Day two. Bookman got it right, that's for sure.

Watching the next few parts will be difficult.

It's the simple things. When it comes down to it, it's always the simple things that really ever matter, that really ever stand out in all of space and time. When you've lived like this all your life, you realize you really only ever want to remember the stupid, little things.

Elaine calls it living. In retrospect though, of course she would.

Sometimes, conversation is enough. Sometimes, conversation is all it takes.

He'd never imagined he'd be one of those kinds of overbearing, god-awful cheesy people though, but what the hell. He takes it all in stride anyway, like he's done all his life. This time, it isn't the concept that's new, but the feeling.

And that's kind of.

"Hey, where are you staying at anyway?"

He lazily opens an eye. "Hm?"

"I mean, since you and your grandpa are just visiting. But you guys have been for a while... not that that's a bad thing or anything, of course. Have you guys just been staying at the inn this whole time?"

It seems fairly obvious to him. "Well, yeah."

"Oh."

"Why?"

She hesitates a bit this time. "Well... doesn't it get kind of lonely sometimes? If it's just the two of you there and all, I mean."

He'd never thought about it that way. For Bookmen, work is just meant to be done in the most efficient manner possible. "Not really."

"Hey Deak, do you guys want to come over for dinner sometime?" And then she describes where she lives. He recognizes the place.

He balks at just thinking of what Bookman's reaction to something like this would be. "No, it's alright, honest, we won't be here for much longer anyway," he says hastily. "That's what gramps said. Oh, and gramps doesn't really like those kinds of social gatherings anyway."

A pause, "Really?"

Oh. He scratches at the back of his head. "Yeah, seems like our work here is done."

"Oh."

A slight silence, before he breaks it cheerfully. "Well, thanks for the consideration anyway."

"So is this what you've decided to do? Taking after your grandpa, I mean."

She's referencing a previous conversation now. He knows the one she's talking about. She's talking about how he said he'd once considered to be an artisan.

His smile is languid. He should probably take more pride in this. "Yeah. It's what I decided."

"Do you like it?"

He pauses. "For the most part."

"Well, that's good." She pauses and thinks about it for a bit. "I mean, I think doing things only matters if you're doing what you want to. And yeah, I know this is going to sound really childish and naive and all but we all have our dreams, right?"

He blinks. He hadn't been thinking anything like this. "Dreams?"

"The things we want to happen. The things we'd chase after to make true."

The things we want to happen. She's right. The idea really is childish and naïve. "But they're called dreams because they won't happen," he points out.

A short silence, and then she smiles. "You're probably right," she admits sheepishly. "But I still think it's good to have one. So that you have something you can turn to when you need it."

"Huh. Sounds like you already have something in mind. So what's your dream then?"

She considers for a bit. "One I probably wouldn't mind trading my life for if it could come true," she answers a little vaguely.

He yawns. "You know how suicidal that sounded just now?"

"I don't want to hear that from someone who actually is."

"Well then."

"No, I'm just kidding, but..." She sits up straighter now. "But well, if it means that I've lived the truest way I could, then I don't mind, I think. I mean, it's all in the plan in the end though, you know? I trust His plan for me."

She's referring to God's plan now, he realizes. Well, there is a plan, that's for sure. A plan that he and his ancestors have watched for just short of eternity, a plan that none of them will ever comprehend. He closes his eyes again. "I guess."

A few days after.

He hesitates.

She's not crying yet, but it comes pretty close. He's still young and naive and he still doesn't really know how to handle these kinds of situations. He scratches at the back of his head uncomfortably.

"Hey, you alright?" He asks before realizing how stupid that sounds. Of course she isn't.

Her eyes are almost brimming with clear liquid. It's like that split-second before you realize the whole world's falling apart and there's nothing much you can do about it. She's open about stuff like that, but there's still a subtle note of bitterness, "Well, not really."

He's not sure what to say. "Oh."

"My family's kind of falling apart," Elaine half-tries.

Now he really doesn't know what to say.

She carries on, pulling at the weeds. "So you know how I said my mom wasn't getting any better? Well, when you don't get better, that just means that you're getting worse, huh?"

"Things have to get worse before they get better," he says unhelpfully before realizing that this is also probably not the right thing to say.

She breaks from her bitterness for a bit and looks up doubtfully. "I can't tell if that's supposed to be reassuring or not."

