So guess what it's been way too long since?

It's been way too long since I've written fanfiction.

Way too long.

For those of you with expectations of romance in this story: it will NOT be 6996. There will be lots of Mukuro and Chrome friendship moments, but no romance. If I'm including any love-story element at all, it will be later on in the story, and it will be implied or very light 6918. If you don't like that, suck it up and deal. I write stories that I want to read. I don't care what kind of stories you want to read. If you don't like it, that's your problem and not mine, so take it somewhere else if you want to complain.

On that note, have some angst.

Chapter 1: Anagram

The first day Mukuro takes up residence in Nagi's mind is a nightmare for both of them. She's still in the hospital, making a miraculous recovery thanks to Mukuro and his illusions, but the doctors won't let her leave until they can ascertain how her devastated organs suddenly appear to be in working order again. She stares at the stark white ceiling, still hooked up to IV drips and a breathing mask and a heart monitor, and thinks for a moment about daydreaming, but decides against it because she's hyper-aware of the boy in the back of her mind. He is watching. He is watching through her eyes, seeing what she sees and hearing what she hears, feeling what she touches, smelling and tasting the things she eats. It's disorienting, certainly. She imagines it's equally disorienting for him. She feels very public, all of a sudden.

He calls her "cute" and "a godsend" and "a blessing." Nagi does not believe in god. God didn't save her when she was dying in the hospital, abandoned by her parents. God didn't save her. Mukuro did.

He also calls her Chrome. She can't figure out why. It's as if he doesn't care to remember her name. Like he wants to make her into someone she isn't. Someone more like him. Nagi is confused by him. He lurks there, silently, for hours on end. She can still feel his presence, and it's uncomfortable because she's used to having her thoughts to herself and her mind as a sanctuary, where she can close her eyes and pretend she isn't wherever she is. Mukuro is an invader, an intrusion, a looming presence in her head. She doesn't like it, not at all. It makes her very nervous. She's afraid to think any of this, afraid to consciously acknowledge how upsetting it is to be host to someone else's psyche, because Mukuro lives in her mind and he can hear all her thoughts.

So Nagi spends her first day with Mukuro, skirting around her darker thoughts and pretending as hard as she can that she's not incredibly freaked out. Mukuro, for his part, spends the first day almost entirely silent after his initial arrival, which mostly consisted of formal introduction. Nagi does not wonder who he is beyond the superficial. She is grateful for his rescue but bothered by his continued presence. This is the bargain she's made, she supposes. Her life for his freedom, so to speak.

At ten at night, when all the lights are off and Nagi is trying to fall asleep but afraid Mukuro will be in her dreams with her, he speaks up.

Chrome,he says. Are you afraid of me?

Nagi imagines a blank, white expanse of nothingness.

Chrome, Mukuro insists. Answer me. You have no reason to be afraid, he adds.

Nagi draws a beautiful world in her mind, washing it over with an ocean and a sparkling beach and palm trees, beautiful blooming hibiscus flowers and her in a white dress and no shoes, standing at the edge of the surf.

I appreciate the scenery, Mukuro sighs, and Nagi can't tell how it's a sigh when he's in her mind. It seems like a sigh, she supposes. However, I would appreciate if you'd at least speak to me.

And suddenly he's there too, standing at the edge of the imaginary water with her. He, too, is dressed in all white. White shorts. White top. All cotton. It looks like hospital garb, and she doesn't want to think about the hospital right now.

Nagi imagines him in a button-up top and board shorts, and suddenly he is.

Goodness, he says. Why did you change my outfit?

Well, I wasn't very happy in the hospital gown, so I figured you weren't either, she thinks.

It wasn't a hospital gown, he says. It was a prison uniform.

The world goes black inside Nagi's mind. For a brief moment she imagines Mukuro in a cell somewhere in Italy before she's back, staring at the ceiling with her eyes wide open. She has a convict sharing space in her head. She can't fathom why he saved her anymore. She can't understand why her. She does not think she will sleep for months. Or at least not until Mukuro leaves.

You know I can hear you, Chrome. I don't appreciate you distrusting me.

You're a criminal?

