You are all about to be made aware of my love for D-Gray Man. I'm so glad my friend forced me to watch it, for it is amazing and I need the manga to update SOON because I am DYING! And I love how Road and Allen are kind of canon in a weird way? It's amazing.
DISCLAIMER - D-Gray Man isn't mine.
He remembered his orders. Of course he did. He was a General of the Black Order. He remembered the exact command.
'Find any and every remaining Noah and any of their direct relatives and apprehend them, for they are ruthless killers and old enemies of the Black Order from the war against the Millennium Earl who have conspired with the greatest evil and closest human incarnation of the devil known to this Earth. Report back to the Black Order Headquarters immediately after apprehension and submit the Noah for examination, testing, trial, and sentencing.'
It was because of those orders that he found himself in the small town of Faerie, the supposed birthplace of one of the most infamous Noah, Road Kamelot. Whereas other exorcists combed through newspaper articles for mass murders and sought out corrupt politicians under the impression that the Noah were bound to forever be lured in by blood and greed, the new General suspected it was for that reason that those were the wrong places to look. After all, they were clever beings.
The sun had fallen when he finally decided it was time for a break to visit the small chapel on the outskirts of town.
It was there that he found her.
He remembered her clearly. She had wild blue eyes with an even wilder head of navy hair and the wildest imagination known to man. She had once licked his blood clean off of one of her magical candles and giggled at the sight of someone being tortured. She childishly clung to anything and everything interesting, and she was ruthlessly stubborn. She reveled in the screams of others as they begged for mercy in their final moments, and she basked in fearful looks sent her direction as she strolled the streets.
The Road that was before him was not that Road. She knelt before the altar, fingers digging into the old wood and face buried into its rough surface as she murmured numerous prayers, some in languages the General swore he could never recognize.
She heard his footsteps.
She slowly turned towards him, withdrawing away from the altar and into her bedraggled form, ripped skirt and muddied shirt and everything. "Allen?" she whispered, all her confidence drained away with her power.
He remembered when his friends would correct the members of the Order who forgot his title was now General Walker.
But he did not correct her.
"Road," he murmured, taking slow and deliberate steps towards her emaciated form. She stood there, frozen like the wild animal she was (once), but with her fangs and claws nowhere to be found. He knelt before her, reaching out to slide his arms around her waist and lure her into his embrace, warm and gentle.
He remembered his orders. He was to take the Noah girl back to Headquarters and submit her to tests and trials.
But if this was the Noah girl, she was very different.
"Please..." The girl he had known didn't beg. "Please don't mock me."
"Mock you?"
"I... I don't want your pity," Road finally informed him, trying to drop her voice to the point where she could somehow intimidate him in her state. "I don't want this false sense of security when you know full well you'll take me in for questioning, experiments, whatever it is the Order deems right. Don't think I'm not aware of the irony of it being you that's going to take me there. To that hell."
Yes, there was something else about that girl.
He remembered she loved him. It certainly would be ironic for it to be the man she loved that took her to the place she loathed.
He'd always wondered if it was true. Could Noah even love? Especially when she almost instantaneously made the claim without truly knowing him.
"I'm not one for false security," Allen whispered into her ear, drawing her even closer. "I won't do that to you."
Hearing those words, she pressed her face to his chest, letting her tears soak his shirt and allowing her hands to grip and pull at the feeble white cloth.
His heart skipped a beat at her close proximity.
Ah, that's right.
He remembered that he loved her, too.
It wasn't that he wouldn't do it; as if he wouldn't take her into the Order and let them impose their cruel will upon her. It was that he couldn't. Looking back on it, he imagined it was rather blasphemous of him, the supposed favorite of God, to have fallen for a Noah such as her: the Noah of Dreams, the sadistic child of hatred and chaos, the girl who adored to drink blood and turn human beings into dolls. If those were the only things listed under Road's name, perhaps Allen would appear insane. Luckily, he had so many other things to describe her in hopes of recognizing her wonderful talents and traits that often hid behind the dirty words society applied to her.
No, he had not agreed with what she had done. But he felt that if he listened he would agree with why she had done it.
"I can't do that to you," he finally added.
"Why?" she breathed against him, and he shuddered at her cool breath on his chest.
