Allen Walker could remember every time his heart had ever been broken.
The first time was a haze of memory clouded by the unformed perceptions of a child. He could not recall specifics, not words, nor deeds, nor reasons. But the sounds, the tones that bit at his past, nipped at his conscience - those he could remember clearly. His senses had long forgotten what his parents looked like or smelled like but he would never lose what they sounded like. Harsh accusations and false affirmations of love in the forms of deceptively soft lullabies and sweet nothings had been engraved in his ears. Yes, the first time his heart had been broken was when his parents had decided their child was a monster with that ugly arm of his and rocked him to sleep with tender words, only for him to wake up alone in the snow.
It was in that same snow that Allen's heart had been broken a second time. Guilt, his misleading ally of wicked tongues, would never allow this memory to leave him. Even when it was clear that Guilt had no place in his assertions, it always persuaded Allen that it was a necessary acquaintance. In the end, the essence of its stories reigned true: the second time, Allen had broken his own heart, smashed it to pieces in the ice with his own gullible foolishness. It was his fault that Mana was gone. It was his fault that Mana had suffered. And rightly so did Allen suffer along with him, still lost in a blizzard of white.
The third time, his heart was brittle, stiffened and dried from years of neglect. It broke easily, desperate as he was to glue it back together. He was trying - trying so hard that his body refused to function and his brain threatened to collapse. But his heart, his heart convinced him - against reason, as it so often does - that he could succeed. That he was not just a useless boy with a deformed arm, but a friend and a hero. That he was important to someone, loved by someone. Lenalee had accepted him, had been a sister to him when all he desired was a family. Yet she had been crying because of him, crying because he had failed to save one of her adopted family even though she had saved him so many times. He had only repaid her in grief and when Suman's body had dissolved and his own Innocence along with him, as everything faded into that pure and cold white, Allen thought it might have been better if he had died as well.
The fourth time, he had allowed his heart to grow big and soft, inflated like a balloon with false hopes of happy companionship. It was no wonder the illusion had been popped so easily. Rocks had been thrown at it again and again as Headquarters was ravaged in that sudden attack. Everything was collapsing around him, yet he still held on to the fleeting faith that maybe everyone would survive in the end, and for a brief moment of respite he honestly believed that they would all be okay. But Fate denied him and shattered this pseudo reality with that horrendous soul, that Level 4 who pierced Allen's distended heart, spread too thin across too many. It had even incited his body to react, so weary was he of so much disappointment. He could not contain the bile rising up from his chest, nor could he hold together the pieces of himself.
The fifth time was quiet, invisible. It snuck up on him in the dead of nights when he was most vulnerable. His patched-up heart had not broken this time; rather, the seams holding it together crumbled with effort as the stitches were no longer adequate seals of his misery. The trouble was that Fate had startled him so many times that now he was weary of these sudden twists. But sentimental assumptions led him to lean on the constants in his life like a crutch, the only solid ground in the swamp of quicksand. Soon enough, he had drowned in it when his support collapsed. The splashes of red stained his memories and sometimes Allen hoped that the twisted crimson was just his master's ridiculous hair playing tricks with his eyes. But reality was cruel and Marian Cross' death was inescapable.
The sixth and final time, Allen thought, would be now. It did not feel real, like his fingers were not his own and his detached soul was floating out in space. The searing pain he had felt in his chest had been dulled as the edges of his vision narrowed like the Red Sea closing in on his consciousness, threatening to swallow him whole and sweep him away. But he could not go yet, and that was the agony of it all.
There was a shadow over him, pressure on his wrist, warm rain drops clinging to his cheek as if trying to cleanse his pale skin of the scarlet that branded it. Then a voice, low, steady, but too quick to be calm - surely, he had never heard such a voice before. And yet, it was familiar with a certainty he clung to in his moment of instability.
He knew this voice, he convinced himself. He knew it. Someone was by his side, someone - perhaps the last someone in this godforsaken world - remained, despite all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that Hamlet had so keenly named. But then again, the fault had been in Hamlet's stars after all while the blame for his own misfortune lay very distinctly with himself. Allen Walker had no place pointing a finger anywhere but to his own chest.
