D.Gray-man // Leftover Angels // 07. Redemption
Characters/Pairings: Ensemble cast. Focus: Kanda/Alma, Allen, 14th/Hevlaska.
Rating: T
Warnings: Character death, violence, a dozen kinds of blasphemy.
Word Count: 26,239 (this chapter: 4227)
Summary: Allen's "death" during the fight with Alma sets off a chain of unexpected and deeply strange consequences which bring up questions about the nature of God himself. Hevlaska goes missing, Crown Clown returns without its owner, and angels and demons work together against a common enemy. While grieving for Alma, Kanda must figure out what's going on and which side he should be fighting for... if any.
Notes: Previous: 01. Innocence // 02. Wake // 03. Covenant // 04. Congregation // 05. Deicide // 06. Suffering
07. Redemption
Hell was already breaking up when Kanda found it, bereft of its master and architect. Even at the end of its glory, it was a terrible place.
The heat was awful, of course, searing and damp like a jungle despite the empty, dusty ground. All the water had leached from it into the air. The wind tasted like blood. The inversion of light and dark was disorienting as well -- the sky was black, but the ground was pale and yellowish, where it wasn't aflame or recently burned out. He walked carelessly over long fields of coals, their eternal fire not yet entirely forgotten. The soles of his feet blistered and melted, but he paid them no heed. He was already dead. The pain was only there to torment him, not warn him of any real damage.
In the distance, in every direction, tall white spires of twisted bone scraped the scorched black sky. The wind was full of freed spirits, warped and howling in search of freedom and rebirth, writhing stormclouds of pale rage and horror. Other than them, there was little else but fire and stone and dust.
Somewhere in this ruined land, perhaps among the terrified clouds, roamed the soul he had come here for.
Somehow he did not think he would find Alma here, in the outskirts. Azazel would have dragged him right down to the center, where the fires burned hottest. Alma had lost himself to the enemy. His punishment would be especially harsh.
Therefore, ignoring the way Hell tore away at his spirit-body and sent breaking agony through him with every step, ignoring the way he could not breathe and could not see properly through his melting eyes, Kanda forged onward towards the white heart of the inferno. Alma was here somewhere. There was nothing else to do but find him and bring him out. Nothing else at all.
There was no way to count time in Hell. There was no sun -- the white towers and the sullen glow of the ember-ground were the only illumination. There was no moon, no stars. Nothing changed. He had no heartbeat, no breath. The torment seemed to extend forever, though he thought it had only been a few hours at most since he had found his way out of the Purgatory of forest and fog.
Every now and then, he called out Alma's name. A hundred thousand souls screamed in response, but he never heard Alma's voice among them.
Slowly, the great coal plains broke up into jagged mountains and gorges, every stone's edge a razor which cut his feet. He scrambled through their treeless heights and depths, keeping his face aimed at the heat he could feel from the center to keep himself from getting lost. The stones flayed his skin away, and again and again it grew back.
As he went further in, it grew steadily quieter. The wind became empty of souls as they each found their way out and up. The coals cooled and stopped crackling. At last there was only the shuffle of his ruined feet against the stones, and the still-distant echo of that familiar discordant song.
Alma had always loved to sing. Tone-deaf idiot.
As Hell died around him, his progress became easier -- the heat eased, the air cleared, the stones softened. He understood without relief, however, that if he took too long, Hell would disintegrate entirely, taking both he and Alma with it. He gritted his teeth and moved faster.
To keep his mind off the pain and focused on what was important, he made himself try and remember Alma; both the Alma he knew and the Alma who had haunted his dreams and visions.
Try as he might, at first he could bring up nothing more of the first Alma beyond the garden and her smile. The second Alma was much easier -- that Alma he couldn't forget, even back when he wanted to.
He remembered waking up in his pool, cold and weightless, to Alma's face. How he'd know it was a face even though he couldn't recall ever seeing one before. How he'd know what the curve of its lips meant, the gleam of tears in its eyes. Though he was very sure he'd never met this face before, it was happy to see him.
Alma had told him what his name was, what "they" called him.
Kanda sometimes tracked the beginning of his second life from that moment. Not from when he had first woken up, alone and freezing to death in the not-water which gave him not-life. He had been awake, but not alive, not a person until Alma told him he had a name.
From there, the memories rolled out like a carpet, paving the way between where he stood and the center of hell -- and he could see it now, from here.
The mountains formed a protective ring around a sunken crater the size of London, and he stood at its precarious edge, facing the long drop. In the middle, rising from the smooth shadowed depths of the gargantuan hole, rose the largest tower he had seen yet by far. It was hard to look at. The pitted white surface was polished to a glare, reflecting the capricious multicoloured light of the bonfires raging around its feet. Its crown was a splintered spear of black-stained ivory. The scale of it was difficult to grasp, as it had no windows or floors that he could see -- it seemed to touch the sky, bisecting the entire world between what lay to its left and what lay to its right.
The entire pit smelled of Azazel -- chemical sterility, as if the fires were burning antiseptic wood.
