A/N: A little exploring around what Lenalee might have been like if she'd awakened as a Noah instead of being chosen by the Innocence as a child.
FROM WILD AND WICKED SLEEP
When she was six years old, Lenalee Lee watched an angel destroy her life.
Every night for the next eight years, she dreamed of the end of the world.
When she was thirteen they came for her.
First: the angel.
There was a Protestant mission in the larger town up the valley from the village where she lived, and her mother was very interested, being a woman of great imagination despite her simple life. She would go every now and then and talk to them for hours, then come home with armfuls of stories about wings and light and wheels of fire. Lenalee would ask for them at bedtime sometimes, fearful but fascinated.
Her father, a practical man with his hands and knees rooted in the earth, had no head for such things and often scoffed under his breath, but he didn't stop his wife from going, or from telling her stories. Theirs was a practical marriage, suiting his personality more than hers, but there was love enough.
Her brother didn't have a spiritual bone in his body either, but he had their mother's sense of humour, so sometimes he would draw extra eyes on his hands and tie chicken feathers to his shoulders and chase her around the house. He didn't like to be serious, but he was kind when he should be kind, and she loved him most of all.
Theirs was not an easy life, clawing sustenance out of the dry earth and huddling together through the cruel winters, but the year she was six was a kind year and summer held on long into the shorter days.
The angel came a week before the equinox, in the golden sunset hour.
It didn't look much like the angels her mother had described. Somehow, though, she knew that was what it was. She could feel the divine wrath devouring it from the inside, could hear the echo of a god's thunderous voice in the winds that howled around it. It was white like sunlight, limbless, headless, haloed like an honoured ghost.
It came over the fields, taller than any tree she had ever seen, and brought its winds with it.
The rest she remembered only in bits and pieces.
Ropes of light, a screaming eyeless face in a pit of scales, the soundless shattering of the houses. Divots sixty feet long dug through the fields, dust in the air, dust in her mouth. The fading red light. The first stars high overhead. A futile fire burning in her chest.
The distant sound of her own voice, wailing for her parents, for her brother, for anyone who could save her from this.
It was her brother who answered. He picked her up and bore her away from the chaos, pressed her face into his shoulder and told her not to look. He was twenty years old this year, tall and fine, and she had never seen him cry. Don't look, he said, and so she put her face into his neck and closed her eyes, and thus didn't see it this time either.
She called many more times for her mother and father, but they never came. Eventually - a long time later - the winds fell silent. The darkness closed in.
They walked all night, stumbling over the knots and holes in the road, until they reached the town up the valley. Komui knocked on the mission door, because this was a problem for priests if ever there was one, but there was no answer. They slept in the street, backs against the mission's white walls.
In the morning, they woke to see the rest of the refugees coming up the street. There were less than twenty of them, and their parents were not among them.
They greeted the survivors gladly, but the survivors were not glad to see the daughter of the woman they now believed was to blame for the catastrophe. This was what came of meddling with foreign religions, they said. Chaos and destruction. Frightened, desperate to lay blame, they had latched on to what was closest at hand.
Komui explained it to her, but she did not understand, and did not want to. It was easier just to hate them. So she hated them, and she hated the angel, and she could not bear to stay there.
So she took her brother's hand, and they left.
It took them a long, cold, hungry week to march to the city from there, and they were gaunt and drawn when they arrived.
Lenalee had already begun to dream, and though the dreams were still only echoes of what they would become, she had weakened quickly and Komui had carried her the rest of the way.
They were penniless, of course, but there are always those who will take pity on children, and so for the first night they slept on a grandmother's floor and ate her rice and warmed their frozen bones by the fire on her hearth.
The next day Komui found a job at the docks. He was strong and capable and honest, so they paid him well. For a while, they stayed with the grandmother, and Komui gave her a portion of his wages for each week they stayed.
He was also very clever, so within a month, they put him in charge of organizing the shipping schedules and gave him a raise.
Three months after coming to the city, he had enough set aside for a small house on the outskirts with just enough room for the two of them. It was run down, so it had come cheap, but he spent his evenings on it and soon it was sturdy and clean and all the cracks in the walls were filled. They slept comfortably and ate good food and all should have been well, but for the dreams.
