When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
The day Link leaves the Vatican City for the last time, he has no destination in mind. He leaves his uniform folded up on a bed with no sheets, his gold badge on top, next to a line of medals he was awarded for his service during the war.
Exemplary conduct. Heroic sacrifice.
Fancy words to describe assassination and espionage. Fancy words to make a man declared dead to transform him into a shadow feel like a human being again.
(It doesn't work.)
On his way out of Central, Link visits the cemetery, his last stop before walking away from the Black Order for good. He recalls that the cemetery was filled to capacity, and an overflow lot was created somewhere else nearby, but he's long stopped forcing himself to recall exact details like that, wound down his mind to focus on less and less. Allowed himself to, dare he say it, relax for once in his godforsaken life. And the exact location of the new yard doesn't matter anyway—all the high-priority casualties had their graves plotted decades in advance.
Including Lvellie.
Link has many regrets from his service in the war. They all trail behind him, dragging along the stone pathways, rusted chains strapped to his limbs clinking as he moves. He knows that only he can hear them, and that everyone else who dares to look him in the eye sees only what they expect to see: the prim, proper, stoic ex-Inspector.
As hard as he's been trying to break from his old ways, to cast off the Crow cloak, the Inspector brand, the dog collar—it's been a half-successful effort at best. And anyone who doesn't care to look deeper than the surface—most people—will see nothing but the same old Howard Link.
Most people will not realize the significance of his actions here today, as he stands at the foot of the headstone of one of his biggest regrets. Lvellie's name is etched into the headstone flawlessly, his birth and death dates separated by a respectable number of years. There's a quote in Latin underneath those dates that Link doesn't bother to read but that he's sure is as every bit pretentious and extreme as Lvellie himself. He probably chose his own quote ahead of time.
Link's regret is not that he missed Lvellie's funeral while he was clinging to life in a hastily made battlefield infirmary. It is not that he missed Lvellie's death when he was hundreds of miles away, akuma oil clinging to his skin, the dust of the dead chalking up his throat. It is not the man he was subservient to died a terrible death when the Earl's forces finally came for Central during the final theater of a seven-thousand-year-old war.
No, Link's regret, standing in the shade of a flourishing tree, on a fine spring day in Italy, the sky blue and nearly cloudless as if the earth has no care in the world—Link's regret is that he never had the opportunity to renounce his loyalty to Malcolm Lvellie.
In the end, Lvellie died with his mark still on Link's neck—so many condolences Link has received, as if the Inspector was his father and not his boss—and it leaves the most bitter taste in the ex-Crow's mouth.
In the end, Link wanted to curse Lvellie to hell and back, for all his machinations, for all his manipulation, that led to so, so many tragedies.
And he never got the chance.
Link stands over Lvellie's grave and mutters his curses now, but the effect is lost in the clear spring air, subdued by the whispers of the wind. And he's forced to accept that the regret chained to his neck will never loosen and certainly never break free. If only he'd realized earlier, heeded the warning signs, followed the heart he didn't think he had…If only.
Link doesn't bow before he walks away, never to return.
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
Link realizes, belatedly, that his original intention in leaving the Order was to run somewhere far, far away. From the Vatican. From the hold of the Church. From the ashy battlefields of the Holy War's final days, dotting central Europe and parts of Asia. But instead, he finds himself wandering through Naples, set up at an inn with a view of the sparkling sea.
Day in, day out, he walks the streets, eating in new restaurants every night, visiting new bakeries every morning for a pastry he hasn't yet tried. He's restless, but he can't figure out where it is he's supposed to go. All he has ever known has collapsed into ruin. The Order is disbanding, for the most part. Central is downsizing. The Vatican is closing ranks around the most prominent members of the Church and beginning to strategically erase the fact they were ever at war at all.
