Commission: Tensura/marvel crossover: Walking elegy: Chapter I: a blue beginning

I always held particular feelings regarding the color blue.

Blue was the color of a freedom so vast it became meaningless. It was the hue of a horizon that promised everything and therefore nothing, a canvas so blank it rejected all attempts at definition. I had always envied it, this thoughtless, boundless liberty. To be so effortlessly infinite, to be looked upon with awe and never with the slow, dawning pity reserved for things that were broken.

My envy was not a clean thing. It was a nest of maggots writhing in the hollow of my chest, a squirming, living mass of want that I could never vomit up, no matter how I scratched at my skin or starved myself of hope.

Blue. A trick of the light. A convenient lie the human brain tells itself to make the unbearable vacuum of space seem like a gentle embrace. A filter to soften the edge of a universe that is, at its heart, indifferent to the point of cruelty.

I had never associated it with death. But then, I had never truly understood death. I thought it was an ending, a full stop. A silence. I hadn't realized it could be a transformation, a sentence written in a language you never learned, for a crime you couldn't remember committing.

I didn't expect to wake up. The act of unplugging myself from the whirring, beeping symphony of my own slow decay had been one of finality. It was not a decision born of dramatic flourish, but of a profound and simple exhaustion. I was tired of the pain—not the grand, theatrical kind, but the mundane, grinding ache that settled into my bones like a tenant who refused to leave. I was tired of being a faulty product, a thing of potential that had curdled in its own packaging. The world had looked at me, sighed a sigh of “what a shame,” and had moved on, closing the door and leaving me in the quiet, sterile dark of a hospital room that smelled of antiseptic and defeated hope.

To wake up was, therefore, the deepest betrayal. It was the universe reneging on its one promise of quietus. And the instrument of this betrayal was blue.

Blue.

It was the first thing I saw, the only thing I saw. A shimmering, alien cerulean that resolved itself into a pattern of scales. Not the soft, overlapping scales of a fish, but the hard, geometric plates of something ancient and terrible. They covered my arms, my chest, what I could see of my legs—a suit of armor I had never asked for, polished to a high, gem-like sheen that reflected the dim light of this place. Sapphire, cobalt, the deep navy of a midnight sea—every shade of blue one could ever have yearned for was now a part of this monstrous new skin.

I was staring into a still, underground pool, its water a perfect, unbroken sheet of the same despised color. My reflection stared back, a grotesque parody wrought in living jewelry. The face was elongated, the jaw strong and lined with those same diamond-hard scales. A ridged brow sheltered eyes that were no longer human, but pupils slit vertically like a cat’s, burning with an internal, amber light. A crest of larger, dagger-like scales swept back from my skull. I looked like a dragon from a storybook, the kind that hoards gold and burns villages, a creature of instinct and destruction.

This was not a body. It didn’t feel like it. It was a condemnation. It was like I was the punchline to a joke I had stopped finding funny a long, long time ago.

A sound escaped me, a raw, grating noise that was half-sob, half-growl. It was not a human sound. It was the sound this new body made in its distress. I was spiraling, and I knew it. A detached, cold part of my mind—the last vestige of the person I used to be—watched the spectacle with clinical disgust. How pathetically predictable, it observed. The broken thing breaks further. What a tedious performance. Do something interesting like a backflip.

But knowing you are spiraling does not stop the fall. It only makes you more acutely aware of the ground rushing up to meet you. My thoughts were a cocktail of despair and a strange, chemical rage, a Chateau Rouge depression spiked with a Percocet-like frenzy. I had chosen nothingness over pain, and in return, I was given more.

More existence. More sensation. More of this unbearable feeling of being wrong.

I had just wanted to rest. To trade the chronic, dull ache of my failing body for the sweet, silent nullity of oblivion. There is no glory in suffering, no nobility in being a vessel for pain. It is simply ugly, and exhausting, and I had reached my limit. If I could not have peace, I would settle for absence. And now, I did not even have that.