Kanda clenched his fists and threw himself headlong off the edge of the pit. There was no sense in picking his way carefully down the sides -- it would take a long time, and save him nothing. He couldn't die. All Hell could do was make him hurt, and he had been suffering a worse pain than this place could ever offer him for nine years. Maybe even longer. Kanda knew how to hurt. More importantly, he knew how to hurt and keep walking.
The sodden, steamy air of the pit swallowed him, dragged him down and hunched on his back, pushing him faster and faster toward the ground. The impact made him black out for a while. He had no way of knowing how long, but he thought it was probably only a few minutes because the bonfires had not burned down much. He still had time. Not much, but it would have to be enough.
"Alma!" he bellowed, then closed his mouth and listened hard.
It was faint, and the bonfires were terribly loud, but there -- the song stopped, and he heard a voice floating down from somewhere high above. "...Yuu?"
Kanda grinned.
The tower crumbled a bit as he approached, its porous calcite walls breaking away to make a door for him. He clambered up over the pieces and went in. The interior was red. Not painted red, but made of it; red as blood, red as marrow. The stench was horrific.
There were no stairs. He set his hands into the tacky material of the walls and climbed them. It was like climbing the dead insides of a lightning-blasted oak. Once or twice he lost his grip and fell, but never quite to the bottom. There were stringy bits like spiderwebs hung across the interior of the tower, and though disgusting, they proved quite useful for catching himself mid-fall.
The climb took perhaps three hours. By the time he reached the prison level, exhaustion had become a meaningless word. He was a ghost of himself, hollowed out and gaunt, but he was there.
There were other prisoners there, he realized slowly. An entire complex grotto of cells, closed off by thin sheets of some sort of whitish soapy substance. Moaning souls beat their translucent fists against their doors, galvanized by the sight of potential rescue. Kanda wasn't interested in them. Somewhere in here, among the roster of the souls Azazel had decided he hated most... somewhere... but where?
"Yuu!" he heard, the voice somehow hardly any louder now than it had been at the base of the tower. "Yuu! Up here!"
His eyes searched restlessly through the ranks, and -- there! Third row up, slightly to his left. He was up the wall and hacking at it with his fingernails and knees in the space of three breaths. The white stuff was resilient, but had not been designed for attack from the outside. He scraped it away like soap residue until a hole opened up. From there, it only took three good blows from his aching knee to make the whole thing give a dull shudder and break into messy chunks.
And then Alma was there in his arms.
Alma's soul didn't look like either of the Almas he had known, but someone instead like both of them at once. He had the first Alma's red lips and long hair, but the second Alma's scar and the long hair was dark, and he realized now that they had always had the same eyes. But it was unmistakably Alma. Thin, bleeding from a hundred places, bruised and shaking, but Alma.
He allowed himself ten seconds to hold on and convince himself that this was real. They were not long enough, but he could feel the floor cooling under his feet and didn't dare risk any longer. Every moment counted now. If he had climbed down the crater wall, it would already have been too late.
"We have to go," he said.
Alma nodded. "I know. I can feel it dying too. But how?"
Kanda shrugged. "No fucking idea. You got anything?"
"Not really." And then Alma grinned at him, and it was like all the best moments of those awful, torturous years under the Order's thumb, every shining second of relief of rage and agony and terror, all put together. He felt lightheaded. "But you already know what's down. So let's go up."
"Up...?" Kanda echoed. Logic said there would be nothing above the tower but sky. But this was Hell. The Afterlife. It didn't have to follow the same rules the living world did, as his body had already proved a dozen times over by remaining intact despite all the punishment Hell had put it through. "Up, huh. All right. Let's try it."
All around them, the other souls were freeing themselves from their prisons, breaking up the weakening gates of others, and milling around. Some of them had been leaders, it seemed, as the ranks quickly tightened up and began discussing strategy amongst themselves. Kanda ignored them and grasped Alma's hand. They were not his business. He had no interest in saving them. Maybe that meant he didn't deserve Heaven. He probably did deserve Hell, but he wanted to be with Alma, and Alma could not be allowed to stay here. End of story.
They could see nothing above them but roof, but it was difficult to guage the distance, and the mazy red webbing obscured much of the walls. There could be a dozen doors there, for all they could see. They just needed one. The climb was downright easy now that the walls no longer burned their hands. They went up fifty feet, seventy-five, a hundred.
"This may have been a bad idea, Yuu," Alma admitted ruefully, little half-grin still firmly in place.
Kanda shook his head. "No. You were right. I... I just know."
Another twenty-five feet up. Fifty. Seventy-five.
The tower gave a great moaning crack and tilted on its base, nearly dislodging Kanda again. Alma let go with one hand and dragged him back in close to the wall. Kanda clung with his face against the gunky warm marrow and tried not to gag on the stench.
Hell was nearly dead. The center would not hold for much longer.
They climbed. They could no longer keep track of how far they had come -- the grotto-prison where they had left the other prisoner souls was invisible in the crimson gloom, and there were no other markers to note their progress. Three more times, they felt the tower tremble and shift beneath them.
"Yuu," Alma said at least, distant and thin with exhaustion. "Look. Up there."
