thirteen minus infinity
Kanda has thirteen lives, and Lavi has infinity. Neither number is associated with a creature like nine is with cats, because anything beyond that is just too much. No living thing would like to be cursed with that. It practically invites hubris.
It comes up one day before "school". So that they don't grow up stupid, Kanda, Lavi, and the tiniest thing in the order (with the possible exception of Lavi's master), Lenalee, are made to sit behind a table and go over piles of schoolbooks. Kanda hates his lessons, hates Lavi who's quite good at them, and hates more than poison Lenalee, because she's the best out of all three of them.
She nulls and voids the theory that the reason the Japanese boy can't grasp basic algebra is because of a language barrier—they're from the same continent and they put him on force-fed English two years earlier. She makes him look like an outright moron by being younger than him, by being a girl (girls aren't supposed to be as good at math, the tutors tsk at him), and by nimbly deriving and integrating away in a workbook that's so advanced that it doesn't even have a number on it. Kanda's books are all stuck on the number seven.
"Don't worry, Kanda." She tells him kindly. "Math is really hard. I'm only a little further ahead because it's my favorite subject. Brother taught me when I was little. I'm sure you'll catch up soon."
Lavi, who's better friends with Kanda and knows the grades he gets across the board, sniggers. Kanda may have not been exposed to math as a child, but Lavi's pretty confident that whatever Kanda's situation prior to coming to the Order, it should have left him with a greater reasoning ability/literacy/overall brains than he has.
No weapons are allowed in the library where class is held, so Kanda settles for a vicious Indian burn under the table. Lavi is assigned a hundred "I will not talk at the same time as the teacher" for yelping disruptively in the middle of lecture.
---
The teachers have already left, but they're responsible for keeping the area clean. As they organize their things and get ready to leave, Lenalee tugs at Lavi's sleeve with one pretty slim hand.
"What did you yell out for, Lavi?" she inquires curiously.
"Yuu tried to hold my hand!" Lavi announces, indignant.
Lenalee rolls her eyes at how Lavi's baiting Kanda, again, and how Kanda completely falls for it, again. While Kanda inserts a fountain pen into Lavi's other arm to match the first wound, Lenalee reaches into her pencil box for a bandage and wonders if her brother will seriously consider a petition to swap out all pointy nibs for feather quills.
Later when they're alone, Kanda hits Lavi again for almost giving it away. Lavi laughs and apologizes, so Kanda grudgingly forgives him and takes his kiss.
---
Kanda won't touch a book outside of class, but Lavi loves them. He zips through homework with ease, but the bulk of his studying comes from pouring through antique-y volumes that are ungodly thick. They make Kanda ill just by looking at their brittle yellow pages. Lavi's eye whizzes over their tiny, cramped text.
Bookman misses his apprentice when he has plenty of paper chores for him, and complains to Komui:
"You needn't worry about the boy growing up ignorant. I've made him read so many books that he could tell you about anything you care to ask about. Let him off the classes, I need him working with me."
Komui, who is a scientist and not a historian, haughtily pushes his glasses further up on the bridge of his nose. "Memorization is not true learning, Bookman. Lavi needs more than just facts. He needs to know what it means to think."
The redhead is supposedly progressing in leaps and bounds according to his marks, but his huge banks of miscellaneous information come into play more than any thinking. ("Now there is a boy who loves knowledge!" the impressed instructor had exclaimed.)
Kanda, who doesn't make a hobby out of either facts or thinking, is not as endearing. With his personality he is more likely to shoot spitballs, only A.) that will mean he will be kept after and it would take even longer to get out, B.) he is too mean-spirited to want to make his fellow pupils laugh, and possibly C.) nothing as wimpy as spitballs can satisfy him after knowing what it's like to cleave things right in half with Mugen.
"Your room stinks of leather." Kanda gripes to Lavi as he wades through the scraps of used parchment littering the floor.
