[Fic] Illusion of Truth - D.Gray-man, Lavi/Kanda, 4/10+
Apparently I forgot that something had been revealed in the anime already, which makes the end of this chapter not quite as much of a cliffhanger as I'd thought it would be for those not following the manga. So maybe you all won't kill me after all. *sheepish* Oh well.
Title: Illusion of Truth
Series: D.Gray-man
Pairing: Lavi/Kanda
Rating: NC-17 in other chapters
Warnings: violence, sex, yaoi, spoilers (I don't usually warn for spoilers, but some of what I know about the characters is manga stuff that hasn't been revealed in the anime yet, just fyi)
Chapter length: 2865
Total length: 12,576
Kanda is starting to wonder if there is a 'real' Lavi.
Standing in the doorway to the common room, Kanda leaned against the jamb and crossed his arms over his chest. He'd been there for several minutes already, but the room's sole occupant didn't seem to have noticed him. Trey had half a dozen stacks of paper and notebooks spread out in front of him, and he was flipping through them in no order Kanda could discern.
Kanda had spent most of the last week promptly leaving any room Trey entered, and vice versa. He'd come down to grab some food for lunch, and when he'd seen Trey in the common room he'd fully intended to return to his room immediately.
Instead he'd made the mistake of pausing for a moment, taking the chance to study the redhead when Trey wasn't deliberately playing a role. The other man thought he was alone, and the mix of personalities that resulted was both baffling and illuminating.
It was Trey's gentle expression on the redhead's face, and Kanda had never seen Lavi nibble at his thumbnail like that before. But the rhythmic tapping of the fingers of his other hand, drumming to a beat only the redhead could hear, was something Kanda had been forced to listen to through countless hours whenever he was trapped in a small space with an idle Lavi. The other Exorcist never had dealt well with being forced into inactivity.
The really fascinating thing was the way he shifted more and more towards 'Lavi' as the minutes ticked by. Even as Kanda watched, the redhead stopped chewing on his nail and bit his lip instead, which had always been Lavi's 'I'm concentrating' gesture. A short time later his shoulders slumped, and his posture shifted until he was sprawling in his seat rather than just sitting in it.
"You don't even know you're doing it, do you?" Kanda remarked, not realizing he was going to say anything until the words had already left his mouth.
Lavi - it was definitely Lavi now - jumped half a foot off the bench and twisted to be able to see the doorway. Sitting with his back against the solid wall across from the window had put his blind side towards the door, which was probably how Kanda had managed to go unnoticed for so long.
"Gods, Yuu! D'you have to sneak up on a guy like that?" Lavi demanded, one hand pressed over his heart. "Doin' what?"
"Changing." Pushing off the doorjamb, Kanda strode into the room and stood where Lavi could see him without effort, hands on his hips. "You're 'slipping' again, that's the term, isn't it? But it wasn't my fault this time."
"Am I? Shit, I am," Lavi exclaimed, dismayed. Shaking his head, he closed his eye briefly. Kanda didn't think he'd ever stop being creeped out by the sudden changes of personality the redhead was capable of, but he was starting to get used to seeing the switch.
"I was going over my records from the Order. Sometimes it helps to be able to physically flip through them," Trey said softly when he opened his eye again. He looked up at Kanda with an expression that was a mixture of wariness and resignation. "That's probably why I was backsliding, it's hard to read my own thoughts from back then without falling into the same pattern."
"Did you find anything?" Kanda asked, because business still took precedence over their personal issues. There had been no further signs of Akuma attacks in the city since his first night here, but he wasn't willing to assume that meant the area was clear just yet. They might be waiting for him to leave.
"Maybe." Trey shuffled some of the papers together and shrugged. "There were plenty of towns we went to where it seemed like everyone had been turned into an Akuma, and I don't see how that could have been possible by the normal process. They were usually places that had at least one second level in the area, so I'm starting to think maybe higher level Akuma have another way of reproducing themselves."
"That means it would only have taken one Akuma surviving the final battle, and we could be facing the whole damned mess all over again," Kanda growled, throwing himself down on the bench across from Trey in frustration. "It wouldn't even have needed to be second level at the time, it's had two years to build up enough deaths to level up since then."
