A/N: This fic has been brewing on my laptop, unfinished, for a long while. It's short, as, like my other fics, it was for a school assignment. However, I hope you enjoy this, as maybe it will take a spin on Meruem and Komugi. And, also, how they could logically be with each other in real life. Hope you enjoy!
Through the synthetic light, she watches a lone moth flutter by her nose. Pale eyes fixate on it, mesmerized by how it moves. The nurse tugging on her sleeve is nothing but a faraway retrospection as she delves in the mirage that is the moth. Komugi wonders where the moth came from, how it weaved its way into this hopeless place. Upon black wings it lands on the far wall, hovering there like a weightless dust, the white silhouette of a skull tattooed on its thorax. Suddenly, a few nameless voices hiss words she can't understand and suddenly the wall and ceiling invert and she's lost to it all again.
Although, she can't name a time when she wasn't disoriented. Komugi treads the fine line of reality and the world of imaginary visions, trying to make sense of which is which. Through the blur of everything Komugi can see the kneeled form of the sister clutching her rosary, her murmured prayers barely audible. A breathy voice slithers in her left ear and she can't make sense of any of it. Her face scrunches and crow's feet line her eyes as she tries to tell herself what is real and what's not. Komugi wonders if there will come a day that these voices and illusions will stop plaguing her. Komugi longs for that day. By her bedside, the sister's prayers seem to ricochet in her head.
"Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.." The third bead is clutched between the nun's pasty fingers. Komugi tries to focus on the prayer, tying herself to the heavens overhead, and not this visionary hell she dwells in. The moth flutters above the nun's fingertips. Within herself, Komugi wonders if this apparition is of heavenly or hellish descent.
The moth lands over Komugi's eyes and mouth. Peering at her with cross-hatched insect eyes, the moth and voices try to override the Hail Mary. But Komugi looks back at that moth seemingly dipped in charcoal dust and smiles fondly, imagining the skull on its back that she had seen earlier. Death doesn't scare her. If nothing else, it would be a restful sleep, a reprieve from a life long distorted. A shrill scream echoes from the corner of the room and it buzzes in her chest, mixing like soup with all the other imaginary people that are haunting her today.
"...Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death."
When the sister looks up, the moth evaporates like a null vapor and the voices silence, as if their voices were stolen by the thieves of God. Komugi can see the ring of brown in the nun's eyes and that's how she guesses she's back to reality. The sister clutches Komugi's hand, the frail bones of her fingers clenching hers fixedly. Lifting Komugi's hand, the sister presses a dry kiss to her knuckles. Komugi feels the soft, flimsiness of her wrinkled cheek and suddenly she realizes she doesn't even know the nun's name. But, before she can ask, she's already standing, ready to leave.
"God bless you," she says, her black robes outwardly making her levitate like a shadow. Stiffly, her blackened figure floats across the stark room as she closes the door behind her. The lock clicks into place.
Alone, Komugi stares up at the white tiles of the ceiling, familiar with the feeling of being by herself. The isolation is like a breath of fresh air that circulates in her throat, clearing a pathway for her to respirate. Internally, she wishes she could see God, among all the other things she sees. The openness and wideness of His smile, more deep and eternal than even the ocean He Himself created. Maybe if she looked upon His face, even just once, then she'd feel safe from all of this.
"You..." Another voice, deep and laden with something malignant, the pronoun the silencer on the gun.
She begins counting the ceiling tiles, ignoring who is trying to talk to her. One, two, three, four. He's not real. He is a figment of her warped brain, another curse that leaches through like rain does to an old roof.
"You...are you...my creator?" Komugi shifts on the hospital bed and the metal frame creaks eerily, an unsettlement wedging itself under her ribs. Why is he aware of him being made by her schizophrenia, a part of herself that she can't understand? Breath coming out roughly chopped, she is unnerved by the unusual development of this voice. Her bloodless hands grip the sheets. Trembling as though the room dropped ten degrees, she realizes that looming in the corner is a figure she must turn her head to see.
