DGM, "His Borrowed Toys"
It was too hard to fight someone who looked, smiled, like Allen. But Lavi would rather have the fighting than... this.
Warnings: Spoilers about the 14th. Theories about the 14th. Theories about the Heart. Theories about Lavi and Allen. Total name confusion. Sexual harassment and self-destructive behavior. Cough.
Contains Lavi/Allen (onesided?) and 14th/Lavi.
.His Borrowed Toys.
The first thing Lavi noticed was that Allen was bleeding. And his first reaction was alarm. He took quick, half-running steps over to the younger man, breathlessly demanding, "Shit, what did you do? Your face is all over blood. Did you fall, did you hur--"
Then Allen looked up, and he saw the blood seeping from the stigmata on his forehead, and it felt for a brief moment like the world was coming to an end.
"Lavi," he said sweetly in Allen's voice, with Allen's smile. "I've been waiting for you."
But he wasn't Allen at all.
The fight that followed was painfully short and brief, as far as Lavi could remember. Lavi couldn't give his all when he kept looking up and seeing Allen, hurt, and the Noah wearing Allen just kept smiling at him with that horrible smile that looked like the younger boy but wasn't, and he had powers at his disposal that Allen never had. From the way he felt when he woke up some time later, Lavi reasoned clinically that he'd suffered a blow to the head that had knocked him unconscious. It probably had come from his right side. Stupid.
He was in a small cabin he'd never seen before, feeling dizzy, and staggered to his feet. A quick glance around gave him all the information he needed, despite the lingering blurring of his vision; it was night, and he was in a small boathouse, and he could hear was the gentle rolling sound of water against a shore, and the slender young man in the doorway wasn't Allen.
Lavi met his gray eyes, achingly identical to the ones already burned into his perfect memory. After a beat, the Noah stepped back out of the doorway, and instantly Lavi took advantage of his distance to dart across the cabin and leap out the window. He'd hardly taken two steps when the Noah was there again, a hand on his shoulder and slamming him back into the wooden wall of the cabin; he hit his head and briefly saw stars, fuck.
"Please don't do that. I don't want to have to hurt you."
He sounded so much like Allen; Lavi felt his lips curl back, even though his eyes were still squeezed tightly shut. "Stop talking," he said roughly.
"Does it bother you?" the Noah asked, mild but interested.
"Yeah, I don't know, something about hearing my friend threaten me for not obliging his evil fucking plans is really upsetting."
The Noah chuckled a little, and Allen's left hand loosened its grip on his shirt. "Evil? I'd never do anything that isn't in your best interests, Lavi." Two gloved claws traced the side of his neck with an almost eerie tenderness. "I'm doing all of this to protect you."
"Right, because protecting Exorcists is all Noah's descendants really want. Oh yeah, and to destroy everything." Lavi opened his uncovered eye to glare at him.
Now that the blood had been mopped up, he looked a little less like Allen, his skin sallow and gray-tinged, and the bandages wrapped around his forehead were beginning to show faint reddened outlines in the shape of crosses. But when he smiled, warm, he looked horribly right, in a way that made Lavi's heart ache.
"You should pay more attention to what Bookman tells you. I betrayed the Earl, Lavi. I don't want to destroy everything. In fact, I don't want to destroy the world at all. Which is why I can't let anything happen to you." His left hand slid down from Lavi's throat, skimming over his ribs and below his waist to settle lightly on the holster on his thigh.
"Because you're the Heart."
Lavi froze, paralyzed, the very idea stealing his breath away. All this time... And Gramps thought going crystal-type would be getting too involved, he thought, numb. The Heart?
Him?
The Noah eased his posture, shifting out of his battle-ready stance and instead standing more naturally, a little too close for comfort. He mused, "Ironic, isn't it?" and placed a hand over Lavi's chest. "Someone who isn't supposed to have a heart at all... has the only Heart that matters."
"No," he said finally, and now his own voice sounded unfamiliar, thin and tense. "You made a mistake. On all counts."
"You're the Heart. And you love him," the Noah said softly.
Lavi's mind went completely blank, all his carefully cultivated intelligence and practiced casual manner deserting him in that one instant. It wasn't something he'd even said to himself. It was something that could ruin the career that he'd spent his whole life training for. And this Noah had just seen right through him.
