化け物
Written for 100femslash
Prompt: 69. Monster
Title: 化け物
Ship: Raindropshipping Aqua/Miyu
Fandom: Yu-Gi-Oh! Vrains
Word Count: 2,261
Rating: T
Warnings: None
Tags: Post Canon, Not Canon Compliant, Reunion, First Meeting, Crying, Hugs, Past Child Abuse, Interspecies Relationships
Resurrection was neither a clean nor linear process.
It was a lot of hard and grimy work – and she didn't even have to get her hands dirty. She just watched. Imagined what it would be like when all was right in the world again but here’s the thing.
She had hoped and expected for splendour and glory. Like the descent of an angel, pure and bright, white light and the choir of reunion. What she got instead was none of that. The dead pixels scattered through the screen. Blue consumed what remained behind the shards of broken glass as an unfathomable creature emerged: the jaws of Hell opened, an abyssal maw not far behind, fierce pink eyes and tentacles that came unbound.
For all Miyu’s life, her bedroom and her house and her school and anything she could possibly come into contact with was flattened so she couldn’t ever have to deal with anything unsavoury or unscrupulous. Lest it remind her of her past. For her Mother, viscous and overprotective, nothing could be worse than that but Miyu could think of a thing or two as she pined to learn the why and who behind the torture she was subject to for those six months she had been kidnapped for as a child.
She shouldn’t have been in that park. She shouldn’t have been searching high and low for the friend who told a lie to save her from being in trouble. She shouldn’t have taken the hand of the first person who told her, “I know just who you're talking about, come with me.” A boy, barely older than her, with a wicked smile and ice blue eyes and then nothing.
No answers. No explanations. This was her life now. She had to accept that. The routine monotony of eat, sleep, duel repeat – and if she was lucky, there would be more winning than losing. After all, she did want to eat during her ordeal.
It was a lot to take in and a lot to deal with afterwards as well. When Miyu was finally rescued, instead of being told news that would bring her justice – the bad guys in prison, you were so strong and brave – she learned about how her own little world had changed. Her parents were divorced. Her grandfather had died of a stress heart attack connected to her disappearance. This and that and all the things she had once enjoyed as freedom, like playing alone and playing card games were now banned.
This was her life now. Eat, sleep, school, repeat, and even the little pleasures in between were denied. She couldn;t play Duel Monsters anymore because even a friendly game on paper held stakes equivalent to life and death for her and no one could deal with that level of intensity. She couldn’t enjoy competitive swimming like she once had because the other children were disturbed by her scars. Her art had taken on darker tones than the cute copycats she had once drawn.
As Miyu got older, she felt like she could do less and less right. She was the class clown, the bottom ranks of academia. She was too intense but she didn’t take anything seriously. All underneath the ire of her parents fear that one wrong move would break her. There was no pretending they were a normal happy family but they tried anyway and Miyu hated it. That was the real glass treatment that she loathed even more than what she put up with in terms of her mother’s dominant overseeing of her life so nothing bad could ever happen to her again.
No obscene teen dramas on television, no social media on a jitterbug-esque phone, not even boy band posters on her walls or anything at all. Miyu was a prisoner in her own life. Again. But through the connection with Aoi, it all came undone and unravelled as she got what she wanted.
Answers.
Aqua.
And so, Miyu’s CRT computer monitor which had been child safety proofed to the cyber safety commissioner’s office and back became Pandor’s Box. For so long, the grey and white, fat backed device did the bare minimum to let her research essays and school papers but that was about it. It couldn’t begin to dream of a world like the Link VRAINS and what lurked within its deepest, most forgotten corners. It couldn’t even access even the most normie websites of the internet like social media and various wikis without a key having to enter a padlock.
The screen illuminated in the sharpest, most searing blue. There was a wailing noise and a crunch. A terrible, horrible noise as the computer was subject to the torture necessary to rip open a hole in the digital world to bring back something from the dead and deleted. The computer monitor buckled under the weight it had to bear as it was forcibly opened. Crack by crack, inch by inch, and so came forth the promise of resurrection.
Of the creature named Aqua: a calm and polite being smaller than a doll with the ability to discern truth from lies, an artificial intelligence with free will and created from the Hanoi Project’s data that Miyu had accumulated for them through her torture.
Through Aoi, Miyu got all the things she wanted. She got her best friend back, the answers to the biggest mysteries of her life, and more, too. She got to meet the other victims and she got to play Duel Monsters again. She got all the things she thought she could never dream of as she was forced into another sterile box not all that dissimilar from the one she had been rescued from in the name of keeping her safe.
But now…
It all came tumbling down. There was no money where her mouth was. She really was the scared and stupid little girl that everyone said she was. Her Mother had been right to wrap her in bubble wrap as Miyu’s stomach fell through the floor as she watched as her computer died so Aqua could come back to life.
Her eyes were closed. She moved with grace. Tentacles undulated around her as her body came through the portal of the broken and fritzing computer. And Miyu could only tremble in terror at this unreal sight.
She held onto her duvet for comfort. Her teddy bears kicked aside. The ceiling light flickered and cast glitching shadows. Miyu quivered as her heart raced a million miles an hour as she tried to fathom the abomination before her. Reaching out, slowly, slowly, slowly, tethered to the computer but where did she stop. She unspooled like a gelatinous river of cyan and baby blue. Her middle, right most tentacle swung outwards, towards Miyu, and stopped before her face, the caress hovered in midair as Miyu rejected her.
