Aaaahhh so short, this chapter. Sorry! I'm having some trouble making it cooperate and move forward, so there might be a lapse between this chapter and the next. Meanwhile, I'm going to try and type up the other 4 chapters for Let The White Heart Beat that I have written down. And do research, of course—for more fics. :D
Still no beta. Typos are being cleaned out as we speak, but some may still get through.
Warnings: Cursing, F-bombs, gore, defiling Stonehenge (in a non-smutty way), and Lavi. :)
Disclaimer: I r not owner uf dee gurei mann.
P.S.: SO I THINK CHAPTER 194 (or was it 193?) OF DGM WAS VERY BEAUTIFUL AND SAD. Thanks Hoshino for shoving me towards KandAlma. Now I have to hold onto my Yullen rope even harder.
Title and lyrics are from Dancing In the Moonlight, by Toploader.
Dancing in the Moonlight
Lavi was not an idiot.
Contrary to what many people thought and believed, he was not, in any sense of the word, 'retarded'.
Yeah, he was curious. Curious enough to risk a limb getting too close to a live Dark Matter parasite. Curious enough to chance pissing Kanda off just to see if he had any new reactions or death threats that day. Curious enough to try and talk to a few captive Akuma.
Curious and dumb enough to unlock a cage for a 'young girl', who ended up being an Akuma.
He just forgot to worry about his own safety sometimes.
Needless to say, she had a liking for clawing at faces. He lost an eye that time in Roanapur. Never knew what became of her. Didn't even know why he was still alive, either, why she hadn't killed him outright.
..Not that Lavi was complaining. It was nice to be alive.
But perhaps someone should be reminding him of that fact sometime soon.
"Komui, where's Leverrier?"
"Lavi? Why are you up?" The supervisor frowned, setting down the papers in his hands. "You should still be resting."
"Never mind that, I feel fine." Yeah. Someone needed to strap Lavi down to a bed. He definitely wasn't feeling fine, but his curiosity just had to be satisfied. "Where's the Inspector? And Yuu, for that matter. They're both missing!"
"Lavi, please go back to bed."
"But Komui--!"
Komui sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. Work was piling up again, especially in the past few days. There was too much to deal with all at once.
"Kanda's gone. The Inspector has his own agenda to attend to."
"Agenda? What agenda? What do mean he's gone?!" The questions poured out despite Lavi's condition, weak as it was. "And Allen, what happened to him?"
"Lavi," Reever cut in, placing a hand on the young man's shoulder. He looked just as stressed and tired as Komui. "..Kanda's been taken away."
Lavi's eyes (well, eye) widened.
"..To where?"
The Australian glanced at Komui, who only gave another resigned sigh.
"Stonehenge, Lavi." The name rang a bell in Lavi's mind. Warning bells. Warning bells he decided to ignore. "Leverrier's putting him through—"
"—remedial lessons."
Reever blinked, then frowned slightly.
"You knew?"
Lavi shook his head.
"Yuu mentioned it once. He hates that place." Lavi made a thoughtful hum. It must've been bad, if Kanda was there even though he hated it. Then again, Leverrier wasn't the type to accept 'no' as an answer. "..I'll go too."
"What? Lavi, you're in no condition to—"
"Komui, I'm a bookman, remember?" Lavi grinned as best as he can. True, he was tired and sore, but he wasn't going to let this chance slip away from him. "I don't think the old Bookman has records of those 'lessons', so I figure, why not go get them myself, yeah?"
"We'll have to confirm that with Bookman first, Lavi."
"I'll keep ya updated on Yuu, too."
Reever and Komui looked at each other, both recognizing the signs that Lavi was not backing down. He had made up his mind.
A nifty part of being in the Clan of Bookman was that, despite being associated with the Black Order, they could act on their own.
"Alright.. But not until you're completely healed, Lavi. Get back to the infirmary!"
Well.. most of the time.
One week.
Seven days, six nights.
One hundred and forty-eight hours.
Eight thousand, eight hundred ,and eighty minutes.
