Dance of Shadows Part II: The Black and the White
He was sitting in a stark shadow, just one of a hundred that draped across the stone walkway in perfect, endless symmetry. Link moved across the floor with quick, silent steps, in and out of the rippling lances of moon and dark, perfect and well-planned, like everything about this castle except its people. The air was cold from the open roof, and the clean, slightly electric scent of Innocence drifted as he moved through the battlefield.
Darkness brought itself to bear yet again, and he cloaked himself in its heavy embrace to survey the newest stretch of hallway for an ambush. Midnight had become his element, but not by choice. It was conditioned, it was home . . . and it was where the other creatures like him lived.
An eternity of shadows ahead of him, a labyrinth growing behind, and then, shapes appeared within the farthest shadow. Several patches of floating grey and one harsh wedge of white....That would be Walker. But, he found when he came closer, he did not move. He lay against the massive pillar like just another corpse on the pile.
Someone had put him there, specifically like that. And if it had been Walker himself. . . . Well, sometimes the creepy things Walker did had nothing to do with Walker himself.
Link drew up short, gauging the only visible parts beyond the flare of moonlight: Allen's shirt, his tie, his hair. The inspector took a breath, and wondered why he had been in such a hurry to get out of the burning graveyard that was the lab for this one, lone, burial-site in the heavens.
"Walker!"
And why he was the one to do it.
The body did not move. Link couldn't make out breathing. But as he came closer, he thought there was . . . muttering?
He edged into Walker's dark shelter, tiptoed around the feet, and checked the other side of the curving hallway. When he was sure the atrium beyond them was clear as well, he turned back to the exorcist.
The golem was sitting faithfully on Allen's knee; it wavered slightly as it so intently fixed itself in place. Truthfully, it was the only reason Link was willing to go anywhere near the boy: it was the one thing an akuma would not be able to reproduce. And if it was any particular evil, playing dead . . . Timcampy wouldn't have stuck around for that, either.
"Walker?" he asked, reaching for his wrist.
There was more breathless mumbling, that ended in something like "'Oo're yu?"
Link draped him over his shoulder, and then pulled his mismatched arms around his neck. He was warm; his flesh depressed like real skin should.
"Howard Link," he replied crisply, getting an arm around one of Allen's thighs while he held the boy's wrists in place. The kid was breathing hard against his back, and it was difficult to ignore.
"...Chink?" Allen groaned at him. He sounded like he'd just gotten the beating of his life, like cells were breaking down. Link lifted to his feet and secured Allen's other leg; the youth himself tumbled against his back like a ragdoll. He was light—the metabolic effects of being a parasytic user? Link let out a grateful breath at his windfall—he had dragged for miles dismembered corpses heavier than Allen's dead weight, and it made the fifteen flights of stairs ahead of them a little less daunting.
As he walked, he continually surveyed the curving black and silver ahead of him; Allen made confused, listless noises; and Timcampy worried at the side of his vision. It was a lot to take in, a lot to shut out, and suddenly, came a voice groaning into his collarbone: "W-urz Len'lee?"
"I took her there," he said, an instantaneous and easy lie to calm; he pushed the exorcist higher up his back, so that the fragile weight was properly on his shoulders. The boy, however, he could feel hesitating.
"And . . . the others?"
Not "the Ark." Not, "The Akuma?" Not something incriminating in the slightest. Firstly, a girl, and then, the closest thing Allen Walker could construe as a family. Nothing evil. Just the dangerous diversions from the True Path any man.
"From before? The lab?" Link clarified, though his mouth twisted down into a grim line. One foot in front of the other. No need in this case to give into the instinctive fear of having something weighing him down, something cutting off his chances of escape. Nothing was going to come after him, nothing was going to attack him.... Probably.
"They're fine," Link continued, to placate the boy and the silence around them. He couldn't keep his eyes from shifting around, though. "General Tiedoll and the Time Exorcist kept the remaining alive. The skulls that were left behind, some of them have already turned into sand. It can be assumed that the others soon will follow." It wasn't pleasant, but it was the truth. And truth was freedom. Especially when dealing with Suspects.