Kanda craned his stiff, knotted neck to follow Alma's shaking finger. Perhaps another forty feet above them, the walls gave way onto a different shade of darkness. Kanda recognized it: the charred sky of Hell. It was an exit. For what that was worth. The entrance he had come in through was much too far away to risk running through, with Hell falling apart around them. But he had no real hope that there would be a way out all the way up here. It was likely there would be nothing but a great view of the end of the world.
It was as good a reason to climb as any. For Alma's sake, he had to try.
The tower shook twice before they reached the dark gap, and once more as they crawled out onto the sharp edge, nearly sending them plummeting down the side and into the sullen remains of the bonfires half a mile below. They were perched on the broken edge of the hollow bone tower, feet finding purchase in its hard porous sponge. The highest edge of the broken spur loomed above them another thirty feet or so. Above that, only sky.
No exit.
They looked around without hurry, knowing already what they would see: beyond the crater, the mountains were splintering and shelving off to crash in pieces in the valleys. Their fall revealed the plains beyond, which were roiling and rent by a thousand plunging chasms. Hell was rendered impassable. They could not reach the borderlands.
Alma turned a terrible look of grief on him -- not for himself, never for himself, but for Kanda who had died to come rescue him from this exact fate. Then he caught himself. "Bad deal," he said, and flashed a cheeky grin at Kanda as if this were merely another failed test which would see them locked in their rooms without supper.
It was monstrously unfair, but there was nothing to be done. They had exhausted what options they had under their own power, and there were no other powers to help them now. God was dead -- at his own hand, no less -- and the Devil owed him no real favours. Kanda had little doubt that Allen had expelled the angel and whatever strength it had, so he couldn't call on that. But wait... there had been another, another who owed him and Allen both.
Hope flared, wild and pure. Kanda had never had real faith in anything but Alma, and this wasn't strong enough to be called that, but it was hope. There was hope, because Allen Walker never gave up.
He had been right. The view was spectacular.
x.x.x
Allen woke up to a unfamiliar ceiling.
Its four support beams tapered from the corners of the square room to meet with a nearly seamless join in the center. They were lacquered black, and the ceiling between them was covered with thick white rice paper. Four sets of little candle-lamps burned in each corner of the room, filling it with more shadows than light. The air smelled of incense and myrrh. His head swam as if drugged. He felt like he could sleep for another dozen hours. Perhaps a whole day.
He didn't recognize the room, but Lenalee did. "Lady Anita?" she cried out, sitting up as quickly as her exhausted body would allow. "Lady Anita!"
"I'm sorry," said the dark-haired woman sitting at their feet, wringing out a green cloth over a silver dish. "It's only me."
"Hevlaska," Allen croaked, then corrected himself. "Lilith. I thought you were leaving?"
He could see her better now, his eyes adjusting to the gloom and blinking away the detritus of sleep. What he had first mistaken for a fifth set of tiny lamps were in fact her eyes, glowing over them unblinkingly as she tended their wounds. She sat with her feet neatly arranged off to the left, bare except for a pair of golden bangles on her right ankle. Had they always been there? He couldn't remember.
"I will," she said, "and I must hurry, but there is one more thing I think you will ask for my help with. I owe you a very great debt, Allen Walker. I cannot repay it, but I will stay for this, as long as I can."
For a long moment, he had no idea what she meant. His head was a vast empty space, a cloudy cavern of shadowy images he could not name. Then it began to clear and he knew. "Kanda," he said. "Kanda is in Hell, isn't he. I saw him die. Alma--"
"I cannot bring them back to life," she interrupted gently. "I do not think that's what you would have asked, but you should know, so you will not wonder. I cannot undo death."
He fell silent and waited for her to continue.
She hesitated for a moment. "It is difficult for me to know what shape the afterlife will take when it has finished collapsing," she said. "Heaven and Hell were both Azazel's constructs, and are doubtless losing their coherency as we speak. But I do not know what the wide lands between them are doing. The afterlife itself is the True God's creation, not Azazel's. They may be safe. But you should know that even if we save your friends from the ruins of Hell, we may still be consigning them to a fate little better."
Allen grinned. "Think who you're talking about, Hevlaska. You know Kanda. You know Alma even better than I do. Don't you think they'll be all right?"
Lilith looked at him, her hands forgetting their task and letting the green silk fall into the bowl. "I... yes. I think they will. Then we shall try. Give me your hand, Allen Walker, and help me find your friends."
x.x.x
The tower grumbled and tilted ten degrees away from the path Kanda had taken into the crater. Not long now. Perhaps a few minutes.
"Yuu," whispered Alma, curling his hand a little tighter around the back of Kanda's neck to hold himself in place while the floor moved dizzily under them. "Yuu, why is it that I'm not scared?"
Kanda shrugged. "Maybe because we're already dead? We've died so many times. It's not surprising that it's not scary anymore."
"Maybe," Alma replied, unsure.