Second: the dreams.
Every night, they grew clearer and stronger, burning themselves into the canyons of her mind, and every night they showed her more of the story.
At first they were just shadows: the smell of brine and the black sky overhead, a weariness in her bones. Then she began to hear the thunder, and feel the downpour on her dark skin. Then the lightning. Then the waves. Then the smell of blood.
Eight months after the angel, someone came to visit her in the night. The visitor spoke in an unfamiliar language in the high, sweet tones of a young girl, but there was a coarse edge to it, a confidence that belied her apparent age.
"Shhh," said the visitor, laying a small hand against her damp brow. "It's too early for you, little one. Sleep deeper. Dream sweeter. I'll come back for you when it's time."
For a long while after that, the dreams were gentler, just shadows again. She regained her energy, and did her best to keep the house while her brother was out working. She took many long walks at the riverside and pictured greater waters, wondering.
She grew taller, stronger, and her hair was long and lustrous black.
Every once in a while she cried for her parents, but all told, she was as happy now as she had ever been in the village... while she was awake.
When she was ten years old and Komui was twenty-four, the dreams began to intensify again, very slowly. Almost slowly enough that she didn't notice, until she began to wake up weeping and wailing in the middle of the night, reaching out for someone whose name she could not remember. Komui was always there to hold her hand and keep her warm, but it wasn't enough. She became afraid to go to sleep.
The dreams deepened. Many times she saw the sea of skinless faces arranged in orderly ranks, a man with a broad sword almost as tall as he was, a light so bright it seared her eyes. She saw maelstroms the size of mountains, a white city floating on the wind, a world of landless, trackless black water. A pale blue egg the size of a house suspended in a golden arch. Dark faces, dark eyes. She felt sorrow and rage and love like they belonged to her.
Komui asked doctor after doctor to look at her, and at one point she spent several months chained to a bed in a house for the mad. Komui visited her every day, but she hated it, and escaped whenever she could. Eventually he gave up and brought her home, and let her scratch and beat his shoulders while he held her through the worst of it. Some of the deeper scratches scarred. He made no complaint, but the bags under his eyes swelled with every passing week.
She didn't want to hurt him. She loved him most in all the world, but she was only a human girl; she could not stop herself from sleeping when she was tired, and she could not stop herself from dreaming when she slept.
Third: the mark.
When she was thirteen, when the moon was nearly gone from the sky and her dreams were at their worst, she woke up in the morning with blood in her eyes. Her head hurt like it was bursting from the inside.
They had no mirror, not with Komui's modest salary, but she poured water into a bowl and peered at herself in the wavering reflection until she could make some sense of what she could feel with her fingers.
A line of crosses marched across her forehead, raw and bloody. They burned like fire.
She thought of her mother's stories, and wondered what she was becoming.
There was a mission in the city. Komui was at work and would not be home for many hours, so she packed her lunch in a square of cloth, tucked it into her tunic, and set off through the maze of streets towards. It took her two hours, but she didn't get lost.
The missionaries were awed, but had no answers that meant anything to her. Marked by God, they muttered to each other. Blessed, or cursed.
She left them to their piety and went home.
Komui made a fuss over her when he returned, tending to her wounds with gentle, worried fingers. She wished she had something to tell him, but even God's emissaries hadn't known what this meant. There was no one else to ask.
She dreamed, and bled, and wished for some nameless salvation.
Four days before the next new moon, her visitor returned, and this time she brought company.
"So young," murmured the man, if indeed he was a man.
She guessed he was, by his voice, but she could see nothing of him beyond a round silhouette and a tall hat; the kind some of the foreign visitors wore when they came up the river on the boats. His voice was creaky and cheerful like worn floorboards. She liked it.
Komui, fast asleep, did not stir.
The other voice hadn't changed, though years had passed. Still a young girl who was not young.
"I did what I could in your absence," she said, faintly reproachful. "I quieted the dreams. It was you she needed, but... well."
