hard living - part 1
Dear DGM,
Here's an idea: how about let's LEAVE KANDA'S BRAIN ALONE?
Oh, the new chapter, so stressful. On the upside, I'd thought I was going to have to rewrite half of this fic, but no! It works out. This is my attempt at a DGM best case scenario.
Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a DGM best case scenario. However, this is what would happen if everything was puppies and sunshine from here on out. Heh. Yikes.
As always, thanks to zephy_magnum for the beta. Also for not telling me I was insane to write this in the first place. :D
ETA: Now with a podfic by rhea314! :D :D :D
Hard Living
The first task of the morning is, of course, getting out of bed.
He can easily remember a time when he didn’t consider getting out of bed to be a task at all. But that was then, and dwelling on the past isn’t going to make crawling to a standing position any easier right now.
He checks himself over first. Stretches and shifts and tests to see if anything’s really going to kick at him when he tries to stand. Back? No worse than usual. Knees? Crackly as ever, but nothing special. Shoulders?
Left shoulder has still not forgiven him for trying to lift that box of books. It wasn’t a huge box of books, for fuck’s sake. He just lifted at the wrong angle.
He lifted at the wrong angle a week ago, and the shoulder shows no sign of ever letting him forget it. It’s ridiculous.
He heaves himself onto his right side, and successfully navigates his way to the floor with only minimal pain. Aches, nothing stabbing. Which is just as well, because he’s completely finished with visits to stupid doctors who only tell him that his problem is that he appears to be twice his actual age.
No shit. That is a problem, isn’t it? How many years did they have to study medicine to tell him that?
Christ.
He manages to get to his feet without falling over, which is lucky, because if he did fall over, he’d probably break his damn hip. And if he broke his hip, he’d probably die before it healed.
He shuffles his way into slippers and to the bathroom. No ambitious big steps. You have to be realistic about what you can get away with. Not as young as you used to be.
Ha ha.
He’s achieved the bathroom. That’s task number two. Task number three is by way of punishment: looking in the mirror.
He glares through a curtain of white hair, and studies the wasted body reflected back at him. Wrinkled, scowling face, sunken chest, a tattoo that used to be ominous, but has gone pale and feeble with time and abuse. Much like the rest of him.
Who are you? he thinks at the old man in the mirror. And what have you done with me?
* * *
* * *
Having finished the upstairs tasks, Kanda carefully struggled down the stairs (which should really count as two tasks, if only because it included the possibility of horrible death) to the smell of eggs just starting to burn. Which meant Allen had fallen asleep again while cooking breakfast. Someday he was going to catch his hair on fire and burn the house down and kill them both.
And the Vatican would be spared the price of two pensions, so it wouldn’t be a total loss for everyone.
He hobbled at his highest speed into the kitchen and snatched the eggs off the fire, scraped them onto the plates already sitting out. Slightly burnt, but still edible. An improvement on some mornings.
He turned to the destroyer of eggs with a sigh.
Allen had managed to curl up in a straight-backed chair and fall asleep. Kanda dearly wished he still had that kind of flexibility. Although, looking at Allen, it might be that Kanda had never had that kind of flexibility. Who could fall asleep in an upright chair?
Well. Allen, obviously.
He looked frail, now, when he slept, where he used to look innocent. If you didn’t know the truth, though, you’d say he was aging gracefully. His crow’s feet and laugh lines gave him a look of gentle good humor, and it was impossible to tell by looking at him that he’d been burnt out from the inside.
If he hadn’t been thirty-one years old, he’d have been looking good. But that was what a parasite-type Innocence and random Noah possession would do to you. Old before your time. Kanda, at least, had the satisfaction of knowing he’d done this to himself. He’d drained his life of his own free will. It was a bitter satisfaction, but he’d take what he could get.
It still pissed him off that wrinkles from scowling weren’t as attractive as wrinkles from smiling like an idiot all the time. Funny how he’d never been vain about his looks until he didn’t have them.
“Wake up, Walker,” he said. “You tried to burn us to death again.”
