The History We Shared

(I Will Always Wait For You)

How I Became Allen

I was four and you were six, and Mana nine, when we first met. You thought I was cute so you dragged me to meet him.

(I was a dirty street urchin. I still don't know what you saw in me.)

I had no family, no money, my clothes barely fit me, and I was named after my arm. They called me Red, for my arm was red and wrinkled and the veins jutted out of the scaly skin. They called me Demon, and burned a cross into the back of my hand to 'cleanse' me. The cross filled with glowing green liquid and solidified into a crystal. They called it witchcraft and tried other ways to 'exorcise the demon' in me.

(They did that more often than I told you. Forgive me, for I lied to you. But I was afraid that if I told you what they'd done and their reasons for it, you'd start to think that they were right to do so. I couldn't bear the thought of losing you like that.)

You were a noble man's son, a child who wanted for nothing, with a loving family and a good home and plenty of food. You had Mana, who was the best brother anyone could have wished for. You had your pick of friends; every child born into the middle-class and above wanted to be close to you. You picked me instead of any of them.

You saw something special in me, you said. Something that was bright and beautiful and fragile and not-quite-as-cherished as it should be. You said that since everyone was trying to cover it in dirt and hate, you would clean it off and polish it until it shone, and I along with it. You cherished me because of it.

(I always wondered what it was that you spoke of. You smiled at my face when you said that, but it was my dirty, horrific arm that you blessed. I used to look at my immobile appendage for hours and wonder why you liked it. I'd stare and stare, but I never saw what it was that seemed to fascinate you.)

(I know what it is now, but I almost wish I didn't.)

Your name was Nea, and after you told me what your name was you asked for mine. I told you all of the names the townspeople called me, but you only seemed to grow angrier and angrier when you heard them. You told me that those words weren't names, just insults, and ordered me to pick a new name. I didn't know what to pick, so I said that I wanted to be like you.

Mana looked at me with fear when he first saw me, but you wanted to be my friend and he could never deny you anything. When I said that I wanted to be like you, he laughed and said that I couldn't be you because only Demons could take on someone else's form.

(He wasn't wrong.)

You compromised. I would be Nea II, except that wasn't really a name. So we rearranged the letters. We flipped the order of your name, and added the Roman numeral for two in the middle. I was aIIeN, and you never seemed to let me go after that.

(I went back onto the streets, but you visited me every day. Sometimes, Mana would drag me over to your mansion, because you'd want to visit me when you were bedridden. It was the only way to stop you from running out of the house and getting sicker.)

How I Learned About The Holy War

When I was ten, my arm changed. I had never been able to use it; it had done nothing but cause me pain, and the one exception was you, who loved it for whatever strange reason.

When I was ten, a lady walked up to me. I remember her even now; she was Mrs. Worringson, the baker's widow. She used to chase me away with a broom anytime I came near her husband's shop. Then her husband died from sickness, and she changed.

That day, I had been sitting on our street corner, waiting for you when she stopped in front of me and just…stared.

(I was frightened when she did that. Now, looking back, I wish I'd run when she'd ambled up the street. Nothing good came of this encounter. Mana may have said it out of fear of me, but he hadn't been wrong when he'd said that only Demons could take on someone else's form.)

(That wasn't Mrs. Worringson at all.)

She stared at me for maybe five or six minutes, and all I did was sit on the corner and look up at her. Then she smiled. It was unnatural. The corners of her mouth split along some previously unseen seam, until all I could see was her throat, and part of her gums.

I remember someone screamed, and then everyone was looking, and then running, until only she and I were left. I don't remember if I was the one to scream or if someone else did, but I do remember that I couldn't move or breathe, so encompassed by fear was I.

Then something crawled out of her throat. It was shaped like the heart in some of the medical textbooks you and Mana had shown me. Cannons protruded where arteries should have been, and it was several times larger than her body. There was a mask in the center of the body, and it was crying. It was the most horrendous thing I'd ever seen.

(I've seen worse now, but the first is always the worst. That thing was an abomination of black magic. Witchcraft, they called the crystal cross on the back of my left hand. Ha. The parasite living in the body of the baker's widow was the real piece of witchcraft.)

