Warnings/Disclaimer: I don't own D. Gray-Man so you no sue. Thanks much. Warnings include this fic is an Alternate Universe and character OOCness with much Lavi-angst from unintentionally rejected unrequited love for Kanda which then leads this fic to hinted shonen-ai/yaoi near the end with somebody else~! :3 Some language because this is a high school fic and Kanda is a crass person, among others xD Enjoy? only my second dgm fic to be posted, though i've written various Lucky drabbles.

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Heartache

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It was sudden- too sudden actually, and it caused a rather large amount of alarm among a certain group of individuals in The Black Order High School. Lavi Bookman left them. Or well, more appropriately, he avoided them. Especially Kanda. On Monday and Tuesday, Lavi had been acting completely normal. Then on Wednesday, he missed school and didn't answer any text messages or calls that Allen and Lenalee sent him. Lavi was back on Thursday, but he was silent whenever the younger teens approached him in concern and he outright walked away when Kanda appeared.

It didn't make sense. Had something happened to Lavi? His grandfather, Bookman, was still alive and well so the possibility of a family death or Lavi in mourning was thrown out, but it still left everyone baffled as to why Lavi had suddenly grown cold, distant, and nearly mute.

Kanda knew, but he would never say, and he would also never say it was his fault.

Tuesday…

Kanda was in a very, very bad mood. Normally, he was rather passive and "grumpy", as his so-called group of friends liked to call him, but today, everything had gone absolutely horridly wrong and he was in the foulest mood he'd ever been in. His adoptive father Tiedoll and adopted two brothers Marie and Daisya were more obnoxiously loud than usual that morning, immediately putting him in a sour mood as soon as he woke up.

Daisya had accidentally pelted Kanda in the head with his soccer ball as soon as he stepped outside to get into his car to head to school, leaving Kanda with a massive headache that wasn't soothed no matter how hard the irate teen beat his soccer-loving brother. Then on the drive to school, because of his pounding headache, he swerved accidentally into another lane and then got pulled over (at 7 in the damn morning!) by a cop who thought he was intoxicated.

After being released on a warning that was completely unncecessry, Kanda arrived thirty minutes late to school, which automatically assured him a detention slip for his first missed class. School grated on his nerves normally, and after the horrid morning he'd had, it was only making his mood darken worse and worse. Other students couldn't get out of his way fast enough as he stormed the hallways.

The only saving grace of Kanda's horrible day was that the usual bouncy stupid usagi was being rather quiet around him, not bothering him nearly as much. Kanda blew it off to Lavi actually using his brain for once and avoiding irritating Kanda even more, as to which the indigo haired teen was very minuscule grateful for. However, that tiny bit of supposed sunshine in Kanda's day was quickly smothered by the fact that he had to miss kendo lessons because of the detention for being late. Detention wasn't something he normally minded, but today there was an awkward substitute teacher monitoring them and she had no control whatsoever so the other students misbehaved raucously and quite rudely- and very, very loud.

It all piled up on Kanda to give him the worst headache he'd had in years, having never fully recovered from the soccer ball blow in the morning, so when he stormed out to his car and saw that Lavi was waiting for him (with an intensely tentative expression that Kanda would only recall much later on), all he saw was Lavi as yet another annoyance that he could last out. And lash out Kanda did, more cruelly than he had ever done before.

"Go the fuck away, baka usagi!" Kanda hissed even before Lavi had a chance to speak, roughly shoving the redhead away from his car to yank open the door and throw his bag inside before turning heatedly to vent more of his rage on the poor other teenager. "I hate when you follow me around like a goddamn dog! I'm not your friend and I never wanted to be, so just fuck off and leave me alone already! Just because you can't get any other friends than a beansprout and a clueless girl doesn't mean you can get any pity friendship from me, one-eyed freak."

Lavi's expression turned from stunned to a rather startling pale look of utter brokenness, especially at Kanda's last statement, the redhead backing away from Kanda's car with clumsy steps. Growling to himself and shooting the staggered teen one last nasty glare of pure frustration, the grumpy teen threw himself into his car and burned rubber as he sped off out of the parking lot.

Tuesday late afternoon, Lavi's POV

Yuu's words had hurt, hurt a lot. It would have hurt just as much if Lavi and Kanda and really only been just friends, but Lavi had been feeling more than "just friends" for awhile now, and had been going to try and confess a bit to Yuu after school, and the barbed words cut him into pieces. It really hurt.

Lavi was unsure how long he stood in the parking lot, staring at his shoes while he struggled to comprehend anything past the slicing, burning pain behind his ribs. The feel of his cell phone vibrating in his pocket finally jolted him out of his daze, and Lavi clumsily pulled it out of his pocket and flipped it open, answering with a shaky greeting.

"Where are you? Do you realize what time it is? You said you'd help me at the store today, brat. You're over an hour late." Lavi's grandfather grumped over the connection.

"A-ah… sorry, Jiji…" Lavi whispered, forcing his feet to unglue from the pavement and step forward one at a time in the direction they instinctually remembered was home. "I'm com-" His voice cracked and Lavi had to breathe heavily for a few moments because his throat suddenly closed up painfully in the way it felt when one was trying their hardest to choke back tears.

