A/N: This chapter leans toward earning this story it's M-rating. Watch out. There's some proper M-rated material coming down the chute shortly. ;D

IV. Patience & Penitence

Lavi awoke first, halfhearted, buttery light creeping in through the window over the bed. He lay on the floor, feeling the ache in his neck and lower back from the barrage of the day before and from the unforgiving floor all night. The air was rather chilly so early, and his coat had been a sorry excuse for a blanket, leaving his feet numb and stiff. He rolled onto his back, laced his hands behind his head, and looked up. Lenalee snored quietly in the bed to his right, a foot or so above him. He could see her slack face, her pale, parted lips.

While the circumstances were unpleasant, there was one favor paid him that morning: by rousing first, he didn't have to go through all those awkward motions required when waking in the platonic company of a woman. His pajama pants weren't nearly heavy enough to help him out with that and, he noted with a glance toward his lower half, neither was his coat. Lavi grinned and had to stifle a laugh at the thought of trying to explain it to Lenalee. First, she'd be horrified and offended. Then he'd explain that no, it's involuntary and had nothing to do with her. Then she'd probably take that personally. Then he'd tell her that, okay, actually, she did have that effect on him—let's be honest here, most women did—but that he would never do anything about it.

And then that stopped being funny rather fast. He would never do anything about it.

With a groan, Lavi sat up and looked around the room. It was even shabbier in the creeping light. The ceiling was bowing in the middle. The plaster on the walls was cracked and greying. There were holes eaten through the baseboards. Lavi curled his lip a little when he saw the him-shaped print in the thick carpet of dust on the floor. He and Lenalee had swept lopsided crop circles in it the night before.

He glanced over at his wife-for-the-night. Lavi allowed himself a self-deprecating snort. It was certainly the closest he'd get to a proper wife. And that was just about the most pathetic thing he'd ever heard because he was definitely on the floor, cold and stiff, and trying to figure out what do with his morning wood before his pretend-wife woke up and slapped him for it.

He chuckled to himself and resolved to tell Lenalee what a lame pretend-wife she was when she woke, and he went for the leather-bound logbook he kept on his person during every journey. He kept it wrapped in a tattered linen handkerchief he had had since before he could remember. Carefully, he fished the log and a small black case out of his bag. Lavi then settled on the floor, his back against the side of the bed, and sprawled his legs out before him. Near his right knee, he set down the black case and clicked open the latch. Inside was the wooden handle and six fresh nibs of his dip pen along with a small corked well of ink and some blotting paper, all nestled in fitted, black velvet cradles. He fit a nib into the handle, stuck it between his incisors, and painstakingly pried the cork out of his ink well.

Lenalee stirred behind him, and Lavi looked over his shoulder at her. The bruise below her eye was a green and purple arc, the ends curving up around the orbit of her eye like a crescent. He twisted his mouth a little—he hadn't realized how hard she had cracked her face on the deck. The impact certainly couldn't have been improved by his falling on her in the process. Her black eye looked worse in the light. Lavi would have to talk her into putting some ice on it when she woke, ideally before people started thinking he was a pretend-wife-beater.

Turning back to the task at hand, Lavi unwrapped his logbook, draped the handkerchief over his knee, and set the book on the floor between his legs. He chewed the end of his pen for just a moment as he sorted through the snapshots in his mind. Then he dipped his pen in his ink and began to write.

Lavi recorded in his own style, one that had always frustrated his mentor, but the technique was effective enough that the elder Bookman couldn't complain too hard. Lavi cataloged events backwards from the time he started writing until he came to his previous entry. This way always made more sense to him. There were never reasons, Lavi would explain, only causes, and he wasn't trying to pen a compelling story. On the contrary, he was recording a chain of events. He could be more objective, analyze the chaos more lucidly if he began with the hurricane and worked back to the butterfly.

"I don't think—" a voice said over Lavi's shoulder, punching a hole in the dusty silence. Lavi let out a squawk and nearly knocked over his ink well. He left a fat blot on the page in his logbook.

He clapped a hand over his chest, and looked at Lenalee. "Jeez, Lenalee. You scared the crap outta me," he gasped.

She was angled up on one elbow, peering over his shoulder at the book on the floor. She laughed. "I was just going to say I've never seen you actually Bookman-ing before."

Lavi dabbed at the pooled ink on the page with his sleeve. "If you call this Bookman-ing, you haven't seen anything yet. There're guys out there who are a lot more on top of their records than I am." He grinned and closed his logbook before it was completely dry. "Speaking of being distracted, you hungry?"

That was a rather abrupt shift, Lenalee thought. She drew back a little. "If you want privacy, Lavi, I can—"

He waved her offer away. "Naw, you're fine. I was about done anyway."

Lenalee didn't look convinced—she had seen the total of two sentences he had written—but she decided not to press it. "Okay," she relented. "We should probably hang out downstairs in case those finders come looking for us."

Lavi tapped his nib against a small tablet of blotting paper in his pen case and packed up quickly. He stowed his logbook and case in his bag, feeling Lenalee's gaze on him the whole time.