Faintly, I remember hearing footsteps. I would have been killed by that monstrosity, if it hadn't been for you. I heard you coming closer, calling for me, and as you came closer I was seized by the sudden realization that I was going to die. Worse, you were going to die trying to save me.

Me dying…That was okay. I had long known that I was going to die, be it from starvation, the cold, illness, or from the townspeople's abuse. I had never dreamed that I was going to die because of some monster living in the body of a spiteful old woman, but since it was a monster from a spiteful old woman, it was still somewhere close to my expectations.

But you were coming, and you had been the center of my world for so long, sometimes I couldn't remember the days when we didn't know each other. It was fine if I died there, but you were too…bright and beautiful and strong and cherished in a way that I had never really been to die.

I was good for nothing even if you had never agreed, so I decided that if I was ever going to do something with my life, I better do it then.

(I didn't notice it then, but looking back, I almost think I can see the eerie glow filtering through the glove on my left hand, radiating from the crystal cross on my hand.)

What I now know was an akuma, a Japanese word meaning Demon, looked at my hand. It knew what gem I carried even if then I hadn't.

(You had known even back then. Sometimes I wonder how early you had begun to awaken, if you sensed it on me all those years ago. Sometimes I wonder if the only reason you wanted to know me was because part of you recognized what made up my arm, and you were only trying to consciously figure out what it was.)

(Sometimes, I wonder if you ever meant to get attached to me. But that thought hurts, so I try not to think of it very often.)

"Innocence…" It rasped and I recall that my courage just about collapsed at hearing it speak.

But I heard you coming, and my bravery flowed back into me at the reminder of the reason I was going to fight back. I could panic later, I thought that day, I could wonder what it meant by that word when all was said and done.

I remember pushing all rationale away, shoving the half-formed thought that if I ran maybe I wouldn't die into the recesses of my mind with the assumption that whatever that monster was it was only after me. I remember my mind going numb with adrenalin, and feeling like a spectator watching my own body as I lunged at it.

That was when my arm changed. No longer was it an immobile, red-as-blood, scaly monstrosity. It grew, until it was as large as the houses, and paled until it was as white as the constellations we spent hours gazing at. It changed shape until it was no longer human in form, but the leg of some giant reptile. Gleaming armored plates covered it, each interlocking until the only sign that there was a seam was the thin marks where another plate grew out of my skin. The green crystal cross was still emblazoned on the back of my hand.

(I thought for so long that my left arm was ugly when it was deactivated. Then I thought it ugly when it was activated. Then I turned fourteen, and it was a different kind of ugly, a kind I cherished because you were so happy to see my arm like that.)

That first activation was the only time I lost control of it. I didn't know what to do with my arm as it was – the fact I could move it was enough of a shock for me to stop my charge.

Then I experienced a horrifying realization: my useless arm was an even bigger abomination than I had originally thought! The horror increased when I realized that I had no control over it. My arm wanted to see the monster destroyed, and my shock was not enough of a deterrent to halt its bloodlust.

You came up to me just as my loathed appendage ripped through the parasite in front of me. You wrapped your arms around me, and if you had something to say to mine, I was too far into shock to hear a word of it. I only surfaced from that mind-numbing haze when we were safely back in your mansion, and there were two strangely dressed people sitting in front of us. Once they knew I was aware again, they started to explain.

My arm was one of God's Crystals, or Innocence, and was designed to destroy Akuma. Akuma were servants of a man called the Millennium Earl, and were made when someone died. The loved one of the deceased would be approached by the Earl, and would be told that they could have their loved one back. They would stand in front of a strange metal skeleton, which would be the new 'body' and call the deceased person back from the dead. The returned soul would inhabit the skeleton, and immediately be placed under the Earl's control. The final step of the process involved the newly made Akuma killing the person who called them back, then crawling into their corpse via the mouth and living their life for them.

Whenever the Akuma got hungry, they would kill. The more they killed, the closer they would get to levelling up. The one I had faced was only a Level One, the weakest level.

