Lavi placed the jar holding the two beautiful, light blue eyes on a clean shelf in the basement of his residence. The orbs were suspended in a fluid that would keep them perfectly preserved for, really, as long as he needed. Lavi placed the pair of delicate, barely scratched hands that he'd cut off at the wrists into an ice bath.

He turned around and looked at the rest of the mutilated body he'd carefully carved at for an hour, only dead about a minute. He would have to throw it away somewhere, maybe into a ravine or perhaps a cemetery would be more apt. Put it with the rest of the forgotten, rotting bodies.

Normally, he'd want to save the body, preserve it for his master to eat the flesh over time, but the other woman's body would provide more than enough for that. Preserving this one's leftovers would just be pointless. Besides, he'd gotten what he wanted from her. Lavi glanced once more at the eyes and hands before turning to leave.

Lavi headed back up to the upper levels of the house. It was sad and all about the young lady he'd just tortured and killed, but needs must. She was the victim, her pain had been irrelevant. He wasn't sadistic, he just didn't care.

As he slid through the doorway of the mansion library, Lavi saw his master reading on the dark red lounge stationed a couple feet away from the doorway. Kanda looked up from the tone and arched a brow at the red headed vampire. "What was that screaming I heard? I assume you had a good reason to bring back live prey?"

"I was harvesting parts for that partner of yours." Lavi replied.

"Lover." Kanda corrected, sharply.

"Right, lover. None should ever make the mistake of thinking you have an equal." Lavi commented, dryly.

"I trust you didn't take everything you needed from the one one body." Kanda checked.

"Of course, Yu. I know you have high standards and no one perfect person exists. I chose the best parts, I'll get the rest later."

"Good." Kanda replied, a glowing recommendation from him. Apparently having decided that the conversation was over, Kanda turned his attention back to the tome and left Lavi to his own devices. Lavi proceeded further into the library and began sorting through the shelves for the right book.

He had done plenty of reading on the relatively-unknown science of body reanimation. He had an eidetic memory and could easily recall anything he had ever read, no matter how long ago he had read it, but there was one aspect of his task that he hadn't read about. All the books he'd been able to find that referenced bringing cadavers to life assumed that the body would be whole and relatively new. Ah, here it was!

His thin, tanned fingers wrapped around the spine of the book he'd wanted, but hadn't yet read. Sewing: How To Neatly Sew Any Material.

Lavi and (to an extent) his master had the habit of collecting several books across a wide variety of topics. This one in particular was the only one they had about sewing and Lavi definitely needed that to accomplish his goal, but he could admit that the title almost certainly referred to common sewing materials like cotton and leather.

Lavi sighed and placed the book under his other arm. I'll just have to hope that these techniques can be applied to stitching limbs back onto a body. It would be so much more time consuming to locate a medical journal with that information. Of course, Kanda couldn't have gotten him all the resources he would need before or when he gave Lavi his body-creation task.

Of course.

Lavi paged through the sewing book as he sat on a tombstone, taking in the relevant information and skipping through the rest. Far off in the distance, on the opposite side of the graveyard if he wasn't mistaken, came the distinct sound of shovels tunneling into cold earth.

In Transylvania, the weather was cold, dim and gloomy all year around and they sometimes got snow. However, it was not so cold this time of year that the ground could not be dug into, it was just that the digger could expect some resistance every time they heaved their shovel back to have another go. A human better have some powerful force behind their thrust if they want to make headway in their digging this night, as it sounds like these humans do.

He flipped the page calmly. If his expectation of their progress had any bearing on reality, they still had aways to go before he could comfortably step in.

Following undertakers is exhausting, Lavi thought, mildly. Nevermind. I think the best sewing method would be the one used to bind leather, though I'll have to be more gentle than the author of this book is. I don't need that much pressure to punch through flesh, even after rigor mortis.

The sounds of two shovels being tossed onto the grass (most sounds were unmistakable, in Lavi's opinion) caused his head to snap up in the direction he knew they came from. The time has come, Lavi mentally hummed.

He marked the page he'd been on and placed it carefully on a nearby tombstone. He slowly stood up and then, within a second, took off at a sprint. The vampire felt there was no point in being quiet in his approach. All the hard ground and moist grass would make that near impossible, even at a leisurely pace.

The humans naturally heard his approach before they saw him. One was standing in the freshly dug grave, while the other had been standing over it by the body. While the first human, upon hearing something running towards them, panicked and desperately tried to crawl out of the grave without his partner's help, the other stooped down and armed himself with a shovel.