"It's not as bad as it could be," Trey shook his head and offered a hesitant smile. "At least you don't have the Earl or Noah's Clan to contend with this time. It just means we have to make sure you get all of them. And that's where Bookman and I will be able to help, researching all the deaths in the vicinity to find the ones that don't match the patterns of the war, and hopefully flush out their hunting grounds."
Kanda didn't even try to return the smile, and after a moment Trey dropped his gaze and riffled nervously through the papers again. That was another gesture Kanda had never seen him make before, that he would never have imagined Lavi ever doing.
Maybe it was the proverbial straw meeting the camel's back, but Kanda suddenly couldn't stand it any longer. "I'm curious," he ground out, glaring at Trey.
"Curious?" Trey asked, his fingers stilling on the papers.
"Which one is the act, Lavi or Trey?" Kanda asked bluntly. "The way you keep slipping into Lavi makes me want to say it's Trey that's the act, but I can't be sure. Which is the real you?"
"Which one?" An incredulous expression spread over the redhead's face, and the cynical laugh he gave was neither Lavi nor Trey. "Yuu, what on earth makes you think you've ever seen the 'real me'?" He snorted and stood up to pace, not looking directly at Kanda. "Do you really think it's just a case of one or the other? That's not the way it works."
"Why hasn't Bookman changed, then?" Kanda demanded. "You're a completely different person, but he's still the same way I remember him."
"He's the Bookman," Trey shrugged eloquently. "He doesn't need an alias, he just is. I'm only the heir, so I have to have some kind of persona when we're on a record, but it changes each time to be appropriate to the situation." The same cynicism from his laugh was threaded through the smile he turned on Kanda. "Lavi was my forty-ninth alias. We decided going into the Order that I'd go with 'frivolous and fun' for that record. I was glad we did, because I admit I've always found the outgoing personalities easier to sustain than the introverted type. Neither of us expected to be there more than a few months, half a year at the outside."
Kanda tried to process that, and didn't like the conclusions he drew. "So it was all an act?" he asked, fighting to keep his voice perfectly level. "Everything? Your cheerfulness, the joking and flirting, your friendships with the others?"
And our relationship? hung unspoken in the air between them, but Kanda refused to give voice to the words.
"I..." Trey looked briefly at him, then away again, turning towards the window. He stood with his arms hugged around himself as if he was cold. "I don't know, honestly," he admitted softly. "Towards the end, sometimes it got hard to remember that I was only acting. Sometimes I even reacted in ways I hadn't planned to."
Kanda couldn't help but wonder whether their relationship had been a planned or unplanned reaction, but he didn't quite dare to ask outright. "And it's just because of me that you keep slipping into Lavi? You certainly never made a single mistake I ever saw when you were in the Order."
"Y'gotta understand, Yuu." It was Lavi who turned back to him, expression almost pleading. "I spent two and a half years as Lavi. That's two years longer'n any other alias I've ever had, includin' Trey." He shook his head. "Lavi's been harder to let go of than any other persona. Every alias since then I've chosen somethin' like Trey, someone as different from Lavi as I could get. Then just when I started t'think I'd moved past him, you show up and thirty seconds later I'm right back at square one."
"And I'm supposed to feel sorry for you?" Kanda snapped, unmoved. He stood to put them at eye level again, unwilling to look up to the redhead. "Forgive me for not sympathizing with your struggles, but it's difficult to believe it was all that painful for a man who could walk away and leave his so-called friends to believe he was dead."
"I'm pretty sure the old panda did that as a test," Lavi muttered, rubbing a hand over his eye. "He spent a lot of our time in the Order lecturin' me about my duties and responsibilities. I think he wanted t'see if I could still do my job and walk away, or if I'd gotten too biased."
"Clearly you passed," Kanda snarled. "Congratulations." Sarcasm dripped from the word so heavily it was a wonder it wasn't visible. "Tell me this, then. And for once, just once in your entire fucking life, be honest. Do you ever regret it?"
