfortunately) nor Spring Awakening.

The sun had already set with its last wink by the time Melchior got home. This was not unusual, for Melchior would often linger out in the forest, beneath the great oak tree where he always sat. Sat and thought. Thinking, thinking, thinking. He was always thinking. About the errors of the world, the fractures in society, the foolishness of religion. He would think of life, and the earth, and the nonexistence of an afterlife. Melchior could not believe there could be a hell. Why torture a man in the afterlife when he had already suffered enough when he was still breathing? Was not hell something that could be and was experienced while still alive? To be honest, it was something that Melchior was quite familiar with already. And heaven? That was absurd. There was nothing at all, only this one life. And beyond that... well, there was nothing.

Purgatory is only a fabrication of the human mind and of human desires, Melchior would think. We believe what we want to see. Humans want to believe that there must be an afterlife, some sort of resolve or rest after the hell they've put through all their life. Others want to believe that wrongdoers must pay their debts, that they must be punished. Everyone must be placed in a slot - "good" or "bad." No one wants to simply drift. Some poor soul must have come up with the idea one day that there should be a place mankind should hope to go one day after he breathed his last. But what was his reason? Reassurance? To spark some sort of vigor in man that he should work well and pray piously, like a kind of mass advertisement? To scare a man into straightening up in fear of falling into hell? And the same is with God. One day our society decided that there had to be something more than just ourselves, something to look up to, to make humans feel that they are not alone. All of religion was constructed out of piteous and implausible optimism. And thoughts as such.

Melchior would gaze up at the sky, a blue abyss that Melchior wished could swallow up and hear all of his questions and desires. His mind would ramble on and on in a stream of consciousness, broad with no direction. Melchior was never able to conclude his thoughts. He was incapable of being satisfied. It was only when he felt his brain could take no more pondering when he would pick himself up from the grass and trudge home.

The gate gave a punctuated screech as Melchior pulled it open and pushed it close. Quietly, he opened the door to the house. The parlor was empty. Melchior headed towards the stairs. He tried to keep his movements stealthy, afraid to attract attention-

"Melchior? You're home?"

It was too late. Melchior exhaled, and turned to face his mother.

"Hello, Mother."

"You have been out rather late again tonight."

"Yes. I was..." Melchior's voice trailed off.

Frau Gabor's lips turned upward in a slight smile. "Thinking again?"

"Perhaps," Melchior replied, not exactly admitting he had spent half of the day just thinking. It would only sound foolish.

"Oh? And about what this time?"

Melchior came up with a lie in a heartbeat. "My thoughts were occupied with the fact that I have a paper due tomorrow for Latin. Excuse me, Mother." Melchior made for the stairs, leaving Frau Gabor alone in the parlor.

Melchior shut the door behind him and stood in his neat room for a minute, not moving. There was a sudden knock at the door. Frau Gabor's voice sounded from the other side, muffled by the wood.

"Melchior, dear, don't you want your supper?"

"No, that's alright, Mother. I'm not hungry," Melchior replied.

There was a pause of silence. Then Melchior heard the sound of footsteps turning away from the door, and slowly getting softer as they stepped down back to the parlor.

Melchior sighed. He set his satchel on his desk, not bothering to take out his books. He went over to the window. The sky was a dark indigo now. Melchior contemplated over whether he should join his mother for dinner anyway. He had had little to eat that day, but Melchior dismissed the idea quickly. After all, it was not food that Melchior was hungry for.

Melchior pressed his forehead against the glass of the window. It was cold, but not icy. The coolness was soothing to his ever-pounding, well-wired head. So then, what was it that he was hungry for? Answers? Repose for his weary soul? Some sort of methadone for his emotions and lusts? Melchior lifted his head from the glass a few inches so that he could see his reflection off its reflective surface. Something was staring back at him. Yes, it had his eyes, his nose, his lips. Yes, it was his face. But at the same time it was not his face. There was a man there, and yet not a man still. A child, and yet not one. A creature lay before his eyes, something of two strange worlds. And that creature was himself. That face there - a normal appearance that betrayed the true, ugly organism festering inside of him. The layers of skin deceived the demon, the insect, the animal - whatever it was - that truly lurked in the shadows and far corners of his soul. Melchior closed his eyes, as if to escape the sight if only for a moment. Oh, to forget that beast wearing that awful disguise!

He lifted the window pane to let in some air. His face was instantly met with a cool breeze. The trees that surrounded the house stirred. The wind was whispering its secrets with inaudible words, its fingers slipping past each leaf and petal. Perhaps there was a storm coming, and only the wind would know, but no one else would. No one else would hear its warnings of rain and lightning and destruction before it was too late.

Melchior looked up at the sky. It was a starless, moonless night. Only darkness and blue. Blue, of the deepest, the loneliest and most mystic of colors. Melchior stood transfixed by the unrelenting dark sapphire that was draped across the sky. If only he could dive into that sea of blue above his head, let its murky waves wash away the burning questions, douse the painful fire in his body. Some think that there is a God that waits beyond that blue, Melchior considered, not with bitterness but with a sort of sympathy. Perhaps religion was the way that people dealt with their hunger, the hunger that Melchior was experiencing now. But that was their remedy. Not his. Religion was not the sort of thing Melchior ever chose to turn to. In truth, he had little to turn to at all. But what could you do when you were an atheistic adolescent?

And even if he could, who would he go to? His mother? Yes, he could be open with her, but even she did not know what was really happening in her own son's mind. Moritz? No, Moritz was as lost as Melchior when it came to reining his emotions. That was somewhat ironic. The man-child with all the answers, in truth, only understood so little. And Wendla? He blinked. He could definitely not talk to Wendla. She could never understand. And anyway, what kind of human could look into another one's soul and see all that lay there? No one could. So, Melchior kept to himself at times like these.

It was late, and Melchior still had that Latin assignment to tend to. Two hours had passed by the time Melchior decided to turn in for the night. Before he undressed and turned off the lamp, he made sure to close the window shut. In truth, he had grown afraid to leave the window open at night. He had taken the precaution of securing the window in the hopes of preventing it. But the ghost found her way inside anyway.

He shivered. The air had grown frigid. Then suddenly it grew scorching hot, the oxygen boiled in his lungs. Then cold again, only colder and emptier than before. So the ghost had arrived. The nightmare and dream began.

Melchior turned on his side, and could feel and see her there. As always, she was naked, with a vacant expression, empty and all-knowing eyes. Melchior could feel his lips moving, but could not hear the words. He demanded why the angel was there, why she came every night, and why need she to torture him so. She never answered his unspoken questions. Maybe it was because she did not know the answers She only smiled that simpering smile that was ugly and beautiful at the same time, then lifted her wings so that the feathers glided down Melchior's hands, his chest, his back. Melchior always grew paralyzed, but not numb. His fingers and palms always itched, his bones always ached. He could not move, but could always feel every move that the ghost, angel, or devil made to him. It poked and prodded him, then would lovingly stroke and caress him, only to spitefully claw at him again.

When Melchior would beg her to leave him, she would stay and continue to play her sadistic game. But when Melchior would beg her to stay, she would leave without a word to fall from her malicious lips. Melchior wanted it and hated it. Fought it and submitted to it. It was a constant battle that he had every night. His nights were made restless by a shadow he had no choice but to grapple with.

Melchior could never get a good look at the ghost's face. It was always changing. It was magnificent one moment, then horrifying the next. One minute a perfect, sun-illuminated face, then a fiendish glare with hungry eyes. It was always flickering images of women, angels, dames, maids...

And sometimes, on the loneliest, most terrifying and most divine of nights, the ghost's face would morph into that of Wendla's.