Is Allen conscious? Does he know now? Is he even alive? he thought, a beat before, Shit, Gramps is gonna disown me. And beat me senseless and leave me on the side of the road.
The Noah was watching him, with a strange expression Lavi had never seen on Allen before -- distant, maybe, as if he were thinking of something else, but easy to read.
He was jealous. Plainly, nakedly jealous.
"Do you know who I am?" he asked, stepping in even closer, so that Lavi was all too aware of the places where they were pressed together, the prickly wood at his back eliminating the possibility of retreat.
Stupid question. "Mana Walker's brother," Lavi said vaguely. "The 14th Noah. The Player of the Ark."
"I am the original Allen Walker." His fingers were delicate on Lavi's neck, his collarbone, the gap in the front of his shirt. "The one your Allen Walker was named for. But do you know who I am?"
Lavi never forgot anything. He gladly took the excuse for a distraction, sending his mind back and running through everything he'd ever heard about the 14th, about Mana's family, about Allen himself. Finally he shook his head, not coming up with anything worth mentioning.
The Noah -- it was impossible to think of him as Allen; Walker, maybe, but he would never be Allen -- murmured, "I hold the memory of Noah's love for humanity." He tilted his head back, so that he was looking Lavi in the eye. "I love everyone. Even you, Lavi."
It was a cruel thing to say in Allen's voice, stealing the breath from him. Lavi shook his head, angrily dismissing those words, but Walker only continued, "And they loved me, of course. Do you know why?"
"Stop asking me questions you don't want me to answer," Lavi snapped.
Walker smiled slightly. "Because I loved them," he said, as if he hadn't heard. "And people are desperate to be loved. Even you, Lavi."
And stop saying that, he thought, shaken. He didn't want or need other people's emotions. He'd given up pretending that he didn't have a heart, but the one thing he knew for certain -- if he had to leave the Order, he knew that he would be able to survive the way he always had, without anyone's 'love'. It was the only way he'd been able to look Allen in the eye.
Knowing that he didn't need anything from Allen that the younger boy wasn't fully ready to give.
"So people loved me because I loved them," the Noah murmured, "and because I couldn't help but love them, I never even minded what greedy opportunistic selfish creatures they all were, fawning at my feet begging for me to smile at them." He tilted his head, thoughtful. "I think I've had sex with... as many as five people at the same time."
Lavi paused to stare at him; those words coming from Allen's mouth were alarming, to say the least, but the idea of anyone having that much gratuitous sex... Few people would have suspected it of him, but he found the idea repulsive. That many people touching you, sweating and panting and covered in fluids and disgusting...
Walker's lips curved up, and he said, "That horrifies you, doesn't it? I'm sorry. If it's any consolation, I didn't enjoy it either." He stroked a hand down Lavi's chest, idle touching. "Sex is meaningless without emotion, isn't it? You think the same thing, don't you?"
There was a long pause, during which the Noah actually waited for him to answer, and he reluctantly nodded. Frozen in his perfect memory forever were a handful of nights, whimsical encounters with pretty girls and one pretty boy, all of which he'd been only too glad to leave behind in the aftermath and return to his books.
"But I wanted it to mean something," Walker murmured. "I kept trying, hoping it would be different, that I was just doing it wrong... Opium and brandy didn't help either." He sighed. "In the end, none of those people loved me. There was just... no getting around it."
Lavi let out a breath, getting a hand between them and starting to push him off. "I'm not interested in your life story," he said roughly.
The Noah didn't resist the motion, but Allen's eyebrows swept up, curious. "Really? Is that something a Bookman would say?"
It was hard to think of what a Bookman should say when all he could think was Give Allen back, you son of a bitch, give him back his life, give him back to me like a damning mantra. Lavi felt his jaw clench, and he didn't say anything.
Walker said, "I only brought it up because I wanted you to understand. My namesake doesn't know how lucky he has it."
His gray eyes, Allen's gray eyes, were intent on Lavi's face, focused in a way that felt almost like it could devour him whole.
"I look like him," Walker murmured, pressing closer now, so that Lavi could feel him all along his body, from chest to knee. Lavi again moved to shove him away, more insistent, but Allen's left arm caught at his wrist and effortlessly steered it back down to his side. "I sound like him, don't I?"