"Regret what?" Lavi looked at him, his gaze piercing. "Which part, Yuu? If you're gonna make me be honest, y'might as well get the right part. D'you wanna know if I regret walkin' away from the Order, or just from you?"
The bastard was going to make him say it out loud. Fine. "You know what," Kanda snapped at him. If looks could kill, Lavi would have been writhing on the floor in that moment. "From me, damn it. I thought I was a cold-blooded bastard. I've certainly been accused of it often enough. I spent the entire seven months we were screwing around trying to convince myself that was all it was, but when I thought you were dead it just about fucking killed me."
There, he'd admitted it. Now maybe he could finally move on with his life... if he could just get the answer to this one final question. Otherwise he knew it was going to eat at him for the rest of his life, not knowing. "Are you really such a heartless asshole that you could fuck someone for over half a year and walk away without a single backward glance? Was there ever even a moment when you thought about us and regretted the decision you made?"
Lavi's expression was carefully blank, the same perfectly neutral look Kanda had so often seen on the Bookman's face. "I'm a Bookman," the redhead replied, his voice low and even, somehow sounding like neither Lavi nor Trey. Even his single visible eye was completely devoid of emotion, as if he was nothing more than a doll. "People aren't people to the Bookmen. They're just ink on paper, history to be written about. If the Bookmen can't stay unbiased, then the secret histories are worthless."
"That's an evasion, not an answer," Kanda growled at him. When the other man said nothing more, Kanda swallowed hard. "But I'll take it for one," he concluded, and turned away. He had his answer. It had all been a lie, all of it, and Kanda was a fool for falling for it. For falling for him.
"Every day." The whisper was so hoarse that Kanda almost couldn't understand it. "Every damned day, Yuu."
Kanda spun on his heel just in time to see Lavi push past him towards the door. He caught only a glimpse of the redhead's face, but it was enough. The other man's expression was still blank, but the piercing green of his eye was obscured by the wash of tears covering it. They didn't spill over onto his cheek, but in all the time they'd spent together it was the closest Kanda had ever seen Lavi come to crying.
He reached out to grab at the redhead's shoulder, and cursed when he missed. "Lavi!" he called after him, determined not to let that be the end of the conversation.
Lavi was obviously equally determined not to continue it, because he fled like his life depended on it. He caught the doorjamb with one hand and used it as a fulcrum to swing himself around into the hallway heading for the outside door without needing to slow down - and promptly skidded to a halt, flailing for balance as a high-pitched shriek came from someone just out of sight.
"Damn it, Marysa!" the redhead snapped, glaring down at the girl Kanda couldn't see. "Didn't anyone ever tell you it's not polite to eavesdrop?"
Kanda reached the doorway just in time to see the other man shove past her and out the door, leaving the blonde girl staring after him, sniffling in disbelief. Kanda was a little stunned, himself.
Lavi would have cracked a joke and invoked laughter to distract her. Trey would have blushed and stammered and used his embarrassment as misdirection. Kanda wasn't quite sure what to make of the way the redhead had snarled at her for daring to eavesdrop, instead.
Maybe there was a real person somewhere under the masks after all.
Maybe, just maybe, that meant the emotion of his last words to Kanda had been real, too.
"Move!" Kanda barked at Marysa, and shoved past her the same way Lavi had done. "Lavi!" he shouted, spotting the other man running down the street. Kanda took off after him, cursing Lavi for his longer legs. He'd always been a faster sprinter than Kanda, much as it had galled the swordsman to admit defeat in any way. "Lavi! Damn it. Trey!" he tried, when the other name got him no response.
Still the redhead didn't turn, and Kanda chased him through the streets of Mafeking. The few people out and about, mostly British soldiers, stared after them in shock, but Kanda paid them no attention. "Come back here!" he insisted, uncaring what everyone else thought.
Lavi glanced back over his shoulder, and his eyes widened. He skidded to a halt and tried to turn so abruptly he actually went down on one knee in a painful-looking tumble. "Yuu! Behind you!" he cried, panicked.