"I like it." Lavi says absently. He's usually energetic and ready to invade Kanda's personal space. (Which is self-designated as at least a ten foot radius, so it's not hard), But when he's absorbed in a book, not even Kanda's blatant misanthropy can tempt his provocation skills.
Kanda hates studying, so he hates Lavi for doing it, but he wants a sparring partner. It's of great aggravation to him that really, his only choices are Lenalee and Lavi, and Lenalee is, as was mentioned, a tiny younger female.
Kanda had weighed his options carefully. He still went to Lenalee first. But Lenalee, scurrying to her brother's office, had only glanced at him reproachfully behind a stack of files, an invasive-looking medical instrument perched on top.
"Not now, Kanda, I'm busy helping brother. Why don't you ask Lavi?"
Lavi himself halfway rejects Kanda anyways, saying: "Fine, but lemme finish first."
Kanda's never bothered to figure out why, but he's rarely ever refused, especially not twice in a row. It happening now pisses him off. (The answer to why is, he is always either too scary or too beautiful for anyone to resist him. Lenalee sees her own looks in the mirror on a daily basis. They are attractive and similar enough for her to have gained an unconscious immunity to Kanda's knockout "exotic" good looks.)
Lavi, who is plenty aware that Kanda is one of the most mind-meltingly beautiful people he has ever met, nevertheless finds him to be less interesting than a good reference book and so makes him wait. Kanda sits next to him on the mattress, moody and silent.
"Okay, Yuu, we can go now!" Lavi shuts the book and bounds to the desk to fish his hammer out from underneath a heap of dog-eared scrolls. Meanwhile, Kanda sulks about being the lower priority. He glares daggers at Lavi's book on the bed.
The Physiology of Ornamental Water Plants, he reads.
When Lavi turns around from slipping his weapon in its holster, Kanda slugs him in the nose.
---
Lavi doesn't even take his eyes of the page, but his hand reaches out and closes around Kanda's ponytail. He yanks so hard Kanda's head falls into his lap. Kanda snarls and is ready to slap the book away—his face is not a tabletop, goddammit!—but Lavi cradles the book to one side and runs his fingers through Kanda's loose bangs on the other. Kanda quiets down and lets Lavi do what he wants, although he's bothered by the mustiness of old animal hide on Lavi's skin and knows the smell will get into his hair.
---
Kanda has thirteen lives and Lavi has infinity.
One day Lavi goes into Kanda's room to steal back his notebook. Kanda "borrowed" it to "compare" their work. Lavi knows Kanda is copying, which he only does because if he doesn't at least look like he's trying (he's not), Komui will hear of it and make sure that plenty of hours will be squandered on make-up work instead of being spent meaningfully on the training grounds. Lavi noticed Kanda practically choking on his own tongue when he asked, in anticipation of Lavi's smirk and the inability to inflict bodily harm in the wake of a favor.
Kanda doesn't risk Lenalee for two reasons. 1.) She is, as always, younger and a girl, and 2.) She will most likely say "No! Here, I'll help you do it yourself," and there goes another six hours of Lenalee making him feel stupid as she drills him with similar sample problems without giving him the exact answers.
Lavi hears a smashing sound suddenly and there is Kanda in the doorway. The shards of the broken pitcher he was refilling are on the flagstones around his boots and there is a growing puddle. Lavi gapes at Kanda, balancing the hourglass he moved off his notebook on one palm.
Anyone who has been at the Order long enough knows that Kanda's normally unpleasant expression is at its most cross when Lavi randomly regurgitates things he's read in the place of shutting the hell up, swinging his hammer likes he's serious, and crying like a baby like it actually hurts when Kanda lands bodily hits three out of five tries.
For the first time Kanda looks as if he doesn't mind and Lavi really looks like he's close to crying. They sit cross-legged on the floor of his room, cushioned by sheets of haphazardly strewn paper.
