- Twelfth Petal -
Serenity
With each falling petal, Kanda falls.
He stands in a dilapidated, broken house lighted with naught but the frail beam of the half-obscured moon. His boots nudge against fallen articles of the building, touching but not knocking aside wrecked tables, crushed shards of glass, burnt clay jars, crinkled plants, and rotting flesh mingled with stringy hair. A low rumbling is all that reverberates across the place in the wary folds of the night. In the far distance, unheard by Kanda, are the cries and clashes of his fellow Exorcists, deep in battle with the enemy and long separated from him when a sudden quake splintered the ground and a gargantuan army of Akuma swept down and around them in a flurry of gray metal and battered rocks.
Now only the steady drone of pulsing infernos is within the realm of his consciousness. It is gentle, even soothing, to the weary swordsman, whose hand barely grasps the smooth hilt of his silvery blade. He blinks, swaying in the crooning notes of the fiery night and feeling the lilting melody of singing flames cleanse him of the blood splattering his coat and face, of the pain of gushing wounds embedded in his chest and abdomen and limbs. The symphony reaches a ringing climax, and in a sudden detonation of angry flames and flying wood, an Akuma crashes down upon him.
"Che, missed one."
He swings Mugen in a swift arc and destroys the demon, who explodes into a creature of splintered metal and fire and joins the blistering harmony of the night. The effort proves too harsh on Kanda's tender body. The barely-healed wounds crack upon once more, being unable to recover as quickly as they once did. Gasping and flinching, he crumbles onto the rough ground and watches apathetically as warm blood seeps through the fingers that he presses against the fleshy gap. He closes his eyes. Even with the mountains and forests of distance between him and the Black Order headquarters, he knows that there is only one more petal left.
Allowing a grimace to pass over his smudged face, Kanda knows he definitely has been overdoing it in the past months—no, years. When did he start volunteering for so many dangerous, almost-suicidal missions? Lenalee has constantly pestered him to stop undertaking the tasks and rest; no human can possibly see through so many life-threatening situations, after all! But Kanda again and again has proved them wrong, returning from the latest trip to Munich and stomping back from an Innocence-retrieval somewhere in the Sahara Desert, always fully healed and sometimes mildly injured. Always ignored Komui's wary eye. Always survived, always lived and continued battling, even at the cost of chipping away at his life until he reaches the final point of his curse. Too late to do anything about it now.
His quivering lungs yearn for fresh air now. Forcing his feet to trudge across the scarlet dust of the crumbled building, he manages to stumble his way into the main path of the destroyed village and gasps into the smoky air. The acrid sting of belching smoke and growling flames greets his liberation from the imprisoning skeletons of wood, joined by the red-orange of shuddering blazes. The infernos are no longer tranquil but are now an angry cacophony. They furiously graze at his elbows and ankles, threatening to pull him into their fiery core like ravishing wolves.
The swirling heat of cinders and ash fly into his loose long hair, prodding at his raw flesh and exacerbating his condition. He continues to gasp and choke in the burning air as he coughs up a sludge of blood onto the dusty path and falls to the ground. In the midst of his aching, smoldering pain and crouching on all fours, he feels his heart tremble irregularly like a petal that hangs pitifully from the wrinkling stem of a lotus flower. That moyashi won't be too happy at seeing him pushed to such limits, always chattering on and on about how he'll protect everyone. Such arrogance. Not that he's one to talk.
Kanda grits his teeth and forces himself to stand up.
"I won't die…" he mutters. "Not yet… not yet…"
Yet his disobeying legs give way again, and his own determination shatters in a flash of pain, sneering flames, and sandy earth. His misty eyes stare through bloodied wisps of dark blue bangs into the red night sky of swirling cinders and ash and shuddering red-orange blazes. He is strangely reminded of the baka usagi, who flaming red hair is constantly one of the first sights he sees each morning in the cafeteria. Such a nuisance, really, but he finds himself yearning to see the familiar cheerful face and glittering emerald eyes once again, to reassure himself that he is still of this world. Instead, his mouth wordlessly utters unspoken words: I won't die, not yet… His consciousness ebbs and flows between worlds of startling red and endless black. Even through the thickening myopia of his mind, Kanda feels a twinge of déjà vu, that he witnessed a similar fiery scene before. But where—?
Another bloodied coughing fit cuts off his crumbling train of thought, and he forgets the strangling frustration and falls onto his back, barely wincing with the impact. Grimly, he notes that his long blue hair, now wildly splayed across the gritty ground, will never again be washed by his long fingers, slathered with bubbly soap suds and amazingly tender for such a weathered swordsman. Never again will he dip his chopsticks into a fragrant bowl of faintly sweet soup and relish in the firmly soft feel of soba noodles. Never again will he see them again, snap at them, scowl at them, scoff at them. Never again. He has failed his own mission. The realizations befall upon him surprisingly gently.
Kanda stares unseeingly at the glowing sky of faint stars. His last view of this world. His sight is dimming, dimming. Soon the last petal will fall. Seemingly far away, the fires crackle and mask the approach of a solitary figure towards the dying man, the Exorcist known as Kanda Yuu who is falling, nearly falling off the threshold of life and slipping away, falling, falling, nearly falling into a sort of inevitable serenity.
A/N: Kanda…! T.T
Um, to brighten up the angsty mood, here are some tasty virtual rice crackers for namikun masaki, chibi yoruichi, InfinityOnTheRun, azab, Belladonna-Isabella, Shinigami's Voice, Velvet Blindfold, Maedhros, pika318, whiteninjaachemist, MorbidFacelift, Ishikawa Yui, Moon-Dash, Kuro666, AnimeFanAmber, chibi.hazel-chan, nellchan0013, and RebelFlame. Thank you for your subscriptions and/or kind reviews. I hope I did not too rudely shove you into a swamp of angst…
D.Gray-Man (c) Hoshino Katsura