He's not human, he's maybe some sort of sick play on her own feeling of being inhuman. Under a green helmet his eyes are carved into his face with a knife, purple and gleaming like a non-cliche monster. Green skin, earlobes that hang grotesquely, as if weighed down with the weight of reality, a chiseled form that could snap her in two. A tail, almost tubular, holds a spike on the end like a thick needle. Komugi's color-sucked eyes glaze over at the needle regally fixated, as if there just to scare her. Suddenly, she remembers the feeling of the drugs in her bloodstream, and how it had set her blood aflame like some sort of gasoline. She remembers that day when she was omitted to this wretched place. Komugi's last hope, medication, had turned on her, as though it resented the idea of her getting better. Never had the medical professionals taken into consideration that she was allergic to the drug. That it would boil her blood, as though to make it drinkable. Sometimes, she could remember what it felt like to have her skin sizzle like bacon. And now, as this monster stands before her, something of a diseased-twisted being, she cannot say he is unlike herself.
He could kill her.
However, the needle on his tail reminds her of the IV that drips the potent sedative into her blood, the only thing that the doctors could find that is able to put her to sleep every night. She can feel the tenderness of her arm, visualize the black and blue needle site in the inside crook of her elbow.
He...he… Can kill her, or make her eternally sleep.
"I won't ask you again." A crease forms between his eyes. "Are you my creator?"
From the bed, a stillness settles in Komugi's gut. All the air is vacuumed from her lungs and she can't grasp onto breath. Her erratic heartbeat makes her anxiousness grow until she feels like she can't bear it. The malice bleeding off of this creature lines her pale skin with gooseflesh. Never has one of her hallucinations been so vivid, like he could reach out to her and she would be able to feel his reptilian skin.
And never has she felt so small, like she could be crushed under his tumb.
Wide-eyed, a squeak escapes Komugi. The words won't roll off her tongue, as if they are kept prisoner in her vocal cords. A lump in her throat barricades her voice inside, making speech impossible.
"I…" Komugi swallows. "I am." Her voice, fragile like a songbird's, wavers the hardness in this creature's eyes. And, for some reason, Komugi sees the light unearth within him. That slight softness she saw a glimpse of was enough. That light envelops every part of her being and suddenly she can't feel his malice, as if she is numbed. It's something she can't fathom. She can't understand. Maybe the Lord will tell her the answer in prayer…
"Then name me. A name worthy of me."
Komugi smiles, realizing that she is no good except for seeing things that aren't even there. Even if this creature were to kill her, it wouldn't matter anyway. She may as well be something worthwhile for now, even if it is giving a measly name to a apparition.
"Meruem," Komugi says, and Meruem looks up, tail wavering slightly, that long needle gleaming. "It means, 'the light that shines on everything.'"
Unmoving, unblinking. Something has flipped, and it makes Komugi feel like she is on the ceiling, looking down on herself upside-down. And just like that, Meruem is gone. He doesn't leave a trace of his presence, as do all of her visions. But for some reason, Komugi can't help but wonder if Meruem is different; if he is someone that will mean something to her, more so than those faceless voices. If nothing else, it reveals even more about what is under her skin.
Suddenly there is light knock on the door. The door swings open, and a nurse in blue scrubs enters the room. Komugi's lunch from the cafeteria is on a cart that the nurse pulls in tow, along with her computer and medical equiptment. Komugi tries to push the thought aside and focus on the salty smell of tomato soup, and the dull crackers upon the tray that the nurse slides onto her lap. Instead, Meruem lingers in the back of her mind, as if he never really left.
"Thank you, miss!" Komugi musters a smile, and the nurse seems taken aback, as she must have had some more unruly patients today. The nurse gives a strained expression back, as though her face is a stretched-out elastic band. As Komugi lifts the spoon to her lips, the nurse begins her evaluation, already asking the questions that seem to become her only conversations these days.
"Are you seeing things right now?" The nurse asks, her hands flying on the keyboard as she clicks on Komugi's file.