Yes. But I am no danger to you, he says. And then he explains. He tells her everything. Well, at least it feels like everything. He tells her that the mafia hurt him. He won't say how, but she tells him she understands him not wanting to say how because sometimes it hurts to say out loud. He tells her how he wanted revenge. He tells her that he got it, too. And the he tells her that they got him, but he got out, and then they got him back and he's under top-security lockdown.

An image floats through Nagi's mind, sent by Mukuro. He's in the white getup from her imaginary beach, underwater, handcuffed and wrapped in chains, with tubes and wires affixed to his eye and a breathing mask over his mouth. Nagi reaches up to touch the mechanism over her own mouth, glances at the IV in her arm, and shivers.

I'm sorry, she thinks. You didn't deserve any of that. For the mafia to hurt you, I mean.That wasn't right.

No, he agrees. It wasn't. Do you understand me better now?

But it also isn't right to attack people that didn't hurt you, I think, she adds. That's what scares me about you now.

Chrome…he tries, but she imagines a blank gray wall with a huge padlock. It's passive-aggressive, true. More aggressive than passive, really. But it gets the point across to Mukuro: I don't want to talk right now.

Nagi falls asleep with her hands clenched in the blankets of the hospital bed, her depth perception out-of-whack from her missing eye, making her think that every shadow in the room is closer to her than it actually is. Every shadow is a gun-toting Mafioso bent on killing her to get to Mukuro. She finally buries her head under her pillow and drifts off into a terrible, blood-splattered nightmare.

The day Nagi is released from the hospital is also a nightmare. She has begun to come to terms with the fact that her mind is now the playground and temporary apartment space of a sycophantic psychopath. He seems intent on showing her only his good side, coaxing her to his side and convincing her he cares. She believes he's full of shit, but she's still afraid to think it, lest she risk him turning against her and leaving her without his illusionary life support.

Three days in the hospital with literally nothing to do had given Mukuro much time to explain himself, and Nagi plenty to get used to him and ascertain that he really wasn't much of a threat at all. After all, if he wanted the ability to wander around freely in the waking world outside of prison, he had to keep her alive. And if he wanted to keep her alive, he had to keep her happy. If he did something to upset her, or used her body to kill people, there wasn't anything stopping her from slitting her wrists in the shower or jumping off of a roof.

It wasn't like she had a whole lot left to live for. Just a cat that she'd saved from a car crash, and the bag she'd had with her when she'd been hit. No family. No home, since she didn't particularly want to go back and Mukuro had insisted that she not, anyway. No real friends to speak about, nobody to worry about her. With any luck, the doctors would discover her missing and tell her mother she'd died.

Nagi walks down the streets of Namimori with bandages over her right eye and a criminal in her mind.

You should get yourself a proper eyepatch, Chrome, Mukuro suggests, so you look a little more respectable. Maybe some new clothing too, although I'm going to be putting you in a Kokuyo Middle uniform anyway.

Nagi doesn't reply, but she hunts down an eyepatch anyway, and affixes it to her face in front of the bathroom mirror at the park.

She wanders along the sidewalks and stares at her reflection in the glass of storefronts. Eyepatch. Torn ends of hair. Still-healing cuts and scrapes and road rash.

A car accident, honestly.

Chrome, says Mukuro, I'm going to introduce you to my comrades soon. They'll be coming soon.

Nagi ignores him and keeps walking, crosses the street (she looks three times before stepping off the sidewalk) and clutches her bag a little bit closer to herself.

They'll look out for you. I've instructed them to do so.

Nagi's feet beat a steady, sharp rhythm along the concrete. She does not speed up. She does not run. She tries hard not to stomp but it's difficult.

Chrome, are you ignoring me? I only wish for your protection, my sweet Chrome. Please, if the mafia discovers that you are harboring my consciousness, they may seek to eradicate you. Chrome, my dear, please respond to me-

"My name is Nagi!" she shrieks suddenly, and very much audibly. A mother coming down the street in her direction tightens her grip on her son's hand and skirts a wide circle around her. People stare. A young man rolls down the window of his car to peer at her.

Is it now, says Mukuro. I would think that after what you'd been through, you would not want to be Nagi anymore.