"It is," he reasserts, mouth loped easy. "Well, kind of. I mean, if you think about it, it makes sense. Really."

She resorts to pulling at the grass again. "Well, I hope that's true then."

They scatter in bits of dirt.

A pause, before she picks at it again. "That things will get better again. I mean, well yeah, of course they will, but it's just kind of hard to see from here, you know? When everything is going all wrong."

He can relate to that easily enough. The first part, anyway. "Yeah, I get what you mean." He actually doesn't know much about things getting better, but it's enough for now.

"Yeah..." her voice trails off for a bit. Her smile is half-assed. It's the first time he's seen it like this. "Let's hope you're right."

"Yeah," is all he can manage to bring out. He grins toothily, reassures, "'Course it will. Come on, have a little more faith."

Faith.

And it's not like he's known her for a long time or anything – just a span of weeks on weeks – but he's never seen her like this before.

He'd never imagined he'd have to.

Bookman comes back on the third day.

Lavi greets Bookman with an easy, amicable smile when the elder finally comes back from the short trip. When Bookman had left to record and given him a seven-day limit to get his act back together. "How'd it go?"

Bookman is mild. "The usual," he says. "I'd imagine you probably have a good idea of what transpired."

A beat, "Yeah, probably."

Bookman pulls out a chair, takes a seat. "What about things on your side?"

Bookman is watching him. Bookman is back to being Bookman, and the thought is probably more comforting than it should be. It is enough to remind him where he should stand, and there's nothing out there scarier than the uncertainty of not knowing.

But this still takes considerable precaution. "My side?"

Bookman is articulate as ever with his language. "Your problem," he indicates blandly. "Are you sorting it out?"

"Something like that."

Bookman is serious. "Lavi."

Lavi blinks before the corners of his mouth tip up in another easy and hopefully reassuring grin. "Well, it's moving at its own pace, somewhat," he admits. "But I gotcha, gramps. I'm working on it. Honest. I won't mess up from here."

Bookman is still very skeptical, he notices. Bookman is a discreet person by nature, but Lavi can tell. He's lived long enough for at least this.

"How's your eye?" Bookman finally asks next.

Lavi touches that cloth of eye patch on instinct. The rest is short, and automatic. "It's fine." Or well, he thinks it is, anyway.

There is a long silence before Bookman says anything else. Bookman closes his eyes, and Lavi can see the definition of wrinkles folded flat across the hardened planes of his face. This is a face that has already seen through both illusion and reality, both truth and pretense. He might have been there before too.

Bookman doesn't betray any indication of empathy when he speaks up again. He folds his hands together. "As a Bookman, you have the ability to record—to remember everything you've ever seen. It's what you do."

Lavi blinks. This is stuff he already more than knows, and both of them know that. "Um, yeah."

"Your right eye," Bookman indicates next, and Lavi stills. "You're still watching the past right now, aren't you?"

A pause. "Yeah," he confesses.

Bookman closes his eyes for a short moment. "How far back are you right now?"

Another moment of hesitation. "Not that far. Only a few months from today."

"So it's Deak."

"Yeah."

Bookman doesn't explicitly question this any further. It isn't Bookman's style to anyway, and that's one thing that Lavi can be grateful for. He can't pull off a confession like this to Bookman. This is one of those things he'd rather keep to himself for all of forever than to have to admit to.

There is a glimmer in Bookman's eyes again. "You've left something unresolved," he says, and it is not quite a question or an accusation, even though there is a little of both in his words.

"Yeah," he admits after a while. This goes entirely against Bookman's principles. "Kind of."

Bookman just tips his head down slightly in acknowledgment. "Then I suppose you are to watch until past and present time meet," he muses.

He'd already figured as much. "That's what I thought. But is there a way around—"

"The past is already recorded, Lavi," Bookman reminds.

Frustration seeps into his voice now. "So I just watch?"

"Yes." Another moment passes before Bookman speaks up again. Bookman pauses. "No."

Lavi blinks. "What?"

Bookman stands up from his seat with calm, fluid movements. "I don't know what you're seeing. Your records are your own." Bookman's words are careful. "But since this is happening like this, there will probably a point in time where the younger you—Deak, I assume—will want to rewrite."

Rewrite.

The word goes completely against all of the Bookmen principles—all of the rules that dictate history and allow records to be properly recorded and kept permanent for all of eternity. His mouth suddenly feels dry.

"And at that point, the present you might need to take action."

