She woke up to the sound of food cooking. The smell filtered into the room, the delicious waft of meat and potatoes in a large pot. Esperanza slowly opened her eyes, the cold air chipping away at her exposed skin. She sat up slowly, the bed she sat on creaking under her shifting weight. She was underneath a blanket wearing an old night gown that looked like it'd been hand woven out of soft, worn wool. She rubbed the material through her fingers, looking around the room. Where was she? How did she get here?

The scarred woman viewed a room made of adobe brick. The walls were rounded at the corners, and the floor was made of uneven stone flags. She frowned, looking at the sparse furnishings, before realizing that she was not alone in her bed. She looked to the side, amazed to see her amigo still breathing next to her, softly twitching and frowning as his lips moved. She felt an overwhelming urge to reach over and touch him to make sure what she saw was truly real.

"Senorita. Esta despierta." She blinked as she turned to the voice, and her eyes widened.

It was the priest. The man who had died on the mountain. How did he come to be here...?

His long, white-streaked black hair was braided, and his lined face was stretched with a smile. He held a chipped bowl full of soup, and Esperanza immediately attempted to stand up at the sight of actual food that wasn't canned. However, her legs were weak, and she collapsed to her knees on the cold floor in shock. The priest rushed forward to catch her elbow, holding her up with one firm hand. She looked up at him sheepishly, struggling to get her legs beneath.

"Senor... what am I doing here?" she asked in Spanish, and the man smiled with a hint of sadness. He led her back to the bed, and she sat down gingerly, trying to avoid waking up her friend.

"I found you. In the snow. You were both nearly blue, very close to Death's door. I had thought I lost you, and especially him. He had a great fever later that night, and it raged for days. It only broke yesterday morning," the man answered, gesturing to the redhead. Again, Esperanza had the urge to reach out to him and make sure he was there, that this was no dream. She felt cheated, all of a sudden, knowing that someone other than her had taken care of her amigo, but she quickly suppressed the feeling. It was petty and pathetic. He received care, and that was all that mattered.

"How long were we asleep?" she asked in a bit of a daze. It suddenly occurred to her that they must've been knocked out for quite a while. Of what she could see from the small window that was farther down a hallway, it was already daylight, maybe even midday if she meant to stretch it. The priest thought for a moment, counting on his fingers.

"Five days. Maybe more than that." Esperanza took a deep breath, rubbing her temples. They'd been... been asleep for nearly a week. She rubbed her forearm, feeling knots underneath the flesh. She felt disgust skitter over her skin, crawling along and making the little hairs stand up beneath the cloth of her borrowed nightgown. She looked up at the priest. She surveyed his lined face. He was in his late thirties, but he looked older. He had a face that grew better in appearance as it aged, gaining character and wisdom as the years passed by.

"Hermano... how are you alive? I thought you were -"

"Dead? Heh, it will take much more to get rid of Hermano Federico. Oh, but if they didn't give me a sore back when I woke up, those demons," Federico said with a light air, and Esperanza winced. She noticed that he had dodged her question, and she decided not to bring it up any longer. Perhaps some things were better left unsaid.

After several minutes of conversation, Esperanza ate her soup, relishing a flavor that was different from the dried, foul stuff she'd been eating for the past four and a half weeks.

"You wish to inspect your friend, no? I've seen you eye him more than once, hermana. I know you worry. The church is sure to keep their soldiers close to each other," Federico said, mouth half-full of soup. Esperanza was hesitant to approach Lavi, as she'd had to walk with some assistance to a table farther into the small, two room house in order to eat properly, and now she'd have to walk back without the Brother's help. She struggled to stand up, legs shaking, but she managed to remain upright. She slowly inched her way over to the bed, using the wall for support. The Father watched her with fascination and attentiveness, so that if she fell he would run in time to catch her. It was not needed, of course. Finally, she scooted around the bed, using it for stability, and she knelt down next to the low frame.

Lavi looked peaceful in sleep, muttering and sometimes moving. He had cuts on his face, but they were covered in a strange sort of paste and gauze. His skin was a healthy pink, a much better color than the ghastly white that had pigmented his skin the last time she'd laid eyes on him. She peeled back the blanket slowly so as not to wake him, and she bit her lip.

In the dark, she had not been able to get a good look at his wounds, only knowing that they were harsh and could possibly be deeper than just flesh and bone. Now, she could see their full extent in the light of day, and she was appalled. She kept her fingers clamped around the bedspread and the blanket in order to keep herself from touching the wounds that dotted his ribs and what she could see of his back.

