Disclaimer: I don't own D. Gray-Man and its characters.
Author's Note: Yes, this is a repost. Let's hope it makes more sense this time around. Read and review!
Reliquary of Words
By: gossec
Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed by thy name.
Tyki Mick is human.
Komui wondered how to write that down on paper. The Church had returned his last report with dissatisfaction. They wanted propaganda. So Komui wondered, really hard, how many different ways he could phrase the truth so it was more comforting, but no less true.
"The answer to everything," Cross laughed and tapped his cigarette ashes on Komui's report, burning little pock marks into the paper, "is deception."
Komui sat by Rinali's bedside, counting the dark bruises on her skin, murmuring under his breath the old stories she always loved so much, though he could hardly remember how they began and ended. Chinese myths and tales reminded him of their mother, so Komui recounted the English fairy tales, modified of course, so everything was just once upon a time and happily ever after.
When she finally woke up Komui opened his mouth because she looked as if she was expecting conversation (I have a map of your life in my pocket, Rinali, and if you will only follow the directions you will reach the best possible destination you could ever hope to reach), paused, and smiled. "How are you feeling?"
Rinali loved maps, but she was attracted to the uncharted territories the most, the ones labeled here be monsters and she was learning a new kind of truth everyday as she explored deeper: humans were monsters too.
"You have a cigarette?" Tyki asked, dragging his forehead against the table, unruly black curls hiding his face from view.
"No." Komui was tapping his pen against the clipboard, wondering whether he had enough glycerol to preserve the samples he took today from the subject. "It's against the new regulations."
"What," Tyki finally lifted his head, eyes wide open, forehead the slightest bit of red, "the cigarettes?"
Komui blinked back at him languidly. "It's unhealthy."
Tyki groaned as his forehead slammed into the table again and again.
"So is self mutilation." Komui informed him, kindly. "Would you like a celery stick?"
Some days Komui felt as if he slept and missed a millennium. The new world was disorientating, with its weekly set of contradictory regulations to follow and the stiff unforgivable roles it cast upon him and his sister. Sometimes the different pasts bled together, until Komui couldn't remember a life different from this one, when the fond memories of home became the dark corridors of the Headquarter, then the sterile halls of the research center in Rome; when the faces of their family had been replaced by those of the scientists and exorcists; when the enemies were no longer Akuma and the Earl.
Some days Komui went through the reports and wondered when life ceased to make sense. When had everything reversed itself? When had the heroes become the villains and the villains the heroes?
The finer points didn't matter anymore. He only wanted Rinali to survive.
"I have a sister too, you know." Tyki said to Komui. He was feeling cruel that day as he laid on his lumpy bed and stared at the stone ceiling, one hand hanging off the bed and brushing against the floor, feeling the summer breeze but not feeling it at the same time.
"You have more than one, from what I'm told." Komui was going over the Science Department ordering list, chin propped on the heel of one hand as he went over each item.
"I'm talking about Rhode." Tyki grinned at the other man. "You know her, the one who turned your sister into a doll, once upon a time."
Komui hummed and made a check on the list. "Do you love her?"
"She's family." Tyki shrugged, a lazy roll of shoulders, as if that explained everything, and it did.
Komui found a mistake on the list on his third time reading, and corrected it fastidiously, wondering all the while if Tyki knew about the Noah's extermination six months ago.
Once upon a time, it was summer and they had a home.
Their mother tied wind chimes made of wood and glass by the windows. Sometimes light would hit a glass prism at a certain angle and the aftereffects dazzled. The way no shadow existed in darkness, the way the chimes sang in the wind, he kept every memory.
There was one night that Komui can't forget. When the Akuma killed and rampaged, the dark midnight sky was streaked by inferno masses of incandescent light. Blood splattered across those prisms created an odd play of shadows in their darkened house. The way the glass screamed, exploded, grinded into bones and sinews.
There was a hand that curled around his arm. There was a whispered message that was never heard above the screams.
Wind chimes looked and sounded different to him after that experience, and he was grateful that she would never remember enough of their childhood to make her avert her eyes whenever she saw the glass decorations. We shall not want what we do not miss, we cannot miss what we don't remember. Memories were different to him after that endless night without darkness.
"It's admirable." Komui murmured into his coffee as the door slammed close behind the furious Exorcist. "Isn't it, Ravi? How they would give up their lives before their principles."
Ravi looked tired, drained, jaded; injustices have long ceased to anger him. He was the Bookman now, a regular spectator in the Supervisor's office, taking notes silently by the side. The two of them and Rinali were the human milestones of the never-ending conflicts. Look to them for the beginning, look to them for the present. Komui often wondered where they'll be in the end. Will there ever be an end?
"You'll have to find some new recruits soon." The red-haired man sighed. "The only one active nowadays is Rinali."
Cross chuckled from where he lounged behind Komui. "Like the big brother would let her get anywhere near one of those petitions."