Bookman's tone is perfectly ambivalent, but the implication sinks in slow.

He's still too young for this.

Bookman closes his eyes and turns to leave the room. "There's something I'll need to check out," he says. "I'll be back before we head back to the Order."

"Wait, gramps." There is a hint of desperation hanging at the edges of the thread of his words now. This is just so—he's lost in all of space and time, and he waits until Bookman looks back before, "What—what do you think I should do?"

For a while, Bookman just looks his apprentice noncommittally. Or maybe there might have been pity. It doesn't even matter anymore. He can't even care about the present anymore, can't bring himself to consider this while all he can see is the past already long gone.

"I already told you," Bookman says, and this time there's a sense of finality loaded in the scheme of his syntax. There's a certain look in his eyes, one that is better left unsaid. This is another sort of test. "You have to decide for yourself."

Day four, and Bookman's words aren't exactly helping. You're watching the past, Lavi, and you've forgotten how to look forward. He can practically see the metaphoric clocks counting down to the seconds now. The clock only turns one way, the counter way, and there's nothing he can do but watch his own recorded history scream it out right in front of him.

So it goes.

Of course it happens like this.

He really should know better than this after all this time, but what the hell. Just for one day, he thinks. It'll just be for one day, and then he'll go back to being the proper Bookman-in-training he's always aspired to be. And besides, Bookmen don't make many promises. And when they do, they don't make the ones they can't keep, he reasons. It'll be fine.

Lavi pushes the thought aside and heads into the bakery. He's been in here a few times, so he whistles amiably and waves when he enters. "Hey," he says cheerfully.

The shopkeeper sighs in good humor when he recognizes him. "What is it this time, Deak?"

Lavi looks appropriately insulted. "Aw hey, what's with that tone?" He looks around the shop. "Anyway, I was hoping to buy some bread."

"Just one loaf, right?"

He reflects a bit and wonders if this had been the shop she'd went to that first time, when he'd been wandering on a still vague line between Seral and Deak. "Yeah, I'd guess so," he muses. "Yeah, actually, that sounds about right."

"Got it," the shopkeeper acknowledges while he sorts out the bread.

The smell of fresh loaves.

It really is warm, and comforting, too, he realizes.

He wonders what it had been he'd felt.

Because now, the feeling's changed.

The shopkeeper interrupts his train of thought jokingly. "Hey, don't go stealing in this good town. Pay up properly, Deak."

"Oh, right." Lavi fumbles around for some change. "Thanks!" He calls out when the bells chime again.

Bookman definitely won't approve of this.

It's probably a good thing that Bookman doesn't know, he considers. Well, hopefully he doesn't know about all this.

After all, well, you looked like you need it, so here is how it starts between him and her. It'd been so wholly whimsical and so unexpected too, and he'd never imagined that he'd ever return the favor. He pauses.

The gesture just feels appropriate, he decides. He's working by instinct today. Off the clock.

He makes it to the last intersection when he actually starts to recollect the whole relationship. Bookman had made himself pretty clear when he'd said that. You should get ready to uproot yourself. There's really only one way to look at a statement like that.

He'd been thinking about Seral. About how Seral had dealt with things – a punch straight in the face. Seral had gotten in his first fist fight, and it had been everything he'd never expected. It had been satisfying, a good solid end, and he had been able to become Deak.

The him now.

He closes his eyes.

Deak is different. Different, and inconsistent with the pattern he's supposed to be following.

He's realizing this slow. He walks the next two blocks in silence, bag of bread clutched in between his two lanky arms.

That bag of bread.

Are you giving this 'cause you pity me or something?

I get the feeling you're about to kill yourself.

He'd really never ever imagined that he would attempt to comfort someone like this. The corners of his mouth tip up wryly.

It's kind of.

Mechanics click.

And blinks.

He stops walking and almost drops the bag of bread. His mouth feels dry, but his fingers—his motor neurons aren't cooperating properly. He tries to swallow too, but the only thing he can do is watch stupidly.

This.

This thing with cannons contorted and protruding all over its body, and striped horns on its head, and black ink painted in thick stars over gunmetal eyelids, and stretches of flimsy human skin begging to be sutured together at the seams. Somehow, with a sinking feeling, he already has a notion of what this is supposed to be.

This, he thinks, is probably what Bookman had called an akuma. A demon. A killing machine.