Others might have suspected him of making a lame attempt at distraction, but Kanda had fought at Lavi's side often enough to know that battle was one thing the redhead always took seriously. Well, relatively speaking. Kanda spun on his heel, drawing and activating Mugen in a reflexive action even before he saw the looming bulk of the Akuma rising above him.
Not just any Akuma, either. It was a second level, bigger than a first level but oddly slender and much closer to a humanoid figure. The fangs in its mouth screamed 'poison', and the sharp claws it had instead of hands looked deadly.
Kanda blocked the first thrust of its claw and dodged the second, hitting the cobblestones hard and rolling to avoid being stepped on. That brought him in range of the claws again, and he took a glancing blow to his side before he managed to push himself out of range and back to his feet.
"Yuu!" Lavi shouted again, sounding agonized. Kanda risked a quick glance back and saw him taking shelter behind a broken wall, hands clenched at his side in frustration and worry.
"I can handle it!" Kanda snapped back at him, bringing his blade up level with his face. "Kaichuu: Ichigen!"
The Hell's Insects broke away from the hilt and swarmed up around the Akuma's face, distracting it and blocking its view. It shrieked and swatted ineffectively at them, then leapt back just before they would have torn through it. Kanda cursed. It was fast, fast enough that the Insects would have trouble blasting it. He'd have to go after it himself.
In the split second when he called the Insects back to him and they were in the process of reforming Mugen's blade, he was vulnerable. No Akuma had ever been fast enough to take advantage of the momentary opportunity before, but this one was. Kanda heard the whine of power at almost the same moment the force of the bullet striking his shoulder slammed him back to the ground.
Agony shot through him, and he couldn't keep the shout of pain locked inside him. He thrashed on the cobblestones, feeling like his blood had been turned to fiery acid that was eating away at him from the inside out.
"Yuu!" Strong hands grabbed at his shoulders, pinning him down and preventing the spasms from tearing his body apart, but they couldn't stop the pain. Kanda forced his eyes open and saw Lavi looking down at him with panic and despair in his expression. "Gods, no, no, Yuu!"
From the corner of his eye Kanda caught a flash of black that didn't belong on his hands, the only part of him not covered by clothing. Looking down, he saw the distinctive dark stars slowly forming on his skin. He'd been hit by the Akuma virus.
Title: Illusion of Truth
Series: D.Gray-man
Pairing: Lavi/Kanda
Rating: NC-17 in other chapters
Warnings: violence, sex, yaoi, spoilers (I don't usually warn for spoilers, but some of what I know about the characters is manga stuff that hasn't been revealed in the anime yet, just fyi)
Chapter length: 2865
Total length: 12,576
Kanda is starting to wonder if there is a 'real' Lavi.
Standing in the doorway to the common room, Kanda leaned against the jamb and crossed his arms over his chest. He'd been there for several minutes already, but the room's sole occupant didn't seem to have noticed him. Trey had half a dozen stacks of paper and notebooks spread out in front of him, and he was flipping through them in no order Kanda could discern.
Kanda had spent most of the last week promptly leaving any room Trey entered, and vice versa. He'd come down to grab some food for lunch, and when he'd seen Trey in the common room he'd fully intended to return to his room immediately.
Instead he'd made the mistake of pausing for a moment, taking the chance to study the redhead when Trey wasn't deliberately playing a role. The other man thought he was alone, and the mix of personalities that resulted was both baffling and illuminating.
It was Trey's gentle expression on the redhead's face, and Kanda had never seen Lavi nibble at his thumbnail like that before. But the rhythmic tapping of the fingers of his other hand, drumming to a beat only the redhead could hear, was something Kanda had been forced to listen to through countless hours whenever he was trapped in a small space with an idle Lavi. The other Exorcist never had dealt well with being forced into inactivity.
The really fascinating thing was the way he shifted more and more towards 'Lavi' as the minutes ticked by. Even as Kanda watched, the redhead stopped chewing on his nail and bit his lip instead, which had always been Lavi's 'I'm concentrating' gesture. A short time later his shoulders slumped, and his posture shifted until he was sprawling in his seat rather than just sitting in it.
