Marian Cross was back, and it looked like he was going to stay.
The first thing he demanded was money. He had hotel bills to pay, food to buy, and vices to indulge in. Allen was, sadly, ready for that, although he made as much fuss as possible about how he hadn't had much time to make money. Cross could go through an awful lot very quickly, and they would run into trouble if the amount of time Allen had to play poker was insufficient.
This could very well turn out to be the case, Allen thought, if his teacher intended to stay past Paris. Cross seemed to have gotten it into his head that Allen's sole purpose in life was to dance, and that everything else was interference, including food, sleep, personal hygiene and education. Only Father Tiedoll's intervention kept Cross from pulling him out of school entirely, and Cross retaliated by working Allen like a dog. Allen was starting to hate the piece he'd chosen for Paris.
One evening as he lay flat on his back in bed wondering if he really had feet or if those things attached to his legs were some kind of torture device, he got a message from Road, a gif of himself in Barcelona with a note: Next time, hold your right leg for just a tiny bit longer.
He'd just spent every hour except school, homework and mealtimes listening to this kind of thing, first from Komui and Reever, then from Cross, so while he knew he was giggling hysterically, he didn't care. Road wth?
Am I wrong?
He looked at the gif for a while, and realized that no, she wasn't wrong. What did you do, turn all of my mistakes into gifs?
I could if you want me to.
You're not serious.
I am.
Why? Why was everyone suddenly nit-picking his dancing to death?
I told you. It's no fun when I know I'm going to win.
The girl was mad as a bag of ferrets. Cross is here, he sent back. If that doesn't make me better, nothing will.
Is he being awful?
Yes. He was taking awful to a whole new level.
I'm sorry. I don't think I would like having Cross as my teacher, either. Maybe I can help. If I see the same mistake made more than once, I'll tell you, and maybe you can fix it before he notices. I'll do it very nicely.
He laughed again. Do you always do this with people's videos?
Only family, and only if I know they're not doing as well as they could.
How do you know when that's happening?
I can tell.
How?
I can just feel it, and if I go through the video carefully, I always find a reason.
She was good like Cross was good. Do I do that a lot?
Not all of the time, just when your leg is coming forward again right away. You're anticipating. Try pretending you're a mechanical skeleton.
He laughed again. What?
That's what I do. I pretend I'm a skeleton because that way I know exactly where all of my bones are, and I pretend I'm mechanical because mechanical things do exactly what they're designed to do.
Allen had a brief notion of replacing himself with just such a toy, and letting Cross torture that. I'll try it.
You have an interesting style. Tell me about your other teachers.
That wasn't an easy request. I've had a lot of them. I had other teachers when I was living with my father, and changed teachers every few months when I was traveling with Cross.
Your father taught you, too, right? Where did he learn?
Allen was grateful that she didn't correct him to foster-father, because he knew better than anyone that there was a difference between sperm donation and fatherhood. Whoever had contributed the male half of Allen's DNA, Mana was his father, and he appreciated it when people respected that. No one knows. He had a head injury. His body remembered how to dance, but his brain didn't remember learning.
What was his name? Maybe we knew him.
That was possible. Mana Walker.
Mana's unusual. Was it short for something?
Not that I know of.
Did you know his family?
Even he didn't know his family. Apparently, they just found him. Nobody knew who he was. They weren't even sure he had his name right, because he had no identification on him.
What happened to him?
An accident. That was all he could tell me, and I was just a kid so nobody told me anything else. It was one of the things they bonded over, being orphaned by accidents.
What was he like?
Allen smiled. Kind. Absent-minded. He liked being a clown because he liked making people smile. There were other things, too, like the fact that they lived on frozen dinners and takeaway until Allen got older because Mana couldn't always be trusted to cook, and that Mana loved cartoons. They had had to learn together to take medication reliably, which made it easier for Allen when he was younger because he didn't feel nagged.
That sounds nice. What was his dancing like?
At the time, Allen had thought of it as just another part of Mana's clowning, but in retrospect, he knew that Mana had once been exceptional, so exceptional that it was amazing no one reported him missing. Mana had been in his mid-twenties when he and Allen met, a time when he should have been at or nearing his peak. How could such a performer go AWOL without anyone scrambling to find him? He was incredible. I was lucky.
You really were. Do you have a picture of him?
Allen had very few pictures of Mana, in part because he hadn't had a device of his own with which to take them until rather late, and he lost data to a problem once before he started backing important things up on the cloud.
He did, however, have one decent shot of Mana without his clown make-up. It was of the two of them together after a recital, when Allen's hair was still mostly brown and he still had both eyes. He thumbed through the necessary apps and sent it to Road.
That's you, right? she asked.
Yes.
You look really happy. You both do. I'm so glad you had a family. Family's important.
He thought of Kanda, who gave up so much to save the closest thing he had to a brother, of Komui and Lenalee, who clung to each other so tightly, of Road herself, whose identity was so wrapped up in her family. He thought of his parents, and how he still struggled sometimes to forgive them for leaving him behind.
He also knew, after extensive googling, that Road's mother had committed suicide when Road was four. She might have a very large extended family, but she understood how it felt to lose people who were important to her.
Yes, he sent back to her. It is.
Can you get to England next Friday?
Was she serious? Wtf?
I'm performing for a charity event. If you can get here, I'll give you tickets.
She was serious. Why?
I'm doing something very different from what I usually do for competition. I'd like you to see it.
She wasn't behaving like an enemy at all, but a friendly rival, an equal. Sorry. No time off, ever.
It's being broadcast online. 8:00 pm. Would it be too much trouble for you to watch?
That would be 9:00 pm his time, while he was supposed to be doing homework, but under the circumstances, watching Road should count as homework. No trouble at all.
She sent him three rows of happy dancing bananas.