hurrah mad scientists
Random Reever fic.
I've often wished there was time for more Science Department in D.Gray-Man. Every glimpse you get of them is pure awesome. Even the zombie chapters. :)
I don't own DGM; it is undoubtedly just as well.
ETA: Now with an Italian translation by youffie_17 . :D :D :D
Welcome Home
Reever had expected his life in the Order to be a complete break from everything previous, and, up to now, it had been. But suddenly, here he was, having unpleasant flashbacks.
He’d grown up in Bendigo, which was a mining town. Mining towns had their advantages and disadvantages. If you were into science beyond extractive metallurgy, for instance, you were out of luck.
There had been two sisters in town-the Healy sisters, originally from Melbourne. Young things, maybe eight and ten when he knew them. Rumor was that their dad (a miner) got drunk and beat them all the time. It was easy to believe. The girls watched the world with glassy, hostile eyes; always on guard, always ready to defend themselves and each other. It was them against everyone they didn’t trust, and they didn’t trust anyone.
Reever watched Komui Li check over his resumé while Li’s sister hovered protectively, and he tried not to draw the obvious parallel.
“Oh, Chief Komui,” the people in his old lab had said, laughing. “He’s got such a sister complex.”
Reever didn’t think it was a sister complex. He thought it was way the hell more disturbing than that. For one thing, it clearly went both ways. Li was deliberately in front, shielding-but his sister was definitely guarding his back. She hadn’t taken her eyes off Reever since he came in. She was holding a coffee tray, and though Reever had never thought of a coffee tray as a weapon before, he was thinking it now.
A thirteen-year-old girl shouldn’t be able to manage this level of scary.
“Reever Wenham,” Li said, looking serious. “You come highly recommended.”
Reever didn’t know what the hell he was supposed to say to that, and he didn’t want to risk it when a wrong answer might mean death by coffee tray, so he just stayed quiet.
“Your file doesn’t mention why you chose to join the Order,” Li continued. There was a pause, and then he said, not impatiently, “So why did you?”
Reever took a moment to think about how much he actually wanted this job.
Not as much as all that, he decided. Worse come to worst, Asia Branch would take him back. He didn’t need to be in Europe, he’d just thought he’d like to be.
So fuck it.
“I’m not telling you that,” he said. They already had him thinking about the past accidentally. He’d be damned if they could make him do it deliberately.
Li’s eyebrows went up. “Really,” he said.
“It’s none of your business,” Reever told him.
“You don’t think I have a right to ask why you want to be my employee?” Li asked, head tipped curiously to the side.
“Everybody’s story is pretty much the same, right?” Reever asked, trying to keep it under control, trying not to scream at this guy who probably wouldn’t hire him now, anyway. “So what d’you need the details for? I’m asking to be your research assistant, not your wife.”
The sister’s eyebrows went up.
“You said I was recommended, yeah? Well, so tell me if you can use me or tell me to kick off, but don’t sit there thinking you can dredge through my personal life. It’s nothing to do with you, and no, I don’t think you have a right to ask about it.”
Li and his sister looked at each other with matching startled expressions.
Reever figured he’d thoroughly burned that job interview. Now he’d have to go back and explain to the guys at Asia Branch how it was he’d managed to fail at this despite the fact that they’d apparently highly recommended him. It was going to be embarrassing. Hideously embarrassing. He’d better start thinking up convincing lies now.
“You’re hired,” Li said.
Reever blinked. “You what?”
“There’s a general feeling among the staff that the Black Order owns their souls and all of their secrets.” Li gave a cheerful smile, which was creepy. “You don’t appear to have that problem at all. Congratulations.”
Reever wondered why he’d ever thought he wanted to leave Asia Branch.
“Johnny-Johnny Gill, second floor lab, very helpful new hire-will do your orientation and that. I can’t be bothered. Come see me when you know something and feel useful! In the meantime, my lovely assistant, Lenalee Li, will give you your paperwork and escort you to Johnny!”
Somewhere toward the end, there, Li had switched from frighteningly serious to manic. Reever didn’t like manic any better.
And the sister was acting friendly now, instead of like she was about to slit his throat with a cup shard. “It’s right this way, Mr. Wenham!” she said with what seemed to be genuine goodwill.