That gave Lavi the time he needed to make up the distance between them, leap the grave, and grab onto the shovel. The human might have been able to fight him off if the vampire hadn't waited until they'd spent upwards of an hour exerting themselves with the grave digging. Those who did that type of work in graveyards tended to be stronger than many other humans and had decent stamina, even compared to some supernatural creatures.

In all likelihood, the one with the shovel could have held his own against Lavi just until his partner managed to stumble out of the grave and then the vampire would have been at quite a disadvantage, but Lavi hadn't lived this long by not thinking his kills through. No bodies left behind, no witnesses, be careful when taking on more than one; humans had the unfortunate habit of forming groups.

These were the rules he'd lived by for some time and they served him well. Both humans were pretty tired from their recent activities, both caught off guard, and one was physically trapped like a caged rat. So, it was only with slight exertion that Lavi wrestled the shovel out of the man's hands and used it to clock him over the head.

Damn. Not enough force in the heat of the moment, would need more to cause permanent damage . . .

After thinking such, Lavi quickly heaved the shovel over his head and bashed it repeatedly into the downed man's skull.

"Raph!" The human in the grave cried out to his friend in horror. Lavi didn't stop until he saw brain tissue. With his strength, it only took a few hits. Turning to the other human, which by this point had barely managed to heft his upper body out of the grave without assistance.

Lavi swung the shovel up over his head, ready to spade it down into the guy's hand, but the second grave digger saw him coming. In a last burst of panic-fueled adrenaline, the worker threw the rest of his body up onto the grass and quickly rolled to the side, narrowly avoiding getting spaded in a place even more unpleasant than his hand.

As Lavi went to bring up the shovel again, sure the man would try to scramble up to his feet, the man instead kicked out at the handle of the shovel. The force of the kick as well as Lavi's firm grip on the lower part of it caused the shovel handle to snap, the metal end of the implement going flying onto the grass behind him. Then, the human dared to scramble to his feet and took off running back towards town.

Normally at this point, Lavi would've given chase and tackled the human, then try to bite them. He generally went to a great deal of effort to not leave breathing victims, but it wasn't really done to silence the humans, as such. Missing humans and found human bodies signalled a monster's presence well enough, even with all witnesses eliminated.

No, the real reason he normally went to such lengths to stop escaping humans was that those who survived once got better at it later. That's how lifelong vampire hunters, among other annoyances, are born. They were attacked but not killed and since resolved to be an absolute pain to monsters like him.

At that moment, though, Lavi was more or less frozen as he watched the human stagger off into the forest between the cemetery and the town, maybe to get help or perhaps to just go home and have a lie down. Part of the vampire's state was due to shock; the human was better at fighting than anticipated and didn't react the way most humans would have.

However, some of Lavi's lack of movement was due to his own choice rather than shock. The rest of him let the guy go, feeling a small amount of respect growing from the disappeared human. It was stupid, he knew, and against his own rules of conduct, but Lavi wanted to see what the man would become, what he would do with his life from here on.

Stay as he had been or chart a new course? Becoming angry and emboldened by the brush with death or withdraw into himself in fright? (Somehow, he doubted this man would become some meek little hideaway after this.) Though, he supposed he would never see this man again to find out.

Lavi would freely admit that he considered his sense of curiosity to be his biggest strength and his greatest weakness. Lavi turned back to the felled human and the fresh corpse behind him.

Gravediggers were a strange breed of human. They were not particularly well-trained in much of anything besides taking care of the corpses entrusted to them and, sometimes, they weren't even very good at that. These people tended to be of the lower classes, although that did not mean they were all members of the absolute bottom of society. It just meant that anyone who could get a better job did.

All humans (but especially gravediggers, considering the prevalence of it in their lives) were aware of the extreme threat level posed by creatures of various species stalking the night for human flesh. The daytime wasn't strictly safe, especially for lone humans outside of their towns, but the night is when most creatures were not only awake but also comfortable to stalk for victims. Night represented safety for monsters and danger for humans, which Lavi thought was rather ironic a division.

Gravediggers made a career of going out at night when no one else dared to do the same. The physiques of those in this profession usually took one of two forms: waifish and thin from hunger or muscular and enduring from the physical conditioning of the job. Even the gangly ones were stronger than a human of their size and food intake not in the same profession. It was a physically demanding job that, at moments, needed to be witnessed to be believed.

They were very strange people mentally, as well. Some people, especially the younger adults, just did stupid things while still knowing the consequences. Yet, few made a career out of it and as a general rule: the older humans got, the more protective they were about their own safety.

This was precisely what made gravediggers and their entire profession so strange, so ghoulish (so to speak).