(Given the short amount of time between her husband's death and her reveal as an Akuma, Mrs. Worringson had probably only recently been turned into one. But looking back, I was just lucky that none of the others in town who were Akuma-fied people had attacked me. The cough-turned-pneumonia that had gone around earlier that winter had left plenty of people grieving, and I know now that half the townspeople were Akuma by the time I left.)

(I wonder if you awakened partially and told them to leave me alone, and the Akuma of Mr. Worringson was just the one that didn't get the message. You never did say when you awoke, though so I suppose I'll just have to wonder.)

I listened blankly to this explanation, but it wasn't until almost a week later that I understood any of it. I was aware of what they were saying, but I couldn't muster the energy to react until they got to the end.

They said that since I had Innocence, I was one of God's chosen apostles, an exorcist. Therefore, it was my duty to help the Black Order, a subsection of the Vatican, destroy the Earl and Akuma. To do so, I would need to leave town and live in the Black Order's European Branch. The Black Order would be my legal guardians, and I would never see my friends and whatever family I had again. They couldn't risk them turning me into an Akuma when I died, after all.

I refused. Maybe I would fight the Akuma, maybe I wouldn't, but either way, I wasn't leaving you and Mana and this hateful but familiar town. Unfortunately, I didn't have a choice. They took me away, and made good on their promise to cut all contact I had with you.

(It seemed like the end of the world then, but you were always stubborn and weren't all that keen on letting me go. I had never been as thankful for anything as I was at that moment, when you found me again.)

How I Found Out The Truth About You

I spent four years doing my 'duty' as an exorcist, wallowing in my miserable, depressing self-pity all the while. Central, the headquarters of the Black Order, sent CROW spell casters to watch me. The CROW operatives stalked me day and night, and for four years they ensured I had no contact with either you, or Mana.

(I don't know if they followed me because I was a flight risk, because they knew the only reason I didn't commit suicide was because I wanted to see you again, or because for someone who had only activated my Innocence, or Invoked to use the correct terminology, once in my life, I had an abnormal synchronization rate.

An exorcist's position in the hierarchy of command was determined by the synch rate. If it fell below 10%, the exorcist risked becoming a Fallen Apostle and dying from the next attempted synchronization. If it rose above 100%, the exorcist joined the ranks of the incredibly powerful Generals. They took on apprentices, worked solo to recover unattached pieces of Innocence, and had authority equal to Section Chiefs. In some cases, they could overrule the Branch Director, who deployed exorcists on various missions.

Every once in a while, the exorcists would be required to have a lady named Hevlaska check their synch rate, and the first test was when they first arrived at the Black Order. I had only activated once when I arrived at the Black Order, but my synch rate was already almost 100% – it was 94% to be exact.)

(I didn't care how high I could synchronize with my Innocence, Hand of God. I wanted to go back to being with you, and the CROW operatives had to stop me from doing everything from throwing myself off of the cliffs the European Branch was situated on to running away mid-mission to cutting my left arm off with a rusty knife I'd found in an alley. I drove them so mad, I'm surprised they never fed me poison, except every non-exorcist in the Black Order was told that we were some species of divine beings living on Earth.)

(I think some of them feared me more than the Akuma and the Earl.)

One day, shortly after Christmas and New Year's Day had passed; I was sent out to a town in Poland. I didn't bother to memorize the name or learn any of the language, I was so convinced that this would be just another nameless town in a long list of nameless towns.

I was left in one hotel room, and the CROW spell casters who were babysitting me that time were staying in another room. They weren't in at that time though, and looking back I know that they were probably reporting to Garrick Leverrier, the head of the CROW corps.

Their absence was a small mercy on their parts: That specific night was my fourteenth birthday, and I was always more miserable when I was reminded of their presence. It was extremely lucky for you and me though, that they weren't in and didn't get back until after dawn.

It was nearing midnight, and after the local church's bells rung twelve times, I would be fourteen. I was sitting gloomily on my bed and awaiting the signal that I had spent another painful year apart from you when a knock sounded at my window. I remember looking up, half wondering if the CROW had come back early, half wondering if it was the Akuma that would finally kill me.

