The trees were covered with snow. That was the first thing she knew for certain. The trees were covered with snow, and she was freezing her near naked hind end off. She lifted up a hand, examining the fine looking scales of metal that dotted her skin, looking as if they'd embedded themselves into it. She ignored it, seeing as it didn't cause any undue pain, as far as she could tell. She brushed a hand through her hair, nearly screaming as she felt pain lance through her fingers. In fact, most every part of her hurt. It was the same sort of soreness that afflicted one who had broken bones in multiple places. It suddenly dawned on her. She had broken many, many bones, but afterwards, things got a little bit blurry. She remembered being shell-shocked. She also remembered fire and smoke and tents and -
Amigo.
She sat up, snow shifting off of her. She hadn't even been aware it had settled on top of her. There was a very thin layer over her skin, almost to the point of being a crust. How did she get up here? She must be at least a good thousand feet above the camp, which meant she must've been hiking all night long. It was day time now, and the sun glistened wetly off the old snow. She shakily stood up, her breath pooling in a cloud of mist around her chin as she swung her head around to stare in every direction. She began to feel panic as she realized that she couldn't find the distinctive red hair of her now-constant companion. She'd gotten so used to his presence, even in those tensely awkward moments where the fact that they were man and woman as well as Exorcist, that his disappearance was like a missing tooth, and her awareness was her tongue running around that hole where the tooth should've been rooted.
Though she didn't see her amigo or his red hair against the landscape of black-green trees and white snow, she did see something else - footprints. She frowned as she realized that the footsteps led to her, and they were lightly sprinkled with a layer of snow. However, blood was still visible in the prints, and she looked at the bottom of her own feet, much to her chagrin. They'd practically been eaten to the bone by the cold and the harsh ground. She got up and began to follow her footsteps, grunting in pain every few steps as the open cuts were pressed into the frozen crust.
After nearly ten minutes of walking down a fairly steep hill, she rubbed her arms and huffed as she saw a familiar figure nearly seventy meters away stopped at a tree. Her footprints went right past him. She continued slowly down the hill, shivering as the cold began to truly permeate her skin and bones, and she felt the ache in the breakages more harshly than before. She stopped at the inert form under the tree, and she brushed off some of the snow. One pierced ear was revealed, a tinge of red outlining the earring where frostbite was worming its way into the flesh. She uncovered more and more of the body, finding a very still, very dead looking Bookman Junior. She felt her body begin to shake, but it was not the cold causing her sudden shivers.
She knelt down, landing heavily on her knees next to the body. What happened? How had they both managed to reach the top of the mountain? What happened last night? Fear suddenly spiked through her as her brain went into overdrive. They were going to die here in the snow. They should've died already, by all accounts. They'd been out overnight in the snow of the mountain top. How was it that they were not dead? Either way, any more exposure and they'd both die... if Lavi was not already dead to begin with. She flipped him onto his back, her hands clumsy with the cold, and she scrambled to find a pulse. Her fingers were too numb to detect it (or so she wanted to believe), so she put her ear to his chest, searching for a heartbeat. It occurred to her that she had never heard a man's heartbeat before, and she briefly wondered if it was any different from a woman's...
There it was. It beat slowly, almost too slowly it seemed, and she relaxed against him in relief. His body was fiercely chilled, though, and that worried her. His face was slack, not the look of peace that usually bestowed his features in sleep, as she had watched him sleep on those nights when dreams of dead children would wake her and she needed to take her mind off things. His face and demeanor had reminded her of a puppy, twitching and mumbling and swatting at imaginary things. Now, it was disturbing to see such a lively person stay so still, and she hauled him behind her as well as she could. There were drag marks where his body had disturbed the snow at some point in time, and she realized that she herself had dragged him here.
Again, questions of what exactly took place the night before ransacked her mind, and she let herself be privy to all sorts of wild imaginings, of dead men and frantic horses and screams and bombs. She realized that past memories were affecting the speculations she had over the night before. She took a very deep breath, and she cleared her mind. In order to help him, she could not fall into that pit of fear of what she had or might've done. She talked to herself in Spanish to calm herself, praying to keep her mind focused. As she recited her familiar, well-stated prayers she examined him carefully for injuries, hoping to God that he didn't have any.