Lavi has his hands folded as he recites:
"Thirteen. A pagan number. When there was more than one god to worship, people went by the lunar calendar. In deference to the moon goddess, when thirteen cycles of the moon were completed, the year finished. On the thirteenth day, the Magi visited the messiah. When the thirteenth apostle sat at the table of the Last Supper, history's first traitor, Judas Iscariot, was born."
"Those all seem appropriate." Kanda answers. "Whatever it is, it's not Christian. That'd make it pagan, wouldn't it? When the thirteen petals are gone, it's over. It was something like a gift. I'm sure I'm betraying something."
Lavi swallows hard. "There's a big difference between infinity and thirteen, Yuu."
Kanda may be a pretty bad student, but he knows that much.
---
That evening Lavi decides that they're old enough. They cut class and end up in bed together.
Kanda's always taken for granted that he's desirable—no shit. He doesn't take proper care of his looks. Hell, by all logic he should have split ends and a pimply complexion. He grabs unidentified bottles during bath time and just slathers the stuff on without caring what they're really for. But he lives on to ignore the covetous looks thrown his way wherever he goes.
At the moment, he decides he's a little grateful for nice hair, flawless skin, and a cut figure, if only to have them for the occasion. Or so people say he has, anyways, and Lavi doesn't seem disagree.
It's obvious Kanda's beautiful, so beautiful that even Kanda gets it even though he's the kind to think a well-crafted katana is the epitome of beauty.
Lavi comes close, though. No one's ever said a thing about Lavi looking like a girl, but Kanda's a little stunned at what he feels because of Lavi nervously biting at his lower lip, because of Lavi's wispy bright red hair fanning unchecked across his brow, because of the incredible vulnerability in the edges of a scar peeking out from under Lavi's bangs.
Lavi hesitantly wraps his arms around Kanda's neck and they, for a lack of a better term, do it.
---
Classes are canceled in the wake of the war beginning in earnest, but not before life proves once again that it is detestable. They last until after a new student arrives and the first tests taken after that are passed back. Kanda is pretty sure itinerant clowns have no business being scholars, but each of Allen's scores is a sum of two of Kanda's.
"My foster parents made me keep up in my lessons." He directs this smug comment specifically at Kanda. Kanda would have put a pencil through Allen's knee if Lenalee hadn't been on the ball and smacked his wrist with a ruler.
"I dropped my book." She says innocently to the teacher's look.
"Whaaat?" Allen wails. He's aghast to be informed that he's still dead last in cumulative grades. ("Mr. Walker, Mr. Kanda may be a poor tester, but he does quite excellently on assignments." the teacher explains primly.)
Kanda grins nastily at Allen. Now that there are four of them instead of three, they are no longer crammed into one long side of the table, with the teacher pacing on the other side. They take up the two short sides and have seatmates. Kanda's, Lavi, hides a smile behind his hand. He does Kanda's homework for him now, so his friend has the time for more interesting things.
---
While Allen fumes about the injustice, and looking dumb in front of the number one "Miss Lee," Lavi takes advantage of their new seating arrangements to casually rub his leg up against Kanda's. Kanda draws it back and kicks him in the shin to make Lavi knock it off. But he gives Lavi's hand a quick squeeze of thanks.
---
Kanda and Lavi are fighting about something. What it makes it a fight and not Kanda just being his usual self is that Lavi too, has an ugly disposition nowadays. He snaps at Lenalee to mind her own business instead of cheerfully recounting all the threats and insults Kanda throws at him for unreciprocated affection.
Her brother Komui is ready to break the Bookman junior's neck, but Lenalee's patient and understands that people and their relationships are complicated. She's been watching the case of Kanda and Lavi for years now and knows there's probably a story behind their ambiguous friendly hostility. They're keeping mum about it, though, and that's not likely to change any time soon.
