Why? 1) Because I wanted to and 2) Because I need five stories up before I can be a beta for my friend!
so... Deal a moment, 'kay?
This was written a while back... no certain time, just enjoy!
I dunt own anything, not DGM, and not Rumpelstiltskin, nor anything else.
...
FLOWERS
Allen slowly climbed the steepest hill in the graveyard. It was a familiar hill, and Allen had memorized every stone, every hole and ditch, every rut and blade of grass on it. Still, he took his time reaching the top, making sure he was out of breath by the time he made it. He wanted to be tired when he went back down, he wanted to be able to fall into a bed and have sleep take him instantly. No tossing or turning or cups of hot milk, he just wanted to fade into a dreamless sleep when this was over.
The hill held one of his greatest secrets—and pains. The faintest sounds of carols drifted up from the church far below. Christmas Eve, and still, snow did not fall up here. Snow had never touched this hilltop, never once, never to be. A gnarled tree with twisted branches bent above a tattered black gravestone bearing 'Mana Walker' in big, white letters. Allen swallowed hard and fidgeted with the bouquet of black roses he had brought.
No leaves crunched as someone approached behind him, for there were no leaves to crunch. The stranger approached, but Allen did not stir.
"What are you doing here, son?" the stranger asked. Turning around, Allen saw it was a priest from the church in the village. "Are you a member of the Black Clergy?" the priest asked when he saw the crest on Allen's chest. Allen nodded. "Please, Sir Exorcist, there have been disappearances lately, we fear demons are behind it, will you please help us?" The priest gasped.
Allen sighed, "Of course, sir..." he said quietly.
"Is there something wrong, sir exorcist?"
Allen shook his head and smiled sadly and looked up to the gnarled branches of the old, tried, tree, and the white crescent moon, already posed in the red sky as the sun set ever so slowly. "No, it's just this place..." The priest nodded in agreement.
"No one has come up here since this grave was put up I'm told..." The priest said.
Allen gave a sad laugh, "This is my father's grave..."
The priest gave a little gasp. "Tomorrow's the birthday he gave me too..." He set the flowers down in front of the grave. "He kept me alive, and so I return my promise to him... I'm still going, and he knows that..." Allen sighed a little and turned around, as he began the long climb down the hill.
The priest looked at the flowers the boy— black clergyman— had lain on the grave. "Black roses?"
The voice of the boy answered his unspoken question, "Neither of us ever really liked anything to be too bright."
STORIES
The Bookman's apprentice rummaged through the overcrowded bookcases, trying to find the perfect book to read. Words were very important to him, especially titles. The way he saw it, if something's title was good enough, if effected everything else about the book. The same with people, right? If a person you meet happens to have the name of the person you hate, then you're less likely to become friends with them, right? The other way around if it happens to be the name of your childhood friend.
Titles... names... they were the real means of identification in the world. He didn't want to be going around being called 'the Bookman's Apprentice'. It was just a title he wasn't exactly... dispositioned to, if he were to make up his own word.
He wanted to either be the Bookman, or Lavi. 'Lavi' was his forty-ninth alias. What was so hard about being the 'forty-ninth'? Suddenly, the apprentice wanted to be 'Lavi', not 'Bookman'. Only Lavi. The apprentice got the feeling that if he were to just leave 'Lavi' so quickly, he would never be quite right.
He eventually pulled out the book of fairy tales from the Three Brothers Grimm. Flipping through the pages, he found the perfect story to satisfy his current name craze. Rumpelstiltskin had always been one of his favorites. He especially loved the part where the little man ripped himself into because the princess guessed his name right.
Yes yes, he found that funny. He found lots of things funny, or to use a better word, entertaining. Very little was actually funny. The apprentice wondered what would happen if someone actually found out his real name... would he act as the elf-man did, and tear himself in half? Would he just shrug it off and accept his name, then try to explain why he never used it? Or would he try and deny his name, let the guilt consume him, but save himself a lot of trouble and at the same time, gain the Bookman's respect?
While reading, he found himself think a lot about names. Though the story was actually quite short, he didn't mind going so slowly his eyes barely seemed to move. It left him plenty of time to think.