They changed with their backs to each other while Lenalee went over her plan for the day. She then stripped the bed and piled the linens up by the door, and together, they made their way down the steep, narrow stairwell into the corridor below. The hall was bustling that morning, and few of the bodies looking as out of place as Lenalee and Lavi. These people, they determined, were occupants of the other guest quarters in the church. Lenalee hung close to Lavi's side as they shouldered through mingling groups of people, all chatting in Maltese.

They made their way to the packed dining room and took their bowls of porridge and jars of coffee into the hall. Lavi found them an empty corner under a heavy, wooden crucifix, and they tucked themselves close to the wall for breakfast.

"You weren't kidding about these people and their Saints Days," Lavi said with a look around. There were clergy interspersed in the crowd, some of them spangled enough to look quite important for such a small church. "But I thought you said things had mysteriously toned down?"

Lenalee swallowed a mouthful of porridge slurped straight from the bowl and washed it down with coffee. "That's what I was told," she said. She turned an incredulous look on Lavi. "This doesn't look like a community with an opium problem, does it?"

"Well, this is a church," Lavi said, putting his hands on the stone floor behind him and leaning back. "I don't imagine the good times promised by volunteering to set up for a St. Queen of the Universe Party appeal to your average junkie."

Lenalee laughed into her hand. "I suppose not." She downed the rest of her coffee and asked, "Maybe we should wait in the atrium?"

"Sounds like a plan," Lavi said and handed Lenalee his bowl and drinking jar as she stood and headed back toward the kitchen.

When passersby through the atrium actually noticed them, they looked like they were observing refugees. Lenalee was starting to feel viscerally awkward while she and Lavi sat on a bench against the wall, probably looking like foreigners and, less forgivably, Protestants. To make matters worse, one of the more bedecked clergymen overheard Lavi say something about "Our Lady of Perpetual Abstinence," and faster than Lenalee could say righteous indignation, they had worn through their welcome.

Lenalee pulled Lavi by his sleeve out of the atrium and into the sun, muttering, "I was hoping we could find some way to pay them back."

They stood on the street, blinking in the morning light, which was quite a shock after the dim, dusty church interior. "I don't think they were that mad," Lavi said, adjusting his collar from where Lenalee had shifted it with her tugging.

"Did you see that priest's face?" Lenalee demanded, putting her fists against her hips. Her suitcase dangled from her right hand, and it thudded against her thigh.

Lavi gave her a dismissive wave. "They're Catholic. They always look like that."

"I swear!" she huffed. "For someone in the Black Order, you sure have a lot to say about the Church."

Lavi shrugged.

Lenalee was not satisfied with that answer, particularly since Lavi couldn't even muster a apologetic expression, but she had other matters to worry about—matters that weren't as futile as trying to wring contrition from her partner. Lenalee knew that their next step was to meet up with those missing finders. Short of walking through the streets looking for a couple of guys in robes with big packs on their backs, their only option was to wait at the church. So wait they did.

They found a bench outside a general store across the street from the church, and they sat where they could watch the men and women coming and leaving the square. For as busy as the church had been, the street seemed disproportionately sparse. An open-air market on the opposite side of the square had attracted a small crowd of women with shopping baskets, and a group of scruffy-looking children seemed to be skirting a perimeter around the two weird-looking tourists warming a bench; otherwise, the street was clear.

"It's certainly no cultural hub," Lavi remarked, rubbing his chin, "but this isn't the kind of ghost town you find along opium trade routes."

Indeed, there were no gaunt, indolent bodies lingering in derelict doorways. There were no women of questionable professions hanging out of windows or sashaying about. No one looked to be starving in the street. Really, no one looked to be doing anything in the street save the children who were now shooting marbles in the middle of the packed-earth lane.

After about fifteen minutes, Lavi got bored and went to try his hand, first, at communicating with the passel of children and, second, at a match of marbles. Lenalee watched him with a certain degree of amazement as he managed to gesture, babble, and charm his way into a round. He looked absurd, then, crouched down in a circle, all knees and elbows and big, goofy grin.

With a sigh, Lenalee turned back to watch the front door to the church. She had, it seemed, refocused her attention just in time. A pair of men in brown robes with big, square packs on their backs were approaching St. Matthias, speaking to one another in low voices. One of the men was tall and sinewy with limp-looking fair hair while the other was broader and more square, his thick, dark hair pulled back in a queue at the base of his skull.

Lenalee shot to her feet, suitcase in hand, and ran toward the finders, arms waving.

"There you are!" she cried, charging toward them. Both men jumped and looked toward her. When they saw who was shouting for them, they both eased a little. "I'm so sorry we missed you last night!" Lenalee said as she skidded to a halt before the men. "Our ferry ran aground, and we had to wait, like, four hours to get here."

"Oh, no," said the fair haired finder. "You were on that ferry?" He turned to the other finder. "I told you were should have waited." The shorter finder looked embarrassed. "We gave up and went home after dark," he explained and began to apologize, but Lenalee put a hand to stop him.

"No, it's okay," she said, "We got a room at the church." She then introduced herself and "that big child over there" with a gesture toward Lavi.

"This is Giorgio Pasquale," the tall finder said and motioned to his swarthy partner. He then put his hand to his own sternum. "I'm Bill."

"Nice to meet you," Lenalee said, trying not to laugh at the very odd pair before her. "What do you say we find some place to sit down and go over particulars?"