(Just as I had had no illusions about how I would die back in our hometown, I had no illusions about how I would die as an exorcist. Now, however, I have no illusions about how I will die, and I refuse to allow anything else but my chosen method kill me.)
(I will die, and, to quote your favorite song, 'your beloved face' will be the last thing I will see.)

It was you that I saw on my windowsill, though. I remember I gaped at you for perhaps a full minute and probably would have done so for longer had you not shivered when you did.

I hopped out of bed and darted to the window to let you in. I suppose you could have been an Akuma, perhaps a Level Two, which have a wide range of abilities including everything from changing shape to look like animals to being able to spit acid to turning invisible, but the idea of you as an Akuma seemed so farfetched, it didn't even occur to me as I led you over to my bed. The sheets were thick and warm, and you needed to be under them more than I did.

Luckily for me, you weren't some monster borrowing your form, although as it turned out, calling you human was also a stretch. After our greetings, you told me that you had unbelievable news. That was your exact phrasing, unbelievable, and it sort of was unbelievable. But you were able to show me what you meant, so I believed you wholeheartedly. To be honest, I would have believed you even if you had no proof and told me that you were a purple pumpkin-eater, our alternative to the Boogeyman.

You told me that the Millennium Earl wasn't working alone, which didn't surprise me. I knew that he had Akuma and Brokers, who were humans that found people willing to make the Earl's Akuma Deal and even orchestrated the deaths of some just to make more victims for their employer. You knew about the Brokers, too but said that there were more than just them helping the Earl.

You looked nervous, I remember, and frightened. I recall thinking that you looked like you were afraid I would reject you, which was stupid since I loathed the Black Order with a burning passion and would join the Earl if you asked me to. I said as much and you looked so flabbergasted when I did that only the faint fear that the CROW would come back, overhear, and get rid of you if I laughed stopped me from doing so.

Finally, you came out with the secret. The Earl was the patriarch of a family of super humans called the Noah Clan. They had these things called Noah Memories, which were a type of gene that stored a certain aspect of the originally Noah's personality and memory. The Noah Clan were the ancestors of humanity, which was wiped out after the Great Biblical Flood. All humans had an inactive Noah gene, and in a select few it was active. The ones with the active Noah genes were the members of the Noah Clan.

The Noah Clan members, among other abilities, could heal at an astonishing rate, and the only thing that could kill them was Innocence. On the off chance that one of them died, their Noah Memory would pick another ordinary human, implant itself, and then activate after a couple of years, sometimes even decades. Once it activated the previously deceased Noah would 'awaken', or be resurrected, and would go about on the Earl's business.

As far as you knew, the Earl had never been reincarnated before, and neither had you. When I asked you why you were included, you asked me not to be too mad. Then you said that the Noah could still take on their 'white' forms, but most times they had really dark gray skin, amber eyes, and a row of seven black stigmata, or crosses, on their foreheads. Then you leaned away from me, closed your eyes, and frowned.

I wanted to ask what you were doing, but before I could, your skin turned gray, and seven stigmata appeared on your forehead. When you opened your eyes, they had gone from being the color of the warm cocoa we used to drink when we were kids to the bright amber you had described. Your pupils were shaped like slits, but a closer look revealed that they were actually tiny crosses, and the shorter line was just unnoticeable due to how thin it was.

My arm twitched as I gazed at you, and I threw myself away from the bed just before Hand of God Invoked itself. You stiffened as you looked at it, and I remember that I couldn't stop begging, both for you to forgive me because I didn't mean for my Innocence to activate and for Hand of God to stop trying to attack you.

Finally, you closed your eyes again and changed back into what I guessed was your 'white' form.

(The term made sense then: your natural skin color may have been rather tanned, but every skin color would probably look white in comparison to the dark grey your skin became when you looked like a Noah.)

After you changed back, Hand of God regressed back into its dormant state and you explained that Noah and Innocence are natural enemies, and often tried to attack one another on sight. Once you were sure that I wasn't frightened or angry at you, you were happy to explain more about the Noah.

There were normally Thirteen 'Apostles' as they called themselves, but you were the newly discovered Fourteenth. I suppose it was fitting then, that just as you said what number you were, the bells tolled and I turned fourteen years old. You certainly seemed to find it amusing, because you laughed and commented on it, before insisting on singing 'Happy Birthday' to me.

Each Apostle had a different ability and title. The Tenth and Eleventh were Noah's 'Bonds' and had the ability to merge into one person. The Ninth Apostle was Noah's 'Dream' and could pull people into a hallucinatory world they could mold and play with as they pleased. The bodies of Dream's victims would serve as soulless dolls for Dream to manipulate, and so long as their mind was trapped in the Dream World they would be Dream's servants.

You were the surprise Fourteenth, and you told everyone that your Noah title was 'The Musician'. It would certainly fit; Noah's Ark was actually a glowing giant cube containing the city of Eden, and the central control system was actually a piano. Anyone could play a song on it, but only the Earl and Dream could manipulate it using the musically transmitted commands. Only the First and Ninth Apostles…and you. You were the newest Noah, but you actually had better, more complete control over the Ark, hence your title of Musician.

But, you confessed to me, you didn't really think that that was your title. Every Noah remembered something from the original Noah's life that dictated which Memory they were. Noah's Wrath remembered something that made Noah angry. Noah's Lust remembered something that Noah lusted over. But the only thing you remembered was the phrase "Destroy the old and impure to Create the new and sinless," which didn't really have anything to do with music.

Also, while Hand of God proved that Innocence hated you, you didn't feel any particular animosity towards Innocence. You thought that your title might be 'the Noah of Destruction' because it felt right, but given the way you felt drawn and fascinated by the Innocence your new family turned to dust at a touch, you thought that even that might be just a nickname. You had a theory that your real title was 'the Noah of Destroyed Innocence.'

I thought that that was amazing and was jealous of you – you had two families that liked you and an amazing ability, while I was stuck with a stupid arm that didn't like you and got me trapped in a place that I hated. Words couldn't have expressed how happy I was to see you nor could they express the depths of my gratitude that you had so much and were still willing to include me.

And you were willing to include me. You rubbed the back of your head, and looked away, and acted sheepish, but I was delighted when you asked if it was okay if you ran an experiment on my arm to test your theory.

You told me that you could do things with your voice, could make things happen, and warned me that if you did what you wanted to do to my arm, you might destroy it if it failed. I was fine with that – was even ecstatic that I could get rid of my Innocence. I agreed without a second thought.

(Knowing what I do now about Innocence, I was so lucky that mine didn't label me a traitor to its side of the war, and turn me into a Fallen right then and there. Even if you'd cut it off immediately after the process started, there was nothing you would have been able to do to save me once I Fell.)

(But I think Hand of God knew what was about to happen, and we had been pushing 99% for a while. I think it knew that this was just the push we needed to break the first Critical Synchronization Point.)

You started singing a lullaby. I recognized it; it had been one we and Mana had written when we were younger. It was pretty enough to listen to, right up until my arm started burning. I tried not to cry out, but it had been so long since the last time I had burned my arm, much less had something burned into it, that I couldn't keep quiet. You nearly stopped at that, but the pain grew worse the quieter your music got, so you started up again.

When the song was finished, my red, scaly, demonic arm had been replaced by a black, scaly arm with red nails and the green crystal cross engraved in the back of it. It looked even worse than it had before, but you had been trying to accomplish something similar, and its altered state proved your theory, so I was happy as well.

Unfortunately, more time than we had anticipated had passed and the CROW would return soon, so you had to leave. It was one thing if they tried to execute you for seeing me, it was an entirely different matter if you were found to be a relative of the Earl's.

We promised to meet up sometime, to not let another four years pass before we saw each other again.

(We kept that promise. It helped that after what you did to my arm, you could pinpoint where it was, and where I was as well.)

(I had to explain what happened to my arm the following morning though. I told the CROW that I had a dream where I turned you into an Akuma, and I refused to see you a slave to the Earl, and then my arm started to ache. When I woke up, it had changed form. The new form it took when activated was called Purgatory, and it was noticeably stronger. The CROW stopped following me.)

