Path Built On Graves: Chapter Two: Choice Made
AN: Reminder that this fic is very AU, so a lot of canon is going to be changed, thrown out, and, rarely, kept, depending on how I see fit.
The morgue was dark and cold when Maria flipped the light on, casting shadows on the multitude of body bags there. There had been more, Maria knew, she'd read the report; thirty-five dead, including Alma of the Second Exorcist Program. Ten had been cremated already, as was customary, and Maria knew there had been rumors about maybe using Alma's cells in a new program, which was why she'd acted so quickly to thoroughly destroy his body.
She'd told Bak immediately.
"I didn't think you'd object, given…" she waved a hand around the general area and Bak heaved a heavy sigh, looking down at his mother's Branch Head white coat, rubbing furiously at his eyes. He was very young, almost too young to be the new Branch Head of the Asian Branch, but his mother and father were the respective Branch Head and Assistant Branch Head, it only made sense that the position would fall to the one that followed them and listened most dutifully to their instructions.
Bak drifted off.
"Bak? Darling?" Maria's touch to his shoulder jerked him back.
"Children," Bak said with shaky certainty, "should not be weapons of war."
Maria said nothing to that, merely turning him towards her and taking the coat silently from him and helping him put one arm through a sleeve and then the other before bringing it up over his shoulders and straightening it. "I feel you might've missed an interdepartmental memo, darling," she said tiredly. Maria, he remembered, had been an exorcist since a finder had seen her performing at the tender age of thirteen, her song enthralling all who heard it. "Exorcists are little more than the Black Order's property."
Bak bowed his head forward and Maria leaned hers against his. "That's a terrible view."
"There's only one way to affect change, Bak," Maria sighed, "from within. If you disagree with how things are done, change them."
"I don't think Central would like that," Bak muttered.
"Ah, fuck those clergy assholes, not literally, obviously, I don't think they'd be very good in bed," Maria mused almost thoughtfully and Bak had to choke on a laugh. "That's why you've got to start small, Bak, then, before you know it, there will be so many changes that they didn't realize were happening until they're already in place."
She leaned back and tipped his head back. "And if the memories of everything that happened here cause you too much pain, then don't dwell on them."
"Bold words from someone who refuses to let go of the past."
It was less like a smile and more like a baring of teeth at that. She had every right to not let go of the past, in Bak's opinion, and she knew that he knew that. "I want to remember," she said finally, "I want to remember how it felt to feel Allen kick inside me, I want to remember how happy my husband was to find out I was carrying him, and I want to remember how painful it was for them to force Innocence into me and then rip my son from me. I want to remember how angry it makes me."
"Sounds very…lonely," Bak decided.
"Some days more than others," Maria agreed with a heavy sigh. "But I'd rather live angry than ever be hurt like that again."
She held out her hand and Muncanpy, who had been fluttering in the air by her head, plopped down.
"Don't play this for her until she's gone back home, all right, Mun?" came a voice from Mun's body. Mun had the ability to record anything, but not everything he recorded was visual, and Bak was familiar with this recording of her husband. "Maria, I love you, regardless of what the Order or my family want and even if we only get fleeting moments together, I want to spend the rest of my life with you."
Maria hooked her fingers into Mun's mouth, tugging them out at the side, stretching the golem almost as far as it would go, her teeth gritted and her eyes shadowed. "What a fool," she rasped out.
"He loved you." Bak had never met Nea D. Campbell and had never spoken his name aloud, per Maria's request, but Maria had told him about Nea and vice versa. Nea, he knew, had been grateful that Maria had found a kindred spirit in the Order; she'd always been such a lonesome figure, even when Bak had met her when she was fourteen.
"It didn't save him in the end." Maria released her golem, who decided to settle instead atop Maria's head. If Bak saw her wipe at her eyes, he didn't mention it. She moved away suddenly. "I'll leave you alone." And she saw gone before Bak could call her back.