His nerves prickled at the reminder, not that he needed it. Allen had a way of lulling a person into complacency, a feeling of safety and calm that set a person like Link on edge every time a wave of it came at him. Currently, as the glowing curve of the stairs came into view, his nerves refreshed the slight changes in pressure of Allen's arms and legs, just in case he had decided to use the opportunity against him.
A shift of muscles, and then, the boy's head came into the side of his vision, white and stringy. Some of it was tinged with blood; in the back of his mind, Link wondered if it came out of Allen's pigmentless hair any better than his own. Against his skin, the boy shook as he breathed; it was getting bad enough to make Link's own lungs rattle, through his back. The kid was weakening fast—
Allen's left arm came up. There was no attack, no long dreamed-of ambush. Only. . . a stifled sobbing in his ear.
Link sighed and entered the ancient stairwell. Crying. About fear and pain, and the release of adrenaline.
It was a closely-decided battle, and an exorcist was crying on his shoulder.
Well, it certainly wasn't the greatest confidence he had been given by someone he'd ended up killing.
What had turned into the triage floor was chaotic. There was an entire corridor of bloodied, wounded men in previously-white labcoats lying dead or in some way unconscious. The doctors were a little further down, patching up people that were dropped in front of them or had otherwise collapsed nearby, missing substantial parts of themselves and wishing they were unconscious.
From the screams and frustrated shouts, Link could tell the make-shift operating room was through the doors ahead—what had been the cafeteria.
Unnoticed to this point—doctors in the hall hoping his passing shadow was not to deposit another body on them, and other personnel too busy to doublecheck him and his carry-on—Link ducked into the cafeteria's nearest open door to spy the first passing attendant.
The tables were surrounded by small clumps of dirted surgeons, several finders to each, who were holding gaping wounds closed, exchanging trays of medical instruments, or taking tools and even kitchen knives to be sterilized.
Near the back of the vast middle aisle, Link's black boots came to stand in a wide, ominously wet series of blood pools streaking across the tile. He stood there, blocking out the sounds of the place, until he finally spotted an opening.
The blood coating the thick soles of his shoes was from a table nearby. The thing and its benches were draped in shades of red and pink, but there was a wiped-down space on the empty top easily the size of Walker.
Link dropped the body on the table. Moving to the open side, he pulled off his gloves and tucked them away while the startled doctor and his two bloody triage runners stared.
"Here's the thing," Link announced, stripping off his jacket and the several layers under it until he was down to nothing but a white cotton shirt. It would soon not be so prestine, he knew, but they didn't need to see his scars.
As the doctors watched, Link deftly unwound the ties around the switchblade on his right arm, tucked his various clothing around it and then gracefully tossed the whole lot into a clean spot against the wall.
"That," he continued, pointing to Allen before starting to tie up his braid with several pins stashes along the rim of his boot, "is an exorcist. It is essential that he not die.
"And this," he added, finishing with his hair and swiftly punching a fist into said exorcist's diaphragm, resulting in a mouthful of blood spraying onto the doctor and his nearer attendant, "is a problem."
Without taking his eyes off the aghast surgeon, he pinned Allen down to the table with one hand in response to his abrupt gasping and offered up the other to the doctor's startled face. Link forced a smile.
"The Central Administration would be appreciative of your applying yourselves to this matter. Now: which wounds would you like me to hold?"
After the hours of shouting and fuzzy calls for supplies, available hands, and missing persons over the black golem's radio there came a sudden, clear voice.
"This is Superviosor Lee. I officially request all able and available hands to assemble in the front lobby for assignment of duties. I repeat, we will be taking a headcount of all able bodies, so please assemble immediately in the main lobby of the tower if you are fit for duties and currently have none. Section supervisors, this will be a preliminary account of members, so please send a representative with numbers if you are unable if at all possible. Exorcists, please report in through comms after this message has ended. Over."
Link shrugged the sweat off his brow with his shoulder, and gave the flouncing bat a long look. A fleet of them had entered the room some time ago—looking for people, he had thought, but perhaps this was the reason. Regardless, with where he had his hands, he couldn't really answer. They wouldn't really want his answer, either.