So she drags Komui to his lab. Although he sniffles about bullies ("Why do they always go after the sweetest, kindest, most gorgeous ones?" he laments) she's at least spending time with him. Besides, she's been burning with some questions about practical applications for higher derivatives. Kanda and Lavi are free to work out their issues by themselves.
They're fighting over numbers.
Kanda sweats as he parries the spear-like tip of Lavi's innocence.
"It's. Not. My. Fault." He pants. His deflection checks the momentum and throws Lavi back, but Lavi simply shrinks his innocence to lessen the effect, slides back, and then grows it back to battle size.
They spend more time in Kanda's room than Lavi's, but Lavi hates Kanda's room. It's barren and cold and the eerily lit flower in the corner puts a damper on the mood. Lavi has to make an effort to not look at the shriveled petals on the bottom of the case, but he's most upset with Kanda refusing to make it less conspicuous.
Lavi's room is out of the question because all the surface area of his bed is taken up by a spread of books and there's no place for two people to sit anymore. Lavi uses his days to read late into the night. So as to not to mess up his work, he curls up in chair in the corner and sleeps there.
"Of course it is! You wanted it." There's a cut on his forehead and Lavi thrusts his arm up. Kanda can see a ring of dots, bleary with light, swelling larger and larger.
"How many left now, Yuu?!" Lavi shouts. He picks his favorite, the four-armed "fire", and pulls back to bring the hammer down. Kanda traces the side of Mugen and it flares into life, its glow distorted by the squirm of needle-toothed creatures jockeying to lunge forward.
Hi-ban and Ichigen chew on each other as Kanda marches over to Lavi and slaps him.
"How about you?" he shoots back. "Which one are you on? How much time is there left for him?"
Lavi angrily spits out a stream of red from biting his tongue. "49. And not much." He shoves a gloved hand into Kanda's chest. "But that's different! Yours is a countdown, mine's infinity. Maybe it won't be the next one, but there'll always be a chance for me with a later alias..."
"You have unlimited lives, and that's worse than having thirteen. It's worse than having none." Kanda sneers.
---
Kanda drags Lavi by his scarf to a dark corner behind a column and they end up having wilder sex than they've ever dared before. As Lavi sleeps with his head on Kanda's shoulder, Kanda thinks.
A baker's dozen. The atomic number of aluminum. The number of nodes in the angel Metatron's cube, the number of steps to the gallows, and the number of principles to the Jewish faith. The legion that Caesar used to cross the Rubicon to his ruin. The Major Arcana's "Death." Lavi knows all this too. He's the one who looked it up.
What exactly is in "infinity"? Kanda thinks scornfully. Everything?
What good is everything?
---
Lavi gave Kanda fair warning, but Kanda secretly relies on the bleeding-heart sensibilities of Lenalee and Allen and the rest of the sappy Order to do something about it when the time comes. He wants to be spared from having to look like he cares. He forgets that Lavi is pretty smart.
Lavi times number 50's arrival perfectly. As far as Kanda can tell Allen is the next Jesus. Jesus dons a white fur clown coat, a gross sentient monocle, and is pretty good with guns, claws, and claymores. And although he fights well with Kanda, Jesus still bugs the shit out of him.
Geeky Lenalee, who now walks around with a shaved head, is also apparently a big deal. As-important-as-the-crucifix important. Yet when they first met up in Edo, Lenalee was a limping gimp. Her legs are polka-dotted like she's got a disease, but for some reason people are happy about it.
Everyone's wrapped up in those two, the Jesus-clown with the big sword and the bald savior who's ridden with the pox. Lavi being a little weird goes amiss when everything is so incredibly, incredibly weird.
Allen and Lenalee get herded here and there to Heveleska, to the labs, to audiences with the higher-ups. Of course they still dote upon Lavi, but they're a bit busy at the moment and even if they had noticed they would have been sensitive enough to consider what it must have been like when Rhode violated his soul. Any strange behavior is perfectly accounted for by emotional and mental trauma.
