Miscellaneous Anime/Manga One-Shots!

iridescent (Zankyou no Terror)

white

Though their faces have long since faded, blurred into a haze of memories, their voices are like splashes of white on a pitch black canvas, like paint stains that he can never, ever scrub away, acid that corrodes into him and leaves ugly pink splotches in its destructive wake.

"Twelve," they murmur, encircling him, running their pale long fingers through his hair, across his shoulders, down the line of his back. White, he thinks numbly, gazing at the tiled floor, tracing patterns on his thighs.

White, the surgical masks they wear, injecting syringe after syringe into him, drug after drug that made his head spin and stomach churn. White, the walls that hold him in that tiny, tiny room, solving the same puzzle over and over again, twisting cubes and drawing figures until he wants to vomit.

White like snow, white like cotton, white like their pale faces as they grow silent, one by one.

black

There's a boy his age, and his name is Nine.

The number flashes in his mind, a brilliant magenta, but Nine's voice is like pinpricks of darkness, smooth and even, rippling with deep velvety blue, and on occasion, a burst of cobalt.

He's lean and lithe, catlike even, with slender fingers that toy with the battered white chess pieces and dark eyes that pierce into him, eyes that calculate and observe and hypothesize, edged with the same cold glint.

"Eleven died yesterday," Nine remarks quietly, knees tucked into his chest.

"Yeah," Twelve mutters, slouching onto the walls. "Wonder when we're going, too."

They lapse into uncomfortable silence.

"Say, Twelve…" Nine says, slow and careful. "Ever think about, I don't know...escaping here?"

"You can't mean…?" He sits up immediately, eyes widening to the size of saucers. "No way. You're insane!"

It's the first time Twelve sees him smile, icy and sinister. "Aren't we all?"

red

The alarm blares an aggressive crimson, blurry shapes that dance across his vision and send his head reeling. A scream threatens to tear itself from his throat as he runs across the dewy grass, shards of glass and rusted metal cutting into his bare feet.

And it doesn't stop.

Lungs burning a fiery red, he pushes himself to keep moving, heedless of everything but the thudding of his heart and the rushing of his blood, because if he stops now, it'll all be over for them, like it's always been from the beginning, from the moment the first syringe entered his body-

He thinks of corpses, tiny in death, and wooden posts and overturned earth.

Ten feet to freedom- nine, eight, seven-

Twelve's never quite grasped the idea of freedom, but he think it might be the feeling of Nine's hand in his, the blue sky on the other side of the fence.

green

They hide out in alleyways and abandoned street corners, living off scraps and whatever they can find. But even so, the world is blur of color- the deep blues of midnight, the warm glow of yellow street lights, amethyst rings the color of Five's eyes.

"What now?" Twelve asks, in a small voice.

"We fight back, of course," Nine replies, his eyes burning into him. "You know we don't have much time left, don't you? Ten years, tops."