The scars would be purple and ugly. They were too jagged and dark to heal correctly without serious medical help. They had been stitched and covered with the same paste that covered the cuts on his face. The deep lacerations were reddish along the sides before fading into purple-blue bruises, a sadistic artist's expression on skin. Her eyes traced back up to his face, and she was suddenly staring into a single, green eye.

"AH!" She fell over backwards as Lavi sat up and laughed. She stared at him in awe, wondering how he could just suddenly wake up and stay so still. He winced as he leaned up on one elbow, shaky but cheerful.

"Scared ya, didn't I? Man, that stings. Thought the devil was picking at me with a pitchfork there for a while. Oh! Sorry, Father, I didn't mean -"

"No offense taken, young one. Do be careful when speaking his name, however. He enjoys a party," the priest said. He looked to both Lavi and Esperanza, one in bed and the other on the floor. They looked slightly absurd, and the man chuckled before shuffling off to tend to his soup. He would leave the two to themselves. He trusted they would behave. Of course, there wasn't much Lavi could do in his state, though he wondered if he should put so much trust in injuries to curb young, passionate feelings.

He'd seen it the minute Esperanza had woken up. There was some sort of unspoken tension between the two, something that he knew must grate against her skin and chafe against his. Still, he shrugged. If they had not confronted it yet, perhaps now was the time.

"Hermanita, su vestido," he stated with a good natured smile, and Esperanza blushed as she realized her dress had climbed up to about mid thigh from falling over. Lavi laughed as he collapsed back on to the bed, and the old priest disappeared. Esperanza watched him leave with a look of longing, as if she wished that he could be here as a buffer between her and Lavi. She wondered how he felt. The last thing she remembered, she'd been near dead in the snow, and from the drag marks she remembered she must've saved Lavi in that space of time she could not remember.

"Amigo...how are you?" she asked hesitantly, the silence finally becoming too heavy. He stretched his arms out, and he winced. He rubbed his face, the skin contorting as he stretched his cheeks. Stubble pricked against his fingers, and he sighed, "I've been better. I was more worried about you. I woke up yesterday." Esperanza's eyes widened in surprise. She'd been asleep longer than he had?

"I guess I recuperated a little faster than you did. Then again, you practically came back from the dead, if Federico is right," Lavi stated nonchalantly, scratching his head and ruffling his mussed hair. His eye patch was slightly skewed, but none of his mysterious eye was revealed. She frowned. He had been well enough to speak with Federico, even. This was awfully odd. How was it that this man, after only four days, had gone from a vegetative state to a highly-functional human being?

"What... happened?" she asked. Lavi scratched at his chin again, thinking hard, before stating, "He didn't say how he got away, but he did say that he was monitoring the camp. He searched through my bag, and he found my golem so he was able to report back to the church. It was broken a while back after I'd accidentally dropped it down that cliff, but he managed to figure out how to fix it." Esperanza nodded.

"And what did he see?" Lavi was suddenly hesitant. She could see it in his face. There was this unspoken twitch of the face, some sort of facial cue, that seemed to immediately convey reluctance. He put his hands in his lap, and he looked away from her. She tilted her head to the side, hair brushing against her side as she moved. Lavi was quiet for a while, and he finally told her, "He said that he was watching when they dragged us in. There's a ridge nearby that overlooks the camp, one that they didn't know about because they hadn't gone any higher than the lake itself. He watched everything."

"Everything?"

"...Everything." She chewed over this for a few moments more, masticating her thoughts like carefully flavored food that had hints of taste she couldn't place. There was something sour and salted about all of this, a hint of blandness. The priest had not helped them at all, only when the battles were over. However, that may have been for the best. Had he not stayed out of the fight perhaps he might've been injured or killed, therefore removing them from his role as caretaker of both wounded Exorcists. Still, she felt a small seed of resent blare annoyance and question over the priest's inaction.

"Esperanza... I don't know how you managed to stay alive," Lavi said softly. He rubbed his eye, his fingers pressing against the lid as if he wanted to rub the images out of his head. He looked back at the worn woman sitting next to the bed. He patted the bed, offering her a spot, and she hesitantly sat down gingerly on the bed. Lavi surveyed her in the nightgown, noting that beyond the fabric of the hem, he could see bits of metal almost seeming to grow out of her skin, the same metal that would've made up her shape-shifting, metallic equipment type Innocence. Perhaps the Innocence had saved her, the way it had saved Allen and Lenalee, taking on a life of it's own. He documented this carefully for later analysis, suddenly realize that, perhaps at last, he'd fallen into his old Bookman ways.

