Ch. 13: Of what cuts and heals
'Fourteen for me,' Lavi exclaimed, shrinking his hammer and putting it back to the holster. He fixed the scarf around his neck and searched the ruined village for signs of motion, grinning when he saw the pretty, sour face, its owner approaching. He repeated his score and the scowl on the face deepened.
'Idiot rabbit,' Kanda growled when he was close enough for Lavi to hear the words. Lavi grinned, not letting the words affect him. Even if he started to become aware that some of the Exorcists had become more than ink on paper, he was not letting such a petty insult break his calm.
'What is your score, Yuu?' he asked innocently, flinching despite himself, when a murderous glare was sent his way. Sometimes just the knowledge that he was safe wasn't enough and it was such a un-Bookman thing to think that Lavi cringed mentally.
'Don't use that name you idiot,' Kanda hissed. 'I'm not playing your stupid games,' he added and Lavi pulled up his best pout. Teasing the irritable swordsman was the best thing about being sent on missions with him and he was not yet done.
'Come on, I know you better than that,' he insisted. He poked the other's side and ducked under the blow. 'You need to work on your pred- Ow,' he groaned when a knee connected to his stomach. 'That's mean,' he gasped.
'Twelve,' Kanda said out of the blue but Lavi followed his trail of thought He allowed himself a gleeful smile as he straightened up painfully. He was already opening his mouth to tease Kanda about getting fewer demons than he had, but he stopped himself. If Kanda was up to actual, physical violence than maybe it wasn't a smart idea to provoke him more.
'At least there's a good chance Innocence is here,' he commented instead, in a way of a peace offering. Kanda grunted and turned away and Lavi figured that it was as good as he was going to get. 'The Finder said it was hidden in the church, which is quite fitting, don't you think? Let's find the church and get it over with,' he chattered cheerfully, choosing to forget that the Finder had been pulverised by a demon. It did not affect him much anyway
'Rabbit,' Kanda growled. 'We trashed the church completely,' he said before Lavi could offer a token protest against the nickname, which he liked. It provided a good counter-balance to his current name. He looked in the direction Kanda was pointing and groaned. At least it now made sense why the demons attacked the church.
'Damn it, if we wait for new Finders there will surely be more demons appearing,' he whined, earning a glare. Kanda didn't like whining.
Or a Noah, Lavi thought darkly but he didn't say that. After Allen and Alma had been sent out, Kaori, Mei and Sora had also been deployed, each with one or two other Exorcists. Kanda, Lavi had found from Bookman, had been kept on observation because Lvellie didn't trust him. How Lvellie figured that out when Kanda had been the one to cut open the little girl in the Asian Branch Lavi didn't know.
Eventually Kanda seemed to have passed the test and got sent out with Suman, which was begging for a disaster, if Suman's file was to be trusted, but Lvellie had been firm about it. They had come back safe and sound and so had Kaori, Mei and Sora with their Exorcists. Neither hide nor hair of a Noah had been observed and Lvellie wanted operations to resume at normal pace, but Komui had managed to buy himself more time. Nevertheless, Kanda got sent out again nearly immediately after returning and, this time, Lavi had gone with him.
'There better be Innocence in that rubble,' Lavi complained as they made their way closer to the ruined church, trying to figure out a way to pick the Innocence up. 'I don't suppose I can use my hammer to get some of that rubble out,' he added with resignation.
'Not with the disastrous precision that you have,' Kanda told him, his voice as cutting as the swordsman could probably manage. Internally, Lavi grinned.
'Not everybody strives to cut a falling leaf in half, mister perfection,' he shot back indignantly, internally chuckling at Kanda's glare. Of course, being actually able to cut a falling leaf in half meant that Kanda's Mugen was deadly sharp, so Lavi said nothing more. Instead, he focused on inspecting the rubble and found something that could, in a pinch, be a way in.
Well, they were in a pinch, he thought and called out to Kanda. Of course the swordsman had to express his displeasure at Lavi's "idiotic idea" of trying to get inside when the whole thing could collapse at any time, but he went in anyway. He even offered that Lavi could wait outside, which must have overpassed his limit of showing that he cared for another decade. Not that Lavi was going to take him up on that offer and suffer from his taunting about how a lion is a coward after all. He should have never told Kanda what his name meant.