"Because..." It was so easy to think such revelations as 'I love you', but to voice them was a whole other matter, yet another reason why he had fallen for the girl. Her ability to stand before her friends and foes and proudly state her emotions was something he could rarely accomplish, even partially, if at all. "I forgive you," he eventually decided on saying.
He remembered that in the old days she scorned those who asked for such a foolish thing as forgiveness.
"I don't deserve it." It was funny how her opinions now were the exact opposite of before.
"Why is that?"
She didn't say anything, and she didn't have to. Her downcast gaze and slow, shuddering exhales gracing his skin spoke volumes. It was because she was cold, malicious, heartless, selfish, and without hope.
"You prayed to God, didn't you?" he asked, referencing the reverent prayers that had spilled from her lips mere minutes beforehand. Road nodded slowly, hesitantly. "Well, I'll pray to him too." Her graze briefly flickered to his face with a question. 'What for?' "I pray that whatever is making you so sick right now goes away quick because this is not the Road I know."
"And what Road did you know? One that killed and laughed at other's pain?"
And he laughed at her. "Confidence," he finally offered. "She was hell but she was just as fun. She could make up anything she ever wanted, paint a picture a blind man could see. And she was the most insistent little thing imaginable, and emotional and passionate and absolutely real in a bit of an insane sort of way with a demented twist, but she was true and she was curious and courageous and I would take her word on anything. That is the Road that I knew."
Silence spun its awkward web between the two, sticking strings to either heart and pulling, plucking, twisting, changing.
"You'd take her word on anything... So, when she said she loved you," Road whispered, a glimmer of her former bold attitude on the edges of her eyes.
"Back when I didn't know Road, of course I questioned it. But the more I got to know her... I started to wonder if it might be possible that my feelings were reciprocated."
His words triggered something absolutely beautiful. He'd never realized how relieved he could feel to have someone simply look at him. Yet when Road looked at him then, he saw her, and he felt that for the first time that night she saw him as well, truly saw him through her utter helplessness and confusion.
Then she smiled, though Allen felt it a truly inadequate word for the expression on her face. He'd never thought to have seen so much love in his lifetime. But there it was, spread out on a set of glittering teeth slid beneath clever lips that had finally revealed all those little secrets. Secrets she had once tucked away.
In that moment he wondered why he had ever questioned her ability to love.
"I always thought you were interesting. Fun, even, if I'm being nice," Road teased, burrowing her head into his neck and pulling him closer to her, catching him off guard.
"Oh, it's an honor," Allen attempted to joke back, realizing how awkward the situation now was with her draped in his lap and pulling him on top of her.
"But since I'm feeling especially nice, would you like to hear something?" she asked, mouth nearing his ear.
He nodded dumbly, and she giggled.
"I always knew I loved you," she whispered right against the shell of his ear.
Allen jolted in that moment as she pressed her lips to his earlobe. Her intimate touch gave him the feeling of being so vulnerable, but it was ridiculous. If anyone was vulnerable that night, it was her. She was the one who had broken down to plead to God. She was the one who had lost everything. How was it that in a single instant he felt she had regained all her strength, all that made her Road in his eyes?
He remembered in that moment that she had always been a rather bright and persistent girl, even when faced with destruction. She just needed something to hold onto.
Sometimes it was a piece of candy. He remembered she liked to eat them in awkward silences and have everyone stare at her while she loudly chewed and swallowed.
Sometimes it was a stuffed animal. He remembered she liked to imagine they had personalities and thoughts of their own and speak to them while in front of people just to make those people uncomfortable.
Sometimes it was someone she loved. He remembered how it used to be Tiki, occasionally even the Millennium Earl, but mostly Tiki, for he knew her best and accepted her nevertheless.
But now she held him closer than anyone ever had, and he wondered if it was because she had decided that, more than anyone, he knew her best, accepted her anyway, loved her most.
"Road I-"
"You don't have to say it, Allen."
He remembered she also had a knack for reading his mind. There was no doubt that she had guessed what he was going to whisper to her in that moment. So why had she stopped him?
"You never told anyone how you wanted to save both humans and Akuma, right?" she asked, pulling back to curiously look at him. She adjusted herself so that she was on her knees, one leg on either side of him.
"No, I- how did you know?" Allen spluttered, dumbfounded.
