Title: Of Bastards and Bailiffs
Fandom: DGM
Author: su-dama/smokingace
Pairing: Allen, Cross
Rating: PG
Words: 1, 950
Disclaimer: DGM belongs to Hoshino Katsura et al.
A/N: Ten instances inspired by the need to blame someone.
-Of Bastards and Bailiffs-
X
If you could condemn Allen for one thing, it would be for choosing a poor excuse of a master.
Or rather, for being stupid enough to get chosen. He might as well have shoved a stake through his heart.
All he had been doing was lazing about, mourning the dead, doing what he did best. Really boring please-don't-say-shit-to-me crap. But most of all, he had been minding his own business. He wondered back then if that had been the case in Cross' situation. Had he been looking for a good place to drink? You know, Allen had not been very happy before Cross came along. That barely changed when Cross did indeed come along. So what does this say?
When he mentioned this at a tavern, he got a pint of beer in return. "Don't go bawling now," Cross said.
Allen didn't go bawling anywhere.
IX
One time it had been harder to ask, but ask not the hand that feeds ya, as Allen used to say.
And Cross had nothing to do with the hand that fed Allen.
"I told you, finding you was a coincidence put on this earth just for—somethin' to do," Cross said, somewhat drunkenly, somewhat faking it. It was so obvious, Allen thought he might have swallowed some luck without realizing it.
"Master, someone just picked you for something to do," Allen said smugly, pointing at a thief.
Cross promptly sent Allen to fetch his money back. "Then I'll tell you. Yoyo, thief! Slow down so my apprentice can catch ya!"
VIII
But Cross never told him, and he had worn thin Allen's patience (and life-force) by their second Christmas together. It had become so thin that Allen had begun resembling it.
"Are you punishing yourself? You know, that's God's job."
Allen looked at Cross as if he'd cracked an egg over his head.
As it turned out, whenever Allen sighed, Cross got antsy. "Weren't you a bouncin' bastard in your days? When someone comforts you, at least show some gratitude."
Allen smiled a fake smile over his new glove.
"Not like that."
Allen grinned a very unnatural grin after eating some chestnuts.
Cross made a twitchy face and shook his head. "Kids these days."
VII
It had seemed Cross had made it his life's goal to season Allen's nature. He made sure Allen knew that he was a bastard, and also that Allen could atone for it by sacrificing for . . . love?
"Not love, idiot apprentice!" Cross said, throwing a grape at him.
"Is there no love?" Allen said, unashamed.
"It's not the kind you've known. I meant the kind you do not understand."
"But I don't understand it at all." His knowledge of it went so far as running from big buxom bosoms.
Cross shrugged, put two juicy grapes on the table, and squashed one with the flat part of a ring.
Allen winced, rubbing juice out of his eye.
"One grape still stands, one grape down for the count. Why is one still standing, I wonder? But the other is finished, finite, kaput. You only ask why that one is finished, and ignore the one still standing. You only know the love for the dead. You do not know the love for the living."
Allen made a motion to clean up the mess; Cross would not let him.
VI
Allen was ordered to swim across the Nile once. Yes, only once, surprisingly. He had hoped to get away by, you know, running, but Cross made it his mission to sit at the riverside and wait.
"You mean, swim now? I dunno how."
Cross knew he was lying and thus, Allen's journey across the Nile consisted of something gnawing at his leg, nearly drowning, and getting sunburned.
"Are these whatchoo call pirananas?" Allen screamed from the water. He could hear Cross laughing in his deck chair.
"Piranhas, dear idiot, piranhas! But don't worry, you're doing swimmingly!" More laughter.
Allen did not believe him for a second. On the other side he was facing a heat wave with a bad reputation, along with finding an alleged wise man to tell him about his future. He could feel his nose freckling, and the alleged wise man he did find wasn't too wise. He muttered mumbo jumbo about ridiculous journeys, impossible outcomes, while he twiddled with those parrot cards or whatever. And Allen really didn't understand the thing about that darkness.
Unfortunately, he made it back with time to spare. Cross ordered him to find the amount of people as there were to the petals of a flower he held in his hand and tell them exactly what they could do to change. Allen did not follow his orders, however.
He could not. Because he already knew, after the wise man, that he could not tell people how to change.
"I wanna go forward and see if I can do it first."
"I thought you might say that," Cross said, offering his cigarette.
V
The pinnacle of his life was this: harboring a fugitive inside. He felt like he was always doing something wrong, like fighting the arms that grabbed him would only prolong the prison that was sure to come.
Come, it did. They jailed him for five long days, with very little food or water. He didn't cry. He didn't pray. He thought of the use of his arm. He mostly thought about the scar across his face, and then he just couldn't stop thinking about it. In the end he couldn't say anything to the master that had finally come to claim him.
The stick man was reluctant to release Allen, but Cross spent some time with him.
