Before Summer Ended

In the summer, Kanda dreams of dying. There is one petal left and heat rises in the Mediterranean.

(Note: this is a heavily revised version of an older story called a href=" s/12840420/1/In-the-Cards" "In the Cards." /a I've evolved a lot as a writer since I wrote the original, and I feel like it's a very different story with my new style. I decided to post it as its own work-I hope you enjoy! Assume it takes place vaguely in season 2/pre-volume 6 canon, though it's got some sneaky references to later things.)


June
_

At the beginning of summer, Kanda Yuu became certain how he would die. He dreamed of it in the nights, and knew it was true in the day. It would arrive before season's end.

One more petal.

The morning spilled onto Kanda's bedsheets from the window, ugly and damp. The light was dull and stifled neutrals, glaring white stripes off the plain cotton. It was never really summer at the Order—the moody sky around the island stayed moody. There were humid rains that rose as steam off the uneasy seas in the morning, a constant pall of gray under the sun.

Kanda rose with the rain. He mechanically dressed in black and mechanically made up his white sheets. Two shades of gray.

His death, though, would be a painted day. When it first appeared in his dreams, Kanda thought it was one of Tiedoll's acrylic landscapes brought to life by his subconsciousness: full of idylls and picturesques, as blue as the first time he remembered ever seeing the sky. He had continued in a fever to dream of that day. The sights, the sounds, the smells. It was a city on the coast.

More often than not now he blundered awake in his bed with his face turned on instinct to the only corner of his room with light: the corner where the lotus shed its colorless, preternatural glow. (Kanda had figured out in short order it was the lotus which controlled his dreams. The lotus controlled everything.)

Except there was no lotus anymore. There remained only a single peel of its white-pink flesh, drifting and unconnected. It had been this way since June began. Kanda had been this way, too.

At first, Kanda didn't understand what the dreams meant. One day, rifling antiseptics from the infirmary supply on the tail-end of a mission he no longer remembered, suddenly he knew there was a place in his dreams surrounded by white and that the white meant death. His death would come true in the summer and the wind would taste of Mediterranean sea-salt and rising bread when it did. The glass bottle shattered out of his hand. For a moment he saw the hourglass in shards on the tile.

Since then Kanda knew, and dreamed more vividly. Now the day came closer all the time and the dreams were more vivid than life. He lost himself in mundanity and passed time only by proximity. Making his bed, and the day was closer. Pulling on his boots, and the day was closer. His bedroom door clicking shut, and the day was closer.

Someone in the hallway outside wished him a happy birthday. Kanda did not know what they meant—his existence was one continuous hesitation. A phantom limb. A phantom petal.

July
_

When he came to the Chief's office, there was no slamming door to herald his arrival. He did not stomp past the threshold. Kanda simply let himself in, closed the door, and stepped over the paperwork to wait.

The Chief looked up from his work and he studied him through his glasses, as though he somehow had not expected Kanda even though he asked for him. This was normal for July. The Chief knew as well as Kanda did things were not the same, but he did not know there was no lotus (or maybe he did, and just did not want to ask).

(Kanda was not really here. Most of him had already gone on ahead to the white city. The "him" at the Order was all that was left behind.)

The man at the desk asked how he was. Kanda said he was fine. That made the man look tired, but he understood Kanda would reveal nothing. He relented in his scrutiny and handed Kanda a folder. Another mission. Perhaps this would be the one. Kanda flipped through it in placid curiosity. Dark deaths, black dust, scattered ashes. Perhaps not. Ah, but blue sea and a town of sculptures—that was good. Kanda closed his eyes and smelled yeast and sun.

When he opened them, the Chief frowned in wariness. Maybe he had said something to Kanda. Maybe he thought he was acting strangely. Maybe he was asking why Kanda never ate anything these days.