Her hopes, it seemed, were more often than not in vain. His face was scratched, bruised, and swollen. His back could've been mistaken for a side of meat. His body was white, so pale he almost blended into the snow. Blood was everywhere, especially in the dragged snow beyond him, but it seemed the snow had helped keep him alive by slowing his heart and keeping the body from bleeding out. He was just barely alive. She couldn't see any other injuries, besides a broken foot and several serious lacerations. She shivered as she imagined the pain he must've gone through, but she also decided pitying him would do neither of them any good.
She slung him over her shoulder, and she grunted in pain. Her bones were still healing, faster than normal but still too slow to be miraculous or to enable her to carry a full-grown man with ease. She shuddered under his weight as she attempted to walk down the mountain.
Time is stretched by pain. It seems that a minute is a day, an hour is a month, a day is a year, and anything longer is a lifetime. The brain no longer keeps an accurate account of time, thus she could no longer remember how long she'd walked. She knew that when she'd started, the sun had already been in the sky, a silver dollar sheathed by gauze. Now, it was a low ball of glowing red that had already disappeared down the mountain, and only the glow against the clouds showed its presence. The snow was growing thinner; the air was growing thicker. She was getting closer to the region of the mountain that was much, much warmer, but she knew that she would never be able to make it by nightfall. They could dodge death once - twice was tempting fate.
However, no matter her effort, she collapsed towards the bottom of the mountain, and she lay there, completely and utterly exhausted. She shivered and curled into a ball, realizing it wouldn't have mattered anyways. Her body couldn't handle the strain, and they'd both die here unless she could find the strength and resolve to get back up, or her amigo could wake up and help. She looked to her companion with a wavering glance, and she clumsily touched his face with cold-bearing fingers. Her chin quivered as she realized that, although she would have people to mourn her, this man who could be so thoughtful and smart, possibly world-changing, would die here forgotten, another piece of the world whisped away. She remembered a short conversation she had had with him about his job as a Bookman, the trials he'd gone through. It'd been heartrending to her.
"That's all we exist for, you know. Our existence is to find information, to keep it, to store it. That's all we do. Once we die, that's it. Poof. Like we were never there."
"Amigo... por favor, desperta... desperta... te necesito... vamos a morir aqui si tu no despertes..." she mumbled half-heartedly, chuckling morbidly. He couldn't hear her. Why was she even trying? What was the use? She had already said goodbye, but then life had been granted back to her, only to be cruelly snatched away at the last second like a bully with a piece of candy to an eager child. She curled up around his body, longing for any sort of warmth, even the cheap, spent warmth of another person's heat. Her shivers racked her body, both from pain and from exhaustion. The snow settled on top of them, and Esperanza dimly recalled a story about a little girl with a matchstick who'd frozen to death. Oh, if only she had a matchstick now. She would use it for all it was worth.
Suddenly, a brightness began to flow over the two of them, and Esperanza wondered if people who froze to death saw a light before leaving this Earth. She squeezed her eyes shut, burying her face in the skin of her amigo's shoulder, too scared to look at what might be headed towards the both of them. Hallucination or no, she was worried that what she would see would break her mind.
A hand descended and touched her neck, and she slowly, oh so ever slowly, turned her head to stare at the thing hovering over them. It held a bright light and wore a large, floppy hat. A long braid trailed down, tickling Esperanza's cheek. A face in shadow peered down, and a voice spoke in a language she did not understand. It took her a moment to realize that this was neither apparition nor hallucination. With shaking hands, she reached for the person that had touched her, and she smiled, a smile that cracked her hard, cold face and seemed to warm her from the inside out. It was a shaky smile, as she had not smiled, not truly smiled as she was doing now, for such a long time, and she was very much out of practice.
She bowed, shaking, at the person's feet, crying from exhaustion and relief, feeling that God had not abandoned her once and for all.
He was aware that it was unseasonably warm. Something brushed continually over his skin, something scratchy and gritty. His eye felt caked, and his ears felt clogged. He felt so warm - in fact, so warm he felt hot. Lavi cracked open an eye, realizing he was awake, and he stood up in absolute confoundment.
He was in a desert. It was not like the desert he had just visited next to the mountains. No, this desert was a shifting ocean of sand, a Saharan wonderland. He shivered, wondering how he got here. He looked up at the sky, watching the clouds move at an unnervingly fast pace across the drained-blue sky that was the color of his mother's eyes. He attempted walking, but the sands shifted so fast under his feet that his step suddenly fell three feet, and he tumbled with a yell down the dune. He looked up, and he realized that there were things in the sand. As he looked down on his hands and knees, he noticed a human hand sticking out of the sand before being covered again by the rolling dunes, and he was carried along with it.