These people were freaks. Even among scientists. Even among Order scientists.
Well, whatever.
“Call me Reever,” he said.
* * *
Johnny Gill, now. Johnny was exactly what Reever expected to find dwelling in the back of a windowless lab.
“Hold this for a second, would you?”
Reever looked at the growing collection of bubbling test tubes he was juggling and wondered when, if ever, Johnny would remember that Reever needed an orientation.
Or at least an introduction.
“Okay. Okay, so do you think if we add sodium to this…I mean, will it actually explode, or will it just be exciting?”
“Define ‘exciting,’” Reever said. “Anyway, I’m a physicist, not a chemist. Further to which, will you tell me how toxic this stuff I’m holding is? And what you’re trying to do with it?”
Johnny gazed up at him though coke-bottle glasses and gave a grin devoid of common sense. “Oh, I won’t know what to do with it until I know what it is,” he said.
Reever closed his eyes and felt very, very tired.
When he opened them again, Johnny was frowning in confusion. He pulled his glasses off, cleaned them, replaced them, studied Reever.
“I don’t know you,” he concluded after a moment.
Reever was glad to see that the spirit of scientific inquiry was alive and well.
“Reever Wenham,” he explained. “Li sent me down here for an orientation.”
“Li?” Johnny asked.
Dear God, Reever thought. Please let him know which century this is.
“Komui Li,” he clarified helplessly. “Chief Officer Komui Li.”
“Oh, the Chief!” Johnny exclaimed, much to Reever’s relief. “Gosh, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody call him just Li before. Komui. Chief Komui. Chief. You idiot. Not Li, though.”
This did not make Reever feel better about anything.
“Orientation, huh? Why me?” Johnny wondered aloud. Reever didn’t know either, but he had dark suspicions. “Well, anyway, I guess I’d better tell you what we’re up to…I wonder what you’ll be doing?”
“The job I applied for was research assistant to L-to Chief Komui. Whatever that means.”
“Paperwork until you die, all-nighters in the lab,” Johnny said gloomily. “Same as the rest of us, only more. Poor guy.”
Was it, Reever wondered, at all feasible to run away screaming at this stage?
“Well, the main project right now is, we’re gonna make bullet-proof uniforms!” Johnny said with wild eyes and alarming levels of enthusiasm, pushing a sheet of paper under Reever’s nose. It was covered in lists of chemical formulas, charts, equations, and what appeared to be a sketch of a benzene ring eating planet Earth.
“I hope you’re not just planning to stick to metals,” Reever said. “Because metal armor went out with the Crusades for a reason.”
Johnny peered at the paper in confusion, then shuddered. “No, no, not that. Wrong paper. That’s part of the old Komurin blueprint. Thought I’d burned all that, sorry.”
He went rummaging through the stacks of files with no further explanation. Reever didn’t think he wanted one, anyway.
“This, this!” he said after ten minutes and several paper avalanches. “This is the one! Or, you know, one of the ones. I think there are ten files on it, really, but this is the most up-to-date idea.”
Reever studied the sketches of molecules, the formulas required to get there. This time there was also a sketch of hydrogen atoms doing obscene things to an oxygen atom in the bottom left-hand corner of the page. Apparently the chemists were the problem.
“You’re saying you can actually make this without destroying your lab equipment?” he asked eventually.
“We did once!” Johnny answered with unsullied enthusiasm. “The other times, we melted the lab tables. But, you know. We’ll get it right again sometime!”
Reever studied further.
“What are you doing with all this leftover hydrochloric acid?” he asked.
“Um,” said Johnny.
Reever’s old lab had been made up of people who were bright, dedicated, well-educated-but not brilliant. They made up for lack of brilliance with meticulousness. They had always been very careful and thorough with the good ideas, because they knew they’d never have a flash of sheer genius. Reever had fit in well with them.
This appeared to be a lab full of geniuses, and for the love of God, they needed someone like Reever.
“Show me where,” he said. He was not a chemist. But he had an awful feeling that once he’d finished putting out all the fires, his job description was going to be putting out fires, no matter who’d caused them.
* * *
“Johnny tells me you’re a sensible guy,” Chief Komui said.
