Nemu and Mayuri
Discoveries through Colour
Every heart is a package
Tangled up in knots
That someone else tied
Josh Ritter
She had nodded seriously when he told her that the programming that had taught her to write was faulty. He hadn't expressed quite how, but she did not ask for anymore detail, mainly because he wished her to perform an experiment that, for once, did not sound particularly painful.
He wanted her to write an essay, although it did seem to be on a particularly strange topic.
"Orange," he had told her, "that shouldn't be too difficult for your stunted mind to fathom, should it?"
So she had sat and had thought about orange, about all those shades of it, from the darkest shades that peter into woody browns and the lightest, which are almost a yellow in the right light. She liked orange- it was a warm colour; definitely not the sort of colour that anyone would decorate the Twelfth division with, which also made it a colour that she saw quite rarely. That, with a combination of her specially created photographic memory, meant that the moments came to her quite quickly.
She started with the mahogany of the chair on which he had sat, waiting for her to wake from the suspended animation that her mind had been placed in whilst he created and adapted her physical form. It had been the first thing that she had seen, before she had looked up to see her Captain (he hadn't appeared strange to her at all, for he was the first person that she had seen, and so she hadn't known that there could be anything different until she had caught sight of herself in a reflective, polished metal surface. For a long time, she had whole-heartedly believed that it was she who was the ugly one). The chair was a strange relic from the time of the previous Captain- wood amongst the metal, and for that oddity to her it could have been the greatest of thrones.
That had been the first thing that she had ever seen, and it implanted that inherent, undeniable seed inside of her, that seed of loyalty that had germinated into a simple acceptance of her servitude.
After all, you always served the man on the throne, no matter what he told you to do.
Her Captain ate apricots sometimes, holding them between his pointed fingernails and devouring the flesh from around the stone with decadent enjoyment, juices running down his hands and wrists and sometimes slopping onto the floor, if the fruit was a particularly overripe one. When he was done he would suck the stone of all its remaining yellow-orange flesh, and would throw it towards the bin. Most of the time his aim was true and he got it in- one time he did not, and she, only a few months old, was still confined to the lab to sort out any 'teething problems' that might manifest themselves. She was ordered, for lack of anything better to do, to tidy up after him, and she dutifully went to pick it up. She felt the hardness of it underneath her fingers, smooth, the grooved ridges, still sticky from the fruit.
That had been the first thing that she had even touched that had come from outside the lab, and her eyes had widened at the sight of it.
When he turned his back on her, she sucked the taste of it from her fingertips. That night, against his better programming and wishes, was the first time that she ever dreamed.
There were other shades of orange too, after those. Next came the orange of a flame, mixed in with all the other shades of reds and yellows and, sometimes, that hottest cone of blue that she had always thought was the ugliest part of the fire, for it did not match the rest of it. Fires were pretty though, and useful because they gave out warmth and could be manipulated into scientific equipment and used for their own gain and benefit. She had always liked to look closely at them, to watch the undulating flicker of them. She liked to blow on them, never hard enough to kill them, because that seemed an oddly cruel thing to do.
Or at least she had liked to do that, until her Captain, catching her idling by a burner on one of the lab desks, took her hand and without warning thrust it into one of these miniature infernos, so much hotter than she had thought that they would be. He had held it there until her skin had blistered. It bled afterwards, and though it was neither an orange nor a new colour, after all her time at the labs she thought to include it, for that had been the first time that she had seen it coming from her.
That had been the very first time that she had ever experienced what it is to feel pain.
She supposed that these sort of things were what he had, in an irritated tone of voice, called her 'teething problems', because it was not too long after that that he finally took her out of the labs, into the real world.
She paused a moment in her writing, before she resumed, looking for all the world to anyone who did not know her and her limitations as if she was about to cry.