A gloved hand touched her forehead, traced the lines of her wounds. The pain eased a little wherever it passed. She leaned into it, grateful for even this brief surcease.
"Can you hear me, child?" the man said.
She nodded. He wasn't speaking her language, but she understood him, just as she had understood her visitor before. It was like she had learned some other tongue in her sleep.
"Do you know who we are?" he asked next.
She hesitated for a moment. She shouldn't know, but she did. Dreams like memories. "Noah," she whispered, the word tasting familiar on her tongue though she had never said it out loud before.
He smiled, a brightness within the shadow of his silhouette. "Do you know who you are?"
This time it was easier. "Noah," she said again. The pain in her head flowed away, an ebbing tide receding from the shoreline of her mind.
"Good girl," he said fondly. "Now, one more question. Will you come with us?"
She tilted her head to look at him and furrowed her brow. She liked him, and she was glad that it no longer hurt so much, and she wanted answers, but this was too much. He and her visitor were both strangers, for one thing, and she had her brother, whom she could never leave. Why would he ask this of her? What did he expect?
"No," she said.
"Ahh," murmured Road, "she doesn't understand, Count. Little one, listen to me. We can help you. You're one of us. If you take the Earl's hand, we will bring you home and the dreams will leave you alone and the bleeding will stop. You won't be in pain anymore. Isn't that what your brother would want? Wouldn't he be happy to know that you're being helped?"
She pondered this for some time.
It was true that it hurt her brother to see her like this, and that he wanted her to be well. He had paid for so many doctors, tried so many things. It was true that he would sleep better if he knew she was taken care of.
The visitors were strangers, though, and she could not trust them so easily. Besides, Komui would cry if she disappeared without telling him where she was going, or why.
The pain in her head was terrible again, now that the Earl had taken his hand away. She was nearly mad with it.
"Can't... leave him," she managed.
Road smiled. "The Ark is no place for an ordinary man," she said, "but you'll see him again soon. I promise. For now, let us help you." She held out her delicate dark hand, and her golden eyes glinted in the morning light, warm and deep.
It hurt so much, she couldn't bear it. She was a little afraid of them, but she was more afraid of dying under the weight of her dreams. Road's hand looked like the salvation she'd wished for.
Lenalee took it.
She was the first of the new generation, she learned in the following days; the first to stir, the first to awaken.
Her skin darkened. Her eyes paled. The wounds on her forehead blackened and healed. Soon she looked just like her visitors, whose names she now knew.
Road was with her whenever she slept, her slight body curled around Lenalee's head and shoulders like a shield. For the first time in years, since before the angel, she didn't dream at all. Road told her in the morning that it was because Road had eaten them all for her, and licked her lips as if they had been sweet.
When Road had the luxury of days off, she spent them with Lenalee, playing dress-up and making the Akuma give them piggyback rides and getting candy stuck in their teeth.
The Earl was often there, too, though not as often as Road. He always had a smile for her. Now that she knew what the dreams were, and had begun to make sense of them, he longer seemed like a stranger to her. She didn't recognize the mask he wore now, but she knew the man beneath it, and when she closed her eyes she could always see him standing at the prow of the ship he'd built to save them, all those thousands of years ago. Her leader, her brother, her savior.
She knew Road, too, though Road had changed more over the interceding millennia and hundreds of incarnations. She was still much of what she had been, underneath all the things that were new: mischievous, childlike, wise beyond her apparent years. The dreamer, the dream. Her compatriot. Her friend.
She wrote letters to Komui when her hands were steadied, and Road delivered them through the Ark when she could. She understood better now why he couldn't have come with her; the Ark's halls were full of hungry poisoned things, and she could not protect him. Slowly, earnestly, she did her best to explain.
He wrote back, reams upon reams. He had been so terrified when she had gone missing, and he wasn't much less worried now. He asked her every question he could think of, and told her everything that happened in his life, as if he feared that if he stopped talking the silence would win and he would lose her forever.
She kept all of his letters between the mattresses of her sumptuous bed.
