A/N: Sorry finals are killing me… Hopefully I will get more writing accomplished over the summer but I'll still have two jobs. This is a tie over chapter the next should be much longer.
It had been almost a year. And yet Kanda was still having a hard time wrapping his head around the fact that Allen was gone. After all, Allen had survived numerous times against seemingly insurmountable odds.
"Gone" yes, that was the word they tended to use, not "dead," never "dead." Kanda couldn't even bring himself to think it even though he had seen the body himself. If anyone had asked him why, he would say that it upset Lenalee (which was true but just a side effect).
No one really talked about Allen anymore, it should have made him upset but he wasn't; he knew they all missed the kid.
He hadn't expected to care, and it pissed him off. He was used to people dying on him, it happened all the time. He was unaffected when Finders and civilians dropped like flies, so why should one little brat be any different? He should have been over it before now, but in a weird way he was glad he wasn't. Perhaps it proved that he was a decent person; or that, regardless of what else he was, he was still human.
For the last few months he'd done his best to keep thoughts of the Moyashi out of his head, with varying degrees of success… but it was almost Christmas. No one was in a festive mood this year. No one wanted to celebrate hat should have been Allen's 17th birthday.
Meditation wasn't helping as much as it used to since too much time had passed to pretend that Allen was just away on some long mission. The only way he could get true peace was to train until he blacked out from exhaustion.
His ownership of Tim made it worse still. Every time the golden golem would zip around the corner it seemed like Allen would be close behind. It was like the brat was haunting him. He wished he hadn't been so mean to the boy, but it didn't mean he was more pleasant to anyone else. On the contrary, he was even worse than before… not that anyone really blamed him.
Xxxx
Allen was surprised when Cross remembered his birthday on his own (without Christmas decorations everywhere). He was even more shocked when his master, in lieu of a present taught him how to check up on his friends at the Order by communicating with the other Tim.
They couldn't see him of course, that would be safe for either party, but he could watch them. The first thing he saw was an image of Kanda sleeping.
A/N: I advise taking International Economies, International Marketing, Global Business and Contract Law, Calculus 3, Technical Writing, Inorganic Chemistry, Intermediate Mandrin Chinese and Federal Tax Law all in the same semester, especially if you're working too… I'm dying.