A/N: I switched to first person a little of the way through because that seemed much more fun and had to go back and change all the pronouns so my bad if I missed any. Might make for some awkward writing but I tried to fix it as much as possible.
Warnings for mucho blood, gore, and language, somebody tell me if I should up the rating, and let me know if anyone has a better way to change scenes please.
Day 1
These burdens weigh me down…they weigh a hundred tons. My back is broken. They are dragging me down with them. These thoughts. These feelings. This pain. I am slowly dying, trapped within my own mind.
But I will fight. And I will lose, but I will drag this burden on until the day I die, fighting tooth and nail with every step I take. I will die an exorcist. I will die, an exorcist.
A sharp jab with a blunt object and my side exploded in pain.
I blearily opened my single eye, groaning. A navy-haired, gray-skinned, black-hearted, adolescent girl's head floated into my vision; far to close to my face. Behind her was the nightmarish room which had been my home for the past seven months.
Perfectly wrapped presents were littered around the room in huge piles and menacing teddy bears sat or lay everywhere like demons in a harmless disguise. Viciously pointed candles hovered in the air, spears ready for the kill.
I saw the never-ending night sky high above, a void without the stars and moon that brought light to the real night. But of course, nothing was real here. Everything was in my mind. I groaned and shut my eye.
"Wakey, wakey, sleep times over, geezer-hair. Come on, its time to play!"
Make me.
Rhode shouted excitedly and jabbed me again with the thick metal pole in her hands.
I was kidding, I was just kidding!
I doubled over on the ground and half grunted, half screamed through clenched teeth.
Not yet. Don't show her the pain just yet.
"Hah! Try that one on for size, geezer-hair."
"Sorry, I don't speak psycho-bitch." I gasped out. "Too bad there's no psycho-bitch-to-English translators here in hell."
"Shut up and let me hear you scream, Walker." Rhode grinned evilly. And smacked me again with that damn pole. I coughed up blood, but it didn't even faze me.
Blood-shmud, its when you start coughing up organs that you have to start worrying.
"Masochist."
In answer she took a full swing at me with her pole and I took it squarely in the stomach. I started to scream but was interrupted by my displaced stomach fluids and meals of the past coming up to greet the world for the second time (in a much less appetizing state).
That was only half a scream. It doesn't really count.
"That's much better." Rhode said.
I swear to God, I'm dragging you down with me when I go, slut.
I wiped blood and stomach acid from my lips and shakily stood. I leaned on a giant rectangular present with a big black bow and spoke in a quiet voice dripping with hate. "That hurt, you dirty child-whore fuck-head."
Rhode tched. "Come on Walker, you're better than that. Fuck-head? Seriously?"
"Shaddup Captain Pirate-hooker. And don't you think it's a little early for torture?"
"Its never too early to play with my favorite toy." Rhode said devilishly and bounced around me, dangerous metal pole still in her grip.
"And do you always break your toys?"
Oops. Said that one out loud.
Rhode turned to face with a look of bewilderment on her face. "There's something else you can do with them?"
"Obviously…"
Rhode spun around again and laughed mirthlessly. "I was just kidding Walker." She said. "All my toys are made to be broken."
"Hurry up and get it over with then."
Dammit, out loud again. Get a hold of yourself Allen.
"Not yet, Walker," she smiled satanically, "The Earl wants you out of the game until he finishes stacking the deck. By that time this world will be quite considerably fucked up enough for us to just sit back and watch you exorcists and your pathetic, hopeless struggle."
"Well, well, are we done with our little speech yet, my bitchy blue-nette?"
Rhode came up right into my face and with in a quiet menacing voice said:
"Oh yes, Walker, we are done, and so are all your little buddies in tights."
I couldn't help it. She threatened my nakama. I spit right in her face.
It only got about halfway there. Rhode eyed the saliva directly in front of her with a funny look on her face. It wasn't spite, or malice, or joy in cruelty, those I knew very well. It was anger. For the first time, I had seen Rhode angry.
I quickly realized this situation had skipped worse and gone from bad straight to downright hellish. I opened my mouth without any idea of what to say to my torturess. I never had the chance to speak, because for the second time that day, I vomited blood. And kept vomiting. I looked down in astonishment, and saw a hole in the center of my chest approximately the size of a lugie.
Over the ringing in my ears I heard a voice "Never, ever forget who is in control here, Walker."
I fell to the ground in a pool of blood, mine, I realized hazily. That's a lot of blood, I thought. The ringing grew louder.
Rhode looked at my prone body with distaste, and closed her eyes. When she opened them I was lying face down on the dry floor; the hole in my chest just a bad memory, and the ringing gone as well.
"Looks like playtimes done for today, old man, I'll be back soon with more fun." Rhode said as she planted my face into the ground with her heel. "Ta ta for now."
