Allen finally felt at home. He finally felt like he belonged. He hadn't been having much luck finding out more about where he was from or how he was created, but that started mattering less and less as time went on. Even with his lamentable lack of memories, he felt confident in saying that he'd never been happier in his life.
Even though he felt the need to keep quiet about his ongoing search into his origins to Lavi, the redheaded vampire was a comforting presence standing over his shoulder most days. If Allen kept enough away from the topics of his conception and past, then Lavi became a fountain of knowledge.
The silver haired boy quickly found that the vampire liked to be left alone most of the time when he was working and that Allen would only be distracting him if he tried to find him during those times. The best times Allen found to talk to Lavi was in the first few hours after the vampire woke up and - if Allen was still awake by then - the last few hours before the vampire went back to sleep. He was less busy then and more languid, allowing Allen to pump him for information on a bunch of topics.
Allen quickly found that Lavi was much more interesting to listen to than the books in the library. What was ink on paper to Lavi's storytelling voice? The technical terms to the vampire's excitement? The redhead relished in reciting information and telling his personal stories to the willing listener. Allen certainly didn't get as much sleep each day as he should, but he still couldn't be awake all the time, something he felt a little sorry for as he stole snatches of time with both monsters.
Yet there was one thing that lingered forebodingly in the shadows of his days and in the back of his mind. That of course being the question of where he came from.
Allen...knew he should give up on it. Maybe Lavi was right when the vampire said that who he was before didn't matter anymore. However, something in Allen's chest sank at the mere thought of it. As much of an annoyance as it had become, he wanted to know where he came from, at least part of it! The idea of just giving up on that desire was…
And, of course, then there were Kanda's words floating through his mind as well, telling him that it was okay to to look into who he was. That it was okay to care about the past. It made Allen smile every time he thought about it, although he wasn't sure why. It was nice to have that support, he knew, but there was something else about the memory that made it so easy for him to smile at it. In fact, he seemed to smile a lot when thinking about Kanda lately.
Okay, moving on. Allen had slowly come to the uncomfortable realization that the library didn't have the kind of information he needed and there was only one place remaining that might.
The lab.
Allen shivered at just the remembrance of the cold, frightening chill the place had given him the last time he'd dared to even look in its direction. It was late night now and if their sleeping schedules were holding true, Lavi should have woken a few hours ago and Kanda was probably asleep. Except for those nights where the human and demon stayed up later than usual while spending time together, the demon tended to retire to his bed only a handful of hours after the sun went down.
Considering the early waking he did every morning, Allen could understand why and unlike Allen, Kanda didn't seem to possess any significant sleeping problems. For his part, Lavi had probably already started on his duties for the day, so Allen was more or less left to his own devices for the moment. On this night, he had actually started feeling pretty tired shortly after Kanda left for his room, but he kept himself up by sheer force of will. Tonight was the night.
The night he was going to explore the Lab for information about himself!
Well, he thought that to himself, but the fact that he didn't look forward to doing it and proceeded to put it off for decently long into the night was not lost on him. Finally, he got frustrated with himself and shoved himself up out of the seat he'd been in. That was how he found himself standing uncomfortably in the hallway that had a hole in its wall that led down to the lab.
The hallway, like all the hallways in the mansion, had a dull lighting to it from the candles along the walls, but the light coming from down the hole to the lab was nonexistent. Whatever Allen could see from past the entrance was only from the light of the hallway. The stairs went straight down and were made out of a gray stone.
Allen carefully walked down the cold, stone steps. The stairway leading down to the lab felt moist, as if something had been dropped on them. He wasn't sure if that actually happened or if it was the cold air affecting the stonework. The rest of the mansion was much warmer and, from what Allen could remember of it, the lab had been if not warm, then at least arid. Admittedly, he couldn't remember all that much about it and that fact wasn't just because it had been some time since then.