When she felt well enough, she went walking through the streets of the Ark. Road had warned her against opening any doors, but sometimes she could not resist the curiosity and peered through the cracks at a hundred countries she had never seen or heard of. There were so many people in the world, she realized, so many languages and songs and gods and stories. She knew so little.
These were her children, her descendants, and she didn't know them at all... but there were too many. Her world wasn't big enough for them all. So she satisfied herself with looking, and decided not to try and love them.
When she was fourteen and dreamless, Komui came for her.
"Your brother is a remarkable man," the Earl commented. "Not many have the conviction to become a broker for me, knowing what kind of suffering they will cause in my my name before the end. He must love you very much."
The Earl sounded sad, a little envious. She didn't know why yet. She would soon.
"As much as I love him," said Lenalee, answering the unspoken question.
A nameless door, a strange city, a dark alley under a forest of swaying wooden signs. He looked older than he had when she'd seen him last even though it hadn't even been a year. Older, and harder. At least for a moment, until he spotted her in the shadows and all at once became the man she'd known again, loud and full of bluster like a cheerful spring storm.
She wanted to cry, but it was hard, lately. She was still human, she still felt pain, but the tears just wouldn't come like they should.
Over and over again, he called out her name, clutching her to his chest like he never meant to let her go.
He didn't, she realized as she listened to him. He meant to stay with her, whatever it took, even if he had to capitalize on the sorrow of others to do it. He had always been clever and hardworking and he cared very little for the state of his conscience if it meant he could be of use to her.
She could see his heart crumbling away in his chest as he said it, and hated herself for bringing him to this. If only she hadn't dreamed. If only she hadn't left. If only she had remained the ignorant, curious little girl she had been when they had lived amid the roots and grasses under the simple summer sky.
She couldn't take it back, and she couldn't pretend she wasn't deeply grateful to have him at her side, whatever it cost him.
At fourteen years of age, with her complement of ancient memories fully integrated, she knew herself better than she had before and understood that she was by nature a selfish being. She wanted so much, so much, and offered so little in return.
She wanted her brother to be with her, to love her, to sacrifice everything he had to stay with her. She wanted to be free of dreams and suffering. She wanted revenge on the angel that had stolen her life; or, failing that, on whatever god the angel had answered to. She never wanted to lose anything again.
Her world had always been very small, and though she had learned much over the last year, it was very small still. Her brother, Road, the Earl; these three things were the world to her, and she could stand to lose none of them.
So she decided that she would protect them. It was all she could do, really, all she could give back after asking so much. They were hers. She would keep them safe.
Over the next three years, she learned the truth.
When the Earl had time, he sat down with her over dinner, sometimes masked and sometimes not, and told her the story of the world.
He told her of his God, and of the other god who had come after, the usurper, the corrupter. He told her of the War and of their place in it. How they had remade humanity in the aftermath, using themselves as templates and teaching their unblemished children how to feel, how to desire things, how to judge right from wrong, how to be human.
He told her about the usurper's awakening, a hundred years ago, of the flowering of corruption. They had not been able to banish or destroy the usurper, he told her, only to seal him away, and he had always leaked poison into the world through his prison bars. Now that he was awake, the world was dying again, frantic and intoxicated under his sway. Humanity would never be safe until he was destroyed beyond recovery, but that was beyond the power of the Noah, so they only fought for reprieve.
He told her the story of the Flood. Not just the Flood of the Bible, but of every Flood. God had tried half a dozen times to make a world in which his children could be happy, and every time his nemesis had spread corruption over it until only the high waters could scour it clean again.
He told her his own story, seven thousand years of stewardship and exhaustion and helpless devotion to a world that would never love him back. About the brother he had loved who had betrayed him.
He told her what the Akuma were for.
She didn't hate the Exorcists, even knowing what they were and what they had done and what they would do again before the end. Hate required a level of caring that she simply couldn't summon up for anyone but her family now. She felt no guilt when she destroyed them, though; their god would do what it would with their souls. They had chosen their side, their cause.
She had chosen otherwise. Her family was here, her world was comprised of these few valiant souls who fought to defend the world from that which sought to poison it. If she was honest, however, it wasn't about the cause, even if she agreed with it; it was just about her own limitations. She had so little room in her heart. Komui and Road and the Earl filled it all up, so she had no space left to care about the fate of the enemy.
