Hallo! Please read this and 50 all at once. Otherwise my waiting to post this is purposeless. :D

Me no owning.

WARNING: LOTS of CUSSING. And VIOLENCE.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Truth Part 1

Kanda pulled Allen's limp form out of the tub, nearly falling when his wet feet slipped on the tile. He laid him out on the cool, flat floor, trying to keep his head regardless of the tears that filled his eyes, the scream that had come from outside. Sable could handle herself – right now, Allen was important.

The British boy did not even groan in his unhealthy slumber, nor did his shivers stop. He lay like a broken creature; helpless, naked, breathing shallowly and raggedly, which made Kanda worry more than anything he had ever known. He could do nothing. Even though he was willing to take every pain and sickness that Allen was enduring on himself, there was no way for that to happen. His curse did not work on this, no matter how much he wanted it to.

The sound of his mother's voice did not distract him from his lover. Allen's skin was impossibly flushed, his heart beating too fast and too hard against his ribcage. Kanda wasn't sure what to do. Did he try to keep him warm? Or was he too hot now? Was he supposed to cool him off? And if that was the case, what the hell was he supposed to cool him off with? A paper fan?

"Kanda…" It was Sable's voice, still outside the window, small sounding. "Allen… you guys should get out here before your mom get's herself killed."

He cursed under his breath, wrapping himself in a yutaka. Now was not a good time for Okaasan to go off murdering a visitor. "Allen's fainted. You take care of it."

"Can't."

"Che, why not?"

"Noah."

Kanda was silent for a moment in the bathroom.

"Uri-Noah." Sable said almost indifferently. With a great effort she pushed herself up off of the ground – snatching her ever so important papers up as she did – and lumbered a little crookedly toward the house, trying to ignore the commotion Hiroko was just beginning to cause.

Because at the far end of the path, just out of the trees, a blond man was walking calmly, his grin visible even from Hiroko's distance.

"Dickhead," She said. "Walk faster so I can send you on your way back to Hell"

Sable wiped blood away from her forehead as she wandered back inside and into the bathroom – the door of which she did not bother knocking on. It was not in her nature to be flustered at the sight of a half dressed Kanda and very naked Allen, both more or less on the tile floor. Instead she was worried immediately by the expression on the Japanese man's face, the lack of one on the British boy's.

"What happened?" She came forward at once, ignoring Kanda's sad attempt to save a scrap of Allen's dignity. "How long's he been like this?"

"Maybe three minutes."

"Shit." Sable pressed bloody fingers against Allen's forehead, forgetting her own troubles. "Drain the tub."

"Why?"

She shook her head, dripping blood on the floor. "He's too hot; we have to pack him in with snow."

"Che, then I'll just take him outside."

She sighed at his obvious lack of observant skill. "My brother, Uri, the one that broke three of your limbs, is outside right now with your mom, most likely getting ready to try and kill her. If you want to take a helpless Allen out there and lay him down in the ice, have at it, but don't blame me when Uri switches targets."

Kanda sighed, pulling his robe tighter. "Fine, I get it. Wrap your head in something and get snow, I'll get rid of the water and douse the fire."

She nodded. "What about your mom? Isn't she going to be in trouble?"

He raised an eyebrow at her in what might have been the closest thing to a smile he had ever shown to anyone besides Hitori and Allen. "Have you even met my mother?"

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hiroko swept her right leg behind her, the better to put power behind her swing, and let a slow, deadly smile creep across her face. She could tell just by looking that this was the man who had hurt Hito, not that she even understood how she knew it. It excited her. The thought of hurting this man, killing him, calling him all sorts of names that he deserved to be called – it made her grin from ear to ear just thinking about it.

Because, like all women of the Kanda clan, she loved those things.

Well not all women. Yumeko was an exception.

Uri sighed when he was not less than fifteen feet away, taking his hands out of his parka pockets and ringing the cold out of them. "Hello, Hiroko-san." He said lightly, pulling at his jacket collar and cracking his neck as he spoke. "Are you going to stand in my way like your son did, or may I speak to Yuu?"