How The Third Side Came To Light

I was twenty the next time something big happened. You and I had kept in contact throughout the years, and had even managed to meet up with Mana.

Your brother, as it turned out, had become the apprentice to a Bookman. I had never heard of them before, but you explained that the Bookmen's job was to keep unbiased records of secret history, like our war.

When Mana was seventeen, you had started living full-time in the Ark. As both of your parents had died when the Akuma had massacred the town without you there to keep their hunger at bay, he had nothing left – no home, no family, no belongings, no money, nothing but the knowledge that there was a secret war going on, and that he knew two people, one on either side of the war, personally and had no way of contacting either of them.

He somehow came across a member of the Bookman Clan, an odd fellow with makeup around his eyes so that he looked like a panda, and was apprenticed to him. Shortly after we met up in Poland, Bookman and he had shown up to record the Noah Clan's side of the war.

I remember that you were infuriated by the fact that he had gotten involved, remember that you had joined the Noah so as to keep their attention away from both of us. Your anger was well-founded. The Noah knew of Mana, since he lived with them in a house on the fringe of the Ark's city of Eden. They knew of me, since shortly after you altered my Innocence I broke the Critical Point and was made a General. They had every General's names and Innocence memorized.

I took on an apprentice named Marian Cross, and he hated the Black Order as much as I did. His Innocence came in the form of a gun named Judgement, and he had an older brother named Smith, who was a pirate. Smith was also an exorcist, but a freelance one who's Innocence took the appearance of a battleship. Marian had been caught by the Black Order after he'd separated from his brother's ship-weapon.

I let him tell his brother that he got caught, and wouldn't be able to continue traveling with him. Marian kept in contact as best he could, and disguised that fact by being as obnoxious and extravagant as possible. Maria Leverrier, a girl about Marian's age helped keep him in line; I never bothered to since I understood the reasoning behind his behavior. He eventually got strong enough that he didn't need to stay close to me and was able to travel on his own.

He knew about my continued allegiance to you, and after meeting you once, swore it to you as well. He told Maria after we separated, but she never ratted us out, despite her loyalty to the Black Order.

Things came to a head though, after Mana wasn't careful enough about meeting Maria. It was really only a brief meeting in the street; they conveniently bumped into each other and Mana said hello after apologizing.

The Earl was and still is possessive about his family, and he didn't like that you had someone from your pre-Noah life around. He used that brief meeting with Maria to declare Mana a traitor, and tried to kill him and Maria. He succeeded with my apprentice's fiancé but you jumped in and saved Mana.

(The Noah didn't understand your loyalty to Mana. They interpreted your saving his life as an act of betrayal. Mana ran to Marian, who contacted me over the golems. I told him to get Mana as far away as possible and to alert Bookman that he may be in danger. I was going to get you.)

You told him to run and never stop. You told me, after I found you bleeding to death, to move on and never stop walking; to never stop living my life. I couldn't.

(I still can't)

That day, ten years before, when I met the Akuma-fied Mrs. Worringson, I knew that I had been with you for so long I could no longer remember the days when you weren't the center of my world. It had been ten years since then, and that fact hadn't changed at all. My first clear memory is of meeting you. My name was taken from you. My reason for surviving my first four years in the Black Order was to find you. My reason for living for the succeeding six years in the Black Order was to be able to serve you.

I could not – would not see you dead without trying something. Anything. No matter how desperate the attempt, you had to live. I could not live without you. And then I remembered something you had said to me, back when you first explained about the Noah family. Your memory would implant in somebody, and eventually you would take over them. Their personality and memories would become yours and yours theirs.

So I made a desperate bid for your life. Even if I had accomplished a lot of things in my life, I had always known that my greatest achievement would have something to do with you. I told you to use me as the vessel for your Memory. You weren't happy about it, but I told you that if you died and didn't let me exhaust my options, then by the time you came back, it would be to find out that I committed suicide.