But Rinali did. On a regular basis. Komui had developed the habit of going over the names scrawled on the petitions tirelessly, one by one by one. Most of the times he recognized more than just Rinali's name; a new scientist in the department; a new Finder freshly recruited; sometimes even an exorcist, just out of the training center and aghast upon learning for the first time just what was expected of them. Sometimes it was the name of a person he liked, or felt like he might grow to like. Sometimes it was the name of a new face that reminded him of an old one.
Their cause was just; they wanted to stop killing, peaceful measures against the protesters. The Church ruled that God dictated otherwise.
He only ever cleared his sister's name from the list. The Church read the petition like a list of assignments to do; an account of all the negative influences to erase.
No doubt Rinali realized why she was the only one on those lists who was still alive and unscathed.
Which hell do we want to burn in if we're wrong?
Months (it felt likes years) ago, Cross had sauntered into Komui's lab with a bleeding gash on his shoulder and a bottle of scotch in his hand.
"I only treat Innocence, you are aware." Komui hummed as he sewed the wound shut.
Cross didn't respond. Komui tightened his hold on the needle driver. The General blew smoke in his face.
"Are you not afraid of pain, General?" Komui asked solicitously as he tugged harder on the suture.
Cross laughed. Pain was no longer a mystery to him, and a man familiar with pain had entered a new kind of freedom. "A Church official saw my face tonight," he commented, an afterthought, "when I was sending the protesters off."
Komui froze. Cross smirked as he smoked his own future and washed the bitter taste down with his twenty-three-year-old scotch.
"Do you eat? Drink?" Komui asked the same questions he always asked as if it was the first time he asked them, as always.
"Yes, and yes." Tyki was unusually restless that day, pacing the length of his side of the room back and forth.
Komui checked the appropriated boxes on his list. "Do you do it because of hunger? Do you feel hunger?"
"Yes." Tyki replied shortly, a half snarl twisting his fine features. "Is Rhode dead?"
A pause, Cross started laughing from where he stood behind Komui. The supervisor spared the guards by the door a glance, they shifted uncomfortably, before turning back to his list. "Do you feel thirst?"
There was a scream and Tyki slammed himself against the bars. The air crackled and shifted as the captives tried to force the transformation of his cells and the displacement of molecules. The entire room was glowing red. The guards were yelling. Cross's laughter were quiet half-choked sobbing screams of air.
"Do you want?"
"Yes." Tyki hit the bars one last time, the spelled steel crackled beneath his fist. Komui could see blood congealing beneath the skin on the Noah's knuckles and checked off one more item on the list. "I want. I dream. I lust. I itch." The Noah was suddenly amused. "Are you going to ask me if I scratch where it itches? Every time I see a little girl with dark hair walk by me, is it love or is it murder? Are you going to ask me if I bleed? Dissect me and tell me it's not pain I feel? Keep me in this room forever and tell me I'm not bored out of my mind? How human of you, supervisor, to think you are a stand above everything else."
"Tell me, supervisor," Tyki crossed his arms over the bars and leaned against it, primrose yellow eyes fixed on the man behind the desk. "Whatever happened to that general of yours?"
Cross snorted.
"He died." Komui replied.
The Noah looked weary. "When is this going to end?" His skin was turning paler, the rose-colored bruises standing out more against the white. "I'm tired."
Komui looked up for the first time since the questioning began. There was a resigned quality to Tyki's words that he had learned to recognize; he had heard it before, time and again. "Have patience." He murmured.
Komui prayed, four hours by the altars every morning, at daybreak.
The Church demanded only two hours from the Supervisor every day; but Komui found the higher-ups to be kinder when he exceeded their expectations.
Every hour moved like a year, he reflected on his knees as a sinner would for absolution. Ser Ciapelletto achieved sainthood at the end of his life through lies and deceit. Komui cannot bring himself to discard the truths.
There was a man named Ian Noscere who loved the dawn; an archbishop in the College of Cardinals. He had a nephew who matched with an Innocence and was fitted to be a soldier of the Church. Komui believed the man must have seen the slow burning out of life after each and every mission, the disillusioned and jaded eyes. Noscere saw one more step into the future than Komui: the silhouette half floating in air with the help of the self-fashioned noose.
Supervisor Li always saw the archbishop in the mornings when he entered the chapel; they had much in common.
Komui kept a close eye on Rinali; a small round Komurin bot, styled after and a tribute to Allen's Tim Campy, whirring behind her shoulder at every step.
The Supervisor's designated bedroom in the Rome Research Center is more spacious than the normal personnel's, situated in the stone tower in the South Wing with a balcony overlooking the narrow cliffs surrounding the secluded structure ("Beautiful view," Komui had remarked dryly to the researcher who had brought him to the room. The other man had beamed at him, not getting the sarcasm).