"No," Komugi responds, swallowing a bit of cracker. "I've seen you around. You're real."
At that, the nurse face cracks into a dry smile. "Alright then." More typing. "Any more hallucinations than usual?"
"Not really," Komugi says, absentmindedly tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. "Although, one was a bit more strange than usual…" She murmurs, and it's so quiet that Komugi is surprised the nurse caught it.
"Oh," she says politely, "Maybe that could be something you could talk to your therapist about."
"Mhm."
The keyboard clicks suddenly sound louder in Komugi's ears. Why can't the nurse just talk to her, have a real conversation with her? Why can't anyone in this place go beyond the protocol? She finds herself wondering why a world must run this way, in such cruelty that the sick may find no refuge.
As the nurse watches Komugi silently digest her lunch, the nurse doesn't know what to say at her unenthusiastic response. The words roll under her tongue and will not spill. Looking at the shrunken girl, the nurse sees what Komugi has become under her unmedicated illness. The tremor to her hands as she lifts a spoonful of pudding, as if her hands won't bear the weight any longer. They will snap like branches in a storm under the burden of her insanity. She becomes frightened at the skeletal, maddened girl as told by her diagnosis- bewildered by the idea that Komugi sees things she could never even envision.
"Ok. I'm done here," the nurse says, and, as if relieved to be moving on, leaves quietly with her cart.
As the saltiness seeps into Komugi's taste buds, just briefly, Komugi thinks she sees the nurse glance back. And that is enough to settle her.
Komugi feels a stillness swirl inside as she realizes something she hasn't ever pondered before. No one will be different, no one who is real will understand her. For Komugi is the opposite of the norm, a jumbled creature who scrounges for a solution to her restless mind. She holds the mentality of an infected, animalistic beast that merely survives on a pure whim.
It doesn't matter, in hindsight, if the normal can see her. She cannot disappear like her illusions, she has nowhere to hide in this sterile room, even if the lights are so white that she blends in like a cotton bedsheet. But, she can see what lies beyond the room, whilst they remain blind. Despite her bones that could snap like matchsticks, she is strong. Her brain is not like the others, her strength is to understand the psyche of the normal, and, as a gift from God, maybe the things that lurk underneath.
Komugi finishes her meal, and pushes the tray aside, and it hits the floor with a crash. She doesn't find herself caring. No one runs to her aid at the sound, just as she expected. Alone in her fake realm she dwells, she does not need to be comforted by worldly things. Only the things that others cannot even dream of witnessing, and what is above the clouds matter. A hand suddenly rests in hers and she cranes her neck to see him there, Meruem. The lines in his grave face seem almost softer, as he must know she has accepted who she is. What she sees, and why that matters. It matters because creations like Meruem are more real than the rest of humanity.
Meruem doesn't move for the whole day, and holds her tiny hand in his large one. Komugi wonders what it will be like with them together in the future. Through her eyes they could lie and look up at the bleeding sky. All the while, they could absorb all the colors that would never exist in real life, or in any sunset. And that hope for more that he gives her transgresses over all of her fears, leading a staircase to heaven, where she can finally rest until she dies. When she doesn't want to brush reality anymore, she must realize that real life is a game, and what can't be seen is what really matters. All the things under the ripples in the ocean are stronger than the tide. Komugi is stronger than them, for she can hunt her demons, see them in the flesh.
Meruem still lingers long into the day. He rubs his thumb over her hand absentmindedly, leaving Komugi comforted for the first time since her admission to the hospital. And even though these imaginary scenarios will never end, Komugi knows that Meruem's sweet transformation will stay with her, the switch he had from anger to understanding.
Later that evening, the nurse arrives, and pricks her with the needle, her liquid sleep for the night. For the first time in a while, Meruem moves, cupping her cheek with his hand, and as Komugi slips under like always, her lips form words before they are taken from her.
"I can do it, for you are with me..." and there is nothing but love as she slips away.
A/N: Please rate and review!
-Kitty