I do not own D Gray Man.

This is not the beginning but it might as well be.

"I found this in the armoury," Mia pointed to the old battered skateboard she was holding, "can I have it?"

Reever looked at it carefully for a moment, uncertain of whose it was.

"Sure, but I don't know why it was there. It might've belonged to…"

A dead kid. Mia knew what he was going to say and yet he refused to say it, so she hugged the board and glared at him.

"It's fine," she mumbled, "I'm sure it's not haunted or anything."

Yeah, but… Reever's face said.

"It's fine, Chief," Mia reassured him because Reever had begun to look at her with that uncertain, melancholy gaze reserved for dying children. Mia wasn't dying and she was fifteen for God's sake. If not for the wealth and privelege her family bestowed on her which allowed them to blaze fearlessly through the patriarchy, she'd have been married with children by now.

"Just don't hurt yourself'."

There are a thousand other ways in which that could happen tomorrow. It wouldn't be appropriate if one of them was a hobby since God had chosen martyrdom for her, without even asking. Was she not allowed to die laughing?

Mia stuck her tounge out at the scientist and chucked the skateboard at the floor where it clattered loud enough to startle the enitre departament back to work. Kicking off the ground with her back foot she zoomed out of the lab, less gracefully than was intended to but with a feeling of sudden, fleeting freedom that tugged at her heart.

"EDITH!"

Mia heard her old name and purposefully didn't react, pushing off of the floor to gather momentum. Edith was gone, along with Ethel and all their dreams, and there were names in a mausoleum to prove it. Olivia had to come to terms with that, no matter how painful it was.

"Eeeedi- fine! MIA!"

The Exorcist turned to see her best friend running to catch up with her, waving a leather-bound book in the air. A couple of pencils dropped out of her bun, spilling her hair across her shoulders and Mia, about to laugh at Olivia's inability to keep her curls in check, rolled the skateboard into a wall.

"I'm not usually like this on the battlefield," Mia explained, holding tightly onto her ankle in case it fell apart. The offending skateboard lay upside down where she was too upset to pick it up.

"I really hope so," Olivia said, her voice on the verge of breaking. Mia had meant it to be humorous, but realized too late that talking about being an unwilling teenage soldier so nonchalantly made people uncomfortable.

"I'm really not. I know you can't see me when I fight, but I am so totally awesome." She untangled a ribbon from her hair and tied it firmly into Olivia's. Her friend smiled at her gratefully.

"I'm sure that's true. Mia?"

"Yeah?"

"I want you to have this."

The book that Olivia had been chasing her with turned out not to be a book at all but a journal. Mia flipped through the empty pages with curiosity. The paper was not quite white, thick and rimmed with gold. Running her fingers along the beautifully embossed leather reminded her too much of home; among the cold empty stone of the Black Order Headquarters the feeling was like a hearth.

"Why? What is it?" Mia questioned rhetorically, closing her eyes and pressing the book to her chest. Olivia suddenly became concerned.

"It's just a journal, silly… It's for writing in, not crying over."

Mia let a drop of ink fall onto the first page. She wasn't sure how to begin, but she loved the sharp contrast of black against white, and how it would slowly fade over time and disappear into the inevitable oblivion long after she did.

There is always hope, the page informed her in Olivia's handwriting. Her best friend wanted this diary to be a positive thing; something to remind her that she could, and should, still care about where her life was going. That not all the choices have been made for her.

MY NAME IS MIA.

This was how the second page began and ended. Writing this in giant block capitals, she let nothing else uproot the fact that her name was Mia.