"You don't even know you're doing it, do you?" Kanda remarked, not realizing he was going to say anything until the words had already left his mouth.
Lavi - it was definitely Lavi now - jumped half a foot off the bench and twisted to be able to see the doorway. Sitting with his back against the solid wall across from the window had put his blind side towards the door, which was probably how Kanda had managed to go unnoticed for so long.
"Gods, Yuu! D'you have to sneak up on a guy like that?" Lavi demanded, one hand pressed over his heart. "Doin' what?"
"Changing." Pushing off the doorjamb, Kanda strode into the room and stood where Lavi could see him without effort, hands on his hips. "You're 'slipping' again, that's the term, isn't it? But it wasn't my fault this time."
"Am I? Shit, I am," Lavi exclaimed, dismayed. Shaking his head, he closed his eye briefly. Kanda didn't think he'd ever stop being creeped out by the sudden changes of personality the redhead was capable of, but he was starting to get used to seeing the switch.
"I was going over my records from the Order. Sometimes it helps to be able to physically flip through them," Trey said softly when he opened his eye again. He looked up at Kanda with an expression that was a mixture of wariness and resignation. "That's probably why I was backsliding, it's hard to read my own thoughts from back then without falling into the same pattern."
"Did you find anything?" Kanda asked, because business still took precedence over their personal issues. There had been no further signs of Akuma attacks in the city since his first night here, but he wasn't willing to assume that meant the area was clear just yet. They might be waiting for him to leave.
"Maybe." Trey shuffled some of the papers together and shrugged. "There were plenty of towns we went to where it seemed like everyone had been turned into an Akuma, and I don't see how that could have been possible by the normal process. They were usually places that had at least one second level in the area, so I'm starting to think maybe higher level Akuma have another way of reproducing themselves."
"That means it would only have taken one Akuma surviving the final battle, and we could be facing the whole damned mess all over again," Kanda growled, throwing himself down on the bench across from Trey in frustration. "It wouldn't even have needed to be second level at the time, it's had two years to build up enough deaths to level up since then."
"It's not as bad as it could be," Trey shook his head and offered a hesitant smile. "At least you don't have the Earl or Noah's Clan to contend with this time. It just means we have to make sure you get all of them. And that's where Bookman and I will be able to help, researching all the deaths in the vicinity to find the ones that don't match the patterns of the war, and hopefully flush out their hunting grounds."
Kanda didn't even try to return the smile, and after a moment Trey dropped his gaze and riffled nervously through the papers again. That was another gesture Kanda had never seen him make before, that he would never have imagined Lavi ever doing.
Maybe it was the proverbial straw meeting the camel's back, but Kanda suddenly couldn't stand it any longer. "I'm curious," he ground out, glaring at Trey.
"Curious?" Trey asked, his fingers stilling on the papers.
"Which one is the act, Lavi or Trey?" Kanda asked bluntly. "The way you keep slipping into Lavi makes me want to say it's Trey that's the act, but I can't be sure. Which is the real you?"
"Which one?" An incredulous expression spread over the redhead's face, and the cynical laugh he gave was neither Lavi nor Trey. "Yuu, what on earth makes you think you've ever seen the 'real me'?" He snorted and stood up to pace, not looking directly at Kanda. "Do you really think it's just a case of one or the other? That's not the way it works."
"Why hasn't Bookman changed, then?" Kanda demanded. "You're a completely different person, but he's still the same way I remember him."
"He's the Bookman," Trey shrugged eloquently. "He doesn't need an alias, he just is. I'm only the heir, so I have to have some kind of persona when we're on a record, but it changes each time to be appropriate to the situation." The same cynicism from his laugh was threaded through the smile he turned on Kanda. "Lavi was my forty-ninth alias. We decided going into the Order that I'd go with 'frivolous and fun' for that record. I was glad we did, because I admit I've always found the outgoing personalities easier to sustain than the introverted type. Neither of us expected to be there more than a few months, half a year at the outside."
Kanda tried to process that, and didn't like the conclusions he drew. "So it was all an act?" he asked, fighting to keep his voice perfectly level. "Everything? Your cheerfulness, the joking and flirting, your friendships with the others?"