Miyu’s mouth wobbled as she was consumed by her fear, as she trembled, she screamed, “Monster!”
Aqua winced, hurt, she tried again, she whispered soothingly, “Be not afraid…”
What useless words. There was so much to be afraid of. There was a monster in her bedroom. A monster who was the purest distillation of all that had gone wrong in Miyu’s life.
Her bedroom was so nice and normal, if a little outgrown for her. Frilly duvet sheets. Dozens of stuffed animals. Things like that but it was comfortable, it was Miyu’s and now, cast in the light of broken glass and unfiltered strangeness. It was no place for an Ignis like Aqua yet here she was.
And here she was, trying to get closer and closer to Miyu. Her every movement was heralded by the babbling of a brook and the tinkling of water. Miyu’s ears pricked on it and she felt like she was going to drown in the kindness that Aqua was trying to extend to her.
Even as Miyu rejected it. She thrashed and cowered. She wasn’t ready. She thought she was. She had been looking forward to this moment for so long but now that it was here… It was sensory overload and guilt and denial.
Miyu’s sense of normal had never been the same since after the Incident. She wanted her parents to love each other and she wanted to sit in her grandfather’s lap whilst he read her a story. She wanted to draw and swim and play her favourite games but it was all askew as Aqua made herself know. She touched her.
The sensation of which was electric.
A bead of sweat dripped down Miyu’s face. Her body turned tense as she collapsed into her bed, head to her pillow, scared. Aqua caressed her face with her tentacle, all the while with such sad and sorry eyes.
“Do you remember me?” Aqua asked. “Do you remember this?”
Miyu nodded but her breath was shaky. Her memory was foggy. Technically, this was not their first meeting. Their first meeting had been shortly after Miyu had been lulled into a coma and Aqua tried to heal her. That little memory was why she believed Aoi at all of all the tall and outlandish tales she told of heroes and villains in the Link VRAINS and how she was at the heart of it. Somehow.
Miyu swallowed thickly. They were in a subversion of what she felt: the only light in the dreamless dark of her sickness. She had just closed her eyes one day and fell asleep. She didn’t wake up until after Lightning was defeated. It baffled the doctors and deranged her mother.
“Miyu…” Aqua called her name but Miyu couldn’t bring herself to respond.
Miyu laid in her bed, scared stiff and that silence, with frenzied eyes and a pounding heart, saddened Aqua greatly. She bowed her head, the tendrils that adorned her lagged. Aqua closed her eyes and cried over.
Miyu flinched as she felt it. Each and every teardrop that Aqua cried. Her tears were cold and slick. Her stomach retched. She clenched her eyes shut and she tried to think of what to think, let alone say. Her mind raced. She wanted to be sick.
Those six months came back to her in flashes. Bits and pieces, the worst of the worst. Miyu’s heart seized as even the memory of being lashed by electricity or ravaged by hunger was terrible, etched into her soul but as were the lessons that she learned: that she had endured. She had been a little girl, only six, and somehow, that six year old had borne the brunt of Aqua’s creation better than the teen girl who quaked in her bed, wet with the tears that monster cried because she was sorry.
Sorry she had been born.
Sorry that she had died.
And sorry that she had lived again.
Miyu felt Aqua’s pleading eyes. She wanted to get along with all humans and especially the one she could call her own, her Origin and so. Miyu did what she thought she did best. She toughened up. She drew on the fount of resilience that she had within her: a fount in the shape of a girl.
So when Miyu thought of the little girl she once was, she asked herself: what would make her proud? What would make her happy?
It for sure wasn’t to know that she grew up to be a private school burnout. A directionless, passionless freak. If there was one thing Miyu learned in that little, white room where she was riddled with electricity and hungry to the point of starvation, it was resilience. Even when her stomach growled and her hair tie had broken, she clung to the belief that one day, she would get out and she could tell Aoi that she was sorry. That the truth would set her free and the truth she wanted to pursue right now was…
Oh, it made Aqua’s eyes shine as Miyu bravely met her gaze. She opened her eyes, her heart clogged in her chest and she felt the precipice of her own sob. The tears that spilled outwards were not in misery but gladness. Miyu hazarded a smile as she felt courage well up inside of her.
“I’m so happy to finally meet you.” Miyu replied.
She held Aqua’s face either side, with both hands. Aqua’s skin was rubbery with a sponge-like give which made it soft.
“I do remember you,” Miyu continued and her face split open with a grin, “thank you for reuniting me with Aoi and thank you… Thank you for seeing me again. I’m a no good troublemaker but if you’ll have me… I’d like that a lot.”
“Oh, Miyu, you are all I have wanted for so long.” Aqua confessed.
Miyu laughed. She felt flattered but it also felt like the twist of a knife in an open stab wound. But suddenly, the monster in front of her didn’t seem like a monster. She had a good spirit and such clarity of mind and finally.
She turned into that other self, that true form.
Miyu couldn’t believe her eyes as between her hands, Aqua’s tentacles furled inwards and her body changed shape. There was yet more light but now soft and cyan. She shrank down and took on a more humanlike form, with long legs and spherical hips, a pair of twin pigtails atop a head shaped like a slime.
Miyu guided Aqua closer to her face and Aqua embraced her. She nuzzled her head, small and squishy, against Miyu’s face and smeared the tears they had both cried.