"Like hell you do," Lavi snarled, a sort of panic rising in his chest that he couldn't force down again. The same thing that had held him back when he'd fought the Noah before was still holding him back. It was Allen's body, if Allen wasn't gone forever.
"You love him," the other whispered, softly. "Surely you can spare a little of that for me...?"
Walker ducked his head, brushing Allen's lips over Lavi's neck, soft and teasing. Lavi shuddered, glancing away, searching for something, anything that he could use -- that would distract him. Despite his protests, despite his distaste for this sort of thing, he didn't know if he could resist. It was Allen's lips, Allen's body pinning him to the wall, Allen and not Allen at all. Walker slipped his tongue out, curling into the hollow of Lavi's throat and making the breath strangle in his lungs. It was as if all those other times had been practice for this seduction.
"Show me what it's like," Allen's voice urged him, hushed and tempting.
Lavi squeezed his eye shut. If he remembered Allen... Considerate, gentle, laughing happily the way he almost never did, devotion and sincerity wrapped up in one wondrous, doomed package... Maybe he couldn't (didn't want to) resist the Noah's ministrations, the hand that slid under his shirt to caress his sensitive stomach, but at least everything he felt would be for that sweet memory, and not for this hollow shell of him.
It took him a moment to realize that the Noah had stilled against him, and then they were both motionless, breathing chaotically.
The Noah pushed away from him, taking two steps back -- putting distance between them. In his hand was the Ace of Spades that Lavi had picked up so long ago, lifted from Lavi's shirt; he started, forced himself away from the wall, demanded, "Give that--!"
"Marian will be here within the hour," the Noah said softly, cutting through the motionless air like a knife. Lavi had to think before realizing he meant General Cross. "It's too dangerous to travel with the Ark, so we'll be going by boat. Please don't make me chase you down."
He had turned away, and wasn't looking at Lavi: his head was turned down, perhaps looking at the card, but he didn't care about the card.
He was conceding defeat.
"...sorry," Lavi said, not sure why he was apologizing. It felt like he had hurt Allen: that posture, the inoffensive, mannerly set of those slim shoulders hiding a disappointed slump.... It was so deeply Allen's that just looking at them made his chest ache.
"No," Walker said quietly. "It was -- a pointless request."
Warnings: Spoilers about the 14th. Theories about the 14th. Theories about the Heart. Theories about Lavi and Allen. Total name confusion. Sexual harassment and self-destructive behavior. Cough.
Contains Lavi/Allen (onesided?) and 14th/Lavi.
.His Borrowed Toys.
The first thing Lavi noticed was that Allen was bleeding. And his first reaction was alarm. He took quick, half-running steps over to the younger man, breathlessly demanding, "Shit, what did you do? Your face is all over blood. Did you fall, did you hur--"
Then Allen looked up, and he saw the blood seeping from the stigmata on his forehead, and it felt for a brief moment like the world was coming to an end.
"Lavi," he said sweetly in Allen's voice, with Allen's smile. "I've been waiting for you."
But he wasn't Allen at all.
The fight that followed was painfully short and brief, as far as Lavi could remember. Lavi couldn't give his all when he kept looking up and seeing Allen, hurt, and the Noah wearing Allen just kept smiling at him with that horrible smile that looked like the younger boy but wasn't, and he had powers at his disposal that Allen never had. From the way he felt when he woke up some time later, Lavi reasoned clinically that he'd suffered a blow to the head that had knocked him unconscious. It probably had come from his right side. Stupid.
He was in a small cabin he'd never seen before, feeling dizzy, and staggered to his feet. A quick glance around gave him all the information he needed, despite the lingering blurring of his vision; it was night, and he was in a small boathouse, and he could hear was the gentle rolling sound of water against a shore, and the slender young man in the doorway wasn't Allen.
Lavi met his gray eyes, achingly identical to the ones already burned into his perfect memory. After a beat, the Noah stepped back out of the doorway, and instantly Lavi took advantage of his distance to dart across the cabin and leap out the window. He'd hardly taken two steps when the Noah was there again, a hand on his shoulder and slamming him back into the wooden wall of the cabin; he hit his head and briefly saw stars, fuck.
"Please don't do that. I don't want to have to hurt you."
He sounded so much like Allen; Lavi felt his lips curl back, even though his eyes were still squeezed tightly shut. "Stop talking," he said roughly.
