this is why i shouldn't write when i'm angry
So I wrote this with rage in my heart against Hoshino, and I've never so sincerely hoped that I'm COMPLETELY WRONG.
This is set immediately after 167, which chapter made me cry in the workplace. This is basically more of the same. You have been warned.
Disclaimer: I don't own D.Gray-Man. If I did, this would NEVER HAVE HAPPENED.
Dream to Forget
You’ve imagined your own death in a hundred different ways.
The akuma bullet hitting in just the wrong place; Tyki Mikk ripping your heart out after all; Road stabbing you somewhere less resilient than your left eye. Starving to death; that one’s lingered since you were a child. You’ve never been afraid to die.
You never thought you would die like this.
Allen, are you sure you’re all right?
Of course, Lenalee. It’s nothing.
Lenalee and Johnny are easy to handle. They just want to be reassured that nothing’s wrong, and reassuring them is simple.
Kanda is fighting with you even more than usual, and that’s soothing in its way. You let yourself fall into the pattern of irritation and name-calling, and you don’t think about anything else for a while. You find yourself seeking Kanda out, which, in turn, seems to irritate him more. A happy arrangement.
Lavi, though. It’s impossible to be around Lavi, because Lavi knows.
Your master knows too, of course, but then your master has always known, and you know what he expects of you. He expects you to suck it up, move forward, and do what has to be done. You understand each other, disturbing though the thought may be.
Lavi’s sympathy is oppressive. It’s hard to cope with people when you’re grieving (and you are grieving, and isn’t that strange?). It’s hard to look at someone who knows and bite down on what you want to say; say what they want to hear instead.
Jesus, Allen. What are you going to do?
Whatever my master tells me to, Lavi. Don’t worry.
Don’t worry!?
Your master is taking you to the Earl, of course. At this point, killing the Earl is truly all you’re good for. You need to get away from anyone you might hurt, and you need to serve your purpose. It won’t matter whether you’re yourself or not by then.
I want to kill him, you tell the shadow in the mirror. I want to. Don’t take that away from me. Not that on top of everything else. And the shadow in the mirror smiles.
It’s a long trip back to Japan. Cross didn’t want to use the Ark, though he wouldn’t tell you why. Maybe it’s that the Vatican doesn’t want you using the Ark. That would be easy enough to understand.
Lenalee and Johnny were worried, Komui and Reever were sad and grim, Leverrier looked terrified and Link looked horrified, and Lavi…
Lavi came along. An observer.
Hey, little Bookman, Master had said. If you’re coming to observe, then you’d better damn well observe. I don’t want to hear a word out of you once we walk out these doors. Do you understand me?
I understand.
You hadn’t thought he’d be able to do it, but you were wrong. After a few days, you’ve almost forgotten Lavi’s there. Almost. Every once in a while, you make the mistake of looking into his eyes; looking at that awful sympathy.
It begins slowly, when it begins. Somewhere in Mongolia, you start dreaming of the desert.
Innocent dreams, quiet. Chasing lizards with your brothers and sisters, smelling dust and sage. Sneaking extra water for no better reason than to play in it, hoping you wouldn’t be caught. Staring up at the sky, tan-blue and endless, and wondering what it would be like to fly.
It’s only after the second dream that you begin to realize what you’ve lost.
Master tossed you an apple, and you caught it, and you couldn’t remember learning to juggle.
You remember how to juggle. You remember that you did learn to juggle. You even remember more or less how it happened, but only as you’d remember a story someone else told you. The story of a little boy whose father taught him to juggle.
You wonder if this is how Tyki Mikk lives, when he lives as a normal human among humans. If he’s living inside the echoes of memories that belong to the corpse he’s wearing.
You wonder if that hasn’t driven him insane.
Morning, stupid apprentice. Are you still you?
So far.
The process is slow, very slow. You’d heard that it was a quick thing; three days of agony and then you were gone. You wonder if the Fourteenth thinks he’s being kind.
A memory for a memory.
It would be less cruel if the old memories just disappeared, because then you wouldn’t know what you were missing. You wouldn’t have to wonder what it must have been like to sit on Mana’s shoulders and try not to get cotton candy in his hair; you wouldn’t have to know that you once knew.
If the process were faster, you wouldn’t realize that you’d traded that memory for one of standing on the bank of a great body of water in the rain, thinking that your father was a fool to believe any ship made by a man could defeat all of this. An unfair exchange.
You lose Cross first, on the sea between China and Japan. He recognizes it almost as soon as you do.
Hang in there, Allen, he says, this stranger you knew so well yesterday. We’re nearly there.
You lose Kanda next, then Lenalee, Komui, Miranda, Lavi, Krory. Just names. Names and faces and stories. No one you know. And you cry over it; you cry because it’s worse than watching them die. It’s a kind of losing you never prepared yourself for.
You know Cross trained you; you know Kanda fought with you. You know Lenalee’s sometimes terrifying worry; Miranda’s competence in the midst of her panic and guilt. You know that Lavi hides so much and worries when he shouldn’t; that Krory never knows what he’s allowed to be.
You know all of these things about all of these people, but they’re people you’ve never met. You don’t know them.
You try not to think about how the boy called Lavi looked when he touched your shoulder and you flinched away as you would from a stranger.
It doesn’t matter, though; it can’t matter. You need to kill the Millennium Earl, and that’s all that matters because that’s all that’s left. What happens after that, well, it’s irrelevant.
You owe this to too many people, even the ones you don’t really remember. You will make sure no more akuma are made. You will make sure no more lives are destroyed. It’s what Mana would have wanted you to do, and you won’t fail him this time.
You’ve failed your brother too often.