Human (is a state of mind)
I
Sometimes he wonders if he's even human, looks in the mirror and sees a monster staring back, and for a moment he doesn't recognize himself. Sometimes he wakes up gasping for breath, the wispy memory of a dream clouding his thoughts.
(He never remembers in the morning.)
His hand will grasp for Mugen, his fingers will close around the hilt, and he'll lay like that for what feels like hours, cold sweat pooling on his forehead and soaking the sheets under him.
He knows the dreams for what they are; memories of a time before, before the Second Exorcist Program, before he died and was remade, leaving him with a name and nothing more.
"Yū." A woman whispers in his dreams. "Yū." And he catches a hint of blonde hair out of the corner of his eye.
He doesn't care, he tells himself, doesn't want to remember something that doesn't matter, a time when he was young and naïve nothing like he is today.
(Kanda Yū tells himself that he is who he is, and the past doesn't matter, but the tattoo over his heart, the nightmares of a young boy with short hair and dark eyes and a blond haired blue-eyed woman say differently.)
II
Before the war picks up, when it's just level ones and the odd level two (level threes once in a blue moon), and there are no Noah lurking in the shadows. Before all of that, Yū spends hours in the training rooms (now gone and buried under tons of rubble).
The slash and swipe, whistle of his blade as he runs through kata that were memorized long ago. 'Faster faster faster' he tells himself, as though if he could move fast enough his past would disappear.
He trains and trains and trains, goes on missions, and returns back to the Order. Does it all over again. A monotonous pattern that has become his life.
(And then everything changes.)
III
There's a catalyst for change, Yū knows. That when Allen Walker joined the order, everything changed.
Allen Walker, with his lilywhite ideas and code of honor and his obsession with saving akuma. Yū hates him, except he doesn't, the naïve young boy who brings with him the height of a war that has been going on for millennia.
And Yū is in the middle of it, surrounded by people who care, when before he been wonderfully (agonizingly) alone.
There's Linali, who he has known of for years, but never really known, Lavi, who has been sitting on the sidelines for so long that Yū isn't sure he knows how to step into the light, and there is even Allen, whom darkness follows like a moth to flame, and Yū is surrounded, on all sides, on and off the battlefield, by people who care about him.
(Sometimes Yū can forget that time, before he had his Innocence, when the Order was throwing him at it over and over in hopes that it would stick, there had been two figures in the shadows, one large and one small, and someone had whispered, "Bookmen.")
IV
Someone once asked him, "In a war for the world how far would you go?"
That's what this is, Yū thinks, a war for the world, with the Earl one one side, the Black Order and the Church on the other.
Yū believes in the cause, believes that the Earl is evil and the Order is good (in some twisted semblance of the word). He doesn't believe in the church, believes that if there is a God, he is cruel and capricious and doesn't give a fuck about any of them anymore (if he ever did to begin with).
After all the things that the Order has done to him, and made him do, he stays because he believes in defeating the Earl.
And maybe because he doesn't know how to do anything else.
Yū will never forget the feel of newly acquired Innocence cleaving flesh, the metallic stink of blood, warm on his face, and the sounds of Alma's screams.
(How far would he go? Pretty damn far.)
V
The Second Exorcist program was born of fear. There was more Innocence than there were accommodators, because for every ten akuma killed, an exorcist went down, and they didn't want to lose the war.
"Can we bring them back?" Someone had probably asked and a scientist had said "Yes."
No one had thought of the consequences.
"Hey let's take the brain of a dead exorcist and stick it in the body the kid." Yū can't imagine who ever thought it was a good idea, and he still can't decide if they were an idiot or a genius.
(They learn their lesson though, or so he thought.
In the end, the only thing that came out of the program is Yū himself.)
VI
Yū can remember, back in the early days of his time in the labs, before everything went to hell, laughing with Alma, as they lay on the cold floor, blood pooling around them as their wounds closed up, bones clicking back into place, healing everything with a familiar itch.
Those were the days when he spent his time avoiding the other boy, pretending as hard as he could that he hated him.
Sometimes Yū wishes he could go back, go back to a time when his memories from Before were limited to sprites and shadowed figures of that woman.
In those months, between the days when they threw him at Mugen over and over and over, Yū had been happy.
They fought, they yelled, they screamed and hit each other, but Alma and Yū had been friends.
(Yū will never, never acknowledge parallels of his relationship with Alma Karma and Alan Walker.)
VII
The first thing Yū ever kills is his best friend. Alma's eyes are glazed with madness, his face covered in the blood of all of the people Yū has ever known, Alma's blade dripping red, pink, plink, plink onto the ground. And Yū doesn't want to, doesn't want to fight, but there's a man behind him who doesn't deserve to die and Yū himself has always only ever wanted to live.
(Yū stands over what is left of Alma Karma and cries.)
VIII
Yū was never born; he had been pulled wet and naked out of a tub, already old enough to walk and talk and, apparently, fight.
Once, he asked how humans were created.
"Humans are born when a man and a woman love you very much." He was told.
Now he knows better, knows the not quite so easy way that babies are made. The fucking and sweating, and panting that makes up the not really very beautiful way that humans come to be.
In the end it always comes back to whether or not he is human.
His body is human, made from an egg and sperm, but there is more than that, that extra bit they gave him that lets him heal broken bone in minutes and regrow a limb in days, that is not human. His mind is human though, with thoughts and feelings and knowledge of right and wrong.
But so was Alma's and we all know how that turned out.
But he was not born, they were not born,.
He is human, no more, no less than Lavi and Linali, and maybe even Allen (because if Yū can call himself human, the Allen must be too).
Yū is human because that is what he believes, because of his actions, not because of how he came to be, and in the end, what he believes is all that really matters.
Omake: On Allen Walker
Walker is everything Kanda Yū hates, he is happy and optimistic and likes everyone. He gets along with the whole of the Black Order in a way that Yū never will.
Yū is cold and violent, Allen is friendly and energetic, and they are just so fucking different that it's needless to say that they don't get along. Yū and Allen spend almost all of the time they spend in each other's presence, at each other's throats, insults thrown like candy at a parade.
But Allen and Yū work well with each other, make a great team and move seamlessly together in battle.
Yū's sword, and Allen's arm are formidable weapons in their own right, but together they are devastating.
This is the first time that Yū has someone to fight beside, someone he trusts, however begrudgingly, with his back.
Allen and Yū fight together on the battlefield and try to fight each other off the battlefield, and somehow in some strange way, it works.
Somehow Yū considers Allen a friend, really, it's quite mind-boggling.