Because she loved the Earl, she cared about his goal and did her best to see it fulfilled. That was all.
Sometimes, she thought she would have done as well if she had ended up with the Order instead. If they had found her, if they had been kind to her, if there had been room there for her brother, she might have fought for them just as hard.
It wasn't like she loved the god of the Noah. She accepted its love for humanity, accepted that it meant well, but she had suffered so much under its onus before her brethren had come for her. There were some things that were not so easily forgiven. Even now, it asked terrible things of her; murder, bloodshed, tragedy.
Even so. Even so. It had given her family when she had lost hers, it had given her purpose when she had had none. She hated it, often, but she owed her world to it.
When it asked things of her, she answered.
Here she was. Here she would remain.
One day, three years later, she met an Exorcist on the battlefield.
He had hair like moonlight and eyes like river water, grey and solemn. He told her she had no right to call herself human.
She wasn't sure if she was strong enough to kill him, but she tried anyway. She tried her hardest. She loved what family she had left, her skin was warm and human blood ran through the veins beneath it, she was fighting to save the world as she knew it. What was she, if not human? How dare he pass judgement, knowing nothing?
The angel that had stolen her life was far beyond her reach, but this self-righteous Exorcist was not.
She knew her nature now, had learned it from her dreams and from her family. She knew what she could do, what she could be. In a twinkling, she was a dragon, massive and invincible within her skin of impenetrable scales, dark and full of fire.
He might have his own reasons for fighting, she knew. Perhaps the Order had saved him as the Noah had saved her. Perhaps he truly believed himself to be in the right, whatever that meant.
It didn't matter. He was a threat, to her and to her family, and she felt nothing but the need to protect them.
She exhaled.
He didn't die, unfortunately, but he would think twice before he came again. That was enough for now.
One by one, her siblings came back to life.
It felt strange to greet them as if she had any kind of seniority. They had all been there together at the end, they all remembered the waves like mountains and the world of water, the blood and the desperation, the voice of God resonating in their ears like harmonious thunder. She might have woken up sooner this time, but they had all lived through the ages together, even if they couldn't remember much of any lives but the first.
They were all older than her in this life, anyway. The memory didn't usually awaken in a person until some time into adulthod, Road told her; she had been unusual, even stranger than Road herself.
One person at a time, her world expanded.
The end was coming again. She could feel it. There was salt on the wind, a daytime darkness to the sky.
The Earl was trying his best to prevent it, she could tell, or at least part of him was. He hadn't told her about his own divided nature, but she had guessed, watching him.
Humanity was his family, descended directly from his brothers and sisters. It hurt him to think of them being erased yet again. And yet, he could find no way to cleanse the corruption of the usurper fast enough to save them.
If all else failed, the Flood would come again, and they would remake humanity in their image as they had before.
Even so... seven thousand years, wasted. All of the Earl's effort and suffering gone for naught.
He was already so tired. Dividing himself had alleviated it somewhat, but not enough to endure this. All three of his hearts would break.
To be fair, she thought, the Flood had happened several times before him, so it wasn't as if he needed to be there to cause it or witness it. It was just that he had wished to stay, and God had answered that wish as a reward for his service. If he wished to be free this time, perhaps God would answer him again, and the Earl's immortal life would end.
She hated the thought.
Even if it was the Earl wanted, and therefore something she had to support, she hated the idea of being without him. Even in his strangest, most destructive moods, when the mission subsumed his human heart, he was family. It was like thinking about Komui dying; too terrible, too awful to contemplate for very long.
When it became unbearable, she became a bird and flew circles around the Ark's highest terrace, the bell tower. When they moved to the new Ark, she spent hours familiarizing herself with its spotless streets, its inky pools and tunnels. She hoped they would never have to move again. The village in the valley had been home. The house on the outskirts of the river city had been home, if only briefly. The original Ark had been home. This new Ark was becoming home, too, but she was tired of adapting. She wanted something dependable, something unassailable that would never vanish out from under her.