He yelled as the dune crashed, and he rolled against the sand before being taken up again by another rolling wave. He attempted to stand up, but it was too tumultuous. Once again, he fell in a heap, only to be lifted by the next wave. After ten minutes of this exercise in futility, he finally began to find his balance along the waves. As he did so, he noticed, as he stood up, cities half buried in the desert, and some of them he recognized. There was the tall spire of the Eiffel Tower, with Paris near-covered in dunes. He frowned, remembering Paris all too vividly. Way too many kissing couples for his liking, if he remembered correctly. And then there was the Taj Mahal, from Agra. He'd liked that place. A massive dune smashed up against the side of it, not even blasting the hard stone. In the distance, he could see the Tower of London, and something began to stir within him.
"You're finally figuring out where you are, aren't you?" a voice said, and he spun around to face the apparition that had continually taunted him for the past week. He remained mute, stony mouthed and tight lipped. The boy looked like he had grown. Instead of coming up to Lavi's shoulder, he was now as tall as his chin. His jaw was stronger, and the baby fat was being stripped away by age and weariness. The voice he used was as monotonous as ever, though Lavi could detect the old, smug tone underlying his words. He would know, after all. He'd used it plenty of times before. Ah, the superiority he'd felt when he was that age, only fourteen or so and on top of the world because he knew something that everyone else didn't.
"This is the inside of your mind. Or the very outskirts, at the least. I don't believe you're very familiar with it," the apparition said, walking through the dunes as easily as a stroll through a park. He walked up to the next buried thing in the sand, a metal flower holding an inkwell with beautiful ebony pens. The boy turned it over in his hands before dropping it in the sand. It sank underneath the shifting sands, disappearing as soon as it had come. Lavi couldn't help but notice the metaphor. No doubt, that was intentional.
"You'll start to figure your way around, so I'm not going to bother with explaining everything to you. You'll find the Memory Palace - of course you remember that don't you? - and all sorts of other things. This isn't a receptacle anymore, though, so that means you'll be plagued by other things as you walk through. Those, I'll let you handle on your own," the apparition said, glancing at Lavi over his shoulder.
"You're not going to show me around?" Lavi asked, half playful and half serious. The apparition smirked, the closest he'd seen to an actual expression on the boy's face. He shrugged.
"It's your mind, isn't it? Who knows it better than you?" With that, the boy was whisked away by the sands, engulfed by a massive set of octopus-like arms that extended out from under him and swallowing him into the depths of the desert. Lavi was alone.
Or so he thought.
As he walked along, over his shoulder at the corner of his eye, he always caught this half-seen glimpse of a figure dressed in bright colored scarves. The figure disappeared every time he attempted to look at it, though, and he decided to leave it be.
He journeyed past many different cities buried in the desert. He slowly learned to navigate the dunes, walking on top of some while riding out others. He started to find a pattern in the placement of cities. The ones he'd been to in his early life, including the city he'd once called home at a time when he'd still had a name, were all dilapidated shells of themselves, and they were nearest to him. The farther he went, the more recent he'd see cities, and even multiples would appear. He'd already seen London fifteen times, at his last count, and he'd spied out New York City at least twelve. Sometimes, he'd see little townships in between the cities, markers of the places he'd been that he'd nearly forgotten, but had hung on to out of a sense of Bookman's duty and pity for those forsaken towns in the middle of nowhere.
And then finally, he reached something he hadn't expected. He could see the Memory Palace, a glimmering amalgamation of crystal, stone, and vegetation, from where he stood, but before he reached it he saw a bed lined with gauzy curtains that concealed what was hidden inside. He frowned. He had not ever seen anything like this. He was sure of it, seeing as he'd remember it. Of all places he'd been, why was a bed with curtains sitting in the middle of his mind, waiting on the outskirts?
He moved back the curtain, and he stopped. He felt his blood trickle into ice. He let the curtain fall, and he turned away.
In the bed were two women, both dressed in their Sunday best. One was his mother. The other was his sister, all grown up with long, wavy red hair and porcelain, delicate skin just like her mother's. The last place he'd been was within his mind, watching his mother and sister die as the building they had been in collapsed. He couldn't commemorate it like the cities he'd been to. It wasn't really a place he'd gone to, but a memory. That was why it was placed like this so close to his Memory Palace, so near to the very heart of his mind. He kept walking, and he did not look back.