Kanda was not sure if he responded or not. He walked out of the office rubbing his fingers together, feeling the texture of salt and dry clay between them. Something was caught in the back of his throat that he thought might be a lotus petal. He had nothing to say to the Chief—his words had died a while ago.

He wound silently though the halls and high corridors he had known since childhood. Swimming in the belly of the tower. For twelve petals, he had known this place. Yet Kanda could not remember much of anything about it and was not interested in trying.

Kanda didn't remember a lot, lately. Nothing was interesting, lately.

Eyes followed him on the way to the canals. They thought he was strange just like the Chief did. Kanda was a ghost here already. Their stares passed over him like humid sunlight. He became one more degree removed from the Earth.

When his awareness surfaced again, Kanda's back was to a pillar beside the waterway and he was waiting for his ferry out of the Order. He was both idle and restless. Kanda thought to check the folder in his hand. Another exorcist was going with him. The name eluded him and the face was only a flesh-colored smear in his mind. Was this what the world looked like from inside an hourglass?

It did not matter. Kanda waited. He had nothing but patience. He was sated, oversaturated, from life. He kept still and imagined he became a part of the building or the wall or something else large and unfeeling. Kanda was waiting. He drifted.

(He fancied the petals had fallen faster the older he got. Nine petals, at the age he'd had them, seemed like a lot. It was only as the petals started falling that his time began to feel stunted. Time became claustrophobic—too stifled, too rigid, too small to grow in. Innocence and Akuma both evolved and got stronger. Kanda's curse could not.)

It was the Bookman Junior who came jogging up to him, spouting colorful greetings. Kanda remembered, after all. He apologized to Kanda for his lateness—he'd lost track of time saying his goodbyes to everyone, he explained.

Kanda wondered if he should have done the same.

Soon there was a call down the canal for the exorcists. A slim ferry came cutting through the water, manned by the Finder. When the long oar scraped to a stop beside them, Kanda stepped onto the boat as weightlessly as a dream.

His partner sprang limberly behind him so that dark ripples went out through the water, throwing lights into the shadows around and above. Already his voice yammered in the tunnel like the crying of gulls. The wood underneath creaked with water and salt, and when the lanterns faded behind Kanda could still hear it and smell it and see the lights so that the illusion surrounded him. The oar gained purchase in the rock below, and then the vessel glided free again.

The world rocked and bumped and gave way to the sea, and Kanda held still behind his eyes as the ferryman rowed them down the Styx.

August
_

When Kanda's eyes opened again, he was rail-bound. The last mission was done, possibly another lost in between, and now he was on to the next. All this had been unconscious.

Kanda dreamed in more detail now: he saw black flowers, and white-breasted birds. They huddled like dark inkblots in the windowsills of the buildings, in a long alley that wound to the sea. He had not slept since July. Kanda blinked and the images stayed in his eyes—blackflower closed whitebreast open. The train's momentum rolled like a pendulum, through his head and heart, and Kanda's face turned on clockwork impulse to the window.

He half-expected the lotus in the corner. But from the train, all he could see were hills and nothing on the other side of them. He didn't care. Didn't care that he didn't care. Maybe if he closed his eyes again he'd die right here and be lost in the hills in pieces.

The Bookman Junior accompanied him still (his name remained gone). He kept looking at Kanda across the train suite, watching him up and down. Kanda felt the potential in his bones to turn his head and see him, to speak, but it stayed crackling in his marrow with nowhere to go. It was as though this body was no longer Kanda's.

The Bookman Junior asked Kanda if there was something he wanted to say. If there was something he was leaving unsaid between them. There was a nervous strain in his voice, something tight and audible in his throat. Kanda swallowed lotus petals in sympathy. He was not surprised. Exorcists and Bookmen could both sense death when it was coming. They lived constantly on the fringes of life.

