A/N: I do not own anything about D. Gray-man. This story is based soley on a fictional timeline after the anime's completion.
The night was young, and so was he. An almost overwhelming nostalgia washed into the red head, and he was dragged under.
"Who are you?" His tone was belligerent and defiant as the red headed youth stumbled upon her in a newly plowed field. "And why are you in the dirt!"
Propping herself up painfully on one elbow in confusion the girl stared blankly at him. She had rings of darkness under her eyes and blisters and lacerations on her bare feet. It was clear that all she had known for a very long time was trudging along, not even sleeping, just walking wearily to a vast unreaching nowhere.
She opened her mouth and tried to voice the answers to his questions that were more demands than anything. I don't know. She wanted to say. I'm tired, I need to sleep. But her throat was so dry nothing came out but a low croak. Hand flying to her neck in shock and fear, the child began to cower away from the boy as she tried unsuccessfully to hide behind short, jaggedly cut hair that she obviously remember to be longer.
"Wait here." The boy commanded and ran off, leaving the stray to obey without a second thought.
As time passed the two of them became closer, the red head would nip snacks and keep the scraps from his dinner to bring to the field of growing wheat and the girl would sit and listen to him go on about what he had learned and witnessed for the day.
"How do you remember everything so well?" Her abused vocal cords were working again though it had been nearly a full week since they had met, allowing for more than a one sided conversation.
The boy looked around conspiratorially, as if he were going to tell some grave secret and was terrified of being caught. "You can keep a secret right?" The girl, whose hair was beginning to grow into spiraling curls of blonde smoke, nodded, wide gray eyes eager for the knowledge. "I'm a Bookman." He whispered. "An apprentice anyway."
After an hour of explaining, the girl managed to grasp the basic idea of the Bookman Clan, and what was required lessons for an apprentice to accomplish. But then the sun was completely gone from the horizon and the young Bookman had to leave and head back to his clan leaving Taylor behind to think, as he always made her do.
"Teach me!" she demanded a full month after they had met and become fast friends.
"Huh?" Her friend asked lazily, chewing on the stalk of wheat where they sat under a tree on a hill above the field.
"Teach me!"
"Teach you what, girl?"
"How to be a Bookman."
"Why?" He asked, "It's nothing to get all worked up about, so why do you want to?"
"I want to know everything! All about the world and everything in it."
"It's not like you would be telling people what you know...We're secret historians logging the stories untold. I told you that."
"I want to know things no one knows. Even if they never know, I want to." He looked into her eyes from his back, green to gray. They both blinked their eyes before he smiled.
"Then we have the same reasons." She smiled to as they both pushed hair out of their faces. "I told ya right? The main requirement is being able to communicate with the other Bookmen. So just concentrate on the knowledge and how you want to record it really bad. Imagine a book in your mind, detailed and clear, and then imagine writing in it with a quill. If you do it right the knowledge is spread amongst the clan, and when you get better at it you can link to a specific mind and talk only to them."
"So I could talk to you like that." Her voice was coy as if suggesting how familiar and intimate that would be causing the boy to blush a pretty scarlet to match his hair. "You still haven't told me your name."
"Well, when I become a Bookman I will pick a new name with each assignment but for now I go by Callum." Again he grinned up at her, and asked..."What about you?"
"Mmm," she hummed softly. "I don't know."
"Tell me!" Callum insisted.
"I really don't know!" The nameless girl shot back frustrated.
"Then your name is Taylor."
"Why Taylor, and hey! You can't just go choosing people's names!"
"Sure I can." Came the impudent response. "And its Taylor cause I want you to be around to sew my life together whenever I start anew. A tailor to my soul."
"How long did it take you to think of that corny line?" The newly named girl asked.
"'Bout ten seconds. Maybe I will get good at that sort of thing when I meet a girl to like. But seriously, Taylor...Stay by me ok? I'll protect you."
Lenalee casted darting, concerned looks first at Bookman who, leaning against a barrel of fish, seemed unsurprised by the turn of events, and then to the simultaneous rise and fall of Lavi's and the strange girl with her mysterious connection's chests. "What will..?" She couldn't quite bring herself to voice the concern she felt.
"It's like that." Kanda said all of a sudden. The others looked at him surprised. "Have you ever heard of the red string of fate? It's something from my country's culture. It's said to link fated hearts together."
"Never knew you were such a romantic, BaKanda." Allen snorted.
Bookman, though, surprised everyone by continuing in agreement. "Even when you cut it, try to burn it out, there is always that connection, and it will bring you together again and again. We Bookmen should have known. We don't like when one of our own suffers."
Every day between the times that Callum left her for bed and when he appeared before her with food, drink and company, Taylor concentrated. Fruitless meditation in an effort to connect her soul with the Bookman Clan.
"There is no soul. Leastwise not in this," Callum threw in when she vented her frustrations four days into her continuous attempts. "I'm telling you just..."
And then she felt it. A world of knowledge plunging into her mind, filling spaces she did not know were there. The torrent pushed and disheveled everything she had ever known, ever thought, and when her mind exhausted its resources and there was nowhere else to fit anything, all she had known before poured into the vast space the knowledge had left.
In that second, the mere second that this all occurred in, Callum dropped to his knees and screamed. Blank staring eyes gazed to a heaven he could not see as fact after fact; emotions uncounted pounded him into an almost comatose oblivion. "Stop IT!"
