Title: Yuurei
Fandom: D.Gray-man
Author: su-dama/tempusfugit3
Pairing: Kanda/Lavi, Marie, Theodore
Rating: R for slight language, sexuality, and dark themes
Words: 2,800
Disclaimer: DGM belongs to Hoshino Katsura et al.
A/N: Spawned from nitrojen who wrote out the kanji for me.
-Yuurei-
Kanda doesn't like this. He doesn't like repeating it.
He doesn't like this. And it always changes so it's not like he can grab onto something.
He is falling and he is not grabbing on because there is. Nothing. There.
He jerks his head up but his body flips in the air and gravity and wind is pushing him and pulling his head upside down and he is falling, falling, falling down to his—
He's not dead. He is asleep. He is sleeping in this sea of black that never changes, despite all the changes since he began with this tattoo. It is not only a tattoo, but the great shrine that bongs whenever he underestimates his skills. He is not using his skills now; forget the moves, he is in darkness and feeling as if he's. Not. Ever. Going.
To open his eyes again.
So he sleeps, and it starts to feel good. There is nothing else to hold him down. Kanda is never going to be obligated to live again.
--
He blinks past the blood in his eyes. A hand covers them and he opens his mouth to speak, but a hand covers that, too. The fingers are touching him. They are thick, rough fingers, from over-touching. He tries to rasp out a name.
The name answers. "It's me, Kanda. Just stay put."
"Mmmar . . ."
"You fell. You hit the ledge hard, I heard it."
"Marie."
"Don't speak."
He can't open his eyes to the normal squint so he keeps them relatively closed, more to hide his shame than for comfort. He gurgles up blood and lets it run down his chin as Marie is picking him up; very carefully how he is picked up and held like a wounded animal. He coughs and spits blood onto a material surface. He feels it splatter back up his nostrils.
Marie's hand is upon his brow, reading them.
"You have blood in your eyes. Keep them closed."
"I am." But Kanda is gurgling and seizing up and groaning and wanting to cry from the pain.
He's not of this; he's not here; he's gone; it's in the past; it's not happening; this does not happen to him, to him, to him at all.
Don't even think it.
He thinks it and screams with his lips closed when a surge of something kills his insides.
--
The next thing he knows is that he's passed out. He had passed out and is now awakening on top of a mat in a hut that looks like it's going to fall on top of him instead. His vision blurs, he squirms, cracks his neck, and drops his head back onto the mat. He couldn't move if he wanted to. He wouldn't move even if his mother sang a Japanese lullaby for him to come back from the dead. As if his death would be this kind of festival.
Kanda wheezes through the pain of his back muscle spasms and rebuilding bones. He knows when a bone is rebuilding. Anyone would know.
No. Never mind, they wouldn't know this much.
He screams for Marie, to get him something, ice, something, a pin, something that would distract him from slowly re-dying and then slowly re-living. It's such arduous work.
Then it's nothing to him; he's redoing everything and it's nothing.
Fucking run; keep It from calling for the parents or morphine.
Kanda shouts at the ceiling again. Marie comes. He is huffing.
"Kanda. You're raising the roof."
Kanda tries to say where the fuck have you been, but his lips stitch themselves and send another stitch to his side, where he squeezes it with both hands.
"Kanda, what are you doing?"
"My side."
Marie kneels down beside the straw mat. He adjusts his ears and makes a face; his enlarged pupils motion over Kanda. Marie touches him where it hurts and Kanda lets out a whimper that leaves his throat itchy and keeling. He is forced to turn; a bone cracks and pits against his hip.
Then Marie says that he had a local doctor stitch him up, and it's acceptable for now, there is no lasting damage; Kanda's healing process is taking too long again, though this isn't the worst of it.
"Worst is that?" Kanda mouths, choking on his swollen tongue. It is swelling in his throat; he's forgetting how to speak basic English.
Marie gets very close to Kanda's mouth and looks past his head. He is listening.
"I'll bring the doc back."
--
Kanda rests now with his fist clenched on the floor, away from his body. He is cold; he is rock that's been iced over in the dead of winter. But rocks can't die, can they? Neither are they incubated—
They are incubated by Mother Earth. Whatever.
He tries to get up. He falls back. He tries to get up. He falls back with a louder thud, teeth clattering. He moves to whine, to open his mouth wide to cry out for help again. He forgets how. He forgets now that his chest is fucking burning a hole through to his heart and into the mat. That his heart is doing it very quickly. He feels his chest, and it is unclothed. He blindly fingers his side.