"This is Lavi," came the first response after nearly a minute, patchy and soft. It made Link suspicious of where exactly he was broadcasting from. "I've got the old man with me, but I'm mostly fine, so I'll come down. . . ."
He tried to fake chipper at the end, if just out of habit, but it didn't quite work. There was an unignorable quantity of unsurity—fear—in the promise. His voice was strangely deep when he did that . . . the familiarity of it rumbled around Link's mind like a blurry dream.
But, Bookman was forcing Lavi's hand. Lavi was much more a child than a soldier. Note taken.
"Roger that. Thank you, Lavi," Komui replied.
"...Roger."
On the tail of Lavi's youthful and indecisive voice came another, rich, deep, and of a more rumbling tone. "This is Marie. I'm still with Miranda. She's exhausted but we're both unharmed. Would you like us both to come?"
There was a pause on the comm link; the yell from an amputation somewhere across the room; and then: "There's nothing more she can do, anyway. Drop her off at the infirmary with the head nurse and come yourself. If she releases Miranda—actually, is Miranda there?"
"Ah—! Ah, yes, I'm here . . . ," came a little voice. Marked with the absolutely terrified and yet dying-to-please female voice that was the Time Woman's. It sounded like she was shouting up to the thing; it was probably hovering at Marie's level. Link had to wonder if they had untangled from each other yet, or if they continued to hold so improprietessly close together like they had been before—
"Miranda, once you're given a clean bill, come find me."
His voice softened there, Link noted, reassessing the pressure of his hands as the doctor pulled a pliers away from between his fingers.
"Roger that," Marie answered, and, on its heels, eager and slightly too delayed, a flustered call of the same from Miranda.
The line went back to static for a while, but was not at all comforting. It was waiting time. What each person was waiting to hear, though, he wondered about.
The doctor hummed in concentration as he pulled another stitch closed. Both of them leaned a little closer.
". . . Anyone else?" Komui's voice returned into the empty space after a few tight minutes. It was obvious that there was one specific answer he did not want to hear. Or rather, not hear.
He had to know everyone else was listening. The poor bastard.
"Hold your horses, Komui," came another female voice—older—suddenly. Link recognized the mature, almost cold tone instantly, but what he remembered more was the beautiful blonde hair that he'd gotten to daydream about after that meeting.
"It's me, Cloud."
There was a rather squirrelly male rumble and then laugh in the background. "Right, you keep on doin' that," he also heard.
Cloud sighed audibly; the thing must have been inches from her face. "An. Y. Way," she huffed, "Zokoro and I are fine. Lau's hyper and's got a few scratches, but otherwise in tact. Advise?"
Ah, the generals. He didn't have a lot of time to be around them, but he was on the fence about how tightly they would close ranks around each other and other exorcists. They seemed autonomous to the point of wanting nothing to do with each other, at times. They were self-important, and as people that had survived the Order for this long, couldn't have done that without knowing when to cut someone off. It was in their eyes at that meeting—all of them. Calculating who had what cards, which boat to jump on. In a fair fight he couldn't take them, especially the monkey, and he wasn't even sure he could stab a knife into the corotid of the giant convict and have him fall. But he could get the Vatican to put pressure on them. And when people squirmed, they made mistakes—
"Do you have General Cross with you, over?"
"Negative."
"Find and assist him if need be. Otherwise, come back here. over."
"Roger."
The conversation died away. Tiedoll checked in, still working as he had been; no news there. If the man wasn't altering his consciousness somehow, it was Link's oppinion that he was plotting something. Wether or not they were paranoid plots, plots to make his students behave, or treasonous plots, however, was something that needed further investigation.
Link leaned over his hands, trying to distinguish between fresh blood and old coloring his fingers. Timcampy, whose frantic ministrations they had been unable to chase away, had been press-ganged into holding a light, and his wings flapped into Link's ear as Link tipped his head to get a better view.
"Here, is that finder back with my seuchers?" the lead surgeon asked. Both he and Link looked toward the kitchen; "Ah, there he is," Link said, spotting the man hurrying up the aisle toward them.
They took a breath before going back to the flesh; Link shrugged more sweat from his face. It was stinging something frightful.
