CHAPTER EDITED: 11/21/2017
Summary: The Earl begins to remember his days as Mana Walker. He soon realizes his greatest enemy may be his own beloved son.
Thank you for all the support! It's an idea that's been settling in my plot-brain for a while. Please don't hesitate to help me find any mistakes with grammar or with D. Gray-Man plot. I'm adding more things to the story I already have, so feel free to suggest anything that's interesting or might be cool.
I'll post a new chapter every Monday, and then one on Thursday if the chapter is really short (like 500 words short).
Earl
Random Excerpt: From A Time Long Past
The summer night is chilly. Upon his position on the bed, he feels Road call to him, and sighs.
He's not about to ignore his family.
He slips out of the one-bed lodging room, but not before he pulls the blanket up on the small, sleeping form beside him. Brown hair peeks out from underneath thick covers, the sheet gently rising up and down with the boy's breathing. These were the only times that Mana could see Allen so relaxed, and a faint, affectionate smile smuggles its way past his conscious thought.
For this alone, he's willing to negotiate.
Earl
He's back to watching children again. Particularly two disheartened earth-haired twins who recently lost both of their parents in a fire. Light from the street lamp is bright, a small candle that illuminated the children's cold skin. They sat still on the bench under the lamp, shoulders hunched—and the Earl can't help but wonder who the irresponsible imbecile was who let them wander by themselves right after losing their parents.
Not that he cares, really. He's only arguing that if he had to take care of an orphaned brown-haired kid who just lost someone (like a kid whose dog friend was beaten to death by an old man—Cosimo, his mind unhelpfully whispers), he wouldn't be letting them out at night alone. He'd try to cheer them up, maybe even dress up like a clown. Children loved clowns, right?
"Little children," The Earl simpers, "where are your parents?"
Both kids barely lift their heads to look at him. Instead, they remain silent, almost as if they did not hear him. Still, the Earl isn't deterred. Most humans whose loved ones passed away in horrific accidents tended to be unresponsive to his pestering.
"Quite the blaze this morning, eh?" He is behind them now. "Hears the fire took down a lovely couple, too."
He notices the children's shoulders tense, fists clench, and he knows that he's got their attention now. After all, there was only one fire in town today and only one set of twins whose parents died in a fire.
Perfect.
"Perhaps you'd like to see your parents again?"
Two new akumas, all in one reaping. He summons two brand new akuma skeletons when his keen ears catch a disturbance from the left. How… positively ill-timed.
Loud shouts come closer to where the twins and the Earl is, but it is the dead of night. He's half tempted to send an akuma to punish the cause of the commotion but decides against it. He curses, perhaps he will come back to these poor human larvas at a later time. He merges himself with the shadows right in the nick of time. A small cloaked figure runs past the Earl's hiding place, and the Earl catches a flash of white hair. Behind the escaping man, a horde of running, yelling men rush past the Earl's place in the shadows, all in hot pursuit of the now blurry cloaked form ahead.
What are these humans up to?
"You little brat!"
"Your master stole my woman!"
"Come back here! You're his son, right?"
"Your master—"
"—Or father—"
"—Owes me six rum-barrels worth of silver!"
"He owes me, too! And you're going to pay for it!" This prompts a series of fiery agreement from the group.
Despicable. From what he heard, the Earl could conclude that the fleeing small man ahead of other humans was the son of an alcoholic, cheating father with a debt problem. A small surge of hatred flares through him. Humans. This was the scum his family was going to clean the world of.
They would deserve whatever was coming to them.
He looks back at the bench where his targets, the twins, were and finds them gone. Another time, then. Grief was not easy to get out of.
The Earl is about to shrug this off and leave, but the cloaked old man escaping the mob of enraged debt-collectors trips. And oh.
Oh no.
The Earl's eyes widen. What he previously conceived to be an old man stuck with his shameless father's financial problems turned out to be something much dearer. The figure with the cloak trips and the long cloth hiding the identity of its user falls off. As it flutters to the ground, it reveals the small, petite cowering form of a child.
The men flood around the little boy.
No.
"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I'm penniless!" The kid cowers. "Ayeee! Please don't kill me!"
Admittedly, he doesn't think things through as much as he'd like to say he did.
He had been thinking a lot lately, what with children and akumas and the heinous Innocence consuming his thoughts. He had assumed that all this brain exercise meant that he had a lot more self-control than he actually did. He's held himself back from getting close to any human in the last thousand years. He had contained himself from simply murdering all the puny insects within the walls of the Black Order, if only to follow the plan.
He has proven multiple times that he has a lot of self-control. But as soon as he sees the kid's terrified (and scarred) face, even with the curious white wig, all thoughts of leaving the child to its fate immediately self-destruct in his head.
"Unhand him."
Allen Walker
Master Cross is the worst. Really.
Allen is starting to see a pattern here. The first time, the two of them had barely escaped. The second time, his master had kicked and sacrificed him to the blood-thirsty lot of people his master had owed. This time, the man had mysteriously disappeared moments before the mob had found Allen. He looks back to the promise of murder in the eyes of people he owes way too much money. Even though it wasn't Allen himself who drank alcohol. Or borrowed money. Or flirted with married women.
Why do these debts always end up on him?
"Eeeek!" He ducks, covering his head with his long-sleeved arms, his gloved fingers expecting a blow. He considers trying to use his innocence. With it, he might be able to frighten his pursuers off. Yet. He's not about to misuse the power that had killed Mana,
Mana.
Fondness bubbles up within him at the thought of his adoptive father, and it's like he's rejuvenated. Mana would not have attacked defenseless men. Mana would have stayed strong. He could do this.
For Mana.
He would survive this, become an exorcist, and protect people from the Millennium Earl. Allen frowns, he would save the akuma from the clutches from that phantom, too. He hates the Earl. Nobody should be condemned to suffer like his stepfather and other human souls trapped inside akumas. His line of thought would have gone longer if one of the men that Master Cross pissed off did not lift him up by the scruff of his dress shirt.
He was dead meat. In second thought, maybe he wouldn't live to be an exorcist.
"Unhand him." Allen barely hears it, as it was said so quietly. But the force that came with the command was such a strong demanding presence it stilled the men around Allen.
Who, Allen wondered, said that? He craned his neck from its position very close to the hand lifting him up the ground.