For a moment, it seemed the former Noah was debating it in her head. Did she answer? Reveal her secret? Leave him wondering for eternity how she ever could have known? "I find that your most sincere wishes are the ones you don't actually say," Road informed him. "One arm by itself saved Akuma, but when the other arm wielded it, it saved the supposedly un-saveable, the humans caught by the Devil. I think that if people looked, they would've heard your most sincere wish then and there."
He had never noticed that.
"So, when I say you don't have to say it, Allen, I mean you don't have to go against what you have always done just so I'm not so self-conscience. I don't need verbal words to be confident in my emotions. I'm a big girl. I'll see that you sincerely feel that way for me in everything else you have done and will do."
And he had never thought about that before, either.
Both were still as Allen thought it through and as Road happily watched his thinking play across his face.
"But if I did say it?" he finally asked.
She 'hmm'ed at that, but did nothing else.
Another five minutes. It wasn't awkward. Far from it, actually. As he swam in his feelings and in possibilities she ran a delicate finger over his dampened shirt, seeking out the tell-tale raised ridges of scars. Allen was so lost in his thoughts that he didn't notice as she became fed up with his shirt getting in her way, as she slowly and stealthily unbuttoned his shirt to appraise the old and new damage with her own eyes. But before she could touch even one, he was back in reality.
"Road."
"Yeah?"
He inhaled. He exhaled. Once more. Twice more. He just needed to say it. But he never did. She smiled. "I love you too," she whispered, as if he had gotten there first, confessed his feelings first, had actually said something. "You had to breathe. That's how I knew," she explained, and for a second he was confused. What did breathing have to do with it? "Your feelings for me leave you breathless," Road added, and his eyes brightened as he made the connection.
Allen's thoughts had kept him from realizing she had managed to partially unclothe him. She needed to keep it that way.
She needed a distraction so he wouldn't see. Quick.
"But that's not all you feel, is it? You feel hungry, too," Road informed him.
"For what?" he scoffed.
"Me," she replied, a wry smirk on her face as she shifted her hips against his.
He groaned, throwing his head back against the wall at the delicious friction she had made. "Of all the things you could have said," he attempted to say, "why that"
Road giggled at that. "I just thought it'd be a smoother way to bridge back to the subject."
"The subject?" he moaned as she began to grind against him.
"What would happen if you said you loved me, which you did, in your own way," she reminded him.
"Don't tell me-"
"If you said it, which you did, I'd reward you and claim you as mine forever. Don't want anyone getting any ideas," Road insisted from her place on top of him.
"In a church?" he gasped before she leaned over to kiss him.
"You've already got your shirt off. Why not?" she asked.
Allen's eyes widened as he glanced down at his bare chest for a brief second before Road slammed his back against the wall.
"Never felt the desire to be the least bit sinful, Allen?" Road teased, voice soft against the shell of his ear.
He honestly couldn't recall ever wanting to.
At least, not before that night. That changed when she licked his neck pressing her hips firmly against his.
He remembered being in that chapel moaning and moving in ways he never thought he'd have the guts to on holy ground.
It never occurred to Allen that he could be that kind of person, the one to crumble to lust in a church of all places. He at least thought he could keep it together in a chapel, hold himself back until he'd been in a committed relationship with the girl in question for several months. Of course, marriage was ideal, but with Cross as his mentor, Allen feared he'd get impatient near the end.
Losing his virginity on the stone floor of Road's hometown church to Road had never seemed like something Allen would do, not according to the image of himself that he had created in his head.
But that was the thing about him and Road. He couldn't recall ever voicing his desires for children until they already had one. He couldn't recall ever kissing her in front of anyone until they were married in front of two hundred people. He couldn't recall a single time he ever said 'I love you' before proposing. He couldn't recall when he had fallen for the forbidden-fruit-gone-helpess-victim-then-back-to-t wisted-little-spitfire.
But there was something Allen did recall.
He remembered everything he loved about Road from her honesty to the way she lazily hummed while she walked to the way her eyes lit up when she spotted something sweet and delicious (sometimes put into a very inappropriate context).
His favorite, though, was how he was no longer like himself with Road, just as she was not quite Road when she was with him. Not because they had to pretend to be different people to interact, and not because they turned each other into something neither were meant to be.
He remembered loving how when he was with her, they were no longer individual people.
They were one, together, complete, seamlessly fused.
He would remember that always.
First D-Gray Man fanfiction ever so... wow, that's done. I hope you enjoyed the one-shot.
Ezzy