They were twisted together into a little dark knot of limbs and long black hair, clinging both to each other and to the tower. Waiting for the end together. It was admittedly better than waiting for the end alone, but not by much. It wasn't enough time. Hadn't they fought hard enough? Hadn't they earned even a little bit of peace? They had. They must have. Alma at least deserved it, and if there were gods there had to be some kind of karmic justice as well, even if it was very slow. But somehow, he didn't think it would be slow this time.
Kanda knew why he wasn't afraid, but it was something he still somehow couldn't admit out loud, even to Alma. It was more than hope, now. More even than faith. Kanda was somehow certain, absolutely and unshakeably certain, that Allen was coming for them. He had no reason to believe it. None at all. And yet he could not shake the bone-deep knowledge that they had not yet been abandoned here for the stones to churn to dust.
So he waited.
And Allen came.
"Kanda!" the voice bellowed from somewhere high above.
"Beansprout's voice is coming from the sky," he noted dryly, realizing only after he said it that he was echoing himself, his own words from what felt like a very long time ago. A time when Allen had done much the same thing he was doing now. Because that was what Allen did. It was who he was.
"Kanda!" Allen yelled again, and this time Kanda could see him, a white star rocketing down from the sky toward them.
Alma stared in amazement. "Is that your friend? The one who helped us back in America?"
"Yes," said Kanda. His smile kept trying to break his face, though he fought hard to keep it suppressed. "Yes, that's Allen."
Allen came at them headfirst, hand outstretched, legs engulfed in strangely elastic shadow. A terrible black hole gaped in his head where his left eye should have been, but the light from the rest of him seemed to shine even brighter than usual. Perhaps that was because his flesh was out of the way.
"Grab on!" he said when he was close enough to reach. "I don't have all day, come on--"
Kanda reached out and took his hand without hesitation. Alma wrapped his arms and legs around Kanda and held on with what strength he had left. Kanda had a tiny moment in which to wonder what exactly was going to happen next, and then Allen... pulled. The three of them went careening through the sky like a small dark comet. The strange shadows slingshotted them away over the ruined mountains, the disintegrating plains, far and away into the misty woodlands of the border country. Behind them, the white tower gave up at last, breaking into three pieces and sinking into its crater with a vast thunder of destruction.
Still they flew, over the woods and over a swathe of dusky golden prairies and a swampy area which smelled strongly of something sweet and floral that wasn't lotuses, until at last the shadow slackened and let them down in a broad mountain valley. Poplars and willows climbed the quiet green flanks of the sleepy monoliths, but the valley floor itself was clear but for a line of brush and maples along the riverside at its bottom. Wildflowers dotted the long fields of high grass. The sun hung overhead, in good temper.
It was beautiful. It had the same slightly out-of-focus, unreal feeling the borderland woods had had, but it was gentler here, like standing in the manifestation of a pleasant daydream.
Allen hovered slightly above them, feet still engulfed in the reaching shadows from the sky. "This is as far as we can bring you," he said with a rueful smile. "Lilith tells me there are lots of other places if you don't like this one, but you'll have to find them on your own."
"Is this Heaven?" Alma asked, wide-eyed.
"No," said Allen. "Heaven is gone. Azazel made it, just like Hell."
"Then what is it?" asked Kanda shortly. "Looks like Heaven to me."
"It's just more of the world. I don't really know how to explain it. I'm not sure I get it myself, but... the real God made the world with layers. You die in the top layer, you end up here. Lots of things are different, but it's still a kind of life. Just... longer. Less urgent. I'm sorry, I don't really have time to explain better. I think you'll figure it out on your own anyway."
"You're going back, then?"
Allen nodded. "Yeah. Somehow, I survived... thanks to you, mostly. You did all the hard work. But don't worry, and try not to miss me too much -- when I die, I'll end up down here too."
"Who'd miss you?" Kanda said bluntly, but there was no force behind it, only amusement. "Live a long time, stupid beansprout, I don't want to see your dumb mug again for quite a while."
In response to that, Allen stuck out his tongue and fingered his eye. Alma laughed.
"I look forward to meeting you again," said Alma. "Thanks again for... you know, what you did."
"Don't mention it." The shadows began to contract, dragging Allen up and away. "See you later, you stupid jerk," he yelled before leaving earshot, getting the last word in just in time. He shrank to the size of the north star, shining ferociously within his little patch of shadow beside the sun, then vanished along with it.
Kanda watched him go without blinking, and knew without looking that Alma was doing the same.
And then it was just the two of them in their sunny valley, with all of eternity stretched out before them. There was no war to fight here. No Akuma. No Innocence. No Order, no scientists, no God, no Devil, no people. Not even a real sense of time, or at least not enough awareness of it to drive them to madness. Just the two of them and the Garden of Eden.
Alma took his hand and leaned into his shoulder. Alma. Whole, alive -- inasmuch as anything here was -- and standing beside him without a single other place he needed to be. Safe. Forever.
"This could be worse," Kanda admitted.
x.x.x
When Allen next opened his eyes, the world was empty of all magic but its own.
And God -- the real One -- saw that it was good.
~FIN~
X.x.x.x.X
A/N: Shortly after I signed up for this bigbang challenge, I was struck down by the worst writer's block I have ever experienced. I kept writing anyway, and this monster is the result. I hope you enjoyed the trip. Thank you for reading.
