notes: Written in February 2010, uploaded for archival purposes. I neither own nor profit from D . Gray-Man—all credit goes to Katsura Hoshino, who needs to start updating more than once every two months. And I still think this could have done well with the title "Lavi and Kanda Go To White Temple".

false limits

The lotus is a bare, dainty ghost at his window. Sunlight filters through the curled petals, red and paling, casting its veins into stark relief. Against those washed-out colors, the studded pad at its heart and the puff of filaments underneath seem unnaturally precise, perfect and so. Kanda knows how the petals will crumple against his training-roughened fingertips if he reaches for it, how the damp sheen could score thin droplets across his nails.

And when he drops his arm, when he turns his head on the way out, the glass will show no reflection of any flower. Another fact to recognize.

Damn it.

"Ladies and gentlemen, it's a staring contest for the ages—Exorcist versus flower, round one! Step right up, we're taking bets!"

In headquarters as large as theirs, it's inevitable that people will spend time in a direction to which Kanda has his back. Equally inexorable is the fact that some of them will not want to stay there. Sometimes, unfortunately, the only way to reconcile that is to travel through space occupied by one Kanda Yuu. Over the years he's spent with the Black Order, Kanda's established something of a compromise: anyone who approaches him from behind makes sure that they're easily heard. In return, he doesn't run them through for sneaking up on him.

Apparently three months hasn't been long enough to drill this message into their latest recruit.

Pride wins out over paranoia. Kanda doesn't deign to turn. "Tch," he says. "Don't tell me this is from you."

The lift of a brow, an eye reflected gleaming. "Thought you'd like it."

In a way, it's a relief. He's not slipping further into insanity. He just has a one-eyed stalker with boundary issues. There's a mantra Lenalee's been reproving him to use in dealing with situations like this. I will not stab him."One word about girliness," Kanda intones without a glance, "and I'll sew your lips shut. Permanently."

"Oh my!" The window reveals the juniormost Bookman in transparencies: fox-grinned, one-eyed and hands clutched over his heart. All the better to mark where he needs to stab—but Kanda suppresses that particular temptation. Since returning from her latest mission, Lenalee seems to have decided that she needs a new task. As such, she's turned to honing her sensitivity, and has developed the ability to sense murderous impulses from up to three floors away. Kanda direly suspects her of spending her spare time talking to the Supervisor about ways to ameliorate his 'little problem'.

Personally, Kanda doesn't see the problem at all. He's never had trouble talking through his feelings. It's everyone else who has an issue with listening to running diatribes about which useless half of Headquarters needs to be sliced into bits, and why. Nor can he be blamed for Lenalee's misinterpretation—but it will be his problem if she convinces Komui to build some kind of crazed therapy robot.

For that reason, if no other, he decides, the Bookman can live. Today.

"I'll count to three," he says.

His charity is lost on his distinctly unwanted companion, who doesn't budge an inch. "I'm getting warnings now?" He makes some sort of noise that curdles Kanda's guts on instinct. It looks as if the idiot needs his own hammer to beat him before he gets a clue. "Aw, be gentle with me, it's my first time!"

I will not stab him, Kanda thinks, scraping the words together into a rhythm. I will not stab him. I will not stab him—

He pauses, and Kanda can feel his gaze sweep the room: the cheap, cracked walls, the skinny cot, the weird impressions hung on the walls, the closet sealed shut. It can't be anything he hasn't seen before. Every Exorcist lives in the same conditions. If he looked at the Bookman's room, Kanda imagines that he would find much the same thing. Maybe there'd be a couple tokens scattered about the nightstand for show, but it would be the same bare sheets, the same creaky wooden slats, the same yellowing expanse arrowing towards the closed door—

—more than twice.

He cuts down the words. Stalks-With-Eyepatch hasn't made any move to step inside, which is progress. In return, Kanda doesn't slice off the two and a half toes he can feel grazing past the threshold. As far as he's concerned, this is a generous arrangement.

"Leave," he says, but the Bookman breezes over him as if he hasn't heard. Kanda still hasn't ruled out the hopeful speculation that whatever took his eye also plunged partway through his skull and took out part of his brain and eardrum. The injury would go some way towards explaining so much.

"'Sides," he adds, draped on the doorway like some ridiculous new ornament, "you don't look like you'd be that interested in needlework."

The only reply Kanda has to this is to half-turn, Mugen's sheath a soft gleam in his grip. He doesn't even have to draw.

The Bookman's nervous laughter resounds, stirring the petals. "Pretty sure that wouldn't fit."