Six hundred thousand, eight hundred seconds.
Thirty-one thousand, five hundred corpses.
Stonehenge was crawling with Akuma and Dark Matter. I had no idea why, only that there was something about this location that drew them in like moths to a flame.
It was fine in the beginning. The first two days, starting from the second I was shoved off the train, led to the giant stone structure, and unbound, they were easy. Simple-minded Akuma, effortless to destroy, like they'd been trained to be sitting targets.
Unnerving, in their own right.
But still easy to get rid of.
The Level 2s were only slightly more of a challenge. Slightly. They were more sentient, they could speak, they could laugh and show 'emotions'. But they still had predictable patterns that I could figure out after killing the first 20 of them. All in all, it proved for some decent exercise. I was even able to test out activating Mugen in this big, open space, though I did make sure not to hit any of the giant rocks. Not that they could topple over from that kind of force anyway.
By the end of day 5, I had cleaved open most of the ground around Stonehenge with Mugen activated. It cleared out the Akuma quickly and easily, even though it sapped my strength. And then they started coming in by the swarm.
Morning was met with a hundred Akuma, sitting around, waiting. After that they arrived by the dozen every minute. It was insane.
It was survival.
Now, it was eerily silent. Nothing stirred, not the wind, not the grasses, nothing at all. That was fine. I was exhausted. I hadn't eaten at all. My only beverage was the rainwater, something that started falling more frequently as of late.
It rained like this the day Allen left. My thoughts wandered back again, but I hated it. My memories were screwing up his image. Every time I thought about him, all that came to mind was something akin to the time Linali realized one of Finders had died, one that had been one of her close friends. All she did was slouch over the coffin, crying. Crying. Crying.
Allen didn't even cry that much, and yet that one single tear spoke volumes, told me more than all of Linali's tears could ever communicate. Because I knew that he wasn't the type to cry—or so I assumed, from what I knew of him. He was strong, prideful, childish, stubborn… but not so easily upset.
…Or so I assumed.
I sighed. The air smelled like blood and oil. Blood, oil, and corpses. Stomach acid from the bodies ate through and started digesting from the inside out around the second day. The smell had continued getting worse as the week went on. Only recently did it start seeming like 'normal', and even then I knew it must smell like shit to anyone who would be walking by.
Worse than shit, even.
Where did l of these Akuma even come from? The nearest town was miles away, it would've taken longer than a few seconds to get to Stonehenge...
...Unless they were already planning to congregate in this exact location for one reason or another and had been traveling for days, weeks even. It would've explained why Leverrier wanted to send me out here so quickly.
It wasn't anything at all like one of his usual 'remedial lessons'. This mindless killing of Akuma wasn't going to teach me anything—there wasn't even the usual instructor nearby to repeat suggestions 24/7, this..
..It was just that.
Mindless slaughter.
For what reason was I doing this? Sure I was killing Akuma, but why? Granted, I never needed a reason why in the past—I just had to. It was my duty to kill these things, I had to do it, because it was my duty to kill them, it was my job to save people from being killed by them, because...
Because..............
It was a horrible sight to behold. He'd seen Kanda rouse up trouble before, just by being heavily injured. Frantic, chaotic, rushing, frenzied—those were the most amusing moments for Lavi.
Never before, however, had he ever seen anything like this.
It was deathly silent, like a graveyard in the middle of the night. Except for the fact that it wasn't quite the middle of the night. And this was no way in hell near a graveyard.
"..Yuu?"
Lavi was answered with silence and the disgusting stench of rotting mechanical flesh. It was too dark to see well, not to mention his right eye was still bothering him.. even though it wasn't even there anymore.
Something shifted on his left and he turned. In the middle of the circle of stones was a solitary boulder, not quite as big as the bluestones. Just a normal boulder.
A normal boulder with a Dark Matter parasite impaled into the stone.
Lavi thought it was dead, but apparently not—it gave a deafening screech, wriggling its spindly legs uselessly, and then fell limp. Silent.
Suffocatingly silent.