"He told me that they'd shot you six times. He watched you fall over the side of the cliff, but he didn't see you hit the bottom. He thinks you might've landed in the river, but I told him that you couldn't swim. He told me that God had created bigger miracles than saving a young woman who'd been shot," Lavi said slowly. "He watched them start draining and opening the lake and the river. He said that he always knew they were looking for something, he just didn't know what. And now, he thinks that they have it."

There was a quiet pause.

"Esperanza, they're gone. The entire camp's either dead or they fled. Even Lulu Bell left. That either means they got what they want or you scared them off enough that they didn't want to risk lingering," Lavi stated in a matter of fact manner. Esperanza licked her dry lips as she asked, "What do you mean, that I scared them off?" They watched each other with wary eyes, noting the other's body language and hesitance. Esperanza seemed to practically hold her breath.

"After you'd been shot, you came back. And you destroyed most of the camp." He glanced at her wrist, eying the slivers of metal sticking out of the skin like small, quicksilver scales. Her Innocence had seemed to kill in a swarm that night, the priest had said. Like a whirlwind of shards. Some men were spared, some men were not, but they both had a hunch that the unlucky ones were akuma in disguise. Lavi itched his cheek with a finger, feeling the sharp prickles intently as he tried to get his mind off the idea that Esperanza may have killed even more people than she already had, albeit against her will.

"What do we do now, then?" Esperanza finally stated after a pause, very business-like. Her face was a mask, carefully built to conceal all emotional discord or disturbance. "If the Noah are no longer here on the mountain, we should go back. And what of Darrin? You have said nothing of him, amigo." Lavi frowned as he realized he hadn't even thought to ask for Darrin. The priest had made no mention of the old man, and he wondered if he had escaped the mayhem.

"He never said anything about Darrin. Still, he told me that we're supposed to just stay around here, recuperate. He wants us healthy before we try to travel down to the town. Federico told me he'd actually rather stay here in this house. It's his mother's, and he'd almost forgotten about it until he'd gone to investigate all the disappearances for the Church."

Suddenly, they heard footsteps, and they looked towards the doorway. Federico stood with two bowls of soup in hand, and he smiled.

"Tengo unas comidas por ustedes. I knew you'd both be hungry," the priest said, walking towards them with the food. Esperanza licked her lips nervously, eying the food. She'd never been this hungry before. Lavi was less enthusiastic. His stomach turned at the thought of food, memories slowly coming back to him, memories he'd been careful to stow away for the time being when he'd realized he could package them and put them away in his new memory palace.

He'd had yet to actually sit down and meditate like Bookman had recommended all those weeks ago. Just as Bookman had warned, he'd ended up starting to fragment his mind involuntarily, and the encounter with Esperanza and the Other Bookman Jr. had brought that into full light. He swallowed, feeling sick again as he thought about the disgusting visage of Esperanza with her hair matted with blood and her face scarred with deep pocks. He was overcome with many different past scenarios, suddenly, bright and vivid in which food had played a part, especially the ones that turned his stomach and rocked his nose.

Immediately, he started to bolt out of the bed as he felt bile rise in his stomach, a slew of senses overtaking him as synesthesia of the strangest sort overcame him. He leaned out a window and emptied the contents of his stomach. Esperanza rushed over to him as quick as she could hobble while the priest set down both bowls and ran to Lavi.

"Amigo...amigo, what's wrong? Are you hurt? Are you sick?" Esperanza asked, and Lavi panted and waved her away. She leaned against the wall and looked on in vexation as he said, "Just... food... makes me... I feel... just, really... really sick... Too many senses... senses at once..." The smell of food had brought on a myriad of other memories, most of them unpleasant, and his stomach had roiled at the feeling of a dozen phantom senses bombarding his brain. Esperanza led him away as the priest picked up an old rag and wiped off his face. They sat him down on the bed, and the priest said, "Perhaps you should rest for a while. You have been sick. I do not think your stomach is ready for food just yet." Lavi lay down, and he took a deep breath.

Apparently, he wasn't out of the woods yet.

Meditation requires patience, focus, and the ability to endure sitting still for many hours. Lavi felt like he had none of those at the moment.

He wasn't quite sure how Kanda managed to do it, and it didn't seem to help the samurai's mood, either. Maybe his mood was bad because he sat for two or more hours just thinking about a single thing. Or maybe his mood did get better, which meant that his mood without meditating was about fifteen times worse than if he had. That was a scary thought.