The Chief's sister (nameless, faceless) had told Kanda once she dreamed the Order was broken into arcane rubble and the sea rose with the blood of the soldiers to slowly swallow it. The persisting black-moon circles under her eyes showed she dreamt it still, and Kanda believed implicitly that it would come true. He did not feel pressed to stay anyhow—the Order would survive as long as there was someone left to dance in their ashes.

Bookman Junior's question died in the train compartment between them. Kanda gazed into the window still, letting the passage of blue mountains outside and the thunder beneath their feet answer. The sky changed, but it never moved. Kanda wanted to become the sky—to become sky. Sky like in his dreams or his youth. Uncontained.

Spiraling in Kanda's thoughts like a leaf broken from its tree was the vague notion that this should frighten him. That whatever was happening to not just his body but to his soul and identity was terribly wrong. In August, all his dreams had eyes in them. But Kanda feared nothing. He felt nothing.

Lotuses bloomed, before they slept. Lotuses had to sleep eventually. A glass had been tipped from the shelf and it was falling and Kanda was waiting for it to shatter because that was how Kanda had been born and lived and would die.

(Kanda didn't think of it until later, but he never packed a suitcase for the return trip.)

September
_

The train pulled into its station. Another mission, another month. Kanda went through the motions. How many times had he disembarked trains as an Exorcist? How many times had he slung luggage, elbowed through aisles, minded his step or the hem of his coat? Today it was all alien. He felt like an imposter. His lungs were leaden. His head was foggy.

Kanda blinked around, trying to catch up with the time he'd missed again. He'd broken free of the station clamor some time ago. White-breasted birds darted in front of his eyes. Their shadows skipped over his upturned face. Behind them, Kanda recognized the city from the mission portfolio.

White sun dazzled off the sides of rough-edged buildings. The sky was so bright it was a blinding ache. Still winds sat cool in the streets, blown in from the coast and trapped in the valley. Low, musical babbling snatched in and out of earshot from the pigeons and the lovebirds. The streets were sanded down by nature and warm underfoot. The heat rose in front of him like gauze hung over the narrow street. The whole city felt like a dream.

Sun seeped through Kanda's black uniform and, slowly, into his bones. He did not feel any warmer. The dead wind stirred and a brief unsteadiness blew through him. A shudder. Kanda was dangerously untethered from reality. He felt eyes.

But there was only one: the Bookman Junior's, questioning him from the opposite end of the road. Kanda had been standing still too long. Or maybe he wasn't supposed to be here. Hadn't they parted ways in Monaco? Hadn't they sat on opposite ends of a train compartment? How long ago had that been? The world's features unfocused around the one unwavering green eye until they lost their meaning. Maybe this was the same mission. Maybe it was still June, August not yet done. Maybe he'd miscounted his petals. Miscounted his steps.

It did not matter. Exorcists always had work to do. Kanda caught up to his partner and they carried on together, winding through the lazy streets. There was a black taint to the white-washed town. Akuma were here, infringing slowly. The briefing documents had said there would be, and it did not take them long to appear.

A mechanical hum rattled the windows. The odor of oily blood fouled the air. The Bookman Junior looked sharply towards the rooftops. Akuma rose like death balloons over the white city blocks on either side of them. Half-humanoid Level Twos slithered and clawed their way from the darkness between. Their guns cranked around.

One more fight.

The Bookman Junior sent the first up in smoke, and the sun burned red through the haze. Kanda leapt through it to find the next body, the next armored shell. He drew out Mugen and then drew out Mugen, the blue he breathed like sky, like immortality, flushing through him like the ocean. Screaming phantom creatures scattered from his blade to devour. His sword drew constellations between enemies—Kanda was good at fighting while he was dying.

He slashed and shouted, dodging rubble from the walls as it tumbled down. There had been a time Kanda believed his future was uncertain. He'd blamed the insistence of those stubborn few people who swore lost causes were never lost. That white-haired one, that Destroyer of Time, was the most stubborn of all. But that had been Kanda's own denial, reflecting back his own hope in everyone but himself. Now he knew. Now he had no fear. No Akuma could touch him.