They made their way carefully, more than once backtracking on their footsteps when a passage was blocked beyond hope. The roof of the church had caved in, fallen columns and large chunks of the ceiling creating a proper maze and Lavi hoped that the Innocence was not somewhere inaccessible.
It was there, that much was sure. Now that they were getting close, the untamed Innocence was resonating with his hammer and, Lavi was sure, Kanda's Mugen, guiding them. Closer, closer, it said, no, turn back and go left, it whispered. It had them running in circles, Lavi realised after a while and the idea that it was in the inaccessible zone was knocking again on the back door of his brain.
'I think it's in the basement,' Kanda said finally and Lavi nodded his agreement. He hoped it was, because the basement should at least be intact and the only other option was in the middle of the rubble, where they would need to hack their way.
It took them a while to locate a usable entrance to the basement, but the reward was an honest wave of resonance and no obstructions on their way to a crypt, where the Innocence was sitting on box, standing on a grave. Lavi was about to reach out and take it, but Kanda grabbed his hand, efficiently freezing him in place.
'What is that under it?' the swordsman asked. With a frown, Lavi took a closer look at the rectangular object on which the Innocence way sitting, on something that looked like a scale.
'It looks like something that's supposed to activate when the Innocence is removed,' he said finally, hesitating. A bomb, said a voice in his head, but he chased that thought away. Why would somebody put a bomb for an Exorcist to find?
Because not everybody likes Exorcists and the Order, said the same voice and Lavi shuddered. Like that the Order loses either an Exorcist or a piece of Innocence, the voice continued. They needed to figure a way to move the Innocence without activating the trigger, he thought.
'Move away, rabbit,' Kanda ordered impatiently and shoved Lavi behind himself. Before Lavi could protest, Kanda reached out and picked the cube up. Nothing happened for a moment and then an explosion sent them both flying against the wall of the crypt. Crushed between the wall and Kanda, Lavi blacked out.
When he came to, the first thing he became aware of was the weight pushing him down. The weight was too warm to be an inanimate object and too cold to be human and could only be Kanda, but Lavi had no time for relief, because he became aware of the wheezing breathing that filled the silence. That he even heard it over the ringing in his ears was already surprising and worrying.
As he moved slightly, he got a better angle of observation and he saw Kanda wrenching a piece of something, probably a shard from the explosion, from out of somewhere in his torso. Lavi grimaced when the shard scratched against a bone, probably Kanda's rib.
'Rabbit?' Kanda asked, his voice barely more audible than his breathing. 'There's more... inside,' he said and coughed. It sounded wet, but Lavi wasted no time dwelling on it. In a split of a second, he was out from under Kanda and opening his uniform, ignoring the blood trailing from Kanda's lips. He needed to get the shards out of the other's body or they risked that Kanda would heal over them and they would never find them. From his lecture of the Second Exorcist Project files, Lavi knew that he had less than ten minutes for sure. How much time had already passed?
'Shouldn't they get expelled when you heal?' he asked absent-mindedly, opening the shirt and counting two more cuts on Kanda's chest. A fraction of a shard was sticking out from one although barely. He hated the idea of fishing for the second one.
'They should,' Kanda whispered, eyes screwed up in a pain-filled expression.
'Won't you get infection if-' he started, hesitating to do what needed to be done.
'Get it out already,' Kanda hissed and coughed again. More blood trickled out from his mouth. He shuddered. Lavi forced him to stay still, so that he could reach for the shard, but it was too late. With a gasp, Kanda's back arched off the ground and Lavi had seen it often enough to know what it meant. In a desperate attempt, he grabbed the shard that was sticking out and pulled it out, tearing the flesh that was already reknitting itself. Kanda screamed.
Moments later, it was over, or so Lavi thought until Kanda tried to sit up and gasped, placing a hand over his chest, his breathing still wheezing in the silence. There was no sign anywhere of the remaining shard and, when Lavi pushed Kanda's hand away, there was not even the smallest scar to mark the shard's place. For a split of a second Lavi wondered if they could make it to the hospital, but then Kanda coughed up more blood. Lavi cursed.
'It's probably in his lung,' said a calm voice behind him. Lavi nearly jumped out of his skin in shock. Before he turned to localise the owner of the voice there was a Noah sitting on the other side of Kanda, smoking. With trembling hands, knowing that Kanda was in no state to fight, Lavi fumbled for his hammer because sure as hell he wasn't going down without a fight.