Kanda hated his first name, the apprentice didn't know why. It was one of the many things that Kanda wouldn't tell him. He had managed to get many interesting topics out of Kanda during his time in the clergy, but he had never gotten that bit of information out of him. All he could guess was it was a matter of Japanese custom.
Allen, however, would become angry whenever he was called anything but his name. His name was very important to him for reasons Lavi could only guess at. He supposed it had to do with all the other titles Allen had been given lately. 'Destroyer Of Time', 'The Musician', but even before those titles had been given to him, he had gotten angry over being called 'Beansprout'. All the apprentice could assume was that something about Allen's name was important to Allen. The poor kid got attached to everything.
The apprentice even started questioning the higher names and titles. Really, the Greeks called their higher beings Gods. 'God' was just a title, right? The same went for 'Lord', right? The apprentice got the sudden chilling feeling he was about to be struck down by something and returned to his story.
DANCE SHOES
Lenalee twirled around the floor. Sliding her feet, bending into a crouch then springing up. Land silently, and immediately return to the rhythm. She knew this was an improper use of her innocence, dancing, but how light her feet always felt when she danced. It wasn't like fighting or even walking around, when she had such a heavy weight, pulling her to the ground the whole time. The innocence on her feet actually seemed to purr in approval. Dancing was her escape.
Lenalee had always loved dancing. Somehow, she got the feeling that her name was somehow tied to this... Lenalee. Her brother always said it was such a graceful name, it seemed to dance on the tongue. It made Lenalee happy to hear her brother liked her name so much. Whenever he would praise her, she would smile and ask her brother if he wanted her to dance too.
Lenalee was always good at dancing too. If you gave her music, she could dance to it. At a young age, she had become such a beautiful dancer, that her parents had actually refused to bind her feet. They were so proud of Lenalee's dancing, they denied even Chinese custom, and Lenalee kept her perfect feet.
'She will hate you for making her ugly' the neighbors would say, but that didn't matter to her parents. They knew if they raised Lenalee with enough love and care, she wouldn't hate them for not binding her feet. And Lenalee didn't hate them. She loved her parents until the very last moments of their lives, and she still loved them, but she wouldn't be tied down by the past. She and Allen had made similar decisions. Neither of them would be tied down because of the death of a loved one, instead, they would fight even harder to protect the ones that were still there. Maybe that was why she liked Allen so much.
Lenalee smiled and began to twirl again. It was strange dancing with short hair, but it didn't feel bad. Just different.
With long hair, dancing was wild. Irrational, but still graceful. As you turned your hair would whip and sting your face, and when you jumped, everything would suddenly fall away all at once, leaving you to float down to earth on your own. The perfect balance of fury and finesse. Almost like fire.
But with short hair, there was no balance to maintain. The air was with you all the time, flitting around you, behind your neck and on your cheeks. Closed eyelids were only closed to protect form wind, not hair. Lenalee loved her hair. It didn't matter how it ended up, she wasn't going to lose to this war.
Dancing was how she would fight back. Dancing on clouds and Boots made of steel. She had named some of her attacks after dances to make this point clearer. She would not fight with brute force, but with grace and finesse, she would cause barely a ripple on water, and we all know that even ripples grow large and effect all. No hail of stones into the pond for a chaotic symphony, but rather dip the point of her shoes in, just to upset the balance a little.
A final leap sent her several feet into the air. With inhuman grace, the butterfly turned in midair and landed on one foot. On point. Perfectly silent. And that was not her Innocence's doing.
SKELETONS
Kanda swung Mugen once again, over and over, keep the rhythm, it's a dance. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, keep, going, just-once, more... He kept shifting his footing, left in front, then pulled to the back, right crossing over, then pulling back.
Kanda had never been good with a sword until about age twelve. At that age though, he still wasn't the one you would ask for pointers, actually, people would often correct his positioning, hands, and still he wasn't but so good. He remembered his first mission, when he had killed a level one Akuma for the first time.. at that point, he had still been the type to steal sake from Jerry's private store. About that time, Lenalee was still under observation. Still thought insane, so Kanda had been the only person of his age in the whole order.