It had taken a lot of pacing and twisting the ring around on her finger before she'd decided to enter the morgue again. Her fingers paused on the zipper of the body bag and Maria steeled her nerves as she drew it down to reveal the face of Tui Chang.
Her hair was as dark as it had been in life, but her eyes were cloudy and her skin was stiff and pale. When Maria had been younger, she'd always seemed so impressive and larger than life, and Maria could remember when that view had changed.
Bak and Tui had been there with her when she'd given birth. She could still hear Tui's encouraging voice ("One more strong push, Maria! You're doing great!") and Bak's hand gripped tight in hers as she screamed.
"My son, let me hold my son," she'd sobbed and been ignored and restrained. Bak had held him first, for Maria, when she couldn't. It had hurt more than anything, not to be able to hold her little Allen, but it had been a relief to know that he wasn't in the arms of some cold-hearted clergyman. And then Tui had taken Bak and Allen out of the room, a regretful look on her face.
Maria couldn't even remember what happened next. The memories were gone. All she remembered was footsteps and a glint of light off glasses and feeling like something was distinctly wrong in her bones.
They'd allowed her to recover at the Asian Branch after that and Maria had spent many nights screaming herself awake.
She never trusted Tui after that, and once she'd revealed the nature of the Second Exorcist Program it was just the last nail in the coffin.
But Bak, Bak was Maria's closest friend, and she'd put him through so much during her recovery.
"It seems wrong to let you go without saying goodbye." Her voice echoed hollowly in the silence and she looked away from Tui's face. "I don't agree with what you did…the Second Exorcist Program was depraved from the start, you had to know that…but I guess what the Pope demands, the Pope receives."
Maria couldn't remove the bitter sting to her words and she didn't want to; she could be completely honest with the dead.
"I know—" Maria paused suddenly, taking in a sharp breath. "I know you tried to convince them to let me hold Allen, and I know it didn't work and that Bak was the next best thing, and I appreciate that, even now I do." If she twisted the ring around her finger too much more she was going to rub the skin raw. "But I also know you did something…I don't know what it was, but it was something, and…and not knowing is always worse…like someone ripped open my skull and took the memories of whatever it was and then put me back together again."
Maria interlocked her fingers and tried to calm her breathing. "I'm sorry that I can't say anything nice about you now, but I can't forgive you for everything that happened."
And every time Maria tried to attempt to remember, all she got was a sharp pain and the feeling like there was something digging its way out of her eyes. It was something important, something that had to do with Nea, because she knew she'd been with him close to a month before he'd pushed her through the Gate, but recalling the details of what happened right before that was harder.
She remembered Nea being angry, not at her but at his family, which was the strangest thing, because though the Millennium Earl had done a lot of awful things through the creation of his akuma, she knew that Nea had still loved his brother, dearly.
It was a sticky sort of situation Maria had found herself in, being the sister-in-law to the Black Order's adversary…thankfully, the only one who'd known about their marriage, other than the priest, was Mana, Nea's twin who hadn't even been a part of the Noah Clan and had disappeared with her husband.
The stabbing pain in her eyes returned and she growled under her breath, pressing the heel of her palm into her eyes, clearing her mind. It was like being a hostage in your own head, not even allowed to be curious about your memory loss unless you wanted to experience pain.
Maria hated it.
She zipped the body bag up once more before laying a hand briefly on the one opposite Tui's. She didn't need to open it to know that it belonged to Edgar, Bak's father.
She could've said something to him, Edgar had never earned her anger except for the part he played in the Second Exorcist Project, but in the end, all Maria was capable of was giving him a brief bow of respect, her throat tight. Then she straightened up and cleared her throat loudly, shaking her head back, running a shaking hand through her hair, pulling it over one shoulder.
There was a long streak of white running through that was for the most part hidden when her hair was pulled back, the result of activating her Innocence almost past its breaking point, to when it was rendered useless for days afterwards. She'd only done it once and it had almost decimated the environment around her.