"I can makeit fit," says Kanda, and watches with no small satisfaction as his stalker makes a hasty retreat.

Then he fetches a bowl for the lotus, fills it with clear water and lays it in the sunlight fading on the sill. The bloom lingers for weeks. When it begins to wither, Kanda sets it aside to dry and at last places its papery shadow in a box he keeps in the corner of his closet. The dried petals rustle as he stirs them to make room for the new one. He stares down at their blossoms, a decade of illusions made real, before slamming the lid and latching it shut.

Everyone in the Order carries their fair share of corpses. It's meaningless to make something out of the fact that his aren't human.

He should be less surprised when his next assignment with a partner's name attached. The Exorcist ranks are thin enough, barely hedging double-digits, if that. If badly-handled, news of a death can take weeks to reach the Order, and they haven't the time to spare. Efficiency above all.

Komui gives him the news alone, possibly out of a warped sympathy born from long familiarity, more likely because he knows that Kanda would skewer the Bookman if he were in the room. Not that his absence is stopping Kanda from pondering the option at all. The nice thing about the Black Order is that belief in saving humanity is often accompanied by belief in human rights like freedom of information.

This means that Kanda knows where he sleeps.

"Now, now," Komui lectures, and it's all very hard to take the effective sovereign of the Black Order seriously when he's wearing slippers and clutching a bunny mug as if it's his sole lifeline. "Lavi will be—"

Kanda narrows his eyes. I must not stab the Supervisor. Perhaps he's got an assistant he won't miss too much… "I hear he's been making time with Lenalee," he grinds out in desperation.

Komui stills. His mouth gapes open in a brilliant, glassy smile. Everyone in the room hits the ground as their Supervisor fires up the drill and prepares a death march.

Then Reever smacks him in the head with a heavy tome.

"Sorry," he tells Kanda as he and two assistants physically restrain their Supervisor. "You're not getting out of this one. Better deal with it." He tosses the book onto the desk, and they cart Komui from the room while Kanda's snarling, presumably to lock him up with a stack of paperwork.

The desk's shudders underneath his grip. Kanda stalks out before he snaps Komui's workstation in half. The chatter outside diminishes to hushed embers as he strides down the hall, trying to remember why it's worth listening to Lenalee in the first place. Sure, she might be a little displeased if news of a decapitation gets to her, but Lenalee is nothing if not understanding. So she can understand that some people just deserve what they get.

"Hey, hey! Yuu!"

—including her brother.

That bastard. He warned Lavi first.

The Bookman ambles up, all guileless smiles and charm—less as if he hasn't noticed the tic beginning in Kanda's eyelid and more as if he's enjoyingit. "Looks like me and you are working together on this—hey, where're you going?"

"To prepare a dead body," Kanda snaps. He pivots on his heel in a random direction and nearly walks into a wall. By the time he orients himself, Lavi has managed to attach himself to Kanda's shadow.

"Whoa," he says from a little ways behind. "That's moving kinda fast. And on our first mission together! But I've got to tell you now—I'm not really into that."

At the stairwell, he whirls. Lavi's expression is flippant, affectionately so, and Kanda feels the bile start in his throat, layers of skin eaten away from the acid he's biting back. The bastard has the indecency to look comfortable in the uniform, a headband drooping over one eye in cocky minimalism as if it's some impoverished dandy's outfit. There's even the ghost of a lotus perched on his shoulder, glossed down to lush pristine lines, and the idiot swaggers as if he can feel its hold. Kanda's seen the way Lavi fights—no one could believe this slapdash nonchalance is all there is to him.

The fact that even Kanda can tell only scrubs salt in the injury that is Lavi's general existence.

"Shut up," he says. "You, a corpse—it's all the same dead weight to me." He sets off down the steps before anyone else decides to pin their crazy burdens on him.

Halfway through the Order, his feet snag on unfamiliar stones. With a shock, he realizes that this isn't the way to his room. A glare maps out his intended steps, and he recognizes the spiral towards Noise Marie's quarters. A stupid homing instinct that he can't quite seem to outgrow. Nevertheless, Kanda strides away from it—heading back to his own quarters.

Marie isn't in. Kanda knows that, has known it for months, eating soba by himself and ignoring the rising chatter of Finders in the halls, trying not to think about what it means that the Exorcists' Order is so empty of actual Exorcists. True or not, the realization is useless. They do what they can. Marie and Daisya have their separate missions in scouting out Akuma, and the General's off somewhere in the world, ostensibly to scout out Innocence, but more likely sketching or wandering through a bazaar buying another set of truly outrageous cardigans for 'his boys'.

