WARNING!! 98% trashy romance, 35% character study, 5% Kanda-bashing, 0% learning to add percentages. The OC in this chapter is unnamed, and if you like to read it that way, even a little bit gender-ambiguous. And I'm sorry, but the ending wrote itself. This is still all about Daisya. Please enjoy.

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He had gathered just enough people to stage a takeover of the training field at Headquarters. For that day at least, everyone was going to play soccer, and Daisya Barry was going to star.

The cocky 20-year-old was no coach and even less of a team player, however, so the game eventually screeched to a halt with a number of his own teammates and opposing team players alike hitting him with a pile-up just to get the ball away. Someone on the winning team who had bothered to keep score was screaming foul, but Kanda was the referee, and he had left for lunch over an hour ago.

In the violent scuffle the old leather ball suffered a small rip, and because I had never seen such sad eyes on a face I stayed to help fix it.

He jingled gently as he sat watching me work, unconsciously tapping one heel on the ground as if he couldn't sit still. He bragged about the game, embellishing heavily despite the fact that I had been right there. Listened to my story with the distant attention of someone who would forget it tomorrow, the knuckles of one long-fingered hand grinding his cheek as he propped his head up to stare as if I had spinach in my teeth when I spoke. I asked if I did, and it made him smile. He asked my name for the third time. Said I hadn't been too bad a goalkeeper.

He followed me to the cafeteria; he followed me out. I was his object of interest for the day– and by then I was quite helplessly taken with his careless braggart's smile and irreverent questions. Down one of the fortress' many dark, narrow corridors I ended up backed against a stone wall, with his hands up my shirt and his tongue in my mouth. If pressed, I might admit to being almost entirely responsible for what happened. In the long minutes that followed we somehow managed to get just enough clothing out of the way to take our act of public indecency seriously.

His rough kisses muffled my involuntary moans, but I heard little in those dizzy moments aside from the faint tinkle of the bell from his fallen hood and the hammering of his heart against my clenched fingers.

At what might have been the noisiest peak of it there was a loud, angry thud of something slamming into the opposite side of the wall we were up against. As opposed to my panicked swearing, Daisya's hawkish face held mostly puzzlement, as if slowly remembering where he was as he backed us away from the wall. I disentangled my legs from his waist, struggling to get dressed with his arms still taut around me. He started laughing then, quietly, but exhilaratedly unapologetic.

Kanda's room was on the other side of that wall.

He planted an impish kiss on my forehead as I looked up in accusatory indignation. Swore it was an accident, and at the same time his face-splitting grin told me he thought he couldn't have planned it better. I beat away his playful attempts to continue what we were doing, pulled my white hood over my burning cheeks and left him smiling in the corridor with only one–unintentionally longing–backward glance.

Life in the Order is always busy, and it's not that I did not carry the sound of a bell and the image of piercing eyes with me for weeks afterward, but somehow it was him who sought me out again. I had no close confidante to tell about the clear laughter that haunted my dreams, although I might have asked around about the restless Exorcist a little too often. Any rumors that might have been floating were rather publicly authenticated at the end of some crowded evening in the cafeteria, where a familiar voice jerked me by the heart from my teacup straight into an open-mouthed kiss.

We had never been placed on the same detail, and certainly never were since then. I endured a number of scathing glances from Kanda, in whose cold practical reasoning an active Seeker could disappear tomorrow, and what if it scarred Daisya's resolve and took him from the field. None of this was worth losing ground in the war to save humanity.

And Kanda was right, so instead of going our separate ways like responsible adults, we talked. Made promises. I told him to write me off for dead every time we parted company. He asserted, serious as cancer, that he would comply.

But he was unflinchingly faithful; relentlessly affectionate. He brought me cheap, obnoxious trinkets from the places he traveled, and would say oh, you're still here. I got these to lay on your gravestone. The first gift I received was a china urn. For your ashes, he had chuckled, just in case I hadn't gotten the joke.

I learned that even the long years away had not made him miss home. He could scoff and laugh at superstition and all the near-religious metaphysical hodge-podge that surrounded the unfinished science of Innocence and Dark Matter, but his faith in the unchanging nature of the dismally backward (if pretty) seaside town never wavered. No desire to visit– there wouldn't be anything new to see. The shop would still be there, and his baby sister would cry, but she had two more older brothers to look out for her. They might even have had another kid. I learned that he didn't look like his parents or the rest of his siblings. He was almost confident some days that he had been adopted, adding fire to his lack of guilt over leaving it all behind and never looking back. He kept no photographs– he couldn't forget their faces if he wanted to.

