The poor, deluded fool feeds on ashes.
He trusts something that can't help him at all.
Yet he cannot bring himself to ask,
"Is this idol that I'm holding in my hand a lie?"
- Isaiah 44:20 (New Living Translation)
Chapter 1: Return to Sender
It wasn't a battlefield.
It was a killing field.
No matter which trumped up superior tried to tell her otherwise, Aria knew that much clearly. When she looked out onto the scene of carnage before her, she knew the difference between a battle and a massacre. Call it a holy war, call it a crusade, the name didn't at all change the essence of the job. It didn't change how much Aria hated the killing.
"Hey!" The supplicating call drew her back to the issue at hand. The speaker looked for all accounts like an adolescent boy. He had a shock of untidy blond hair, dewy blue eyes, and a grin that revealed a mouthful of white teeth. He stood in the middle of bloody destruction. In one hand, he dangled a black-coated man by the neck. "Should I eat you first?"
No, it wasn't a boy. It wasn't the six-or-seventeen-year-old young man whose guise it wore. It was an Akuma. It was the enslaved incarnation of a tortured human soul.
Aria surveyed the Akuma coldly. Her pale eyes slid between its dazzling grin and the helpless Exorcist in its possession. Her head flicked backwards and forwards, eyes checking the ground and marking her opponent. As she readied her body for battle, her mind raced, considering the options. Perhaps activating the Innocence... but that would mean leaving the barrier erected by the Finder behind her. A part of her desperately wished to remain within the safety of the barrier until further backup arrived, but that was impossible. Aria was the backup.
"Toma," Aria snapped at the Finder with her after a fast decision.
The Finder started and stared at the Exorcist for a long, precious second before deactivating the talisman.
The iridescent film protecting them from the chaos outside dissolved in a flash. The smell of blood and rotting flesh almost made her gag, but it was the sound of the Akuma's voice that made her skin crawl.
"Yes!" it celebrated. The terrible snake-like hiss that emerged from the distorted mouth of a good-looking boy made Aria want to clap her hands over her ears.
It was almost harder to fight the Akuma while they hid behind their human disguises. Almost. There was always the upside that while in a human's body, they had a human's limitations. She advantage took the Akuma's temporary incapacity before it transformed to dive for the two disks on the ground, snatching them up and spinning to face the Akuma.
"Too late!" it cackled. But it still wore its human skin. A good sign. Only a very weak Exorcist would die at the hands of a human-shaped Akuma.
"Innocence, Invocate!" Aria intoned. "Sakuya-hime!"
The Akuma growled and its face distorted when Aria's melodic voice reached its ears. A stream of glistening scales erupted from the wide open mouth. It began coiling around the unconscious Exorcist as the body of the boy fell away like a discarded garment. But its retaliation came too late.
A brilliant flash of light followed by a long, drawn out shriek of pain blocked off her sight and hearing, but Aria didn't need them to find her opponent. She darted forward, still blind and deaf, to ensure its defeat.
Toma the Finder sent up a silent prayer.
The Akuma was only Level 1. The fight was over in under a minute.
"No! Curse you!" The Akuma's dwindling voice sounded like an old radio broadcast, complete with clipping, clicks, and jamming. "Damn you, Exorcist! Damn—"
The human shell it left behind was decomposing rapidly. The odor repulsed Aria. She fingered the silver cross insignia pinned to her shirt to focus herself and swallowed hard. It wouldn't help her to fall to pieces.
"Millennia of servitude..." she whispered under her breath. "You're free."
By the time Toma reached the girl, she had already confirmed the vital signs of the Exorcist and propped him up against the rocks.
"Toma," Aria prompted.
He nodded and swung the telephone box off his back.
Aria strapped the two disks to her black leather belt and watched the still unconscious Exorcist as Toma contacted the other parties of dispatched Finders. The brown-haired man looked two times her sixteen years with faint wrinkles around the corners of his eyes and mouth. Other than that, his face was unblemished. The absence of any obvious scarring killed her theory that this was a weak Exorcist. The parasitic-type Innocence that replaced his right arm also indicated otherwise. In her experience, parasitic-types always had a higher synchronization rate, and therefore more power. As interesting as his physical characteristics were, Aria quickly grew impatient. She was getting ready to shake him awake when he finally sputtered, indicating the first obvious signs of life.
"Die, Akuma!" he yowled.
Aria didn't flinch as he attempted to lunge for her neck and fell flat, drained from his short battle with the real Akuma.
Toma did react, dropping the headset and hurrying to support his fallen superior. Aria continued watching from a safe distance of less than a foot away and stroked Sakuya-hime with a gentle finger.
The Exorcist managed to stand with Toma's assistance and leaned against the shorter man, wheezing. His vision seemed to focus on the cool female before him, or at least, on the silver emblem on her chest.
"An Exorcist...?"
Aria scoffed at his slowness, brushed the annoying bangs out of her eyes, and tapped the cross.
His gaze had moved onto the remains of the Akuma. He ventured uncertainly, "Should I thank you for saving me?"
"It was convenient."