"Lavi, give me a hand."
They're all in the library for their very last class, in which the teacher will distribute all past work and they gather their things. Lenalee's shaky on her lame feet and can't even get up on tiptoe to grab her worksheets on the top shelf. Lavi lays a hand on her shoulder and reaches over her. He says:
"I think I'd like to go by 'Junior' from now on. As in 'Bookman Junior'."
"Huh?" Lenalee suspiciously takes her things from him and holds them to her chest. "What for?"
"No reason. I just like it better."
Kanda looks up from emptying his inkwell into the wastebasket. (And drowning out Allen, who's scolding him for wasting supplies, but it's not like Kanda's going to use an inkwell on his own time.)
---
"Yuu." Junior whispers as his arms twine around him. That is not normal. Usually it's Kanda who holds him. They look at the lotus across the room together from Kanda's bed.
"Did you know, botanists assign the infinity symbol to flowers that have more than twenty stamens? Your lotus has more than twenty. Maybe once all the petals are gone, the stamens will count too. You could be infinity. You could be just like me, Yuu Kanda." He lowers his mouth to Kanda's shoulder muscle and sucks.
Kanda shoves him away. Junior has a cold glare to match his own.
Kanda isn't wild about sweet things, but then again Lavi hadn't really been sweet. Lavi had been the maddening, hysterical laughter that dogged every mission they went on, the blush of pleasure on Lavi's skin when they had made love. Lavi had been the furious hand moving to smash the glass case that housed the lotus, for dripping another petal. Kanda had had to use so much brutal force to wrench him away from it that it had left a bruise, but Lavi hadn't been mad about that. He'd cried and covered Kanda with kisses, hugging him tightly.
Lavi had been in love with him.
Number 50, Junior, is just a bastard. A bastard with 49's soft lips, ragged red hair, and scent of leather and wood pulp. He makes Kanda seethe and wonder when 51 will be forthcoming.
But whoever 51, 52, 76, 99, infinity, will be, it won't be number 49. Lavi.
Kanda realizes that he was also completely in love with Lavi.
---
Lavi had hated his thirteen, and so Kanda will hate his infinity. Infinity lurks in 50, who's creepy and cold and stole Lavi's identity, so on their next mission alone together, crossing a lonely tundra, Kanda decides to get rid of him.
He runs through one of 50's knees from behind with Mugen. He gets the other before 50 can even turn around. He's unhappily surprised that in the same glass-green eye, the same upturned mouth, he sees none of Lavi, and can't even be made to hold back a second before stabbing him through the chest, just like the in the nightmare Lavi told him about.
Kanda works on laving Junior's fingers together in a peaceful pose before Junior is completely dead.
"Hey Kanda." Junior says as Kanda roughly rearranges his hands with his own. "What's thirteen minus infinity?" He dies.
---
It's a few months ago and a bright enough of a spring day to blind them, and that doesn't happen often in London. Lavi yawns and nuzzles Kanda's hand dreamily. Kanda snatches it back. They're sitting in the solarium and have their books out, but Lavi's already done and Kanda's waiting on him to snap out of his sleepy haze so Lavi can start on his.
"Yuu-chan, our birthdays are coming up."
"Yeah? So?" Kanda doesn't care about birthdays. They mean he has to sit through a parade of obligatory greetings at breakfast, but that's about it. No one at the Order's stupid enough to try to throw him the customary surprise birthday party.
"We'll be eighteen. That's a big deal."
"What's with you and numbers? What does that matter?"
Lavi chuckles and tilts his head against Kanda's arm.
"If we were Jewish, we would have become adults at thirteen. But we're supposed to be Christian, aren't we? We'll be men, I guess." Lavi's laugh is more soft and sentimental than lewd. "Of course, you could say we've already made each other men…"
Kanda knows that he should punch Lavi for that, but he feels a strange pang that stops him. It's not exactly warm. It's more like a premonition. So he reluctantly yields Lavi a kiss and leaves it at that.
