Author's Notes:
It's my birthday today (28 November) and I decided to celebrate by offering you a little extra chapter. As you will see once you read it, the dialogue is set after chapter 28 (ah, how uncanny, as today's the 28th as well! *lolz* I'm being stupid).
I've taken some liberties with Kanda's childhood and I kind of like it, even though it's depressing.
Disclaimer: -Man belongs to Katsura Hoshino
Extra Kapitel: November Glory
The turn of the seasons had seemed to him an endless, tedious circle of hypocritical change. Back at a home he barely dared to remember, the seasons had been all the same, varying solely in the ferocity of terror around him. When he was taken out of the pandemonium of his early childhood, Kanda first had to learn that there were other things in the world beside Akuma tyranny. He had to see that spring was not the season when Akuma would go out hunting for humans, that summer was not the time of burnt villages, that autumn was not there to hide among blood red leaves and breed new prey and that winter was not the only time when the dead could be buried under cold snow. Kanda had classified "seasons" as something only Akuma knew and that they, their prey, had to follow because "seasons" were the rules that the Akuma constituted.
In England, things had been different. Spring was full of flowers and new blooming life. It was mild and green and fresh. Summer was the height of existence, where everything was burning in bright colours, where the sun was warm and life was good. Autumn was then the season of thought and melancholy because the falling leaves seemed on one hand to be tears lamenting the passing of summer and on the other hand they were signs of a fast approaching winter. Winter that would eat away the colours of the lands, that would cover everything up in layers of innocent white. Of course, the seasons were never the same, Kanda saw that and he was taught to pay attention to it. However, after winter a new spring would come. It was all lies. Just because something varied did not mean that it was exceptional. Just because there were no Akuma to rule them, didn't mean that the seasons were something great. It was all hypocrisy because it was an endless cycle and spring would always be spring and it would always follow winter. It was sickeningly monotonous. Kanda hated it.
-
Time passed unnoticed by Kanda now that he had the freedom to ignore that each passing season brought new threats one had to prepare for. He could just pull on a warmer coat when it was winter and wear less clothes when it was summer, grow flowers when it was spring and let kites fly when it was autumn. That was all there was to European seasons. Boring, without a thrill, without danger to body and mind.
Even though Kanda never cared whether it was spring, summer, autumn or winter, he was a bit biased, because he decided to favour Autumn over the other seasons. It stopped being too hot and it was not that cold yet. The trees changed colour, the landscape became a field of sparkling fire, autumn burned the trees, turning green into ashes. The nights were getting longer, the walks he took in the garden seemed more pleasant to him. It smelled different, colours looked different, people were different. It was the season when each person would stop to think. Kanda disliked thinking and he hated melancholy. Why did people cry about the falling of leaves? They would return once spring came. It was senseless. But Kanda liked the sky in autumn. Not too bleak, not too bright, not suddenly clouded by a passing storm because one always expects rain in autumn.
-
Of all the months Kanda came to like November best. November days were calm, serene, but not melancholic for Kanda. When the month was nearing its end, it would still be dark once Kanda got up. His room would be cold, the window frozen shut and the world behind it dark. When Kanda left the Black Order to exercise in the woods, he could breathe in an air that was crisp, cleansing but still soothingly alive with the scent of damp earth, decaying leaves, the barks of trees. Nothing like the over-kill of sensations in spring, or like the heat in summer that turned the world around it to insufferable degrees of hot smells that used to get Kanda's head to spin and neither was it like winter, where a ice cold layer covered every trace of life. Nothing visible, nothing audible, nothing that he could smell – winter was perfect silence. In a way Kanda liked this as well, but there was something nice in sounds, something quite charming in a world that was ushered to bed but refused to go without at least making a stubborn last scene of protest like a small child not wanting to go to sleep.
When the sun would start to push at the darkness, the world was renouncing the charms of night very slowly. The world first became a shady mass of nebulous black, gray and white. A layer of mist that rose out of the earth covered the ground of the forest and wound its way around the tree trunks. While the shadows slowly assumed a light purple tinted shade before twilight chased away purple for the sake of clean light. At the end of November, even the sun seemed to move over the sky in slow motion, like it was in no hurry at all to obey the laws of nature that forced it to rise, shine and sink again. In November, clouds were nothing unusual, neither was wind and Kanda marvelled in gray skies and fluttering leaves. It got dark very early and the last rays of the sun were a strong yellow and orange (and sometimes the light was cool bluish white), filling the lands with a glow that never failed to ease Kanda's mind. And once the moon shone in the dark and he could see the milky-way and the stars, he knew that if he were to find happiness, it was in November.
-
Back at home autumn was the season where humans had time to regain their spirits, but there was nothing much to look forward to but a hard time of snow, frost, hunger and burial. Autumn here carried promised. It was November that brought him his one and only love. She was a true child of late autumn, almost winter. He remembered meeting her on a dark day that she tore through with her shocking whiteness. Kanda had first thought her plain or faded because of her white skin, her white hair, her white eye lashes, her pale eyes and little, slim body, that looked like it would blow over by the first winter storm. But like Kanda came to appreciate November, he came to love its most graceful creature. Of course, there were a lot of things about Ellen Walker that reminded Kanda of autumn; her eyes were the sky and her hair reflected the passage of one season to the other; her auburn hair had turned to winter, had turned to snow. Unexpected snow, but even unexpected things could be loved, even where love was most unexpected.