Was this karma? Divine punishment? If so, it was hilariously misaimed. What god would look upon a life of quiet, medical suffering and decide the appropriate response was to resurrect the sufferer as a monster? Hadn’t I already filled my quota? Hadn’t I paid my dues in blood draws and sleepless nights and the slow, humiliating erosion of my own dignity?

I didn’t care that I was breathing again, that my heart—or whatever pumped vital fluids through this scaled carcass—was beating with a strong, steady rhythm I hadn’t felt in years. This wasn’t a second chance. It was a life sentence in a prison I had not designed. The walls were my own skin, the bars were my own bones. And if the warden of this cosmic joke couldn’t get it right the first time, then I would simply have to keep throwing myself against the walls until the structure finally gave way.

Blue.

I hated it. I hated it with the fervor of a zealot, with the specificity of a scholar. I yearned for it with the desperate, hopeless ache of a ghost for its lost life. It was my Lenore, my lost Lenore, whispered on a wind that would never again touch me. It was every “could have been,” every “almost,” every Jane Doe of a dream that had died unnamed in the back alleys of my mind. It was the beauty I could never possess, now made into the flesh I could never escape.

To yearn for and despise the same thing with equal intensity is a special kind of hell. It tears you in two, and both halves bleed the same color.

I looked down at my reflection in the pond. The monster looked back, its alien eyes holding a familiar despair. This was me now. This was the punchline. The girl who wanted to stop being a burden had become a dragon. How utterly, devastatingly hilarious. The universe had a sense of humor, and it was the cruel, petty humor of a schoolyard bully.

I wondered, idly, if my new body was as durable as it looked. The scales seemed tough. Would they resist a sharp rock? Could I claw my way out of this prison, even if it meant tearing myself to pieces in the process? The thought was not frightening. It was practical. A problem to be solved.

A less charitable stranger would describe this line of thinking as the height of ingratitude. They might, if being of a particularly sentimental persuasion, call it a waste of a miracle. Upon hearing such a thing, I would have coolly informed this pitiable stranger that making claims on the currently intangible nature of miracles was uselessly naïve. Why, if this was a miracle, then so was a tumor, for it too was an unexpected growth. Perhaps instead of making wide, sweeping declarations on a monster’s existential crisis, they would be better served by examining what unfortunate tedium existed in their own life that made analyzing a reptile’s life more interesting than their own.

Or, I could simply call them an idiot.

I liked the latter idea.

My country’s police, statistically, could be persuaded to examine the cases of willful stupidity in the surrounding areas and then reasonably conclude that it would be simpler to arrest, imprison, and silence first before gathering evidence.

That was the sort of person I was. A remarkably petty, painfully twisted sort of person who, despite all my disadvantages and discomforts, had grown into someone who preferred to ruthlessly, definitively, and exhaustively crush those who garnered my dislike. Or when I wanted to vent my stuffy feelings.

It could be said that I was a too clever girl who saw too much and too far, and now had the claws to match the cutting edge of my thoughts.

In that regard, the cavern around me looked distinctly out of place.

Rather than saying it was only the setting that didn’t fit, the background failed to integrate my being inside it. Which didn’t sound like it made much or any sense, but that was the only way I knew how to describe it.

Maybe it was just that I simply would look out of place anywhere. Distinct by being permanently out of belonging. The like of the color magenta on the spectrum of light. The cavern was a natural thing, all rough-hewn stone and the gentle drip of water, a place of quiet geology. I was an imposition. A manufactured thing, a work of unnatural art dropped into a world of honest randomness.

I became aware of other sensations, now that the initial shock was receding, leaving a vast, numb plain in its wake. The air was cool and damp, carrying the scent of wet stone and something else, something earthy and primordial. I could feel the texture of the rock beneath my… my feet. I looked down. They were digitigrade, ending in three powerful toes tipped with black talons that clicked softly against the stone as I shifted my weight.