The stitches are nice and tight.
A stitch is almost pulled out by an unbroken, unbitten nail: a voice has disrupted his finger play.
"He told me you were hurt. Bad."
Kanda turns his eyes to the disrupter. Lavi is the Destructor, always giving that eye of judgment. Always saying something. There is also that word for a self-destructive person.
Kanda is a rock, just a rock that just keeps on, an incubated rock.
Lavi's hands drop slowly onto Kanda's chest, and roam, and move about the bandages.
"They're back on again," he says. "You have a wound here. And here, do you feel that?" Lavi's hands are wiping the dried skin from Kanda's belly. They are there and warm. They are warm and there.
Kanda coughs. He doesn't intend to cough up anything more than spittle, though he can still feel the hints of blood. Or just the one hint: iron. He coughs it up and it flies into the air. He must seek Lavi out with his fist, which hits a knee so weakly.
"Yuu, don't hit me."
Kanda is given a compress and a washcloth. He is tended to like he's a fucking useless wreck. Lavi is this idiot that might do enough for this fucking useless wreck.
Migraine, heat-wave, pounding, thinking.
Kanda now realizes Lavi is wounded as well. He points because he no longer knows how to speak English. He only speaks through his finger. He is that primitive.
Lavi cottons on at his own pace, which is frustrating. Kanda grows Frustrated.
Lavi laughs about the missing patch, and the medical gauze down the side of his face. "I got hit." Then he thinks about it. "I'm not so bad off like you are now. You're pretty fucked up."
Kanda bares his teeth and the point of his finger falls to Lavi's knee again.
So it's everything and nothing that pains him into this sort of submission that keeps him on his back, bruised and bloodied and soiled, touched by death and life at the same time that he can't cope with the residual dirt. He's been washed, it's clear, but his skin is not breathing.
Lavi wipes the washcloth across Kanda's collarbone and down around his nipples, through the bandages. Kanda watches that eye glance over him, and there are scratches around it, wrinkles like symptoms of premature aging. There are still lines across his cheek and forehead from the patch.
Kanda's groin tightens and pulls up, making him lick his teeth. It was full before, when he'd landed, after. It happens.
Lavi's hand rests on his hipbone.
Kanda closes his eyes again to the feelings.
Feelings of a hand crawling and slipping under a waistband; it's a paperweight on his bladder, it's in his crotch.
Lavi tells him it's time to sleep.
--
That's easy for him to say. Though when Kanda comes, he is coming, in such a prolonged and unconstructed way, after so, so long, that he falls right to sleep and doesn't dream one thing.
There is no such thing as love or sex or people. Or hate.
Can hate be all it can be?
--
A body is in the dark with him. He doesn't want to see it. He knows.
"Tou . . ." Kanda breathes. He repeats the address. He smells whom he addresses; he could smile.
Theodore's bold hand, of paints and oils, breaches the darkness and moves Kanda's hair out of his eyes. His lashes stick.
He makes a blessing in Japanese.
Kanda winces. He's not dying. What the fuck. He's not even unconscious.
But he needs to be.
"Tousan," Kanda says. He can make out his father in the dark. He must have been praying to himself. Beads jangle. Kanda suddenly misses their Daisya.
--
When Lavi comes back some unspecified time later, Kanda does not greet him nor does he ignore him like he's prone to do. He just lies there and feels his bones meshing with the mat. He is a heap of fermenting flesh.
"H—ey," Lavi says.
Kanda blinks and chews the inside of his cheek. Looks at the wall. It blanks itself out.
He busies himself with blanking it out so much that Lavi has to prop up his head to arouse him. Kanda chokes out a scream that means for Lavi to stop, but Lavi is strong. Kanda's back is about to crack in half and he's heaving and he's going under—
He's not.
"Yuu. Are you hungry? Do you feel hungry? You can feel your legs, right? How are they? Um. Look. Feel this?" Lavi runs his finger from Kanda's nose, to his chin, sloping down his throat to his sternum. It's all right. "You feel that? I'm being serious, I need you to answer me." Kanda feels it all right. "I need to turn you over."
Kanda needs to hide his growing fascination with Lavi's hands. It's always his hands. On his deathday, birthday, whichever. He'll have to resign to embarrassing himself.
"Oh, Yuu." And that's all Lavi says. He has propped up Kanda's head, his backside; he has done things for Kanda that makes him go white in the face. He's getting whiter as Lavi is yanking down his pants and breathing on Kanda's cock. Spreading. His body is a block of baked clay; his crotch is a block of ice. It doesn't stop there.