'Don't sweat it kid,' the Noah said. 'I'll take it out and then I'm gone, as long as you give me the Innocence. It's a fair deal, don't you think?' he added with a smirk. It crossed Lavi's mind that he was not really in position to argue.
'Go to hell,' Kanda hissed and sat up slowly, painfully. The Noah looked amused as Kanda reached for Mugen, even though it obviously pained him to move. The Noah laughed and said that they could go together if he so wished. Then, before Lavi could say anything or do anything, he plunged his hand into Kanda's chest. For some reason that defied all logic Lavi could come up with, the samurai did not scream, only stared, shocked. It took Lavi a full minute for what he was seeing to sink in.
'See, I touch only what I want. I could, if I wanted to, take out your heart, for example. No wait, not this time,' the Noah laughed, his hand moving slowly, as though he was really searching for the shard inside of Kanda's body. Kanda only stared at him, frozen and wide-eyed and absolutely terrified. Lavi felt sick. His brain was rebelling, telling him that there should be a lot of blood involved. 'Ah, there it is,' the Noah said with triumph and took out his hand, holding quite a large shard of the bomb. There was not a single sign of what had just happened on Kanda.
'What the,' Lavi started. He felt that his brain would overheat in the attempt to observe every single, miniscule detail. It was the power of that particular Noah, the Noah of Pleasure Tykki Mikk, it must have been. It needed to be memorised and analysed. It needed to be recorded, like the powers of Skinn Bolic and Jasdevi had been.
'Now, for the Innocence,' the Noah said and forced open Kanda's palm, without much resistance from the samurai. Kanda seemed to still be in a shock after what had just happened and Lavi didn't blame him in the slightest. Himself, he hadn't found it in him to move yet and stop the Noah, so how could Kanda?
Undisturbed by either of them, the Noah took the cube delicately and stood up. Lavi thought that he said something as he crushed the cube in his hand, producing a glittering, green dust, but he couldn't be sure and it didn't matter much. He watched, together with the smirking Noah, the dust fade into nothing. Then the Noah turned around and walked through the wall, bidding them a polite goodbye. As the last of the Noah disappeared, Kanda gasped.
Trying to push the new information away far enough so that he could function, Lavi watched Kanda curl up on himself as the seal worked on erasing whatever internal damage the shard had caused. He managed by the time that Kanda sagged against the wall, eyes closed and breathing blessedly quiet. Automatically, he grinned when Kanda's black eyes opened and looked at him, but the grin was emptier than ever.
'Don't look at me like that or I'll carve you up,' Kanda whispered weakly and Lavi grinned more, a real grin this time. If the other was up to insulting him then everything was fine. Or rather, as fine as it could be with the Innocence gone and the Noah's weird behaviour, he amended. 'What are we going to tell Komui?' Kanda asked.
'That we got knocked out by the bomb and, by the time we woke up, the Innocence was gone?' Lavi suggested and winced as a thought occurred to him. 'Damn it, I cannot keep this hidden from the Bookman,' he moaned, tugging at his hair in desperation. Road chatting with Allen was not a big deal and could be kept off-record, but the first encounter of a new power of Noah? There was no excuse he could give himself. He growled with frustration, for the first time stuck between recording the true history and protecting a comrade.
'Screw Bookman,' Kanda whispered, closing his eyes tiredly. 'The only thing that old man does is abuse you over the smallest mistake and lie to you about life,' he added and Lavi blinked at him.
'Why would you say that?' he asked, unable to stop himself.
'Having no feelings doesn't make you a better observer. It makes you inhuman, a doll like Kaori to be used by whoever is smart enough,' Kanda said, his voice gaining some strength. Lavi felt as though he had slapped him in the face. He was nothing like Kaori! He knew his purpose and he knew how to get there and the old panda was sometimes violent but "Lavi" was a horrible persona.
Kaori also knows her purpose and how to get there, said a treacherous voice in Lavi's head, but he shook it away. Like hell he would go listening to Kanda in such important matters. Kanda knew nothing about life, nothing about the hidden truth.
Except he lived it every day, the irritating voice said. If Lavi had any less self-control, he would have growled. As it was, he told Kanda that he would call for new Finders to come and get them, while they wait and recover their strength. Kanda said nothing and Lavi was left alone with his nagging thoughts and voices that a Bookman should not have.