we'reeeeeee back! as they say: it gets worse before it gets better
The day after, they escaped without a problem. Daisya remembered some of the sights he'd seen running through the empty streets of the town. They stuck to the quiet parts, out of sight without a hitch. He and Kanda saw, counted, and avoided the crowds that came out to goggle at the mess from last night. People swept shards of windows and the odd mirror into dustpans on the corners while talking quietly about how long it was going to take to find new glassware. Everywhere there were eyes that looked for soldiers. What else could do that much damage except artillery? Except who could sneak cannons in and out overnight?
Daisya couldn't find it as funny as he wanted it to. He was a soldier, here.
Together they stole through the cold morning.
Striped canopies mixed with thatch or wooden galleries jutting out into the streets. Business wasn't stopped for everyone. All Daisya had to do was keep his ears open for the sound of something promising.
They didn't stop once. Kanda's long strides kept up with his own double-time march. Around the back of one stable he remembered as they passed by, there was a stolid pony getting fitted up for travel. That was good enough.
Motioning to Kanda, Daisya had looked for a grunt or a shrug. What he got was a calm nod. That was even eerier than getting ignored.
So they took a ride on an empty cart headed out for charcoal collection and took lunch with them. Daisya had sneaked some from the inn's kitchen while everyone was fussing over the news of the collapse. A few of the regulars hadn't made it out, or so he heard.
They hunched down below the sides of the cart. Daisya looked at Kanda. Kanda looked at Daisya. Neither of them said anything, or tried to. The burn of waking up sweating meant that they still hadn't noticed how cold it was this morning. On either side the tall facades of townhouses passed them by, then turned to the brick buildings that made up the wall, then cut off to nothing.
The town grew smaller as they jolted down the road.
The old man driver barely noticed they were there after they'd paid for travel. As for Kanda, he could've been a shadow with how much noise came from him. Normally Daisya could at least expect a grumble from him whenever he spoke, but he didn't complain, and Daisya didn't say much, because he couldn't decide what to say first.
So he got out his notebook and dotted some staves. The music on the page didn't come alive to him like it did for Marie. He couldn't only get the rhythm down that was pounding in his head. One-two-one-two, a two-four time.
The pony's hooves clopped to the same tune. He got down a few measures of it before he got to the end of what was in his head. The rest of the ride was just excruciating. His notebook was already three-quarters full, there wasn't enough space to spend on sketches.
Then halfway through, Daisya had got so bored that he started to sing. He went through all the ones he remembered. The old man joined in on some of them, but he wouldn't say of the words. Just hummed along quietly.
Kanda didn't whine at all as they got through the next few hours.
Of course, it'd be dumb to just leave that disaster and let the akuma trace them out of it. Word was going to go around fast. The military police might show up, and who knew what kind of actual metal akuma were lurking in the army. So they couldn't rest that long.
Good.
They ate their sausage and brown bread in total silence, since Daisya's mouth was plugged up with the chewing, and gave some to the driver, since he had oatcakes to share. After lunch, Daisya thanked him.
They hopped off without stopping at the next intersection with a mid-size road. It wasn't a plan Daisya actually needed to talk about. They'd take a day sleeping in a shed at whatever village they found and head out on the train tomorrow, from a station far enough that no one would think they'd walked. That's what formed in his mind. Kanda would have to play along.
So, there they were. Stuck between fields. Shivering, since they didn't move around while they were on the cart. Daisya watched the old man and his pony trundle out of sight. When the skin-crawly cold started to sink in through his gloves, he stuck his hands in his pockets to keep his fingers moving.
"I guess we gotta walk," he said.
"Yeah," said Kanda.
Then they walked.
…
Yesterday's cloud had stuck around.
Daisya's breath came out in long feathery clouds like smoke. Even Kanda's fogged in the sticky wet. Just the two of them together, they had no real place to go. They dawdled over frozen ruts in a path between fallow fields.
Not much farming going on this time of year. People flooded into towns for work or joined the army, while the few who stayed out on the steadings were doing the math right now to see how long they could afford to. Daisya turned his head from shoulder to shoulder, watching the frost that still hadn't burnt off.
That meant there were no people around they could see. The land curved just a little here in the southeastern states. Nothing that you'd notice as you climbed a slope, but enough that the world seemed smaller. The hills hugged the horizon all around.
Only a few birds had stayed through the winter. He and Kanda could have been the only things alive, and you'd never know it.
With no other entertainment options, Daisya came back to the only moving thing in the scenery.
It ignored him.
