[Open]

[sublimated]

Method: Action or prose
Who: Kanda and anyone who wants to run into him.
Where: Poring Island
When: February 1, around midday
What: Killing little blobs of sentient jelly is about the farthest thing from Kanda's mind.

Comments

[crossgraved]

This was, without a doubt, not one of Allen's finer moments by any means. There he was, an exorcist (until otherwise dismissed) of the Black Order, a soldier, a capable and well-versed fighter, sprawled out on his back under the assault... of porings. Granted, one of them was especially large and was doing a fairly decent job of pressing its weight down upon him, but the others were sort of casually boffing at his legs and face. He was in the process of managing to grab one off of his face and toss it to the side when his entire head was enveloped by the large pink mass above him.

It was around that point that Allen Walker realised that if this continued his ultimate fate was going to be suffocation by jelly. There was something so utterly humiliating in that thought that he began to thrash wildly with muffled noises of resistance, his limbs flailing as he tried desperately to grab or shove any part of the giant glob of jelly to bring himself closer to air again.

Through the large pink blob upon his chest, Allen thought he could see someone approaching, but given his vision was not prefect when looking through the jellied-body of a monster, he could neither tell who it was or even if someone was definitely there at all.

[sublimated]

The momentum of Kanda's run carried him through the last of the trees and into the clearing, and there he slowed to a standstill, stopped, and for a moment simply stared.

The jelly was huge. Far bigger than him. It stood nearly as tall as a small tree and easily as wide. That in and of itself might have been enough to warrant a stare, but not near so much as the too-easily identifiable legs and torso struggling to try and free their upper half.

That absolute, complete, unrivaled IDIOT! What the hell was he even supposed to be doing? Was he trying to get himself killed? And not even by a proper foe, but by a damn overgrown dessert.

Kanda had more than half a mind to just walk off to leave him there. Leave him there to die of suffocation if that was his fate. Any idiot who wound up trapped under a giant jelly probably damn well deserved what he got. In fact, the swordsman made it as far as the trees before he stopped again.

It was the strangest feeling: the feeling of actually giving a damn whether Allen Walker lived or died. Not for anything that had to do with the Order or the war, but just simply because of Allen himself. It was, Kanda realized, a vague shadow of the shock he'd felt when he'd run him through, when he felt him slide off the length of his blade and crumple to the ground for those few moments when Kanda as sure he must be dead for good.

Only that was the recognition of an action already done, and this...

Kanda was already moving as he unsheathed the borrowed blade he carried, running to the spot where Allen lay and slicing into the creature with an upswing of the blade which would bisect the portion of it that Allen was trying to leverage off of himself.

[crossgraved]

There was someone there! At least there had been, Allen was sure. A sense of discontent had filtered through him as he realised that whomever it was had clearly seen this appalling set-up, turned and walked away. If he were not in such a situation, Allen may have just wept a bit. This was not the most flattering situation he'd ever been in.

But his awareness was caught quite sharply as he noticed the return of that person's presence, felt the rush of a movement and the rush of... air. He took a generous gulp of air as the Mastering recoiled back a way. It didn't make a noise of distress itself, but it did make a face as though it were surprised to have been hit at all.

This moment gives Allen enough time and space to roll himself to the side, panting heavily and trying to catch up on missed breath before getting to finally take a look at his rescuer. It would be a lie to say he was expecting it to be Kanda and he stares at the older exorcist with unabashed surprise.

"Kanda..." he barely realised that he'd spoken the swordsman name aloud, though it dawned on Allen fairly swiftly that he didn't have time to gawk at Kanda as though he were some rare exotic creature; the Mastering was regrouping itself with it's minions.

Allen turned his head toward it then as it began to bounce back toward the two to them, a more serious look falling across his face as he brought his left arm forward in preparation to activate his Innocence.

"It's surprisingly strong," he informed his comrade "It surprised me, that's how I ended up like that."

As the blob and it's mob of smaller blobs drew closer, Allen transformed his arm before moving forward quickly to back-claw two of the porings that were trying to attack them from the side away. But the Mastering itself had located a new target.

Perhaps it was difficult to tell given that the thing was still smiling, but it felt a bit slighted by Kanda who had interrupted what it had been doing. Kanda was now the prime target and it was headed straight for him, seeming to be very intent on smushing itself into him fully.

[sublimated]

Kanda had seen Allen get to his feet, but for all the acknowledgment he bothered to give him he might almost not have. There was a single, rather baleful, sidelong glance, and then his full attention was returned to the huge mass of jelly as its momentum shifted towards him.

Absurd as the thing looked, it was still an enemy, and it wouldn't be hard for Kanda to guess that if he was caught in its path it would have the advantage of weight. But big as it was, he doubted it would be very maneuverable.

