Heya lovelies! Here's yet another chapter that was pretty much made up on the spot (aren't they always?) Hopefully it won't be fail... From the responses Saya got last chapter, she might have to retract her statement about it sucking.

Saya owns the play but not the actors, they belong to Hoshino-ka.

Rated T... Because a kiss doesn't call for an M rating. Rating will get higher with the chapters.

26. Memories

Kanda wasn't sure where to start, there were a million things he would love to say about his family. He was sure that he had the ability to become just as much of a family-crazed nascence as Komui was, the key difference between Komui and he being that he had this little thing called self-control and dignity that prevented him from wanting to ramble for hours on end like a proud and shameless father over his family.

"Yuu-chan! Are ya gonna start anytime soon?" Lavi asked, waving a hand in front of Kanda's face, he seemed to have zoned out a little bit. He looked deep in thought, and that worried Lavi a little because Kanda wasn't a thinker, he was a slash-then-think kinda guy. There had been no slashing, so it would follow that there should be no thinking.

Kanda pulled himself from his thoughts, looking at Lavi for a moment as though he'd forgotten the other was there. "Er...right." He wasn't very good at story-telling, and even then, he wasn't exactly telling a story, he was just describing his family. Still, where, oh where to begin? He had never been good at talking for extended periods of time, which is why he tended to avoid them, so why wasn't he avoiding talking about this?

Oh, right, because he never gave up a chance to talk about his family.

After another long pause of Kanda thinking, Lavi finally caught onto the fact that he wasn't being stubborn about talking, he just wasn't sure where to start. Maybe a little prompting was in order?

"Ya got any siblings? A brother or sister? Maybe a really annoying cousin with an extra toe or something?" Kanda squinted at him like there was something wrong with him; What kinda random question was that? Of course none of his relatives would have an extra toe.

"Just askin'." Kanda sighed and decided he'd start by describing his older brother, Hayate. After all, usually one saves the best for last, and so Naoko's description would come later.

"I've got two siblings, an older brother and a younger sister." He started, taking a deep breath he was sure he would need. "Hayate is four years older than I, his birthday is in July so he'll be 19 soon. He's an idiot, sorta like you. Actually, he's almost exactly like you, much to my displeasure. Hayate likes to cause trouble, though the only thing he's ever done that's illegal is drink any time he can get his hands on some sake. He's probably wandered into the red light district a few times too, while he was still underage. He tends to pull dare-devil stunts and he just loves to drag me into whatever he's doing... especially around my birthday..."

Lavi was a bit miffed about the "an idiot like you" comment still; What was so wrong with being an idiot sometimes? Still, Hayate seemed like an ok person at this point. Lavi grinned a little at Yuu's last sentence.

"So that's why you hate birthdays, huh? 'Cause your big brother always terrified you when they came around." Kanda scowled, Lavi seemed so close to laughing and Kanda felt like punching him just to keep that idiotic grin off his face.

"So what of it? You'd probably hate your birthday too if every year your brother tried to push you off a cliff, or tried to make you use shinai as stilts, or-"

"Dress ya up like a girl and try to take you to the red light's district?"

"Well, even he wouldn't take me to the red lights district like that... But God I couldn't face Naoko for a week..." Lavi slapped a hand over his mouth to stop himself from laughing, and Kanda bowed his head low and groaned at the realization of what he'd just admitted to.

When Lavi felt he would open his mouth again without snorting or something, he tried to get Yuu back on track.

"Um... moving on..." Kanda was more than glad to get beyond that embarrassing memory.

"Right... well... I suppose that he had some qualities that some people would consider good... He was laid back, and didn't rush people or admonish them... But he was a slacker beyond the point of acceptance, and he's already said he refuses to take over our family's dojo... Even so, I guess he was a good brother...or something." Kanda was looking in every direction but at Lavi, as though he were embarrassed to be admitting that he actually thought his brother was an ok guy. Lavi really wanted to tease him and tell him his denial was adorable, but thought better of it; He still had a sister and two parents to learn about, along with whatever else he could get out of Yuu, it wouldn't be good if he got Kanda angry before he learned about them.

"I dunno Yuu, he sounds like a fun guy to me!"

"Well of course he would, he's practically your soul twin."

"Soul twin..? Anyway, who was that Naoko person you were talking about? A lil' gal pal perhaps?" Kanda gave Lavi a look that told him he should never, ever say something like that again, on the pain of death.