Kanda seemed to be all healed up just after one night. It figured, his powers worked well enough that Daisya only took a few hours to go from exorcist paste to badly-injured and unconscious. The air even nipped hard enough to bring some blood to his cheeks, which meant that he looked more alive now than he did when he was doing just fine. He was quiet. On purpose. He walked through the world around him like it was stopped in motion, moving silently from one foot to the other as mist froze on his lashes.
"What."
Or, he'd been quiet. Daisya supposed that staring might've clued him into the fact that he had something on his mind.
"You doing okay? You've been kind of quiet," he said idiotically.
"Tch."
"See? You don't even sound like you mean it." Daisya backed off, scuffing his heel on the ground. "Excuse me for noticing."
The late wake-up and the low cloud were throwing off Daisya's senses. It should be mid-afternoon by his clock. It didn't look it. The sunlight was glowing gold all around like it was sunrise. Probably it was clear way overhead, but the mist around them was just thick enough to spread the sun like butter without blocking it out.
Kanda had gone back to ignoring him. That just meant he wanted Daisya to poke further.
"You got pretty hurt. I don't think I've ever seen you actually break something," he said.
"I'm fine."
"Listen," Daisya reasoned, "If this is about you telling me all kinds of things last night, you were the one who brought it up. It's not my fault you get chatty with a head injury!"
Kanda grunted on the next footfall. Normal enough reaction, so that must not have been the thing that was bugging him.
"It's something else, huh? I'm out of guesses," Daisya said. "Come on."
Skipping to the next foot, he aimed a kick at Kanda's ankle that bounced off harmlessly.
"You killed them," said Kanda.
"Huh?"
The smoke from Kanda's mouth snuffed out.
"Don't lie."
Daisya squinted at the iced-over puddle that had formed in the centre of the dirt road.
"Yeah, I'm not trying to," said Daisya. "I got the akuma that took Mugen, then I came to get you straight after. I was smart about it. I didn't even take any risks."
Kanda scoffed. Okay, that one was a bit of a lie. At this angle the sun shone off the puddle like a mirror. He wondered if he could just step through it like a portal and be at the next train station without walking the distance. He was bored of this straight-to-the-point Kanda.
"You know I'm trying be careful now. Which is your fault, by the way," he said.
"Daisya."
Reluctantly for once, he dragged his eyes back to the other guy. He was giving him the same old glare. Yep, it was definitely old. Daisya hadn't got this one in a while.
"They had to be akuma!" he argued. "Humans wouldn't go for Innocence like that."
"Idiot."
They split, each to one side of the white-hot score in the earth.
Daisya decided to give up a little ground. "Then what's the difference? Akuma are made out of souls, aren't they? What makes them so different from humans?"
He thought it was a pretty good question. There wasn't any agreement from the other side. So Kanda wasn't going to answer him now, huh?
Fine! They were back in the type of puzzle game he liked. Daisya could do it himself.
"It's that they keep shooting at me!" he yelled. "That's the difference."
"They were alive."
"D'ya think I'd wait around and check pulses when someone's trying to kill me and snatch Mugen? No way!"
He thrust his hands into his pockets. There wasn't any kind of way you could argue against that. Kanda would just sulk for a few days and get over it.
"They'll hang you," Kanda said, and Daisya stumbled.
He didn't…
What?
Kanda didn't…
Daisya tried to get his sense of balance back on the icy ground beneath his boots.
"Yeah, yeah, you too. We've both killed loads of akuma," he said dazedly.
"That's different."
"They were killers too!"
You should have been dead after what they did.
A bitter gust tore a patch out of the cloud cover that saw them both swallowed up by midday sun. Daisya broke into a run to keep up with the silhouette that seemed smaller by the second. Where'd he get off, leaving him behind?
"Kanda," he called. "Kan-daaaa, I know you're listening to me," he panted, drawing level. "Think you're the first one? They totally jumped one or two people before."
"I don't care."
That was it. Daisya ran out of patience. Not that he had a lot, but that was the last time he wanted to hear the same answer from Kanda today. He grabbed Kanda by the arm, taking his chance against his strength. There was only frozen mud under them to get a grip on. A push, and he'd be going tumbling down.
"You have got to be kidding me!"
But Kanda didn't fight him. He let him hold him still and he faced him. Nothing more than that.
"It's done," he said, voice low. "They don't come back."
"Good!"
Daisya thought he was going to snap or at least say something. He just turned away. Didn't even glare, which was the worst part. He stepped right out of his grasp and didn't look back.
It's not like he shouldn't have expected him to do that.
Daisya was just hoping that Kanda would surprise him again.
He wiped his eyes.
Go figure.
The back of that retreating jacket hung in front of him like a red rag, stubbornly refusing to burn or wilt no matter how Daisya stared at it. Fine.