He looked bemused by her response.
Toma elaborated, "Our unit was closest when your golem sent the distress signal, Lord Suman." If he hadn't been so burdened, he would have bowed.
"Oh, I see. Thank you," he said humbly with a hint of cheek.
She shrugged ungraciously.
If Aria's rudeness fazed him, he didn't show it. "May I ask the name of my savior?" the man made another amiable attempt at conversation, undaunted by his savior's surliness.
"No." Outside the strain of battle, Aria's voice was lower than the average girl's and husky, though still within the normal range.
The male Exorcist glanced at Toma, who watched the proceedings with unabashed interest, and then looked away in silence.
The wind blew noisily in the absence of human voices. Toma and the target Exorcist shifted uncomfortably.
Aria, however, was perfectly at home in the environment. She examined the landscape while the other two stared at each other. Aria felt marshland wetness in the breeze. The ground under her booted feet was squishy, but not boggy, indicating only slight proximity. Tall marsh grass that was more brown than green reached as high as her knees. A few meters away, the grass had been burned away by either the Akuma's or the Exorcist's attacks. The village people were already crowding in the clearing, salvaging what they could from the ruined huts. Aria saw their haggard expressions of sorrow and resolution clearly from the distance, and she had to look away.
Then she heard the sound of running footsteps coming from behind, and she whirled around in suspicion. Her hands found their way to the weapons on her hips.
"Miss..." A little girl tugged on Aria's pant leg and popped her thumb into her mouth when the older girl fixed her with a blank stare. "Thank you."
Aria didn't relax, but she nodded in acknowledgment.
The girl scurried off, back towards the site of reconstruction.
Aria didn't watch her go. She turned away before any memories could resurface, spotted the pale yellow Finder hoods emerging from the lowland, and strode away without a word. She left Toma and the approaching five Finders to find a dignified way to move the injured Exorcist.
They coped eventually, stringing their cloaks together to make a sort of makeshift sling, befitting for handling dead bodies, but less so for living Exorcists. He didn't seem to mind though. He hummed a lively tune as he bounced up and down to the Finder's rolling gait.
Toma sighed softly as he sloughed through the increasingly watery and muddy ground. If he could admit it, he would have said that he had been looking forward to the return trip because of the prospect of new conversation. From the way things were going, it seemed there would be very little conversation after all. He heaved another aggrieved sigh. This one, Aria could hear even above the rushing wind. She turned, putting a hand up to keep her dark hair from blocking her view.
"Discontent?" she asked. A hint of amusement found its way into Aria's otherwise flat tone.
Toma started and nearly dropped his half-asleep baggage. He recovered gracefully, turning the movement into a very low and more extravagant than normal bow. Aria turned her head away, disgusted. All of the Finders had stopped with her, lined up like some sort of sick honor guard. Perhaps after she spent thirty-odd years on the job, she would find it as natural as the Finders did.
"Not at all, Lady Exorcist," Toma assured. "Working with you is always a pleasure; even better when that work ends in a successful return ho-h-h-" Toma stuttered, before correcting himself immediately, "to headquarters."
Aria opened her mouth to issue a command, and then closed it as the corners of her mouth inched up involuntarily at his kindness. She turned her back on them before they could see and continued walking. The urge to smile disappeared within the next few paces.
To the normal eye, everything was perfectly fine, only a little strange. Who wouldn't find a line of four cars in the middle of a wetland odd? It was exactly the same as when she had arrived not long ago after receiving an urgent call from help from Finders now dead. Those bodies had already been dressed and loaded ceremoniously into the last car. But the problem lay within the foremost cars; the first two reserved for the rescued Exorcist and presumably herself. Aria waited until the Finders and their burden were only a few feet behind her to speak.
"Toma."
Good old Toma, who had accompanied her on so many missions and so was well practiced in understanding Aria's one-to-two-word sentences, bowed in apology. He had not yet learned that Aria hated being bowed to, much easier to see as it was. "It has been quite a while since you returned to Headquarters, has it not?" he said, trotting forward and loading the Exorcist into the back seat with the assistance of his comrades. "Lady Lenalee will be looking forward to seeing you."
How cheap of him to mention Lenalee. It was a token of the time they'd spent together that a Finder was comfortable with manipulating an Exorcist without fearing for his life.
Aria sighed in resignation, her fingers polishing the surface of her weapon. She glanced to the east, the direction of headquarters. The eastern portion of the sky was already a dusky purple.
"We should be back before dawn, milady."
Disclaimer: DGM (c) Katsura Hoshino
Originally posted on both quizilla and lunaescence under the same name (yes, I'm just everywhere.)
Here on FF in a much changed form. Better, if I do say so myself. :D
Thanks for reading, y'all! Tell me what you think :)
P.S. I always felt for Suman Dark. Let's see what we can do with him ^-^ Understand I'm building his character off the fact that he was childish enough to get sulky when Johnny beat him at chess... so I've taken quite a few liberties, I guess. His part is over for now, but he'll be making a dramatic reappearance (as you all know)
That's all for now~ Toodles~