Title: The Reality of Us
Author: Pup-Ashbless
Fandom: D Gray Man
Disclaimer: I do not own the official franchise.
Summary: There is a difference between reality and patterns of behavior. Decide if they know difference. Lenalee/Allen romance(?) + Lenalee+Komui sibling fic.
Lenalee watches Allen all the time. Even when she doesn't, some part of her is still aware of his presence.
It's not love, not exactly, if it were just love than Allen wouldn't be special. He is a piece of the puzzle that belongs in the middle where she can see what it's about rather than the edges that keeps it there.
To Lenalee, Allen is reality.
Lenalee is not a person who lives outside reality too much, even when she does it's usually never pleasant.
Why are the akuma here? Some would ask.
Because people couldn't let go, others would say
No, Leanlee would think, but never say out loud, it's not that people couldn't let go. It's because they couldn't bare reality anymore.
Lenalee is a serious person with serious beliefs. One a person disappeared, they died, and when they died it was over. That was reality. She almost died because of this reality, if not for her Brother who realized what it meant to live in reality and not just with it.
People who called upon loved ones in the form of loved ones were people who could not see reality as just anymore. But Komui knew the difference, unlike so many others, that she was still a reality in life in general.
Komui, her elder Brother, told her that as a scientist he discovered the similarity between fact and fiction was the same as science and reality.
He went on to tell her that while due to his studies he could tell anyone the chemical reactions as to why a fire could light, it was not as close as important to the fact that the reason it was lit in the first place was because a man wanted to be warm.
Science could explain behavior patterns but it couldn't explain the reality of why something existed in the first place. Not the true reason that has kept humanity living for so long. Why parents raised a child together, why Brothers and Sisters would protect each other, why two people would choose to love and desire to grow old together over everyone else.
Sometimes she wondered if the reason he chose to pursue a scientific back round was so he could understand the reality and the behavior patterns of life itself without confusing either one for the other (which would probably confuse some people after experiencing his latest, and useless, scientific scandals).
She's glad he did, she's be dead or worse if he hadn't. She wonders if she could ever do the same. But then thinks so long as Komui exists than so would reality itself and does not deal with worrying over it.
Komui was her reality guide, while Allen was her other hope of it.
Allen, who would trip, fall, grieve, cry, poker plaster face smile and somehow mean it all the while when he didn't – proved to her reality was not always so unpleasant.
Because he was like her, in a way, in that he too was locked in a spiral of history that always rhymed for control and yet tried, no matter how small, to rebel absolute shackling for a cause she didn't really believe in. Not for the reasons she was told to.
Lenalee made the Order her haven. Full of people she could fight and care for. Allen chose to use his curse eye to see the love, instead of just the pain, akuma thrived from.
She had hated it, so young and wishing reality wasn't so cruel to someone so full of yearning. He wasn't dirty like them, he was in hell itself and expecting to go further for the captives she didn't even understand or care to be rescued (it's not like she could see them as something beyond things that hurt her and her loved ones).
But she grew to love it, not like it – she would never like it. Because in its own horrible twisted ness it proved to her he was someone else who could turn a given evil into a blessing. She used to hate herself for such a thought, but now, she has grown to not just love Allen, but understand him. Understand him enough to relate to him. To know it was something he loved above all else so even with her hatred and confusion of the true depth of his reliance on it, she wouldn't touch it with skittish and harsh hands.
It shouldn't have been possible for a necessary evil like the Order to become a family, just like it shouldn't be possible for a curse that showed nothing but grief and sorrow to give a broken boy a will to walk forward.
What's it like to keep walking she asked him once, because asking him why he does would seem like an insult in her mind.
Because I'm a weak person who wants to live for something, he answered.
She's never understood the need to classify people into weak or strong. Because people are made up of both, Lenalee knows this because she only knows weak people who are trying to move on and keep living in their own ways.
You're a liar Allen, she tells him once. But she's not accusing him; it comes out more natural than upsetting. For most, saying someone is a liar here is the same as saying honey is sweet.
He looked at her as if she were stating fact and did nothing to deny it other than smile.
Who knows, he answered as though it was there secret but waited for her to go on with not one bit of reason to feel surprised over her next words. After all they were both actors who always played one role seen as dozens by others.
She tells him he's always telling people it will be okay even when he doesn't believe. It's gotten to the point she believes him anyway despite knowing better.
Allen tells her it's not as though nothing bad will ever happen, he knows this, better than anyone – which is probably why his luck is so bad, as bad thoughts are always followed by bad luck. Such is the science. But it's like the sun, eventually it's going to rise again, because it always will - he just has to wait for it.
Except you can't sleep through their darkness without knowing, but neither speaks that thought out loud. It's as natural as a baby breathing after all.
I think you're like the sun, only better because you don't run away when it's time to get dark, she says – or whishes she could say. The words come to the tip of her tongue but they can't pour out. Her walls are still too high. She's not ready for this reality. No, she doesn't understand this reality nor truly want it enough. But for once it's okay. Allen has shown, for this war that births beings that do not belong at least, he will always come back to her. He comes back because he has reasons that exist in reality to go on.
The important ones anyway, she thinks?
This is good enough for her in the short, mid, or even long term, she tells herself.
Notes*
Just a quickie that hit me, decide how much anyone lives in and for reality here in this fic (or the series for that matter).