He hadn't paid as much attention to his surroundings as he might have. When he'd woken up, he'd been so disoriented and...he couldn't really blame himself for that. He took a moment to stop walking, to just stand there in that dank tunnel on those wet stone steps, and flex his hand experimentally in front of his face.
There was barely any lighting at all floating down the corridor from the hall above and Allen only had human eyes, but he could still see his fingers curling and extending. The movements were fluid and they came as easily to him as breathing. Yet, he could still remember how it had felt to become alive for the first time he could remember. The first time.
The pain all over his body, the parts that didn't hurt feeling sapped of energy, practically feeling drilled to the table he woke up on even as nothing truly held him down. His limbs felt spectacularly unused and his fingers and toes felt completely stiff to the point where he could barely use them. It felt almost unreal looking back on it now. He got the hang of it pretty soon after that and his body moved easily for him now that it was hard to reconcile the two sensations.
Still, the feeling of being new to his own body was ingrained in his being and it frightened him. Maybe that was part of the reason why he feared the lab so much, though he couldn't completely understand it regardless. He knew he wasn't scared of the place the first and last time he'd been there, he'd left the place completely calm - if a little confused - behind Lavi. He hadn't given the room much thought at all.
Allen shook his head and placed his arm back against the smooth wall to ease his descent and continued with it. He didn't understand completely why he was so afraid of this place, he'd spent so little time in it and nothing had really happened to him there, but all that was important was that he had to go down there, whether he liked it or not.
He'd exhausted almost all of the options he had for finding out more about his past, both the recent and the more distant. He'd tried reading a variety of books from the library and even with more of his days lately being taken up by spending time with Kanda and Lavi, he made good time. Irritatingly though, even as he found so many interesting topics that he liked to look into more, he never found something relating to his search. Any leads he thought he found didn't lead very far at all.
Kanda didn't know anything about his creation by the man's own admissions and Lavi wouldn't talk to him about it. This was his only option. He wasn't sure he would find his answers down there, but it was the only route he hadn't checked that might have something.
Down, down further he spiraled towards the place of such foreboding. The way down was actually a pretty limited distance, the staircase probably being one of the shortest in the entire mansion, yet it felt to Allen like it was taking forever and he couldn't force himself to walk downwards any faster than he was. Every instinct he now had - apparently ones he hadn't before - were screaming at him to go back up. That this wasn't the place for him. Not anymore.
It felt like he was walking back to death itself.
So saying, the oppressive feeling of the hall and the place lurking beneath it didn't go away. It didn't intensify either, though; it stayed the same kind of oppressive the further he got. God, he wanted to run.
FInally, he got to the bottom of the steps. The stone staircase led to a very small square of flooring that maybe measured about four feet in diameter with the same stone walls that had followed him down there closing off the front and right sides. The left side had a heavy looking door in it. Allen took a deep breath to steady himself and then, not letting himself have time to back out, he grabbed the cold iron handle and pushed it open. A small part of him had been mildly expecting the door to be locked, but it wasn't. The lab was just as he remembered it and yet completely different.
Now that he was really paying attention to his surroundings, there were a lot of little things in it. A curious cart with wheels on its bottom that seemed to hold miscellaneous clean tools was pushed close to the corner of the lab. In the center of said lab was the table Allen had woken up on in what felt like half a lifetime ago. The chains that weren't being used for anything still hung loosely on the different corners of the table.
The lab felt a little more cluttered to him now that he was back, but maybe that was because of all the vials, jars, and ingredients that littered the tables and shelves in the place. The boy felt a moderate relief now that he was down here, the place not quite as terrifying as his instincts had insisted it would be, but he still couldn't calm himself completely. This place represented something to him. He wasn't sure what.
Allen stepped heavily through the doorway into the lab, his feet feeling like they were made out of lead. Which was just a trick of his mind, he reminded himself sternly. There was nothing wrong with his body just because he'd gone into the lab, it was just his mind being dramatic.