The sweet orange of the pumpkins that people had put up in their windows in October, she liked that one, because you could eat it, too- not that she needed food, for he had created her beyond such trivial details, but the smell from her Captain's dish was pleasant, and it put him in a good mood. It had been night that first time, and she had walked behind her Captain and only once had glanced to the side to see the creations, with a candle in them to illuminate carved faces. They reminded her of herself- created with a perpetual expression, her existent reliant on the assumption that her Captain would, she hoped, replace that metaphorical candle inside herself whenever she started to slow down.
With a start, she realised that such thoughts must be the beginning of the thing that her Captain muttered about darkly- imagination.
That had been the first time that she had been allowed out, and she had been struck by how she had nothing to guarantee that she would survive but the attentions of a creator who did not seem to particularly like her.
Burnt umber was a type of paint, she learnt when she joined the Shinigami Woman's Association, and had joined silently and diligently in with that week's project, which was full-size canvas painting of 'Ken-chan killing some stuff'. She had been in charge of painting the background, and had used that tube of paint for the landscape. It had gotten all over her fingers and no-one had seemed to care at all. Afterwards, Lieutenant Kusajishi had patted her on her head (getting the vermillion red paint- that had been used to paint in the copious red blood after the scarlet had run out- into her hair) and told her that she really was quite a nice friend of theirs, even if she didn't smile very much.
That had been the first time that anyone, in her created life, had ever told her that she was a person with any worth, even if it was only in an indirect sort of way.
That had scared her. She was not sure what to do with such a gift, and she still wasn't.
She had found rust, on her fingernails, a few months later. Or, at least, what her Captain had tsked and called rust, in a disgusted sort of voice that was laced with projected blame. It was sort of orange, sort of brown, and flaked out from where her nail left her finger like small, metallic snowflakes. Apparently some of the compounds he had used to create her were building in her finger nail beds, and so he subsequently strapped her back onto the operating table- the same one that, all that time ago, she had first seen the mahogany chair from- and ripped each nail out, whistling underneath his breath. She didn't cry out aloud, but her face was a contorted parable of undeniable pain and horror.
He never even looked up.
It was about that time that it finally sunk in, that nobody would care if she disappeared, least of all the man who, in her head, she called 'Father'. She had stared down at him, as his whistling turned to humming, and wished, for the first time, that she could cry.
She still couldn't, but later she had come to understand sorrow.
She concluded her report on amber, those chunks of fossilized tree resin. She had never seen it before until Lieutenant Matsumoto had shown her a pendant of it that she had purchased in the Rukongai. It had been about the size of the space made when she touched her forefinger and thumb, and suspended in it had been a small insect, frozen in time right there as it had died, until one day it had been taken away and made into some sort of jewellery. But it was beautiful, despite the sadness that had come with it, and as she held it up to the light she felt something inside her convulse and grow, beating at her ribs in a way that she had never experienced and had never thought that she would be able to know
That wretched creature, how she had pitied it! It had taken her a while to realise that it made her feel that way because it reminded her of herself.
She left that part out of the essay, dated it, and took it to her Captain, who was busy in the lab tinkering with a couple of jars of unidentifiable things and electrical currents. He took it off her and put it on the desk, peeling some new fruit that she had never seen before with his nails as he read, quickly and meticulously, her efforts. When he got to the end he proceeded to eat the fruit, and she stared with fascination at the way that it broke into pre-planned segments for better access- what clever programming that was.
He turned to her, and slapped her across the face.
She stumbled, catching herself on a desk to prevent her falling over. There was blood in her mouth- her Captain had never restrained himself when it came to punishment- and she could feel it cloying in her throat. He slapped her again, on the other side of the face this time, and if to mimic the imperfect symmetry of nature he made this one even harder. The noise rang through the cavernous rooms as he dropped the peel by her feet and systematically ripped up her carefully written essay.
"Imagination," he sneered in disgust as he turned his back on her. "Pathetic."
She stared at the orange peel on the floor, and spat blood.
Right there, she learnt to feel hatred.