the colour wheel.
/ a preface, if you will /
Rating: PG for some medical gore.
Genre: Introspective? Hurt/Comfort? I'm not entirely sure.
Characters/Pairing: Chrome. Mukuro. Written in pre-pairing spirit. Hence: A preface.
Spoilers: Rehashes much of their canon meeting and the events preceding.
Disclaimer: KHR belongs to Amano. Standard fanfic disclaimers apply.
In the beginning, she has two eyes.
Two eyes.
Saucer-wide with youth, lash-ferned, painted above cheeks dusted by fading freckles, button flat press of a little girl's nose; the cheeks, round as they are, seem to grow down from the eyes, out from the contours of the cartilage. But the eyes - and there are two, purple, each - are the gravitational center of the face, the suns which hoist into place the smooth tissues over a wiring of jaw bone which will sharpen to a heart shape with age.
This is the first image you see.
Eyes which dominate everything. Swell of a face. Small boyish body with its gangly little limbs, waves of matching hair, and she is outside, her feet encased in ballerina slippers - memory of some forgotten childhood pursuit - pat pat pat on the cement sidewalk, running after a tabby which is as grey as the stone, as grey as the sky, as grey as everything which you see in this picture save for the eyes and the hair.
You are looking, you realize, at a world set in greyscale.
This is her world.
Her two eyes are fixed, singularly, on the cat, which all this time has been propelling itself toward the grey road, before a grey car which will make of it a flattened pulp of fur and bone - and this girl, in her grey thoughtlessness, dives forward, thinking if she moves quickly, she will nudge them both forward, and -
Her knee hits the ground.
Dribbles the first pinpricks of red.
The last thing she sees, with two eyes, is the grey cat bounding away.
Narrowly avoiding the press of a tire.
~X~
One eye opens.
Oh, this girl thinks. Stupid, she guesses.
Her small body, which has not yet formed all its parts, and here she lies on the hospital bed, a cracked eye taking in a white expanse of cracked ceiling, shifting down to the white sheets - cleanly laid out over the slight rise of her abdomen, the stillness of the legs she cannot feel. (Her white (death shroud) sheets look like those linens her mother's servant hangs to dry, and, curiously, when the girl regains consciousness, this is the first thought she holds of the one with whom she shares blood:
(Sheet. = Mother's servant. = Mother.) Distant after-image.)
Here she is. Blinking at herself.
Blinking: her only movement. Her tiny rebellion.
Closes eye(-s).
Stupid, she guesses.
~X~
This must be what it feels like to be newly born.
Or reconstructed to such a degree that you may as well have been. The girl fades in and out of consciousness on an opiatic ocean; the room sharpens, boxlike, no soft focus, and she does not always think of her body amid the intensity of the edges and corners, the nightmares that rise and crawl about her brain, shadow-golems which leave her knuckles white, grasping the covers, but which she can never with any clarity recall.
When she remembers her body again, it is as this: New. Small. Pink-tipped. Open. Vulnerable. Mechanical. Hollow. Medical. It is the last, above all else, which she feels. She had chanced it, this girl. Had tried to make it across the road, past fate. The machine had collided with her flesh: an epiphany in motion. And though the result had undoubtedly been one of beautiful gore, red on that greyscale asphalt, this girl knows her body now not by the blood she emptied, but by the emptiness left in its wake.
A loud roar. A tangle of metal. Corners.
It was the side of the car which struck her. A steel nudge just spot-on enough to serrate her abdomen, open it like a can; kick up glass splinters from the shattered windshield (which she does not remember striking). One such splinter knifed her eye, gouged a diamond-point into the vitreous humour and tore through the lens. The doctors - at some moment in her drug-slumber - plucked out this invading shard. Took with it nerve bundles. Optic nerve like a little curl of spaghetti filament. She's blind now anyway, doctor. Can't see with that eye, anyway.
In her mind's eye, she is a frog on a student's dissecting table: flesh pinned back, scalpels navigating the recesses of her cavities. (What a bad girl you are, opening yourself to such metal intimacy.)
Carved out her eye. Reduced her entrails to rot and waste. Marked her like a lover.
Sterile four-corner hospital room.
The girl is no longer a girl.
She is a series of parts.
Parts that are still here. Parts that are gone. Remaining organ tissues which will be donated when she dies. (She hears the doctors discussing this, when they believe she has lost consciousness again. Woman in nearby province needs a transfusion - )
The car married her to technology, a non-consensual union.