Allen refused to blink as he walked further into the place and only allowed his eyes to blink closed when he no longer felt like he might book it back out of the room at the slightest hesitation. He let out a shaky breath as his eyes closed, before forcing them back open again and slowly began wandering around the room.
He ran his fingertips over the nearest table, using it as a grounding sensation and as a guide to work his way around the room. He felt the rough wood of the table carefully under his fingers, finding it a safe thing to take interest in, but as he shuffled forward, he allowed himself to cautiously examine whatever his wandering hand ran into.
He picked up the odd vial, but mostly left them on the tables after only moving them around a little to get a good look at them. He was most definitely afraid that he'd drop and break one or more of them if he handled them too much. A few of them had liquids in them, although many more were empty. Few of the filled vials were even halfway full, usually having only about a quarter of an inch of liquid in the containers.
He didn't know how long he trailed around the room, but eventually his mind started to wander and he didn't really refocus until his fingers found the cold metal of a door handle. It was the door to a little closet in the corner of the room that Allen truly hadn't noticed until that point. Glancing down, he noticed a dark red smear on the flooring sliding under the closet door. It looked like something had been dragged under it. He swung the closet door open.
There wasn't anything in it. Some more empty vials in crates and other random supplies. Another red stain on the base of the closet, but nothing immediately visible that could have caused it. Allen swung the door closed and tried not to think about what those stains might be. He...he didn't want to know.
He'd thought about turning back in that moment. He really did. Part of him said there wasn't anything here, part of him said there was too much here. He saw a book. It was sitting on a stool behind the table with the chains. He wouldn't have seen it if he wasn't standing at the right angle to see it. He stepped towards it, his feet barely moving an inch forward with each step.
His hands met the cover and it felt like leather. Not the tough kind, but a thinner and maybe cheaper kind. He turned the cover and the first few pages open. A book on sewing. He hadn't been expecting that. He was going to continue flipping through it, but his hand accidentally pushed the book up a little bit, revealing the corner of another book's cover hidden beneath it.
Allen blinked startled. His small, pale hand shone brightly in the dull lab as it moved the book further out of the way, his other hand reaching underneath it at the same time to pull the new book out from beneath. This one was different. The book and its cover were thicker and heavier and unlike the book with sewing information, looked like it had barely been read. He wasn't sure what the cover was made out of. It seemed like it could have been just as much leather as it could have been anything else.
It was...what was this book about?
He flipped open the cover of it, a little more hesitant than the last time. There was a demon on the inside. It was not the kind like Kanda and actually Allen wasn't sure how he knew what it was supposed to be, just that he did. It was drawn by an incredibly skilled hand and a kind of ink Allen didn't think he'd seen before. Whatever had been used to make the drawing would have been really delicate, making these very thin lines that came together to make the creation.
The demon was a ghastly looking thing, a living shadow. It's eyes were angry, pupil-less triangles, it's muscular arms held over its own body, clawed fingers reaching out towards the reader. It loomed off of the page, glaring sightlessly. Allen got the irrational feeling like it was trying to grab him and take him back. Back where, he couldn't imagine, but the thought nonetheless crossed his mind.
He might have stayed there staring at the picture for minutes if his fingers hadn't found the end of a folded page that acted as a bookmark. The drawing of a demonic creature disappeared behind the pages as Allen flipped through to the marked page. The writing was a little hard for him to read.
Actually, he realized he had never really thought about how he could read, either how he'd learned or how he'd remembered without any memories. He'd never had any trouble, except when he came to large or foreign words that he couldn't recognize the meanings of. It was only now that he found a page of writing so truly difficult to so much identify that he thought about it at all.
Just more questions that needed answering.
Allen brought his face much closer to the book, squinting at the words as he ran his finger along them. He couldn't read them easily, but that didn't mean it was impossible. He could...he could read it barely if he focussed hard enough.