Once, pricking my lower lip on his freakishly-long canines for the umpteenth time finally caused me to yank his wide mouth open to inspect them. They couldn't possibly be real, I insisted, and he had replied, matter-of-factly, that they were not. Like the clownish purple streaks he had tattooed into his cheeks with his own hands when he was a boy, he had had the fangs installed by an eager accomplice from the science division because he'd gotten bored with his own face.

I asked, without much consideration, when he would become bored with me. He said I'd have to tell him how I kept rising from the dead. I told him that I would take my secret to my grave.

I don't know why it was all so funny back then.

The call went out with Yeegar's brutal death, and we learned that even a Marshal's apocalyptic powers had somehow completely succumbed to the combined efforts of two members of the Noah Clan. It had to be some manner of fluke; some filthy trick– we had to believe we could still win this war.

Daisya threw open my door not very long before a large team of us was set to leave. His golem, an angular self-repairing prototype I always liked, had already been activated, so he crushed it underfoot as he approached and kicked it through my closed window amid my exclamations of protest. It would catch up with him later.

There hadn't been time for the shattered glass to settle before he pinned me to the bed with a bruising kiss. His slender, diminutive frame was only slightly larger than mine was, but somehow he weighed a ton. When our lips parted he breathed as if the air was boiling in his lungs. There was a look on his face that I had never seen before.

"They're going after Tiedoll. They want the Marshals dead," I heard it in his voice then, a tone fiercely protective. Love was the tremor in his fearless spirit. "I owe the old man everything. I'd die for him. I'll die before I let them hurt him!"

"So I'm sor–" I covered his thin lips with a hand that shook visibly. Told him it's okay, I'm already dead.

He kissed and kissed me, his quick hands familiar with every snap and buckle on my uniform. In the tangle of limbs and clothing, with the Charity Bell somewhere in the sheets, I remember gasping "I love you" against the curve of Daisya's wide smile.

It was nearly four weeks later when the dust finally settled in Barcelona. I heard my name murmured amongst the crowd of white coats around the lamp post as I drifted toward the center of it. Someone I barely knew hugged me, and I saw Kanda and the quiet Marie coming towards me in the crowd. Marie hesitated–he was the kindest of Tiedoll's proteges–and raised a hand to stop me. Kanda's face was a cold veneer, but his teeth were clenched with...anger? Sorrow? I could never tell. I started running then, and people made way.

He would have made fun of me for my rather unremarkable reaction to the sight of his corpse. I traced the tattoo on his cold cheek, whispered something through my tears about how he looked like he was only asleep. When someone finally came to pry my hands from his coat and I felt the arm of a sympathetic cohort, I said, "It's okay, I'm already dead."

They gave me a week of leave, but I spent my time helping courier things around the giant fortress until I dropped from exhaustion. No one in the science division would allow me access to the records from Daisya's old golem. No one but the poor sock-on-a-stick who did most of the menial labor on that floor despite being programmed for much higher functions. No one ever told No. 65 anything.

The first recording that flashed on the screen lasted fifteen seconds and made me drop the discs I was holding. On the monitor I saw my own face, damp with sweat and eyes closed, oblivious in the throes of climax. Daisya was on top of me, his encircling arms conveniently obscuring everything else from view. I watched with my mouth agape as he brushed his lips tenderly across my eyebrow and turned to steal a look straight at the camera, with a smirk that said he was pretty proud of himself. The bastard had done this on purpose.

Under threat of bodily harm No. 65 assured me that this recording was the only one of its kind, and that Daisya used to watch it some days when he was in and I was away from Headquarters on duty. I didn't allow myself to think about who else might have gotten a viewing as I snapped the disc in two, with hands that trembled with conflicting feelings of deep loss and murderous rage.

I slipped the second disc into the machine.

Some strained reservoir of my grief broke when I watched Daisya's last moments of suffering as he faced his death with dauntless mien. Perhaps it was a mistake to carry his anguished screams and the face of the monster who slew him with me, but surely it was more than that which burned white-hot behind my heart as I stumbled through the corridors, following an inexorable pull toward the fortress' lowest floor.

The strange, ancient creature they called Hevlaska loomed in her chamber, a towering mass of glowing blue appendages. She seemed busy–two Marshals had returned recently to temporarily deposit their cache of Innocence fragments. One such fragment shone like a star in her hand. Time seemed to stop. She was looking at me.

My bid for compatibility as an Innocence host had showed no results when I first arrived at the Order three years ago. I never really knew if it was because they had found a new fragment, or if something about me had changed when I lost Daisya, but when Hevlaska beckoned to me, I went.

When she set me back on my feet and gave me the shining fragment, she also gave me a cryptic message about pain and hardship on the road to come. Daisya's laughter, like a bell, rang in my head. I had my response for her.

"It's okay, I'm already dead."

-end-