"Does it bother you?" the Noah asked, mild but interested.
"Yeah, I don't know, something about hearing my friend threaten me for not obliging his evil fucking plans is really upsetting."
The Noah chuckled a little, and Allen's left hand loosened its grip on his shirt. "Evil? I'd never do anything that isn't in your best interests, Lavi." Two gloved claws traced the side of his neck with an almost eerie tenderness. "I'm doing all of this to protect you."
"Right, because protecting Exorcists is all Noah's descendants really want. Oh yeah, and to destroy everything." Lavi opened his uncovered eye to glare at him.
Now that the blood had been mopped up, he looked a little less like Allen, his skin sallow and gray-tinged, and the bandages wrapped around his forehead were beginning to show faint reddened outlines in the shape of crosses. But when he smiled, warm, he looked horribly right, in a way that made Lavi's heart ache.
"You should pay more attention to what Bookman tells you. I betrayed the Earl, Lavi. I don't want to destroy everything. In fact, I don't want to destroy the world at all. Which is why I can't let anything happen to you." His left hand slid down from Lavi's throat, skimming over his ribs and below his waist to settle lightly on the holster on his thigh.
"Because you're the Heart."
Lavi froze, paralyzed, the very idea stealing his breath away. All this time... And Gramps thought going crystal-type would be getting too involved, he thought, numb. The Heart?
Him?
The Noah eased his posture, shifting out of his battle-ready stance and instead standing more naturally, a little too close for comfort. He mused, "Ironic, isn't it?" and placed a hand over Lavi's chest. "Someone who isn't supposed to have a heart at all... has the only Heart that matters."
"No," he said finally, and now his own voice sounded unfamiliar, thin and tense. "You made a mistake. On all counts."
"You're the Heart. And you love him," the Noah said softly.
Lavi's mind went completely blank, all his carefully cultivated intelligence and practiced casual manner deserting him in that one instant. It wasn't something he'd even said to himself. It was something that could ruin the career that he'd spent his whole life training for. And this Noah had just seen right through him.
Is Allen conscious? Does he know now? Is he even alive? he thought, a beat before, Shit, Gramps is gonna disown me. And beat me senseless and leave me on the side of the road.
The Noah was watching him, with a strange expression Lavi had never seen on Allen before -- distant, maybe, as if he were thinking of something else, but easy to read.
He was jealous. Plainly, nakedly jealous.
"Do you know who I am?" he asked, stepping in even closer, so that Lavi was all too aware of the places where they were pressed together, the prickly wood at his back eliminating the possibility of retreat.
Stupid question. "Mana Walker's brother," Lavi said vaguely. "The 14th Noah. The Player of the Ark."
"I am the original Allen Walker." His fingers were delicate on Lavi's neck, his collarbone, the gap in the front of his shirt. "The one your Allen Walker was named for. But do you know who I am?"
Lavi never forgot anything. He gladly took the excuse for a distraction, sending his mind back and running through everything he'd ever heard about the 14th, about Mana's family, about Allen himself. Finally he shook his head, not coming up with anything worth mentioning.
The Noah -- it was impossible to think of him as Allen; Walker, maybe, but he would never be Allen -- murmured, "I hold the memory of Noah's love for humanity." He tilted his head back, so that he was looking Lavi in the eye. "I love everyone. Even you, Lavi."
It was a cruel thing to say in Allen's voice, stealing the breath from him. Lavi shook his head, angrily dismissing those words, but Walker only continued, "And they loved me, of course. Do you know why?"
"Stop asking me questions you don't want me to answer," Lavi snapped.
Walker smiled slightly. "Because I loved them," he said, as if he hadn't heard. "And people are desperate to be loved. Even you, Lavi."
And stop saying that, he thought, shaken. He didn't want or need other people's emotions. He'd given up pretending that he didn't have a heart, but the one thing he knew for certain -- if he had to leave the Order, he knew that he would be able to survive the way he always had, without anyone's 'love'. It was the only way he'd been able to look Allen in the eye.
Knowing that he didn't need anything from Allen that the younger boy wasn't fully ready to give.
"So people loved me because I loved them," the Noah murmured, "and because I couldn't help but love them, I never even minded what greedy opportunistic selfish creatures they all were, fawning at my feet begging for me to smile at them." He tilted his head, thoughtful. "I think I've had sex with... as many as five people at the same time."