Leave the dead to bury their dead.
His Palace loomed before him, a gleaming shard in the desert. Night was falling in his mind, and the fast moving clouds seemed to speed up as the sky darkened. Shadows lengthened, and Lavi felt engulfed by the sheer massiveness of the skyscraper in front of which he stood. It was chock full of memories, many of them incredibly painful and others that were downright forbidden to access. There was no door, but Lavi knew how to get inside. He closed his eyes, and he tried to dig up a memory -
deadened, blackened hair splayed out around the boy as a sixteen year old Lavi ran as fast as he could towards the Japanese Exorcist. He skidded to a stop next to the body, feeling for a pulse.
Lavi opened his eyes, and he was in the memory, at the threshold, a literal one, of a memory that was playing out in a room that was not a room. A younger, much less expressive Lavi shook Kanda with a look that might've been concern, but was rather hard to discern. The Japanese Exorcist, also much younger with shorter hair and a hotter temper, grabbed the young Bookman by the throat. Rain cascaded down as the two stared at each other, one with wariness and the other with blatant surprise. The rainforest choked the air as the two stared, and Lavi walked away from the memory, knowing exactly what would happen next. That had been the first mission he'd ever tackled with Kanda and Bookman. They'd gotten separated from Bookman, and they'd had to fight through an entire jungle with only each other for company.
But he wasn't interested in that. He had to figure out how to get out of the Palace and out of his mind. He had to search for a memory that Bookman had given him, one about Bookmen and their mental defenses and defense mechanisms. He knew he remembered, but he just didn't know how to wade through the sheer amount of stuff. Though all of his memories were meticulously organized, he didn't know exactly how they were physically put together in his head, like which went at the bottom of the tower and what went at the top. He decided to try a different route.
He thought of Bookman, the old panda's kohl-lined eyes and his clawed hands, that stupid question-mark ponytail and his short stature, the mean kick that he had -
Just like that, he was at the door of another room that was not a room, and a younger version of himself barreled through a door as Bookman seethed with a smoking foot, piping hot for another use.
"Idiot apprentice! Tch. Spilling tea all over my papers. Be more careful next time. You are lucky it was the weak stuff I was drinking, or else I'd make you rewrite everything I just put down," Bookman stated. The younger Lavi grumbled as he began to shuffle papers, placing them in files and muttering to himself about old, dodgy men who should be too old to be kicking the crap out of their younger students. Bookman gave Lavi a pointed look, and Lavi immediately shut up. The current Lavi found this unnerving to watch, as he was viewing everything from an outside perspective, his Bookman brain allowing him to view all of the information from a different point of view, though he could tell where patches had to be made whenever things became fuzzy or slightly distorted.
Lavi decided, instead of pulling up a random memory, to instead look into the hallways of his Palace. He was amazed to find all sorts of doodads and whatsits sitting around in the halls, just stuff piled up inside of his mind. He hadn't realized just how much clutter there was. Here was the clipboard that Lenalee had used on Kanda the first time the both of them had 'met', though 'brutally maimed each other' was a better word. There was Timcanpy, chewing on an electrical cord (which Lavi made sure to yank out of his mouth - mental or not, that was dangerous, and he didn't like to see a sad Tim). And then there was his saddle from his time as Phillip while in Russia. There, in the corner, was a little doll that a girl had played with in Mensch. All these random items were just strewn all over the place, covering the floor with meaningless trinkets that had significance in some way or another to Lavi.
He'd been wrong about keeping gifts. Lavi kept gifts in a unique way that no one else could touch. He kept memories of those objects, and in doing so he managed to somehow keep the object itself. Just as he thought this, he turned his head to stare at a birthday cake with a single candle and bright frosting, and a birthday present that was sitting right next to it. He gave a smile -
And accidentally jettisoned himself into the room the memory was housed in. He blinked as he watched Esperanza's concerned face as his own shone with tears. He hadn't realized that he'd been blubbering! He blushed as he realized just how serious his breach of conduct was, but it didn't seem to worry Esperanza one bit. He'd never noticed just how forlorn he'd looked as he'd looked at the decorations, or how in awe he'd been when he'd opened his present. It was a surreal experience to watch something that had happened only a few weeks ago from an outside perspective. Lavi looked down as he watched himself run around the table to hug Esperanza enthusiastically, knowing as he watched himself that slowly he'd been breaking rules long established in his mind. Don't show emotion. Don't touch others, physically or emotionally. Don't allow personal feelings to get in the way of work. Don't allow personal attachments. He'd broken so many with Esperanza, and so many of those with Kanda and Lenalee and Allen and Johnny and Reever and even Bookman, at points.