Reever’s mind helpfully interpreted this to mean, “From now on, all the crap jobs are yours.”
He’d spent all of the last two days marching into people’s workspaces and demanding to see what disasters they’d created, then putting them right as best he could.
Brilliant, these people were. Yes, geniuses. But only in very, very narrow fields. Tapp, for instance, had very nearly destroyed a year’s worth of research notes through unfortunate placement of a bowl of pea soup.
If Reever had studied for twenty years, he would never have come up with the conclusions in those notes. They had been truly awe-inspiring. And a fat lot of good they would have done anyone once they were covered in pea soup.
So he’d been nosing into other people’s business for 24 hours, and by now, he’d started thinking of it as his right. It was the momentum that made him do it; he didn’t even stop to consider before rummaging through the paperwork on Komui’s desk.
Unpaid bills. Ignored expense reports. Fifteen pages of rabbit sketches. A mountain of unsigned authorizations. Stacks of unopened letters.
“You’re making tiny enraged noises,” Komui noted with interest, holding his coffee cup up between them like a shield.
Reever ignored him.
Under all the administrative stuff, there were several sheets that looked like early notes on Johnny’s bulletproof uniforms. Under those was a folder, and inside the folder, an amazingly neat collection of sketches.
Each sheet had a name, a sketched uniform design, a description of a weapon and a fighting style. Several had comments taped to them. “He’s more comfortable with a hood,” “She’s too skinny for that much bulk,” “Can we make a uniform for the monkey?” “He will STAB YOU, Chief!!!”
“These in any particular order?” Reever asked, starting over at the beginning and reading more carefully.
“Reverse order of arrival,” Komui answered in the serious voice he’d used when they’d first met. “The newest exorcist is on top, the oldest on the bottom. There’s a second copy of the current uniform design for each exorcist in their individual files, and there’s a file devoted to old uniform designs. The hope is that we’ll learn from the past.” He smiled. It didn’t strike Reever as particularly sincere.
Ten exorcists down, there was an unusual sheet. It had a date at the top-last month-just above the name (Catherine Willis). Instead of a uniform sketch, there was a blank silhouette of a person with a red spot on the left thigh. The rest of the information was the same, but in the lower right corner (usually the designated spot for taped comments) there was a block of scribbled text. Reever squinted at it.
“Description of death: Akuma bullet to left thigh. Glancing blow; might have been deflected by sturdier material for trousers. Decision made not to use such material due to Catherine’s need for quick movement. Investigate: variable thickness feasible? Further research: lighter, more durable material.
“Surviving family: younger brother, Andrew Willis. Leeds, England.”
Reever flipped to the next sheet, and the next. The further back he went, the more silhouettes. By the bottom of the stack, almost nothing but silhouettes. One of the last sheets had a very old note in handwriting that didn’t belong to anyone Reever had met in the lab. It said, “This was my fault.”
He made it to the very last page (silhouette) without throwing up, and he was damn proud to have managed it.
Asia Branch didn’t often train exorcists. It collected them, patched them up, passed them on. It was, first and foremost, a research facility. The researchers knew only intellectually that they were trying to save lives.
Here, the researchers watched people they knew die because of their mistakes. Komui might have to watch his sister die because of his mistakes. Reever wondered whether he was really keeping those silhouette sheets to learn from, or if he was just keeping them to punish himself.
He carefully closed the file, took a deep breath, and looked up to meet Komui’s considering gaze.
“Well, Chief,” he said. “At least there’s something you take seriously.”
Komui responded with a disarmingly goofy look of dismay, and Reever felt, obscurely, that he’d just passed some kind of test. “You don’t think I take every bit of my job seriously?” Komui asked, would-be wounded.
Reever brandished a bill. “Five months overdue,” he snapped.
“Maybe God will sort it out,” Komui suggested.
Reever snarled.
* * *
His original plan had been to refuse to get to know any of the exorcists. Getting to know them was stupid; they had an eighty percent turnover rate over the course of ten years. Steering clear was a good plan.
Of course the plan had been shot to hell by the end of the first week, because there was no way to work with Komui without getting to know Lenalee. She was always around, always so cheerful and friendly and helpful that it was easy to forget how terrifying she’d been before she’d decided that Reever was one of hers.