Oxygen mask over the face. Penetrated by tubes. A cut in the forearm; intravenous drip, drugs to fill her when nothing else is doing so, mechanical apparatus attempting the work of crude digestion.
No orifice, no inch of her, seems above the promise of tubing, bleeding, exhaustion and insertion.
Urine and blood in bags.
She opens her eye to see these containers - hovering near the bed, neat little pouches of herself in fluid form.
~X~
The girl is no longer a girl.
She feels nothing, or she feels pain. Feels tenderness at every nerve ending, feels pricked, or descends into agony so intense she transcends screams and passes into whimpers. Won't last long now, even with the machine. Not without a transplant.
Hears her mother refuse. That child, that burdensome child. No one wants her to live.
A pale corpse beneath a pale sheet. Waiting to stop breathing, end the charade, so she can be divided. Segmented. Sent off to give aid to others. The doctors' voices ebb and flow like tides across her nightmare shores. Discussing her surgeries. Her kidneys and pancreas and uterus and anything, anything but a whole human being.
When she scrapes together a moment of energy, Nagi cries with her single eye until she loses consciousness again.
~X~
There was a girl named Dorothy, and one day, she went to a place called Oz. Yellow roads and wizards and candied plants. Opiate poppies; a drift of not-snow to make you close your eyes. But first, first you see.
First. Nagi opens her eye.
Colours enter the world.
Edge of an ocean; ultramarine and aqua, cumulus drifts in a hazy-edged sky, faded blue wonderland over spears of green. She can breathe in the colours. She realizes she could drink them down like liquid for her starved, thirsty body: her empty body, which is light in this place, where everything is light. And Nagi thinks, based on what she knows of heaven, that certainly she has died.
She does not notice him at first, so busy is she being distracted by the width of the horizon. The gentle borders.
It is the first beautiful thing she has ever seen in her life, this girl.
An ending is merely the beginning of another cycle, he tells her.
Nagi does not understand at first. Not then. She will come to understand, later. (It is the first lesson he imparts unto her.) She turns. Gazes in wonder. Thinks, surely, she has died. This is a dream which will fade into a quiet death.
Miracles do not happen to her. She has never believed. She has never had anything in which to believe, in her grey life in her grey world.
The first impression that Nagi has of Mukuro is that the colours in the world must leech from him - red of an eye for apples and blood, blue for the waters, and his skin, fair as bleached bones in the desert sun, the white of their clothing in this Not World as bright as ocean foam, linen off the clothing line, or death shrouds. Design of darkness to appall. He must be the epicenter of the colours in the world. And he painted this himself, she realizes. These skies, these fields; he put them together from memories, from wisps of her own mind, perhaps.
I need you, Nagi, he tells her, and extends his hand.
It is disbelief which threads through her, at first.
Uncertainty. Because no one has ever needed or wanted Nagi, and certainly not anyone who could cast a world like this from down out of the sky. An angel, a god. Something like that. Maybe she's being silly again.
Someone who is more than human, at any rate. She knows he's not merely human. Not merely like her. Not a sum of the parts.
She feels no pain in her body. No half-conscious sinking nightmares of doctors' voices and bursting, prismatic visions of vivisections. Here, there is only light filtering up and through them. A nimbus-universe. Here, there is only the sense of loveliness.
She has walked into a water-colour imprint, an impressionistic landscape.
She is weightless.
She takes his hand.
~X~
Kuromu Dokuro.
The anagram name he gives her: Rokudo Mukuro. It is later, only later - after she has seen others of the worlds he weaves - after she has felt the weight of the trident in her hands, felt the strangeness of training her body to fight, to move with muscles she had never before thought to utilize, after he has opened her eye to the complex system of enterprises which she will now be irrevocably entering and entered unto - it is only after all of this that she wonders with what skill he has created for her these illusions which function with sufficient similarity to reality.
Pumping fluids through her. Wired by unseen nerves to her brain. (To his brain?) A fictional womb around which her female adulthood will develop someday. She asks him where he learned to create even something so precise as artificial transplants.
He only tips back his head and laughs. Answers:
"In a place not so unlike hell."
The mark sliced onto his eye flickers with amused light.
