A/N: I couldn't help myself, I had to write a Self-Insert fic of my own after reading all the wonderful ones out there.

(Ps. I use some phrases in Spanish in this chapter, but know that I'll probably keep all the dialogue in English. Someone suggested I put the Spanish Translations next to the actual Spanish, so I've editted things so that is seen.)

"Hey, Allen? Do you know why people are willing to do anything for love?"

Allen was thoughtful, right hand absentmindedly reaching for the scar hidden underneath his bangs. His gaze was distant as he thought over his answer. The firewood let out a soft crack and the right words came to him as he watched the flames reflect in the night of her eyes.

"Because love can save people." He said, "It can give them something to hold on to- a reason to keep on going, a reason to fight, a reason to live, a reason to die."

His moonbeam eyes watched her from across the campfire, the flickering fire staining them with their light. They looked almost golden and her heart jumped to her throat. She averted her gaze and wrapped her arms tighter around her knees.

"You're right." She agreed, "Love is strong enough a force for the Earl to use it to bring back the dead. It's strong enough of a force for people to be willing to do anything for it."

She heard the frown in his voice. "If you already knew the answer then why did you ask?

(Because a part of me wishes that the people I loved would have used their love to bring me back, she wanted to say, the words heavy on her tongue, because I wonder if the love I have found in this world is worth anything when love didn't save me last time I died.)

"Because my mother was so in love that she sold her life to the Earl to hear my father's voice one more time." She said instead. "Because I'm scared of what I would give; of just how far I would be willing to sink into depravity for those I love."

She smiled then and upward curl of her lips was forced, like it hurt her to do so. Like her smile was made out of shattered glass. Like she didn't notice the way the effort made her bleed. Like she couldn't taste the blood that filled her mouth at the words that escaped her.

(Scared of how far she'd sink into depravity? That was a lie.)

"How far would you go for the people you love?" Allen asked curiously and the part of her that had never stopped mourning him clawed jagged wounds on the inside of her ribcage.

(You already know what I would do, she wanted to scream, youknowyouknowyouknow.)

"Oh Allen," Her smile grew wider (howcouldyouforgetwhatI'vedoneforyou) she swallowed the words that threatened to erupt from her mouth and met his eyes again- because if those words left her then all she would lose hold on all the things she kept hidden.

The darkness the fire had been keeping at bay crept closer, seeping into her words as the flames shrunk into dying embers. "I'll tear down the world itself, along with everyone on it, if that's what will save the ones I love from their fates. "

Allen shivered, goosebumps erupting on his skin despite the warmth of the night.

Her words sounded like an omen.

Her new life had started with a simple question.

"¿Te gustaría volver aver a tu amado?" (" Would you like to see your beloved again?")

Skeletal arms wrapped themselves around her and a hummingbird heartbeat sped up with a pained stutter. There was a weakening heartbeat pressed against her ear; someone with rattling lungs pressing their dry lips against her forehead. The room smelled like antiseptic and blood; the faint scent of lavender lingering on the skin of the dying woman holding her.

The woman holding the infant in her arms carefully nodded in affirmation.

"Todo lo que tienes que hacer es llamar su nombre y estarán juntos otra vez." ("All you have to do is call out his name and you will be together again.")

The woman's heart was frantically trying to keep her alive but it was beginning to fail her. It was beating far too quickly; her breathing too shallow and irregular; her skinny arms trembling as she held her child close to her in desperation.

Her new life had started with a simple question; with a simple promise; with a single answer from her mother's lips.

A scratchy voice filled the silence of the hospital room. "Rénee!"

Then the Millennium Earl threw his head back and laughed as a man's soul was torn from the arms of God. He gave the akuma it's first order and vanished in a violet flash.

The skeleton housing the soul of her father wept apologies as he killed the woman he loved, as he shoved himself down her throat, as he wore her skin and walked out the room.

He left his newborn child untouched.

(Later, when the Earl told her she had been lucky to have survived that night; she thought of how she was left in the sheets soaked with her mother's blood until a nurse found her. She thought about the weeping of her grandmother at the funeral she should've been too young to remember. She thought about the years she spent wanting to claw the skin that wasn't hers from her bones. She thought about activating her Innocence for the first time, screaming until her throat was raw for the pain to stop. And she smiled at him- whispering the words 'lucky indeed.')

Before she was an exorcist-

-before the Order, before Cross and Mana, before the promises, before the circus, before Red-who-was-Allen-who-was-Neah, before the hunger, before the loneliness, before Tyki, before the search, before the massacre, before the church, before Maria Elena, before the Earl, before her mother, before she had opened her eyes for the first time-

-she had died.

Being born happened afterward.

It didn't sink in until months of waking up in a body not hers, that there was no going back to the life she had before. Despite how much she wished otherwise, she couldn't find it in herself to keep on denying the truth of what had happened to her. Her mother in the before wouldn't have been pleased to hear that she was allowing herself to waste away. Her brother would have smacked her if he learned that she wasn't doing her best to move forward with her life.