Without more than a passing Tch at Allen, Kanda ran towards the thing, one foot planting in the middle of its grin as he propelled himself over it, managing to turn before he landed and drive his sword down through the thick of its gelatinous body.

Now that Allen was on his feet, he trusted that he would at least manage to avoid getting pinned under the thing a second time.

[crossgraved]

The jelly itself may have momentarily looked confused, or as confused as a smiling jelly-blob can manage when blinking its little black eyes and wondering where the pretty swords-thing had gone. It was soon to find out when it juddered with, apparently, pain as Kanda's sword embedded itself into the backside of the Mastering.

It wobbled a little, seemingly trying to spin itself around to get back to bashing itself face-on into Kanda. It was having difficulty doing this however and began to sway itself from side to side roughly, trying to dislodge the sword in its back.

Allen was trying to make swift work of the ten or so porings that were blocking his path, giving up on the gently-gently tactic of moving them aside (as they just kept coming back to 'attack' again) and instead beginning to slice through them quickly with the claw of his Crown Clown. He stepped forward then to push the talons on his left hand into the side of the Mastering, trying to keep it from turning and beginning an assault again. It clearly noticed that both the young men were now ganging up on it and started to bounce and shove itself around violently in all directions.

"K-Kanda! Now!"

[sublimated]

Kanda did not need to be told twice. In fact, he might not even have needed to be told once, and whether he was responding to Allen's call or just doing the exact same thing he would have done anyway was anyone's guess.

He had already pulled his sword free and was preparing for his next strike which, whether he'd intended it to be or not, was well coordinated with the younger exorcist's words.

He drove his sword straight through into the pith of the thing, impaling it right around where an ear might have been, had it had one. And then, a second later, he twisted and angled the sword, heaving it up like a lever that would cut the jelly blob in half.

[crossgraved]

There were some targets that requires ripping at the seams from several places, and then there were apparently other enemies that were too spherical to have seams. Allen took this to mean that he would need to maintain a hold on the jelly, keep the target stable as he felt the pressure from Kanda's attack move the large pink mass before it shortly after fell apart across the grassy floor. And partly over Allen.

The splatters of pink goo didn't coat him from head to foot or anything--instead it was more like the blob had fallen apart into a few large segments and a handful of smaller pebble-sized globs that had smacked against Allen's forearms.

With a sigh, he began to brush the jelly on his arms and upper torso off of him with the back of his right hand before glancing toward Kanda. He offered the other exorcist a sheepish kind of smile, his comrade's silence throughout the whole event certainly not escaping his notice.

"It's...a bit different from dealing with akuma. I didn't even know it was aggressive."

[sublimated]

Death--whether it be human, animal, Noah, or akuma--was always messy, in Kanda's view. He expected as much because as a general rule, nothing wanted to die, and so struggled reflexively to live. Killing something meant getting dirty.

It did not, however, necessarily mean getting sprayed with bits of jelly and goo that rained down from a disintegrating body like a miniature rain shower to splatter wetly around one's feet.

The swordsman sneered in distaste at the whole stupid situation, sheathed his sword with a rough clap into its saya, and then spun on Allen, stomping through the carnage of gelatin so that he could yell into the younger exorcist's face.

"WHAT THE HELL IS THE MATTER WITH YOU, YOU GODDAMN IDIOT?!"

[crossgraved]

Evidenced by Kanda's less than conversational nature, especially of late, Allen had not expected any kind of response from the swordsman at all really. At best, he had existed a distasteful 'tch' or a glare, and at worst an absence of acknowledgement entirely.

It did come as a genuine shock to Allen then to glance around in time to see the elder exorcist almost eye to eye with him, and only a bare second before the vocal onslaught began.

For a second, Allen was so stunned he could only stare at Kanda stupidly in total silence, his eyes wide with surprise and his mouth was held slightly aghast.

"I..." he began to reply, but then paused once again briefly. He didn't really know how to answer that question, or even if he should answer the question--was Kanda being rhetorical?

"I wasn't expecting that to happen. It looked like the other pink blobs which had all been pretty harmless. It was just...bigger."

[sublimated]

The excuse (or explanation, or whatever it was that Allen intended it to be) didn't go far with Kanda. In fact, it went absolutely nowhere. Except, perhaps, to make him even more angry. Of all the idiotic 'justifications' that the stupid Beansprout could have tried to offer...

The words swirled red in his mind, and before he'd even fully realized it, his fist had flown square into Allen's jaw. He didn't, he knew on impact, feel even a little bad for having done it.