"Did you know your face is burned? You should get that looked at, when we can get a replacement over here," the surgeon said, kindly.
He shook his head. "I'll be fine."
Link shifted his weight on his feet, but the doctor was still looking at him. "Thank you, however," he offered to placate.
The surgeon sighed and went back to the thread in his hand. "Kids these days. You should really take better care of yourselves."
"I thank you for your concern, but I really don't think that we have that luxury, until we end the war."
The doctor sighed again, and rubbed his eyes with his shoulders.
"How are you doing on blood, anyway?"
"Honestly, I don't know," Link said, looking to his elbow. "I can still stand. I don't know what you're going to do when I tap dry, though."
"God, this kid has too many holes. . . ."
Link was consdering what, if anything, to say to that, when the hovering black golem patched through again.
"This is Supervisor Lee again. Has anyone seen Lenalee . . . or Allen Walker?"
There was silence. The blood-spattered surgeon looked at Link. Link looked back at the surgeon.
"Supervisor, this is Reever," came the man's voice, soft and fuzzy. It was flecked with strain, and hoarse, punctuated by pauses of heavy swallowing. The man would die trying, he really would. Link respected that. "The last time I saw Lenalee was just after you; she was with a medic. I think he was treating her head and was talking about responsiveness. . . . So, she may be asleep somewhere."
"All staff," Komui responded after a breath. "Has anyone seen exoricist Lenalee Lee or remember working on her?"
"She should be barefoot and have crosses on her legs," Reever added.
"I'll do whatever it takes to find her. . . ."
"Shut up, Bak. Whomever he's with, keep him down."
"It's been a while since I've seen her," offered a new, winded voice. A man's. "But I do remember her saying something about Allen Walker. I sent someone up to get him where she said he was, but the runner reported that no one was there."
Link could almost hear the suspicious intake of breath silence the room. It was like everyone had paused their needles and saws. He nearly laughed.
Though . . . He blinked hard. He couldn't quite see straight.
". . . There was just . . . a lot of blood."
Link thought he heard Komui sigh, distant and muffled. He could almost physically feel the morale slipping away.
He should do something.
But how, now that was a question.
The blond eyed the innards his fingers were holding closed, then Timcampy, which was still fluttering frantically over Allen's chest, light in tail.
"Hey, golem," Link barked at it. Tim looked at him—at least he assumed that was what it was doing—and then flew over to just above Link's shoulder, over the floor. Link eyed it carefully, the rhythmic upward, downward movement . . . and then smacked his forehead, just above the burn, straight into it. The golden ball rocketed backwards, directly into the black bat flouncing around too far away to reach, and knocked them both out of orbit.
Timcampy fell out of Link's vision and all he cared was that it didn't fall on Walker's open wounds; the injured black golem, however, flapped over to Link's head obediently, jarred into paying attention to him.
"Supervisor Lee," he managed to grit out, "this is Link, over."
"Link! Thank God, tell me you know where Allen is."
That was probably the only time he was ever going to hear that sort of gratitude from any of these people, and it was not lost on him. He smiled ruthlessly.
". . . 'Over'?" he asked. He shook his head out, waiting for the reply: his eyes were refocusing when they didn't need to be, and his limbs were singing in a jittery manner that he had managed to avoid for quite some battles until now. But, he reminded himself, he was being listened to by everyone—so he'd better make himself and L'Vallier look good.
"Um, yes. 'Over.'"
The embarrassment was clear, but he had no time to enjoy it. "Right. Well, I've got Walker here, but . . . do you have anyone that could give some A or O blood? Over."
Link looked over the bent heads of the now several doctors that clustered about the table, surrounded by finders; to his surprise, a lot of the room had grown honestly quiet, listening. To his right, someone was being wrestled to a table, and a high-pitched wail ended in an uncomfortable and sudden silence.
". . . Inspector Link?"
"We're in the back of the cafeteria, and that blood would be appreciated stat, please: we're running out of mine. I'm gonna pass out soon, I think. . . ."
"Yours?"
Link sighed, momentarily forgetting what he was doing while his eyes blurred. "Affirmative, over...."
The shiver over the line was audible. ". . . How much blood have you put through him?"