It seemed to be a recipe of some sort...maybe a ritual? A ritualistic recipe for what? Was it related to the demonic drawing on the back of the cover...a ritual to summon a demon? He slowly made his way down the parchment. Each time he finished laboring through a sentence, he would have to go back and string together its meaning to make sure he understood it.
When was this book written? It had to have been a long while ago, but couldn't be so far back that the written language would be unrecognizable…
It was only as Allen started making his way to the bottom half of the third page that a horrifying realization.
It was instructing someone how to create a body!
No...not create...how to use one. It spoke of finding body parts or a whole body...fresh enough to be of use...and the rituals and medical procedures necessary to…
Allen felt like he wanted to throw up a little. Okay, maybe a lot.
He thought he understood what it meant to have been dead and be created in a lab. He thought he'd made peace with that knowledge, but reading how it was done...And the words fresh body parts keep repeating loudly in his mind, deafeningly. It didn't mean anything, it didn't mean anything, he told himself, but he could extricate the information from what he knew of the people he lived with.
Kanda was an aggressive person, but Lavi was the person that created him and Lavi wouldn't...well, wouldn't he?
Would he kill someone just to make him?
Allen's feet took him quickly out of the lab, the cold of the stone steps on his bare feet nowhere near enough to clear the panicky haze from his mind. He was out of the stairway and tearing down the hall faster than he had gone down it and too fast for him to think about what he was going to do.
He caught Lavi in the hallway nearby the kitchen. The vampire was already looking his way when he entered the area. His expression was a greeting one that immediately slipped into something more surprised and wary at seeing whatever expression he saw on Allen's face.
Lavi's eyes dropped to Allen's right hand and his somewhat surprised expression turned to absolute shock and perhaps worry. Allen couldn't make himself look down where Lavi was looking, but he absently tightened his right hand, only to feel the ritual book's familiar binding held strongly in his grip. He hadn't even realized he was still holding it.
Allen just looked back at Lavi, not sure where he was expecting this to go. He couldn't think! He could just see those words over and over again, creating an unpleasant haze in his mind.
"Did you kill people to make me?" Allen demanded desperately, angry tears pricking his eyes as he stared at the vampire whose expression was slowly stonewalling. "How many died so that I could live?"
"Not—Look, Allen, you've got the wrong idea." Lavi tried to explain, but his heart felt like it was seizing in his chest. Even as feelings tore at his chest, his features and body language refused to express any of it. His words failing him, he tried to reach out to Allen, only to have the boy violently slap his hand away, dropping the book he'd been holding as he did so
Allen's hand froze in the air where he'd smacked away Lavi's. His light blue eyes stared at it in horror for several long seconds until he slowly - very slowly - lowered it so it was held out in front of him. He continued to stare at it in horror.
"This hand…" He whispered out with a shaky voice, barely audible to human hearing but ringing loudly enough to Lavi's ears. "Is it really mine?"
Lavi's breath caught in his throat as he watched, only able to stare at the emotional breakdown enfolding in front of him. All the centuries he'd lived and he had nothing in the face of his creation losing it. It was his fault. He didn't know why or what he could have done differently, but the swirling feelings in his chest insisted that it was his fault.
"!-" Allen spoke again, his voice sounding vacant and his wide eyes staring at a far off point over the vampire's shoulder. "I have to go. I can't stay here."
Only now-now did Lavi's expression change. Crumple, really, as the stress of the situation got to him. "Allen, what are you saying? You can't leave-!" It was like the redhead's words released whatever had frozen Allen and like that, the boy was off.
He ran.
Lavi could have caught him. Lavi should have caught him. Lavi was a vampire and whatever else he might be, the boy was still human. Lavi didn't have the speed of Kanda, but he had more than enough to tackle a young human. He did give chase, but - crucially - he himself had frozen for near a minute.