Her lips parted, showing a white shimmer of teeth as she smiled broader. "Don't even pretend to be nice, Fuck-face, I'm not interested in it. I don't know who the hell you are and I don't know what the fuck you do, but I don't give a damn; you'll die before you lay a finger on that bastard."

He raised an eyebrow at her, took to cracking his knuckles one at a time. "Is that so?" He sighed a little, folding his arms. "Well, I don't like fighting, Hiro-chan. I like talking. Wouldn't you rather just sit down and have a nice little chat about all of this? You, me, Yuu-kun—"

"I get it." She narrowed her eyes at him. "Hiro-chan, yo? No one's called me that since Otousan left. You can read my mind, eh? That's nifty. And a pretty goddamn stupid for an offensive power, if you ask me. Might be pretty easy to gut you, Chatty-san, if that's all you got." She twirled her sword twice, taking her eyes off of him to watch the silver blade swirl in the afternoon light. "It's most likely not though. What is it you can do? Speed? Strength? Something I can't win against unless I've got a piece of Innocence shoved up my ass? Che!"

"Well… I guess you're more of a fighter than I thought you were." Uri observed. "Graphic images in that mind of yours; I see where Kanda-san gets it."

She laughed, settled on her feet as she breathed, timing her last insult with the beginning of her first strike. "I've killed twelve men with this sword and four with Mugen before Yuu inherited it. Does that count as being graphic? Or does it take more than sixteen men, Chatty-san? Because if it does I'd like to hear how many men you've killed with nothing but your hands."

Uri did not even think before he answered. "None." But the woman he directed the answer at was no longer standing as she had been, looking at the tip of her sword in thought, instead she was less than a foot away, slashing down at the space he occupied.

Worse yet, he could not glean from her mind what her next move was. He brought his right arm up, aware that it would do little to stop the blade coming for his face, and stepped back in a feeble attempt avoid her offhanded strike from below. It was impossible. He did not realize until a razor edge came down and imbedding itself in his forearm just how very out overpowering she was, and just how much she wanted to see him bleed. Her left blade caught him in the hip, made him grimace.

He shoved her back as hard as he could; sending her perhaps four steps and showering the gray stone walk with crimson. He had not thought she could cut him badly, not until then. And he was very happy when she did not keep slicing at him – because even if she could not kill him with those swords, she could make his day a living nightmare.

"Had enough, bitch?" She seethed, shaking the blood from her blades.

"Heh," He almost laughed as he pressed the wound on his arm with a steady left hand. "You're terribly worked up over all of this aren't you? Kind of odd for someone so un-motherly."

She laughed back at him, centered her shorter sword directly in front of her body once again. "You see, that's something you haven't been able to notice about me, even if you can read my thoughts." Her smile never faded, even though her voice took on a distinctly different quality. "I might say shit to my kids to make them feel like worthless cunts, and I might beat Hito over the head sometimes, but that's me. No one else gets to fuck up the people I care about."

"How nice for them."

"No kidding. Can you imagine life with me and a useless wanker like yourself after their asses?"

"Certainly not."

This time he saw the twitch of her foot and dodged, but she kept her head too well protected for him to touch it. She seemed to understand that her face was important, at least.

"Just hold still dammit."

"Yeah, like I'm that stupid."

"You look like it."

"Better to look stupid than be stupid."

"Che!"

Why does this feel familiar?

A stream of gold from the house was all he needed to know a fraction of the answer.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sable tiptoed out the back door, one hand on the old linen obi around her forehead and the other still attempting to get the blood off of her face. It wasn't working so well, but she figured her tiny bandage was better than nothing.

She bent low to the ground just where the iced over snow had not been walked on, attempted not to look over at Hiroko and Uri as she filled her arms and shirt with it. It occurred to her then that there most likely would be no more snow here until next winter, and the icy, hard substance in her hands was as good as she was going to find anywhere, which was too bad for Allen. He'd wake up sore and bruised and maybe cut from it. If he woke up at all.

Kanda had put out the fire first, silently and hurriedly, then hastily gone back inside to drain the water and see if Allen was getting worse or better. The tremors had lessened, but he still twitched occasionally, his face did not register pain or pleasure, only indifference to the world around him. With hands that did not want to perform the action Kanda wrapped him in an over large towel, it's only function to cover him from prying eyes. He had picked a white one. The color made him realize just how pale Allen really was.