Henceforth it was limited to actual emergencies only.
Maria tightened her ponytail, gave herself one last shake and stepped out of the room only to pause and stare. "Don't you have a bedtime, Yu?"
Yu growled loudly where he was sitting against the wall, his arms locked under his knees. "Can't sleep."
Maria arched an eyebrow and Mun fluttered close to Yu, surprising him when the golem rubbed affectionately against his cheek. "H-hey!" he swatted Mun away and Maria clicked her tongue, amused when the golem instead sat on top of Yu's head.
"Relax," she smiled, "Mun's affectionate. He must like you."
"Aren't golems supposed to be…" Yu struggled to find the right word and Maria helped him out.
"Mechanical?" she offered and he nodded. "They are. The golems that the Order uses are, I should say, but Mun's different."
She made a gesture with her hand and Yu stood in order to keep up with her as she started walking.
"How?" he asked with a furrowed brow.
It was adorable, the confused look on his face paired with the golem sitting atop his head.
"Muncanpy is part of a pair of golems that were made by my husband," Maria supplied, "they're a bit more sentient than most." Mun bared his teeth at Maria, earning a smile from his master. "Communicating with him like a normal golem is hard, though, so Bak's working on a temporary communication device for me to wear…though I like people being able to contact me freely even less."
Maria grimaced at the thought of the Order being given free reign to give her orders.
"Husband?" Yu had heard the term before. "Like Tui and Edgar? They were husbands."
Maria choked on her laughter so suddenly that in order to not earn herself a glare from the young boy who was now more open than he had been the previous day. "Tui and Edgar were husband and wife. Edgar was Tui's husband, and Tui was Edgar's wife."
"That's…confusing," Yu muttered.
She scratched her cheek slightly with a light laugh. "Yes, I suppose it is."
Yu looked up at her then, when she wasn't looking, her grey eyes shifted away and her smile soft and sad.
"Where's your husband?"
Maria's lips twisted. "Dead. Killed by the Millennium Earl…did they ever tell you who the Earl is?"
"He's the bad guy." Yu remembered that one.
"Mostly," Maria agreed with a sigh, "though the Order does give him a run for their money with their tactics." She grimaced. "The Earl makes things called akuma…do you know what those are?"
"Just that apostles are supposed to destroy them." Yu's thoughts drifted to that hazy memory he had, of a gloved hand reaching up to the sky with a whisper of "I love you…forever" before a grotesque almost clown-like creature came and struck him down. "I think…I think one killed me, before."
He expected her to say something along the lines of "Don't dwell on your past, the lotus isn't real, who you were before isn't real anymore". No one liked him talking about his hallucinations.
"Probably an evolved akuma," Maria mused instead. "If you'd been shot the Dark Matter would've crumpled you to ash."
Yu stared at her.
"Kid," she snorted, "I've been doing this since I was thirteen."
"How old are you now?" Yu still had a lot of trouble with guessing that. Alma was better. Tui and Edgar had always looked pretty young, but Maria hung out a lot with Bak a lot, so she had to be close to his age, right?
Wait…how old was Bak?
Before Yu could have a meltdown, Maria patiently told him, "I'm twenty-five."
"Okay that's, one-two-three—"
Maria waited while he counted out on his fingers until he got to "Twelve?"
"That's right," she smiled indulgently and Yu didn't know if he liked it. It gave him a tingly feeling in his stomach that he wanted to claw out. "Twelve years and I've hated almost every minute of those twelve years."
She sounded incredibly bitter, which, Yu couldn't really blame her after all that happened with Alma.
"Do I have to be an exorcist?" He couldn't help the question.
For a long moment Maria didn't answer him. "Unfortunately, accommodators of Innocence get no choice in the matter. If you'd found on the street they would've dragged you here regardless, kicking and screaming if necessary."
"Did they do that to you?" Yu couldn't silence the question.
Maria hummed softly, an almost haunting tune that sounded like the one she'd sung to him the night before.