Not that any of them would be of any use even if they were at Headquarters, with Tiedoll's incongruous philosophy about fragile things like mercy and sparing people's lives.

Frailties have no place in a war. Those who can't fight should get the hell out of the way.

Kanda tolerates Finders because someone has to do the groundwork. But the best way to accomplish a mission is to do it alone. In images, it's a simple setting: people scattered into obstacles and hostages, the sky hollow and aching blue, Innocence descending like an angel to wreak white havoc on everything. He doesn't see the point in pretending that the Exorcists are saving anything. All they can afford is destroy what's coming before it overwhelms them. There's no glory in that.

He returns to a dimmed room with the curtains drawn back, the last of the daylight stroking along the floor. Kanda strides to the window, watches the darkening wind whip the forest into madness. The bowl is still sitting on the mantel, inches from his fingertips. Kanda glares at the empty water, the floating wilted scraps. He turns away.

Then something occurs to him. How the hell had that bastard—

"—found out?"

The Bookman's shrug is delicate. There's a scarf wound about his throat today, so vividly green that the damned leaves would darken with envy. It's as gaudy a target as the pin fixed to his coat, and twice as meaningless. Trust Lavi to find something so inane to wear for a mission. His eye slides towards their third companion, and Kanda follows his gaze. In the corner, the older Bookman's breathing hitches as the buggy jolts, then evens out again in slumber.

Conspiratorially, Lavi adds: "Just one of those things, I guess! You know how rumors get around."

"It's not one of those things," Kanda says evenly, resisting the urge to maim him for being a bad liar. Come to think of it, I must not stab is a slight restriction. After all, Kanda knows plenty of things that don't fall under stabbing: goring, amputating, gouging… Furtively, he glances back at the retreating shape of Headquarters in case a tiny dark-haired girl appears at the gate, fists on her hips and boots locked onto her heels to prepare her to fly. If nothing else, Kanda is certain of this much: there is nowhere he can run on Earth where Lenalee will not hunt him down, lace her fingers in disappointment and kick him into painstaking remorse. He resettles Mugen across his knees, palming the hilt. "They don't talk about me."

"And why is that?"

Respect. Self-preservation. Lack of interest. Does it really make a difference? They're a factory turning out whittled soldiers forged to murder. What Kanda keepshas no bearing.

"Easy, easy," Lavi flaps his fingers without looking back, busy watching the world go by. Kanda doesn't see why he bothers. It's not as if they haven't seen the surrounding countryside before. The damn Bookman's probably counted every twig and bud on the trees by now. Twice."I was talking to a couple Finders. They mentioned hearing you mutter about lotuses a couple of times. One of the Asia branch transfers got a package from home with seeds. The Science Department's working on preserving packages, and they wanted an unusual flower to work with. They came up with a couple spares."

"The day I want someone's leavings, I'll beg at their heels myself."

His laughter rattles the carriage, easy in the day. "Hey, there's no conspiracy. Just figured it might be nice for you."

There he goes again. Kanda ratchets up his glower to a glare. "You some kind of—idiot stalker?"

In turn, Lavi glances from the buggy window, still leaning on the edge. Daylight threads his grins with ivory and gold, wreathes his face in a mask of stars. Warmth is only human,Kanda remembers Tiedoll saying—but so is lying, and that comes twice as easy.

"Maybe I just like you," Lavi says.

Kanda ignores him for the rest of the journey.

India is parched and hot, the landscape caught between shadows and fierce golds. Their mission draws them to a city of filigreed towers capped in domes and carvings, where the English aren't quite as thick on the ground and the natives trust in prayer, reincarnation, sitting gods with slow, curving limbs. Pale robes haunt the streets, tented by stick-framed men and women wrapped in colorful thin scarves. Past the city limits, civilization gives way to huts and dry earth, with ivory temples rising in the distance, engraved and ornate with faith. On a hunch, Lavi drags them all to the nearest temple, and Kanda spends the day watching two Bookmen flutter from statue to statue as white blossoms linger and furl in the still pools nearby.

Everything in this country sets him on edge: its peeling gilded idols, the water-flowers, its placid religion, the sense of overwhelming karma. Every action is weighed in its performance, every kindness thick with ulterior motives.