Before Sable could come in with her first loud he did something he had not done since he was young, since before he had become an Exorcist. He pulled his lover's head into his lap and quietly spoke a prayer for him, a selfish prayer, without incense or candles or names of the dead, and he meant every word of it. He did it unthinkingly, though he picked his words carefully, and when he was finished he felt just as useless as before. Allen's expression had not changed in the least.

Sable came in then with her shirt held out and her arms bent around a ball of snow so large he was amazed she could lift it. With a grim smile that was nearly all teeth she lumbered across the tile and dumped it lazily into the tub. She turned back to him, rearranging the thing across her forehead that she was starting to bleed through.

"I'll get more snow; you flatten that out and put him on it. After that, you're going to want to go help your mum."

"Che, is she losing?" Kanda asked as he laid Allen gently back down again.

Sable glanced sideways at nothing before looking back. "…not yet…"

"Didn't think so. If you're so worried about her, you fight him."

Sable narrowed her eyes at him. "Uri's partially compatible with my Innocence remember? I can't fight him."

Kanda harrumphed and spread the icy snow around the bottom of the still slightly warm tub, ignoring Sable altogether. She soon took the hint and disappeared out the door again, sighing. She was thinking, Kanda knew, that Hiroko was defenseless against her brother, perfectly incapable of killing him or hurting him or anything, but Kanda knew otherwise. If anyone could stand toe to toe with a Noah without Innocence it was his okaasan – especially if her children were threatened. She just had it in her like no one else did.

By the time Sable came in with more snow he had the first layer spread out in an even sheet. He moved quickly across the floor, scooping Allen into his arms, towel and all. It was a dangerous thing, lowering the shivering boy into the tub without hitting any one part of him on the hard edges, but he was careful in doing it. Kanda felt horrible about putting Allen, who had complained so often about being cold, on a bed of frozen water. He felt even more horrible when Sable dumped more on top of him, helped Kanda smooth it over his torso and thighs. What made it the worse, however, was that he did not move. Allen just lay there; face calm, unmoving, without as much as sighing at him or twitching an eyelash.

If Kanda had not known better, he would have thought his lover dead.

"Okay," Sable said with finality, brushing snow from herself, "I'd like to let you stay in here with him, but logically it won't work out. You have to go out there and fight Uri; I'll find Hito and then watch Allen."

Kanda's eyes narrowed at her and his palm unconsciously found Allen's forehead. "Find Hito?" His face became darker as he said it. "What do you mean find Hito?"

"Well…"

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hiroko cackled as her left hand jabbed forward, tearing the Noah's jacket again. She was growing more fond of him as she went, because no matter how much she cut, no matter how much she made him bleed, he kept standing, kept pushing against her blade, kept saying things even though he was starting to mumble. She new that he should have died four times over, but it didn't matter that he was still breathing – in fact, it filled her with a sick sense of happiness.

And when she cut him so hard in the shoulder that he fell to his knees, she could only grin broader.

Uri was getting fed up. This woman wouldn't leave her skull open to attack for more than a half second before she hacked at his arms again, or attempted to disembowel him with a sideways stroke. His wounds would heal quickly, he knew, but they still hurt while he had them. Pain was not lessened for a Noah. Nor was guilt. He'd feel guilty if he broke her arms like he had Kanda's, even more so if he hurt her in a way that would not heal properly. But guilt would shrivel in comparison to the accomplishment he would feel when he had finely killed the man he had hoped months before to betray is comrades to. The pain and the guilt would be worth it.

It was time to play dirty. As she dug the sword in her right hand through his heart he sighed to himself, aware that what he was about to do would not be pleasant for her.

She watched the man sag against her blade, blood flowing unhindered from his lips, falling in strings to the ground. "Immortal my left ass cheek, fuckers." She smiled, placing a sandaled foot in the middle of his chest to slide his body off – it was always hard to pull a blade out from between someone's ribs, especially when one turned it like she had.

