A/N: Oh, it has been a while…damn. Okay so I'm just coming out of a prolonged bad part in my life. It's not like I've been sunk into depression for a last however long, it's just that things have been really hard for a long while. I'm trying to catch up to the various parts of my life that may have slipped though!

For anyone who doesn't know or who isn't following my account, I have another story on this account that I haven't updated in a long while and I'll try to get back to that in the future because I have a promise to myself to never leave a story unfinished forever. But it might be a while. I might want to go over that story again and reintroduce myself to it and decide where I want to go with it in the future. Until then! Have this story which is hopefully as good if not better than that one!

Sorry that I've been low activity for so long, but hopefully things are getting better now.


I wonder where it all went wrong, Lavi thought as he stared at the gray sky. The land around him had nearly been laid to waste during this final battle. The area he had landed after that last hit had been abandoned during the battle, with only a few burned bodies in his immediate vicinity. Of which, he would soon be one.

Despite knowing that, he could do nothing but lay on his back on the scorched ground and stare listlessly up at the sky. His body didn't just feel weak, it felt battered and bruised. Nothing Lavi couldn't withstand after millenia of fighting, but the wounds had become too much to simply shake off and it would be the end of him this time, he was sure of that.

Lavi was known by many names, both in this life and in others. He occupied a strange, unquantifiable role both as a human and as a Noah once his memories had awakened. But his most famous name was the Millennium Earl. It had been so long now since he had awakened as a Noah, nearly forty years. Before that, he had been a Bookman's apprentice for most of his younger years. The teachings he'd been given during that time was something he'd benefited greatly from and took with him when he returned to his Noah, of which there were twelve besides himself.

He hadn't really had any more relations with the Bookman again after that, although the Bookman and the Noah occasionally had a mutually-beneficial symbiotic relationship due to the Bookman Clan's nature as impartial observers whose only true goal was to make sure accounts of secret histories survived the test of time. As a once-Bookman himself, Lavi understood this nature better than anyone. The Noah hadn't worked closely with the Bookman Clan in the last few decades. In fact, the current Bookman was working with the Order now.

He was eighteen and still training when his Noah memories awakened, causing him to abandon the path of the Bookman and forcing his old master to start a mad dash to find another student to train. After all, if the Bookman died before he could train someone else, that would be bad news for the Bookman clan's continuation. Not that he'd cared, they weren't his concern anymore.

As a Noah, the superior race of humans, Lavi hadn't aged externally in all those years since he'd awakened. Although he had the memories of thousands of years worth of incarnations and battles, he still looked eighteen. Road Kamelot, one of his Noahs, was much the same way. She had awakened a few decades before him when she was thirteen and she still looked five years younger than him.

His heart hurt at the thought of how his family's purpose would come to naught. Thousands of years of fighting against the injustice of Innocence and God only to be beaten in the end. It was such a shock when the tides of war changed, too. The Order had always been on the losing end of the war and everyone but the Order themselves seemed to know it. The Order's struggle for ground in the war has been an endless source of amusement for him and his Noah. They had never truly seen the Order or the Exorcists as a true threat to their mission.

No, instead they had only seen the Heart as the true threat.

After all, it was what had killed the first Earl of Millennium, way back during the Flood. It was what they searched endlessly for in order to finally put an end to the war. Destroying the Order would do nothing for them if they couldn't find and destroy the Heart, so they settled for allowing the organization to survive until then. Several of his Noah were already dead now, the downward spiral starting shortly after Skinn Bolic, the last incarnation of Wrath, was killed.

Even as heartbroken as he was, Lavi couldn't help a small, wry smile curling his lips slightly at the irony. To think, in the end it wasn't even the wielder of the Heart that killed him. No, it was a powerful Exorcist but not the Heart wielder. Not even a General.

The sound of boots crunching dirt broke Lavi out of his pre-destruction reverie. There was his successful rival now. The opponent whom Lavi had looked down on for so long after belatedly becoming aware of their existence and yet now could no longer withhold his respect. They'd achieved the unthinkable, after all. They'd killed the Earl of Millennium and won the war.

Allen Walker came to stand next to him, head tilted down slightly to look at his prone form. The Exorcist's hair had broken out of the ponytail he usually kept it in sometime during the heated fight and now his bangs hung down over his face, shielding his eyes from view. Lavi wondered what his expression looked like.

Victorious and exhausted, probably. Lavi could allow him that. After all, he had earned it.

Allen had made off better by a small margin, but he still sported numerous bruises and abrasions, covered in blood and with a noticeable limp. Lavi still felt a mixture of anger and hatred in his gut, though. This person who worked for the Order, who was one of the closest agents of the Heart, had single-handedly ruined everything for them. If it wasn't for him, they would have found the Heart, destroyed it, and won. They would've destroying this disgusting version of mankind that had come about after the flood - after God had suppressed their superior genes - and replace mankind to what it once was.

Instead not only had Allen beaten him, the strongest of the Noah Clan, but his presence had made it so that the Heart never had to come out to play. It got to stay hidden away in its little hidey-hole, away from danger and they never got the chance to destroy it. They still didn't know where it was, which made Lavi seethe in rage. If they were going down, he would've at least wanted to take that detestable Heart down with him, but he was left with only an impotent rage on that front.