And our relationship? hung unspoken in the air between them, but Kanda refused to give voice to the words.
"I..." Trey looked briefly at him, then away again, turning towards the window. He stood with his arms hugged around himself as if he was cold. "I don't know, honestly," he admitted softly. "Towards the end, sometimes it got hard to remember that I was only acting. Sometimes I even reacted in ways I hadn't planned to."
Kanda couldn't help but wonder whether their relationship had been a planned or unplanned reaction, but he didn't quite dare to ask outright. "And it's just because of me that you keep slipping into Lavi? You certainly never made a single mistake I ever saw when you were in the Order."
"Y'gotta understand, Yuu." It was Lavi who turned back to him, expression almost pleading. "I spent two and a half years as Lavi. That's two years longer'n any other alias I've ever had, includin' Trey." He shook his head. "Lavi's been harder to let go of than any other persona. Every alias since then I've chosen somethin' like Trey, someone as different from Lavi as I could get. Then just when I started t'think I'd moved past him, you show up and thirty seconds later I'm right back at square one."
"And I'm supposed to feel sorry for you?" Kanda snapped, unmoved. He stood to put them at eye level again, unwilling to look up to the redhead. "Forgive me for not sympathizing with your struggles, but it's difficult to believe it was all that painful for a man who could walk away and leave his so-called friends to believe he was dead."
"I'm pretty sure the old panda did that as a test," Lavi muttered, rubbing a hand over his eye. "He spent a lot of our time in the Order lecturin' me about my duties and responsibilities. I think he wanted t'see if I could still do my job and walk away, or if I'd gotten too biased."
"Clearly you passed," Kanda snarled. "Congratulations." Sarcasm dripped from the word so heavily it was a wonder it wasn't visible. "Tell me this, then. And for once, just once in your entire fucking life, be honest. Do you ever regret it?"
"Regret what?" Lavi looked at him, his gaze piercing. "Which part, Yuu? If you're gonna make me be honest, y'might as well get the right part. D'you wanna know if I regret walkin' away from the Order, or just from you?"
The bastard was going to make him say it out loud. Fine. "You know what," Kanda snapped at him. If looks could kill, Lavi would have been writhing on the floor in that moment. "From me, damn it. I thought I was a cold-blooded bastard. I've certainly been accused of it often enough. I spent the entire seven months we were screwing around trying to convince myself that was all it was, but when I thought you were dead it just about fucking killed me."
There, he'd admitted it. Now maybe he could finally move on with his life... if he could just get the answer to this one final question. Otherwise he knew it was going to eat at him for the rest of his life, not knowing. "Are you really such a heartless asshole that you could fuck someone for over half a year and walk away without a single backward glance? Was there ever even a moment when you thought about us and regretted the decision you made?"
Lavi's expression was carefully blank, the same perfectly neutral look Kanda had so often seen on the Bookman's face. "I'm a Bookman," the redhead replied, his voice low and even, somehow sounding like neither Lavi nor Trey. Even his single visible eye was completely devoid of emotion, as if he was nothing more than a doll. "People aren't people to the Bookmen. They're just ink on paper, history to be written about. If the Bookmen can't stay unbiased, then the secret histories are worthless."
"That's an evasion, not an answer," Kanda growled at him. When the other man said nothing more, Kanda swallowed hard. "But I'll take it for one," he concluded, and turned away. He had his answer. It had all been a lie, all of it, and Kanda was a fool for falling for it. For falling for him.
"Every day." The whisper was so hoarse that Kanda almost couldn't understand it. "Every damned day, Yuu."
Kanda spun on his heel just in time to see Lavi push past him towards the door. He caught only a glimpse of the redhead's face, but it was enough. The other man's expression was still blank, but the piercing green of his eye was obscured by the wash of tears covering it. They didn't spill over onto his cheek, but in all the time they'd spent together it was the closest Kanda had ever seen Lavi come to crying.
He reached out to grab at the redhead's shoulder, and cursed when he missed. "Lavi!" he called after him, determined not to let that be the end of the conversation.
Lavi was obviously equally determined not to continue it, because he fled like his life depended on it. He caught the doorjamb with one hand and used it as a fulcrum to swing himself around into the hallway heading for the outside door without needing to slow down - and promptly skidded to a halt, flailing for balance as a high-pitched shriek came from someone just out of sight.
"Damn it, Marysa!" the redhead snapped, glaring down at the girl Kanda couldn't see. "Didn't anyone ever tell you it's not polite to eavesdrop?"
Kanda reached the doorway just in time to see the other man shove past her and out the door, leaving the blonde girl staring after him, sniffling in disbelief. Kanda was a little stunned, himself.
Lavi would have cracked a joke and invoked laughter to distract her. Trey would have blushed and stammered and used his embarrassment as misdirection. Kanda wasn't quite sure what to make of the way the redhead had snarled at her for daring to eavesdrop, instead.
Maybe there was a real person somewhere under the masks after all.
Maybe, just maybe, that meant the emotion of his last words to Kanda had been real, too.
"Move!" Kanda barked at Marysa, and shoved past her the same way Lavi had done. "Lavi!" he shouted, spotting the other man running down the street. Kanda took off after him, cursing Lavi for his longer legs. He'd always been a faster sprinter than Kanda, much as it had galled the swordsman to admit defeat in any way. "Lavi! Damn it. Trey!" he tried, when the other name got him no response.
Still the redhead didn't turn, and Kanda chased him through the streets of Mafeking. The few people out and about, mostly British soldiers, stared after them in shock, but Kanda paid them no attention. "Come back here!" he insisted, uncaring what everyone else thought.
Lavi glanced back over his shoulder, and his eyes widened. He skidded to a halt and tried to turn so abruptly he actually went down on one knee in a painful-looking tumble. "Yuu! Behind you!" he cried, panicked.
Others might have suspected him of making a lame attempt at distraction, but Kanda had fought at Lavi's side often enough to know that battle was one thing the redhead always took seriously. Well, relatively speaking. Kanda spun on his heel, drawing and activating Mugen in a reflexive action even before he saw the looming bulk of the Akuma rising above him.
Not just any Akuma, either. It was a second level, bigger than a first level but oddly slender and much closer to a humanoid figure. The fangs in its mouth screamed 'poison', and the sharp claws it had instead of hands looked deadly.
Kanda blocked the first thrust of its claw and dodged the second, hitting the cobblestones hard and rolling to avoid being stepped on. That brought him in range of the claws again, and he took a glancing blow to his side before he managed to push himself out of range and back to his feet.
"Yuu!" Lavi shouted again, sounding agonized. Kanda risked a quick glance back and saw him taking shelter behind a broken wall, hands clenched at his side in frustration and worry.
"I can handle it!" Kanda snapped back at him, bringing his blade up level with his face. "Kaichuu: Ichigen!"
The Hell's Insects broke away from the hilt and swarmed up around the Akuma's face, distracting it and blocking its view. It shrieked and swatted ineffectively at them, then leapt back just before they would have torn through it. Kanda cursed. It was fast, fast enough that the Insects would have trouble blasting it. He'd have to go after it himself.
In the split second when he called the Insects back to him and they were in the process of reforming Mugen's blade, he was vulnerable. No Akuma had ever been fast enough to take advantage of the momentary opportunity before, but this one was. Kanda heard the whine of power at almost the same moment the force of the bullet striking his shoulder slammed him back to the ground.
Agony shot through him, and he couldn't keep the shout of pain locked inside him. He thrashed on the cobblestones, feeling like his blood had been turned to fiery acid that was eating away at him from the inside out.
"Yuu!" Strong hands grabbed at his shoulders, pinning him down and preventing the spasms from tearing his body apart, but they couldn't stop the pain. Kanda forced his eyes open and saw Lavi looking down at him with panic and despair in his expression. "Gods, no, no, Yuu!"
From the corner of his eye Kanda caught a flash of black that didn't belong on his hands, the only part of him not covered by clothing. Looking down, he saw the distinctive dark stars slowly forming on his skin. He'd been hit by the Akuma virus.