"Like hell, she was-is-my little sister." Kanda only just realized that he was talking about his family in the past tense. They were still alive, of that he was sure, the Order had promised to protect his family when he entered it. He may not be able to see them anymore, but they were still his family and he had no reason to speak as though they weren't.

"She is easily the best little sister a person could ask for. She practically idolized me but wasn't annoying in the least. Usually she managed to stop Hayate's evil schemes before too much damage could be done to me or any random person's property. She was very honest, and very blunt, it was always hilarious to watch her completely destroy my brother's crack-logic. She could probably tear you to shreds verbally and she's only 11."

"...I can see why you like her so much... She does all the talking and you do all the slicing, huh?"

"Sounds about right."

"So...she's 11, eh? Only 3 years younger than me... Makes me wanna meet her, is she cute?"

"She was easily the cutest person in our village." Lavi's mind went crazy thinking of a miniature female Kanda look-alike. His mental images were cute enough to send him far, far off into some fluffy land of fantasy.

"If you even think about her, I'll kill you." Kanda the terrible would surely come back with a vengeance if he ever found that Lavi was thinking anything at all about his sister. He just plain didn't trust Lavi's perverted mind.

"Um...back to before when you weren't threatening to kill me please, for now anyway." Lavi said in a small voice, Kanda raised an eyebrow at the "for now" part, but decided to continue on.

"Naoko was sensible, and reliable, a pretty good fighter too. I suppose if I never make it back to Japan then she'll just take over." The idea of Naoko taking over the dojo made him smirk with pride, she would undoubtably make their name one to be feared. She was only 11 and she could already beat Hayate with ease; He was pretty good, despite how he slacked off. It would only be a matter of time before she reached his level and surpassed him.

Mugen was added to Lavi's mental image of Kanda's little sister, and somehow he wasn't sure he'd be able to survive even imagining what she looked like anymore... if Kanda didn't kill him surely an angry Naoko would...somehow.

"All right! So siblings are out of the way, right? What about your parents?"

"They're good people, they were always fair to us and never jumped to wild conclusions. Well, they might've done that with Hayate, but then they were usually correct. As soon as we got into the dojo though, father was a demon, anyone would think it was a completely different person. And then he changed even more if mother was in there with him..." Muscles on Kanda's face were tightening and loosening, as though he were holding back a fond smile that desperately wanted to break out on his face. "Then she was in charge and he was whipped."

Lavi really wanted to hug Kanda, he just looked so adorable it was hard to keep his hands off of him. He really should've asked these questions sooner, because a Kanda who is fondly remembering things is cute and so much easier to handle than a Kanda who is constantly swinging his sword around, pissed as all hell (even though an angry Kanda is also cute). Still, somehow the dots just weren't connecting. Usually, when people are brought up in a happy home, they aren't as prone to be violent...right? At least, not as sword-happy as Kanda was. Every once in a while, sure, some random person just gets a bit weird, but Lavi felt that wasn't the case here. Kanda seemed more than a little mistrusting too, and aside from the terror that was his older brother, he couldn't see any reason why Kanda would be so suspicious of everyone.

Well, ok, scratch that last one, anyone who was in the Black Order knew that they had to be suspicious of everyone they met. Lavi wondered if Kanda had always been so distrusting, or if this was something that was fairly new? Maybe someone in his family had been attacked by an akuma, or maybe someone who lived in his village? It was more than possible, Japan was an incredibly difficult place for humans to live, Bookman had said so once in passing one day when he'd asked why they never go there, and why he had to know the basics of a language he'd never use.

"Your family seems so nice, you're really lucky to have had a family that was so warm." Lavi thought aloud. Kanda scowled, he was starting to get annoyed with all this past-tense talk.

"I still have them you know, there's no point in talking like they don't exist anymore. I don't care if this war goes on forever and I never get to see them or contact them again, they are still mine." Lavi tried his best not to let his face contort into some pitying frown, no doubt Kanda would get angry with him if he did. Just from talking about them, Kanda was starting to get sensitive about the subject. He was glad he asked about this now, because he could tell that from the way things were going, one day Kanda would refuse to even mention his parents, or his siblings, or the dojo he would've most definitely have run well if he hadn't been drafted into the Order by the innocence. Someone would have to remember those things for him, so Lavi figured he might as well.

A change of subject was in order, for if he waited much longer, Lavi was sure Kanda would just get up and leave.