Kanda wasn't ignoring him, he realized. There wasn't any Daisya for Kanda to see. Now and back then, there was just a space at Kanda's side where he wanted Alma to be, and Daisya was the sucker who stepped into it.
Only, now that he'd sent some chumps off to the big bar in the sky, he'd proved for once and for all that it was somebody else here. Whoever Alma was wouldn't do that. Kanda couldn't deal with the fact that Daisya was the one who could.
Fine! Wasn't that something he wanted in the first place? He'd got Kanda all figured out, now!
He wasn't going to trail behind for long.
Kanda was just something to play with until he got bored. If he lost his stretch and stopped bouncing back each time he kicked him, Daisya wasn't about to keep an old football he couldn't stitch back together by himself.
He forced his legs to get moving again. The muscles were pulled as stiff as they could go by the last few days of use, but as the heat turned up, they melted again like rubber. Each new step glided more easily past the next as he fell into the run that would carry him across the football pitch mid-game without any danger of tiring.
There was a place in the road where it disappeared over a bluff, barely more than a field's length away, and the snow-glare blocked out everything behind it. If he just got over the next rise, there'd be something new to see. Daisya's world would be fun again once it whited out and came back into focus.
So Daisya chased past Kanda. He didn't look at him either. Two could play at that game.
But once he got past him, it was like he was running in place. The end of the path stayed out of sight off between the distant fences. The wind could have been pushing him back as fast as he ran. There was just the wheeling motion of knee to wrist and back again.
Why'd it have to feel so bad?
The breaths that usually came easy were catching. He had to force them through now and then with a cough. It wasn't just the winter weather—things were cold, but they weren't that cold. He was used to the chill. It wouldn't be long until the steam came off his forehead.
He just had to keep going.
That was the only thing left for him. Nobody was following. He had to get over the high horizon.
Then as soon as he thought it again—bam! Things would get easier. There was something waiting for him to do and nothing behind him.
So Daisya cut through the fog. The air was so heavy he felt it part in front of him and swoop around like stage curtains. He just had to keep going until the burn in his lungs wiped out whatever pain was sloshing around in his chest right now.
Kanda wasn't going to thank him, was he? Wasn't going to say sorry for what he put him through? Daisya was more scared than he'd been in his stupid short life running after those things. Of course people don't come back!
He'd thought Kanda wasn't going to.
Softening his knees, Daisya slid across another patch of snow-dusted ice. The stomach drop he got the first time he skated was almost gone now, but it still gave him something to think about. He didn't even wobble when he hopped back on to the dirt road.
All the terror of seeing a corpse instead of Kanda lying there in the alley and what did he do? He just yelled at Daisya for killing a few humans. They weren't even people. No person could do something like that to another person and walk away from it. And Kanda wanted him to leave him there forever rather than doing what it took to find him. Would he have survived in the cold like that? Did his healing factor cover hypothermia?
Daisya coughed again, barely keeping his rhythm. With this much breathing trouble he was going to cramp up before he got tired.
What a jerk. Kanda never even thanked him. It's not like Daisya could've done anything else, just, it would've been nice.
All the hurt Kanda put him through, it would've been nice if he knew.
He felt the sweat start to build under his bandages as he crested the rise he'd been on. The only way he knew it was that the windbreaks and fences that had been at the horizon were beside him now, and everything else was covered over in wet sheep's wool. It still felt like he was climbing uphill.
Kanda wasn't even mad at him. He wasn't anything at him. He was just mad at the results he got. It was like Daisya was a machine! Or maybe he was a metaphor. People got killed, he got rescued, and Daisya had nothing to do with it. To him, it could've been anyone who turned an entire town into a radar golem. It could've been the greenest wet-eared exorcist they had who had found him, who could wield his Innocence like a scalpel to bring down one wall of a building and leave everything else standing. Daisya was so replaceable that he could be Alma, because anyone beside Kanda had to be, and it wouldn't even matter who!
The curiosity that was bubbling in him from before he even really knew Kanda had boiled off once he got the picture. He wasn't waiting to find out more now. Alma wasn't a mystery. He was a fact. Following him, staying by his side, Daisya was just passing the time as Kanda told him all about how he'd…
"Aaaagh!"
The stitch ripped up his side like a fishhook when it came, tripping Daisya over his own feet.
"Fuck. Hell. Damn it. Ah, shit."
He stumbled and slid back. While he hacked his lungs out, he saw something just slipping out of view and whipped his head around.
Kanda wasn't even a foot behind him. He'd kept up all the while.
Sorry that updates haven't been as regular as I've hoped, it's been a couple of months. Still aiming to finish by December, there aren't any major arcs left. Hope you've had fun! Thank you as usual to my erudite and refined readers, you guys are the best. I hold every hit dear