Lavi walked out, slowly meandering down the hallways and letting his memories walk him along different paths. He frowned as he eyed a doorway that was covered in chains, lines of yellow and black 'KEEP OUT' rope, and a steel door. His hand strayed towards it -
and then he remembered what that memory was. It was one of the few he would never, ever allow himself to indulge in, yet he couldn't bear to part with it. It'd been his first, almost real interaction with another human being in such a way that was intimate. He'd never thought of himself as the type to be romantic, but it'd been so hard to keep this memory from resurfacing. He drew his hand away from the door, not even realizing that he'd been touching it. He would leave it be. He could not wrestle with it, not on his own. He needed Bookman for that.
He continued to walk through his Memory Palace, going up and down Escher-esque staircases, into clogged hallways, through memories that had no rhyme nor reason. There were even portions of his Memory Palace that were purely thought, not really made up of actual memories. Here, he had to be careful, of course, lest he forget what was a memory and what was a thought that he perceived as memory. He went from top to bottom, wandering back and forth through favorite memories and funny moments he'd neglected to remember.
And then, finally, he found what he was looking for, merely by wandering around and not looking for it.
"Apprentice, there is something I must talk to you about," Bookman said, his face characteristically serious. There was no mischievous gleam in his eye, though, and a much younger Lavi, perhaps only just seventeen, looked puzzled at his somber tone. As of late, Bookman had taken a tendency to lighten up a little bit now that they were at the Order. Perhaps it was the environment. Perhaps it was the people. Maybe it was the nature of their mission. Either way, Bookman took to being a little more playful these days than usual, something Lavi had taken due note of with fascination.
"What is it, jiji?" Lavi asked, using the Japanese honorific for 'grandpa'. Though Lavi himself was not Japanese, he loved the cute little endings that could be stuck to names. It made them sound endearing. It was his inner love of people that shone through in this regard, and he tried to keep it at a minimum, only indulging in this one practice when he could. Bookman knew the reasons behind it, and the half-hearted glare that he gave Lavi made him shrug.
"Do you remember when we spoke about memory storage and such?" the Bookman said, and his apprentice nodded. He scratched at the skin underneath his headband, half-listening. Bookman gave him a swift, snapping smack to the back of the head.
"OW! Damn, old man, you still have an arm. That hurt."
"Listen to me for a few minutes, would you? I'm telling you something important." Lavi blinked, and he repositioned himself as to make it harder for Bookman to hit him and easier for the apprentice to actually pay attention. Bookman steepled his fingers and stated, "I am going to tell you a very, very, very clandestine practice that we Bookmen employ. You will not be able to use it until you are older and you can control it, but I think you are old enough to know about it at the very least. There is a very slim chance you may even stumble upon it on accident." Lavi cocked his head to the side in vexation, reminiscent of a puppy being given a command it does not recognize.
"I am talking about a memory manifestation. This is where a Bookman may literally journey into his mind to retrieve information that has been hidden from himself. Every Bookman's manifestation is different. Some have an ocean. Others have a jungle. Some have a park. Rarely, someone will get an actual palace within a palace. All in all, it is a very, very secret practice that allows us to retrieve memories so deeply hidden within our minds as to be almost unreachable by normal means," Bookman explained, and Lavi digested this information with a serious expression.
"What's so hard about it? It sounds like our usual memory classification system, only deeper," Lavi stated, and Bookman shook his head.
"You're making it too simple. This is not a simple store-and-retrieve system. The manifestation seems physical to the one using it, and the subconscious can also affect the conscious. It is dangerous to those unschooled in controlling their minds. Some of those memories could break a human being, shattering their psyche into millions of pieces. A Bookman is inert when inside of a memory manifestation, and it is highly dangerous to accidentally access it during battle. That is why I believe you need to be taught more control before we attempt it. Most Apprentices don't learn about this until they are well into their twenties, but your training has been... extensive in comparison. We may start when you reach the age of twenty-one. For now, you will continue training your mind for it," Bookman said. Lavi nodded in understanding. Something that expansive... Especially with a Bookman's memory, a person could get lost inside something that big.
"How do you get in and out of a manifestation?" Lavi asked, suddenly curious. Bookman closed his eyes, and he sighed.
