AN: As Chapters 1-3 have been revised and rewritten as of today, it might be a good idea to skim through them again before reading this chapter as I did add a few things to the previous chapters. However, I wouldn't say they are major additions so feel free to simply read only Chapter 4.
Thanks for reading, hope you'll enjoy this.
It is Kanda who sounds Lavi out.
One week after the first war council, Lavi drags Kanda to the arcade, and Kanda doesn't resist. He puts up a few customary grumbles, but otherwise allows Lavi to pull him along. Lavi looks concerned for a moment, when he finds nothing but a courtesy resistance, but doesn't comment on Kanda's abnormal behaviour.
Then, after Lavi achieves a high score for shooting countless zombies, Kanda stands up and points at the screen. "What if this were real?" he says.
"Say what?" Lavi says.
"I said, what would you do if this were real?"
"Oh, come on, Yu, don't joke around. Zombies aren't real and you know it. You do know, right? You can't be that ignorant? Oh, maybe you are that ignorant. I really hope not –"
"Why do you always talk so much?" Kanda presses his fingers against his temples. "What if I said there was a way to bring the dead back to life?"
Lavi laughs. "Honestly, Kanda – if I thought you weren't joking –" He catches sight of Kanda's face. "You aren't joking? Come on, Yu, really. You and I both know there aren't any zombies in this world. It's scientifically impossible. It's a nullity."
"No."
"What's wrong with you, Yu? Is something wrong?"
"Have you had the dreams?"
"What dreams?" asks Lavi. "You okay, man? You're really off today, you know?"
Kanda groans. "Never mind. Play your game."
With that, Kanda exits the room, leaving a puzzled Lavi staring after him. Kanda pulls up a message chat group, and types, Lavi doesn't fucking remember.
Strangely enough, Link's memories are the next to come back.
One fine day, while Link is in the middle of typing out a long report, double-spaced and in font size twelve, in his tidy office in a law enforcement bureau, a terrible headache hits him. When two tablets of pain-relief medicine do nothing for his state, he gets up, sways, and somehow finds his way to the washroom.
The nausea hits badly, a vortex in his abdomen, and rings of thunder against his skull. He throws up, and then cleans up as best he can through the double-vision. He leans his head against the cool walls of the stall, and tries to empty his mind.
But he finds that his mind is chaotic, a deadly sea in the grasp of a dark and terrible storm. No matter which way he steers, he finds himself in the throes of a deadly fear waiting to strangle him.
When he opens his eyes, he sees both the white tiles of the toilet cubicle and a different world – a world of shadows, a world of pain, a world brimming with anxiety and teetering on the edge of destruction.
Shadows dance across the stage of the other world, the flitting memories of things lost ground to dust.
Link watches, his mind hazy. He sees himself, in a thick coat, marching after a young boy with snow-white hair. He sees the same young boy pinned to the ground by rectangular strips of paper, sees an empty room with its lone glass window cracked and broken, blood sloshed over the windowsill.
He sees a scene of despair, marble columns and balustrades yielding to the forces of gravity, thick wafts of grey smoke curling across the floor as a thing with wings and a cherubic face flies above the scene of carnage. He sees blood and death and piles of empty clothing and thinks, I know this place. I lived here once. He sees the boy lying prone on the ground, sees himself spring up, knives shooting out from under his sleeves. I could do that?
He sees the boy fight, sees the boy triumph, sees the boy fall into another snare. He sees the boy cast into captivity. He sees the pain in the boy's eyes, the loss, the fear.
He sees a kind-faced man step into the boy's prison cell, sees his own eyes speared by the man's strange powers. Sees himself die. As the scene unfolds, Link intuitively clutches his chest, reliving again the phantom stab of a strange weapon the world had not known before.
He sees a large man fighting the boy in a cobblestoned street, sees the boy double over in pain, sees himself – I thought I was dead? – rush over, binding spells at the ready.
He sees himself kneel before the boy, sees his lips moving. Then he thinks, I am to become the Fourteenth's ally and yet deep within me I pray for Allen Walker to rally against his sorrowful fate. These thoughts are foreign to his mind, and yet he recognises the tenor in them, recognises the depth of his plea and wonders at the protective instinct that soars up in his breast at the mention of the name Allen Walker.
Who is this Allen Walker?
When the nausea passes and the headache dies out, Link shakes the cobwebs of his fears from his hair and wipes the grotesque shadowy scenes from the contours of his eyelids. He stands before his desk, and pulls up a database. He is determined to discover who Allen Walker is.
When the search results come in, and he finds out that a white-haired youth, one Allen Walker, has been institutionalised in the Katerina Campbell Psychiatric Institute located within the St Noah Hospital in the south of the city.
I will find him and get to the bottom of this, he thinks. Jaws clenched, Link checks the address and ward number, and makes a mental note to free up his schedule on the morrow.
Lenalee and Kanda wander among the strange artefacts.
They have somehow found their way to catacombs long described as nearly impossible to explore. Generations of explorers, professional and amateur alike, have catalogued the catacombs as being stubborn and closed off.
And yet somehow, Lenalee and Kanda have managed to pass through three levels of buried rock and stone.
There is a strange feeling to the rocks and stones here, an intensity of knowledge that emanates off them. Lenalee feels the draw of the place, as if the very foundations are calling out to her.
"This place is very strange," she remarks.
"Yes," Kanda says. "And dangerous."
"I feel like I know this place."
Kanda nods.
"Do you think it might be?"
When Kanda doesn't answer, Lenalee turns back. She finds Kanda staring through what appears to be a hole in the ground.
"Kanda?"
But Kanda doesn't respond.
Lenalee tries again. "Kanda? Are you alright?"
Kanda startles. Slowly, he looks at Lenalee. "I think we've found the place." He beckons her over to the hole.
Together they gaze into the darkness, and feel the pull of the centuries. This is a feeling they both know, a feeling of desperation. Hurt and pain galore ratchet through their minds, and freeze their very blood. There is a memory here of something despicable, something that tormented countless children. There has been death here, and a slaying of fallen angels.
Kanda and Lenalee look at each other, at a loss for words. They remember, these two comrades, they remember the trials of the past, blood spilled and blood lost, the indescribable pain of a forced synchronization with the cruel talons of the Innocence.
Kanda almost sighs. "We've found the place."
When she is able to speak past the lump in her throat, Lenalee takes Kanda's hand. "Yes, I think we've found the place."