I took a step. Then another. The movement was not clumsy. It was fluid, powerful. My body understood this new architecture in a way my mind did not. It was like sitting in the driver’s seat of a strange, incredibly responsive vehicle. I could feel coiled strength in my legs, in the thick muscles of my tail—a tail, I had a tail—that swept behind me for balance.

I walked to the edge of the pool and stared down. The blue-scaled monster stared back. I lifted a hand—a claw—and watched the reflection do the same. The fingers were long, ending in those same black talons, capable of both delicate articulation and, I suspected, terrible violence.

A thought, cold and clear as the water in the pool, surfaced in the turmoil of my mind. This is what you are now. You can rage against it. You can try to tear it apart. Or…

The thought trailed off, unwilling to complete itself. Or what? I could live? As this? The idea was so absurd it was almost funny. What would that even mean? Would I live in this cave, hunting blind fish and licking moss from the walls? Would I eventually emerge, a blazing blue terror to be hunted by men with guns and a righteous cause? Neither option appealed. Both were just different flavors of the same imprisonment.

But the rage was beginning to bank, the initial inferno dying down to embers. In its place was a weary, exhausted like resignation. The universe had thrown me a curveball of apocalyptic proportions. Dying on the mound in protest seemed, in a way, like letting it win. A final, petulant surrender.

I am, if nothing else, stubborn.

I looked at my reflection again. Not at the monster, but at the eyes within the monster’s face. They were my eyes. The color and shape were wrong, but the consciousness behind them was the same cynical, observant, and terribly tired consciousness that had decided to unplug a machine. That consciousness was now housed in blue scales and claws.

Blue.

It was a color I hated. I yearned for it. It was my cage. It was my skin.

A terrible, wry smile stretched my new lips, revealing a hint of fang. It felt alien on my face. How ironic. To become the very thing you coveted. It was a lesson in "be careful what you wish for" delivered with the subtlety of a meteor strike.

I had wanted the sky’s freedom. Instead, I had become the earthbound beast that could only look up at it. I had wanted the ocean’s depth. Instead, I was the monster that lurked in its darkest trenches.

I sat on the cool stone, the action surprisingly graceful, and let the silence of the cavern press in on me. The maggots in my chest were still. For now. The spiraling had stopped, leaving a landscape of scorched earth in my mind. There were no answers here. Only the question, and it was a monster.

The question’s name was Blue; the monster’s name was not. Undoubtedly, it was a false name, a label for a state of being I didn’t understand. But in the confusing manner the universe still could be, yes, even after a resurrection, it seemed to find the deception less insulting than… appropriate.

I thought differently. And I only thought so.

After all, making wide, sweeping, declarations ill-suited me. To do so was, in my eyes… a little unsightly? Unrefined?

Ah. The word I was thinking of. It came to me. How sloppy.

Generalizations ultimately served no one and no end except to lessen the true worth of whatever they failed to describe so pithily. Thus, sloppy.

Blue was not just a color. It was a condition. It was the state of being both the prison and the prisoner. It was the beautiful, despicable truth of my new existence.

I leaned forward, until my forehead nearly touched the water. The reflection grew larger, its amber eyes holding mine.

"Alright," I whispered, the sound a low rumble in the cavern. The word was not one of acceptance, but of acknowledgment. A statement of fact. "This is what we are now."

The monster in the water did not disagree.

I closed my eyes, shutting out the blue, the reflection, the impossible reality of it all. The darkness behind my eyelids was a relief. It was a color I could understand. A color that asked for nothing, promised nothing, and was, in its own way, brutally honest.

It was a beautiful thing to look at before deciding to drown, don’t you think?

…

Deleted Scene =>

Narrator: "So, I'm a blue dragon-girl. Cool, cool. Definitely the optimal form for someone who just wanted a nap. I can only assume my life is now a poorly written isekai light novel. I’d like to speak to the manager of this reincarnation cycle, please. I have several complaints, the first of which is the lack of an instruction manual. The second is the interior decorating. Who chose ‘dank cave’ as a starting zone? Zero stars."

Universe: Is silent.

Narrator: "Typical."