Disclaimer: Nope. Mine is mine, yours is yours.
Notes: character study. More on Nagi than Chrome…and very vague. :D
Disenchanting World
Nagi is a good runner.
Her legs are thin, almost sticks, but her gym teacher says there is hope if she keeps at it. Nagi tries to smile for him and manages something between a grimace and a frown.
Running has always come naturally to her. She's not sure why—the wind doesn't feel nice to her sticky face, she doesn't like the pounding sounds her feet make on the fleeting pavement, and her mother doesn't care if her daughter is one of the fastest in her class.
It is, she thinks, another worn-out routine in her stagnant life.
And then—then she sees that little cat, limping and in the middle of rushing cars. Its eyes are wide, a slate gray that hints at beauty, and Nagi is moving, the background blurring around her in snatches of green and blue.
Red, too. Red and orange and when she blinks, head pounding, the world comes alive.
She hears the whispered shouts of the people swarming her, some swearing and others turning a sickening green. They take her away, and as she looks for the little cat she thinks that her loyal knights have come too late.
Nagi drifts in and out of life, the stinging scent of the hospital drifting by her nose. Her mother is there, waiting but impatient and not truly her mother. Her father stays for a few seconds, speaking on the phone and dealing with the doctors in his usual brusque manner. No one is crying and the nurse who comes by every hour to fluff her pillow smells of cheap perfume and defeat.
Her eyes are closed when Nagi feels a murmur in her ear. The nurse says her halting goodbye and Nagi is alone in all senses of the word, but there is someone there, someone trying to brush her arm, asking can you hear me?
The voice—because it is a voice, a beautiful voice—takes her to a world flushed in color. The boy-man before her could be her twin, with eyes of blue and red that tell Nagi to run. To leave, to die because this is bad, this is scary and she would be better off wasting away in a hollow, bleached white room. But Nagi's legs are too broken to run, and she's already dying, so she talks.
She's aware, in the back of her mind where her love for her parents is, that he is using her in a way that is worse than her project partners at school. Nagi (Chrome, that's her name now, for the monotone colors of the cruel, cruel world) doesn't mind. The boy looks through her six times out of ten, but the numbers are still better than any she's had before and Chrome thinks she is almost happy.
He asks her one day, when she is with the two others he found (saved, they say, and Mukuro-sama scoffs), why she is only almost happy.
Chrome feels the grass prickling her feet in their imaginary home. Her legs are covered by her dress here but she knows if she lifts the hem she will see scars visible only to her eyes. Chrome doesn't particularly miss her old life because there hadn't been a life to miss; she does, though, wonder about that cat and what could have been if she kept at running.
She tells him she is happy, demure and in Chrome's voice. Mukuro-sama raises an eyebrow at her thoughts of a life where she is smiling in a track uniform, friends surrounding her, and sends her back to reality with his laugh in her ears.