Ah, but he could not feel his fingers anymore. Perhaps it was a sign from the God that had so cruelly abandoned him.
A faint touch on his forehead brought him out of his disorganized reverie and he remembered. Right - someone was with him. Someone was speaking to him, caressing his skin with more care than his own mother had ever bothered to. If this was to be his last moment, he was content with just this, wanted nothing more than that comforting hand to keep brushing back the blood-soaked hair from his forehead forever.
"Allen." His name. Who was speaking his name with such fear? His name did not deserve to be weighed down with reverence.
"Allen-" Again. Who was it...?
"Allen, you son of a bitch, wake the fuck up!"
The flash of forced anger was what reminded him. He could feel the edge of his mouth twitch in the foreign desire for a genuine smile. The one person who had never called him by his name was now desperately repeating it over and over in some kind of self-assuring chant. As if uttering a name would be enough to banish the cold blade of Reality.
His tongue was glued to the roof of his mouth with blood but he forced himself to swallow the iron barricading his voice. "Kanda," he croaked. He could not speak above a whisper and his words were clogged in his throat, but this was important, this was the very last moment he had to communicate with anyone, but, most importantly, that someone was Kanda.
His left eye was long gone, but he found the will to open his right. Everything was blurry, colors falling into each other without heeding the boundaries that separated them, like peering through a kaleidoscope. Nevertheless, Kanda's form above him was distinct; he would be able to pick out the dark curtain of his hair spilling over his shoulders even if he were blind.
He realized that he probably was blind now and that revelation prompted him to become painfully aware of his chest constricting, heart slowing - his lungs were most likely filling with fluid at that very moment. He was on borrowed time.
Breathing through the liquid, his cracked lips broke into a secret smile. "You called me Allen," he whispered into the open air, as if directed to no one in particular.
He sensed Kanda's form tense beside him, envisioned those dark eyes flaring, jaw clenching. "Shut up, dumbass," Kanda hissed. "You're wasting energy. Focus for once in your goddamn life."
Allen wanted to laugh, wanted to cry, wanted to scream that this was not the end.
"I like it," he mumbled. It was a passing reflection, but something compelled him to get it out into the air before speech failed him altogether. "Sounds... good, the way you..." His words crumbled into wet convulsions of his throat and he was fairly certain he hacked up some blood.
Kanda's fingers on his wrist had curled into white-hot chains. "I told you to shut the fuck up. Are you deaf?"
"Probably," he rasped with as cheeky an inflection as he could manage at this point. "I'm-" He gagged on another wave of melted iron. "I'm dying, Kanda."
"You're not gonna die if you shut your oversized mouth, you fucking idiot." He stood by his claim to deafness, but Kanda sounded hollow to him.
"Just," he wheezed, "please. Listen, Kanda, please."
Kanda drew a ragged breath and the almost desperate heat of his hand moved to envelope Allen's grotesquely distorted innocence, as though it was a reflex. The reminder that such a monstrous entity was a part of his own body came with significantly less disgust.
Taking that as confirmation of Kanda's attention, he stifled another spasm in his lungs. "Lenalee- take, take care of her. Doesn't need protection, just... watch her." He coerced as much oxygen as he could through his nose and continued, all-too aware of how quickly his voice was fading. "Lavi, don't be too, too harsh on him. And..." He had so many things he wanted to say but everything was starting to run together in his mind. He could not remember it all and reluctantly let them go.
Shaking his head faintly, he finished, "Kanda- Yuu..." He mustered the last of his remaining strength to raise his cold right hand and found the soft silk of Kanda's hair. Fingers nearly slipping through the dark waterfalls, he urged Kanda's head down and clumsily touched their lips together. His arm lost its will and as it hit the ground with a muffled thump, Kanda's mouth bore down on him with cautious but warm pressure.
What broke his heart was not the stilling of his pulse; it was concluding his conscious stream of thoughts with the realization that it was not raining after all.
The dew drops dotting his face were tears.