Allen slept peacefully on, and Kanda uncharitably suspected him of going deaf. He set the eggs down on the table and reached over to scratch his fingers roughly through Allen’s hair.
It always woke him up, which was something that shouting his name, throwing things at him, and shaking him didn’t necessarily do. That was Kanda’s explanation.
The real explanation was more complicated. It was an excuse to touch him, and if Kanda had touched him, then it was almost proof that he was real. That Kanda was real. That this life, complete with pain and burnt eggs and horrible stairs, was more than a fever dream or a nightmare. Kanda didn’t know why he found that comforting. Surely he should want it to be a nightmare.
“Kanda?” Allen asked, blinking slowly awake. He eventually registered where he was, where Kanda was, and the fact that there were scorched eggs sitting in front of him. “Oh. Sorry.”
“Death, Walker,” Kanda told him. “Painful death by burning.”
“I’m sure I’d wake up if they were actually on fire,” Allen said blithely and like the idiot that he was. Still. After all these years.
“Or maybe you’d suffocate in the smoke, and the first I’d know of it was when it got upstairs.”
“Don’t worry,” Allen said seriously. “I’m pretty sure you’d suffocate from the smoke, too. Before you figured out what was going on, I mean.”
Kanda grunted and sat down in front of his charred eggs. Allen could out-morbid him any day. He didn’t know why he felt the need to keep proving it.
“So what are you doing today?” Allen asked brightly, so spry that you’d never believe this was the guy who couldn’t stay awake long enough to cook eggs.
For the first few years they’d lived together, it had driven Kanda insane that Allen couldn’t just let him have his breakfast in peace. Around year four, his spirit had broken.
“Working on that damn baby thing,” he muttered. The neighbors were having a kid, and they’d unfortunately heard that Kanda was capable of making furniture. How they’d arrived at the conclusion that he’d be willing to make them a cradle was unclear. But hell. They’d offered a lot of money for it. And he’d never done a cradle before.
“Still?” Allen asked.
Kanda pointed the fork menacingly in his direction, and Allen smirked and lowered his eyes to his eggs.
“You?” Kanda asked, because he’d learned through hard experience that Allen would sulk all day if he wasn’t asked. And when you were the only two people in a small house, that could be damned uncomfortable.
“I’m visiting the Carvers,” the baby people, “and then calling Miranda.”
Kanda frowned. Allen generally filled his days with nosing into everyone’s business, so that wasn’t unusual. But Miranda…didn’t always take well to hearing from them. She’d stayed with Krory until the end, and it had done her mind no favors. She didn’t want much to do with people who were about to self-destruct. It was the first thing about her that Kanda had ever understood.
“That a good idea?” he asked. Not because he cared about Miranda particularly, he assured himself, but because if she was miserable, she’d make Allen miserable. And if she made Allen miserable, he’d be impossible to live with.
“Lenalee said she wanted to hear from me,” Allen said reassuringly, as if Kanda needed reassurance.
“Whatever,” Kanda mumbled. Allen allowed him to have the rest of his breakfast in blessed silence.
* * *
Kanda spent most mornings in his workshop. At least, he stayed there until it hurt too much to be hunched over the bench. That could mean anything from two to four hours, depending on the weather and his health.
Woodworking had started with Allen, so it had that in common with just about everything else Kanda had done for the last, say, eight years. The first year after they’d moved to this house, Kanda had walked past a door to the hallway (restless, he’d always been restless back then), and overheard Allen talking to someone on the phone. Once he’d realized they were talking about him, he’d stopped and listened, and had quickly become appalled.
“He has no sense of purpose,” Walker had said, hushed. “Before, he always trained four hours a day unless he was too busy fighting for his life. Now he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He can only spend so much time throwing knives at the wall. He feels useless.”
Having his mental problems rattled off to random phone people by Walker. Fantastic. That must have been the last of his dignity dying.
“So figure something out; you’re a genius, aren’t you? Something he can do with his hands that won’t hurt him. No. No, he’s never been artistic, and that would only remind him…”
Of Theodore. And that would hurt.
…Just how well did Walker know him?
“Woodworking,” Walker said, quietly pleased. “Yes. I think he’ll like that.”