He resigned himself to Lenalee. One exorcist wasn’t so bad, right? How much heartbreak could there be with one exorcist?
What he hadn’t realized was that getting to know Lenalee meant getting to know Kanda-this little, hostile Japanese kid who never spoke except to tell people to fuck off. In practice, though, he was never further than shouting distance from Lenalee.
Reever half expected Komui to have a protective fit about that, but all Komui said was, “Kanda was a brother to Lenalee when I couldn’t be.” And followed it up with an expression of hideous grief that made Reever deeply uncomfortable.
But Lenalee and Kanda, Reever thought, were still safe enough. He could cope with caring about two.
Then, suddenly, there was Cross Marian. Who was drunk and worthless and insane. He showed up abruptly one winter, ransacked the library, woke half the science department in the middle of the night crashing around the lab, and generally made a nuisance of himself until he disappeared even more abruptly a month later.
For reasons he could not explain even to himself, Reever found he was fretting over Cross’s health like a great mother hen. It wasn’t fair.
Next, the Bookmen arrived. It was easy not to get to know Bookman-in fact, he seemed to prefer it that way-but Lavi, you knew whether you wanted to or not. And knowing him meant caring about him. Or maybe Reever was just a soft touch.
Noise Marie was calm and pleasant to be around. Daisya was strangely endearing. Cloudnyne had a dignity Reever couldn’t help but respect. Suman had befriended Johnny, which meant he couldn’t be all bad.
By the end of a year, Reever had completely given up. He was doomed; he accepted it. He was going to end up just as crazy as Komui, reciting the names of his dead before he went to sleep.
He seriously considered asking Komui if the rabbit sketching helped any.
* * *
The consequences of too much caring made their first appearance in the form of increasing numbers of all-nighters in the lab.
One of them had been caused by Toma, the Finder, pointing out some really glaring flaws in the shield designs. Among other things, the way the generators kept getting taken out was unfortunate. Couldn’t they make sturdier generators, Toma wanted to know.
Komui had responded to this by locking a dozen people in the lab indefinitely. Apparently they were going to make sturdier generators or die trying.
“You should use the blue sparkly ones for the energy source,” Johnny murmured.
“Johnny. When was the last time you slept?” Reever asked. He was propping his temples on his palms to read, which, as a bonus, made it hard to close his eyes.
“…Yesterday,” Johnny decided after a long pause.
“What day do you think it is?”
“The sixteenth?”
“No, Johnny. No.” Reever picked himself up enough to put his chin in his hands and look around. “It’s the eighteenth. You slept yesterday two days ago. And now you’re hallucinating.”
Johnny considered that. “I wondered where we’d gotten the blue sparkly ones,” he said finally.
“What were we even doing in the first place?” Tapp asked, sprawled backward over several stacks of files.
“Saving the world,” the Chief answered from underneath a book on chaos theory. “Don’t forget it.”
“Thought you were only here to save Lenalee, Chief,” Reever mumbled because he was too tired to stop himself, then immediately felt guilty because he knew it wasn’t true.
“Same thing,” Komui replied groggily. “Cuz if she dies, I’m taking it all down. Blow up the fucking Vatican. All going down.”
That didn’t sound like something even an exhausted Komui would admit to. Concerned, Reever leaned over and lifted the book off his face. He was asleep. Talking in his sleep. Did that mean he was telling the truth, or just that he was having freaky dreams?
“Who put that fountain there?” Johnny asked, staring curiously at a bookshelf.
“I’m going to bed,” Reever said, standing. “And if you idiots blow up the mountain, at least I’ll never have to pull another all-nighter with you ever again.”
He left. He left, and tried hard not to think about the things an exhausted Komui, unsupervised, might create in a fully stocked lab.
* * *
There was a division within the science department, clear to members, invisible to outsiders. The majority of the department was the rank and file research section. They did fairly normal jobs and worked fairly normal hours. They had the job Reever had thought he was applying for.
Unfortunately for him, he’d somehow managed to make the inner circle.