"Hard to say," he admitted honestly, looking over their tattered canvas of flesh. "It's kind of everywhere, and we've got two doctors still stitching things. . . ."
"W—" There was a pause. "Like where? . . . O-over."
"Presently?" Link asked. "My hand is in his lung."
There was a long, very long pause. ". . . What?"
Link shook his head. He was still speaking English, right? They'd all be screwed if he reverted to Dutch or something.
"Lung. That thing you breathe with. That. My hand is in it."
Link thought he heard a sigh, and a distinct, but far-away bout of swearing.
"At least Lenalee's alive, right?" he spat. "It's just one loss; I'm sure we can take it if you've got people that need it more. It's what Walker would say, is it not?"
". . . Quite." Link ignored the icy glare coming through the golem. L'vallier would be glad he was putting people on edge, at least. "Right," the supervisor continued. "Anyone currently in the cafeteria that can donate blood . . . there any supervisors still there that can collect them?"
"I can do it. . . ."
"Dammit, Bak, just stay down, would you?"
"Actually, I could parcel out jobs," said a rather high, but unfortunately male, voice.
"Jerry? That you?"
"Yes, dearie. I'm in the kitchen, sterilizing tools. We could use summore runners and cleaners, too. Could we just have um come back and see me? And poor Walker, I won't let anything happen to him!"
"It's a plan, then. Anybody in or around the cafeteria that could do either of those things, go see Jerry at the kitchen. Inspector Link."
"I think I've finally got it . . . ," said the doctor to Link's left, as both of them leaned toward a particularly bad tear Link was holding closed and the man was pulling a suture from.
"Do you have Timcampy there, Inspector Link?" Komui continued. "Have him fly above you so that we can figure out where you are."
"Rog—ah!"
"What? What is it?"
He wasn't sure if the surgeon slipped or something under him moved, but a hot jet of blood spurted up and pelted both of them in the face.
"Ah, we—ugh, something ruptured. Sorry, we gotta go."
"What? Ah . . . Dammit! . . ."
Link rubbed his eyes clean and searched for the cause of the gusher. It was not where he had had his hands; oh the Holy Mother, it wasn't under his rib, was it—? "Goddammit, Walker, you better wake up from this—"
"Idiot fucking desciple!" roared the little bat, sending it out of orbit and causing several in the room to burst into puffs of smoke. "If you don't wake the hell up immediately, you will be stuck with the god-damned bill!"
Allen's arm jerked, smacking Link in the thigh. He shivered enough to disrupt the surgeon working on his leg, and suddenly, there was gasping. Horrible, terrible gasping.
Link abandoned his quest for the wound and shoved his elbow over the boy's throat, just in time to see him trying to look down.
Allen's silver, bloodshot eyes were open wide, he was gasping, and Link did not, at all costs, want him to look at where Link's other hand was. As he held down a bleeding patch, it brushed against Allen's last rib.
Link fixed his eyes on Allen's face instead, and thank God, he didn't seem to be completely awake, or else he would have felt that.
"Did that help?" asked the general.
Link was starting to breathe quicker, heavier. A shiver went down his arm; it made him far too aware of the simultaneous rhythm in the lung he held with his left hand and the expanding of the hot throat under his other.
"What?" Cross's voice asked in the background, muffled. "Don't give me that look, L'Vallier. . . ."
A sudden cold burst from Link's chest down to the rest of him. For a split-second, everything he saw went nearly grayscale. Oh, sh—
"I think we need to get under that rib—"
He looked down, and there was new blood all over his arms, the medic's . . . it was everywhere.
"...L...ink?"
"Don't. Fucking. Move."
"Eng . . . lish?" Allen rasped.
Oh f—. Link screwed his eyes shut and dropped to the bench. "Someone hold him," he commanded, as he laid both heavy arms over Allen's collarbone and rested his head in the crook of the boy's shoulder.
Link shivered; his mind wandered for an unknown amount of time as he gasped for air. When he finally pulled himself back into lucidity it was only by the idea that he had to remove the stint from his arm or else he could bleed to death, straight into Walker.
Hands, strong but gentle, gripped his shoulders and pulled him backward. His arm was pulled out to the side, and a sharp pain from it was enough to get his eyes back open.