Kanda had never made anything out of wood before. He had no idea whether he’d like it or not. And he didn’t want to encourage Walker to interfere in his life like this.
“What am I doing?” Walker said to the phone, sounding surprised. “What does it matter?”
That had pulled Kanda up short, for some reason. In fact, he was so thrown off that when Johnny came to teach him woodworking, he learned with minimal fuss. He was too distracted by thinking, off and on and at odd moments, What does it matter?
What the hell was that even supposed to mean, what did it matter? How could Walker have gotten so much older and been through so much and still be this annoying?
The very first thing Kanda had carved was a cane for himself out of oak. Simple. Heavy. Deliberately top-heavy, in fact, the better to beat people with. Not that he’d actually needed to beat anyone with it (yet), but he felt better for being prepared. He could do some serious damage with that cane, even taking his feeble old-man arms into consideration.
Now, though, he was making a cradle. Of all ridiculous things. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d seen a baby up close. A living baby, anyway. Not since he was a boy himself, probably. First there’d been those years as an exorcist, then all the traveling, never stopping anywhere. As for here…well, the people in town called him a bad-tempered old codger and kept their brats away from him, and that suited everyone fine.
Apparently the couple next door were stupid.
He saw that Allen had snuck in at some point and penciled leaves around the frame of the cradle. What was he trying to say? That Kanda’s cradle was too bare? That Kanda didn’t have the imagination to draw his own goddamn leaves? That Kanda couldn’t carve leaves?
Or maybe he’d just been bored. Surely bothering people and napping couldn’t keep him occupied all day.
Kanda worked on the cradle until almost noon, which was an accomplishment, but then the aching became too annoying, and he staggered into the living room and collapsed on the couch. The phone was in the hallway, so from the couch, Kanda could hear whoever Allen was talking to.
It wasn’t exactly eavesdropping. Allen could have moved out of hearing range of the living room if he’d wanted, but he always stayed there and let Kanda listen. If Kanda had been inclined to waste time fretting over Allen’s mental state, he’d have worried about what it meant that Allen was apparently too worn out to care about keeping secrets.
“I thought he was dead,” Allen said with the tight voice and edging-toward-gutter accent that meant he was talking about Cross. “If he thinks he’s coming here-”
Kanda pictured what that would be like, and decided that even Allen’s suffering wouldn’t make it worthwhile.
“I don’t care who you foist him off on,” Allen hissed. “As long as it isn’t us.”
Kanda knew exactly how this was going to go. Allen was going to whine and curse and possibly scream, but he’d give in eventually. He loved Cross. It was a love that was twisted and fucked up beyond belief, but it was still love. Kanda would have done the same for Theodore. Of course, Theodore had never been as much of a dick as Cross, but that wasn’t the point.
The point was, Kanda was going to end up with Cross Marian living in his house.
“I’ll kill him.”
Allen leaned around the doorframe into the living room and gave Kanda a grateful look. “There you go, Komui,” he said into the phone, vindicated. “Kanda says he’ll kill him. So we can’t take him. Make Lenalee do it. And remind him that I get Timcampy back when he finally does die.”
Then he winced and held the phone away from his ear, but he was smiling.
There, Kanda thought. Problem solved.
* * *
Lunch and dinner were both Kanda’s responsibility, because when you came right down to it, Allen couldn’t even reliably cook eggs.
“Can’t we have anything that isn’t soba?” Allen complained. “Anything! We are falling apart, you know. I mean, we’re frail. We’ll probably get scurvy. Our fingernails will come off. Something.”
Allen was an ungrateful asshole. And as far as falling apart went, that was inevitable. The way Kanda saw it, they were going to die soon and in pain anyway. All the leafy greens in the world wouldn’t give them back what they’d lost. So what was the point?
Lenalee had tacked a list of recommended foods onto the wall next to the sink. “For your condition,” she said. Kanda ignored it with what even he recognized as slightly demented glee.
“If you don’t want soba,” Kanda said for the nth time, “then cook your own damn lunch.”
“And dinner,” Allen muttered.
