Memories of the 49
A D Gray-Man Fanfiction
Six years old.
What a damn foolish age to be deciding the course of the rest of your life. But you were six, and you think you know enough to make that call.
`To know what no one else knows.`
With that promise alone, I chose to become a Bookman.
Foolish, foolish child.
Foolish child, filled with ideas and dreams and expectations of what that will mean. Visions full of adventure and intrigue like all those grand stories you heard, told off of the lips of soft-spoken parental figures and repeated by excitable youth.
Adventure awaits you.
Mysteries that will be your secrets to keep or tell as you wish.
The tales you will tell around the candle fire at night, when no one can sleep and time is passed through oral tradition.
Excitement fills you. It tingles in every pore, fidgets in every finger, floods your mind and your heart.
You're six, and you just know that your life will be exciting, and you don't know that you are so, so foolish for thinking so.
You are just too damn young.
You are ignorant.
And you don't even realize.
But that's the reason why, isn't it?
Six years old, eager, seeing life through a tainted lens, where everything is grand. You're innocent, and innocence - as they say - is bliss. Willing to do what is asked of you, pining for acceptance and validation from those you look up to - literally. The perfect, vital age for molding however one needs you to be, to shape how you will think and participate in the world without having to re-wire your perceptions.
You're six, and the world is yours to explore, but it is not.
Leaving everything is no big deal to you. You had little to hang on to anyway. Very little was yours, but very much was out there, just waiting for you.
It was waiting for you, and you had to find it.
So, at six years old, too young, too deluded, you agree to sign your life to this task. This is who you are. This is who you will be now, and you are so thrilled.
"I accept you as a successor to the Bookman line," he - Bookman - says.
Its such a weird name, he thought... Bookman. Its almost like the name of a character in a story. Bookman. Why only that?
"Hidden history refers to those excluded historical facts that are outside what is generally known. From now on, you will record this hidden history, all right?"
"Yes!" There's no hesitation as you follow his heels, the old man looking over his shoulder and down. As the strong smell of wheat fills your nose and the wind sweeps through the sea of golden stalks, and carrying dandelions on the breeze under a bright blue, near-cloudless sunny sky.
The waving flicker of that field, like waves on the ocean, mirrored by the sun against a canvas of bright azure was so beautiful, a fitting backdrop to great things to come.
As you follow old-man Bookman, the discussion takes a turn.
Your name - your four-letter name - cannot stay. As an heir to Bookman, you must renounce who you were, which means your name cannot remain. You must dawn a new one.
Its weird, but not an impossible adjustment to make. You're so used to answering to it, but you can learn, if that's what it takes to follow this course.
If its what you have to do to be a Bookman.
"What kind of name?" you ask, thinking of what sort of name you'd like. He tells you, a name that has the same number of characters as the name he started with. That's good, because your name is short and sweet.
It has to be impersonal, he adds. No ties. No attachments to anything. No naming yourself after friends or family, nothing like that. You think about it for a while, but he tells you it doesn't matter.
You don't really need a name yet. In fact its better that you don't have one - that you get used to not having one.
For now you are only Junior.
Junior Bookman, heir to Bookman. It is the only name - title, rather - that you will keep for a long time to come, until you, too, become just Bookman.
Junior and Bookman.
Its so weird.
Its weird, but you'll get used to it.
Bookman plans to travel a long way, and that, too, is something you'll get used to. In fact, moving around is preferred, at first. Seeing new places is much of the reason you agreed to go along.
You travel through many places. Bookman is old, but no obstacle seems too steep for him to bypass. The same cannot always be said for you, but you are determined. Whether you travel a flat road, or try to scale past a mountain with him, you are determined.
You keep following, and you try not to complain sometimes, and if you have trouble finding a way to get past something, Bookman waits. Sometimes he speaks, offers advice, and sometimes he simply watches in silence and expectation. When you finally get around something more difficult, he nods quiet approval, and you move on.
Times when you stop to rest for a time, Bookman shows you things. He teaches you ways to fight. The world - he tells you - can be a dangerous place, unforgiving to those who cannot defend themselves. The world - the human world - trusts outsiders little, and so outsiders, as they are, must be able to take care of themselves, much as is possible.
You accept this reasoning at face value, even though it is so much more complicated than that, yet it is also so very simple. You don't think about what it foreshadows. It is simply the smart thing to be prepared for anything, isn't it?
So he teaches you proper form, and he teaches you stretches that will have the most benefit for them. He shows how to move, plays a little of Monkey See, Monkey Do with you, and every so often he moves a limb to the right place when you don't quite have it down. He shows you so many styles, fighting hand-to-hand but also with weapons. He shows how to manipulate another in a fight, both physically and psychologically.
You are young, and for all your youthful ignorance, you are still smart, and you take to it well. You are eager to please Bookman, who makes sure you learn all these things you never knew about before, and Bookman approves in quiet, passive movements, gestures, and on rare occasions he even gives a kind word.
Mostly his words are harsh, but sometimes they aren't, and those days are the best.
He doesn't only teach you movement.
He teaches you perception, ways to look at thing differently, to see sides and angles you never would have thought to. To keep your mind open, able to accept things as they are, but still to question why and how they are, because to never question, blindly following only certain things, is unacceptable in their line of work.
He teaches how to survive, both in society and out of it. How to work, to make yourself useful with what skills you possess, sometimes that you never would have even thought off. How to survive the wild, what places make good locations to rest in, and how to identify things that will make staying alive easier, like what kinds of foods to eat or leave alone and how to find water and shelter when none not of your own or someone else's making is available. He teaches these things in easy summer, and teaches them still through the hard winter.
And he teaches you language. Language you already spoke, but never had words so advanced for. Languages you didn't, and that you hear on the lips of strangers as you and Bookman pass through.
And he teaches you a language that you only ever hear from the old man. A language specific only to their clan, that no other people in the entire world except for you and him speak.
This language - like you - has no name.
It needs no name, as it has no country of origin, and no need for any others to reference, just as you have no home country to return to and no one waiting there to speak the words with.
And that is the best thing of all.
It is a secret, and no one else knows it. You keep that knowledge close. You treasure it.
This language is yours and you and Bookman are the only ones who even know it exists.
You learn something on your own. You learn to call Bookman Gramps, and you also learn that he doesn't like it.
He tells you not to call him Gramps.
You ask why.
"Because I am your teacher, not your grandfather."
"But you're old," you tell him, blunt. Innocent.
You learn one more thing.
Bookman hits hard.
You learn another thing.
Bookman hates being called old.
You think you shouldn't do either one again, but you will. You won't know it yet, but you definitely will. That's one more thing you'll come to learn: you like to razz people, and you like nicknames. So make that two things.
You live like this way for a year, just learning things, seeing new places, and its everything you hoped for and more. You are chosen, and you chose, and you are fortunate. There are so many things to learn, and it seems as if Bookman knows them all, and soon so will you.
You are seven, then, and you have learned so much. Bookman is pleased with you, and you are pleased with yourself.
And you are ready for the next stage in your training as the successor to the Bookman line.
This is the day you get your new - your first of many - names. Bookman asks if you would like to pick it. You decline. You trust Bookman to give you a good one. A good one that means nothing, and yet, means everything, just like everything else Bookman has given you up to this point.
He thinks only for a moment, and then he decides.
Jona.
Jona Junior Bookman.
You grin at him, delighted.
Your first Name.
Your very first record ever.
Now, you are really, truly ready to start not just learning, but being a proper Junior Bookman.
Today you have your first Name, and today, you will witness your first war.
And today, your eyes will open for the very first time.