(But she missed her family so damn much that it ached to breathe every time they crossed her mind- because she would never see them again; would never hear their voice, their laughter, feel their embraces on her skin. God how was she supposed to live without her family there to let her know that things would be alright- how was she supposed to keep on going when she had nothing left?)

It took months for her to mourn the people she had left behind without a word of farewell; months for her to come to terms with her death and subsequent rebirth.

There had been a part of her for those first six months- that insisted that all of this was just a bad dream; that she didn't really slip through the cosmic fingers of whatever divine being was in charge of the whole reincarnation thing, and that she wasn't born with all her past memories intact. There was a time when she tried to convince herself that she hadn't been born into a fictional story, that she couldn't really exist in the world of D. Gray-man.

Because it was better to wish it was a just a bad dream, a dreadful terrible dream, than to believe that her life had been torn away from her and that she had been forced to start over again in a world with demons and soldiers. Because there was a part of her that thought it better to imagine that maybe there had been a different kind of reason for her waking up after never expecting to do so again, than to think of it all just happening without purpose, without something worth the sacrifice of a lifetime lived.

Later in her life, she would regret asking for a reason; she would wish that everything was just a mistake; she would close her eyes as her friends died and pray to an uncaring God to let it all end. Later in her life, the purpose given to her would crush the air out of her lungs; but by then it would be too late to do much of anything else.

Early on in her new life, she learned that the world was infinitely cruel.

She learned that love could drive people to madness (her mother loved so deeply, that the devil himself took note) and that God had a twisted sense of humor. She found herself unable to stop thinking about the way things had turned out; about the demon born from her mother's grief.

(Her mother had died- and her dead father had killed her.)

How did someone get over something like that?

Her mother had called upon the Millenium Earl within the first minutes of her life. She'd been born to a dying woman with a hummingbird heart and wheezing lungs- with a metal skeleton at the foot of the bed and someone half-mad murmuring sweet nothings into her mother's ears so she called out the name of the dead.

The name that was hers now- her grandmother named her in honor of her father.

Rénee Lúz Castillo.

She often dreamt of horrible things. Of things she remembered from a lifetime ago.

Of stories full of tragedy that fit with the world she was born into.

Of children fighting in wars they wouldn't live through.

Of soldiers knowing they could not run from their duty or the world would die.

Of metal skeletons and anguished people calling souls back.

Of a war with cogs slicked with oil blood and the despair of those who had nothing to lose.

Of weapons like demons and guardians like monsters.

Of massacres and far too many funerals.

Of brothers, betrayal, fractured psyches and death.

Of haunting music and silver eyes melting into gold.

(She never got to know how the story ended before she died.)

If the sleepless nights were good for anything though, it was letting Rénee know that she had someone who cared for her in this life. Rénee had heard hymns being sung to her; had felt gnarled, gentle hands comb through her fluffy hair whenever a whimper escaped her from the nightmares that haunted her night after night.

(It made the ache of being in a body that didn't belong to her burn less.)

This person was a constant in her new life. She was the one who fed her, changed her, and raised her. She was an older woman with plenty of stories and tales of adventure that she told Rénee despite assuming she didn't understand them due to her age. Her grandmother loved telling Rénee stories. Rénee loved listening to them. They lessened the crippling depression that had clung to her from the moment she realized what had happened, and took her mind away from the fact that she was entirely dependent on another person for her survival.

Her grandmother, Maria Elena, didn't even bat an eye at her odd behavior. Though Rénee's heart sunk at realizing that Maria Elena was oblivious to her daughter's fate and that the words of what had happened that night would never escape her lips if she could help it.

The freedom her grandmother granted Rénee allowed her plenty of time to work on the goals she had set for herself. Rénee wasn't impressed with the struggles of childhood so far. Teething had been a terrible experience. Her limbs enjoyed flopping around like limp noodles. She was so moody, and all she did was sleep.

She spent most of that first year listening to folklore and making plans about how she could regain her independence. She was too young to physically take care of herself, but it didn't stop her from practicing speech and her movements. Rénee was determined to walk and talk as soon as possible, it would make the anxiety at being so helpless fade.

(The disgust at her own existence would take much longer to disappear.)

The natural order of things dictated that once anything was born, it one day had to die.

The person she had once been had known in the way every human being did, in that instinctual gut-wrenching way, that she could not run from death. She had known it from the moment she was old enough to understand what death was. She had known it as the darkness swallowed everything she was, had been and could have been.

(She had known it as she died.)

Whoever she may have been in the past, Rénee was someone different.

Rénee was the one that crawled out of the darkness, was the one that had to live in the stolen body of a child. The natural order of things dictated that once something died, it was to stay that way. Akuma were weapons born out of love and despair. They were creatures birthed from death who stole the skin of another to evolve.

In a way, she was like an akuma; they were both things that would have been better off staying dead. Only monsters destroyed the order of things and by living again she had destroyed the order, she had become something unnatural.

Unnatural creatures could hate the truth of what they were- but it would not change the horror of their existence in the slightest.

A/N: Please remember to review and follow! See you next time.