Relativity
Author's Notes: Written for the LJ community 31 Days, for the May 30th theme, "The dose makes the poison". Set somewhere after the manga. (I love how these two are constantly at each other's throats.)
"You're going to what?"
She only glanced at him, a small, serene smile on her face, a momentary gleam in her eyes. She held the needle over his arm, but he pulled it away and he glared at her, angry dashes of crimson streaked on his otherwise pale face.
"It's merely so you won't have to feel the pain," she said. "Unless, of course, you want to keep feeling it while you're recovering from that almost fatal wound of yours, just say so."
"But what you're going to put into me," Sanosuke said hotly, "Is opium."
"Just something like it: morphine."
Sanosuke looked nonplussed, for the chemical she named still sounded potentially fatal. "Do you really want to kill me?"
"Right now, yes," she said. "For being a difficult patient. But not with this, if you must know."
"I don't trust you," he said, bluntly.
"You certainly don't have a choice, do you?" She took his arm, and he flinched as she—intentionally, he thought—brushed over a bruise on his arm, which was already turning purple. "The amount I'm giving you is so small that it can hardly cause an addiction," she continued. "The dose makes the poison, so they say. Just like this sudden visit I got from you."
"What do you mean by that?"
"Three years," Megumi said. "I haven't heard from you for that long a time, and I almost thought that I actually—" He suddenly pulled his arm free, only to have it pinned back down on the hospital bed.
Megumi inserted the needle under his skin, and he gasped with the sudden pain. "And then you suddenly come rushing in here," she continued, pushing the needle in further, "And now I see too much of you for my own good. I was wrong, after all."
"What the hell are you—"
She pulled the needle out of his skin with an almost sinister relish, and as her eyes blazed, he wondered what he said, or did wrong. Women, he thought in conclusion, while she directed her eyes heavenward, wishing she could just blame the morphine for this, instead of his own inherent idiocy.