It wasn't a reasonable wish, she knew. Change was inevitable. It was bigger than humanity, bigger even than the world. The sun changed, the stars beyond it changed. It was the deepest nature of creation.
Even so, she wished for it to be otherwise, however selfish a wish it was.
What she wouldn't give for a world in nothing moved, in which everything she loved was forever safe.
She wanted. She yearned. She knew better.
The final battle drew near.
She could feel God, watching over her shoulder, waiting for proof that this version of the world was beyond saving. She wanted to prove him wrong, but it hardly seemed possible anymore.
If not for the Fourteenth, if not for Allen Walker, they might have won.
She knew that Road and Tyki and the human sides of the Earl liked Allen, maybe even loved him, but she felt nothing for him but searing resentment. She had met him several times since that first time, and his conviction had remained unshakeable. Oh, it was true that he was unusually compassionate, more willing to try and understand them than most Exorcists, but at the end of the day she knew he would never renounce his allegiance. He would always be an Exorcist. Always an enemy.
Her siblings might be infatuated, but she would keep her heart and mind clear. She would protect them, when the time came.
When they needed her, she would be there, uncompromised and ready.
She didn't need to dream to see it now.
Komui had his arms around her, mortal and terrified and determined to do what he could to protect her. She loved him. She had never loved anyone more than him, and she never would. He was the center of her world. Every other love she felt radiated out like fireglow from what she felt for him.
The Earl, maskless and middle-aged and tired, held his sword in both hands. The person facing him held a sword that was a mirror to his, black where the Earl's was white, white where the Earl's was black. She couldn't tell if it was Allen or the Fourteenth or some combination thereof.
Whichever it was, he knew the truth, and stood in opposition to the Earl anyway.
She couldn't understand it. True, the souls bound into the Akuma system suffered briefly, but they served a greater purpose and were granted a happier ending than most. They would forgive what was done to them when they came to understand the reason for it. Allen and Nea already knew that, but they were angry anyway. She didn't understand.
Briefly, she considered again that it might just be a matter of where they're standing. She had sided with the Earl because she knew him, because she loved him, because she believed he wanted the best for humanity. If she had been an Exorcist instead, however, how would she have seen this? Would she have been horrified, as Allen was?
She put it out of her mind. Perhaps she would have felt differently if things had happened differently, but they hadn't. She was a Noah, and the Earl was her family. She would support him until the end.
Komui's arms tightened around her. She ought to be joining the battle, she knew, but she found it hard to leave him when he was so afraid.
She could feel the storm gathering. The Flood was rising. God no longer believed the Earl could salvage the project.
God was weak, she thought. If she were in his place, she would give the Earl all her faith and hold out till the very end. Waiting for failure like it was inevitable was a defensive stance; in his place, she would fight. She would throw all her strength into this final reach for victory.
She hated him only slightly less than she hated the Order's god. One was a weakling, the other reached beyond his station, and they were both too human for her tastes. Too narrow, too fallible. It was no wonder the world was such a mess, with parents like these.
Komui was trembling. She leaned her face against his, understanding. He was so powerless in the face of something this huge, this apocalyptic. He'd done what he could for her, bringing grieving souls to the Earl's attention so his army would grow, but this was so much bigger than him.
She took his face between her hands and kissed him once on each cheek, once on the forehead. He stared at her, too afraid to admit he that understood what she meant by it.
"I'm going," she said.
The war was waiting for her. Somehow she felt sure that no matter what life she had lived, she would have ended up here, on one side or the other, fighting to preserve the souls that made up the world as she knew it.
The Flood was coming. She became an eagle and took to the skies, looking down on the pieces scattered across the board. A game, only a game.
She spread her wings and breathed in the bitter iron scent of the wind.
Oh God, whom I hate so much,she thought, make me strong.
A/N: As you may have noticed, this changes a few canon events (how their parents died, etc.) and makes some pretty wild guesses as to where the series is going from here. If in the future any of them get jossed, please refrain from commenting to tell me so. I'm not going to edit this fic in the future, so if I'm wrong it's just going to have to stay wrong.
Cheers, and thanks for reading!