Rating: T
Warnings: Character death, violence, a dozen kinds of blasphemy.
Word Count: 26,239 (this chapter: 4227)
Summary: Allen's "death" during the fight with Alma sets off a chain of unexpected and deeply strange consequences which bring up questions about the nature of God himself. Hevlaska goes missing, Crown Clown returns without its owner, and angels and demons work together against a common enemy. While grieving for Alma, Kanda must figure out what's going on and which side he should be fighting for... if any.
Notes: Previous: 01. Innocence // 02. Wake // 03. Covenant // 04. Congregation // 05. Deicide // 06. Suffering
07. Redemption
Hell was already breaking up when Kanda found it, bereft of its master and architect. Even at the end of its glory, it was a terrible place.
The heat was awful, of course, searing and damp like a jungle despite the empty, dusty ground. All the water had leached from it into the air. The wind tasted like blood. The inversion of light and dark was disorienting as well -- the sky was black, but the ground was pale and yellowish, where it wasn't aflame or recently burned out. He walked carelessly over long fields of coals, their eternal fire not yet entirely forgotten. The soles of his feet blistered and melted, but he paid them no heed. He was already dead. The pain was only there to torment him, not warn him of any real damage.
In the distance, in every direction, tall white spires of twisted bone scraped the scorched black sky. The wind was full of freed spirits, warped and howling in search of freedom and rebirth, writhing stormclouds of pale rage and horror. Other than them, there was little else but fire and stone and dust.
Somewhere in this ruined land, perhaps among the terrified clouds, roamed the soul he had come here for.
Somehow he did not think he would find Alma here, in the outskirts. Azazel would have dragged him right down to the center, where the fires burned hottest. Alma had lost himself to the enemy. His punishment would be especially harsh.
Therefore, ignoring the way Hell tore away at his spirit-body and sent breaking agony through him with every step, ignoring the way he could not breathe and could not see properly through his melting eyes, Kanda forged onward towards the white heart of the inferno. Alma was here somewhere. There was nothing else to do but find him and bring him out. Nothing else at all.
There was no way to count time in Hell. There was no sun -- the white towers and the sullen glow of the ember-ground were the only illumination. There was no moon, no stars. Nothing changed. He had no heartbeat, no breath. The torment seemed to extend forever, though he thought it had only been a few hours at most since he had found his way out of the Purgatory of forest and fog.
Every now and then, he called out Alma's name. A hundred thousand souls screamed in response, but he never heard Alma's voice among them.
Slowly, the great coal plains broke up into jagged mountains and gorges, every stone's edge a razor which cut his feet. He scrambled through their treeless heights and depths, keeping his face aimed at the heat he could feel from the center to keep himself from getting lost. The stones flayed his skin away, and again and again it grew back.
As he went further in, it grew steadily quieter. The wind became empty of souls as they each found their way out and up. The coals cooled and stopped crackling. At last there was only the shuffle of his ruined feet against the stones, and the still-distant echo of that familiar discordant song.
Alma had always loved to sing. Tone-deaf idiot.
As Hell died around him, his progress became easier -- the heat eased, the air cleared, the stones softened. He understood without relief, however, that if he took too long, Hell would disintegrate entirely, taking both he and Alma with it. He gritted his teeth and moved faster.
To keep his mind off the pain and focused on what was important, he made himself try and remember Alma; both the Alma he knew and the Alma who had haunted his dreams and visions.
Try as he might, at first he could bring up nothing more of the first Alma beyond the garden and her smile. The second Alma was much easier -- that Alma he couldn't forget, even back when he wanted to.
He remembered waking up in his pool, cold and weightless, to Alma's face. How he'd know it was a face even though he couldn't recall ever seeing one before. How he'd know what the curve of its lips meant, the gleam of tears in its eyes. Though he was very sure he'd never met this face before, it was happy to see him.
Alma had told him what his name was, what "they" called him.
Kanda sometimes tracked the beginning of his second life from that moment. Not from when he had first woken up, alone and freezing to death in the not-water which gave him not-life. He had been awake, but not alive, not a person until Alma told him he had a name.
From there, the memories rolled out like a carpet, paving the way between where he stood and the center of hell -- and he could see it now, from here.
The mountains formed a protective ring around a sunken crater the size of London, and he stood at its precarious edge, facing the long drop. In the middle, rising from the smooth shadowed depths of the gargantuan hole, rose the largest tower he had seen yet by far. It was hard to look at. The pitted white surface was polished to a glare, reflecting the capricious multicoloured light of the bonfires raging around its feet. Its crown was a splintered spear of black-stained ivory. The scale of it was difficult to grasp, as it had no windows or floors that he could see -- it seemed to touch the sky, bisecting the entire world between what lay to its left and what lay to its right.
The entire pit smelled of Azazel -- chemical sterility, as if the fires were burning antiseptic wood.
