[R E A C T i O N]
She'd just wanted to take me to see the nuclear reactor on the outskirts of town. …But I didn't know that she was going to throw herself in there. An AU version of Rin's "Meltdown". Len x Rin. Noncest! Vocaloid fic.
Authoress:Nietono-no-Shana
Disclaimer: I do not own Vocaloid.
The stiffening air blew past us in the wintry night.
I glanced down at my new wristwatch my father had given me the day before.
It read 2:00 AM on the dot.
As I glanced back up, I saw Rin slipping a delicate finger across the crystal clear glass of the contraption.
It must've been at least 120 feet tall; isn't that how tall most towers were like?
I've never seen an actual tower, though. I've always lived this bumpkin-country-of-a-village all my life, and bumpkin-country kids are always thought to be dumb.
Which is true, I admit.
And maybe being a bumpkin-country-of-a-kid was why I was unable to comprehend what was going to come next.
"Hey," she said to me, her green eyes sparkling with fascination. "Let's climb up to the top."
She'd always been the black sheep of our town.
Kids our age had been picking on her the moment she'd stepped foot here.
And since we were a poor town, it meant that none of us would be leaving this gloomy place anytime soon. So, throughout school (and may I remind you that there was only one school in town,) Rin had been stuck with the bullying and teasing ever since.
But despite all the bruises and scratches she'd get from school, she never complained.
In fact, she fascinated by it, just like all the other foreign things us country kids despised: mathematics, chemistry, microscopes, astronomy, lizards, snakes, minerals, volcanoes, and that horrid-looking abacus thing.
This was what made her the black sheep – the most eccentric of us all.
She was always a mysterious girl.
And that was why she wanted to scope out the nuclear reactor that had been built in the outskirts of town.
We'd managed to find a narrow ladder made of steel that the workers had used to climb up.
Instantaneously, Rin had kicked off her shoes and had clambered up the cold steel with only a small sliver of sock-fabric to guard her naked feet from frostbite.
"Rin! What in God's name are you doing!?" I cried as another gust of wind had attempted to take my hat.
She merely paused mid-step and turned to look down at me. She then let one hand go off the steel bars, which automatically made me run over towards her so that I could catch her when she'd fall.
But she didn't.
Instead she grinned down at me with her white-toothed smile and calmly said, "Oh Len, don't you get it? This'll be fun."
My parents had always told me to stay away from Rin.
Whenever they'd see me walking down Market Street after school with her, they'd always bolt out our bakery door and drag me away. Then what would follow would be a slap on the face and a nice whip from the leather belt my father wore.
But no matter how many times they'd hurt me, I'd continue to disobey them.
She was shrouded in mystery, and I wanted to be the one to decode it.
The air was a lot cooler at the top.
And it was hard to balance in shoes, too; there was such little room for one's feet to cling on to.
"Rin," I said as I wobbled with terror, "What are we going to do now?"
She didn't respond.
Instead, she looked up into the starry night sky and sucked in a deep breath of fresh cold air.
"Just stand and wait a bit," she answered.
Her favorite thing other than astronomy and the abacus was the forest.
In spring, we'd always manage to sneak out of school lessons and sit by the lakeside.
The quietness and sereneness was always nice to hear, especially when one got bored with the noises of a gloomy bumpkin town.
"Len," Rin had said one day in the forest, "Why do you hang around me so much? Everyone will think you're weird if you stay with me…"
"I don't think you're weird," I'd responded. "I just think you're misunderstood."
At this, she'd laughed and kicked a bunch of lake water with her bare, pale feet. Her blonde hair swished as her head rocked back and forth from laughing.
"Misunderstood, huh?"
"Now what?" I'd asked after a few minutes had gone by.
I'd already gotten bored with looking at The Big Dipper.
Rin lowered her gaze and stared down into the piercing white lights of the nuclear reactor.
It looked like a huge gaping mouth, ready to suck anything or anyone if one fell down into its white depths…
I shivered and turned my gaze back to Rin.
"Len," she whispered in a nearly inaudible voice, "What would you do to make all your sins go away?"
No one knew where Rin lived.
No one even knew if she had parents.
She was always alone.
That is, if she wasn't with me.
One day, I'd gathered enough courage to ask about her parents on the lakeside pier.
When I'd asked, her face had stiffened into stone.
Then in a blur, she'd shoved me down onto the wooden boards of the pier, making the back of my head crack and bleed. The next thing I knew, she'd had her hands placed tightly strung around my throat, and I was struggling to get up.
I remembered her eyes: green with fiery desire. As if… she was possessed.
"R-Rin," I'd croaked, "S-Stop…!"
As quick as her devilish eyes had appeared, her usual clouded, mysterious green hue had returned to her eyes.
Afraid of what she had done, she let go and stumbled back, her hands shivering and shaking with horror.
I sat up and felt the back of my head. When I looked at the palm of my hand, streaks of crimson red were trickling down my wrist.
She'd knocked me down pretty hard.
Rin had drawn her shaky hands to her face in order to cover her eyes. It was as if she was too scared to look at me anymore.
"Rin?"
"Stay back," she commanded. "Stay away…from me…"
"Rin…what's-?"
"I've hurt you!" she screamed. "Just like I have everyone else!" She looked her at hands with anguish and hatred, soaked with tears of her own. "I thought that this once would be different, but…"
The next day, she didn't talk to me.
In fact, she'd locked herself up at our tree house.
But the day after that, she'd returned from her hermitage and greeted me with a smile, acting as if everything was normal again.
And after that incident, I'd never questioned her family's whereabouts.
"Rin, no!" I yelled, pulling her fragile arm towards me. "What do you think you're doing!?"
"You wouldn't understand…" she murmured melodically.
Suddenly, a shrill bleep echoed deep within the reactor, and a flash of white spurted up from it.
I stared with widened eyes and a gaping mouth at the spectacle.
Was this what technology was like…?
Then, I felt a warm wave of heat come close to my chest. And when I looked down to realize what is was, I saw a small tuft of short blonde hair and a white ribbon.
"I'm sorry, Len," she said through a muffled voice. "I'm sorry for everything I've ever done to you."
"W-Why are you apologizing all of a sudden?!" I stammered.
Another screech roared from the reactor.
"Before I atone for my sins, can I at least sin one more time…?"
And after her warm, angel-pink lips had touched mine and had heated my insides, she'd flown away like a dove and jumped into the reactor without a word.
…The last thing I saw of her before she was enveloped in that bright light was her white rabbit ribbon, falling off and flying into the current of a passing wind…
Hey, take me to a nuclear reactor.
I wish to dive into the core and fly, fly, fly
A beautiful ray of blue lights surrounds my body…
Hey, take me to a nuclear reactor.
If I could dive into the core, and then cry, cry, cry
All the sins I did would be allowed within a miracle…
-END
Notes: Well, this is one of my favorite Vocaloid songs at the moment, so I decided why not inspire something from it? I don't think many people have heard of Rin's song, 炉心融解, or "Meltdown" in English. It's got a beautiful jazzy, yet techno beat, with meaningful lyrics as well. Len was never in this PV, so that was why I made it AU. (Because everyone likes a little Len x Rin noncest once in a while, right?) Anyway, thanks for reading! Reviews would be nice, if you could tell me what you thought of it.
-Shana-san