"So, I'm tryin' to figure somethin' out about you. How is it that you became so anti-social and distrustful?" Kanda huffed and looked away sharply, he had no reason to explain that to anyone. Looking back on it, what happened wasn't all that significant, he knew he was making a huge deal about it, and that he should've stopped being so pessimistic years ago. He was aware of that, and it seemed so stupid to stay hung up over something so small, and yet it was so ingrained into his being by now to be suspicious of everyone that he couldn't stop even if he tried. It was so childish of him and yet he couldn't shake it.

"No comment." Kanda said cooly, determined not to say a thing about the stupid transaction that still managed to hold him back even now.

Lavi didn't feel like prying at the moment, he was getting rather fed up with how the mood was going from bad to worse. He needed to do or ask something Lavi-ish, he needed to take out Nyoibo and crush the upsetting mood into little, tiny bits.

"What about you?" Kanda asked suddenly, diverting the attention from himself. He continued when Lavi gave him a quizzical look. "You had to come from somewhere."

Lavi gave a mirthless laugh, though he hadn't meant for it to come out that way. Where he came from, what his real name was, his parents' faces, all of those things that normal people knew about themselves, he either didn't remember, or had given up. Maybe he felt a little bitter about that for some reason? It only made sense that sometimes he would dislike the fact that he'd actually chosen to do that, every once in a while he couldn't help but regret it.

Still, all he had to do was remember why he chose to become a Bookman in the first place, and those regrets disappeared. The only problem was remembering why he'd chosen to leave home, he'd been so very young when he left. He had this feeling that his family hadn't been the best of them. Any time he tried to remember that time, a time that he was scarcely old enough to remember anyway, all he got was a bad feeling. Maybe it was best to leave those memories buried deep within his subconscious.

"As far as I know, I have no siblings. I chose to be a Bookman a looong time ago, and Panda-jiji is the only person that's always been with me since then."

"Oh." Was all Kanda said, it had never occurred to him that maybe there were painful things in Lavi's past. Sure, everyone had things they preferred not to remember, but Lavi always seemed to laugh like he knew no pain, he always smiled like nothing was wrong, when really the world was falling apart all around them. Of course there was always the dream Lavi... but it was hard to connect those two in his mind, because he'd never actually been there to physically see, with his own two eyes, that cold, distant person, he'd only ever seen that Lavi in dreams. He felt quite dumb for bringing up the subject of Lavi's family, and told himself that it was not pity that was threatening to momentarily take over.

"One more question, and I'm done for the day, promise." Lavi said, making sure to mentally add that this would not be the last time he questioned Yuu if he could help it. Kanda wasn't so sure about letting Lavi ask him anything else though, because honestly his throat was starting to hurt from talking so much and he was sick of hearing his own voice. Talking for extended periods of time tended to make him realize that he still had a long way to go before he could speak unaccented English, and he didn't particularly like being reminded of how he couldn't quite pin down the difference between "L" and "R", or how he still had trouble with the "Th" sound.

Lavi was not oblivious to how Kanda seemed to just want to clam up in his room for the rest of the week and stay mute for a while.

"Who is it that I have so rudely yet completely replaced?" He asked, his tone happy and his sudden shift in attitude coming off as just a bit overbearing. Kanda put a finger to his lip in the cutest of fashions as he thought (the cuteness being unintentional, of course.)

"Well Hayate was always the village idiot..." Lavi huffed indignantly, seriously, what was wrong with being an idiot?!

"That's not what I meant! Geez, do you always think so negatively? I'm askin' who your old best friend was back home!"

Kanda gave him a completely bewildered look. Lavi was his what now? Granted, it had been a while since he last best friend and maybe the times had changed or these types of relationships changed as one got older but he was pretty damn sure that best friends should not act the way they did. Did real best friends go around constantly trying to piss the other off? Would someone who was supposedly a "Best friend" molest him all the time? Was he supposed to try to kill his best friend or use him as a punching bag when he was pissed? Somehow that just didn't seem to match up with the memories of his last best friend. Of course, when he started comparing Lavi and this old friend, he started to see why he didn't trust Lavi that much. If there was one thing he'd learned before, it was that best friends weren't always so trustworthy.

"...Yori. His name was Yori."

"Hm... So his name was "trust" huh? Seems like a good name for a friend." Kanda just rolled his eyes and got up, he wasn't going to answer any more questions, he didn't know why he'd been so cooperative in the first place.

"Whatever. I'm leaving." Was all Kanda said before he left the library, and Lavi was left wondering why that seemed like such and unexpectedly sore subject.