The redhead squeezed his eyes shut and tried to get back on track. He was sitting on a stump outside of the priest's house, staring out across the expanse of the mountain. If he wasn't careful, though, he'd open his eyes a crack and take a peek at the mountain. And then he'd get distracted. Which meant he had to start all over again. Lavi slumped and sighed as he stared at the sky.

He hadn't had to do meditations since he was twelve. Back then he'd been more cynical and infinitely more lazy, if that was even possible. Usually he wasn't actually meditating then, of course - more like, he was taking a cat nap while Bookman sat there and watched him to make sure he didn't just get up and leave. However, when he had made an effort, he'd managed to get some sort of inner focus going. It seems as age had taken its toll, he'd lost his ability to focus. He felt like a fidgety child trying to sit still during church and focus on the liturgy that was being spoken in a language he honestly did not understand nor cared to learn.

He'd been trying to meditate for days. They'd already stayed another week at the cottage owned by the priest, and so far he'd recovered enough to take short walks outside and maybe stomach down a piece of bread or two, though not much more. The very smell of cooking food sent him reeling with a bunch of other senses. He'd never realized it, but his sense of smell was one of his most sensitive to memories, and it tended to bring back past experiences more than any other sense. This in itself wasn't bad - he could pinpoint bad things he remembered from prior experiences just by how the situation smelled, at least for now. This wasn't so good in the realm of food.

His sense of smell was also disrupting his ability to concentrate because he could smell the pine and the juniper and the new grass and the cottage's earthy aroma. He closed his eyes, tried to concentrate again on another single, lone thought, and he found himself failing miserably. There was too much to think about at the moment, and he couldn't seem to empty his mind. He grumbled to himself as he leaned his cleanshaven chin into his hand, resting his elbow on his knee. He chewed on his bottom lip, deciding it was no use. He was just going to sit here and do nothing. That was it.

Wait... wasn't that basically meditating?

Lavi deliberated this for a moment, but then he decided that was shirking, and heaven knew what happened when he shirked. He was in this mess becuase he shirked! He closed his eyes and felt the dim, clouded over sunlight in his face, enjoying the fleeting warmth. He smiled a little bit, loving any sort of warmth -

He suddenly smelled something else. He frowned to himself, not bothering to open his eyes. What was that smell? It was familiar and drifting towards him, not like the concentrated smell of crushed pine needles and juniper berries that were around him at the edges of the forest. It was the smell of laundry, a muted hint of home-made soap, and an aroma he'd never been able to pinpoint but always had associated with the scent of sunshine. His eyes shot open as he realized that he knew that smell. He got up and began to turn around to look at her -

He was accidentally jettisoned into his memory palace, recognizing the more-than-real walls of his mental manifestation of memories. He swallowed, looking around, wondering how exactly he'd gotten into the place. He knew that last time, he had merely retreated here out of necessity. This time, he'd come here accidentally, and he wondered what his body was doing outside.

The memory he viewed... He realized that he was actually watching everything from an outside perspective, and he swallowed deeply. He couldn't cover his eyes. This was the one room, one compartment, of which he'd hoped to escape and forget. Of course, that was stupid. He couldn't ever forget anything. It was in his training.

The memory-Lavi sat on a log next to Esperanza, and the woman suddenly stretched out, her back popping in several places. He could remember everything about this encounter - what she was wearing, what he was wearing, what she smelled like (the trigger of the memory, that trigger that had started this nightmare), what they'd drank, where they'd been, all of his thoughts but none of hers. It was a strange, almost one-sided memory that was being viewed from the outside. He knew everything about the man sitting on the log, all of his worries and fears and accomplishments, but he knew absolutely nothing about the woman other than that she was his partner, his student to an extent, and a murderer of innocents and... and that he actually might like her.

"Ir a voy a acostarme," Esperanza slurred together, and she got up. A phantom pang of panic raced across Lavi's skin like a bad high, and he knew what would happen next. Memory-Lavi's eye widened in utter terror, and he stumbled to his feet, shouting, "WAIT! Wait, wait, wait!" His movements were clumsy and dulled as he scrambled over the log, falling on his face, and snagged Esperanza's hand. Her face was slightly blurry as Lavi realized that he didn't know what her face had looked like - it'd been too dark. He watched as his memory self held her wrists and pulled her towards himself, embracing her like a child who'd just lost his mother and had found her again.

He knew that her body was stiff, and her countenance was one of confusion. Finally, though, he watched as she hugged his memory-self back, and they began to trip and bumble their way back to the log they'd sat on.

"Sorry," his memory self muttered.

"Es bien," the Spanish woman answered.

Lavi bit his lip as he realized he knew what was going to come next, and he'd better find a way to get out of the memory. He closed his eyes, blocking out the next scene, the one he was ashamed of, and he tried to think of something else, but here was the part where he was trying to explain himself, and he knew every word that had run through his little, befuddled, stupid, idiotic, drunken head. He wondered why he'd even bothered?

He tried to think of another memory, any other memory, but the smell of campfires, soap, and juniper only seemed to lead back to this moment in time. He couldn't recall anything else, and he wondered if he could run from this memory into another one.

He desperately scrambled for something else, anything else, as he began hearing the sounds of lips meeting lips, hormones clashing, hands reaching -

He suddenly turned, imagining a door or a path or a portal, anything that would take him somewhere else, and he took whatever he had imagined.

His sense of hearing came back first. He could hear someone speaking to him, but the voice was muffled and low as if he were trapped in a box. His smell came back, and the familiar scent of soap came back again. His touch returned, coming back with the feeling of the forest floor and fingers on his neck. He regained movement, and he pushed away from the smell of soap, the smell he loathed now, the smell he couldn't bear to be around because it brought back so much shame and failure. He flailed his hands about as he started to scramble upwards into the light. His eyes opened, and he stared into Esperanza's shocked face. A red mark was already forming where his knuckles had made contact with the skin, and it took Lavi a few moments to process that he'd just punched the only actual friend he had out here in the wilderness.

"Esperanza... Esperanza, I'm so sorry," Lavi said, brushing the side of her face with his fingertips, but jerking them back as if he'd touched something treacherously hot. She shook her head, absolutely unfazed by the fact he'd hit her. He wondered if that was due to her submissive nature or because she'd expected something like it from a flailing invalid.

"I am more worried about you, amigo. You got up to turn to me when I walked towards you, and you immediately fell. I had thought something went wrong inside of you," she said, tapping his chest and his head for clarification. Lately, they'd noticed that Lavi was prone to taking dizzy spells every now again, and they weren't sure why. They had no idea if it was permanent or not.

Esperanza's eyes were suddenly steely. The blue clashed with green as she narrowed her eyes and said, "You talk in your sleep, amigo. I hope you realize that." Lavi blinked. He hadn't been aware that he talked in his sleep... but about what? The look on her face froze him cold. The secret disgust of her was coming out. She knew about how much she represented his failure and inability to control his own mind. Did she?

"You must tell me everything. Lavi, I will not allow us to keep each other in the dark," she stated vehemently, taking him firmly by the shoulders as she lifted him upright into a sitting position. Lavi knew she was serious now - she'd used his name, or the only semblance of a name he possessed. He nodded numbly. She would ask questions with answers she probably didn't want to hear. She didn't know what she was doing...

"Esperanza -"

"No buts, amigo. No buts. I need to know, and I need to know now what is wrong with you, and what is wrong with me. I know you have shied from my touch before - as a young man, that is normal. But you also look at me in this... this... this guilty way that teine muy hambre. Is so hungry. From you, that is strange. And I must know," Esperanza stated in a voice that was riveted tight with no space to argue. She did have a right to know, though hungry wasn't a word Lavi would call his glances at her. More like... like... Actually, hungry was a good word.

"All right, all right. I'll... I'll tell you everything," Lavi sighed, and in half-amused thought, he wondered how this woman could manage to wring the truth from him so easily with just a few words and a single encounter? Kanda could do as much, but he needed a sword and a foul mood to accomplish it. Allen was good, too, by coaxing it out, but even he didn't get a full story.

Damn womanly wiles. That had to be it.

A/N: Shew, this is a record breaker. I finished this one in a little over two days. Ha!

Enough about that. We have a small number of new reviewers, subscribers, and favorites. On Team Favorite, we have one new player (correct me if I'm wrong): janrockiss! A familiar face, I remember she also submitted a review quite a while ago. On Team Subscribe, we have one more new player (again, correct me if I'm wrong): Kai-chan94! Again, a familiar face, seeing as this person is also on Team Review and Team Favorite. Apparently, fraternizing with the enemy is pretty common. And finally, on Team Review, we have, again, janrockiss and Kai-chan94! Sheesh, those guys are on a roll.

Well, I'm glad people are still reading. It makes me smile, knowing that there are still people out there who love me (or, at the least, the story). I cryeth tears of joy!

The next few chapters may be slow, I apologize. A lot of it is going to be inner reflection, and I may experiment with a literary style or two on different chapters (keep in mind, I am an aspiring writer, so I will try out new things every now and again - I apologize if that throws anybody off).

Hopefully, I'll the next few out in a bit! God bless, and happy reading!

-Doctor Yok