And with that spectacular remark, she vanished into thin air, and I was safe for another few hours.
No I would not forget anytime soon who held the power in the situation. But I remembered that strange, angered face. Even Rhode had an ounce of humanity left in her. And humans were not invincible.
[Scene Break
"Lenalee." A soothing voice whispered.
The slim sixteen-and-a-half year old in question mumbled something incomprehensibly in her sleep and rolled over.
"Lenalee, wake up." The voice spoke again, and a pair of strong hands shook the young girl gently.
As Lenalee's eyes shot open, she twirled around and grabbed the impostor's right hand and began to press hard on the center of the man's wrist.
"Ow, ow, ow, that huuuurts Lenalee!" Lavi whined as he struggled to free himself from iron grip of the surprisingly strong girl in front of him.
The pain stopped as immediately as it had began and Lavi opened his eyes to see a silver cross below him with a navy background behind it. His first thought was that Lenalee had killed him and he was entering heaven, but as his eyes followed the spine of the cross he saw a mass of shimmering dark green hair.
"Lenalee?" He questioned as he slowly knelt down to stare at the bowing girl in front of him. "Sheesh, what was that—" Lavi stopped immediately as he saw rain running down Lenalee's two ponytails and dripping off the ends to form identical glistening puddles on the hewn stone floor below.
He looked up at the sky and saw only the arched stone ceiling of the Order's personal suites, reserved solely for its exorcists.
"Ah." Tears, he added silently to himself.
"Please forgive me." Lenalee spoke quietly. To harm her friends, no matter how, was unforgivable.
Eyepatch just stared at her, for once at a loss for words.
Lenalee, her head still facing the floor, hair still dripping tears, repeated herself. "Forgive me, Lavi."
Lavi smacked himself on the forehead, put his hand on Lenalee's head, and patted awkwardly.
"No, you forgive me," he said, a tad michevious, "I must've spilled some of my ice water on your face." Lavi ignored the fact that he hadn't had a glass of water since yesterday, and continued to pat Lenalee's head comfortingly.
She looked up at him through tearstained eyes, and smiled bravely. "You're a horrible liar sometimes, you know."
Lavi noticed her voice still shook a little as she spoke. He wasn't an idiot. At least not completely. Something was still bothering her.
"Sometimes." He said as Lenalee stood upright. "Sometimes."
And he had more than a pretty good idea of what it was bothering her. Or who it was.
Lenalee walked into an adjacent room and Lavi began to follow, deep in thought. Lenalee turned around and stared at him until he looked up. "Excuse me?" She joked. "Do you know where you're going?"
Lavi had the decency to blush. They were standing in the decorative doorway of the master bathroom of Lenalee's suite, and she herself was fiddling with the dials that brought steaming water streaming into the huge bath in the center of the room.
"Ah, I'll just, leave, I guess…" He said awkwardly as he began to back into her bedroom.
"That would be for the best." Lenalee said, a hint of counterfeit humor still on her voice.
Lavi understood when he was being told not to bring up painful subjects. But as he crossed over to the thick wooden door he wavered, remembering the tremor in Lenalee's voice. He turned toward the velvet curtain Lenalee had drawn across the doorway.
"Lenalee—"He began. Lenalee cut him off "I dreamed about him last night." She said, voice full of an incurable pain. "Again."
"I know," he said, and sighed, "you were screaming in your sleep. That's why I woke you up."
Silence.
Lavi exited quickly, leaving Lenalee to her own storm of emotions as she found her eyes were leaking ice water for the second time already that day.
[Scene Break
Day 1 (Cont.)
I am tired. So tired. Around me are the teddy bears, and the wrapped boxes, and the floating candles that want to stab me.
Yeah that's a great way to go out. The headlines will read: "Boy stabbed to death by ferocious candles". Sweeeet…
My heavy eyelids flutter down on their own accord. Rhode will hurt me. I know this. But Rhode always hurts me, and why should I not use these few precious moments to sleep if I want to. The darkness overtakes everything.
Soon they flicker open again to a bright, slowly swinging light. The candles and presents and bears have vanished. Back and forth, back and forth, the pendulum of light floats before me. Am I dying? I ask myself. Not likely. Rhode said she wouldn't kill me just yet. And Rhode always keeps her promises.
I look around and see cracked concrete walls with exposed brick beneath, and a oak door that discourages any attempts to escape with looks alone. I feel a burning pain in my hands and feet, and my vision is temporarily blurred with something dark and hot flowing down my face.
