The new Headquarters was a much brighter place than the last one. Light streamed in its windows during the day, and though the weather was still coastal and damp, the rains came gently rather than torrentially, and they brought a fresh, earthy scent in the mornings instead of salt and slick like it had on the old island.
But perhaps the most remarkably different thing about their new home-and home it would be, Lenalee was sure, because that was where family was-was the people. For her entire life as a known Accommodator, Lenalee had grown, played, and lived in the old Order Headquarters. Her backyard was black, tangled forest and her porch was jagged beach rock dotted with forbidding stone outposts. The empty sky had been her only neighbor, the spire of the building corkscrewing high above the churning sea.
Yet now, in this great mansion they had been basically given by the Catholic church, there were smooth woods, warm tones, and there was…a town.
It was very strange, to have an actual, functioning human habitation on the island with them, all Order supporters, and all privy to the unusual circumstances surrounding the secretive newcomers. Lenalee had been excited when she found out-here were people that she could talk to, who she could see live normal lives and go about day to day as families, reminding her what she was trying to protect. She didn't have to fly herself to the mainland anymore if she wanted to visit the shops, and she could even wear her uniform out.
The way Lenalee had envisioned it, there was no reason she couldn't get to know the town, or make outside friendships that could actually last, without having to break them off at a dock or train station or think of them at a funeral. Plus, it had the insurance of being right next to the base of the Black Order, the one place where there would always be Exorcists on call. There could not be a safer town in the world-yet when Lenalee visited for the first time, that safety was the last thing on her mind.
Lenalee had always felt ugly. Not on the outside, where she sometimes felt stares that slid like oil down her back and her clavicle, the ones that made her want to run back to her brother and let him build her an empire. No, Lenalee found ugliness in the nature of her psyche, riddled with trauma and hate and half-formed ideals that had warped and melted inside of her into things that she didn't know how to fight.
When she had burned down over the sea to Edo from the heavens that she was sure held no paradise, aflame with her conviction and surely, surely, the spite of a God who would use her and break her like every one of his soldiers, she had prayed spitefully to Him that he burn her skin right off, because without a doubt the strings of sinew and charred lumps of flesh would resemble her far better than the delicate aesthetic her parents had given her. That prayer had not been answered, as she'd known it wouldn't be-Lenalee was a stranger to herself on the surface.
She had never been able to judge people well by what their outward appearance-it was one of the reasons that it came so naturally to her to suspect everyone. But the town, which was friendly and buzzing as soon as she entered it, was not a place of suspicion, and suddenly her confidence was gone.
It was much easier to classify enemies and victims when she expected that a human might become a monster at any moment-it was certainly easier for her to think that those stares and leers on her were because there might be a monster under someone's skin. Monsters attacked humans. Exorcists fought monsters. Exorcists protected humans. But with that uncertainty removed…when she went out into that town, every eye followed her, and every mouth said "hate", because that was the truth Lenalee never wanted to face: she was afraid of humans.
It was the Order that had done it, when she was just a girl-the Order who had chained her and whipped her, had given her flight but taken her freedom. Oh, she had been wary of humanity, even before that-it had not been Akuma who killed her parents, after all-but it was the Order who cast her soul into eclipse forever. Yet it was also the Order who gave her haven-her family the Order, the precious people she fought with, who had all of her love for humanity spread among them solely, and who she took care to learn as deeply as if their faces and their feelings were scripture. Despite the Order and because of the Order, Lenalee could curb the forbidden things that ranged in barren parts of her, and she could quiet the long-developed urge to drive those who had hurt her to their knees with wind and steel, and make the rose cross the bit in their mouths.
Lenalee was not fit to be human. She was not fit to love them freely, and she should have known it. She turned her back to the sunny town of playing children and energetic market trade practically before she'd entered it, and she felt the odious eyes, greedy eyes, stuck to her all over. Lenalee took to the sky, and for once she was viciously uncaring that it set her apart from the acceptable mundane. She flew fast, determined but resigned-she would pour herself back into the containment of the Order, and run through its halls like water or blood to join her brothers.
And if the Science Department noticed that Lenalee lingered just a bit longer than usual on her coffee rounds, well, they were just glad to have her.
I go through phases of appreciating scary!Lenalee. Look out for her in Hymns for Dead Hearts.
Believe it or not, this was actually started before The Doorstep and Semantics and Respite, but it's only decided to write itself now. I think I'm going to keep this pattern-alternating between posting short stories and chapters of Hymns for Dead Hearts.
I know it's short, but tell me what you think. I love to hear it, and more often than not, I need to hear it. I am a very poor judge of my own writing.
Thank you for reading in any case, and cheers!
(Edited: Went in and changed up some of the paragraph spacings, hopefully it feels less like the Textual Wall of Jericho now, oops.)