What, thinks Nagi, with as much venom as she can imagine, would give you that impression? Nagi is all I have left.

Mukuro is silent for a moment. Nagi is aware of a seeping sadness and contempt that is thrashing in the depths of her subconscious, in the dark corners where Mukuro retreats when she can't completely sense his presence in her psyche.

Because, he says, it's the name your mother gave you. And she abandoned you. Why not abandon her in return, and give up the name that she called you?

Nagi considers this briefly, and also considers briefly telling Mukuro to get out of her body and let her just die, or else she'll throw herself in front of another oncoming vehicle. She considers that wide out in the open expanse of her mind where he can see it, like she's strung it up in neon lights in his front yard. But right now, his front yard is her front yard, because he's freeloading off of her. He's got to take what she gives him and deal with it, Nagi realizes. It's her mind. It's her life. He's a leech, a parasite, and she should be in control.

The second this thought crosses her mind, she suddenly feels very numb. She feels like she's floating, or rather like she's still standing but the ground has fallen out from under her feet. There's a strange sense of detachment, of disconnection from herself, and when she opens her remaining eye she is watching herself from inside her own head, watching her body move without her consent.

What are you doing? She thinks. Mukuro laughs, and it's her lips laughing. Let me go.

I am in control, Chrome,he thinks, walking her down the street and onto the next bus heading out of Namimori.

It's Nagi.

Not anymore.

This statement worries her, and Mukuro doesn't say anything more to her for the rest of the bus ride. He gets off in the next town over and walks right into the local middle school. Nagi feels –but not really feels, just sort of gets the sense of –her body disappearing, of her becoming invisible. Mukuro relinquishes some control back to her, and she wavers as she tries to find her footing.

I am always left with a strange sense of vertigo when I possess someone of drastically different height than myself.

Where am I?

Kokuyo middle. Pick out a uniform that fits you, he says. I won't watch while you change.

At least, Nagi decides, he has some odd sense of chivalry, because she actually feels him mentally turn his back as she slips out of her beat-up tights and torn dress from the day of the car accident. She hunts down a small-size of the Kokuyo Middle School uniform –it looks like an army getup, she thinks –and puts it on. It shows her midriff, and Nagi wonders how this could ever be allowed to pass for a school uniform, even on the wildest of days. She searches through the supply closet until she finds a pair of black boots (she can't imagine why they're there, unless they belong to the student council or something), and puts those on too, because her beat-up flats are red and they look bad with Kokuyo Green.

"Hey, kid, who're you?" says a voice behind her, and Nagi whirls around to face a group of tall boys and girls. They have black armbands pinned to their sleeves. Probably the student council.

"Um," says Nagi.

"You don't go here," says one of the Kokuyo students. "You stealing a uniform or something? You're gonna get it, bitch."

Nagi takes a step back.

Mukuro takes control, and takes a step forward. He smiles, and it curves her lips in a way she hasn't felt before. It isn't a smile of happiness. It isn't a laugh. It's a prideful, smug smirk that was not Nagi at all.

"You think so?" Mukuro says, with her mouth, with her voice. "Try it."

And they certainly tried it. They actually charged her, they came at her as if to pick her up by the arms and throw her out the front doors of the school, and maybe yank the school uniform off of her first.

Mukuro pushes her off completely and with her body, her hands, he punched the first one in the face. Ducked another, then tripped him. Twisted an arm behind a back, shoved and threw and swiped and slammed until they were all on the ground. All unconscious. And Nagi, on her own, in the middle of it all, staring at what had been done.

You are Chrome Dokuro, said the soft voice of Mukuro in the back of her mind. And I will make you powerful. I will bring you back better. I will give you a life, so long as you promise you'll use it to help me.

Nagi says nothing.

You do want a purpose, don't you?

Nagi doesn't say anything to this. She's gone, gone somewhere far away and she isn't coming back.

Yes, says Chrome. I do.

Well, I just creeped myself out. Great!

For those that don't know me, I update fics really erratically. Don't expect punctuality from me, and especially don't expect a schedule. I tried it, it didn't work for me.

Review if you feel like reviewing.