Something moved again. The redhead kept a hand hovering over his thigh where the holster for his weapon was. The voice that reached his ears was one he was relieved to hear, yet it was so chilling, so calm, too calm for a situation like this.
"..Did you know, Lavi?"
Kanda's flat, defeated tone almost took him by surprise. Where was he? What happened? This had to be the first time Lavi had ever heard Kanda sound almost.. lifeless.
It was a frightening thing.
"Know what, Yuu? Where are you?"
But he didn't let it show in his reply. A bookman knew how to disguise his emotions, knew how to kill them, knew how to render them unimportant-- because they were exactly that. Emotions don't belong in history.
But it was still scary being here.
"Yuu..?"
The drizzle had stopped a while ago and the clouds were moving again, slowly by surely. Inch by inch, foot by foot, meter by meter, the grassy hill in the distance was being lit up by the moon. Closer, closer, closer still it crept, until finally—
"I've heard that Stonehenge looks best under a full moon."
Lavi covered his mouth and nose with his hand, the smell finally registering again and bombarding his senses relentlessly. He took a step back, heard a crunch, and found the shell of a parasite crumbling under his boot. The grass around that area would soon die in a few hours, infected by the virus in the blood.
"B-bullshit, Yuu," the redhead croaked, swallowing with a grimace as the odor followed the air down his esophagus. "..Ain't nothin' nice about this."
A string of entrails caught his eye, strewn on the ground, on the small boulders, on dead bodies, everywhere—everywhere. Rips protruded from seemingly nowhere, sticking up from the dirt like a grave marker, cracked and bleeding marrow, morbidly cradling the remaining chunks of flesh and mechanical organs that an Akuma consisted of.
The breeze swept by, taking with it some of the horrible smell, but also tipping over a severed head. It landed with a dull, muffled 'thump', only alerting the sole observer to the decapitated corpse nearby, fingers still twitching as the gears slowly ticked to a halt.
But, god, the worst part—wasn't the bodies, wasn't the death, wasn't Kanda looking up at the Moon like everything was fucking okay.
It was the blood. Everywhere, everywhere, everything was stained red. The Sarsans looked like a child had taken a giant paintbrush to them, smearing crimson across the surfaces and spilling onto the grass where dead emerald fields melted into shimmering ruby blades. The bluestones weren't better off. Being smaller and closer to the ground, they were nearly dunked in the iron-copper liquid-oil, slowly dripping down and being washed by the earlier drizzle—
Only now the rain had stopped, and they were just slowly and silently oozing, dribbling to the ground like melted icing on a fucking cake. And that was a horrible analogy, because Lavi so loved his cakes.
Which brings the subject back to what he'd meant to ask at the beginning.
"..Did you do all this, Yuu?"
He knew the answer, he feared it, but he still needed to know. He needed a count of every dead Akuma. For the records.
"Che. Does it look like anyone else is here besides you and me?"
For the recods.
No, there isn't. And that's what scares me the most, Kanda.
…You.
"Heads up, rabbit." Wearily, Kanda pulled his sword out from the stone and tossed the parasite's corpse aside. "We've got company."
In the distance, a dull cloud was moving towards them at an alarming speed. Too fast to be a rain cloud, too flat to be a tornado, too oddly shaped to be anything but—
Akuma.
The bookman apprentice's hand twitched.
"Don't even try it. You don't stand a chance."
All too willingly, Lavi stepped back. Of course he wouldn't stand a chance. He wasn't a monster like Kanda. Of course not.
The fastest Akuma, a Level 2 looking like a deformed soccer ball (Lavi wouldn't be surprised if it was kicked over here), fell towards Kanda at a dangerous speed. A second later, it was falling to the ground in two pieces, leaving a spray of crimson red behind to reflect the glow of the moon.
Five minutes later, four more Akuma were in quarters, heads lolling and croaking, and Lavi couldn't help wondering…
..just how much longer would this worldwide war continue..?
You can't dance and stay uptight
It's a supernatural delight
Everybody was dancing in the moonlight
Dancing in the moonlight