"Entering is a matter of focus and the ability to submerge oneself into the mind. Leaving is a different matter. No one person leaves the same way out of a manifestation. It depends on the man or woman," Bookman stated. Lavi's face lit up at the mention of 'woman'.
"There are women Bookmen? Jiji, you've been holding out on me!"
THWACK!
"Idiot apprentice! You should know by now we're all celibate, you twit!"
Lavi watched this entire exchange with a look akin to horrid fascination and despair. Each person gets out a different way... That didn't exactly give him much. How was he supposed to get out now...? He wandered back into the halls, aimlessly wandering when he suddenly noticed that he was going progressively lower and lower, and it was getting darker and darker. The walls began morphing into black marble shot with silver veins, and the hallways became less cluttered. Finally, it was empty, and he could see shadows stir beneath the black marble. It dawned on him that he must be inside of his subconscious. He blinked at the realization, watching a bubble form out of the black marble and then float into the opposite wall, disappearing as if it had never been. Shadows prowled, half-real and half-not. This was the realm of all those thoughts he wouldn't allow himself to face, those things he couldn't deal with alone -
A flash of red caught his eye, and he watched the end of a red dress disappear around a corner. He followed the dress, looking around the corner to see it disappear again, the end of it bright against the black marble. He frowned as he progressively started to run after the dress, always ending up a corner behind or a corner above. He could hear the steady 'clip clop clip clop' of heeled boots hit the floor, and he imagined the sound of a deep, throaty laugh that was all too familiar, and yet he couldn't remember for the life of him where he'd heard it.
He followed it deeper and deeper into his subconscious mind, this red dress with its disembodied voice and invisible shoes before suddenly entering a massive anteroom. His eyes widened as he stared at the wide expanse of sheer space. His breath fogged in the air as it steadily got cooler, and Lavi wondered what he was doing here. It looked like an arena of sorts.
"I see you finally made it," a voice said, and Lavi turned around to face... himself. The young apparition was no longer fourteen or fifteen. He was now seventeen or eighteen, his jawline smooth and strong, with a head full of thick red hair, an eye patch, a green headband and an eye like a green, glass marble. He was wearing a crisp Order uniform, and he stood at parade rest, his feet apart with his hands behind his back.
"Wait... what are you doing here?" Lavi asked, watching his Bookman self as he circled around him, his counterpart doing the same. They watched each other warily.
Suddenly, something distracted Lavi, and he looked back behind him, the flash of scarves tearing his attention away from his adversary. This time, he knew that the scarves and the dress were one and the same, the bright red of bloody clothing. He quickly returned his attention to his opponent, only to realize that his opponent had disappeared. Lavi felt apprehensive as it seemed to get progressively darker within his subconscious mind.
"I don't think you get it." The voice was disembodied, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. Lavi merely stood there, aware that the bloody flashes of clothing were becoming more and more frequent.
"This is the place where all those little things you don't want anyone to know come to life. This is where they hide, and this is where they stay. This is the fringe where all those thoughts you want to think get discarded and shoved into the back of your head. You know, you used to live here. Maybe you're so uncomfortable because you're afraid you'll be stuffed back into your box," the voice stated in seething tones, and Lavi winced. At one time, he had been here, that was true, but the thing was he'd grown into the person he was today. The voice speaking, the apparition talking to him, the one that tormented him was actually himself. It wasn't a separate entity. It was just that part of him that didn't want to die, the Bookman that was clinging so desperately to remain the lead on the stage in the limelight, the one that was speaking and acting out everything. It was a manifestation of his Bookman tendencies and training, separated out through stress and confusion.
His train of thought was broken when he was aware of another presence of sorts. It wasn't an actual presence - merely another manifestation of his thoughts. He looked behind him slowly, locking eyes with Esperanza in her bloodied, tattered, soot-covered clothing. He could see home-made bombs around her waist and bits of human bone and grit in her hair. This was Esperanza at her worst, as the warrior woman he'd learned that she had been rather than the gentle, though firm, peacemaker who could calm a horse with mere words and sooth a ravaged soul with bright colored paper and a small birthday cake.
