Ten Percent

Yuu slumped forward with a groan. She had not gotten enough sleep last night, and now she had a trip to Egypt to deal with. She hoped it was the nicer part of Egypt, well within the vicinity of a certain river that kept everything cool and lush with plantlife, so she wouldn't have to go stomping around the Arabian Desert. Though with her luck, the Innocence was probably wreaking havoc in the Valley of the Kings and she would be spending a weekend with sand everywhere. Please God, let the phenomenon be snow or something.

She opened her eyes at the sound of a tray clattering gently onto the table, and when she looked up, Olympia was already sitting down with a warm smile. "Good morning, Karma." Yuu grunted in response and reached for her half-eaten breakfast while the older woman spooned a lump of sugar into one of two coffee mugs she'd brought with her and slid it across the table. "Here. You look like you need this."

"Thank you."

"I heard you, Lottie, and Malcolm brought a new exorcist in last night." Olympia said around a bite of toast. "And she was a woman?"

After one sip of bittersweet coffee, Yuu sighed as warmth spread through her. "Yeah. Up until last night, she was a ballerina in London."

"Oh." Olympia nodded. "I imagine Director Leverrier was thrilled."

"You know it," Yuu scowled. "I swear, if a man comes to us with vision impairment, amputated limbs, or what have you, Central nods its head and praises God for a new exorcist. If a woman comes to us with railway spine*, Old Frederick scowls and takes it as proof a woman cannot be an exorcist." By the end of her tirade, Yuu noticed she was nearly shouting, but in the din of the mess hall, no one had noticed. Lowering her voice, she added. "You've seen how he treats Lottie."

"I've seen how he treats both his children." Olympia's tone was placid as snow.

"Yes, but Malcolm has a future in Central and the inner workings of the Black Order's politics. Lottie?" Yuu rubbed her temples. "I wouldn't be surprised if the old man called her to his office one day, announced he had a marriage arrangement for her, and then we never see her again."

"Yuu!" Olympia hissed and leaned forward. "You don't need to be saying things like that. What if it gets back to Charlotte? I know we're all thinking it, but the poor girl doesn't need us saying it out loud."

Yuu wanted to say more, but the older woman's mother bear instinct had its hackles raised and would not brook any further argument. With an exasperated growl, she backed down and began stabbing at her breakfast again. She was good friends with Olympia Floros and she didn't like quarreling with her. They'd met in Greece a few years back when Yuu was returning to the Order after a solo assigment. Olympia had formerly worked as a prostitute in one of the brothels of Athens, and their paths crossed when Yuu walked into her employer's establishment to test a theory far, far away from the Black Order's all-seeing eye. She laid her money on the table, all scrimped and saved and borrowed from her comrades as the Order would never sanction such an expense. No one, not even her closest friends, were to know about this.

The madame, not even blinking, took the money and gestured to the available girls with a smile. Yuu chose one roughly her own age with a sweet face and rings of blonde hair so pale that they looked white against her own dark tresses. Yuu cringed at the memory of her awkward, fumbling hands, her inability to look the young woman in the eye, but it had been enough. After an hour with her, she found herself sitting on the brothel's front step, smoking a cigarette while she came to terms with what the Black Order's private chaplains would certainly call a defect. While it was true Yuu took every opportunity she could to piss off the higher ups who frowned at her for not being their perfect male and European-born apostle of God, she had a nervous suspicion that proudly declaring herself a woman who preferred other women would be a step too far for Central to swallow. She could even imagine the Director tasking the science division with finding a way to 'fix' her.

She didn't want to be fixed nor did she think there was anything to fix. But she also didn't want to keep it hidden either. It wasn't a rebellion, it was just…

"Did our Iris treat you well?" The voice came from behind her and she turned to see a woman with dark red hair standing in the open doorway. She wasn't the one she'd paid for, thank God; she didn't think she could ever look Olympia in the eye after that night if that had been the case. The woman introduced herself and asked if she had a cigarette to spare. Yuu passed her one and started telling her about home, because she had wanted to talk about literally anything else in that moment. Olympia listened. Listening was a part of her trade, she'd said once. Listen and smile, and who knew what dirty, valuable, little secrets the client would spill.

"This Black Order of yours…" She exhaled a cloud of smoke. "Could someone like me find honest work there?"

"Olympia." She turned her jaded gaze back to her friend. "That night when we talked in front of the Athens house."

"Yes." Olympia said with a knowing smile.

"I told you about the Black Order. I didn't wax poetic about it either."

"Do you ever wax poetic about anything?" The older woman sipped her coffee.

"So what made you decide to ask me to bring you here? I mean, I get a brothel isn't the best life, but you up and decided to uproot everything you'd ever known and come away with me to some shady organization in England, all on the assumption I wasn't some weirdo out to sell parts of you on the black market."

Olympia laughed. "Well…that did cross my mind. But after the life I'd led and considering what little I actually had to lose, I decided why not. Who knows? Maybe my Innocence was calling to me through your words."

Yuu would never forget the shock of bringing Olympia down to see Hevlaska, as all newcomers were required to do, and finding out her unexpected travel companion was one of them.

"Besides," Olympia said. "If there was a chance I could have a better life, I felt it was worth the risk."

"Cheers to that." Yuu drained the last few lukewarm drops of coffee and rose from the table.

"So where are you headed now? I see you're in uniform."

"Egypt. With Arminius."

"Oh." Olympia nodded solemnly. "Go easy on him. I know he's…difficult sometimes, but even you have to have noticed how he's been doing since Anna…well, we all know you're forty-five percent grit and forty-five percent spite. But that last ten percent is compassion. Right now, Arminius could use that ten percent."

Yuu sighed. "Yeah, I know. How long's it been? Almost a year, right?"

"Just about."

Wrapped in their own reminiscing, the pair lapsed into silence. Yuu propped her chin in her hand and looked around the mess hall full of familiar, new, and even absent faces. Finders she didn't recognize, scientists whose names were too numerous to learn in the brief time she knew them, medical staff who'd patched up her hurts. She knew and loved them the best. In the corner, Ira Koslov sat playing a game of backgammon with the friends he'd made among the Finder units. Several tables over, General Cassandra could be seen hosting a conversation with a rather eclectric group of scientists, one or two off-shift cooks, and even a few Crows. Szebasztián Mészáros, the last exorcist they'd discovered before Alma Casales, came into the mess with his arm in a sling and Charlotte fussing over him. Olympia, Szebasztián, Koslov, the General…. Yuu made the tally in her head, counting on her fingers as her lips formed the names without sound. Alma Casales…and me. That's eighteen of us now.

Still…after their losses this last year, she didn't think even Casales' arrival would generate much cause for celebration. Sure, the arrival of a new accommodator was always cause for hope, but after three mass funerals with a total of three hundred and twenty-seven confirmed fatalities between them, after another hundred or so whose bodies had been unrecoverable and were therefore marked as missing in action, after General Anna Leonardi's death, as well as that of two more exorcists….and Casales being the only apostle they'd found this entire year so far…Yuu sighed again. After all that, they were tired. They were all very, very tired.

"I'd better go find Arminius."

"Remember—"

"Shut up. I got it." But she patted her friend's shoulder all the same.

-0-0-0-

Author's Notes: Hope you enjoyed.

*Railway spine was a diagnosis for the victims of railroad accidents in the 19th century. The term PTSD or post traumatic stress disorder as we know it came into use in the 1970s. Before, terms like railway spine (1860s), nostalgia (late 1600s), and shell-shock or war neuroses (1940s) were the norm.

D. Gray Man is owned by Katsura Hoshino.