Komui was almost never there, he had picked out another room for himself among his laboratories, but some nights he dragged himself into the cold dusty room and sat down on the railing of the balcony, twining his legs through the bars. He would stare off into the distance and if he stayed silent long enough, he would start to hear the sound of wind chimes in the distance; he couldn't make the distinction anymore. How do we bear any sense without muting its tone? The cuff of meat around the marrow bone.
On those nights, Komui tried hard to recall some piece of sunshine memory from the past. Something warm that could spread through his body and bring back all its sensations. Some form of sustenance that could strengthen him, bind him and keep him from tumbling over the edge. But all he could remember was how for many weeks after their parents' death, all he and Rinali ate were the bland rice brought by the neighbors. When they ran out of those, he had went into the kitchen, gathered ingredients, and made omelets. He had been slow, unsure of his own actions, and bothered by Rinali's quiet sniffles, but he had done it, and the family had eaten together that night: two.
Afterward, when he had been washing the dishes, he cried more than he had at the grave, the most so far at that point, muffling and choking back his sobs so not to wake Rinali, who slept on his bed, because he found the saddest thing of all to be the simple truth of his capacity to move on.
Those nights Komui wake to the loud cacophony of broken glass in the back of his mind, mixed with Rinali's raspy breaths. No one knew how close he was to untwining himself from the banister and falling.
"Your fatal flaw," Komui murmured, a cup of cold coffee in his hand, "among many, was that you had no patience."
Cross was silent for once. Standing beside Komui, the General gazed at his own name on the epitaph.
The two of them stood still in front of the altars. So many names, sacrificed in the crusade for God. Komui remembered their names (all of them) as was his duty and if one's soul was truly everlasting, their names will remain etched in memory till the end of eternity.
Regret only last till the last sip of coffee.
It was twenty four minutes and forty seconds past midnight exactly when the small bracelet he wore around his wrist began to vibrate and shrill.
Komui had abandoned his papers and was out of his office before the clock moved to twenty five.
Cross stood stationary in front of Komui as he flied down the corridor; expression grim and unsmiling. "You know what is happening." There were sounds now, he can hear, a repetitive banging that chilled him to the bones. The corridor seemed to stretch on forever; the turn at its end seemed to twist into a spiral. "You knew this would happen."
Komui couldn't reply, he turned at the twist of the corridor. Cross leaned against the wall. "It was a mission to contain the mob rebellion in Ester city." No one knew who fired the first shot, but everyone was involved. Human against human.
His Komurin bot whirled outside of Rinali's door, slamming itself again and again into the chipped wood, forming spider web cracks. It stilled at Komui's touch, and his fingers found a small button under the mechanical wings and pressed; the band around his wrist stopped moving.
"Thirty two petitions, this is what she wanted."
Rinali lounged limp and languid in a scarlet armchair, the color staining her pale flesh. For a second it seemed as if the whole room was encased in red, wind chimes sang in the distance. The bot whirled to a stop and rested by the letter opener. He reached for the wound.
"This is what she wanted."
Sorry, brother.
Komui had always had a love affair with science, because it proved, over and over again in countless successions, that there was a solution to every problem.
"The problem here is that I think there is no God watching." Tyki smiled at him from behind the bars, hands wrapped around the carven steel. "And you don't know if there is one."
Komui didn't answer him, he was working meticulously on the written symbols on the walls, rubbing away at the words written in red. "How pagan." Cross had laughed when they examined Tyki's jail that first time long ago, when Komui was still afraid of a dead man's voice.
"Everyone is agnostic, it's the unknown that drives them to religion." Tyki pushed experimentally at the bars, particles shifted and rearranged. The symbols glowed beneath Komui's fingers. The Noah hissed and brought his hand back, rubbing at the fingers. "I can't wait for a fucking cigarette."
Cross chortled. "I know the feeling."
"You scientists are god-killers, you know." Tyki laughed, giddily, his approaching freedom was a promise that worked through his body like an adrenalin rush.
The symbols and words lost their glow beneath Komui's hands. Tyki reached.
In an ironic turn of fate no one could've foreseen, the Noahs became heroes.
Tyki Mick, chagrined, found himself becoming the figurehead of the protestors; Komui expected it.
It was not due to the caprice of the people; it was the natural result of good unopposed by evil.
White and black; roles are regularly reversed. Komui only planned to let fate run her course.
Flectere si nequeo superos, Achaeronta movebo.
Ian Noscere had the will, he was capable of the thought, and he was not the only one.
Komui had researched them, studied them, now he only had to supply them with the means; create the opportunities and take advantage of their influence.
Tyki Mick will weaken the destabilized structure from the outside. The Church will always exist, perhaps under a new ascendancy, because doubts exist, but Komui will be there to present the world with its new prophets when the new age arrives.
Revolution was not always by force.
"I would have been proud." Cross smirked at him from across the room.
fin