His scream reverberated through the plains as if they were in the mountains, bouncing off unseen walls that began to block the flow. Walls built from parties unknown. As Callum screamed on and on, a group of men ran towards him, concentration evident in everything they did. But all the concentration in the world would not erase the pain Callum broadcast, which Taylor felt and amplified through the link she had forged between them.
It was through that link that the whole Clan felt their bodies being dragged through the field by their hair, rocks digging into their backs and soil grinding into the wounds they inflicted. The wheat that she and Callum played and hid in throughout their friendship brushed unyieldingly against the Clan's arms.
At the same time they felt a warm pair of arms cradling them against a broad chest wherein beat a heart like a freight train.
The Clan felt themselves thrown bodily into a cold stone cellar that smelled of mold and sour cheese.
And in her fear Taylor felt Callum gently being lain down on a warm linen wrapped bed, a fire burning in the corner of the room and the scent of roasting pig wafting from the window nearby. She like the rest of the clan heard a grainy and confused voice whisper, "What have you done?"
"I can't give you specifics, or reasons," Bookman told the Exorcists plainly. "Lavi committed a devastating crime when they were young. A crime that should have ended it. But not even the Bookman Clan knows everything."
The sun was out when the Bookmen felt a rough hand grabbed at their hair...Taylor was being dragged from the dark storage she had spent the night in. The sun stung pain into their eyes. At the same time, Lavi was dragged out of the room he had rested peacefully in.
"It is a crime to bestow the heritage of Bookman on a woman. We are Bookmen. The minds of men are able to handle the link, able to assimilate the information. This child threatens the whole of the clan. A woman is not stable." The leader of the clan, a surprisingly young man with hair so pale it seemed silver and eyes chilled blue, intoned from the center of the gathering of huts beyond which stood the wheat fields which hid Taylor and kept her well.
"Judgment shall be passed on two." The leader continued. "One, to Callum, an Apprentice Bookman. Innocent, one who does not know the law cannot be charged by it. Consider this a lesson learned." Callum sagged in relief, unaware that his body had been so tense.
"Two: Child unknown, also innocent for the same reason." Callum crowed happily, "However..." The leader continued, silencing Callum abruptly. "There must be consequences. Deaden the link."
The last thing the Clan felt from Taylor was an overwhelming relief swiftly change to dread before everything from her went silent.
Bereft of the link that seemed almost too familiar now, Taylor could only stare across the wide middle ground of the clan's home to where Callum looked on in horror, uncertain.
"Punishment to be meted out to preserve the Clan: to the unknown girl who links her mind to ours without right...Death."
"WHAT!" Callum screamed from where he stood so far away. She could hear Callum struggle as a man wearing all black painfully grabbed her arms and dragged her to the fire pit in the direct center of the village.
"If we do nothing she will continue to broadcast. She is a girl, females cannot be Bookmen. They cannot control the link."
"Wait." The villagers pushed past him, ready to record everything that happened. "Wait!" Callum felt tears spark his eyes as he looked to the indifferent clan leader. "Please, wait!"
The executioner looked to the silver haired Bookman, stopping as he saw a hand forestalling action. "Well?"
"Anything!" He blurted out terrified. "Anything but her life. Take anything but that. Anything...and I will share the pain. It's my fault she learned. I taught her."
"But she went through the effort...It's like Eve and the apple. The knowledge was offered, she could not have eaten of it."
"She's the same as any of us. The same as me. The passion to know...she has it! Don't kill her because she wants to know."
"It is for the best, Bookman cannot feel. It taints the records."
"Don't!" Callum pleaded.
The clan leader crouched to his heels, thinking as he picked his lip. "Fine. Her eye. She should lose the connection if we take it from her with the link deadened forcibly."
"Mine too then." Callum said resolutely.
"That is unnecessary."
"If you don't," Callum gulped audibly at the audacity of his conviction, "I will do it myself...and I will broadcast."
The head took in the threat and nodded, not bothering to look reluctant. "If that is your choice."
The man in black held Taylor with her hands behind her back as another in like garb came forward with a burning hot poker. Scared, but defiant of that fear, she didn't even blink as he lowered the poker directly in front of her right eye. The sound of a scuffle made the man pause and Taylor felt her mind open to the deadened link as Callum kicked one of the men concentrating on keeping her mind closed. The whole clan could feel the heat against their eyes as the young red haired boy used the moment to broadcast to her, and through the same link to all the Bookman, "I'm sorry Taylor. I love you."
The connection abruptly terminated and without wasting any time the executioner stabbed at the young girl's eye, deftly twisting her eye out and cauterizing the wound at the same time.
Collapsing, screaming, Taylor cried tears from her left eye and blood from her right. Looking up in shock, she heard Callum say calmly "Now me." He took a step forward, standing over her. "I won't 'cast. Not if you do it."
Again the executioner looked to the Leader of the Bookman Clan, and again the young man nodded. So, swiftly the man reheated his poker and repeated his actions. Callum dropped to the ground in shock and pain, but managed to look at Taylor with his left eye, reach out to her and mutter with more feeling then he thought possible..."Eye for an eye."
While the children were knocked out from pain and the stress of the ordeal, the clan used medicinal secrets to erase the memories of the two, both of the incident and each other.
Because a Bookman cannot feel, and resentment is a feeling, hatred a powerful one.