And then as the dust of their metal shells began to settle in flakes that burned bits of sun off of them as they flickered to the ground, Kanda realized he could feel wounds across his body. Not open ones—his skin was clean. He could feel scars. They pulled as his body twisted, as his sword slid home in its sheathe. He was a latticework, an embroidery, a battlefield. Maybe if he were to open his coat now he would be able to see them where they had each disappeared inside of him.

For the first time in his life, Kanda mourned scars: this one that saved a life, this one that taught a lesson, this one that made someone cry for him. And Kanda realized that his shell was cracking under the white rising heat of the dream town.

Months of silence broke apart. He could think in names again. He remembered who he'd saved (Allen) and who had taught him (MarieTiedollDaisya) and who had cried for him (Lenalee). He owed them scars, and goodbyes, and he remembered who he trusted to deliver them (Lavi). Who he'd chosen to follow until summer ended. The light brightened over and around him, like focusing through a crystal, like reflection from a swinging blade, like funeral white. The dream intensified. Now, it would become real or he would become unreal.

Lavi was dusting the toxic film off his clothes. He was leaning on his hammer, catching his breath. There was sound in Kanda's mouth. A word to make Lavi turn back. But—

Kanda had been alone on that day, the dreaming day. He gazed at the back of the Lavi's head, conflicted. He didn't have to be alone. Maybe this didn't have to be the day. Maybe he could leave this town and go home and the lotus would disappear. Maybe there was choice. But then what should he choose?

In his peripheral gaze, small black mouths gnawed. Kanda turned and saw: there were flowers in the window, black-on-white and beckoning with their soft pale fingers. They were bright with dark centers—anemones—and the reflection off the window was even brighter, white to the back of Kanda's eyes. He could see himself through the whiteness. He looked like he was in pain. He could not remember if he had made up his bedsheets before he left.

It might be the mission was a dream after all. He was just now waking up. Death stalked him from a distance. Bread rose under the eaves. Poisonous smoke lingered. Maybe Kanda was in the dream so deep he would wake up to find summer hadn't started yet. Maybe he would wake up to find he had never been Kanda at all. Perhaps that was the real state of things.

(Lenalee had told him recently about waking up in a morning far away where she could run with light shoes and be caught up in her brother's arms and feel no guilt, where her whole life as an exorcist was the dream. She had spilled this out to Kanda with a palpable urgency when she caught hold of him alone in the lounge, neither of them able to sleep through the night. She could sense an ending coming and she always told Kanda such things. Kanda had not told her about his own dreams. He wondered at times if Lenalee knew already his world would end before hers.)

Kanda forgot about Lavi. In the window he watched one of the petals fall; shiver first, and then drop from its cluster, from the place where it had shape and meaning—except that the petal did not belong to the anemones and it was miles across the continent in a room he'd lived his whole life.

And surely as the sun and moon and Allen Walker's left arm, his ending was captured in blackheart anemone. Now the end was behind Kanda. He was in unheard, unknown. Lotuses couldn't live like humans did; Kanda was at peace with this.

Lavi was standing up straight now; Lavi was just starting to wonder. He would see. But lotuses sleep. Will sleep.

There was a sense of going, as though Kanda himself was an hourglass and the last of his sand had just run through him. The sky was brighter than Innocence, than God. He had stepped into the rest of himself, the part waiting here all these months. For a moment he was alive. He had not eaten in a long time. Petals were in his throat and he could not breathe. The question haunted him, a compulsive panic before oblivion: was he escaping fate? Or was he meeting it in surrender? Then the sun shifted off his skin and the cold shade swallowed him. Kanda left his body with the sun.

Lotuses sank down to the middle of the Earth. Kanda died. Summer ended.


If you've read the older version of this story, I'm really curious to hear how they compare! And if not, of course I still want to hear what you think. Cheers!