The inner circle, the handful of scientists the Chief trusted implicitly, were honored by being allowed to slave over near-impossible tasks until ungodly hours of the morning, and when they moved on from that, they had the privilege of filing all the paperwork Komui didn’t want anybody else to know about.
Reever couldn’t figure out how best to express his gratitude. Maybe with explosives.
“This is morally wrong and possibly illegal,” he told Komui, holding up a sheaf of papers on some fairly out-there human experimentation.
“Put it in the locked cabinet under the Genghis Khan biscuit tin. Key’s in the tin,” Komui said, not looking up from the letter he was writing to the Finders in Munich. “Leverrier’s monkeys never look there.”
“I didn’t think Leverrier had a problem with this kind of thing,” Reever said, hunting under stacks of papers for a Genghis Khan biscuit tin.
“He doesn’t. The problem is that he might try to use it himself.”
Then throw it away, Reever thought. Burn it, for fuck’s sake. Why did you research it in the first place?
He didn’t say any of that. The blank stare he’d inevitably get in response would do bad things to his blood pressure.
“Can you read Greek at all?” Komui asked absently.
“What? A little. Ancient better than Modern.”
“Ancient Greek is useless to me,” Komui sing-songed, passing Reever a stack of documents. Reever reined in his Importance of the Classics rant. “Translate these; they’re supposed to be about possible Innocence. Maybe the Oracle of Delphi is working again.”
Reever glanced at the top sheet. “No Oracle. There’s a guy with a talking cow somewhere outside Athens. Chief, who brings you this shit?”
“And this is for you.” A single sheet of paper.
“What is it?” Reever asked warily.
“It’s a promotion,” Komui answered.
“Promotion?” Reever yelped. “I don’t want a promotion!”
“You’re getting a promotion whether you want one or not.”
“Section Chief? What does that even mean? This is just an excuse to make me do more paperwork!”
“Did I need an excuse?”
“Why are you doing this to me?”
Komui adjusted his glasses and looked sternly at Reever. “It’s a compliment,” he said.
“The hell it is.”
“And if I die, I need someone I trust in a position to take care of Lenalee.”
Bastard knew there was nothing Reever could say to that.
Well, almost nothing. “If you die, it’ll probably be in a messy lab accident, and I’m going down right along with you.”
“The lab is perfectly safe,” Komui insisted, affronted.
“Do we have to have the talk about lab safety again? Because actually it’s a disaster and it’s a miracle we haven’t blown ourselves sky-high already.”
“This is why I need you as my second-in-command.”
Reever was aware that Komui thought his incoherent sounds of rage were funny. It wasn’t enough to stop him from making them.
* * *
“65 said the data processing would be finished yesterday,” Reever mentioned with false calm. Worrying about this sort of thing was just one of the many joys his promotion had brought him.
“…Yes, Section Chief,” said Peter, whose job it was to collect data.
“And yet you don’t appear to have the data,” Reever continued.
“Well.” Peter fidgeted. “It isn’t done yet.”
“Why isn’t it done?”
“Uh. 65 says he’s tired.”
“65 is not human,” Reever pointed out, trying hard not to scream at Peter, since this really wasn’t his fault.
“He says….” Peter trailed off, plainly hoping Reever would let him get away with not finishing that sentence.
“What does he say?” Unhappily for Peter, Reever was not in a sympathetic mood.
“…that you don’t understand his pain,” he concluded in a very small voice.
“What?”
“Do you want me to talk to him?” Lenalee asked, appearing like a coffee-bearing angel of mercy at Reever’s side.
“Lenalee,” he said with a sigh of relief. Lenalee always brought sanity with her. It was only a temporary reprieve, true, but it was better than nothing. “Yes. Maybe he’ll think you understand his mechanical pain. D’you know where your brother is?”
“In his office,” she said. Always so well-informed. “But he’s sleeping…”
“You didn’t wake him up for coffee?”
“No, I didn’t bother going to the office. Since he was sleeping.”
This was the only problem with Lenalee visits. Every once in a while, her creepy-sibling-sense would show, and it gave Reever the shivers.
“Right,” he said. No comment was safest. How the hell did you know he was asleep, then? would only lead to a terrifying answer. “I don’t need him awake until I have the data, anyway. So, Peter-”
He turned to discover that Peter had disappeared.
