Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread;
Now that I am without you, all is desolate;
All that was once so beautiful is dead.
It rains the day they meet. Ruins a garden party outside the sprawling Campbell estate. Ladies in fancy dresses rushing inside to protect fine silk. Men shielding cigars with white-gloved hands. The wind whipping sheer curtains in and out of wide French doors. And all the while, servants—ignored on principle, even now—clearing the tables and gathering up the half-uneaten food.
Thunder rumbles across the wheat fields, shuddering through the ground, and Allen stares at the streaks of hot white light through the branches of a dead old tree. And when does, he spies in the limbs, curled up, inconsolable, a boy about his age, or perhaps a year or two younger—unimpeded by the rain, unbothered by the lightning, his eyes focused elsewhere, far, far away.
Bookman tugs on Allen's sleeve. "Come on, boy, we need to head inside. While they're all in disarray. I need to speak the Campbell woman immediately."
At the sound of Bookman's voice, the boy in the tree finally brings himself back to the world and peers down from his branch, short, dark hair sopping, dripping wet. Face streaked with water. And with tears. Their eyes meet for a fraction of a second—but it's long enough.
Long enough for Allen to witness the darkness within, the fate beyond—the path of Nea D. Campbell, nearly impassable, rife with obstacles, flooded with rains so heavy that they threaten to drag him down, down, down…
Allen wonders how a boy so young can have seen so much already, could know even now, sitting in a tree in a field of gold in the middle of a rainstorm…how can he know the perils of a future not yet here?
Perhaps if Bookman lets them stay long enough, Allen will find out.
For now, he records the boy in the tree in his colossal memory, and follows Bookman inside, as instructed.
Years later, Allen will remember this as the day he chose his own path, and laugh at the thought that the future is impossible to predict.
It is just as easy to foretell as the war-mongering past.
Your hands once touched this table and this silver,
And I have seen your fingers hold this glass.
These things do not remember you, belovèd,
And yet your touch upon them will not pass.
There is one event in his entire life for which Allen cannot pinpoint where in his record that things went so terribly, terribly wrong.
All wars have a starting point, an inciting event—and family feuds, so big, so small, have the most obvious trigger of them all. And yet, standing on the street, in the rain again, drops tap, tapping against the worn cobbles, he finds he cannot remember the moment in time and space that doomed Nea D. Campbell to end up here.
Slumped against a random wall in a random town, unknown to every passerby, alone in every sense. Blood pooling all around him, washed from his body by the rain, red rivulets rushing down the lane, life literally heading for the nearest drain, to vanish into the ground. And, Allen supposes, a funeral is an apt comparison—because this moment is the only farewell Nea D. Campbell will ever get.
The Noah will not bury him, nor burn. And what is left of Mana will not either.
Allen steps closer to the man he dared to call a friend, once upon a time, in defiance, in a whisper, in all the places where Bookman could not hear him. Nea's eyes are dull, the light of life fading fast. The Earl's sword rests on the ground, limp in his grip, a useless implement now—but for the longest time it was the most powerful. Allen was there when Nea used it, twice, to cut down another Noah.
They'd marveled at the irony of it, over dinner one night last year.
But all irony, Allen knows well, corrects itself in the end. And always in the bitterest of ways.
For once, however, Allen will not—cannot, he supposes—stand by and let the world rebound to its proper axis. Bookman would be so disappointed to learn how far he's strayed, but Allen has long thought the clan so outmoded in their ways. How can you record the world when there is no world left? How can you pass the record down when no one else lives on?
The Holy War will take the Bookmen too, if it's allowed to continue to its end, Earl versus Innocence, Heart versus Heart, Black Order versus Noah—7000 years of push and pull, each side trying with all its might to burn the whole world down.
Nea, because of Mana—and only because of Mana; nothing else could ever have driven him so far—tried to pull the world out of its spiral toward suicide. Tried to stop the war once and for all, no flood, no days of darkness, and definitely none of the lurid ends the Heart of Innocence has planned.
He tried.
He failed.
And now there is nothing to stop the war from marching on.
Unless…
Allen crouches before the man he called his friend, once upon a time—so long ago—and wonders, not for the first time, if he misjudged the day he met Nea in the rain. Perhaps it was not Nea's future he saw, churning like a whirlpool in his eyes.
"Nea," he says, "use me…"
Perhaps it was a reflection of his own fate all along.
For it was in my heart you moved among them,
And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes;
And in my heart they will remember always,—
They knew you once, O beautiful and wise.
It is not until the Innocence comes, so many, many years later, wearing the face of a man, skin stretched tight, too tight, too small, over the bulk of a vicious beast…
…it is not until that event, seared into his record, that Allen realizes just how right that reflection was.
A/N: Poem Bread and Music by Conrad Aiken