You were even less enthusiastic about that idea, but if Mana had never been able to deny you anything, then you had never been able to deny me anything. You accepted, and the moment the Memory began to transfer, I knew it. It burned, and Purgatory hated it.

(Purgatory rarely ever denied me something that I wanted, and I guess my Innocence loved me more than it hated the Memory because it didn't make me a Fallen. Or maybe it was just repaying the debt for when you allowed it to evolve.)

How I Got To The End Of My Life

It's been thirty-five years since that day, I think as I open my eyes. I'm sitting in a cell in the Black Order, and Timcanpy, the golem you made for me when you heard about the Order's primary method of communication, is in his large form and covered in CROW seals.

I had spent twenty or so years of the time between when I took in your memory and now seesawing between agony, sleep, and brief, blissful snatches of consciousness.

Marian had hit the Critical Point trying to save me from an enraged Road right after the Memory transfer started. The Black Order had promoted him and held a funeral for me after he told them that I'd gone after Earl.

According to his story, General Allen Black had seen had seen Maria Leverrier fall at the Earl's hand and told him to get nearby civilians and Maria's corpse out of the way while he stalled the Earl. Marian had managed to bind Requiem to him in the modified form of Grave of Maria and had gone back to save the General, but didn't manage to get there before the Earl threw a massive ball of Dark Matter at him. Marian was unable to recover either General Black's Innocence or his body, but was able to break the Critical Point while protecting himself from the blast.

Meanwhile, Marian had dropped my comatose body off with his newly-married brother and his wife Cornelia. They took care of me as the Memory and Purgatory waged war inside of me, and Marian eventually got away from the Black Order long enough to look after me as Smith went back to pirating and culling the Akuma population in the waters between England and Europe.

The conflict between your Noah Memory and my Innocence eventually resolved itself, and I woke up twenty-four years after your death in the body of a four-year-old. A mission from the Black Order soon sent my apprentice away and I returned to the streets with a once-again-immobile red left arm. Three years later, I had joined a Circus and met up with Mana.

After your death, his mind shattered. He started thinking he was seventeen again and had no memory of what he'd been doing since you left. He didn't remember Bookman, so the old panda dismissed him as his apprentice. He ended up as a traveling clown with a dog named after me.

I felt bad for him, but every time I tried to explain what happened he never believed me, and I ended up just following him around and looking after him. Eventually he named me Allen again, and adopted me. I took on the surname Walker, and when he died I went along with the Earl's attempt to make an Akuma so my arm would activate again. I got more than an activated arm for my trouble, but the Earl left to mope over you to Road when I called Mana's name, and so didn't see my Innocence.

I suppose I'm really lucky that Mana's name reminded him of you and that he was more interested in wondering what he'd done to drive you away with Dream to stay and make sure the process was a success. Had he had a little less confidence in his Akuma skeleton, he would have stuck around and figured out who I really was.

Marian picked me up after that, and tried to use his apparent older age to get me to pay his debts, but I always paid him back tenfold in training exercises afterwards. I'm sure he got his kicks out of getting to call me his apprentice when he sent me back to the Black Order.

It's interesting being in the Black Order. It's really changed from how it was all those years ago, and I'm working with some familiar faces. It's nice to meet Bookman properly, and I find it amusing that for all the care Smith took to avoid the Black Order, his son inherited his Innocence and now works for it. I wonder, though, if Lavi knows that his father was a freelance exorcist, that Marian is his uncle, that Iron Hammer used to be called Nautilus Empire, that his parents took care of me for a couple years, that I'm older than I look. I don't think he does, but I think Bookman is suspicious of my age.

(Iron Hammer laughed until he cried when Purgatory asked.)

Speaking of people that should be suspicious of me, I know Kanda remembers pieces of his past life, but I find it interesting that he doesn't remember me. Yuu Tatsushi, Alma Pater, and I were … not friends exactly, but definitely friendly acquaintances. Alma Karma certainly remembered me, but he was too preoccupied with ensuring Kanda never forgot his past self to really care. Perhaps he's told Kanda about me, while they recover in the city of Mater.