“Fuck you,” Kanda said. “Soba is easy. Like hell am I going to slave over a four-course meal for you when my entire body hurts. Get used to it.” You’d think he would have, after all these years. Christ.
“You’re such a whiner,” Allen said. “I think it’s because you never had to heal like a normal person in the old days, and now you’re healing five times slower than normal people.”
“I am not whining.”
“You are whining,” Allen insisted. “I’m not saying it’s not justified; it’s just strange hearing it from you. Daily threat of imminent death, that you can handle. Getting old, you can’t handle. What, it’s not enough glory for you?”
“Shut the fuck up!” Kanda snapped, edging toward outrage. “You think your way is better? Ignoring everything until you faint on the goddamn floor-”
“I didn’t ignore anything! If I’d seen it coming, don’t you think I’d at least have sat down or-”
“You didn’t feel dizzy? You didn’t lose your appetite? Felt completely fine, did you, you-”
“I told you, I-”
Daily lunchtime shouting match. Kanda had considered penciling it into Allen’s calendar.
* * *
After lunch, Kanda usually tottered down to the pub in town, so long as there wasn’t anything in the house that needed to be fixed. The middle of the afternoon was a good time; it was when all the old men congregated there. He didn’t run as much of a risk of having someone his own age hold the door open for him or otherwise treat him like a doddering incompetent. Besides, he enjoyed the old men. He listened to them discuss their various ailments with an avid curiosity that Allen assured him was sick.
Kanda thought it was perfectly reasonable. He wasn’t really an old man, and there was no better way to prove it than by watching real old men. Their teeth were rotting and cracking and their minds were going. They complained about incontinence and ungrateful children until hell wouldn’t have it. None of this was a problem for Kanda. Besides, the old men had lived a lot longer than he had, but they hadn’t seen half as much.
He didn’t see what was sick about appreciating what he had.
Allen went with him sometimes, though not today. Allen always said pointless things, compared how the various old men went about being old.
“That man used to be handsome,” he’d say, though Kanda didn’t see how he could tell through the wrinkles and the liver spots. “Being handsome was everything he was. He thinks he’s ugly now. He doesn’t know what he’s living for, and it makes him miserable. That’s why he’s so angry.”
Or, “That man must have grandchildren. He’s not thinking about himself at all; he’s thinking about the next thing he’s going to do for his grandchildren.”
Or, “That man’s been looking for an excuse to do whatever he wants all his life, and now he has one. He’s happy. He’s always wanted to be old.”
What Kanda saw was a bunch of old men getting ready to die. There didn’t seem to be any point in pondering how they were going about it. It didn’t hurt anything to let Allen ramble, though. It got his mind off of Kanda’s business for a while, and that was worth a lot.
Today, Kanda walked into the bar alone and found the old men burbling on about war. If he’d had any sense, he would have turned straight around and walked back out.
“Taught those Frenchies what for,” said a fat old man with one leg. “Made ‘em regret tangling with us, I’ll tell you!”
Kanda sat at his usual table and brooded to himself over the improbability of that statement. If they’d really given an enemy ‘what for,’ then the enemy should have been dead, and dead men don’t have regrets. Regret was a privilege reserved for the living.
He distracted himself by ordering a beer, but tuned back into the conversation in time to hear, “My son was in the Boer War. Terrible war, that one. Terrible. Still won’t talk about it, he won’t. Didn’t come back quite right in the head, did he?”
“Young people never come back right from a war,” another said sadly.
This was so much bullshit. At most, the guy’s grandson had seen three years of real combat, and he sure as hell hadn’t seen it starting from age ten. And yet Lenalee wasn’t a shell-shocked lunatic, and neither was Allen. Nor Marie, Theodore, Daisya, even the rabbit. They’d all managed to suck it up and deal, and Kanda had no patience for this kind of whining.
He gave up on his beer and left. He knew when he got home, Allen would ask, “Bad day at the pub?” and Kanda would want to knock him unconscious. It was still worth it to get out of there.
* * *
He passed a shop on the way home and stopped to buy oranges. They were not going to get fucking scurvy.