---
Kanda is just the right kind of asshole. He plays aloof.
"How the hell would I know how the idiot managed to get lost? Someone that stupid deserves to die!"
He lets his so-called true sorrow manifest in his failure to bring back the innocence and his pitching of Komui's coffee mug against the wall. By the time he's done storming out, Komui is on the verge of shedding the "held-back tears" for him.
When he asks, Lenalee flips through his primer for him, then discards it over her shoulder because it doesn't even mention an idea as abstract as infinity. But she knows what to look for. Komui has drawn it for her before, that pretty symbol, a sideways eight, always looping into itself. Going on always. It had lurked, curvy and graceful and artistic, amid the lines and lines of rigid figures he wrote down on chalkboards to estimate an integer value for ectoplasm, souls, innocence.
She's practically her brother's secretary, so she knows exactly where in his stacks of mess are his scientific papers, his astounding revelations about the occult transposed into calculus. She sees the two dozens of times, the digits 1 and 3 partnered up and the infinity symbol. She searches to the point that the rows upon rows of numbers make her head swim. But they are always apart, never together.
"What is that? Are you trying to find a limit?" Lenalee's frustrated. "It sounds like a function and a limit problem combined. Has that even been invented yet?"
She shakes her head like Kanda's a creative math genius. (Although in truth, Kanda is the type to think a creative mathematician is an oxymoron. Even if Kanda's never learned the literary term, "oxymoron.")
Kanda leaves her rifling through her brother's things, her own curiosity piqued. He goes into Lavi's room instead, the place he hasn't been in for a while. First, it was too messy, and then 50 spent all his time in the library and camped on the sofas. To his surprise, it's completely cleared, except for a lone paper on the sheets.
On it is one last fact for him, written in the neat, professional handwriting Lavi had reserved for his research notes.
Mugen, written the wrong way, means infinity.
And then, in a childish scrawl of a side-note underneath
(When Yuu goes wrong: me)?
Lavi+ Yuu : love
Kanda gets out a sharp pencil from the drawer and, for the first time, does some math without being forced to.
On the same paper, he writes:
0: death
13-13 : 0
Infinity-13: 0
13-13 : Infinity-13
13: - Infinity
Yuu Kanda: 13
Lavi : Infinity
(13: - Infinity): (Yuu Kanda has killed Lavi.)
Kanda+Lavi:?
(?: love) ?
---
Author's note:
…because Kanda--- Allen--- Lavi--- Lenalee from dumbest to smartest kills me. :-P
Ahem, behold, what I do with higher education! Half of the stuff in here is wiki, half high school AP/ college classes. I approve of education! My god, the info on this fic would not stop. Here's even something I couldn't use; Lavi's voice actor (or seiyu), is in a group called "STA MEN". Wild. On that note...I am terribly sorry, and a little miffed, that FF doesn't process "equals" signs. I had to subsitute colons.
Meanwhile, I actually like Allen, but I don't think I understand him very well. That's why his presence in my fics can get a little skimpy, although I do want to include him.
If the ending caught you by surprise, notice that the title is "thirteen minus infinity," not "thirteen plus infinity":-) I know (or at least hope) Lavi won't turn out like this after fighting for his heart, but that's what fics are for, to explore what the series doesn't. Majorly inspired by lilla-bis's fics, which are mad creative! Love her stuff, go read it and love with me. Also influenced by KandiLandComplex's KandaLavi fics. She too, is awesome.
Here are a few more notes:
I am a mediocre calculus student. I get it, but I'm no prodigy, so please don't report to these kinds of things to your teachers or professors.
Kanda, Lenalee, and Lavi use those old-timey textbooks (primers) ala Little House on the Prairie/ American Girl's Samantha. Anyways, Kanda's "7" means he stuck at the equivalent of 7th grade math.