Hey guys, remember when D. Gray-Man had happy endings? Me neither. Something about the God-awful squelching sound effect of baby Kanda hacking Alma to pieces in the last Hallow episode really made me need this. Enjoy the Lee sibling feels (plus the rain of ships) and try not to imagine how miserable the poor flowers are!

When Komui had become his baby sister's primary caretaker, no one had been certain how he would handle it.

"This is another person," a haggard Reever had insisted, talking around an enormous stack of paperwork he was trying to put on his desk. "Like, an actual living thing, not a robot. And not a living thing you can experiment on either! You can't slack off or forget about her or…" The list went on.

Fellow eccentric inventor Marian Cross had laughed heartily (and drunkenly) at his expense. "You, domestic? Imagine that!"

"Uncle Cross, I'm hungry," his tiny godson Allen had complained from the corner he'd been assigned to.

"No you aren't, brat," Cross said without looking around. "Not while I don't have the money to feed a standing army, you're not. Anyway, Komui, I wouldn't worry-I'm sure you'll be a wonderful mother!" And then he'd laughed some more.

"You'll need to get in touch with your feminine side, honey," was what his good friend Jerry had told him, tossing his long lilac hair over his shoulder. "Most little girls don't like big, scary robots."

"Look, isn't Lenalee so precious," Komui had cooed back dreamily, watching her draw smiley faces in the fog on the window. Jerry had glanced over his glasses, tapping his spatula against a pan of sautéed vegetables for a long time. "You know what, I think you're going to be just fine."

And Komui was more than fine. He kissed Komui the indomitable mechanical genius goodbye and welcomed Komui the doting nanny with open arms, because he was the best big brother in the world. He lived for sitting down to imaginary tea in tiny little chairs, and for doing pigtails just right so that they didn't hurt or hang unevenly. His Lenalee was like a precious china doll, all soft baby skin and shining, rosy cheeks, except she was so much better because she could talk and laugh and whine-it didn't really matter which because it was him she was doing it at-and she could run and trip and whenever she put on Komui's old rain boots she could turn into a superhero that he would fly around the house in his arms.

That besides, Komui had talked to her teachers and they all told him how smart she was, how clever and mature, and Komui knew that she would be a genius just like him someday, and that they would rule the world together. Parents gushed about how wonderful she was, children always wanted to play with her…everyone loved her.

But no one loved her more than Komui. Lenalee was the center of his whole world-no, she was his world. She was his world and his atmosphere and his entire universe.

But it wasn't until the day that Lenalee brought home a boy for the first time that Komui explicitly understood his place in that world.

"Brother? This is Kanda, he's my friend!"

She tugged a small, dark-haired child in the door and Komui's eyes zeroed in on their interlocked hands. (Well, really, Lenalee had young Kanda's fingers in a squeeze that threatened pain if he tried to escape, while the slightly older boy tried sourly to squirm out of her grip, but Komui's MAX BROTHERLY INSTINCTS deemed these details unimportant.)

"I see," said Komui. And he saw, alright, because he hovered just outside the doorway and watched unblinkingly. He saw Lenalee bossing the put-upon Kanda around their "house" of blankets and dolls, and the excitement with which she chattered at him, and Komui…well, Komui saw a little bit of red, too. He'd gotten used to being an insider, and the thought of his baby maybe not wanting him there, even for something as small as one of her games of make-believe, made his knees go watery.

(He'd never thought they were small. Lenalee's imagination was wide and beautiful, and sometimes in her violet eyes he caught glimpses of fathomless seas and silver stars and women who danced on air.)

When Mr. Tiedoll came to usher his youngest foster child into the car with his brothers, Lenalee stood on the couch to wave goodbye out the window, and Komui let his hackles start to come down. Then Lenalee turned to him very seriously.

"Kanda and I are going to get married someday," she confided.

So Komui got ready to go to war with the lecherous men of the world.

Kanda, who matured slowly from moody little boy to moody teenager, never did figure out why everything in the Lee house always tried to kill him.