* * *
“Oh, you bought oranges!”
“Shut up.”
“Bad day at the pub?”
“Fuck you.”
Allen cut two oranges into wedges, which seemed like a waste of time to Kanda, because they made less of a damn mess if you just peeled them and ate them in sections. But whatever. Kanda cooked the soba. Allen complained about the soba. Kanda threatened to kill him. Allen made fun of Kanda’s old man temper. Kanda had to remind himself that Allen was breakable, and that attacking him was no longer allowed.
And after all, Kanda was breakable too, these days.
Allen insisted on asking about Kanda’s day over dinner, as if they hadn’t both done exactly the same thing every day for years.
This was the problem, Kanda thought, with living with someone too long. Eventually you ran out of things that needed to be said and instead talked endlessly about nothing. Out of boredom. Out of habit.
After dinner, they sat together on the couch, as they always did. Kanda was reading a book on carving that Lavi had brought him. He generally read when he wasn’t whittling experimentally, or sharpening knives, just in case. Allen was pretending to read a book that Marie had lent him, but, really, he was going to be asleep in less than ten minutes.
Kanda preferred this routine to the endless card tricks. When Allen did card tricks, he felt the need to fidget around and be irritating. Reading and napping were at least quiet, and Kanda had learned to cope with Allen’s tendency to fall asleep on him.
This might’ve been Kanda’s favorite part of the day, though it was without doubt the most uselessly unproductive.
* * *
Because of the way life is, Kanda’s favorite time of day was, of course, immediately followed by his least favorite. He looked up the stairs between him and his bed, and thought to no one in particular, You can’t seriously expect me to climb all of those.
“Want help, old man?” Walker asked cheerfully.
“Die, Walker,” Kanda snapped.
“I’m working on it,” Allen answered, cheer undiminished. “Don’t be so impatient.”
Kanda ignored Allen and struggled up the stairs. It took a little longer every day, and Allen kept saying very reasonable and therefore very annoying things about how Kanda should give up and sleep downstairs.
He’d die on those stairs before he’d let them win, dammit.
Stairs finally overcome, he staggered through his nightly routine, until there was only one more task before he was allowed to sleep. He sat in bed, and turned to stare at the lotus, behind him and to the left. He supposed he should be grateful that there was only one. Or did quantity really count when it came to hallucinated flowers?
The lotus was a scraggly, pitiful thing. As long as the tattoo had worked, there had been an alarming number of flowers, but at least they had been flawless and beautiful. Now the last flower was shriveled and browning, and petals didn’t fall so much as crumple.
Kanda sneered at the correlation, and turned off the light.
* * *
And that was the daily routine, give or take errands, visitors, travel, and illness.
* * *
Kanda’s problems might have been the more visible, but Allen’s were every bit as dire. His Innocence had apparently decided to honor his personality, and had made all of his ailments obscure and subtle; easy to hide. Easy to hide from people who didn’t live with him, anyway.
Kanda came down the stairs one morning to find him unconscious on the floor (and the eggs burned). Another morning, Allen had doubled over on the walk into town and started vomiting blood. Yet another time, he’d spontaneously developed an appallingly high fever, and Kanda had stuck his head in a tub of ice water and tried not to panic over the possibility of brain damage.
And so on and so forth. Each crisis more creative than the last.
None of these things seemed to have any medical explanation. Kanda believed that, because their doctor these days was Lenalee, and if there had been any medical explanation, she and Komui would have found it. Unlike the quacks in town, who’d probably bust out fucking leeches or something. (Kanda knew all about those quacks. He’d gone through a phase of marching impatiently to local doctors instead of waiting for Lenalee. He was never making that mistake again.)
The result of all this was that Allen could and did help Kanda in a hundred ways every day, but Kanda couldn’t do anything for Allen. It was irritating. Not least because some of Allen’s “help” was diametrically opposed to what Kanda actually wanted.
* * *
Kanda’s first experience with Allen’s help had been on the morning of his twenty-third birthday. He’d woken up to find himself hurting all over and Komui standing over him with a grim face and a sharp knife.