They all think it best to forget, or at least to pretend, that the acts committed in the name of defeating the Millennium Earl…weren't just as heinous as the Earl himself. Perhaps the lie will help them sleep better at night. Perhaps it will help them forget the exorcists, the remaining exorcists, who grew up at war and don't understand how to live in a world without it. Perhaps it will help them forget Howard Link, whose identity they molded into something unfit for peace and prosperity.
Perhaps not, Link whispers on a prayer to a God he's no longer sure he believes in.
The next morning, his prayer still unfulfilled, as expected, he dresses himself in clothes that seem too loose without knives hidden underneath and leaves his room at the inn without a single weapon on his person. It is the first time he has done so since he was an orphan on the streets. But then, as an orphan, his quick fingers were his best weapons. Now, his joints are stiff from overuse in his youth, and Link isn't sure he could snatch a single berry from a vendor.
Not that he needs to. Not with all the money Central showered on him at his retirement ceremony. With the implicit hope that such funds would keep him quiet.
Link doesn't stay quiet because of the money, he thinks, as he walks three miles to visit a new bakery he caught wind of yesterday, the hot winds of summer fluttering through his hair. No, he stays quiet because there is no point in saying anything. His accusations won't change the Church—it's too late for that. It was too late the day he crawled through mud and blood and akuma oil, severed body parts and mechanical pieces, to find a boy dressed all in white lying dead on the battlefield.
Link was always just a tad too late. To save the Thirds before they self-destructed. To save the 14th before Apocryphos caught up to him and ripped him straight from Walker's soul. To save Allen Walker from his suicide run to defeat the Earl and the Heart before the powers brought the world down with them.
A tad too late from start to finish. That is the legacy of Howard Link.
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
Pastry in hand, Link winds his way slowly toward the sea, weaving in and out of a maze of narrow streets. As he turns into a more open square, a group of children run past him, a boy nearly colliding with the back of Link's leg. Link watches the boy recover from his near disaster, the child giggling all the way, even though he scraped his palm on a rough patch of stone.
Link pauses and observes the children as they rush toward a growing crowd near the center of the square, people laughing and cheering at something Link cannot see. He eats the last bite of his pastry and eyes the sea calling out to him, waves lapping gently against the shore, not nearly forceful or angry enough to stop someone from wading as far as they please, away and away from the world.
Link turns back to the crowd, contemplating, and then makes his way toward it. As he closes in, he spies a white-gloved hand jutting up above the crowd, a row of playing cards splayed out across the fingers. It reminds Link of something, a half-forgotten memory of a train ride to somewhere on the edge of the earth, some misbegotten town rife with akuma activity. A game played between two young men while he watched on, chastising. It reminds him of…
The hand vanishes from his sight, and Link suddenly finds himself walking faster, steps more deliberate, something pulling him away from the meandering path he's been walking, aimless, since the day he was hauled from the final battlefield on a stretcher underneath a crying sky. He maneuvers around the children trying to squeeze through the crowd and pushes his way through women and men, old and young, ruder than he has ever been in his entire life.
Finally, he breaks through the front of the crowd, and—
A playing card is shoved in his face. It stops a quarter of an inch before it hits his nose. Link glances down at the card, a strange, bent, worn old thing that looks like it was drawn by hand instead of bought in a store.
An Ace of Spades.
The card slowly retreats, back toward the man at the center of attention, until Link's view is no longer blocked, until the sun illuminates in his vision, ethereal, glorious, almost glittering in the light…a young man dressed like a silly clown, sporting a right arm but no left, two blue eyes where one is glass, and a broad smile on his face that is so, so much more real than Link remembers.
Allen Walker stares back at him in surprise for a moment. A moment that Link will remember for the rest of his life.
Then his smiles softens yet grows brighter than the sun, and he says, in a voice that Link feared he would forget, feared would fade to nothing in his mind, feared would only ever be a broken memory…
Allen Walker says, "Hey there, Link. You're right on time."
A/N: Poem When You Are Old by William Butler Yeats