Kanda clenched his fists and threw himself headlong off the edge of the pit. There was no sense in picking his way carefully down the sides -- it would take a long time, and save him nothing. He couldn't die. All Hell could do was make him hurt, and he had been suffering a worse pain than this place could ever offer him for nine years. Maybe even longer. Kanda knew how to hurt. More importantly, he knew how to hurt and keep walking.
The sodden, steamy air of the pit swallowed him, dragged him down and hunched on his back, pushing him faster and faster toward the ground. The impact made him black out for a while. He had no way of knowing how long, but he thought it was probably only a few minutes because the bonfires had not burned down much. He still had time. Not much, but it would have to be enough.
"Alma!" he bellowed, then closed his mouth and listened hard.
It was faint, and the bonfires were terribly loud, but there -- the song stopped, and he heard a voice floating down from somewhere high above. "...Yuu?"
Kanda grinned.
The tower crumbled a bit as he approached, its porous calcite walls breaking away to make a door for him. He clambered up over the pieces and went in. The interior was red. Not painted red, but made of it; red as blood, red as marrow. The stench was horrific.
There were no stairs. He set his hands into the tacky material of the walls and climbed them. It was like climbing the dead insides of a lightning-blasted oak. Once or twice he lost his grip and fell, but never quite to the bottom. There were stringy bits like spiderwebs hung across the interior of the tower, and though disgusting, they proved quite useful for catching himself mid-fall.
The climb took perhaps three hours. By the time he reached the prison level, exhaustion had become a meaningless word. He was a ghost of himself, hollowed out and gaunt, but he was there.
There were other prisoners there, he realized slowly. An entire complex grotto of cells, closed off by thin sheets of some sort of whitish soapy substance. Moaning souls beat their translucent fists against their doors, galvanized by the sight of potential rescue. Kanda wasn't interested in them. Somewhere in here, among the roster of the souls Azazel had decided he hated most... somewhere... but where?
"Yuu!" he heard, the voice somehow hardly any louder now than it had been at the base of the tower. "Yuu! Up here!"
His eyes searched restlessly through the ranks, and -- there! Third row up, slightly to his left. He was up the wall and hacking at it with his fingernails and knees in the space of three breaths. The white stuff was resilient, but had not been designed for attack from the outside. He scraped it away like soap residue until a hole opened up. From there, it only took three good blows from his aching knee to make the whole thing give a dull shudder and break into messy chunks.
And then Alma was there in his arms.
Alma's soul didn't look like either of the Almas he had known, but someone instead like both of them at once. He had the first Alma's red lips and long hair, but the second Alma's scar and the long hair was dark, and he realized now that they had always had the same eyes. But it was unmistakably Alma. Thin, bleeding from a hundred places, bruised and shaking, but Alma.
He allowed himself ten seconds to hold on and convince himself that this was real. They were not long enough, but he could feel the floor cooling under his feet and didn't dare risk any longer. Every moment counted now. If he had climbed down the crater wall, it would already have been too late.
"We have to go," he said.
Alma nodded. "I know. I can feel it dying too. But how?"
Kanda shrugged. "No fucking idea. You got anything?"
"Not really." And then Alma grinned at him, and it was like all the best moments of those awful, torturous years under the Order's thumb, every shining second of relief of rage and agony and terror, all put together. He felt lightheaded. "But you already know what's down. So let's go up."
"Up...?" Kanda echoed. Logic said there would be nothing above the tower but sky. But this was Hell. The Afterlife. It didn't have to follow the same rules the living world did, as his body had already proved a dozen times over by remaining intact despite all the punishment Hell had put it through. "Up, huh. All right. Let's try it."
All around them, the other souls were freeing themselves from their prisons, breaking up the weakening gates of others, and milling around. Some of them had been leaders, it seemed, as the ranks quickly tightened up and began discussing strategy amongst themselves. Kanda ignored them and grasped Alma's hand. They were not his business. He had no interest in saving them. Maybe that meant he didn't deserve Heaven. He probably did deserve Hell, but he wanted to be with Alma, and Alma could not be allowed to stay here. End of story.
They could see nothing above them but roof, but it was difficult to guage the distance, and the mazy red webbing obscured much of the walls. There could be a dozen doors there, for all they could see. They just needed one. The climb was downright easy now that the walls no longer burned their hands. They went up fifty feet, seventy-five, a hundred.
"This may have been a bad idea, Yuu," Alma admitted ruefully, little half-grin still firmly in place.
Kanda shook his head. "No. You were right. I... I just know."
Another twenty-five feet up. Fifty. Seventy-five.
The tower gave a great moaning crack and tilted on its base, nearly dislodging Kanda again. Alma let go with one hand and dragged him back in close to the wall. Kanda clung with his face against the gunky warm marrow and tried not to gag on the stench.
Hell was nearly dead. The center would not hold for much longer.
They climbed. They could no longer keep track of how far they had come -- the grotto-prison where they had left the other prisoner souls was invisible in the crimson gloom, and there were no other markers to note their progress. Three more times, they felt the tower tremble and shift beneath them.
"Yuu," Alma said at least, distant and thin with exhaustion. "Look. Up there."