They continually went out at night, at times alone, with human remains. As if they themselves were not enough of a lure for any creature looking for a treat, they had to have another possible treat in the form of recently deceased bodies with them. Their god help them if the body was in the process of becoming a vampire or ghoul and no one noticed. That happened sometimes.

Not all in the gravedigger and similar professions died, but not all of them lived, either. Diligence and pairs is what saved most of them. Luck, too.

Likewise, sometimes it was just bad luck that felled the men, like this one. Lavi would drink his fill from the man he'd killed, but he'd chosen this pair of workers for one reason and one reason alone; the body they were supposed to be burying was visually appealing. Very appealing.

Had the body been unappealing on the whole, it would have neither caught nor held Lavi's attention and this man would have lived. It was just the guy's bad luck that Lavi was in the market for a good-looking body and that he had a demanding master. That body was quite something, too.

The body was clearly that of a teenage boy, somewhere around the age of thirteen or fourteen. Recently deceased, smelling to be about four days dead. The features were the typical amount of soft and delicate of that age range.

It seemed the boy died at the perfect time, another year or two and his coming of age would have made his features more drawn and angular. Harsher. That is a distinctly unattractive trait in most people, Yu didn't count.

The deceased had soft brown hair and he would assume brown eyes, although the lids had been closed as long as he had seen the body (good, he couldn't use it if it reanimated) so he had not seen the eyes yet to confirm that. It was just that people with brown hair quite often had brown eyes accompanying them, so it was a same assumption to make.

The boy's height had been typical for his age, not especially short or irregularly tall. Of course, he was quite short compared with someone even just a few years older. The lips and skin were pale with death, but they couldn't have been more than a few shades lighter in life.

The body wasn't perfect. The hands were too small and marked up from what had to have been his daily labors. The legs were too muscular for the rest of the delicate and almost starved looking figure. Other than that, Lavi had stumbled upon a real time-saver in the looks department.

The hair was soft and curved delicately around the heart-shaped face, even if it had clearly not been well-cared for (in keeping with the theme of the rest of the body). Which made sense. Humans that were not part of the upper classes, especially the hardworking classes like this body was probably from, did not have the time or respect for their bodies enough to care for their looks more than was necessary.

The lips were on the thinner side, but not so much as to cause a problem. The eyes were not the normal almond-shaped kind often connected with the image of beauty. However, when opened, they should be large and imploring, pleasantly showing off the eyes Lavi had picked out to perfection.

As he thought, the facial features were youthful and still retained some of their baby-softness. Overall, quite pleasing.

Yu would notice the structural issues with the thighs and hands, so Lavi would have to improve those before bringing life to the body.

He'd gotten a good start on that by procuring an alternate pair of eyes and hands and brushing up on his sewing, so all he really needed now was a fitting pair of legs. . . . Maybe Yu would want this boy's ill-proportioned pair to munch on while he awaited his love . . . Then he could get this body-reanimating party started!

Regardless, the risk wasn't high, but Lavi still decided he should play it safe and leave soon. He'd strengthen himself in this man's body, grab the boy's body, detour around to grab his book, and head back to the mansion. As much as he wanted to do it now, he would wait until he was home to inspect the boy's body on a closer level for other issues and impediments. For now . . .

Lavi stepped towards the former gravedigger's body and leaned down towards it, keeping an ear out for danger. He drank.


A/N: So Allen's body is introduced into the story, now, barring the distinctive blue eyes that will have to be plonked into his skull by Lavi. If the idea of Kanda potentially getting a hard-on for someone who used to be a corpse, especially one that had the body and brain of a thirteen or fourteen year old boy and the eyes and hands of an innocent girl tortured and killed specifically to get them is disturbing and off-putting . . . good. That was entirely the intention.

In case you haven't noticed Lavi and Kanda aren't written to be evil, as such, but still don't have the conventional morality as other people and that extends to more than killing. Plus, you know, the ostensibly pseudo victorian time this is set in makes things like age more trifles than stumbling blocks.

Anyone (including that one lovely commenter) who read the girl getting killed last chapter and didn't know how to feel about it, that was also intentional (I know, I state the obvious). Gruesome and uncomfortable scene, but she wasn't exactly a perfect saint who engendered pure sympathy, either. That is a specific theme I'm going for in this fic, but you'll find it in my fics across the board. No one's pure evil, no one's pure good. Not everyone's acts are justified or even understandable, but there's always something more going on with my people, their histories, their minds. That's where a lot of the fun with writing comes from, for me, and I hope it's fun to read!

Got any questions, ask them! Alright, monologue over . . . for now . . . I'll be back-