Unlike the other exorcists, Allen wasn't (at least, the way Kanda saw it) accustomed to being on his guard--the threat of being caught unawares wasn't always foremost in his mind. But that, it seemed to Kanda, wasn't the damn point. The point was that Allen just didn't think in battle! The same way he hadn't thought about the consequences of impaling himself on his damn sword.

Perhaps he thought more the rest of the time, but Allen's particular brand of not thinking was the kind that was going to get him killed. And it made Kanda angry. Doubly so, in fact: angry at Allen and angry at himself for giving a shit.

His fist still clenched, he glared daggers down at the younger exorcist. "You're never expecting it, you damn fool! You let that eye of yours guide you by the nose, and if it shows you nothing then nothing is there. You'll end up dying out here from something you never saw coming because you see as much of what's around you as a naked mole rat, and move about half as fast!"

And did Kanda care? He grit his teeth in fury at the ambiguity of his own answer to that as he stood there seething. Then, not bothering to wait for an answer, he turned and stormed off, not wanting to hear a word that Allen might have to say.

[crossgraved]

It was a kind of deja-vu, Allen realised, as the crack to his jaw set him hurtling backwards to land fairly gracelessly upon the floor. He had about enough time to register what had just happen and stare up at Kanda before the other exorcist gave his version of an explanation behind the punch. With Kanda, his thought process was rarely obvious or straightforward, he took a lot of work to make sense of, and often Allen hadn’t known what was going on for Kanda until it was too late. Especially recently.

Allen had felt as though he’d unwittingly been given access to many of the big questions surrounding Kanda in seeing what had happened to him and Alma in the past. It didn’t make Kanda easy to understand or make everything make sense all of a sudden, but it framed the exorcist differently in Allen’s eyes. He could no longer just see Kanda as a heartless jerk who took some kind of pleasure in brutal honesty, but instead Allen had a sense of why Kanda acted that way, why his view on the world was both so harsh and pragmatic. But he still didn’t understand Kanda, because Kanda didn’t explain things in easy, simple ways.

This time though, the annoyance and reason seemed quite clear to Allen-Kanda was angry about Allen’s supposed complacency. It was true he had never had to worry about being caught unaware by akuma-there was always a warning in the form of his left eye. It forced him to look, focused his attention, but it did mean that when there were no akuma to be made aware of that he didn’t keep his other senses open for other dangers. It wasn’t a conscious choice-he didn’t decide he wasn’t going to worry about other dangers, but equally it was something he was at least aware of at the periphery of his brain. When Road had gouged his eyes with one of her candles the sense of paranoia that Allen had experienced had been significant. It had, as Kanda suggested, nearly gotten him killed then, had it not been for Lavi. Allen had never spoken about that experience to Kanda (why would he?), but he had a sense that Lavi may have mentioned it at some point to Kanda-they apparently spoke with each other not too rarely, after all.

The punch itself and the fuel behind it left Allen rather stunned in that moment though, too stunned to come up with anything to say in reply to it before Kanda had begun to stalk away. It wasn’t the first time Allen had been slugged in such a manner, and not the first time he’d been slugged in such a way by Kanda specifically. That was what made it feel so much like deja-vu. It was felt like when he had found himself hitting the dusty ground of Martel and had his coat thrown harshly back in his face.

Don’t you have anything important to you?!

It wasn’t exactly the same, but it felt close enough. No, the more Allen thought about it as he sat on the grass in silence the more it seemed clear that it really was the same. He fought when he was forced into it, and sometimes he’d be forced into it when he wasn’t expecting it. Because he wasn’t expecting it. Because he didn’t have something of his own to stay actively alert enough for.

It was the same as the very first mission they’d gone on together. Allen didn’t think Kanda had any right to be angry at him for his opinions back then, but in this context, many months and experiences later, Allen couldn’t fault the other exorcist’s reaction.

[crossgraved]

There was a part of Allen’s brain that said he should be glad that Kanda even had a reaction at all, that it was proof that he was on his way to becoming more like himself again. But it didn’t make Allen feel better, it made things worse. He’d seen something in Kanda before he had opened the gate to send him and Alma to Martel-he’d seen his gratitude and heard him speak his name in full. He’d had a sense that things between them, at least for a moment, had been in a different place than they’d ever been before. It seemed like it was just for a moment, and the knowledge that Kanda was moving from a state of catatonia back to ‘himself’ did not fill Allen with pleasure, but heavy discontent.

He sat with his hands loosely in his lap, a cynical breath of a laugh leaving his lips. He really was an idiot sometimes.

Throughout that rather rough exchange and Allen’s quiet processing of it, the sentient jellies, in their various sizes and colours, didn’t seem to pay much attention at all.