Kanda craned his stiff, knotted neck to follow Alma's shaking finger. Perhaps another forty feet above them, the walls gave way onto a different shade of darkness. Kanda recognized it: the charred sky of Hell. It was an exit. For what that was worth. The entrance he had come in through was much too far away to risk running through, with Hell falling apart around them. But he had no real hope that there would be a way out all the way up here. It was likely there would be nothing but a great view of the end of the world.
It was as good a reason to climb as any. For Alma's sake, he had to try.
The tower shook twice before they reached the dark gap, and once more as they crawled out onto the sharp edge, nearly sending them plummeting down the side and into the sullen remains of the bonfires half a mile below. They were perched on the broken edge of the hollow bone tower, feet finding purchase in its hard porous sponge. The highest edge of the broken spur loomed above them another thirty feet or so. Above that, only sky.
No exit.
They looked around without hurry, knowing already what they would see: beyond the crater, the mountains were splintering and shelving off to crash in pieces in the valleys. Their fall revealed the plains beyond, which were roiling and rent by a thousand plunging chasms. Hell was rendered impassable. They could not reach the borderlands.
Alma turned a terrible look of grief on him -- not for himself, never for himself, but for Kanda who had died to come rescue him from this exact fate. Then he caught himself. "Bad deal," he said, and flashed a cheeky grin at Kanda as if this were merely another failed test which would see them locked in their rooms without supper.
It was monstrously unfair, but there was nothing to be done. They had exhausted what options they had under their own power, and there were no other powers to help them now. God was dead -- at his own hand, no less -- and the Devil owed him no real favours. Kanda had little doubt that Allen had expelled the angel and whatever strength it had, so he couldn't call on that. But wait... there had been another, another who owed him and Allen both.
Hope flared, wild and pure. Kanda had never had real faith in anything but Alma, and this wasn't strong enough to be called that, but it was hope. There was hope, because Allen Walker never gave up.
He had been right. The view was spectacular.
x.x.x
Allen woke up to a unfamiliar ceiling.
Its four support beams tapered from the corners of the square room to meet with a nearly seamless join in the center. They were lacquered black, and the ceiling between them was covered with thick white rice paper. Four sets of little candle-lamps burned in each corner of the room, filling it with more shadows than light. The air smelled of incense and myrrh. His head swam as if drugged. He felt like he could sleep for another dozen hours. Perhaps a whole day.
He didn't recognize the room, but Lenalee did. "Lady Anita?" she cried out, sitting up as quickly as her exhausted body would allow. "Lady Anita!"
"I'm sorry," said the dark-haired woman sitting at their feet, wringing out a green cloth over a silver dish. "It's only me."
"Hevlaska," Allen croaked, then corrected himself. "Lilith. I thought you were leaving?"
He could see her better now, his eyes adjusting to the gloom and blinking away the detritus of sleep. What he had first mistaken for a fifth set of tiny lamps were in fact her eyes, glowing over them unblinkingly as she tended their wounds. She sat with her feet neatly arranged off to the left, bare except for a pair of golden bangles on her right ankle. Had they always been there? He couldn't remember.
"I will," she said, "and I must hurry, but there is one more thing I think you will ask for my help with. I owe you a very great debt, Allen Walker. I cannot repay it, but I will stay for this, as long as I can."
For a long moment, he had no idea what she meant. His head was a vast empty space, a cloudy cavern of shadowy images he could not name. Then it began to clear and he knew. "Kanda," he said. "Kanda is in Hell, isn't he. I saw him die. Alma--"
"I cannot bring them back to life," she interrupted gently. "I do not think that's what you would have asked, but you should know, so you will not wonder. I cannot undo death."
He fell silent and waited for her to continue.
She hesitated for a moment. "It is difficult for me to know what shape the afterlife will take when it has finished collapsing," she said. "Heaven and Hell were both Azazel's constructs, and are doubtless losing their coherency as we speak. But I do not know what the wide lands between them are doing. The afterlife itself is the True God's creation, not Azazel's. They may be safe. But you should know that even if we save your friends from the ruins of Hell, we may still be consigning them to a fate little better."
Allen grinned. "Think who you're talking about, Hevlaska. You know Kanda. You know Alma even better than I do. Don't you think they'll be all right?"
Lilith looked at him, her hands forgetting their task and letting the green silk fall into the bowl. "I... yes. I think they will. Then we shall try. Give me your hand, Allen Walker, and help me find your friends."
x.x.x
The tower grumbled and tilted ten degrees away from the path Kanda had taken into the crater. Not long now. Perhaps a few minutes.
"Yuu," whispered Alma, curling his hand a little tighter around the back of Kanda's neck to hold himself in place while the floor moved dizzily under them. "Yuu, why is it that I'm not scared?"
Kanda shrugged. "Maybe because we're already dead? We've died so many times. It's not surprising that it's not scary anymore."
"Maybe," Alma replied, unsure.
They were twisted together into a little dark knot of limbs and long black hair, clinging both to each other and to the tower. Waiting for the end together. It was admittedly better than waiting for the end alone, but not by much. It wasn't enough time. Hadn't they fought hard enough? Hadn't they earned even a little bit of peace? They had. They must have. Alma at least deserved it, and if there were gods there had to be some kind of karmic justice as well, even if it was very slow. But somehow, he didn't think it would be slow this time.