It wasn’t the first morning of his life to start out this way, but it also wasn’t an experience that improved with repetition.
“What,” he said carefully, “the fuck.”
Komui held the grim look for a moment longer, then broke into his annoying fake grin. “It went very well,” he announced, like that was some kind of comfort.
What had gone well? Kanda couldn’t remember coming within a hundred miles of Komui any time recently, let alone giving him permission to be holding that knife and smiling that smile.
He tried to remember what had led up to this. He’d been in Sweden, hadn’t he? Sweden with the beansprout, and everything around them had been bleak and cold, from the landscape to the people. It hadn’t felt like spring at all. Kanda had been an idiot to even imagine that his sister would be in a place like that.
They’d been staying in Stockholm. On a boat, of all ridiculous things-a boat that functioned mostly as a brothel, what was more. If Kanda had had any idea that this was what Walker had meant when he said, “I found a cheap place for us to stay,” he would have thrown him in the water.
And then…then they’d gotten into a fight-another fight-about Kanda’s tattoo. They’d had this same fight every time Kanda’d used the tattoo since Walker had found out what it did. As always, Walker had ordered Kanda to stop using it, and Kanda had told him to mind his own goddamn business. Walker had been pacing the room, Kanda had been ignoring him. But then?
Ah. Someone had slapped a cloth over his face. Walker, obviously. And he must have passed out. Fuck knew what Walker had poured on that cloth.
“I’ll kill him.”
“Now, now,” Komui murmured. “He only wanted the best for you…in the long term. I admit that the short term looks pretty grim.”
“What did you do?”
* * *
The second time Kanda woke up, it was Allen Walker hovering over him, dark circles under his eyes, hair sticking up everywhere. He looked pathetic.
“I’m not sorry,” Walker said defiantly.
Of course he wasn’t sorry. Why would he be? He had no idea what he’d done.
Kanda had had a plan for his life, which, much like everything else about Kanda, had been none of Walker’s business. He’d been planning to keep himself useful for as long as possible, and to die the instant he wasn’t useful anymore. Simple, elegant, efficient. There was dignity in that.
There was no dignity at all in lingering on interminably after you’d fallen apart. Walker had taken a life with a lot of good years left in it and rendered those years useless. And he wasn’t sorry.
Kanda studied Walker’s pathetic face and set mouth, and when he couldn’t stand to look at him anymore, he closed his eyes and tried to will himself dead. It worked about as well as he’d expected.
* * *
At first, it hadn’t seemed as bad as all that. Yes, he was a little fragile, he looked a little older than his age, and he would no longer be able to work through any injury, no matter how dire. But he was still perfectly capable of looking for his sister. He’d thought.
Walker came with him because he couldn’t be driven away. He ignored insults, stony silence, and outright attack with unvarying grim determination. Kanda did his best to work around him.
A month later, Kanda jumped down from a wall and broke his femur.
His femur. Komui assured him that the femur was the strongest bone in the body, but failed to explain why it had been the first to break. And it refused to heal. It refused to heal for almost a year.
Komui responded to Kanda’s rage and frustration by throwing him into a house with Walker, cheerfully ordering them to get along, and running like hell.
Kanda refused to accept Walker’s help. Walker refused to let him do anything alone. The first three months were filled with so much silent, raging resentment on both sides that it was a wonder the house hadn’t collapsed under the pressure.
It might have ended that way. Once Kanda had been able to hobble around on crutches and more or less take care of himself, Walker might have left the house. They might never have seen or spoken to each other again, if it hadn’t been for Walker’s nosebleed.
It hadn’t seemed like much of a problem at first. Everyone got nosebleeds. After the first day, it started to seem like more of a problem, and at the end of the second, Kanda called Komui in spite of all of Walker’s arguing. It turned out to be lucky timing, because after Kanda hung up, Walker started bleeding like it was going out of style, then fainted.
Komui called it a “temporary bleeding disorder,” then smiled. Apparently that was some kind of medical joke. Allen would be a medical joke.
It hadn’t just been the nosebleed; he’d been bleeding internally, too. He’d been covered in bruises, and the idiot hadn’t said anything about it. The bleeding had stopped as suddenly and mysteriously as it had started; nothing Komui had done had had any effect.