He could imagine the slaughter of his last surviving Noah that would occur after he was gone. Without their leader and especially if Allen could still fight, they would turn into the hunted. The ones that were still alive might manage to retreat and regroup, but the Order wouldn't sit waiting. Especially not with Allen's surprise ability.

See, almost every exorcist had a special ability. Lavi recalled one that could turn back time and another that could possess Akuma. Early research had told him that Allen's eyes were special and could see the souls of Akuma, so he had presumed that that was Allen's special ability.

Well if it was, then Allen achieved a second: killing someone's internal Noah.

Perhaps sever the Noah's connection to this world would be a better way to put it. That late-breaking news had been what had initially panicked Lavi enough to put out a hit on Allen to the exclusion of all others. It had been what had convinced Lavi that Allen had to die now, not that it had worked.

Two reasons that they had thought that the Order would never win the war was because the Noah - though smaller in numbers - were ridiculously powerful and they would be able to keep coming back on top of that. They could keep being reborn in random humans at any time, anywhere in the world and start the fight again. Yet, Allen had once again single-handedly changed it all. If the idea of anyone but the Heart killing the Earl was inconceivable, then what did that make this revelation?

Well, it made Allen Public Enemy #1 to the Noah is what it did.

When Allen had killed Tyki, that was when he chose to make it known what he could do. Not only had Tyki died but the pain that each Noah had experienced was amplified past anything they'd felt before. Because Joyd - Tyki's Noah memory - died too. The grief and anger they had all felt at that had been immeasurable. Lavi could see it now, how his Noah memory would be destroyed by Allen as well and then how each of his Noah would eventually be hunted down and destroyed permanently, putting an end to the war forever.

Against the Order, the Noah would have had nothing to fear even without their Earl, but against someone who managed to kill him? Unless they managed to kill Allen, he would undoubtedly be able to end each of them. After all, Lavi was stronger than all of them combined and here Allen Walker was, the victor.

As painful as speaking sounded right at that moment, Lavi realized Allen wasn't doing anything and well, the redhead sometimes had trouble keeping his mouth shut.

"Looks like you win after all." Lavi forced the words to sound mocking rather than mourning, his voice scratchy.

Still, Allen said nothing. Getting annoyed now, Lavi tried to provoke him one last time. "Hey, aren't you going to say anything? I realize I'm beat here, but the least you can do is not be such a prick about ignoring me-"

Lavi was stopped in his burgeoning tirade by something wet falling down onto him. A drop of water landed on his cheek. Is it raining? Lavi squinted at the sky, trying to see. It was gloomy enough for it. Just as he was wondering about it, Allen chose that moment to sink to his knees next to Lavi and distracted the redhead once more.

The act changed the angle at which he was looking at Lavi and now he could see his face. The redhead's heart nearly stuttered to a stop at the sight he was met with. It hadn't been rain. Tears were pooling in Allen's eyes and some were slipping down his cheeks.

But why? Why was Allen crying with an expression of pure heartbreak on his face? Lavi saw no reason for it, this was his moment of victory, after all. The payoff for everything he had been fighting for. After everything Lavi and his fellow Noah have done to Allen and his comrades, he should be nothing but happy at Lavi's death. This…didn't match with what he believed reality should be.

Lavi was already feeling so much more weak and tired than even just a few minutes ago. His vision swam a little and darkness began encroaching on the edges of his sight. Somehow he just knew he was in the process of dying. Succumbing to the wounds he'd sustained and the Innocence poisoning.

Still, he needed to know. Wanted desperately with that Bookman curiosity that he'd learned in his formative years, why Allen was crying for him. Was the guy really that soft to cry for a hated enemy?

"Why…" Lavi coughed violently, each one wracking his body with incredible pain. Still, he pushed on. "Why are you making that face? Why…"

Because Allen was crying over him, the silver haired boy's tears dripping all over Lavi's forehead and cheeks now - not that he minded. The exorcist's expression looked nearly broken and his eyes had an understated desperation to them hidden underneath a thick curtain of sadness.

At hearing Lavi's words, the sadness in Allen Walker's eyes amplified. The tears came down faster for a moment but then Allen started to respond, haltingly and obviously with great hesitation. "I…"

But Lavi's ears had started to ring and he couldn't hear Allen's voice anymore. Instead, he read the man's lips, desperately taking in the confession of the one person to see him die. His mind, fuzzy as it was becoming now, saw the words spoken but couldn't think about them or what they meant.

Lavi felt himself succumbing to his wounds now, his mind starting to fuzz out of awareness. He could barely see, could barely hear.

I wonder… Lavi thought with the absolute last bit of awareness he possessed before he slipped under forever. I wonder if I could have done things differently. If there was something I could have changed to avoid our fate. If I could have, would any of this have happened? Could I have changed my own fate or was the 'villain' that the Innocence has dubbed me as always destined to lose?

And then he was gone.


Another note! I'm basically going to be screwing around heavily with the canon of the show. As in, a lot of even the previous events of the show are going to be rewritten because I think it'll be fun. Hopefully, things that were changed will be explained properly in the story but I'm open to questions if they aren't! Despite the impending fucking with canon that's about to happen, this is possibly the first DGM story I've written that doesn't take place in an AU world, and I'm pretty excited for that!