Kanda knew why he wasn't afraid, but it was something he still somehow couldn't admit out loud, even to Alma. It was more than hope, now. More even than faith. Kanda was somehow certain, absolutely and unshakeably certain, that Allen was coming for them. He had no reason to believe it. None at all. And yet he could not shake the bone-deep knowledge that they had not yet been abandoned here for the stones to churn to dust.
So he waited.
And Allen came.
"Kanda!" the voice bellowed from somewhere high above.
"Beansprout's voice is coming from the sky," he noted dryly, realizing only after he said it that he was echoing himself, his own words from what felt like a very long time ago. A time when Allen had done much the same thing he was doing now. Because that was what Allen did. It was who he was.
"Kanda!" Allen yelled again, and this time Kanda could see him, a white star rocketing down from the sky toward them.
Alma stared in amazement. "Is that your friend? The one who helped us back in America?"
"Yes," said Kanda. His smile kept trying to break his face, though he fought hard to keep it suppressed. "Yes, that's Allen."
Allen came at them headfirst, hand outstretched, legs engulfed in strangely elastic shadow. A terrible black hole gaped in his head where his left eye should have been, but the light from the rest of him seemed to shine even brighter than usual. Perhaps that was because his flesh was out of the way.
"Grab on!" he said when he was close enough to reach. "I don't have all day, come on--"
Kanda reached out and took his hand without hesitation. Alma wrapped his arms and legs around Kanda and held on with what strength he had left. Kanda had a tiny moment in which to wonder what exactly was going to happen next, and then Allen... pulled. The three of them went careening through the sky like a small dark comet. The strange shadows slingshotted them away over the ruined mountains, the disintegrating plains, far and away into the misty woodlands of the border country. Behind them, the white tower gave up at last, breaking into three pieces and sinking into its crater with a vast thunder of destruction.
Still they flew, over the woods and over a swathe of dusky golden prairies and a swampy area which smelled strongly of something sweet and floral that wasn't lotuses, until at last the shadow slackened and let them down in a broad mountain valley. Poplars and willows climbed the quiet green flanks of the sleepy monoliths, but the valley floor itself was clear but for a line of brush and maples along the riverside at its bottom. Wildflowers dotted the long fields of high grass. The sun hung overhead, in good temper.
It was beautiful. It had the same slightly out-of-focus, unreal feeling the borderland woods had had, but it was gentler here, like standing in the manifestation of a pleasant daydream.
Allen hovered slightly above them, feet still engulfed in the reaching shadows from the sky. "This is as far as we can bring you," he said with a rueful smile. "Lilith tells me there are lots of other places if you don't like this one, but you'll have to find them on your own."
"Is this Heaven?" Alma asked, wide-eyed.
"No," said Allen. "Heaven is gone. Azazel made it, just like Hell."
"Then what is it?" asked Kanda shortly. "Looks like Heaven to me."
"It's just more of the world. I don't really know how to explain it. I'm not sure I get it myself, but... the real God made the world with layers. You die in the top layer, you end up here. Lots of things are different, but it's still a kind of life. Just... longer. Less urgent. I'm sorry, I don't really have time to explain better. I think you'll figure it out on your own anyway."
"You're going back, then?"
Allen nodded. "Yeah. Somehow, I survived... thanks to you, mostly. You did all the hard work. But don't worry, and try not to miss me too much -- when I die, I'll end up down here too."
"Who'd miss you?" Kanda said bluntly, but there was no force behind it, only amusement. "Live a long time, stupid beansprout, I don't want to see your dumb mug again for quite a while."
In response to that, Allen stuck out his tongue and fingered his eye. Alma laughed.
"I look forward to meeting you again," said Alma. "Thanks again for... you know, what you did."
"Don't mention it." The shadows began to contract, dragging Allen up and away. "See you later, you stupid jerk," he yelled before leaving earshot, getting the last word in just in time. He shrank to the size of the north star, shining ferociously within his little patch of shadow beside the sun, then vanished along with it.
Kanda watched him go without blinking, and knew without looking that Alma was doing the same.
And then it was just the two of them in their sunny valley, with all of eternity stretched out before them. There was no war to fight here. No Akuma. No Innocence. No Order, no scientists, no God, no Devil, no people. Not even a real sense of time, or at least not enough awareness of it to drive them to madness. Just the two of them and the Garden of Eden.
Alma took his hand and leaned into his shoulder. Alma. Whole, alive -- inasmuch as anything here was -- and standing beside him without a single other place he needed to be. Safe. Forever.
"This could be worse," Kanda admitted.
x.x.x
When Allen next opened his eyes, the world was empty of all magic but its own.
And God -- the real One -- saw that it was good.
~FIN~
X.x.x.x.X
A/N: Shortly after I signed up for this bigbang challenge, I was struck down by the worst writer's block I have ever experienced. I kept writing anyway, and this monster is the result. I hope you enjoyed the trip. Thank you for reading.