“This may be an effect of the Innocence,” Komui said. “Or of the Noah. Either way, it’s likely it will get worse over time. It will almost certainly kill him, in the end.”
Kanda looked down at Allen’s unconscious, pale face. It was hard to picture Allen dead. He’d always been so annoyingly alive.
Of course, it had been the same with Daisya. Everyone died, sooner or later.
“How long?” Kanda asked.
“Impossible to know,” Komui said sadly. He put a hand on Kanda’s shoulder, as if to offer comfort.
Komui hadn’t actually said that Walker needed to be immobilized for a week, but it had seemed like common sense. Common sense, and a perfectly good opportunity for payback.
It wasn’t easy to take care of an invalid when you were an invalid, though. The crutches were an endless pain in the ass. Luckily, Allen was an idiot, so when Kanda managed to dump an entire bowl of Lenalee’s disgustingly medicinal food-of-the-day into Allen’s lap, Allen responded by laughing.
It was an unspeakably stupid situation, and maybe that was why it put everything else into perspective. It would be ridiculous to go back to ignoring Allen after having dumped a plate of random gruel and sliced apples all over him, after weeks of following him around making sure he wasn’t bleeding on the sly or fainting in strange places.
And thanks to perspective, here they still were, ten years later, same damn house. One as useless as the other. Proof that you could get used to anything.
Komui had eventually informed Kanda that Walker had talked him and Reever into looking for a way to disable the tattoo as soon as the war had ended. (“We would have done it anyway,” Komui said, which didn’t earn him any points with Kanda).
Kanda wasn’t sure whether or not he felt betrayed. He shouldn’t; Walker had never made him any promises, tacit or otherwise. It was hard, at this point, to feel anything above resigned, anyway.
* * *
Very few people had died in the final battle. Ridiculously few. The exorcists were free, which no one but Komui had ever really believed would happen.
They were free to die slowly and in pain, in the case of the parasite types and Kanda Yuu. At least, Kanda often thought, they were a political and financial nightmare for the Vatican. That was a comfort. All those bored exorcists running all over the world, getting diseased and beaten up and arrested and every other damn thing.
Hell, yes. God’s chosen ones.
If you caught Allen in the right mood and sufficiently drunk, he’d wax quite poetic on the subject of how God had let them survive because He was a fucking sadist. Allen liked to cite key passages from the Bible and his entire life as evidence.
Jesus had had some nice ideas, Kanda had to admit. But in their experience, God had been a lot less about infinite love and a lot more about using humans as pawns. Old Testament living.
“What do you mean,” Allen said to the phone, “Timothy’s been deported? He can’t be deported! He’s a citizen!” A pause, then Allen sighed, put his hand over the phone, said to Kanda, “He was pretending to be French.”
Kanda shook his head in disgust. Allen shrugged.
To the phone, he said, “Didn’t they check his paperwork?” A pause, then to Kanda, “He forged his paperwork.”
Kanda was impressed in spite of himself. He’d never have thought Timothy had enough patience to do more than a completely half-assed forgery.
Or maybe it was completely half-assed, and the government had just jumped at any excuse to ship him to France. Who could blame them?
“Sure I know people in France,” Allen told the phone. “They’re exactly the same people that you know in France, though. Isn’t this Link’s job? Well, whether he’s busy or not, it’s not my job. I’m not Timothy’s keeper. I’m too old for this.”
Just as it was obvious when Allen was talking about Cross, so it was obvious when he was talking to Komui. Actually, it was obvious when anybody was talking to Komui, because Komui had been foisting responsibility off onto absolutely anyone who held still long enough ever since the war had ended. Not even Lenalee had been spared. And Allen seemed to be his favorite.
“Anyway, Lavi said he was heading to France the last time he was here,” Allen muttered like the sullen little sellout he was. “Make him do it. Yes, he says he doesn’t work for you anymore, but he owes you and he knows it.”
As far as Kanda could work out, Allen resented Lavi for being able to run away, and punished him accordingly.
