Title: Deeper Into the World
Characters: Komui, Kanda, Lenalee, Lavi, and Allen, mainly. Mentions of Finders, Miranda, Bookman, Rhode, etc.
Rating: T for Teen.
Word Count: 2,795
Warnings: Dark, dark, darkness. Weirdness, creepiness, character death, implied character death, violence, fire, and did I mention death…? And quite off-canon. Also my style is weird; I've heard it can get pretty confusing. POV changes.
A/N: It physically hurt to write this, no joke. First actual -fic. Comments and crit really, really extra-appreciated.
Summary: Everything goes very wrong, very fast.
Deeper Into the World
(the crow-black dream)
Human beings are not equal.
The structure of the Black Order is rigid in its form, upright and ecclesiastical like the century-old castle, doctrined by the unyielding words of God and His infallible Holiness. There is a hierarchy there, a stalwart echelon like the many dioceses, like the concentric circles of angels in Heaven's silver city. So it is with most organizations, sturdy and unrelenting, the bulwark of Christianity against the Devil's wrath, the skeleton of a gallows-tree in silhouette against the moon.
But the century-old castle is gone now, a dark tower left alone to crumble in the chaos of a new era, the latest scene in this obscene play. When Komui sleeps, he sleeps fitfully, thoughts of rebellion and anarchy flashing like burning trees behind his eyelids. The Finders are deserting. There have always been Finders deserting; the ones who never quite believed they were putting their lives on the line until they saw all those flat coffins, whole towns and villages of them, the sneers and averted eyes of everyone else. But where there once were weak dribbles of deserters, now there are whole pilgrimages, streams and eddies of them, the masks torn from their faces and defiance gleaming in their eyes. Komui can't keep track. He doesn't want to.
They are leaving; it is a fact. (Even more of them are dying. So it is with Finders, so it always has been. Fifty of them, one exorcist. A hundred of them, one exorcist. Komui used to be sickened by those odds.) They are leaving the Order, abandoning the cause, convinced their mission has become warped into some children's crusade (and how accurate they are in their perceptions, blunt as an executioner's axe and just as penetrating, just as ruthless). They look at Allen and the rest hatefully, whispering deathly words, snakes in his sister's bed, slipping poison in Kanda's soba.
And Komui is powerless to stop them.
And in his mind's eye he has nightmares of a gallows-tree, ever-burning, underneath a grinning red moon.