"You had to face up to the truth at some point or another. You know that this is your mental image of her from now on. You can't ever look at her the same," the voice said, a body attached as the apparition walked behind Esperanza, who was holding twin pistols in her hands as she stared at Lavi with steely, blue eyes. Behind her, Kanda suddenly stepped up from the shadows, charred and half-cooked, a half-baked Second Exorcist. Allen joined their ranks, distorting the world around him into a gruesome black-and-white amalgamation with his cursed vision. Lenalee, broken and pitiful, sobbed nearby, and Miranda, useless as always, wandered aimlessly.
"These are all the foolish people you love. Look at them all. Aren't they all pathetic? You know they are, and yet... you still hang on to them," the apparition stated. He stared at Lavi, the two copies glaring one another in the eye, and suddenly Lavi wondered if he was the fake and the other was real. The room seemed to twist as Lavi found himself indecisive. Did he really... truly... love these people? Could he? Should he? He looked at them all, at their worst states. Komui was killing people left and right with a robot, silly as can be yet looking deadlier for it. Timothy stole from a child, snatching food out of its mouth. Noise ignored a civilian as he cried out for help in order to protect one of the Exorcists instead. Chaoji attempted to strangle Allen, and instead Allen killed him with superior might.
And then, Lavi had a realization. None of this was real. It was all his imagination.
His subconscious was tricking him into thinking that all of this was actually happening, that it had actually happened. It was so easy to believe that this was the real world, and that all these things were possible -
Just like that, Lavi knew how to get out of his own head, and he laughed. His subconscious seemed to light up like a stage after a performance when the audience leaves. All of the things he saw, all the people, they disappeared. All of the blood, gore, maiming, horrible acts, all of it disappeared. Only Lavi and his counterpart remained, with Esperanza fixed firmly in the same spot she'd been standing.
Lavi stared at her a few moments, and he asked himself, quite literally, "Why doesn't she leave?" Esperanza sat down, ignoring him. She sharpened a knife on a whetstone. The other Lavi shrugged.
"It's your subconscious. Maybe she likes it here. Maybe, to her, it's home." He gave him a look. "Maybe, because to you it's her home. It's where she belongs, at the back of your mind." Lavi had nothing to say to that. As he watched Esperanza continue to sharpen her knife and inspect it, the bits of bone dangling from her hair reminding him of gruesome hair ornaments, he asked, "And what about you? Why do you stick around?" The other Lavi blinked, and he frowned.
"I don't know. I'm not sure who was here first. All I know... we share this place. And we were the same person. We are the same person. I guess you just have problems, because you're arguing with yourself and losing," he answered. Lavi chuckled, closing his eyes as he savored that quip, but when he opened them, he realized he was in another, different memory. A happier one, he could tell, still in his subconscious, but in the portion that regularly cycled through previous memories without regard for which ones they were.
He watched as he, Kanda, Lenalee, and Allen all went out for a sundae in town. What a warm place it would be, with a sundae in hand as they toured the village with no greater cares other than what was for dinner and how much more ice cream they could afford as Lenalee would smile, Kanda and Allen would pick at each other, and Lavi would observe with the greatest interest and amazement at how much he could love people and still be as separate from them as oil from water.
A/N: Ooooookay, it's time for the recognition portion of our stories! Big thanks to janrockiss for his/her wonderful review over the previous chapter. We have a lot more subscribers on the bandwagon, with a grand total of 3 new, fresh people: janrockiss (again), BleachLuver2357, and bellaXmonster. Thank you, thank you, thank you for subscribing, as I love to know people love the story enough to keep tabs on it! On the favorites side, we have one newcomer, cottoncandydeath (oooh, death by confectionery, my favorite).
I am ecstatic to know that people are keeping up, especially with how busy school and everything can be, so I'd like to thank all the other, unnamed and unnoted readers out there that I can't address by name. I truly do appreciate you all reading this story. I write in order to please both myself and an audience, so I'm glad to know that there's a fair number of people in that audience.
I have also noted something of purport about reviews - sometimes you don't know what to talk about! You hit the review button, and you've got absolutely no idea what to put in the review after that. Like Afrikaan Voices, I am going to try to incorporate actual discussion questions in this section as to get your brain juices flowing. So, what was your favorite part of the story (as a whole)? What symbolism do you think you can pull out of Lavi's inner psyche? Do you think this 'Memory Palace' will be a plot point later on? Do you think that Lavi and Esperanza will survive past these next few chapters? And what do you think the Noah were doing at the lake on top of the mountain? What is your least favorite thing about the story (again, as a whole)?
Good day to you all, and happy reading! May you find words of great importance or thought, and carry on to have a blessed day!
-Doctor Yok