Before Lavi could attempt to clear his voice, Bookman's voice was sharp over the connection. "What happened?" He asked immediately, easily able to tell that his grandson was very upset.

"You were right, Jiji…" Lavi barely managed to choke out, the hand holding his cell phone forced to grip the piece of technology tighter so he wouldn't drop it because his fingers had begun to shake. "I-I got attached, and it hurts… a lot…"

Bookman's sigh was heavy. "I wish I could say I told you so, but sometimes I wish I wasn't right. Where are you? I'll send a taxi to bring you home."

Without bothering to protest, Lavi breathed out the shaky word, "School." And then slumped to sit on the curb when Bookman made a sound of affirmative and hung up without a goodbye. Without bothering to close or put away his phone, Lavi crossed his arms shakily over his knees and rested his head in the cradle of his left elbow, finally allowing the tears to slip free from his single eye just so that his throat would stop aching so painfully.

Lavi didn't move from the cold concrete until he heard the sound of wheels crunch the loose gravel in front of him, and it felt like a ton to lift his head enough to see the yellow door of a taxi a few feet in front of his face. Standing was even more laborious, like walking through water that went over one's head and the door took a lot of effort to get open before Lavi slid gracelessly into the backseat. Without a word, the taxi driver having picked up on Lavi's crushing despair, the taxi drove back to Bookman's home silently.

The man had already been paid, so as soon as Lavi dragged himself from the backseat and laboriously pushed the door closed, he pulled the taxi away and drove off, leaving Lavi to shuffle up towards the steps where his grandfather stood waiting with a slighter softer than usual expression. Unable to help it, Lavi wiped clumsily at his moist eye and cheek, hiccupping from the shortness of breath because it felt like his lungs had collapsed.

Bookman sighed at the heartache written all over his grandson, ushering the redhead inside and to the couch as to which Lavi slumped onto carelessly. Bookman stood in front of the emotionally damaged teen, placing a hand on top of fiery tresses in a comforting manner. "You may stay home from school tomorrow, but you will return on Thursday."

Lavi looked up at Bookman with teary gratefulness, drawing sympathy from Bookman's heart as the redhead hiccupped pathetically before whispering in the most broken, pleading voice of a utterly heartbroken teenager. "Can you make it stop hurting, Jiji?"

Bookman frowned slightly, but he remembered the feeling Lavi was going through from a very long time ago in his own youth, and decided that he would do this only once, and told the redhead so. The answer he received was a heavy nod and the morose words of, "Yeah, this'll be the only and last time. I swear."

And so Bookman taught Lavi how not to feel.

Friday and on…

On Thursday, Lavi had applied for the chance to take his exams early for the classes he currently had, and then asked to be transferred to new classes. It was a rather unorthodox question, but the school had no particular rule expressively forbidding this, and all of Lavi's marks were meticulously the highest in all the grades, so his request was passed after some debate. He took all his exams on Friday, and over the weekend by Monday, he was enrolled in an entirely new schedule for the rest of the semester.

It made Allen and Lenalee even more upset, because Lavi's new schedule completely cut them out of the redhead's life because now not only did he not speak to them, they never saw him besides glimpses in the hallway. As the two younger teens mourned the loss of their bright, cheery friend while Kanda struggled to live under the crushing weight of guilt weighing on him. He would have gruffly apologized to Lavi, but unlike Allen and Lenalee who were lucky enough to catch glimpses of Lavi, Kanda never saw a single strand of red hair. It was almost like Lavi had vanished from his life, and he had.

Rumors circulated for little over two weeks about Lavi's abrupt complete change in personality, but after consistent lack of information and genuine knowledge of why this had all happened, the gossip died off back into random trivial things again. That didn't mean that Kanda still heard these trivial relationship gossips that now and again whispered of a possible physical relationship developing between Lavi and an upperclassmen by the name Tyki Mikk.

Allen and Lenalee still had not completely gotten over Lavi's abandonment of them, and even Kanda was regretting that day more than anything else. He wanted more than anything to go back to that afternoon and just hear what Lavi had been looking like he wanted to say. He didn't have the faintest clue what it could have been, but the usagi had truly been the closest thing Yuu Kanda had ever had for a friend, and he'd ripped that tentative bond to shreds ruthlessly all because of a single bad day. Lavi had been trying so hard to get close to Kanda for years now, but Yuu's words had just been too cruel, Kanda thought bitterly, and Lavi had given up.

It was nobody else's fault but Kanda's for driving Lavi away, and they weren't getting him back.

Oh how I love angst… it wasn't as heavy or bad as it could've been (it's only teenager angst after all, but it still hurts like a bitch no?) and I just loving making Lavi angsty. I like making all my favorite characters angst xD it's a sinful pleasure. Anyways, poor Kanda. Look what you did. And he never had a clue… and of course I just had to put some Lucky (Tyki/Lavi) in there too because I LOVE them~!

Anyways, this is only my second Dgm fic to be posted. My first is called Don't Open Locked Doors and it's another Lavi-centered fic along with Timothy Hearst (the newest nine year old Exorcist introduced in manga chapter 172 if you don't know) with an interesting idea. It may not get a lot of attention because it does have Timothy in it, so please check it out? It's not yaoi, but it's a "What if?" kind of scenario. I'd appreciate it :)

How bout a review? :) I'll get around to uploading some Lucky fics eventually xD