It's typical of Lavi to take to it all. He's enchanted from the heartbeat that the boat moors on the docks: with the weather, the stinging-hot food, the gaggle he interviews from day to day. The last is all dark and lithe and young, most of them extremely female beneath their veils. The only advantage Kanda's noticed to this country is that Lavi seems to have taken the hint. Or perhaps he's just learned that they both have better things to do. Kanda puts stock in neither theory. He hasn't built up the, hah, karma for that kind of mercy from the universe.

Attacks come sluggishly and strike at random. Their incidents are notable only through how deeply they've taken root in the country before news of them reached Headquarters. As far as Kanda can tell, this has less to do with the Earl's influence than the state itself: sudden deaths are nothing strange to a country already invaded by foreigners. The land's blood is its populace, and the body is running dry.

As Bookman and Lavi whittle away at the country's collective consciousness, Kanda exhausts his days in sword drills behind the inn, fighting the aching red heat and every frustration that's cropped up in the past five months. It's a waste of time. How Komui was ever persuaded to disperse Order funds on this journey is beyond him. Kanda would favor the theory that years of coffee have finally taken their toll and caffeine poisoning is manifesting in the form of sanity loss if he didn't think that Lenalee would cry. The Order's a distant thought, but not distant enough: he wears their mark, their imprint tattooed on him anew with every time the skin knits together and his bones soften into its same, familiar cage. Again and again, he breaks down his limits. He works skin to blisters and blisters to calluses, and thins the skin down again to blood. Somewhere in the world, there's a reproach draggingon the General's tongue, but Kanda's far enough away to escape everything but the possibility of regretting the risk. He can afford a little disgrace.

In evenings, he wanders crowded roads, the Exorcist's cross polished and pinned over his chest like a target as he waits for an Akuma's challenge. He slices his footfalls into the dust again and again, winding a path that trails farther each time. Nothing answers the challenge. Murmurs of life after death linger in every corner, and how the hell can they find the Earl's demon frame in a country which takes his promises for fact?

Lavi still calls to him whenever they pass by in the same space, but his pursuit's died off into casual waves and baiting comments at mealtimes. His attention's drifted elsewhere. After the first two weeks, the Finders are terrified to drop more than two syllables at a time in Kanda's presence. Into their second month, he wrecks a children's toy stand in search of a promise, a whisper, the barest hint of a deadly wonder. Anything. It leaves no lasting mark on the city; two weeks later, when he passes, the merchant has vanished, possibly erased by soothing Bookman words and Black Order funds—Kanda never learns his fate. Bookman's watchfulness is the only constant, and the old man never says a word, which isn't bait enough. The city grows on him into something stark and known: after a time, even the clay-skinned children skipping stones and games in the fields begin to seem familiar.

Only the temple keeps him at bay. Lotuses are profuse enough in the countryside, or underneath his heel. He can't be bothered with ones whose existence is a charade, who taunt him by withering and blooming in seasons.

Naturally, the Akuma turns out to be one of the temple caretakers.

It's Lavi's discovery, charmed out of the broken mouth of the woman's son. How his mother's thick arms wasted to skeletal weeds and her eyes rolled huge and dark as marbles in her skull. How she claimed that, as in the stories, she would not eat mortal substance but feast on greater things. How she paced the lustrous temple halls each night, fretting in the moonlight until her feet dragged and bled. Kanda's less concerned with the story than the fact that Lavi seems to have let himself go since their arrival. The ensuing battle with the Akuma nearly wrecks half the building, and still Lavi prolongs the battle with soothing flirtations for the boy's sister standing by. He seems almost disappointed when Kanda cuts the Akuma down before he reaches his best lines.

After the Akuma disperses to ash, Kanda leaves the temple at a dead stride. Lotuses ripple through the water in his wake, and he doesn't pause to see whether they're anything like to real.

"Tell your idiot to get a grip on himself," he barks at Bookman as he bursts into their room. "We leave at dawn."

Bookman levels him with a look that Kanda almost recognizes. It's a look that Lavi nearly wears sometimes, between all his smiles. On Bookman's wrinkled features, it's less of a lie, and Kanda feels his breaths settle into an old current. It's no promise, only fact; it's a crow-eyed look that says that if Kanda falls in the war, Bookman will not forget his mark or his status. Someone will carry his name out of the battle, alive. That's his purpose.

"He knows," Bookman says.

Report. Recuperate. Return to limbo.

