vanity; claymore
galatea; flash fic; introspection
a/n: I did take some liberties with Galatea's title, God Eye, for the fic. I do not own Claymore.
She runs because all she can see is blood in her future, indelible and as hideous as the demon whose head she's just severed from the rest of its monstrous body.
There is no end in sight - only terror after terror, each one rearing an uglier head than the last. demon after demon, creeping closer and closer to the line that barely - just barely - separates them from the creatures who make up half of her genetic code, until they've breached the border and distinguishing is beyond even her eyes.
And yet she is made to lay eyes on each and every one - God's eye, they - the organization - call her. God's eye, Galatea. the claymore who sees all, knows all, every ugly truth, every loathsome dealing.
Then she knows too much, and that is when "disposable" is the next word she hears.
It's the most beautiful word she's heard, because she's sick, so sick of being used like a hunter's faithful hound kept by leash and whip. She runs, thinks she's escaped the bellow of the bugles, and tears through the remnants of her captivity - a sweep of her sword across her eyes, and she is God's eye no more.
Yet she sees, she sees - every sense of hers, already heightened by the unholy graft of demon to girl to demon until they were one and the same, exploded into awareness, alive, alive, until she's whole again, but not god's eye - she is her own. She sees nothing and yet she sees all, pinpricks of life like the twinkling of stars in her senses.
It's like she can see the sky again.
By no means does she scorn her alias, though - no, she finds her place in a church, in a little village among the very people who she protected and the people who also feared her as one of the claymore, one of the silver-eyed witches who slaughtered demons and whomever happened to get in the way of their job.
Terrible, beautiful, she's heard it all, though she frowns at the first - if there is anything Galatea is known for, it is her vanity.
And yet here she is with nothing but black in her eyes and the sounds of prayer in her ear - she does not reach towards her face, where she knows the scar is tough and unpleasant beneath her fingers.
They know her for what she is immediately, the church people, but they do not question her disfigurement or her motives, and for the first time she feels very far away from the gaze of the organization.
It's almost comforting.
While they say nothing, the wariness is unmistakable - she can hear it, feel it, almost tangible in the air as though she might pluck it like fruit from a vine, little whispers that she hears and understands.
She says nothing.
The children, though - the children that play around the church are unreserved in their words, their actions, and she can hear the giggles behind her, the ruffle of clothing in the breeze as they peek around the stone walls and then disappear with peals of laughter dying on the air.
They get a little closer everytime, and she wryly wonders if it's her scar that attracts them rather than her status as a newcomer. Suddenly she feels rather annoyed. Of all the things, it'd had to have been her eyes. For all her efforts to stay lovely, she'd certainly blown that ideal.
Then one of the children breaks away from the crowd and comes running up to her.
The girl holds a flower in her hand where the warm spring air wafts the sweet scent to her nose.
She smiles, and wraps delicate fingers around the child's ever soft hands, skin warm to the touch and the beat of vitality sounding in her keen ears. The flower slides into her hand, petals dewy and cold but soft and silken, stem and leaves settling into the grip that once wielded death.
Galatea slides her fingers across the petals she cannot see except in the sketch she slowly fills and colors in her mind, and for a moment she wants to forget that she knows that darkness, that she sees it, because there is beauty in her hands and before her, beauty in the laughter that peals through the church alongside the bells, and what more could she ask.
She cannot see and yet she sees it now, that all-consuming darkness on the very fringes of her senses that threatens to overwhelm even the endless neutral black. It approaches, closer, closer, a void in the stars cold as ice.
It curls, it roils, and there is no fear, there is no apprehension, but the flower she has formed in her mind, that has risen off the canvas so vividly she can hardly believe it (it may, of course, be a mortal plant, but mortal things she finds even more terribly lovely) withers away until she is left blind and alone again, the wilted, rotting remains of the plant fading into the black that is her world.
She does not shudder, or gasp, or even sigh. She waits with the flower sliding sticky dew across her skin for them to come again, and then she will pick up her blade again with stem in hand.
Such monstrosities, she muses, should never befoul such fragile things.