Lavi paused to stare at him; those words coming from Allen's mouth were alarming, to say the least, but the idea of anyone having that much gratuitous sex... Few people would have suspected it of him, but he found the idea repulsive. That many people touching you, sweating and panting and covered in fluids and disgusting...
Walker's lips curved up, and he said, "That horrifies you, doesn't it? I'm sorry. If it's any consolation, I didn't enjoy it either." He stroked a hand down Lavi's chest, idle touching. "Sex is meaningless without emotion, isn't it? You think the same thing, don't you?"
There was a long pause, during which the Noah actually waited for him to answer, and he reluctantly nodded. Frozen in his perfect memory forever were a handful of nights, whimsical encounters with pretty girls and one pretty boy, all of which he'd been only too glad to leave behind in the aftermath and return to his books.
"But I wanted it to mean something," Walker murmured. "I kept trying, hoping it would be different, that I was just doing it wrong... Opium and brandy didn't help either." He sighed. "In the end, none of those people loved me. There was just... no getting around it."
Lavi let out a breath, getting a hand between them and starting to push him off. "I'm not interested in your life story," he said roughly.
The Noah didn't resist the motion, but Allen's eyebrows swept up, curious. "Really? Is that something a Bookman would say?"
It was hard to think of what a Bookman should say when all he could think was Give Allen back, you son of a bitch, give him back his life, give him back to me like a damning mantra. Lavi felt his jaw clench, and he didn't say anything.
Walker said, "I only brought it up because I wanted you to understand. My namesake doesn't know how lucky he has it."
His gray eyes, Allen's gray eyes, were intent on Lavi's face, focused in a way that felt almost like it could devour him whole.
"I look like him," Walker murmured, pressing closer now, so that Lavi could feel him all along his body, from chest to knee. Lavi again moved to shove him away, more insistent, but Allen's left arm caught at his wrist and effortlessly steered it back down to his side. "I sound like him, don't I?"
"Like hell you do," Lavi snarled, a sort of panic rising in his chest that he couldn't force down again. The same thing that had held him back when he'd fought the Noah before was still holding him back. It was Allen's body, if Allen wasn't gone forever.
"You love him," the other whispered, softly. "Surely you can spare a little of that for me...?"
Walker ducked his head, brushing Allen's lips over Lavi's neck, soft and teasing. Lavi shuddered, glancing away, searching for something, anything that he could use -- that would distract him. Despite his protests, despite his distaste for this sort of thing, he didn't know if he could resist. It was Allen's lips, Allen's body pinning him to the wall, Allen and not Allen at all. Walker slipped his tongue out, curling into the hollow of Lavi's throat and making the breath strangle in his lungs. It was as if all those other times had been practice for this seduction.
"Show me what it's like," Allen's voice urged him, hushed and tempting.
Lavi squeezed his eye shut. If he remembered Allen... Considerate, gentle, laughing happily the way he almost never did, devotion and sincerity wrapped up in one wondrous, doomed package... Maybe he couldn't (didn't want to) resist the Noah's ministrations, the hand that slid under his shirt to caress his sensitive stomach, but at least everything he felt would be for that sweet memory, and not for this hollow shell of him.
It took him a moment to realize that the Noah had stilled against him, and then they were both motionless, breathing chaotically.
The Noah pushed away from him, taking two steps back -- putting distance between them. In his hand was the Ace of Spades that Lavi had picked up so long ago, lifted from Lavi's shirt; he started, forced himself away from the wall, demanded, "Give that--!"
"Marian will be here within the hour," the Noah said softly, cutting through the motionless air like a knife. Lavi had to think before realizing he meant General Cross. "It's too dangerous to travel with the Ark, so we'll be going by boat. Please don't make me chase you down."
He had turned away, and wasn't looking at Lavi: his head was turned down, perhaps looking at the card, but he didn't care about the card.
He was conceding defeat.
"...sorry," Lavi said, not sure why he was apologizing. It felt like he had hurt Allen: that posture, the inoffensive, mannerly set of those slim shoulders hiding a disappointed slump.... It was so deeply Allen's that just looking at them made his chest ache.
"No," Walker said quietly. "It was -- a pointless request."