When Kanda first entered the Order, it would still be a year before Komui appeared and saved Lenalee, and three years before Lavi came onto the scene. Five before the dreaded Beansprout, who was probably still in the sewers at the time. Many of the older personnel thought it foolish to have a child as inexperienced and illiterate (Kanda was Japanese, in case no one had noticed! It was a completely different language!), not only that, but even then, Kanda had been positively rebellious, as any self-respecting preteen should have been, and still, no one seemed to see that he was struggling. Slowly, Kanda grew colder and colder. By thirteen and eight months, he had begun threatening people with Mugen, but whenever he did, they all just laughed, because they all knew that he was a failure.
Kanda gave the nearest poor punching bag a long and powerful swipe with Mugen's sharp edge. It was instantly sliced open and utterly mutilated to save for any other comment.
Once Komui had come, amazingly enough, things had gotten better. Lenalee appeared, and she was nicer than anyone else, perhaps because of the age similarity, or because she felt a little useless as well, or because they were both of Asian decent and still learning English, or maybe just because she wanted a friend and she didn't care if he was a bad exorcist as far as exorcists went. He and Lenalee practiced together continuously, amazingly enough, they both improved together at a startling rate. It could have been because sword fighting was like a dance.
The people who use to tease him about being a bad exorcist slowly left, and though Kanda felt guilty admitting it (partly because Lenalee mourned them), he was a little happy they were no longer there to tease them, whether about being bad at fighting so long ago or having—as they called it—a kiddie-crush on Lenalee.
Later, Lavi came. Despite how Kanda tried to deny it, he was happy to see someone around his age. A boy no less. Kanda had opened up to Lenalee, and he had found his first friend in her, but there were some parts of the teenage-boy mind that a girl couldn't help them with. Slowly, Lavi had opened up to Kanda as well, and though he was supposed to be happy-go-lucky, Kanda may have been the first to realize that he wasn't all he seemed to be.
Then the Beansprout had come... unlike the others, there was something that continuously irked him about the younger exorcist. He had learned that the Beansprout was cursed, that knowledge spread quickly throughout the Order. It was amazing how much faster the gossip chain went compared to warnings/orders/mandatory knowledge/etc. And still, Kanda didn't really know what made Allen so strange. Kanda had even seen Allen's curse in Matter, apparently, he could identify Akuma. Still, Kanda couldn't place what made him so envious almost, of Allen.
Yes, Yuu Kanda, felt envious of Allen Walker. It was the little twittering voice in the back of his head that kept saying 'Walker can stand something you cant' and it annoyed Kanda to no end. Perhaps he would've been able to understand once he found out what Allen could do that he couldn't. He confided in Lavi when Allen had gone with Lanalee to the rewinding town.
Lavi had gone with Allen to Krory's castle and seen his curse firsthand. After calling Komui, he had immediately called Kanda once on the train. Allen's curse had upgraded and he could now let others see what he saw.
What Lavi described made Kanda's stomach churn. Not because he felt overwhelming pity for Allen—he did pity Allen, seeing what he saw, but Kanda heard Lavi snicker on the other side of the line.
Curse him for ever discovering Yuu-chan was afraid of ghosts.
ANALYSIS FROM AKKY (rhyme not intended)
first of all, I must say, when I was writing Lavi, I really did get a little chill like a bolt of lightning was going to strike me down at any moment... .; shudder
we all know that all the DGM characters we know and love seem to have their own colors so here's a list of what I think all their colors are:
Allen – Gray (duh)
Lavi – Orange (duh again)
Lenalee – Green (bigger duh)
Kanda – Dark Blue (you're an idiot if you didn't see that coming)
Bak – Yellow
Fou – Pink
Komui – Faded Blue
Bookman – Plad (lol)
Miranda – Darker-blueish (speckled)
Krory – Tawney
Cross – Misty-ish (not a word) Blue-Gray
Tim – gold with silver lining
Anita – Pink-Purple
Tyki – Gray
Road – Red
Levirrier – the ugliest greenish-brown imaginable (in other words, puke colored)
Earl – not a color, a HAT