Chrome jolts, suddenly, to find herself trapped in what must be his memories. Red rooms; surgical blades, tubing, a screaming chaos. 350 bones and 78 organs in the human body; she gasps as the striated and smooth tissues grow so large in her mind's eye that they seem to wrap around her brain, as liver slices gleam like smiles in dishes, porous bone fibers like bird legs, and it's entering her - not only the images, but the weight of some knowledge that is being grasped at, some sense of how to make them, of how to make everything, heavy and terrifying. Not knowledge like numbers, like figures, like letters with which to create words, but knowledge as if she might, with the proper movements, layer the interstices with her own two hands.
As if she might someday make a man.
As if she might, someday, make herself, as Mukuro has made her.
He smiles. Says nothing.
She pants and shudders and almost vomits - but never, not once, asks for it to end.
She does not want it to end.
~X~
She understood, after seeing it, what he meant about their similarity. Where he came from, and where she did. And yet she still cannot think of them as alike. Her mind traces over his elegant bones and the effortless landscapes of his art. One night, she sits in her wispy evening gown, gazing into the mirror. He is inside of her now. His handiwork, and his presence, and on some evenings, she will feel his laughter or the echo of his voice, like a dream in the shadow of the night. Psychologically and physically tethered. It will be a strange way of going through puberty, but.
But never mind. She watches for him in the mirror, this man.
She is a synthetic woman now, born without sex, without a mother. Made by a man. Is this not a reversal of the natural order? But never mind, again. She looks for him. For some sign of him. In her veins, or in the reflection of her lone eye, or perhaps even in the shallow pit of the open socket. She thinks if she watches long enough, arteries will sprout and a blooded iris will look out at her, and she will be something more than human, too.
Chrome is learning to cast the illusions.
To shape the world.
This will be her skill.
And later, still later, the joy washes over her like a deluge. Joy because she is needed. Wanted. Joy because she has been taken aside and shown something of such surpassing loveliness. And with it comes the first breaking of love, this hot fierce feeling over which she is instantly protective, instantly secretive, because she is too young to know what love is, too eagerly grasping for any little shred of kindness in this world, and she knows, she knows, but.
What she wouldn't do, in exchange for that smile.
For only a smile.
~X~
That night, Nagi - no, Chrome - stands before the mirror again, wielding a set of scissors.
Hair is only so many dead cells, so many filaments separating her body from his.
Her sex from his sex.
She reaches up.
Watches herself make the first jagged cut.
She could cry from it, from the freedom she feels, for she has enough liquid to spare now, but she does not; her hair parts from her, falls in tufts around the hastily-slicing blades, and she sees, in between purple flurries, that an expression she cannot remember having had in a long time, if ever before, is spreading across her face: uncertain, at first, as if she expects someone to strike it from her skin. Then, gradually, it grows in confidence, and at last: a real, true smile.
It is a thing she will do often in later years, but this is the first time she learns it. Masters it.
Joy.
For his smile.
For her own.
A/N: In the rather unlikely event that someone recognizes this story from Kannagara RPG (where it was posted as a dream), yeah, that's me. I'm the TYL Chrome there. Just making note so no one thinks it's plagiarized.
My first foray into 6996, at least 96's end of the 'ship. Written last year. Doesn't get into all the complications that I like about the pairing, woe, but I hope to make up for this with later works.
I think Chrome does appear rather idealistic, being new to everything - but my goal was to portray her as having the autonomy of making some conscious choices with relation to Mukuro, even she didn't have a lot of other options (read: dying) insofar as his actually selecting her to begin with. I like to think that her altered appearance and her new goals reflect a very deliberate enthusiasm.
"Her sex from his sex" - Yeah, I was playing with gender/sex issues a tiny bit. I don't mean to suggest that she literally wants to become physically sexed as male, but as a girl on the cusp of adolescence, I can only think fusing mentally and physically with a teenage boy might, well, complicate her gender/sex/body identity, and she does emulate Mukuro on the physical level. Probably because she recognizes him as powerful, whereas, with her physical disability and social role, she's relatively less so; I think she grasps at his autonomy without quite knowing what she's grasping at. Which is not to suggest I think she's merely dependent on him. On the contrary, I like to think his joining with her is just the first springboard, and she will continue to grasp and reach and come into her own. He's the muse of her inspiration. The Beatrice to her Dante. Or. Something. Yadda.
"design of darkness to appall" - line from Robert Frost's poem, "Design" - came into my head because of all the white/death-related imagery I was using, which, along with the idea of a sinister construction of reality (lol Mukuro) is what that particular poem details