Author's Note: Hello all. I'm a new writer to this site and a new writer to this series. This story will contain spoilers and will follow the D. Gray Man story line, with the exception of my own chapters/drabbles. I do not appreciate flames of any sort, but I do appreciate constructive criticism. If you would like to express your opinion of my story in a negative way, please do so in a civil manner and please make the reason for the negativiy clear. That is all I ask.
Reviews and rates of positive manner are greatly appreciated and loved.
"Maybe...someday, we'll be able to live without fear."
Akuma kill for no reason.
They are living shells of dead souls, puppets controlled by strings of their master marionette: The Earl of Millennium. They are pitiful creatures, living only to serve their heartless master, like a chained dog with razor teeth, so broken and alone that the only thing they seem to understand is death and pain.
A truly disgraceful existence.
But their births are almost as disgusting as their lives. Sadness, anguish, loneliness, and bitterness...all emotions of their grieving loved ones, the ones that the dead souls of an Akuma had left behind when their time to leave this world had come.
However, some people do not except death with open eyes, hearts, and minds.
They choose to close themselves away, to avoid the hurtful truth with a wonderful lie. But it can only last for so long...it can only last until he appears...The Earl of Millennium, the killer of hope, the puppeteer of death.
Promises can be intricately woven lies. Those weaved lies sound so much prettier than the ugly truth, the reality that no one ever wants to face, but eventually will...the loved ones of an Akuma are examples of this, ones who wish to stall the bleak precedent.
The Earl wrote the gospel of fabrication. With every word finely printed and defined, he swallows in the dread of the shattered with a promise that would be hard to refuse, if you were ever put into such a situation.
I can bring them back, he claims, sparking a small and dying flame of hope. I can bring them back, but I will need for you to call out to them, he says as he watches the torn and the damned open their eyes, hearts, and minds to his overwhelming darkness.
But that is when...when an Akuma is born. The sadness, anguish, loneliness, and bitterness intertwine with one another, creating a blackened body for an apostle of hell to reside, and creating the strings for the puppeteer to use. Where a puppet will be able to receive its strings, where a soul will lose its freedom, and where an innocent will lose their life...
All in the event of one, single, pleading cry...all completed with a dead hope...
A truly distasteful birth...the beginning for their disgusting lives...
Pain, horror, regret, heartbreak, hate, sadness, suffering...so many words to describe a single anomaly, yet so little of it actually falls on open eyes, hearts, and minds.
But to those with open eyes, hearts, and minds...to those willing to free the creatures bound to hell, a new found light resides. The light of God. The light of defiance against the darkness known as the Earl:
Exorcists, humans granted with holy prowess of God himself, with the power to free the crushed and dying souls of the deathly Akuma, to finally bring them forth to heaven.
For they are God's judgment in human bodies, the clergymen with the power to destroy the demons of the shadows, the ones chosen by God...they exist in order to hunt the ominous ones who live in the darkness...
But Exorcists are not immune to death just because they are protected by God. The fear and the amount of caution Exorcists surface within themselves is one of the only things they can rely on...
For Akuma are invisible to the human eye, wearing skins of their dead loved ones with the closed eyes, hearts, and minds as their shields...
She fully understood these concepts; she had seen and felt it all before. The horror...the seclusion...only those beside her understood the amount of terror that lived in her dreams and in her real world.
And as she picked her way through ruins of a once peaceful town, she realized that the people that had once lived in this sanctuary had, had no idea of what was to become of them in their very near futures.
Unfortunately, neither had anyone else until the catastrophe had occurred...
'What a mess...'
If she were to discover any survivors in this wreckage, that would be a lone miracle...houses lay in shambles, their roofs being her foot ground. Glass lay everywhere, dull and grey, mirroring the sky above her, and their very foundations of cement were now dust, which would whip around her whenever the icy wind blew.
But this was the catastrophe of Akuma: death. There was nothing she could alter to rewind this dead town, to rewind and maybe save a life or two. A prolonged sadness that lay dormant in the pit of her stomach went unnoticed as she traveled deeper into the wreckage, only to be sufficed in later events...
The girl pulled gently on her black hood of her uniform, tugging it over her pale hair and frost-bitten feeling face. A tickling sensation nipped at her neck, only to reveal a dark-feathered, butterfly-like creature appear from her cloak, which was now fluttering desperately against the violent wind in front of her face.
"Did you find anything?" A voice echoed through the tiny Golem. The female watched the delicate creature's wings pump against the wind before responding a few moments later:
"Nothing, did you find anything on your side Fio?" The Golem gave a particularly hard thrust of its wings, hovering a bit higher in the dreary sky. "Well, I found rubble, rubble, and more rubble, oh and some dust too."
The girl sighed. "This isn't the time to joke."
The black creature shivered in the breath of the sky, "Yeah, yeah, just trying to lighten the mood." The voice of the young man said through the Golem. "Well, seeing as there's no Innocence or Akuma or anything alive here, I think we can head to head quarters now."
There was a pause on the female's side.
"...Miss Mikael? Is there something wrong?"
The cold girl closed her eyes for a moment, listening to the quick rhythm of beating wings and whistling of the frozen wind. "No, everything's fine. I'll meet you at the North-Western gate of the town, the one we entered, alright?"
The Golem seemed to light up. "Roger, where's your current location?"
Mikael glanced around her. "Well, if my calculations of the town's structure are correct, I should be in the Eastern living quarters, about...maybe twenty minutes away from the North-Western gate? How about you?"
She heard a heavy sigh through the Golem. "I'm in the North market sector, about five minutes away." Mikael shuddered before replying, "Is there a problem? You don't sound too happy."
Fio exhaled again, the puff of breath seeming to shift through the small black creature. "I don't want to be alone in this ghost town. It gives me the creeps, hurry up will ya?"
Mikael smiled gently, even though Fio couldn't see it. "Scared?"
The voice on the other end of the line immediately snapped back at her, "I'm not scared! This is just...man, it's just too quiet around here."
"I'm already at the gate of the living quarters; I'll see you in ten minutes."
"Thank God! Alright, I'll see you soon Miss Mikael."
Mikael stumbled over uneven and broken ground. "Okay, be careful Fio, I don't want your first mission to end in disaster." But Fio had already hung up his connection, because as soon as Mikael muttered those words, the small Golem was already twittering anxiously at her uniform collar, begging to take a perch beside her warm skin once again.
The girl gave the creature a simple smile before adjusting her collar and letting him bury himself in the nape of her neck again, and after a few moments, she was hiking through the lifeless, ruined town yet again.