When I can see again, I turn my head half an inch, an immense effort. Before my brain even registers what I am seeing, my body reacts and I vomit loudly. Through each of my hands is a nail that fixes me to what looks like a wooden plank. Another turn of my head downwards reveals the same fate for my feet. Looking up I can see the edges of what I now realize to be branches of some sort. Their thorns bite into my head. No, not branches, but a wreath. A laurel.
Suddenly everything clicks into place, and I realize with a pathetic moan the seriousness of my situation. Crucifixion.
The vague thought floats through my mind that at least that would be way more macho than death by candles. I laugh, a wheeze that turns into a full blown heaving of my chest before I can stop.
Suddenly I see a flash of gold, wings, a tail, and the floating golden thing that was my only source of light disappears.
Tears trickle down my face. I liked the light. It seemed, somehow, friendly. And I sure could use a friend right now.
I sleep again.
My eyes shot open and I gasped for air like a fish out of water. I sat up immediately, more wide awake than I had been for months. I had a dream.
For all the time I had been in Rhode's prison I had never dreamt. Maybe it was because I couldn't dream within my mind, or maybe Rhode just didn't want me to unless she said so. But when I awoke I remembered the cross and the wreath on my head with a shiver, but more importantly I remembered the golden blur.
Tim.
The hope I had gone to sleep with came rushing back and it was like the sun was shining all around me. There was still a chance, however small. I could survive. Rescue. That one small word and I was in tears.
I had hoped of rescue, for about a month or so. Nothing had happened, nothing came, and slowly it dwindled. Then Rhode decided to do her little "Rescue Walker" skit, and I hoped again.
Now for the third time, I felt that swelling in my chest, the feeling that things might go right for once. But this time, it felt genuine. I knew what I had seen, and I knew Rhode didn't know about it.
A glimpse of the real world. Just a single, tiny glimpse, but I had seen Tim. And he had flown off, for help I hoped. For rescue.
Just then Rhode herself came hopping in gloriously like nothing had happened earlier that day. I tried to act like I had never dreamt, and if I do say so myself, I succeeded quite well. I had become quite adept at hiding my emotions.
Such a little girl.
We reached a small clearing surrounded by tall, colorful presents. Very intimidating presents, I might add. Rhode perched herself on a single giant teddy bear in the center of the clearing. She turned towards me, and with a jolt of terror I knew what would come next.
"Alright Al. You don't mind if I call you Al, do you?" The slut said.
"No way you dumb bi-" I started.
Buy…more…time…
"No one cares, now shut the fuck up Al" Rhode interjected. Harsh.
"Screw off, you damn hermaphrodite." I muttered.
"Oh dear, sounds like somebody needs a tampon."
"Enough about tampons, midget, pre-pubescants like you shouldn't know about things like that." I said.
"Ah, so what'll it be, slow dismemberment or should I sever all your tendons and ligaments and have a workout session?" Rhode asked sweetly.
I pretended to consider while swearing my head off in my mind.
"Ooh definitely the tendons one, dismemberment is so cliché nowadays." A new voice spoke up.
That bastard is dead, for chrissakes.
"Tyki!! I've missed you so much, where have you been all this time?" Rhode screamed shrilly as she jumped around Tyki Mikk, the one Noah Allen knew to be dead.
"I was here just last week, Rhode, you remember, Allen's pile of organs."
"Damn straight they were my organs, and your bitch little sister jumped around in them like a pile of leaves."
They both stared at me.
"Shit."
Rhode rolled her eyes and turned back towards the tall bastard. "Okey-dokey Tyki-weeky, we'll do the tendons just 'cause you asked for it."
"Thanks Rhode" Tyki said, emphasizing the fact he didn't add annoying rhyme endings to peoples names. For once I agreed with him.
"Do you think I could watch?" He went on.
"Sure, I always perform better with an audience."
Fuck. Shit. Dammit.
Rhode waved her hands around and the room was plunged into darkness.
FUCK!!!
[Scene Break
My first sensation when the room lit again was a hard coldness on my back and behind. I sat up trembling, and stared directly at my family jewels. I was stark-naked.
"Sick bastards." I whispered to myself.
Thick red curtains with gold lace hung to my immediate right. Beneath me was a wooden stage and directly in front lay a set of deadweights.
A low mist filtered in, and the curtains were slowly drawn to the sides, revealing the rest of the room. Fancy maroon seats sat in several rows, but only a one was occupied. The tiki-fucker was sipping a from a straw and snacking on a bag of popcorn with a bored look on his face that quickly turned into one of excitement when the curtains rolled back. Rhode popped into existence next to me clad in an ornate headdress and brightly-colored robes that revealed much of her gray body.
The scene looked like a cross between a theatre event and an Aztec sacrifice, and was more than slightly ridiculous. It was funny in a really sick way.
"No one needs to see that, psycho-bitch."
At least I'll die laughing.