Kanda fancied himself as a child of summer (not that he liked summer, but he couldn't help being born then). And as he saw summer as a time of fire and charred wood, temper, passions and heat, he could relate to it. His skin – even though washed white by 10 years of European rain – was slightly coloured, his hair looked like charcoal, his eyes like a cloudless, dark blue sky and he had his bad-weather phases, including violent thunderstorms. And Ellen put up with it, remained unshaken, because no matter how lousy a summer the year sees, autumn will always follow.
-
"Dear Yu, there's a finder for you". Kanda looked up from the book he was reading and saw General Tiedoll standing at the door of the room. He shuddered slightly and shook his hair, dropping a bit of snow on the floor. "Cold, isn't it? I'm happy that you threw some logs into the fire". Kanda didn't reply and got up to meet the finder in the hallway. It was someone he didn't know, some young guy that seemed flustered and proud to be standing in front of the exorcist.
"What?" Kanda asked and the finder produced an envelope.
"I have a letter addressed to you. Fresh off the Finder Network!" he announced and Kanda put on a sceptical frown, but took the envelope never the less. He dismissed the finder with a muttered and wooden sounding "thank you" and went back into the room, where Tiedoll was studying the novel Kanda had been reading.
"I never knew you liked novels"
"I don't read them for the content. I read them to learn." Kanda replied and opened the letter. He found the contents to be a photograph, which he first mistook for some sort of postcard because of the subject. Two women in Kimonos, resembling Geishas, but upon closer inspection he realized that the girls were in fact the beautiful Linali and his beloved beansprout, Ellen. Tiedoll let Kanda be thunderstruck in silence and spared him his fatherly comments. Kanda looked at the picture very intently, almost not believing that he held something of Ellen in his hands. How long hadn't he seen her? Three months? She was as beautiful as he remembered her to be. The Eastern dress did look a bit foreign on her, because she had the posture and look of a very English upper-class lady and they had their own way of posing for photographs. But she didn't seem uneasy at all, she looked confident and determined. Stunning. Beautiful. Divine.
And Kanda realized that he had missed weeks with her. He had missed opportunites to be happy, to make her love, to make her feel safe, to protect her, to just enjoy her. He had missed the beansprout in winter. Was she as stunning as in autumn? And how did she look now, now that it was nearly spring? He consulted the photograph. She seemed to have grown a bit, but it was hard to make out much of her face because of the make up and her slender body was covered with layers and layers of silk. But still, she was charming, Kanda hadn't expected it to be otherwise.
"What's with that melancholic expression, Yu?" Tiedoll wondered and Kanda looked up in surprise. Melancholy? He? He dared to steal a glance at himself in the glass of the window. He looked perfectly fine. "Is it because you miss Japan?". Kanda frowned and shook his head. Tiedoll seemed convinced enough that he was right, because he dropped the subject. Had he known that the girl on the picture was the one that Kanda intended to marry, he wouldn't have let him off that easily. Kanda turned around the picture and found Ellen's neat handwriting on the back:
"Dear Kanda
We are in China now, as you might have guessed by our clothes. We will sail to Japan when morning comes. We took a picture and I decided to send it to you. I wonder where you are right now as I write these lines…
I hope you are well.
With all my best wishes,
Ellen"
Japan… The beansprout was headed for Japan, as were they. Not long and they would meet again. Not long and he would see her again. Now he was anxious to finally get going. He gave the picture one last intense look, then he put it into his suitcase. There it would be safe.
"Yu?" Tiedoll called again, "There's a phone call from Rabi." he said and Kanda groaned. "He seems to be quite in a state of distress".
"That idiot, what's wrong now!" Kanda snorted and walked over to the door, there he stopped and sighed. He shouldn't be that angry right now. After all, Ellen was safe, he had finally seen her again (even though it was only on a picture) and now he was very keen to hear news of her. Soon, soon he would be there with her. Soon he would finally be able to embrace her again and see how Ellen would turn a Japanese spring into something wonderful by her mere presence. Kanda picked up the phone in perfect spirits.
"What do you want?". There was silence on the other side of the line; Kanda could hear the rush of waves and shrieks of seagulls. Then Rabi spoke up, sombre, collected, chilly and menacing like his mother whispering to him: Darling, run, it's spring.
"There is something you need to know"
Notes:
And we know what Rabi has to say, but I didn't want to include Kanda's reaction.
I know that Kanda might not think the things I make him think, but I hope you just accept my way of dealing with his emotions! X3
And I hope that you liked it! :3
The real story will then continue with Kapitel 30
P.S. I didn't find the right place to include it in the extra chapter, but the book that Kanda is reading is Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho.