Something's not right... [OPEN]

[sandnsky]

Who: Daisya Barry and anyone else
What: Daisya is outside trying to figure out why his Innocence isn't working at full power.
Where: Behind the house- as far from it as he dares to get, really, so he doesn't break anything.
When: October 2, Late afternoon, 1928
Rating and Warnings: PG? Daisya swears a lot.

Comments

[kandescence]

Kanda hadn't stepped outside looking for company. After the morning he'd had--arriving at the house, running into Allen, and then managing to extricate himself only to run into Lenalee--he was feeling saturated with people and more than a bit overwhelmed.

The knowledge that an entire portion of his life effectively didn't exist--that no one in his world ever knew that he'd been stuck in the Ark, left behind to claw his way out--was hard to come to terms with. Kanda had had to cope with erasures of his past before, but this felt different. No one had contrived to do this, and no one had lied about it. It was simply as though he'd been left behind by history. It had forgotten and gone on without him...or with some other version of him. He really wasn't very clear on how that worked.

He just wanted some fresh air and some calm, and the overgrown garden paths he'd seen from one of the house's windows made him think that would be the place to get it.

The last person he was expecting to see was Daisya standing there with his bell in his hands just as though he hadn't died and Kanda hadn't felt the weight of his body when they'd lowered in from the lamppost months ago.

Frozen on the spot at the bend of the path where the scene before him and first come into view, Kanda stared in silence, not even managing to wonder what he should say. For the moment, the possibility of saying anything at all just seemed lost on him.

[sandnsky]

Daisya sensed more than heard someone behind him, and he turned around to face Kanda with a smile. "Heh, so there you are. Figured you'd end up here too at some point." He deactivated the Charity Bell and put it back on his hood, not necessarily wanting Kanda to know just yet what had happened. Of course, Daisya had no choice to assume that he did- because Kanda looked like he'd just been hit in the face with a board. "Don't worry. I already know about th' whole 'you're s'posed t'be dead' bit."

[kandescence]

And yet that statement did not stop Kanda from saying the only thing that his brain seemed able to process at that moment as he continued to stand and stare.

"You're supposed to be dead."

It wasn't a particularly useful thing to have said, he realized as he watched Daisya put the Bell back on his hood just like he'd seen him do a hundred times before. It was just one thing too many in that day, after what he'd learned from Allen, after seeing Lenalee, and an edge of defensive anger crept into his voice. "I saw your body! We took you down! You're supposed to be dead!"

[sandnsky]

Daisya sighed and crossed his arms, though the motion was more or less lost by his poncho-like coat. "You done yet?" he asked, eying the man who'd been his best friend for nearly half his life. "Look, I dunno what t'say. It's all fucked up, I know that much. ... an' I'm sorry y'had t'see that, it was bad enough for me bein' there."

He felt bad for Kanda, honestly, because the look in his eyes was one of a man who'd seen just a bit too much for the day- he recognized it from when they were doing their first missions. "It's okay, though," he said quietly, walking closer and tipping his chin up to look at the other Exorcist. "'m not dead- 'm stuck here in this place with you, so all we gotta do is wait for Marie an' we'll decide what t'do next."

[kandescence]

Effectively derailed in mid-tirade, Kanda couldn't manage to do anything but a return to open-mouthed staring for a moment. It was a different sort of stare this time though, more blatantly lost and overwhelmed.

"For Marie..." he echoed after a moment, realizing as he said it that he wasn't expecting Marie to turn up at all. But then he hadn't been expecting Daisya either.

It occurred to Kanda, suddenly, that there were people here from his past and people who claimed to be from his future. But there wasn't a single damn person from his present. It was more than a little irksome. He'd be damned if that meant he was going to wait for one or the other to catch him up though.

The firm set of his jaw returning, Kanda's gaze became much more steady. "I've been here a month already. I'm done with waiting."

[sandnsky]

Daisya frowned. "Yeah? What're you gonna do, then? If y'wanna leave I'll go with, but... there're people here who need us, I think." He shook his head. "I've already made a friend- his name's George. He helped patch me up when I first got here, since that Noah bastard beat th' shit out of me."

Just thinking about Tyki made Daisya's skin crawl, and his lip curled in a faint sneer- mostly at himself and his failure. He'd bitten off far more than he could chew, and yes, he had done it for Kanda and Marie... but at the same time, he'd also done it because he's a reckless bastard and that's what he did.

"Listen, I need t'ask you somethin'," he continued, looking at the wood he'd been trying to destroy. "Mugen... is it workin' right?"

[kandescence]

Kanda was not, unsurprisingly, moved by Daisya's mention of a friend, nor did he care about whether people there needed him. To his mind, what was more important was that, after being stuck in this world for a whole month, there was finally an outside chance that someone might be able to show him a way back home.

It didn't occur to him at the moment (and probably wouldn't until some time later) that for Daisya, going back home would almost certainly mean a death sentence.

"I didn't say I was leaving. We crossed the damn country to find this 'Professor Watney.' If there's going to be a way home he and that other one are going to have something to do with it. I don't need anyone else to show up to tell me that."

It was almost a point of respect that he didn't pry for details about what happened in Daisya's fight with Tyki. After all, it was clearly Daisya who had lost, and Kanda had no desire to shame him by making him talk about it. Instead he focused on the latter question, looking at Daisya carefully before he answered.

"There aren't any akuma here. I haven't needed to activate it," he frowned. "Why."

[sandnsky]

"So it never occurred t'you t'test it out?" Daisya frowned. "An' what th' hell do you mean, traveled across the country?" He remembered Kanda saying he'd been here a month and his frown deepened. It was certainly unlike him to doubt his friends or be suspicious of them, but this... just seemed weird. Kanda couldn't usually go two whole seconds without threatening someone with Mugen, and now... he hadn't even tried it?

Daisya shrugged and turned away, gesturing to the wood. "That's all th' Charity Bell can do," he says curtly. "Somethin's wrong with it, maybe after th' fight with what's his face. ... but Komui's not here t'fix it an' I don't know what to do."

[kandescence]

Kanda frowned at Daisya for a moment. He had, of course, used Mugen when he needed to. He'd had more than a few occasions to draw the sword. But on none of those was he drawing it against akuma nor against anything that required him to activate his Innocence.

Unlike Daisya's Bell, Mugen still functioned as a weapon whether Kanda's Innocence was activated or not, and the fact that the sword still cut things like a sword meant that he'd simply taken it for granted that it still did everything else that it always did too. Now that Daisya mentioned it though, not having tested its activation seemed a rather glaring oversight.

Without saying a word, he stepped forward and to Dasiya's side, drawing the blade smoothly and running his fingers down its back. "Mugen, hatsudou." He could feel the effect in the thrum through his fingers, like a fine hum of energy, though the glow was subtle in the sunlight. There. Fine.

Only Daisya hadn't said that he couldn't activate his Bell at all. Merely that it couldn't do what he expected it to. There was a pause as Kanda thought of what to do. He certainly wasn't going to go hacking away at firewood. But...

"Kaichu Ichigen." He sliced through the air releasing the illusory insects, and they did fly out from the arc of his blade...but there were only three, and not having a target, they seemed to fade more quickly than expected. No, that was not as it should be either.

For several seconds Kanda was silent, his back still to Daisya. After all he had seen and struggled through in this world, it seemed that he should now have an additional concern over the particulars of Mugen's functioning. Only Kanda was less than inclined to be so self-indulgent: the sword worked, his Innocence worked, and even if it didn't he wasn't going to lay down and die for it.

He re-sheathed the blade with a sharp snap as it settled into its saya. "This place isn't like where we come from," he said without turning his head. "I came here after fighting a Noah too. I won. That's not it.

"There are no akuma here. No Earl. If Innocence works differently, there's nothing we can do about it." It wasn't an explanation for how he knew it or what he'd seen, but to Kanda this was the more pressing matter.

[sandnsky]

Daisya frowned as he watched Kanda working with Mugen, and that frown deepened when he resheathed it and seemed so damn nonchalant about the whole thing. For Daisya, his life revolved around his Innocence; his job as an Exorcist was quite literally all he had. He'd left his home and his family behind in search of adventure, and while he'd certainly found it, being without his main source of defense was rather unsettling. Still, it was good to know that the Charity Bell wasn't rejecting him out of hand simply because he'd lost to Tyki Mikk.

"I'm not worried about it workin' differently," he finally said with a shrug. "I'm worried about it not workin' at all when we need it. ... an' for all you know there are Akuma an' there is an Earl, we just haven't seen 'em yet."

He was fairly sure Kanda was right, but part of Daisya wanted him to be wrong. Part of him wanted that war to keep going on so that he would have something to fight for, something to live for. Something to be useful for that wasn't settling for a horrible existence in the shithole of a town he'd been born in. Having no direction, no sense of purpose- and having everyone say hey, aren't you supposed to be dead?- was really starting to get to him.

"Doesn't matter," he finally muttered, shaking his head. "We'll find out when we're meant to. ... but I don't wanna sit around on my ass, so if you can come down off your high horse t'spar with me in th' mornin', that'd be nice."

[kandescence]

If Kanda had intuited just why it mattered so much to Daisya, he might have been somewhat softer in what he had to say. But as it was, his mind was already too distracted, too overwhelmed. And so what he felt most was irritation at Daisya's unwillingness to take him at his word. He turned back to face him again, answering the frown with one of his own.

"Tch. Weren't you listening? I've been in this world for a damn month and I've come nearly three thousand miles across this stupid country to get here. There were dozens of towns I passed through or stopped at. And there wasn't a single akuma, not in one of them. The Church here has never heard of the Black Order and they've never heard of us. And even if the damn war had just ended, they should have a record. They should know. This isn't our world Daisya."

He huffed in frustration. This wasn't how he wanted this reunion to be going, but it was doing so in spite of him, and he couldn't see a way around it. Anyway, Kanda wasn't in the reassurance business. The best he could do was acquiesce to the latter request without complaint, and he'd have done that anyway since training with Daisya in the mornings was something he'd actually want to do.

That didn't make his tone particularly gentle though, but some of the irritation did melt away when he answered. "I'll be there. Could ask the others too, if you want. Lenalee," a pause and then as a rather discontented afterthought, "and the Beansprout."

[sandnsky]

Daisya wasn't entirely sure how to respond to that, so he decided not to. He'd always known there were a lot of things he didn't understand, and for Kanda- Kanda, his best friend, to be saying this- it had to be true. No Vatican, no Black Order, no war... no real purpose as of the moment. He fell silent, contemplating the very idea of having no set goals and destinations- and then finally coming to the most logical conclusion his brain could produce.

"So we're both dead, then," he said flatly. "May as well be for all th' good we can do in our world, which- in case you've forgotten- is where our war is goin' on without us. " He sighed and shook his head, the Charity Bell chiming softly and reminding him of home. "You, me, Allen, Lenalee- all of us are fuckin' dead so far as we can make any difference. Maybe we've got no purpose here, but 'm not gonna sit on my ass 'til I find out. I'm gonna keep trainin' an' keep gettin' stronger, so- 'm glad you'll be there."

He didn't have any particular idea as to when things had started getting awkward between him and Kanda; perhapsit had been the miles Kanda claimed to have traveled or perhaps the years Daisya had spent away from the Order. Either way, he wasn't going to take any chances that would involve losing his best friend, so he decided then and there not to mention home again until or unless Kanda brought it up.

[kandescence]

It was not news to Kanda that Daisya's logic was sometimes...strange. The way that he reasoned and the conclusions that he drew often seemed to Kanda to be the most convoluted and illogical that he could imagine, jumping from reasonable evidence to decide the most outrageous things. So it wasn't so much that Kanda was surprised by Daisya's reasoning now, nor that he was shocked at his leap to the conclusion he'd drawn.

It was simply, to Kanda's mind, wrong.

"We're not dead." And it was a mark of their friendship that Kanda didn't call him an idiot for saying so. "I didn't die. And if you're here then you must not have either. The only way dead people get up and walk around is if they're not people anymore."

It almost surprised Kanda to discover not just how firm he was on the course of action that must lie ahead or how clear it all was in his mind, the product of a month's focused motivation, perhaps, but something he'd taken for granted up until that moment. "While we're here our purpose is to find a way home, and those two professors are the way to do it. Heine and I traveled all the way here because some priest said he'd heard one of their names, and we get here to find all of you turning up not a week later. That's no damn coincidence." The swordsman hadn't even noticed that he'd named his traveling companion in what he'd said; he simply wasn't paying attention to that.

That they would keep training was, to Kanda, such a foregone conclusion that he didn't even bother to comment on it further. Of course they would train, just like they would breathe and eat and sleep. It wasn't even a question.

[sandnsky]

"Yeah, whatever," Daisya replied, shaking his head. He wanted to be done with this topic- he didn't like the feeling of increasing distance between himself and Kanda, and he had a feeling it was because of that exact thing. "Anyway, we'll figure it out an' get home an'... yeah. I dunno what."

'cept I wasn't s'posed t'live this long. That thought came out of nowhere and made Daisya frown a little, then he shook his head. Now's not th' time t'be superstitious. ... but I've seen so many little signs- tch! No. None of that. It's stupid an' not for an Exorcist t'even think of.

[kandescence]

Kanda, for his part, was willing to let it go at that as well. He felt no less overwhelmed now than he had when he first stepped outside, and his desire for time alone hadn't diminished either. If he noticed anything off or strained between himself and Daisya, to him it wasn't any more strained than every other interactions he'd had with his fellow exorcists since he walked through the front door of the house that morning.

He needed some time. Probably they all needed some time. And hopefully then they'd all be content not to talk about it, to leave all of these complications and confusions aside. To Kanda's mind, that would be the best thing that could happen. Just box it up and slide it off into a corner somewhere so it wouldn't get in the way of the work they needed to do. If he could just do that, this would be fine.

And so, with a final, "Yeah. Fine," he turned and made to walk off down the path, to find some place out in the grounds where he could really be alone.