True and Clear Utterances
By: SurreptitiousFox245
Disclaimer: I don't own DGM. All rights go to their respective peoples.
Quick Author's Note: I don't know really what got into me with this. I started writing just a freewrite to get over some writer's block, and it ended up being a quickwrite about Lavi? I dunno. Call it a character study type thing if you want. I liked it. Decided to post it.
Meh. Enjoy!
"We were not meant to mask ourselves before our fellow-beings, but to be, through our human forms, true and clear utterances of the spirit within. Since God gave us these bodies, they must have been given us as guides to Him and revealers of Him."
-Lucy Larcom
He remembers when things were simpler.
Well, that's a bit too specific, if he's honest—he remembers everything anymore—but it doesn't fall far from the truth. In the same way that the memories are clear, they're also fuzzy, alien, inane in a way that only time and change can bring. In a way that only seeing the worst the world has to offer plied right up against the best can do, poisoning it with its taint alongside a smile saying it's for the "better good". It never is. He knows this now. Back then he didn't, and it was harder, but time changes all. Or so Bookman says, and so he likes to think.
Does he? A part of him doesn't know anymore. Which part? Eleven? Or maybe Five? Two or Thirty-Seven? Definitely not Forty-Nine—Lavi is the fool who is more than he seems, but that's not for them to know. It's something that goes behind the mask. An element all of his aliases have in common, he figures. Something of him? Something of who he was before? No, he thinks, he wasn't anyone before. Not really. Not like now and not like he ever will be again. A Bookman records, fades, records, fades. He doesn't exist. And if he exists, then he doesn't. If he exists, then he fails.
But he remembers everything, and he remembers when things were cut and dry. When people weren't shells and good wasn't bad and grief was an abstract thing he didn't have to hide. A part of him resents the day Bookman decided he saw something in that stupid little kid as much as he rejoices in it. He remembers when things were simpler, and he remembers the day when that naïveté drained away in a cold wash of anger that left him tasting something bitter like regret and sour like disappointment. He still has the scar, actually, from the day he almost died. From the day he realized that for their petty conflicts and senseless wars, humans will harm anyone in their way. Even if that "anyone" is a little kid, an apprentice to someone not even involved, someone meant to watch and record their stupidity. He was not defenseless then despite only being with Bookman for a year, but they hadn't known that. And they'd been careless with the directions in which they discharged their weapons. What did it matter? It's not like he and Bookman were one of them, right?
It's things like that, the parts that hurt him somewhere behind the masks that he wishes he could forget, those moments that he knows are never going to erase themselves from his memory. A memory honed perhaps too sharp (thanks, Bookman), beyond the point of willful forgetting. Objectivity can only carry one so far, and it's difficult to remain objective with the vivid, picturesque image of a medic standing over him, refusing medical attention to a dying child because that child was not on their side of their righteous war. Bookman was the one to save his life, if only barely, and he supposes that contributes to why he stays despite his doubts, despite the difficulty. He…owes the old man. If nothing else, he has a debt, and if the only way to see it repaid is to become the panda's successor, then so be it.
Apprentice he shall outgrow.
Exorcist he shall cast off.
Comrade he shall forsake.
Bookman he will become.
Bookman he will embrace.
And Bookman he will remain.