Notes: For ninja butterfliie. Attack of the birthday drabbles, part two!
A Standard for Beauty
One of the most surreal moments in his life is when he's just a week away from nineteen, reading, and half-listening to the chatter around him, picking out key words here and there and rewinding sentences when someone asks him a question.
But it isn't until Lenalee says, "Oh, no, no one would ever want to marry me," that he puts his book down. He finds out later that she'd been talking to Miranda about the older woman's once-fiancé, a dress maker back in Germany whose talent lay in making others look beautiful. He ended up never showing up for the wedding.
"Why?" he says, when the really question is, "Why not?"
Lenalee looks over at him, her short hair brushing against her shoulders now, and regards him warily, licking her lips and looking for an escape, before she smiles on reflex, and he knows she's not happy.
"What about you, Lavi?" she says instead, pale white hands ghosting over her knees, twining together in her lap. He looks at them. "You have a girl waiting for you somewhere?"
Several. Just not for him. "Just you," he says, and she blushes and looks away and he knows she didn't answer his question.
He asks Kanda about it later, since he imagines the two of them are closest in culture. Kanda shoots him a dark look from under his bangs, hanging his face in shadow.
"Don't ask stupid questions," he says sharply, with more bite than really necessary. The topic's obviously a sour one, but Lavi finds himself asking again, anyways.
"Don't be like that," he bumps Kanda's shoulder with his knee until Kanda's spine is so stiff it might snap, and the other boy catches his knee in a bone-shattering grip.
"What."
"Tell me," Lavi insists, and Kanda studies him for a moment before snapping back his hand and assuming one of the most rigid meditative poses Lavi has ever seen. His eyes are closed when he says, "She does not dress as a young woman of her, or my country should. Only the cheapest whore would bare so much of her skin."
Lavi looks at the back of Kanda's head for a moment. "You don't really think that, do you?"
Kanda doesn't say anything for a very long minute. "Not anymore."
He mentions it to Allen, but to his surprise, the boy has an entirely different answer. He gets pretty worked up when he hears about Kanda, and stomps around for half an hour swearing retribution for Lenalee's honor, before he finally quiets down enough to take a deep breath and say, "He's wrong about that. It might be shocking but it's not so…awful. And once you get to know her, it's—" he abruptly turns a very bright red and suffers something of a coughing fit. Lavi watches all of this with some amusement.
"Girls are quite nice, aren't they?" he remarks casually, and it is worth it when Allen sort of keels over.
When they've calmed down enough to speak again, Allen brushes back his bangs and sighs. "It's the scars on her wrists."
Lavi thinks back to them, puffy and swollen slightly around shiny white lines. Allen looks sadly at his feet. "It's a horrible thing to do, where I'm from. A horrible thing."
Which is funny, Lavi reflects as he shuts the door, because where Kanda's from, killing yourself can be just another mark of honor.
So in the end, he just asks Lenalee.
She gets very quiet and looks at her feet for such a long time that it sharpens and grows rather pointed, and Lavi looks down as well. They're bare, it being indoors, and her toes flex into the floor, painted and pretty. Her mouth twists ruefully.
"They're too big." She says. He looks back down. They just look like feet, to him.
"They look kind of small to me," he offers, and sticks out his own foot for comparison. She cracks a smile and shakes her head and toys with the ends of her hair, biting her lower lip.
And then she reaches down and nearly bends her foot in half—something Lavi's sure, sure he can't do.
"I joined the order when I was very young," she says slowly, lets go and lets anatomy snap back into place, "So they were able to reset most of the bones. It took me a year to learn how to walk again." She rolls onto the outer edges, lifts herself up, settles back down. "In China, a woman marries rich so that she can afford to have herself carried."
She catches his eye and does not look away, "Or you crawl."
He stares at her for a very long moment, and there is something almost ashamed in her eyes, ashamed for this slight on her small vanity.
"Would you rather they had been broken?" he asks her suddenly, because people have the habbit of irrationality.
"Sometimes," she whispers, "No. No, I don't—just. Just sometimes, just a little bit."
"I think your feet are lovely," he tells her quite firmly, "Your scars just make your hands look daintier, and I wouldn't mind if your skirt were shorter."
He ducks when she tries to smack him with her clipboard, and runs off laughing. He feels, perhaps if not better, then at least of an easier mind. He looks over his shoulder and sees her studying her feet dubiously, and yells, "You're heavy. I wouldn't want to carry you everywhere."