"Do you know what a circus?" she asked him finally and Yu shook his head. "It's kind of like…a group of people with different skills coming together and putting on a show. There's clowns, fire-breathers, and there were tightrope walkers, like me. My balance was very good and I'd been so eager to get away from the orphanage I'd been living in…" Maria tugged on the end of her ponytail. "So, I sang and crossed that tightrope until my feet blistered and then some. I had no idea that my singing had an affect on the audience, I was more preoccupied with keeping my balance, but a finder noticed." Her mouth thinned into a hard line. "I was thirteen when they sent me out to fight in a war that I wanted no part in and under a master who abandoned me when I needed him the most."
Mun lifted from Yu's head bump slightly against Maria's cheek, making her smile. She knelt down so her head was level with Yu's.
"I offered to be your master because I am your best-case scenario, and that is unfortunately all that you are afforded." The grimace warped across her face. "Cross Marian is notorious for never taking on students and if he would, I have no doubt that he'd foist all his debt on them because he's absolutely psychotic." The expression on her face was now pure annoyance. "Froi Tiedoll is a good man, but he can be a bit…overbearing and someone who dislikes physical contact like you do might take offense. Winters Sokalo…" Maria shuddered. "That man's Innocence is called Madness, let's leave it at that. Klaud Nine has her own student and Kevin Yeegar…" Disdain twisted into something sharp and wrathful. "Well, I'd rather not throw you under the train with that one…that being said, you do have the choice, and those are all just my opinions."
Yu was a bit thrown off about the whole 'making decisions' thing, because he was used to being told what to do.
'Yu, try to bind with the Innocence'
'Yu, don't fight with Alma or your arm is going to fall off again'
'Yu, we're going to put you to sleep now that you won't wake up from'
And here was Maria Walker who had waltzed into his life and never told him it wasn't okay for him to have those hallucinations of his, who let him get angry about what a shitty situation his life was, who sang him to sleep and made him eat when he didn't want to.
"Is she always like that?" Yu had asked Marie after she'd gone off the previous day with a small tray of food for Bak.
"Calm? Or kind?" Marie had been amused by the question. "I don't think she's calm all the time, she has her fuses that blow from time to time. But Maria's always been kind…she was going to be a mother, actually, but the Order took her baby from her. So, I think she's very motherly, and sees you as a child that needs a guiding hand."
Yu hadn't known how to feel about that.
"No one's ever given me options before," he said finally.
"Take your time," Maria advised, "there's no need to make hasty decisions."
And then they walked in silence all the way back to the sleeping area and Yu couldn't help but think Maria looked tired and immeasurably sad.
Maria awoke to the phantom touch of warm fingers along her arm, warm breath skittering across her skin as a kiss was pressed to her shoulder, and then the curve of her neck, and finally against her cheek.
"I'll be back before you wake up," Nea promised in a whisper, leaning back, the bed deepening as he sat on the edge, rustling about.
Maria opened her eyes tiredly and rolled over. "Darling?" the endearment was slightly slurred with sleep. "What's going on?"
"Don't worry about it," Nea assured her, leaning down to press a light kiss to her lips. "Mana just needs help with something…I'll be back before you wake up completely, I promise." He kissed her one last time and Maria's eyes drifted close, the last thing she saw being Nea pulling his coat up over his shoulders.
She shot awake with a gasp, lurching in the bed, her hand outstretched in front of her as if trying to grab at Nea's shoulders from within the dream. Mun fluttered around her anxiously.
Maria pressed the hand against her eyes, her shoulders trembling with restraint, but that didn't stop the tears from cascading down her cheeks.
Muncanpy did what only Muncanpy could do; he expanded to a size large enough for Maria wrap her arms around and bury her face into. Mun's mistress was such a sad and somber figure without Mun's master; Mun wished he had more to offer but also knew what he had to offer was enough.