Kanda only bothers with the first. The rest is unneeded, though it'll be some time before his body adjusts to the change in hours again. He keeps waking in a stir to the scent of lotuses, petals grazing his fingertips, skies raw and open and a dead woman's whisper coiling into his mouth. Ten years, and the vision lingers. Shut up, he wants to say, but even the ghost has exhausted itself out of his dreams. Instead of talking to himself, he snatches Mugen and heads down to the training grounds in the dark.

Lavi tracks him there by his fourth day. He hears the footsteps coming and briefly ponders Mugen's possibilities as a javelin before deciding it's not worth the trouble. The blade has years of execution left in the metal, and that man in the Asian branch would complain if he damaged it.

"Still mad about India?"

Kanda snaps out a towel. "If you're going to use up the air in this place," he says, slinging it around his neck, "don't waste my time."

It's not a challenge he expects Lavi to take. But Lavi grins and falls into an easy stance. "Might as well see if I've learned anything—" he starts, and Kanda thinks that it's warning enough that he bothered to set the conditions. He sheathes Mugen and leans it against the railing. Then he's up and lunging, and it needs all Lavi's reflexes to dodge.

He's smug, which makes him slow.

Kanda isn't smug. Nor is he in the mood for mercy.

He breaks out a volley of punches, culminating in a kick at an unlucky angle. The Bookman barely sees it coming. He takes it in the side and staggers, wheezing but not out of commission. Not as good as the old man, who moves like a hunting snake, but still prepared to keep up—at least until Kanda follows it with a jab he can't dodge. He doesn't mean it to be kind and it isn't: he can see from the way Lavi moves that it's cracked something vital.

"I hate idiots who pretend," he grinds out. Any reply the Bookman wants to make lapses into feints and reeling breaths. It can't be the first bone he's broken, but that won't make the pain any easier. It's an advantage Kanda's willing to seize. "You know we're not friends. Don't bother faking again just because we're here."

For a few minutes they fight without speaking, dodging and deflecting in level patterns.

Then Lavi jumps back, mopping sweat out of his eyes. "You really think that?" His smile has wavered down to the thinnest edge, light and steady. It's no question, and Kanda has no answer.

They trade strikes again, Lavi always lagging a pulse or two behind, circle each other and try once more. The air's tangled in weariness and caution, making the Bookman a quick read. He can't compare to Kanda for speed or endurance, which Kanda knows because he's compared them. The only way left to go is—

A pebble crunches and skids underneath his heel. It's a momentary gap in Kanda's guard, a slip that's barely a pace out of place. He sees it in the same instant he catches the Bookman's eye flashing to the same spot—as if he's maneuvered for this, as if it's been strategized. Then Lavi's stepping in, fists swinging up. Before Kanda can recover, he manages to get three punches in: chest, throat, jaw. Each snaps past his defenses, and Kanda hears the gritty crack of bone. Pain blares through his skull, a bolt of agony that strips his vision white. The fourth shot rolls out in a blur, but Kanda stamps his foot down, scrapes it against the scratched cavern floor and thrusts up his arm. He blocks.

The impact shocks through them both, arm against wrist, but they hold. For a moment, the training grounds are empty of anything but the sound of panting. Kanda glares away the sweat. Acid rolls through bone and tendon. He clenches his teeth against the ache and feels the scene scrape together. Lavi's aimed a coarse blow turning upward with the heel of the hand curved towards the temple.

Kanda knows enough about hand-to-hand fighting to recognize the purpose behind that.

His elbow gives a vicious jerk, dislodging Lavi's. Lavi drops from his stance, all killing intent gone between one rabbiting heartbeat and the next. Sweat slicks the Bookman's hair into spikes. Red spatters the corner of his mouth—which curls up again.

"Now that'sjust hurtful, Yuu," he says. He stretches out to his fingertips, works the cricks out of his neck and exhales in relief. Then, with a leisurely gesture, he saunters off.

Kanda watches him take the steps two by two. His tongue's plated too thick to speak. After a moment, he swallows down the copper taste and scrubs the sweat from his face. Already, he can feel his cheek thickening, a bruise that will bloom and fade within the next few hours. Deliberately, he works his jaw, ignoring the blind spasm until he nearly stalks into the railing. It will fade. Nothing lasts on this damned, puppeted skin.

There's no use in speculating about the hollow lights in the Bookman's eye, that slight hesitation in tone. Kanda quashes the image again and again as he hits each step, ascending in larger, staggered strides without touching the wall. No one won this one.

It doesn't matter if Lavi had been telling the truth. Kanda said it first: they aren't friends. Nothing close.