His mouth feels dry. Bookman's words are spinning.

He shows them a framework of a special skeleton, tells them that all that's needed for revival is the dead soul, and coaxes them to cry out their beloved's name to draw out the soul.

Bookman hadn't ever really described it physically, but he can just tell. Just looking at it, just breathing the same air it's standing in, just... just. It's nauseating. He puts a hand over his mouth.

This couldn't have once been human, but.

The thing's mouth is bleeding in black.

The boy in front of it is shaking. Screaming. Crying.

And.

And his own eyes. They faithfully record every second of it.

When it is all over, when all he can hear is his pulse in his numbed ears, he turns and runs away from all he knows. When he can't find his legs anymore, he can feel his lunch. His breakfast comes next.

It isn't until much later when he remembers the bread again. But now, the loaf is already dry and hardened, and it'd probably be more of an insult to present to anyone at all. Even the pigeons deserve better than this half-assed attempt.

The context has changed too, and all he feels now is a sense of the most terrific helplessness. He'd never imagined it to look like that. He's still shaking.

And now there's this too.

He presses a hand at his temples.

This is just too much at once.

Her real name is Madeline.

It's a little late in the game, but he finds out when he rereads the obituary section from the weekly paper. He'd just skimmed through it at first, because honestly after a while they just bleed together, but then he'd actually looked at the accompanying photograph of the woman and her family printed alongside the article. He had remembered it of course, but he hadn't given it thought. Now he knows why that article had felt wrong to read the first time.

The girl in the clipped family photograph.

He closes his eyes.

Margaret Wheeler had died four days ago. Margaret Wheeler had been married to Daniel Sather and had one child, Madeline Sather. The former Mrs. Sather had been a homemaker. After years of struggling and vague diagnoses and misdiagnoses, the mother had succumbed to death. Rest in peace.

He pauses, thinks about what he had seen just days before with a brush of wariness. And there's what Bookman had said when he'd told the elder about his first time seeing an akuma. Bookman had that same glimmer in his eyes again when he had said it.

Bookman had said, "It's beginning."

Lavi had just blinked. "What is?"

"We're about to record another war, Deak. A different war now."

"Different?"

"The war against akuma."

"Right."

Realities like these just aren't supposed to exist.

"Deak, I've been researching. It seems as though the Millennium Earl is moving more actively nowadays."

He'd left it at a nonchalant "Okay," but now.

But now.

She wouldn't though, right? He thinks about it again grimly. She actually might, and that's probably the truth of it.

He hesitates, glances back at the dry, crusted loaf of bread, and kind of makes a decision. Or something like one, anyway. He grabs a coat, and the bag of bread, and there is something like the almost desperation of a half-prayer too.

Elaine.

Or Madeline.

It can't hurt.

Five.

He already knows what is to come next in the story. It isn't hard for someone who remembers everything he's ever seen, but his fingers are itching in raw anticipation anyway. Maybe it really is possible for things to be harder to handle the second time around.

This isn't acceptance of what's about to happen, but records are records, the past is white ink bled dry, and there are no two ways around that. Everything is happening just as he remembers them to, and he's holding his breath slow, clenching his fists tight. There's no need to count to nine today.

They are at the cemetery again, only now the context of the place has changed. This isn't exactly a respected burial ground anymore; it's more like the prelude to a spiritual bloodbath, and the rest is already decided by the records. The rest is meant to happen in quick succession.

Lavi watches this last bit with a hand pressed over his mouth. There's so much he knows now, so much he's seen, in hindsight. Hindsight can't do a goddamn thing.

A shadow of a smile.

"Madeline, was it?"

Elaine. She's crying.

"If you had the chance to change your past," asks the Earl, "would you?"

And that look. And that goddamn look in her eyes when her mouth parts.

It's like.

Because. Because even when no one's there, God's still listening.

Your question from earlier about why people believe and all? Well, there's always going to be suffering. No one ever promised a fair or easy life. Things'll look up again if you just keep your end of the deal.

I trust His plan for me.

He can't tell whose breath is hitched now.

And spin.

And the stars again.

Burning.

There's a time limit, Deak.

A time limit. Do you think there's anything we can do about it other than stupidly watch it pass by?

The Earl is expectant.

And he's not thinking anymore. He's already made a decision without even consciously realizing it. Maybe it's not even him who does any of this, but it is done. He plunges, and reaches.

Deak.

Elaine.