The woman made a short sound of surprise when the fingers of his right hand closed around her slim ankle and pulled her down, driving the other sword she still had pointed at him into his shoulder and scraping the lower half of her spine on the bloody stones as she fell. Her eyes went wide as the man she thought to be dead placed a palm against her forehead and tried to find within her the whereabouts of Kanda Yuu.

He found it at once – the bathroom – but she continued to writhe in his hands. It made him frown. How could she keep fighting when he was ravaging her mind with his hand?

"Why can't you just die, Chatty-chan?" She asked, kicking him hard in the gut in an attempt to get him to release her. "Something wrong with my head?"

He tried again, bringing up all manner of twisted images and destroyed memories, twisting them and changing them, waiting for her to stiff with shock in his hands.

Hiroko laughed. "You aren't gonna get anything else out of me," She leaned up and took the handle of one of the swords in her hand again. "So you might as well stop trying."

Uri frowned deeply. Why wouldn't it work? It had always worked before! What made this one little Japanese woman different? "Call him out, Hiro-chan," He growled. "Call him out or I'll crush your skull between my fingers."

"Yeah, like he'll listen to me?" She scoffed. "If you wanted to kill me you'd have smashed my head in by now, ain't that right, Baka-bollocks? You're more of a pussy than Hito is in the long run."

"Hmph." He stood up from the ground as quickly as he could, throwing the little samurai as he did. He felt her hands tighten on the swords in his chest and sighed half in relief when they sailed away with her toward the woodpile – it would have been difficult to pull them out himself.

Hiroko found herself looking at the blond man from the corner of the house by the bathroom, though she couldn't quite decide how she had gotten there. Not that it mattered. She'd stabbed him through the heart and he hadn't even flinched. That wasn't something she could deal with. With a sigh that made her feel very, very weak she stood up, turned her head over her shoulder so she could yell.

"Kanda Yuu! Eldest bastard son of the Kanda line! Womanish man-fairy! Come kill this idiot! I'm bored and this whore is weak!" She turned back to the man she had deemed Chatty-chan to see him poking the places she had stabbed experimentally, smiling at the new flesh that had knitted over the holes. "I don't want to fight some bastard who's going to heal up every time I own him; it's boring as shit."

Uri smiled at her as he rubbed the skin over his heart. The Japanese woman jabbed one of her swords into the ground and sat down beside it, folding her legs comfortably as she laid the other blade across her lap. She seemed so very indifferent, so at ease that he almost felt worried. "You did ruin my jacket, if it makes you feel better."

"Che!" She glared at him. "I'd rather have killed you, douche bag." She shrugged. "But I guess it is fine. You didn't get to have your way with my brain, so I guess that's something."

"You'll have to tell me how you do that. After I kill your son."

"Ha! As if you can do that. If I can beat the living crap out of you, he'll be able to slice you open like a fish on the dock."

He was about to say something else, something too mean to not be friendly, when a door slammed on the outside of the house. He could find no words when the man he sought finally came into sight.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sable snuck from the front of the house around the back, chanting silencio over and over in her head, though she wasn't sure why. Her feet still made crunching sounds on the ice and her breath still hissed loudly through her teeth, her heart still beat noisily in her chest. There was no such thing as silence when she didn't want to make noise.

She circumvented the whole house, which was much bigger when she had to walk around it, and at long last came to the expanse of woods that the Kanda family owned. She figured Uri wouldn't go after her if he did see her, so she kept just inside the tree line after she darted through the clearing unnoticed. Besides, she needed to know where the path was at every moment, being Hito was bound to be on it somewhere.

Distantly she could hear the sound of voices raised in anger, one of them Hiroko's, another Kanda's. She couldn't hear Uri. She didn't know if that was good or bad.

After perhaps two minutes more of walking in the snow she at last moved instead to the stone path, glad that it was at least a little worn down by Hiroko and Hitori's feet, otherwise the ice would have been almost impossible to walk on. The shadows tried to play tricks on her eyes, but she ignored them, always looking passed them and onto the white ground they painted with broken lines and blotches. Hitori's form wouldn't be a shadow cast from above, so there was no use looking at them.

She saw a small, wet flash of red and stopped short, her eyes following it toward her own feet but stopped when they came across a pair of open, dull gray eyes. Hitori's eyes. His long ebony hair thrown back over a small shoulder, his bruised lips did not move to speak to her or cry for help, but his chest rose and fell in a more or less normal pattern, little tears glimmered in his eyes as they drew her feet into focus.

