Characters: Nemu
Summary: The long legs of a runaway and the broken feet of a princess.
Pairings: None
Warnings/Spoilers: No spoilers
Timeline: No timeline needed
Author's Note: Ah, yet another Nemu piece. Hope you guys like this one. It's pretty downcast and pessimistic though; be prepared.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
If she started to walk free of all restraint and chains, her pale legs would crumple like paper and collapse even under her own slight weight. Nemu's legs, her fragile independence, won't hold the weight if there aren't chains across and around, chafing her skin and rubbing it raw to bind her bones together. As much as she wants to run, to fly, Nemu doesn't trust the strength of her legs to test out her run. She can't trust her own legs to keep her up.
Of course, experience and observation binds Nemu to her flesh, her insecurities, her unknowing, unconscious fears. She has never seen reality as being anything more than what she can see with her eyes and touch with her hands. There is no world beyond the one of her consciousness, her observations, her certainties and truths.
Nemu observes crutches.
Namely, her analyzing, truthful mind, spies out the crutches that, she's dully amazed to realize, everyone around her utilizes and leans on. The excuses they make, the reasons they offer up, to survive the long days and interminable nights ahead.
Hinamori still cries out for Aizen late at night, moaning, to keep hidden the cracks that have appeared and widened in her own psyche, the things she can't fix and can't face. Hinamori is a study in the art of utter denial.
Byakuya buttons down and clams up against pain, ices over against reality's cruel sting. He's long since ceased to live in any world but his half-mad, unceasing agony; without that stony mask madness will inevitably set in, for madness is all there is left to him.
Soi Fong, hard and cold and paradoxically childish, will always actively destroy all of her better impulses, until the Soi Fong who loved Yoruichi isn't anything but a hollow mockery of a blackened soul.
Nemu notes, with a peculiar amalgam of detachment and unsettled disquiet deep within the hollow parts of her chest, that no one ever walks, but rather limps, hobbles, crawls, dragging dust into their mouths. No one stands tall; no one ever raises their weary, bedraggled heads towards the sun to see the light and their futures before them. They can only see their pasts, and render their souls to hollow dust and rotten flesh.
And anyone who ever tries to fly or run falls hard across the earth or has their limbs hewn from their bodies before they can ever leave the ground.
What small confidence Nemu possesses in her own abilities, in her own capacity to run, drains away from her when she sees what her comrades have fallen to. They have become the mockery of breathing souls, not living, dead as dust. They are so much stronger, so much more vital than her; how can she possibly succeed where they have failed?
The desire to stand tall and independent has always hummed deep in her, even in the days before Nemu even had a name to call her own, let alone a thought to her own identity. She can't define it, can't put a name to it, but she knows it is there, singing in tones sometimes sweet sometimes chaotic and jumbled.
It is only natural, she supposes, to feel this way; she was created to simulate humanity as closely as possible, and from Nemu's observations all those whom she has ever watched feel the same way. Everyone wants to be able to walk alone without stumbling.
And she can't.
She hasn't even tried before.
There is no use in trying. None at all. Nemu trusts one thing only—the certainty of her life in the division, her certainty of Mayuri in her life, no matter what happens—and there is no room in her for any trust in anything else. She was not made to trust herself or rely on herself; she is as fit for independence as an infant, possibly even less so.
But she still wants it.
Nemu experiences, twisting inside, growing, changing, the experience of "want", of wanting something she can never have, of wanting to be like them. She has grown to want, to want things when in the beginning there was only emptiness and the promise of service to research. She doesn't know how to express that she wants things, so she keeps silent. But she does want to be free.
Nemu wants to be free when she doesn't even know how to define freedom. She doesn't know freedom's shape or its taste, or why the appeal of it is so strong, but it still rings clear in the hollow of her chest, an unquenchable desire.
She will always want freedom, she supposes, the way a man dying of thirst wants water even when she doesn't know what that word means, can't comprehend it, doesn't even know why she wants it and knows, with the devastating honesty of one who never learned how to lie, that she can't have it, that her pale, long-fingered hands will never reach for something tangible and will only ever grasp at smoke.
Nemu's feet will always be broken, curling on themselves, toes pale and delicate as they, bones crushed, coil under the soles of her feet. The blue veins will stand out like the veins on broken butterfly wings. Her walk will always shuffle with the dull agony of knives, hobble where it should run.
Because there is no reality beyond the reality Nemu can touch. And in this reality, freedom is a fantasy, a concept with no substance, and Nemu's legs will never support her weight unless fettered.
This is the reality of today.
This is the reality she can touch.