And all was more-or-less well for the next years, which seemed like they lasted no time at all. At least, until Lenalee's freshman year of high school, which brought with it the next great upheaval in the form of the much-vaunted first boyfriend. Komui had never cried so many tears.

"Brother, this is-"

"Hiya, Mr. Lee! I'm Lavi, 's nice to meet you! Hope I have your blessing to date your lovely Lena, sir!"

The torrent of words, in combination with the bright red hair, bright green eye (singular), and bright orange scarf, would have flattened a man not so used to personalities with the force of a bowling ball crashing into the pins of more passive dispositions. Komui, however, thrived in eccentricity (not that he recognized it as such), and many people found he, himself, a bit overwhelming anyway, so all this silly "Lavi" creature got in reaction was a slitted glare over the flash of his glasses.

"Come in," he said. That's where the sharp things were.

"Yessir, thank you, sir, you're as scary as Lena m' Lee said you'd be," Lavi rambled exuberantly back, slinging an arm around Lenalee and melting bonelessly over her. She, trying hard not to laugh, delivered a surgical jab between the ribs that made him yipe at her in apparent agony, giving her his saddest puppy dog eyes (eye?) while she straightened her pigtails. All three knew full well that Lenalee was capable of putting hardier men on the ground with the right amount of force behind that blow (Komui had to make sure she was protected somehow, didn't he?), and that was the only reason that Lavi Bookman, Jr. was allowed over the threshold fully without incident.

Lenalee gave him a significant look over Lavi's head while he bent to untie his shoes, and Komui reluctantly gestured for his tiny security golems to retreat back behind the staircase. Drat.

Which was how Lavi also made it into the living room unscathed-where he promptly proceeded to slither over the back of the couch and drape himself all over Kanda, who despite Komui's best efforts had become something of an unfriendly brownie around the house that drank his tea and left potted plants littered around.

The angry Japanese expletive and the fleshy thud of redhead hitting floor told him that at least Kanda was earning his keep, but the sound of Lavi still whining for "Yuu-chan"'s attention from the hardwood made Komui glance at Lenalee with something almost like judgment.

She colored very slightly in return. "He's just a very loving person," she explained.

Komui was not as surprised as he could have been when their relationship gave up trying to get off the ground by summer, though he did feel an overwhelming relief that everything was as it should be again (even if he somehow now had history books and colorful headbands turning up alongside his…wait, no, Kanda's invading garden).

Yet, whether or not there were any octopi trespassing in Lenalee's life, there was no denying that she was aging, and changing, and now had a growing variety of interests and concerns that knocked her older brother down a couple of rungs in her priorities. Komui tried his hardest to deny it anyway, because Komui was a master at putting things off (as Reever could attest), and he could put off his sister's impending adulthood the same way. Surely.

Surely.

The sudden influx of new names and faces and moods had him doubting it. Komui was very nearly glad when the next year brought the next boy, because at least that was something he was familiar with.

"Brother, this is Allen. We've, um, just started seeing each other! Please try to get to know him."

Lenalee smiled hopefully at him, still angelic and endearing even with her new rebelliously shorn hair, and the young man next to her blushed deeply when she gave his arm a squeeze.

Komui wasn't fooled, not by that or by the fact that he was a full two inches shorter than Lenalee in her heels-and hadn't it taken him a while to let her wear them, because that meant his baby was slipping away from him and transforming into a foreign grown-up person who didn't laugh at his jokes anymore.

Critically, Komui examined the latest catch, not quite sure what to think. First Kanda with his tattoo and Lavi with his piercings and now white-haired, red-pentacled, vaguely steampunk Allen.

Wait. Allen.

Cross.

Under the reasoning that growing up with Cross and his strange, strange friends would make anyone a little odd, Komui decided that, just this once, he would cut an encroaching male some slack. Allen told him that it was very nice to meet him all these years later and bowed his way into the house, skirting around a monstrous hydrangea and immediately getting his feet tangled in a discarded scarf.