"God, that asshole," She said with a growl, kneeling to touch Hitori's shoulder ever so gently. She rolled him onto his back, pulling his pale, emotionless face up into her lap to look at more clearly. His eyes focused on her face but his expression did not react – her heart clenched in her chest at the small line of red that dripping from the corner of his mouth unhindered, the source of the blood on the path no doubt. "Are you hurt badly? Blink twice for 'yes' and once for 'no,' 'kay?" She watched him blink slowly down once, determinedly, as if he hadn't been able to even do that not too long ago. "I'm going to haul you back to the house for now, until what Uri did wears off. I'll explain everything when you can ask questions, otherwise I'll run myself off at the mouth and you won't learn anything."

Hitori blinked back a very steady yes.

He wished that he had some way to protest when she picked him up like a baby and threw his arm over her shoulder, the better to give a little support. He remembered being able to move that arm, the same as he had remembered blinking, but moving it wasn't as natural and what he had managed with his eyes. Blinking was just an eyelid, so it wasn't hard to remind himself how to. But hooking his arm around Sable's neck was completely different; there were too many muscles to talk to, and talking to them risked sending the wrong message.

He didn't want to accidentally punch her in the face.

"S-ss-s…" He tried. They had moved maybe twenty paces, each one faster and quieter than the first, and now she was walking off of the path, looking down at the footprints she must have left in her wake. "Soli."

Sable chuckled and looked down at him, a sad smile cracking her face tiredly. "Nondemonai, Hitori-kun." She hefted him a little higher and tightened her grip. "You must have done something right; otherwise he would have killed you."

He sighed because, somehow, even when she was trying, his barer could not manage to be reassuring.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"If you weren't such a lame ass weak sack of useless pig shit, I would encourage you! But as it is you're hopeless!"

"Okaasan – trying – to – CONCENTRATE!

"Che! Give up you worthless whore. I had him bleeding in seven places by this long into our fight."

"Okaasan – urusanai!"

"Oh c'mon, Yuu-baka, if you can't run with the big dogs, stay on the porch."

Uri laughed under his breath as he slid passed Kanda's blade and hit him in the shoulder, not hard enough to break anything, but hard enough to throw him back a few feet. "She's right, you know." He said to the samurai as he pushed himself up hurriedly. "She's far less predictable than you are."

Hiroko smiled proudly. "It's pretty easy to be unpredictable when you don't think." She sighed; the sound was almost dreamy in Kanda's ears. "Too bad you were so fucking lazy as a kid – never learned to understand that concept."

"Okaasan…" The name was a growl. He did not need her talking right now. He needed nothing but a clear shot at Uri's guts and it would all be over. Completely. And he could go find out how Allen was and how Hito was and then just hold his lover until he got better. Because that was far more important than this stupid Noah and his idiotic grin. "Please go see how Allen is doing."

"Che! I'm not your slave."

"You know…" Uri said thoughtfully. "You think far too much about things that have nothing to do with the moment at hand."

"Che," Kanda rolled his bruised shoulder. Such a small wound would heal in a matter of moments. "Those things are what make this moment matter."

Uri laughed. "You also let far too much about yourself into that little head of yours."

He didn't answer. Kanda could not have cared less if Uri thought that his mind was disorganized. He was going to flay his skin from his body the next he spoke.

"Like you curse," He said the word so that it made Kanda's fingers grip Mugen tighter. "Or should I say some thing more… eloquent? Perhaps… The gift your father gave you?"

The Japanese man's eyes narrowed dangerously. Hiroko was as still as stone at those words.

"It's true, isn't it?" Uri asked in a quiet voice, taking a step forward. "A small, gifted samurai, not yet old enough to understand what it means to be compatible with his Innocence, dragged into a life filled with the horror of akuma and the pain of a double edged power—"

"Shut up."

"Every invocation sapped away your strength, left you on the verge of death. It was killing you slowly. So they were going to let you live out life as a normal boy – it was too much to ask of a six year old. They even brought you home. They left you and the sword at your mother's doorstep, the one place you had wanted most to return to – the place where fighting didn't cause you impossible pain and fear."