“He’s afraid of you, you know,” Lenalee said, biting her lip against a smile.
Reever scowled. If Peter was so afraid of him, why didn’t he just do his job?
Lenalee laughed at his expression, and leaned over and kissed him on the head. “I’ll go talk to 65 for you,” she said, and wandered off, still snickering.
Reever kept an eye out for Kanda, just on the off-chance, but he didn’t show. His proximity to Lenalee had eased over the years. You still found them in the same wing more often than not, though, whenever they were both home.
Damn exorcists. All of this work was for them, and if Reever had been allowed to really resent them, it would have made the whole situation more bearable. Why did they have to be so easy to love? It ruined everything.
* * *
On the third anniversary of his coming to work in the madhouse, Reever woke up and noticed a test tube of something green and bubbly perched precariously on his bedside table. He didn’t know what it was. He didn’t know how it had gotten there. He didn’t understand how he could possibly have left something like that so close to the place where he slept.
Dear God, he thought. I’m one of them now.
Only three years. It had only taken three years for them to undermine every good habit he had and turn him into just another slavering, sleep-deprived, mad scientist.
This was all the Chief’s fault.
Anniversaries were a good time to brood, so Reever kept on brooding all the way to the dining hall.
He almost never had breakfast anymore; he was making a special anniversary effort. Back in the real world, he’d always had breakfast, because his mother used to insist that it was the most important meal of the day. Here in the madhouse, he usually had about ten cups of coffee instead. He was going to develop an ulcer. He was going to develop an ulcer and name it Komui.
“Happy anniversary!” Johnny sang out, sitting opposite him and pushing a miniature chocolate cake across the table.
Reever blinked. “How did you know about that?” Johnny didn’t reliably know which month it was.
“Uh.” He nervously pushed his glasses up with his fork handle. “Lenalee told me.”
“Oh.” That was all right, then. The world wasn’t ending. Yet.
“Happy anniversary, Reever!” Lenalee herself. “I made brother promise not to get you anything. Or make you anything.”
“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever done for me, Lenalee,” he said with perfect honesty.
“He’s not coming down because he doesn’t believe in mornings,” she told him.
“Believe me, I know.”
Just about everyone else trickled in, though, much to Reever’s amazement. Even Peter, who gave him an apple tart. Not that Reever planned on eating it until he’d tested it for poison. Nothing that would kill him; that wasn’t the right style. Something mild that could be confused with food poisoning, though. He could easily see Peter doing that.
Possibly because he was paranoid, but still.
Speaking of paranoid, Kanda had arrived. It was hard to say whether he knew about the anniversary or not. He scowled at them in passing where other people might have said hello, and made his way to Jerry to demand food.
He looks more like a man every day, Reever thought, then mentally slapped himself. He was not going to get sentimental over Kanda, of all people. Anniversary or no anniversary.
God, three years. It seemed incredible. Three years, and Reever had only lost one exorcist he’d known well, and that hadn’t been his fault. They’d lost more Finders, but Reever hardly knew any of the Finders. His section didn’t work with them much.
He understood that it was only luck. And that it was bound to run out, probably sooner rather than later.
Happy anniversary to me, he thought, and used his coffee cup to toast no one.
Which prompted Johnny to ask if he’d gotten enough sleep. He was going to have to give Johnny a lecture on letting people brood.
* * *
“Chief, you’re sure the kid’s an exorcist?” Peter asked nervously once Lenalee was gone.
“Of course, of course! It’s completely obvious,” Komui said, then took his coffee and wandered off to meet the exorcist, cheery, oblivious, and not helpful at all.
“Right,” Reever said. “Peter.” Peter cringed. “Tell the staff to get a room ready for a new exorcist. 65, refresh your memory on parasites; we haven’t had a new one for a while. Dmitri, go prep the surgery. I think Kanda got him pretty good. Johnny, Tapp, you two need to finish cleaning up the lab before something explodes. I’m going to go warn Hevlaska.”
“And then we can meet him?” Johnny asked hopefully.
“And then we can get back to work,” Reever snapped.
Moans all around.
“All right, enough already,” Reever said, standing. “Let’s get this show on the road.”