Malcolm C. Leverrier, Garrick Leverrier's son and Maria's nephew, has a strong suspicion about who I really am. I think it's why he badgered Marian about 'carrying out the Fourteenth's will.' He knows that I resemble General Allen Black too much, and my Innocence likewise, for it to be a coincidence. He was fourteen when Maria died, and he'd met me before I 'died' as well.

(He remembers too much of us both to be fooled.)

I sit up. Even as Link talks to me and I respond, I'm listening. You had told me your biggest secret, the one you told no one else, not even Mana. I had told you mine that night as well, and you had kept it as faithfully as I had kept yours.

Purgatory, for I have never truly thought of my Innocence as Crown Clown, had been with me since the day I was born. My first clear memory is of meeting you, but the years before it are filled with the white haze of Purgatory's translucent cape. I learned hate from the townspeople, and kindness from you, but love, devotion, and human speech I had taken from the ghostly figure of my unseen guardian.

I found out what he was after I learned of Innocence. I loathed my once-friend for years afterwards, and only made up with Purgatory after I awoke from my long sleep. Still, though I couldn't see all Innocence fragments, only my own, I could hear them, all of them, in a way that even Noise Marie couldn't. To him, they were a cacophony of sound. To me, they were people, voices, and the Black Order was a city of people unaware of the nation's worth of specters living next to them.

No Innocence fragment had a distinct voice, just as Purgatory's body was a vague outline that blurred at the edges. With each new wielder, their voices changed, but the old voice stuck around as well. Iron Hammer spoke with a deeper version of Lavi's voice, but Smith's somber tenor reverberated alongside it. Nautilus Empire had been Banshee Fantasia before Smith had owned him, and Banshee's fainter voice still screeched alongside all of the other voices Iron Hammer spoke with. Purgatory had more than seven-thousand wielders, and seven-thousand voices speak in tandem with every word he says.

I listen as Link tells me about his childhood with the Third Exorcists. I feel bad for not trying to help them more, partially because this version of Allen needs to stay separate from the old version and empathy for everybody is a good way to set my new self apart from the cold, uncaring General. Part of my distress at the news of Link's childhood stems from my still simmering hatred of the Black Order. A large part of it stems from what I am quickly beginning to realize is a symptom of your awakening.

At my side Purgatory screams in rage, all seven-thousand voices shrieking in a howl as deadly as a siren song. A cardinal comes in, but I want to run from his 'aid.' He's not human. No human speaks with one voice and one thousand simultaneously.

When Tyki arrives, I want to ask him if he's deaf; I want to correct him. Apocryphos is not an independent Innocence that self-wields. It is an Innocence fragment that, like Hevlaska's Diviner, has swallowed up its Accommodator, its wielder. Unlike with Hevlaska and Diviner, though, Apocryphos has not given its wielder the luxury of being aware of the outside world. I wonder, vaguely, if being wrapped in its embrace is anything like being trapped in Dream's world.

Before I know it, I have been taken outside and have said my goodbyes to the Noah. Lenalee has come and gone, and I have opened a gate to the city of Eden. I'm walking down the streets, heading to the house that Mana and Bookman lived in thirty-five years ago. The pangs are getting stronger, and I've come to the brink of death enough times to know when I'm dying.

Your favorite song carried a verse that read something along the lines of "your beloved face." I've pretended otherwise for years, but my ultimate goal was to die, with the image of your face in the mirror as the last thing I see.

Purgatory wraps around me, Tim settles on my shoulder, and I collapse onto your favorite chair in Mana's old house. I tilt my head back and pick up the mirror the city of Eden has provided me.

"Tim," I start. "Tell Nea when you see him that this was precisely the way I wanted to die. Tell him that after all the history we shared, I could only wait for him if he would come back to life through me. And if he ever gets to the afterlife…tell him that I said 'I will always wait for you there'. And Purgatory…please forgive me for leaving you with him. You've been so patient with me, and I really deserved to Fall years ago. Please put up with him, and try not to bring him harm." I smile, and see your beloved face in the mirror. It's the last thing I see, and Tim and Purgatory's sad crooning and soft requiems are the last I hear.

I feel hot, and then everything fades to black.