In her right hand she held a night black obsidian knife. I looked down at where the knife was pointing and groaned.
"Wave bye-bye Walker, you won't be seeing those again."
I started to scream.
"On the bright side, you'll have a beautiful future in opera to look forward to after all this is over."
[Scene break
Lavi sat in his bedroom, lounging awkwardly in the hard wooden chair in front of the desk. He rocked back and forth, tapping the desk nervously. Without a mission, he was stuck here, nothing to do but think. And thinking was a very dangerous thing, these days.
He was worried, honestly. After seven long months she had finally been showing improvements. Finally, step by step, losing the haunting dullness in her once-bright eyes.
It had been that lack of feeling, that lack of anything at all, that had scared him the most when he first saw her out of the infirmary. More than when she was re-admitted to the hospital—this time not because of an injury, at least one that could be healed with mere antibiotics—more than the guards that stood outside of her curtained off room and wouldn't let him in no matter how hard he tried. More than even the leather restraints he had seen carted into the hospital wing early one morning.
Because he knew that he couldn't bear to lose another, or he would end up worse than Lenalee was.
The bookman's successor could not take sides. Could not have emotion, or comrades. The bookman's successor's only job was to record, to watch and write down everything he observed.
Yeah, right. Lavi had abandoned that mindset the second he became an exorcist, and there was no going back.
Besides, if he just sat back and enjoyed the show, there would be nothing left to watch sooner or later.
That was his constant justification, a mantra he used to maintain his sanity as he was pulled apart by two opposing, but equal, parts of himself. Exorcist and Bookman.
Lavi sighed.
"Allen, where are you?" He asked himself.
He hadn't been able to properly concentrate for a while. For Seven months, and fourteen days, exactly. In the unavoidable in-between moments of life, the time before sleeping and after waking, meals and snacks eaten alone, the silent journeys to missions, a white-haired boy constantly hovered on the edge of his thoughts.
Lavi had been dreaming, too. Dreaming of his fifteen year old comrade—the one with the cursed eye and the claw—screaming uncontrollably, crying, bleeding. He hadn't been able to sleep well either for a while.
He always awoke with a silent scream several hours before dawn, and lay in his bed with his hands on his head until he was ready to drag himself through another cold, lonely, day.
That morning had been no different, and it had been about 3:30 when Lavi finally decided to take a walk in a hopeless effort to clear his mind. He had been marching along the fifty-seventh story of the Order's atrium, when he had heard crying and screams. The sound had originated a few floors above, a Lavi hurried up, activating his hammer on the way. Then he had recognized where he was and the worry on his face had turned to a sad understanding.
"Lenalee…" She had been hit harder by Allen's capture than anyone else, including himself. The poor girl was a wreck, physically and mentally, when she had returned from that fateful mission several months earlier, and had been one ever since.
Lavi remembered with shame the feelings he had felt then. Anger, undue, he knew, had clouded his vision. Fucking Allen. Didn't he understand that trading his own life for Lenalee had been the worst thing he could've done? An exorcist dies when he or she is supposed too, and not a moment sooner. He could've still had a chance, he could've fought instead of giving up so easily. He could still be standing here, next to Lavi, and Lenalee wouldn't be screaming in her sleep. If only Allen wasn't such a dumbass.
But there was a part of Lavi, the coldly logical part: the Bookman in him, that was saying that Allen had done the only thing he could. Instead of fighting and having two dead bodies instead of one, Allen had sacrificed himself for the girl.
"A hero 'til the end?" Lavi asked the wall.
"Nope, definitely a dumbass."
The intercom embedded in his wall blared loudly. "Lavi? Lavi are you there?" Komui's voice echoed in Lavi's room. Lavi hurried pressed the reply button on his desk "I'm here, I'm here, and keep it down, I was trying to nap" he lied.
Komui, unheeding of Lavi's words, shouted out of the intercom again excitedly "Good. Great! Go grab my little sister and get her down here, stat!" He yelled.
Lavi flinched, and then scratched his head. It had been ages since he had heard any but a blank monotone from the director. Damn you, Allen.
"Okay, okay" he said with a sigh, "but what the hell's up with you?"
"I've got news, and its about you-know-who." Komui said, and Lavi could practically here him hopping back and forth on his feet.
Wait a second. Wait one damn second.
"What did you just say?" Lavi asked, not even daring to hope until he heard it again.
" I said, we've got news—"
The line went silent, and Komui heard the patter of footsteps and the loud slamming of a door.
"That's more like it." He said; took a sip of coffee from his favorite mug, and did a stupid little jig.
Then Komui slipped on all the layers of paperwork that served as a second carpet for his office, screaming girlishly as he fell. The loud thud got all the Science Department wondering what had their director in such good mood.