She fell back asleep, her arms still wound around him and it was like when Nea had first gifted Mun to Maria, surprised and delighted at sixteen. "An apology," he'd said at the time, like he hadn't created Mun with her in mind, "for all the times I tried to kill you."
It had made her laugh, but she'd fallen asleep the first night with her arms around Mun. Now, it was not so different, Mun just hoped that one day Maria wouldn't smell so much of misery.
Maria's song had transformed Yu's Innocence into a form that suited him. She told him it was a katana, a Japanese sword.
"It's a bit long for you, but you'll grow into it, if you live long enough."
"Maria!" Marie's exasperation was clear. "You can't just tell him that!"
"Oh, are we lying to minors?" Maria arched an eyebrow. "Darling, leave that to the church, we exorcists have to be realistic."
Yu liked that about Maria, the brutal honesty that reminded him of Tui -yet, somehow, he appreciated it more in Maria than he ever had with Tui.
"Have you come up with a name yet?"
"There was once an exorcist who likened himself to a lotus blossom…his name was Mugen…do you know what that name means? It means dream, fantasy, or infinite."
"Mugen," Yu decided, missing the amusement that spread across her lips at the name of his previous life, or that he'd even taken her suggestion in the first place.
"Not a bad name," Marie complimented. Yu shrugged; it was just a name. Maria's lips twitched as she knelt in front of him to do up the buttons of his new exorcist uniform even though Yu grumbled "I can do it myself" under his breath. "Where'll you be heading?"
"I hear there's an infestation of akuma in England, around the Keswick region," Maria mused, "I feel that'll be a good place for Yu to get his feet wet, so to speak, and if we run into any along the way—" She shrugged, even though he couldn't see it.
"Taking the long or short way?" Marie asked, making Yu frown in confusion.
"Long," she said without thinking too much about it, "I'd prefer to use it as little as possible."
Yu looked from her to Marie without comprehension, but neither offered an explanation.
"Come along, student, we have places to be." Maria smiled before darting up to kiss Marie's cheek. "We'll be seeing you around, Marie, and you'll be hearing from us."
"Haha," Marie said without humor, though his lips twisted in amusement that put pains to that idea.
Yu looked down at his uniform compared to his new master's. The rose cross on his breast and the accents were silver and it was long, almost reaching the floor, but Maria's fit her better, more like a tunic paired with trousers than anything else, a long beige overcoat pulled up over her shoulders so that she wasn't drowning in the black.
"I'm worried about Bak, though," Maria told Marie quietly, "Will you…will you keep an eye on him while you recover?"
Marie took her hand and squeezed it, his smile rather indulgent, but Maria appreciated it nonetheless. "I'll do what I can."
"Thank you," she breathed in obvious relief and Mun bobbed on her shoulder. She'd already said goodbye to him and felt how his shoulders had shaken and how he'd clung to her, just like when she'd come out of the Gate. Recovery, she knew, took time, and Maria was still healing, even years later.
She lifted a hand to rub against Mun where he was positioned, his presence as soothing as it had been the previous night. Mun rubbed against her hand in response.
"Got everything, darling?" Maria asked Yu, her smile back in place and it didn't seem quite so forced. Yu simply nodded. "All right, then."
"Good luck, Kanda!" Marie called after them as Yu followed his new master out into the sunlight.
The world is dark and hard to breathe was what he had first thought when he'd awoken in the lab, but the air was lighter now and he had a master to steady his footing. Maybe it wasn't the path he would've chosen, but he had been given a choice in the end.
"Reminiscing already, Yu? We've barely even left the Asian Branch!"
Yu growled. "I am not!"
"Well, then, hurry up, darling!" Maria laughed where she was ahead of him, the sunlight turning her eyes silver as she smiled. "We haven't got all day!"
And Yu picked up the pace, ready for the next chapter of his life.
AN: Maria is a very tragic, very sad character and its going to be interesting writing her finding meaning in training Kanda :)
Mun is definitely like a cross between a cat and a dog in how he behaves, but he's not your usual golem.
