The first glimpse I get of my impending doom comes an hour later. Fushiguro has been gone and has made no attempt to contact me- go figure. Nobody has come or gone from the shut down school. The sun was setting now for a second time since I'd left home as I pace the length of the schools foyer, and it crosses my mind that I've never been on a mission this long before. I wonder how long the exhaustion will take to catch up to me. To alleviate my unending boredom with the menial task Fushiguro so graciously entrusted to me, I've been meticulously placing each of my steps, heel to the crack of each yellow-white tile.
The toe of my black boot has just struck the ground, and the orange streaming in from the windows was giving way to a dusty blue when I felt it. A pulse like a heartbeat, each thrum of it birthing a crushing weight into the air, producing not a physical pain, but a deep, inexorable sense of something fundamentally wrong.
It's a feeling I recognize by now, and without another thought to my weaponless hands, my feet are shooting off in the direction of the most intense cursed energy I've ever felt.
As I bound over the dewy grass towards the building the pulse is emanating from, I spare a thought to the fact that six months ago- three months ago, even - I would have scrambled in the opposite direction of this feeling like a rat from a stray, and like the rodent I was, I would never have looked back. In the back of my mind, I wonder when that changed. When did I start caring so much about the world around me? The people?
The air gets heavier as I leap up the tile steps two at a time. The feeling of cursed energy is familiar enough to me to not slow me down as it intensifies, but the churning fear in my stomach has yet to subside; maybe it never will. Maybe I don't wish it to.
It keeps me alert as I pivot on the second landing and bounce up the stairs to the third floor, and it is the only reason I manage to sidestep the meaty, stark white hand of a curse that reaches for my ankle. Without stopping, I slam a foot down on it, and swing my knee up into its ugly face. I don't wait to watch it tumble down the stairs. Instead I take off towards the fourth floor, where the cursed energy is so thick it is almost hard to breathe. The warm colors of the sun are entirely gone now, and the only light the window offers is a faint bluish white swirling like water as I reach the fourth floor just in time to hear a bone-splitting shriek.
My feet react before I do, and I peel around a corner, sprinting through an explosion of energy pluming up around me, curling around every inch of my body and consuming the fourth floor in its entirety. A loud clattering sound echos through the hall and I watch the metal door fly off its hinges in what feels like slow motion. Two shadowy shapes - people - careen out of the room and move in opposite directions.
The larger one moves away from me, down the north side of the hall, but I can make out the features of a girl as the other sprints in my direction. She doesn't seem to notice me, and tries to blow right past, in the direction of the stairs that I came up, now clanging and shuddering as the curse I kicked down them clambers its way back towards me. I catch her deftly by her clothed elbow as she passes, and use her momentum to swing her around into an alcove between two doors. She grunts loudly at the impact of her back hitting the wall, and distantly I'm reminded of the first time I met Fushiguro.
My first instinct is to apologize, but I can hear the heavy, squelching footsteps of a curse lumbering from the direction she came, and quickly internalize the lack of time and make note to say sorry when it wouldn't be wasted on a dead girl walking.
"Listen to me carefully," I whisper quickly as she shudders, slowly sinking down the wall into a squatting position. Her eyes are glazed behind her round glasses, and her fingers tremble as she reaches up to cover her shaky gasps. I worry for a moment that she's too shocked to hear me, but she nods. Again, I see myself in her, and remind myself how afraid I was the first time I experienced this. Only I'm not sure I can protect her like Fushiguro protected me; the thought terrifies me, but I refuse to let her see that.
YOU ARE READING
Human Adjacent - Megumi Fushiguro x READER
Fanfiction"'Are you even human, Fushiguro?" He smiled softly, a hand rubbing nervously at the back of his neck. "Human... adjacent. I guess.'" Their worlds weren't meant to collide. It was his job to protect people like her from a distance, but after a terrif...