The unbelievability of the situation, how quickly everything seemed to go to hell, and his own clenching chest pains of emotion made it difficult for his usually lightning fast brain to come around to what it needed to do. He needed to catch the boy, to keep him there by any means necessary, but his brain didn't seem to control his body anymore. Just for a moment.
Then, like the boom of a bullet exiting a rifle, Lavi's advanced vampiric hearing picked up the sound of the front door of the mansion slamming shut. The boy had already left the building. He was now outside.
Snapped out of his stupor by the frightening reality check, Lavi shot out of the hall and through several rooms to the door. He threw the front door open and flung himself out onto the lawn. His mind was too focused on his task and hazed by panic for him to think of going to get Yu in the moment, but later he would lament the fact that he hadn't. Yu would have been able to catch the boy with little problem.
Lavi wasn't used to being inadequate at tasks, but he'd already failed by letting Allen get a head start. Their argument had happened on the first floor, meaning even Allen's human running speed was able to get him through the door and outside in very little time. Lavi's hesitation in chasing him ultimately destroyed his ability to catch the frantic boy, who only had one place to go in order to escape.
Into the forest.
Allen was already out of sight by the time Lavi was out; nowhere to be seen. There was only one place where he could've gone really, since the entirety of the outside perimeter of their home was surrounded with thick forest stretching out in every direction for miles and miles.
If Allen wanted to leave, he had to go through the forest and in his current state of mind, there was no doubt that the boy had plunged head first into the forest without thinking. That thought caused Lavi himself to run into the forest without thinking. He tore through the forest path directly in front of the mansion, likely telegraphing his location to Allen if the creation was still close enough to hear it.
Yet, if he did take the time to think about it, what good would have that done? It would've only given his creation more time to get a greater distance away. Even panicking the way he was, the vampire's keen eyes had taken in additional information about his surroundings. The front of the home and probably all sides of it had Allen and Yu's footprints all over it, maybe some of them as fresh as that afternoon. They would be useless for determining which way the boy had gone.
Still, his mind was dulled and not thinking clearly. At this point was definitely when he should have gone and gotten Yu, hopefully to track Allen down before the boy could completely disappear from the area. Yu's senses of smell and sight along with many other senses were stronger than Lavi's and where Allen seemed to be just barely past the notice of his vampiric senses, he wouldn't be unnoticable by the demon.
He didn't think of that at the time. All he thought about was that he needed to catch Allen before something happened to him. These woods were dangerous. Humans have probably entered the woods from the opposite side, but they've never made it out the other side to the mansion. The forest was a good size and while not densely populated, could house any number of other monsters that loved preying on humans.
If Allen was running around in there as scared as Lavi had seen him a few moments ago, then that made it even worse. Increased heart rate and panic could make the boy more easily detectable by some creatures, especially if he was crashing and smashing through the forest like Lavi was.
Speaking of…
Lavi smelled something. Not Allen, something else. A Jikininki.
They didn't hunt by smell or sight so they would be able to find Allen if it was still in the forest, which Lavi was sure he was, and they would be able to do it before Lavi did. They couldn't hurt Lavi - they wouldn't even try - but if Allen so much as caught a good glimpse of one as they closed in on his location, then he would already be a goner.
I have no choice, Lavi thought to himself, clenching a hand onto the front of his shirt in frustrated anger. Allen was hiding somewhere nearby. Lavi couldn't sense him, but these creatures could. Lavi might be able to scare them away or at least distract them by making a nuisance of himself, but doing that would give Allen a clear opportunity to get the rest of the way out of the forest.
If he protected the boy now, he'd basically be giving up his last chance to catch him.
Did he want to do that?
He could use the creatures to find Allen by going quiet and waiting for them to track the human down in a large group and then come out.
...If he did that, he ran a real risk of Allen being killed, seriously hurt, or traumatized by the experience. But if he distracted the creatures from finding Allen, the boy would get away…
But he would be safe, at least.
Lavi took a deep breath, flung his head back with his wild red hair flying everywhere, and howled.
