Allen awoke from his sleep so instantaneously that it seemed to him as if he hadn't been asleep at all. However, the energy he'd gotten from his rest quickly dissuaded him of that thought. The room was dimly lit from the light filtering brightly into the otherwise pitch room.
It was only that little light that allowed him to see the two candles sitting on the trunk at the base of his bed. They'd been lit by him and Lavi the previous night, but he'd snuffed them out before going to sleep. He wouldn't have thought of it, he was not particularly familiar with using candles, but Lavi had taken several minutes to impress upon him the importance of remembering to put out the candle when he felt himself getting tired.
After a little bit of that, Allen had insisted that he wouldn't forget and his redheaded creator excused himself to take care of a number of chores, after apologizing for not being able to introduce Allen to more things about life that night, like they'd planned. Allen sent him off with his own apologies. After all, it was his fight with Kanda that had rushed the night, after all.
Despite his assurances, Allen didn't think he would get to sleep at all, just like the previous night. He hadn't been able to sleep before when he was supposed to, so what hope did he have for doing so when he was supposed to be up and about? Apparently a good deal, as Allen felt himself near immediately pulled into sleep the second his head hit the pillow.
Allen was forced to leap back up from the bed to snuff out the two candles or be forced to set ablaze his promise . . . and also possibly his room along with it. That was rather important. Allen was still surprised he'd still fallen asleep at all and, nevermind for all long as he'd had.
The light coming in from the window, even though most of it was lost to the room, was more than enough to show early-to-mid morning. Considering it hadn't even been late yet in the night when he'd gone to sleep, Allen had been asleep for quite a while by that time.
Allen glanced around the room and at the door leading out, finding himself wondering if Lavi was sleeping now and hoping that Kanda was. They'd talked quite a bit with each other the previous night while on their trip around the sizable mansion and Lavi had mentioned that he often slept from dawn until dusk, mostly due to his extreme vampiric skin sensitivity to light.
Even a small amount, just some soft light, was damaging and should be avoided by any vampire that wasn't an idiot, according to him. Lavi freely called himself reckless, but not that reckless. Well, Allen himself wasn't going to go to sleep again so he might as well take another walk.
While he could guess that Lavi was asleep now, the boy really hoped that Yu Kanda was asleep, too. Even if it was a foolish thought, he rather hoped he'd never see the demon again. Allen shuffled out of the bed and quietly headed to the door, absurdly worried that he would wake someone up.
On second thought after opening the door into the hallway and seeing nothing but complete darkness, Allen turned around and grabbed one of the candles, lighting it before proceeding onwards.
It was hard to make his way around the hall now, more than when he'd explored it the three times previous. During those times, someone had lit multiple candles attached to the walls all along the entire length.
In the hall at that moment, there was nothing. No candles were lit, no windows were built in at all, no undead guide, nothing. His footsteps echoed slightly along the expanse of hallway and he could only be grateful he wasn't wearing shoes or he would surely have awakened some of his . . . new family, with them being sensitive to sound and such.
Allen didn't really know where he was going, but he felt the need, the strong desire, to go somewhere. He disappeared further and further down into the mansion's depths, but stopped himself when the mansion's flooring turned from dark wood to gray rock. Allen knew, could remember, what was beyond this point.
Yes, he knew that though it would be a few more minutes walking from that spot to get there, but the laboratory basically started where the stone flooring appeared. Allen could see, now that he didn't have anything better to do than look, that the parts of the building and flooring where the stone started really looked different from the rest of the house.
Much like it had been added in later, the rest of the home separated from the lab area by more than a door and some stone. Allen would bet his newly returned life, looking at it now, that the stone walls and floor were the exact marker of where the old building ended and the new construction began.
One of the most important things that was different was the feeling he was getting about the area now, as he stood at what was effectively the threshold of the lab where he was created, hesitating to go down there.
The rest of the mansion (and exactly one of its occupants) were as far from welcoming and comforting as a home could get. It was dark and foreboding and cold, not to mention very hard to make your way around when you're new. As he was. That couldn't be helped.
However, the feeling the lab space gave him now as Allen stood there, redefined the word "uncomfortable" for him. The cold wafted up from the stairs that sloped sharply down into darkness like it was alive. Like smoke rising from the source of a fire, but invisible.
The cold wafting up felt like it was coming for him, wanting him. Allen didn't know why, in his imagination, the cold was a sentient thing that reached out to grab him. What would it want from him, of all people?
Well, in his mind's eye, that question was answered by the image of ghostly white hands like wisps and cold as ice grabbing his arms and legs and dragging him kicking and screaming down into the place of his conception.
To take back what had been given so freely earlier. To retrieve the gift of life that had been wasted on him.
Had it really been free, though? Truly? Perhaps it was just a loan, the life he'd been given, and that's why he was suddenly so afraid of the place that gave him life and why the cold felt so viciously accusing.
It was for this moment that Allen became aware of a sharp difference between him and the person he was closest to at this point, Lavi.
Lavi, from what little he's been able to observe and ask of the man in regards to his scientific projects, seemed to take it as his right to do whatever he wanted with science and with necromancy. It was hard for Allen to really articulate what he felt was the truth about the redhead into tangible words in his head, but they were beginning to form, nonetheless.
To Lavi, it seemed, all that limited him was what he could realistically accomplish and, in his own words, he could accomplish a great many unbelievable things once he put his mind to it. It could be that anything he could do was in his right to perform. There was no sense in holding himself back if he wanted something, concerning himself with ideas like not having a right to do anything.
Allen, on the other hand, could never quite stop thinking about what he had a right to do. Did he have a right to even live? This concern, more than any other, tended to swirl in and out of his thoughts, plaguing him, in a way. He wondered now if he had felt that way about his place in the world when he had been alive?
He couldn't remember, but if he did or not, he certainly worried about it now and how could he not? He had no memories of being naturally born or growing up with a family and instead was only briefly familiar with this artificial life. That was what it was, even if Lavi did outright say it or perhaps even think it to himself.
Lavi created life, but he is only a man. An undead man, clearly old and with deep wells of knowledge on subjects that Allen couldn't even guess at, but he was still just a man. How could he possibly create a true life, a true person?
How could a vampire playing with and manipulating forces that had existed for eons longer than him possibly manage to stack up against the truly unknowable force that created life and human souls? How could Allen stack up against that?
Did he even have a soul? How would one even create a soul? Lavi couldn't seem to answer that. So, did that mean that he hadn't created one?
It seemed strange for the thoughtful person that Allen had come to know in the last two days for him not to have thought about that. Perhaps he'd thought about it and just hadn't cared? Sometimes problems just take care of themselves.
Envy curled in Allen's gut, even as the thought of no one caring if he had a soul or not caused his heart to sink a little in his chest. He envied it, he realized; Lavi's ability to feel like he belonged anywhere, that he had a right to everything he wanted to do.
It made him indescribably sad and yet gave him hope for the future. That maybe one day, when he was older, he could feel like he belonged - anywhere, really - as well as Lavi did. Lavi, who researched and manipulated the very forces of life and death like they were his right to play with.
Not like Allen. A small, lone man in a big world. He turned around swiftly and headed down another hallway he hadn't gone down before. He wouldn't go down to that dark place, not ever.
He didn't know that hallway would take him to a door that lead to outside the stately home. He didn't know that going out that way would take him outside a certain someone's bedroom window.