"Stop."

"But your father wanted to save the world. So he sealed your life in a lotus – broke apart your soul and made you what you are now. Living. Filling the fate you grew to despise so young. A curse you call it; a curse that makes you worth the air you breathe."

"Shut up!"

"Come now, Kanda-san," He said as if speaking to a child. "Is that really the attitude that you should have toward the person that united you and your wife?"

He lunged.

The Noah could only smile at the fury in those ocean deep eyes.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sable was wheezing and trying to hide it. Too… many… pastries… She thought as she sat Hitori down on the bathroom floor. I'm either fat or… or… he is… gah…

She gasped a few times, sinking down to rearrange the Japanese boy more comfortably on the tile. "S-sorry that I...hoo… carried you here… hah, haa… Allen fainted and Kanda's fighting and I just… hoo…did not feel like hauling you to your room." She swallowed hard as she folded his arms across his stomach. "I'm gonna go see how our dear limey is doing, will you be fine here?"

"Mmhmm…" He blinked twice. His gray eyes were brighter now, and he managed to twitch his fingers closed on her sleeve when she tried to turn away. It was not going to take an hour for him to move again, he had decided. "Stell 'e…" He swallowed, willing his lips to work the way he wanted. "Ha-haw he… is. An a'out… Nii…s-ss…s…"

"Shh, I get it." She touched him on the cheek with her free hand. "You're worried too. Don't try so hard, I wasn't going to leave you in the dark." She gave him a little pat and tilted her head to the side, smiling. "You know, in levels of determination, I think you're a lot like your brother. But you're way better at expressing concern. He tends to be more..." She narrowed her eyes in the most Kanda like way she could manage, "'Che, I hate people who can't carrying their own weight; let me get your suitcase.'"

"Tch…" Hitori rolled his eyes. "No'ing alike."

"So say all siblings."

She turned away from him and walked the few steps to the bathtub, aware that his gaze was following her as she went. Not that she minded. He was a cute kid. He could look if he wanted.

Allen was still lying still in the bathtub, but his lips had fallen open slightly, his breath came in slow, unlabored waves, as if he were sleeping soundly. She placed two fingers gently on his forehead, expecting to find his skin just a little cooler than before.

It was cooler, a lot cooler, and his skin was slicked with sweat.

Weakly his silver eyes blinked open at the contact, distant, unfocused, and half-lidded when they stopped blinking. He turned his whole head up as Sable pulled her hand away, looking confused and pale and more than a little sleepy. "Sable?' His voice was so very small, like a whisper of wind through his throat. It pained her to hear it. "How come you're in the bathroom with me and Kanda? And…" He glanced down at himself, raising an eyebrow. "Why am I covered in snow?" As soon as he asked the question his teeth started clacking together as if he were cold.

Laughing, she knelt down beside the tub, leaned on the edge of it and peered at his slowly comprehending eyes. "You fainted in the tub, silly. You're fever was too high so we had to pack you with ice to keep you from cooking yourself from the inside out."

"Oh."

"You're just that hot," She giggled.

He narrowed his tired eyes at her. "Where's Kanda." It wasn't a question. It was a demand. She had been there on Christmas when he had been jealous of Lavi for a whole of five seconds, but it was still odd to hear him sound so… defensive..

"Come on," She said with a sigh. "Let's get you into something warm and dry while I explain that situation." She took him by the shoulder and pulled him up hurriedly, turning away when she saw that he was still wearing nothing but a towel. She used Hitori as an excuse for turning. "Oh, and Hito?"

"Mm?"

"Still watching me, eh?"

"Nu huh."

"Hm, liar." She turned back to Allen to find him frowning at his wet towel, but seemingly satisfied with how much of him it covered. "Let's go, Limey-chan! Kanda might need your help in about… ten minutes, so let's get you filled in and not naked by then. Up we go…" She stood with him, holding his right arm steady while his left hand clutched the towel to his shivering body.

He was cold and weak, and they both knew that it was will and love alone that kept Allen from falling back into the tub.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm sorry that I can't write action :(
Please don't be too hard on me for it QQ