He is breathing. Kanda breathes with him; he is here; he is now; he is alive and sweating out the color of his skin into the blankness of this hut. His spine is better; he is feeling better.
He realizes that he loves release. He wants it.
So he lifts his hand into Lavi's unwashed hair and begs for release with his mind. He wants Lavi to hear him. Instead he forgets himself and starts stringing his words in Japanese again. He's seeing sad things, bad things, things you never want to show your children. So he begins to cry.
If he could translate, it would be all the things he can't begin to mourn. And this just makes his body coarser.
Lavi probably notices this. He is still going down on Kanda, at this pace that makes everything hiccup and go very awry. Kanda cries and comes; he can't help both.
Lavi seems to drink him up and Kanda can't understand why he would. He wants to throw up. They kiss, but only because Lavi initiates it, that's it.
There has to be more to the story, at the end, where it cuts off? But it just cuts off.
"Ff—" Lavi says. Just Ff. Once he starts to cry, it is dry, and he must leave before Kanda can gather the strength to hit him. Lavi leaves him.
Kanda wants to draw up his knees and turn over and maybe shake.
--
You know there's something wrong, something else, when you can only focus on the nervous distraction in your knees. They are backfiring and fucking killing you with something you can't explain. You have to wonder if anyone else experiences this. It's numb, but it's not numb at all. It's this alien numbness that's not so alien once you feel it and it sets out to kill you or your sanity or both from the start. That is why it exists.
This is why Kanda exists.
He thinks about all the sad-bad things. How they disturbed his release and also encouraged it. This is disturbing. He's alive but everything is so wrong.
His cock is soft and wet and sticky and tucked away by a helpful boy who is this redheaded demon and also Kanda's demise. Kanda lets his eyes drift shut and he can feel Lavi moving his nose up his thigh. He wants—
He wants nothing to touch him. Lavi is already nobody. He is also nothing, and this is relieving, then not, because then Lavi is really touching him.
Kanda thinks about Noise Marie. There is somehow a parallel. Marie is nice for a moment before he flickers away with footsteps from afar. Maybe he is on guard. Maybe he knows about Kanda and his sexual exploits. Maybe he knows that Kanda has thought about him at times when Kanda has been left to his own devices.
It's the pupils.
Just as Lavi is back to licking his inner thigh, Kanda blinks the image away and faces the wall once again. He has managed to move himself and now faces the right wall. It is white. He realizes it is white of a stucco nature; above him is a roof of clay shingles, with beams. The thing he's seen beneath him is a soft fur rug. It might have been a mat before.
Oriental meets Mediterranean.
He starts. Kanda is lifting himself. He is better. He thinks. He thinks about everyone and blanks out his mind so they don't—could they? They can—kill him.
He's in that Ark where the roads had crumbled apart.
--
Kanda grabs his throat and sputters. He is finally able to speak. He hollers as if he's about to attack the wall. The painting on the wall had been flipped over once before. It falls to the ground now and falls back, toward Kanda, and Kanda hollers at the portrait.
Nobody hears him at first, and this is scaring him.
He screams now. They come. Lavi comes.
"What, what?! What the hell's the matter with—?" Lavi stops in front of Kanda. Kanda stops screaming. "What?" Lavi says, sounding exhausted.
Kanda can feel himself go up in flames and gulps down rancid curses. He says, "This place."
"Yuu. You're. Yuu. C'mon. Get yourself togeth—"
"I woke up and my knees were killing me," Kanda says without thinking.
"You're speaking again."
"It was bad."
"How bad?"
Kanda looks at him with only his eyes. They feel heavier than heavy. He immediately puts his hand between his legs. It's not heavy there. He shudders: his spine can handle anything. He is as light as a ghost; he is like he's always been, always this, this way.
"Good God, Yuu. Stop bein' weird." Lavi is laughing. He has a different patch on his face. His hair is in a ponytail, damp. He has a blue bruise across his cheekbone where it might have broken.
The hoop once in one ear is now missing, with a bloody hole.
Kanda pushes forward to hold onto Lavi's leg. Lavi is forced to stand there. He is a pillar, and Kanda is finally holding on. It is his birthday. It is all right.
Happy birthday to those who believe the best is yet to come.
And he lets himself think about his parents, about his other father, about how he leaves and is left. He may think about the kids from his youth and the bitter embankments and the old acquaintance with self-destruction. For once his hands are not holding a weapon; his arms are around Lavi's leg. And.
It is all right.