000

Kanda felt exhausted after another afternoon of training. He was starting to think he should change up his schedule a little, there is a limit to how bland one's day should be. Maybe he'd spend some time in one of the parlors? He could always help Lenalee out with something... Maybe not, he wasn't the helpful type. Reading was always an option; It was infuriating to have to struggle through it, but he had to do it sometime, he should practice now while he had the time, rather than when he's going out for a mission and only has so much time to look over his papers. But he'd just been in the library earlier, and he would feel a little dumb if he went back so soon. Maybe he should just wander around until he found something worth doing?

Sadly, that's actually what he ended up doing. He had to wonder why people were still looking at him like he was going to suddenly bring out Mugen and slice them all into little sushi-sized pieces, even though he wasn't exuding any particularly evil aura. Not to say he minded never having to deal with congested halls. It was something to be proud of really, to be a boy who was just barely 15 years old, and have 80 percent of a building stuffed with full-grown adults fear him. He wondered what would happen if he ever said "boo"?

Somehow, in his wandering, Kanda found himself climbing a large staircase, with no visible end in sight. When he realized this, his first thought was that he wanted to find out where he was going, where these stairs headed. Sometimes he found himself doing something he didn't realize he was doing, and he would simply have to follow through with it out of compulsion. Now was one of those times. He had to reach the top, he had to see just what was up there, he'd never bothered to explore the castle much, anything could be up there.

The stairs spiraled downward, in a tight rectangle that left maybe a two meter square of space in the center where he could look down and see all the way to the bottom of the tower. Well, he could try to anyway, it was way too far down to see clearly.

Half an hour after he'd realized he was climbing the steps, he had still not reached the top. The tower was tall, he knew, with God-knew how many stories, but this was ridiculous, was there even anything on all of these floors? Was it all lodgings or the secret experiment rooms he'd heard so much about from Lenalee? And why, oh why did he have to find stairs and not an elevator? He thought about turning back, but he realized that he would probably waste more time going back down than he would if he just finished his trek... probably. Whatever was at the top damn well better be worth all the energy he was wasting to get there.

It took about another half hour to get to the top, maybe more, maybe less, he wouldn't know. He had gone by floor after floor, waiting to come to the top floor, and for the stairs to just stop coming, but instead he found himself face-to-face with a door; He'd reached the roof, he guessed. Yuu was a little annoyed that he'd just spent more than an hour climbing to the roof, but who knew what could be up there, it might be nice, and he doubted that may other people in the Order would have the time or will to climb up all of those steps, it could be a nice place to be alone.

He opened the door and was immediately hit by rain; Damn England and its rainy weather. He ignored it easily, for he had trained in it many times before, and because the air was (slightly) warmer than usual, and he was practically exhausted from his long climb up here, the rain felt pretty nice, and was quite welcome. The first thing Kanda did was check to see if anyone was on the roof, and as far as he could tell, all that was up there was a few chimney stacks, the larger components of the Order's ventilation system, a water tower, and a few other miscellaneous things that he wasn't quite sure about.

Kanda looked up to the sky, it was sunset already. Just how long had he wandered? And how long had he climbed? He shook his head a few times to get rid of these pointless thoughts, this was a perfect chance to meditate and watch the sun set. He was not one of those romantic souls who would dream of sharing this place with anyone, far from it, he wanted it all to himself. He didn't particularly care about the sun set, or how the sky changed colors by the minute, each more dark and beautiful than the last. Yuu could still appreciate nature though, if he really felt up to it. Really though, he just wanted a place to be alone, where no one could find him.

He sat himself down as comfortably as he could while on the cold and wet roof, and watch the sun sink behind the large city that sat far, far below, already glittering with street lights that looked just as small as the stars did.

What kinda ending was that? Oh well... so...notes and stuff! "Yori" as Lavi said, means "Trust". When Saya was choosing this name, she already had the meaning she wanted in mind, she either wanted it to match his role in Kanda's past perfectly, or be a completely ironic name. Surely all of you could tell from the context of the chapter which one she went with. He won't physically appear in this story, he's just there by name, to give Lavi something to investigate when bored. Honestly though, this name stuck out to Saya because it's sounds a lot like "Yoru" and Saya just loves that name! In her head she can just hear Ran from Sukisyo whispering "Yoru" before the two go off into yaoi land! hehe...

And Sorry about the crazy updating lately...Saya just can't update daily anymore. Her chapters are getting longer (they're nearly a respectable length! yay!) And her ideas are growing smaller. She's been writing nonstop for nearly a year now though, the river has to turn into a trickle sometime.