His head was leaning back against a chest, and to his great surprise, a scowling Oriental face met his own for just a moment before turning out to the table.
Allen himself was giving the young man a very distasteful look. But the crease to Allen's white eyebrows smoothed and his eyes slid shut; his cheek fell back onto the table.
"I'm here to save your ass, pipsqueak," Kanda growled in answer. His hands tightened drastically around Link's arms. "You better not die, so that I can take this out on you later."
Allen's eyes fluttered under his eyelids, but he made no noise and he otherwise did not stir.
"You, you," Kanda commanded, motioning around several of the people trailing him, "take a needle." He handed off Link to a woman next to him, and then moved behind Allen's head, holding his shoulders down. "The rest of you, we're going to need you—do something useful and don't fuck up your blood supply."
There was a general shifting of bodies and a flurry of surgeons trying to stop the massive bloodloss, and Link stayed as small and out of their way as he could until he had stopped crashing long enough to stand. He hobbled to his feet as soon as possible, and then leaned against the wall next to his discarded clothes, holding his bleeding elbow on his knees. The flow would stop pretty soon, so there was nothing else to that. He just hoped the spots in front of his eyes and the anxiety turning his stomach would without issue, as well.
Another triage medic added himself to the pile and together Walker's newest wound was patched up enough to avoid killing him immediately. Link recognized, somewhere in the back of his brain, that if anyone he knew found him just sitting there, there would be hell to pay. Especially since he'd volunteered to get himself into this situation in the first place. Right and wrong would not be an issue. The Black Order's rules were King, and the rules were: "Die for the Cause, not the Suspects."
Hair sticking to the wall, he let his body splay out a little more, until he rested in a comfortable, half-awake position. His heart was beating annoyingly thick in his chest, and even though he was sucking in air like a drowning man, none of it felt like it got to him. On top of that, he was stupidly vulnerable: if he fell asleep, he wouldn't put it past an enterprising person like Kanda to come out of the woodwork and stab him inconspicuously while no one was looking, making it appear as though they were checking on him. He'd certainly been trained to do so. And hell, after the stunt he'd just pulled with Komui, no one would probably care.
And there was the truth. He was not protected, and even the people who could would snap their line to him in an instant. That was the oath he'd taken, and even though it was lonely against this wall, it was his fate and he was resigned to doing it well.
So he shifted into a position where he could watch the important things going on with Walker and most of the aisle along the length of the room. Beyond everything else, there was a definite incentive to keep his eyes off the floor. He had never seen so much blood and disembodied flesh in one place. Not in his entire career.
And this was home.
After a time, Kanda moved off, probably to find someone that matched his blood type, or to keep from killing Allen out of frustration. Link stared after him, his thin, black-clad back moving into the crowd.
His whole life, just like Link's, was to get harvested for someone else's benefit.
And so, he thought, staring up at the operating table, the bright lights, and the stains of red he'd rather not see, the world struggles to live.
With a sigh, Link closed his eyes, and reveled in the light that shone through their darkness.
A/N: Wow, part 2 is about 1000 words longer than part 1. And here I was thinking the first one was long. 9.9
This was an interesting foray into how Link probably has to go through life--compulsively noticing and cataloging people's behaviors and their interactions with each other in minute detail.
Hee hee, Cross. His voice can raise Allen out of anything.
Also: Lol, Kanda. It's not a pairing here, but I bet the KxA Fangirl Interpretation will do as it will to my poor story.
Other note: I know now that Kanda and Allen don't have the same blood type, but I didn't when I started writing this. No news yet on Link's. Honestly, they shouldn't even have blood transfusion tech for several decades yet, but well, they have computers and flying gizmos, I assume they've got modern medicine stolen from the Earl somehow, too. ;)
And before you ask: "Blonde" = woman and "blond" = man. :)
I hoped you liked this second part. Review or send a note to tell me what you liked, what might benefit from a fix, a typo, or even how it made you feel. I like those the best. Wonderful compliments are the best way to get more fics out of me.... :3 (...As if I'm that important, ha.) Thanks for reading! ^__^
Last edited: 3/10 (general editing)