Lenalee laughed at him and told him he was silly and dear, and Komui gripped the banister with the clamping force of an alligator's jaws, riding out the intense surge of jealousy with practiced ease.

Who said he couldn't mature?

Unfortunately (at least for a frustrated Lenalee), the promising pair didn't. They stayed perpetually stuck in the awkward stage of tentative hand-holding and knee-nudging, always struggling to get out what they wanted to say to each other and somehow managing to politely and utterly fail at coming together on anything of real emotional value. Lenalee was convinced it was something she was doing wrong. Allen didn't realize something was wrong half the time.

Even Komui, by then, was sort of hoping that things would work themselves out between them, because besides his extreme, deep-seated aversion to the idea he didn't understand why they wouldn't. After all, if Komui had to, absolutely had to, pick a suitable partner for Lenalee, he supposed it would be Allen Walker, so careful and kind (and completely, gratifyingly terrified of him, to boot).

That didn't change the fact that watching them together was like watching two people trying to assemble a puzzle with all the right pieces, but finding that somehow none of them fit together. It was maddening and Komui knew in the way that he always knew how deeply upset Lenalee was by this. And Komui wondered with her-why wasn't it working?

He wanted more than anything to help her, just to make her happy again, even if that meant the bothersome male specimen stuck around, but it wasn't him she looked to anymore. It was Kanda who she called for hours to talk about it, and Lavi who she let distract her with jokes. Komui didn't understand why he couldn't be the one to make everything all better.

(She didn't need him anymore. She didn't need him. What if he needed her?)

The correspondence between Lenalee and Allen petered out into a slightly confused friendship, neither knowing what had gone wrong but still immensely platonically fond of each other, and other than Komui's resigned realization that his pantry would never be full again because of it, no earth-shattering revelations followed. Lenalee seemed content to have the men in her life the way they were, and while several more showed up over time, drawn in by her caring nature and each as peculiar as the last, it was only they who looked at her with the nervous buzz of a crush. Lenalee always looked pensively straight ahead, and in between chasing off the men who were a little too interested for his tastes, Komui tried his best to see inside of her like he had once been able to. And so time passed.

With her thoughts still her own, Lenalee ventured out from home base in England to school in Germany, of all places, and for once Komui was sincerely grateful that she had once considered Kanda a marriage prospect and Lavi boyfriend material, because it was only the combined effort of the two coming back from their own schooling that stopped him from losing his mind with her out of the house. It was like a spell had been lifted-suddenly coffee, that wonderful caffeine elixir, tasted awful because she wasn't making it, and he felt keenly remorseful for not watering Kanda's plethora of house plants, and he started forgetting where he put his glasses sometimes, and he felt sad and old.

He missed her, and he refused to let himself believe even for a second that having her gone got any easier over time, because she was his world. He missed her so much that he could hardly believe it when she told him through the blustering reception of her phone that she was coming home for break and she was bringing someone with her.

And there she was on the doorstep again, except that something was different from all the other times he's seen her there, and it wasn't just the more refined angles of her face or the sleekness of her hair grown back out nearly to her shoulders. Lenalee, all of her radiance and her passion blossoming out of her into something that he could only call a woman, smiled at him with a profound and humble love of life that abruptly made him very young again. Deep in her eye there shone a light that reminded him of all the wild things he had seen in her time ago, and in a gesture reflecting peace and strength shared, he saw that her fingers were laced assuredly into a set as delicate as hers.

"Brother, this is Road. I love her."

And so they could never have candles on birthday cake ever, ever again.

Thanks for joining me on this adventure, and I hope you got something positive out of it. For a nerdy inside joke, see if you can catch all the times this pays homage to the original manga/anime storyline. And tell me what you think, if you're so inclined-the reviews for "Not Now, Not Ever" were so lovely and thoughtful and perfect I can hardly stand it!

As an aside, I really can't write anything without some LaviYuu or Yuuvi or what have you slipping its way in there, can I? Geez.

Cheers!

(Also, can I just say, the most recent Hallow with Kanda's skin melting off of his face? Yeah.)