"He's a sad boy, not built for a happy life," Cross was saying.
The stick man walked over to Allen's cell and stared at him through the bars. Those eyes told him what he didn't need to know.
That he didn't need these bars to be jailed. If he so wished it, all he had to do was dream, and he'd be out in the open air.
IV
"Allen," Cross said one day in the midst of polishing a cigar case. They weren't too busy doing anything important, as usual.
Allen didn't respond, still embarrassed about getting caught even though it had been weeks ago.
"I'll tell you now."
Allen responded this time. "Tell me what?" About his scar about his arm about his dead father about where he came from about - ! "About my parents?"
"God, boy, why would I ever talk about them?"
And he said it as if he knew who they were, how they had abandoned Allen. He had been abandoned; it was the only explanation.
"Well. Do I have parents?"
"How should I know?"
"Did I have parents?"
"How - ? Boy, you'd do well to forget them. So forget 'em."
"I can't." Though he could if he didn't think about it.
"You better."
"What about my Mana?"
"Your Mana, your Mana. Mana Walker only did what he did because."
Allen leaned in to listen very carefully. He sniveled into his kerchief and crossed his arms defiantly.
"Because he was a good soul," Cross finished, wineglass shining in the candlelight.
"You knew him, then?"
They were interrupted by a gentleman friend telling them that the town was in danger of an insurgence.
III
Allen's past became irrelevant. Maybe it had become that way the night he met Cross Marian. Maybe it became that way the night Allen wanted to talk about something enlightening. The words just wanted to spill out of him like vomit. He knew the smell of the answer would have been beyond foul; he could only hope.
The day he stopped hoping was the day he first and last saw Cross holding his mask away from his face. He watched from the distance as Cross dipped it in the river water, and he could feel the humanity inside of him fidget and fluster. Cross must feel it, too. If Cross knew the truth, he must feel it at its worst. It should even kill him.
Because it would kill Allen. He knew it. He'd always known it.
This wasn't a very good revelation, but as he watched Cross seal the mask to his face once again, with the sound of nothing, he began to think things he never dreamed of thinking.
Cross had loved. Cross had lost. Cross could only despair through such wretched means.
He could hear that name being whispered, Maria, Maria, as if Cross were talking to someone in front of him. Allen dropped his smile when Cross turned around.
"We'll live in India," he said. And when Allen made to grab Cross's coat as he passed him, Cross didn't swat his hand away.
II
Time flew by, as it always did, and due to, erm, special circumstances, it was a necessary blessing. Allen had stopped longing for many things that might have seemed normal. He no longer cared to be like everyone else. Sure, his arm, for one thing, was hard to explain, but overall he felt as if he'd.
He'd.
Something.
He could say in all honesty that the unexplainable pieces were probably the least of his worries. Cross agreed. He agreed in the coach (be happy you're not walkin'), he agreed when Allen refused to enter a temple (at least it's not a church, eh?), and he agreed when he let Allen out of his sight for a hour and Allen, very accidentally, of course, got arrested for trespassing or other. The charges weren't very important.
"Don't you realize how careless you've become?" Cross asked, pacing before him.
Allen fidgeted with his tied wrists. There they were, at it again. It was just the way his life went. Allen looked away.
Cross slouched down and grabbed Allen's shoulders. He hissed, "Do you come out - to play - only to scamper back into the woodwork?"
Allen swallowed his horror. He shook his head because he wanted to think Cross had gone mad.
Cross' glasses gleamed and his eye went to its corner, glaring at something. Then he stood up so quickly that Allen fell against his hip, bruising himself against the gun.
"We've got company. Keep yourself, together," Cross said, hair whipping into Allen's eyes and blurring his vision to the monsters.
For a moment, he had believed he was one of them.
I
"You can condemn Allen for anything you put your mind to, just don't choose the one where he gives himself up for the Fourteenth. That would be bad, and yes, it would make me mad. Dear Marian, he had not known the price of his apprentice. He had known a half-truth, the half he had knowingly altered to protect the Innocence. Dear Marian, he had played tricks and earned himself tricks. It's no wonder Allen has tried to destroy me. Dear Allen, we'll tell him, you're just not what you're meant to be."
"Tell me, do you know when he'll return?" the one they call Link says now.
"My Marian, Allen, or both? Oh, but you want both, don't you."
There, the essence of fear. "Walker. Walker would be preferable."
"That would be foolish. I cannot allow the purest evil to flood this earth." Link shifts in the dark. "Nor can we . . . allow it to be overrun with such sacrificial lambs. Wolf."
Link puts the lamp on, and Allen emerges from the end of Link's bed, blue in the face.
"I keep, keep choking on my sheets," Allen stutters, hacking.
"No. You . . . keep talking in your sleep," Link says, in a way that makes Allen look on him as if he were looking upon his master once again.