What Kanda hates isn't Lavi. It's everything that Lavi stands for: each damned lie he sings out, all the little hearts and civilian flirtations on missions, his surgical eye and sound hold on the hammer. How he seems to forget at times that slaughter is their first priority, like they've anything else in life to hang onto. The first morning he'd sauntered into Headquarters, a hammer slung on his shoulder and an easy greeting of "Yuu!" Kanda had the measure of him before the rest of the Order ever received that gawky fool's salute: gauged him by a blade's length, his throat a few times the span of Mugen's tip. It's all in the gestures. Lavi put his arms up then, but his stiff shock hung easy on his jaw. He forgot to tremble.

Bookman.

The problem, of course, is this: what Lavi stands for has nothing to do with what he is. What Kanda hates is a shape in the air, a slippery clever laugh, a bloody shock of hair. He wants to beat and slice something that, tomorrow, may have never been.

Lavi is a construct built up by false footsteps and wooden gestures. And yet there's something real: in his voice, the way he's the fastest to memorize the headquarters layout, how he looks when the Finders trudge in filthy and injured—as if he's keeping count of every stitch, blade and limb lost for the cause somewhere inside his scrubby head. Of course it wouldn't be enough for the bastard that he lies—he can't even be bothered to keep his falsehoods constant.

Kanda hates that most.

A few weeks later, there's another lotus on his windowsill.

This time, Kanda doesn't wait for Lavi to come to him. Instead, the Bookman returns from dinner to find him waiting in the middle of his room.

"You're an idiot," Kanda says as soon as Lavi steps inside, and once he starts, he can't stop the words from building on top of each other, everything held back during the Indian mission and more. Loathing reeks of iron between his teeth, and he exhales until all the air feels like a single bitter hiss. "You're a slack-jawed fool who doesn't know anything about how to behave on missions, and you snore, and you ate more soba than you needed at that stand in India—don't think I didn't notice—and you meddle in business that's nothing to do with you because you don't have the brains to fill an eggshell, and how the hell that old man puts up with you is beyond me."

Silence. Lavi's expression is wry, unfazed. He pushes up his headband, taps a finger against his cheek and crosses the room. Kanda doesn't miss how easy his movements are as he skirts around him, careful to make no contact on his way to his cot. He could nearly miss the slight favoring of one side, the faint wince creasing brow and jaw. If he hadn't known—but he does now, and it's an advantage he can't forsake. "That all?" he says.

Kanda weighs the rebuff against his heavy breaths and Lenalee's presence, now barely a few levels away again. He should have run Lavi through in India when he'd had the chance. "From now on," he says levelly, "I'll cut a tooth out of your mouth for the petal on every flower you give me."

With an exaggerated sigh, Lavi sprawls on the bed. "Fair enough."

"Shut the hell—" Kanda's retort stutters off the rails. This isn't quite the comeback he imagined. "What?"

The Bookman's getting better at it—Kanda can barely see the tension stringing his nerves, ready to jerk him up and towards the door if someone decides to, say, rid Lavi of one of those unnecessary limbs. Lenalee, his self-preservative instincts remind him, and he unwraps his fingers from Mugen's hilt.

"All you ever had to do was ask nicely," Lavi's telling the ceiling in a smug lilt. "No favor too big for a comrade, right?"

Kanda opens his mouth. Kanda closes his mouth. "Tch," he mutters, and stalks towards the door.

"Oh my," comes the reply after a beat, before he's quite made it into the hall. "you didn't deny it! That's a first. You sure know the way to a guy's heart, Yuu."

He pauses at the frame, a hand stopped above the wood. Trust a Bookman not to miss the details. "Underneath the ribs, up through the guts," he growls back instead, and fixes what little he can see of Lavi at this angle with a skewering look. "Any idiot knows that. And one more thing."

"Yeah?"

"Don't call me that, you bastard."

Lavi laughs. "Will do," he says, and salutes without sitting up as Kanda takes his leave, slamming the door behind him. And if Kanda knows that he's lying—well, this time, at least, he knows that Lavi means him to.

Outside, he covers the ground in brusque steps, cuts through a scatter of lotuses and never treads on one wraith-like petal.

They know what they are, now. In a way, it's fighting on even ground.

He changes the old lotus's stale water for a new bowl. When it wilts, he will pluck the seeds from the pad and plant them in a bag to keep. There's an old, unused pond a little ways from headquarters, far from Bookman questions and Orderly snooping. It'll do.

Around him, the lotuses are luminous and growing. But he has seeds, and the promise of sky. Sometime in the coming days, Kanda knows, it will be spring. He can keep the time.