REGENERATION
Thanks to Shiek & FormerAbyssalone of Animesuki for their help with this final draft.
DISCLAIMERS: Claymore & its characters are the rightful property of Norihiro Yagi & his affiliates
SPOILERS: For events post-timeskip (especially manga chapters 90 & onwards)
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Long live Riful!
Her voice: is not strong enough to free her, not when the knife leaps into her, dancing around her ribs, shuffling through her skin and mixing everything up. Every tone in her throat has become unstuck, reacting to the shriveled muscles and the cords that bind her to the table. When they start feeding her body with monster flesh, her mouth seems to collapse in on herself, the sound she makes doesn't seem familiar and there's another voice, mixed with her pleading, a voice she's never heard before. And then someone stuffs his fist into her mouth.
Her sisters: are all dogs. No, they are worse than yoma. Her team leader taunts her with her height, and the others say in her presence: what kind of a stupid name is Ree-ful? Her handler will not let her switch teams. And townspeople, in addition to the traditional greeting they give witches, point and ask aloud why this witch is so undeveloped. When their team goes on hunts, her teammates bring back yoma heads and tell her, smirking: look, you're so small and pathetic only corrupted blood would ever love you.
Her sword: is too short, when the first Awakened creature she faces disposes of the rest of the team. The Claymore stings her wrists with its weight, and when she swings it she barely nicks the monster's exposed head. Her leader yells at her to withdraw, but she steadies herself and holds her ground as the monster's shadow absorbs her. She takes a low guard, the monster laughs and before she can make another swing she fells the sword leave hand and her cheeks crumple under the Awakened Being's punch. The blood bursting through her teeth tastes worse than the salivary residue of her own fear.
Her Awakening: is too untimely. It's too early – she's only been number one for just a few months. As leader of her own team, she chases down an Awakened Being – only to be ambushed by eight more. They overpower her. They chop off her fingers one-by-one with their tusks, horns, claws, nails. They wring her limbs until they are all contorted beyond recognition. And then they take turns at her crotch. When she finally comes into Awakening, her limbs fall away into thousands of wiry strips, and she props herself up wearily as her tormentors rejoice. Then she shears all of them with a single wave of her newly-divisible arm. Her teammates (those still alive) tell her to come back, come back before she tests her new strength on their fragile excuse for armour. She thinks: why come back? To where? And she knows – her Awakening: it's come too late. She should've done this sooner.
Their first meeting: is such a drama. She knows he has been watching, his poorly-hidden voyeuristic tendencies given away by his clumsiness. Yet she obliges him and cloaks her own strength. She strips freely, lures him in with a kind of adolescent striptease, till he has no choice to come out into the open. When, she chooses to reveal her true self to him, she realizes he, too, has another shell of truth, another layer beneath his supposed boorish-ness. In the ensuring fight that follows, he loses (of course). But she likes how he thrashes about in her arms and surrenders, infatuated. And she wishes Dauf had just come straight out of the forest and said so in the first place.
The four black-cloaked warriors, especially the one she has met twice now: are too quick. Don't they understand why? Don't they care about her own dreams, now ten decades backdated? But – no, they don't. Even as she snatches trees and fingers her way across the rocks and hills, she knows she will never find them, their own yoki so clean and transparent. She wants to scream. But instead dwells on the image of that one cocky, young short-haired warrior standing before her like an uplifted human finger. She sees something in her face, something in that very haughty voice. She thinks: if only she caught her. Because she knows, seeing beyond that face: there will not be any more chances.
This fight: should not end this way. She cannot feel her feet, or the tips of her fingers, anymore – their degenerating, fragmenting into sand – surely an ultimatum for her. While her enemy dances, she swings the remainder of her self in an ill-timed defence. But she fails. And now she knows how this will end. The sky overturns itself: her eyes see it coming up at her like a floor. The din of something brittle shattering. Her world crashing to meet the stones on the ground. The sad bellow of a monster, and then – she's thinking there are still so many things she wants to do, so many people she wants to see – but not now, not now. Now she can't see, but knows from the warmth: someone's there.
And she spends her last bit of energy tucking herself into that warmth – his arms, she thinks, are the only place left now.
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END
Edited 01/06/2010