“Good.” Allen smiled, good cheer restored. Apparently he’d won. Again. These people were weak, letting him bowl them over like that. They needed to stop encouraging him. “We’ll see you and Lenalee next week, right?” Allen went on, shameless. “Please don’t call me before that. Please. Komui!”
He sighed, studied the phone, then hung it up with a shrug. “Why me?” he asked rhetorically.
“Because you’re the nosiest man alive.” Kanda didn’t believe in rhetoric.
Allen huffed, offended, but didn’t bother to respond. Instead, he wandered over to fuss with the curtains, back toward the hall to check the phone, over to the fireplace to inspect the ashes, then finally plucked one of Lenalee’s medical books off of the coffee table, curled up on the couch next to Kanda, and leaned against him for warmth.
It was like watching a cat settle.
As Allen read, Kanda thought about the rhetorical question. He knew his answer was right; Allen kept in touch with everyone, and even if he was completely (bafflingly) unwilling to leave the house for any length of time, he always knew someone who would help, no matter where the problem was.
It was just that, ten years before, the answer would have been different. Back then, it would have been because Allen was an obliging pushover. Somewhere along the line, that had changed-drastically. Allen didn’t defer to anyone anymore. No formal language, no “chief” or “sir” or even “mister.” Everyone got the same treatment: first names, plain language, and Allen’s point-blank refusal to leave the house for anyone’s benefit but his own. And possibly Kanda’s.
Kanda knew better than anyone that brooding over Allen was a mistake. Brooding over Allen only gave rise to more things to brood over. Such as the strange fact that Allen called everyone by given name except for Kanda. He felt almost left out.
“You’ve never tried to call me by my given name,” he said. No sense in brooding in silence. “Why not?”
“Hm?” Allen looked up from the book, eyes not quite focused on the real world. “You didn’t want me to.”
“I didn’t want you to help look for my sister, either,” Kanda pointed out. “I didn’t want you to move in with me or burn the eggs every morning. What’s the real reason?”
Allen shrugged, his shoulder sliding against Kanda’s, his eyes drifting back to the book. “I don’t like it.”
He was, he thought, actually offended. “What do you mean you don’t like it?”
“Yuu,” Allen muttered at the book. “Too soft for you. No consonants. And I don’t know what it means, and that bothers me.”
It was a name without kanji; it could mean almost anything. Courage, gentleness, evening, friend, help. Otherworldly. It was just a name. He didn’t see why it should matter.
“What does Allen mean?” he asked.
“That my parents were British.”
Kanda was about to fly completely off the handle when it occurred to him that that might be valuable information to Allen. It might be as much as he knew about his parents: that they were British. That they’d named him Allen and disappeared. If he’d had parents at all, which sometimes seemed questionnable.
“You don’t know what Kanda means, either,” he pointed out.
“God field,” Allen told the book.
“Why do you know that?” Kanda demanded.
“I don’t remember.”
“You lie so much I don’t know why I bother to ask you anything.”
“Maybe Komui told me.”
“Maybe the pixies did.” Despite appearances, Komui was very careful with anything that might be considered secret. Telling Komui personal information was like dropping coins into a bottomless well.
“Okay, so Noise told me.”
“Marie needs to learn to mind his own fucking business.”
“I asked him.”
“And obviously you need to learn to mind your own fucking business.”
“Oh, Yuu,” Allen cooed, and Kanda bitterly regretted having had this conversation. He’d never heard anything as unholy as the sound of his name in that tone of voice. “Your business is my business.”
And with that, Allen got up and bolted; the block of wood Kanda threw after him bounced harmlessly off the doorframe.
He might be a bastard, Allen Walker, but he was no fool.
* * *
Kanda had never experienced peace, not that he could clearly remember. He suspected it must feel something like this. It couldn’t exactly be called happiness, but he was…comfortably resigned. Resigned to his failures and his aches and even his companion. It was a nice balance of guilt and punishment. Plus Allen, who was something else again.
This wasn’t the death Kanda had wanted, but it wasn’t turning out to be as disgraceful as he’d thought it would.
Part 2