Bit of a short one here, it's been busy!
The apprentice was always happy to be dry ever since his arrival at the coldest, wettest place he'd ever been to. That didn't mean he didn't think rain would be fitting right now.
Here he was, following a dark and sinister teenager with anger issues down a forest path into the most backwater part of this mountain country. Really, he should be going to his death. An elaborate ruse to get rid of the last Bookman.
He followed Yuu's footsteps past one boarded-up cottage, careful to stay more than two swordlengths away. This one might be the most uncomplicated of the exorcists he'd been told to be friendly with.
Not to say he was an open book, but how little Yuu said and how fast he snapped had already told him what he needed to know. He and gramps both were sure he'd never kill him. Unless he had good reason. All the control in his skinny body went toward something other than his manners. Yuu exercised it like a muscle.
You could see it strain.
The apprentice would have picked up any killing intent if he had it. So, maybe it wasn't a trap, getting sent out to an undisclosed location that the young section chief wouldn't write down on paper.
The apprentice still didn't like being out here with a physically unbeatable, inhuman thing he'd spent some time studying. There was a different kind of tension that buzzed around its hard edges.
"I wonder what happened to the people here," he said out loud.
Yuu ignored him as expected.
"That place back there, someone nailed the shutters down. They knew they were leaving."
Before he finished speaking, Yuu had picked up the pace. It was subtle enough that the apprentice might not have noticed. Not if he weren't charting their path by paces and the direction of the sun. Gramps would want to know on the off-chance there really was something going on behind this trip's cover.
The apprentice let his feet swing forward more loosely to catch up. He'd hit his growth spurt before they enlisted. If Yuu's plan was to tire him out so he'd stop asking, it wasn't going to work.
They had left the signposted road hours ago and now tramped down some dirt path that had seen the other end of a storm. Trees were splintered and overturned the roadside. That gave one explanation for the empty cottages. The handful of hunters or coalburners that lived out here might've left during floods or before the storm, preparing their winter shacks for a return.
Not likely. These were real houses, homes where people lived with families, and the ground didn't show any signs of flooding. A windstorm could do this, the apprentice mused. Then, the problem was that those were hard to predict. There would be no time to prepare the houses.
Catching himself at the last moment, the apprentice skipped one foot over a gash in the track. He could've sworn he heard a noise from Yuu as he found his balance.
Hmm.
Considering it, there was no sound it could be except a chuckle. He thought that was funny? The apprentice could work with that.
"Say, Yuu, was there any flooding here?" the apprentice said sweetly.
He dodged the whip-fast blow without a problem as Yuu turned, letting that sheathed sword blade drift right past his face.
Payback, for the laughter. The apprentice wasn't about to give him the satisfaction of being scared. Though Yuu's tantrum went like clockwork, the rage seemed to be real each time. He never knew if he was actually trying to hit him.
"Don't."
"What, it's your name! What else can I call you? Spot? Rover? Daisy?"
The shock on Yuu's stormy face was like a lightning flash. Huh, the apprentice thought. That look—
His knuckles stung as the sword cracked across the back of his hand. Yuu had touched him with a flick he didn't even notice.
"Ouch!"
"Shut up."
The apprentice leapt back, shaking out his fingers. Gramps would say he was too old to keep spacing out like that. But this time he'd had good reason to be distracted!
What he saw wasn't the same two notes of anger or sullen irritation that were Yuu's only faces. He'd struck an actual nerve. The dog allusions? Maybe he'd had a pet as a kid. Gramps would want to know about this one.
Waiting to be sure Yuu's back was turned, the apprentice sucked on his swollen fingers. That really hurt, that time. What was his problem?
Behind them, the boarded-up house faded again in the forest's screen of sparse branches. The apprentice felt a shadow pass over him at the thought that they'd just passed the last sign of people in this wood.
He kept his eyes on Yuu's back.
The last sign of humanity
It was hard to miss that Yuu's abilities went beyond any of the known magics. The Order's library was a repository of accounts of Innocence, as they called it. Most manifestations were unique. Levels of augmented strength, animal-like senses, those were common enough. The consensus was that these powers developed naturally as the exorcists synchronized more closely, but Gramps was fairly sure it was the other way around, that Innocence took a form that was compatible with the user's talents. True accommodators were so rare, it only made sense that the few they found were freaks in one way or another.
The apprentice himself wasn't sure what that meant. The Innocence he'd been given did his work for him, it stayed as light as air in his hands even when it could slam into the ground with seismic levels of force, but it wasn't like he was that kind of a guy. Bookmen avoided fights when they could. Sure, they took on the elements, but that was only trying to get between different people in different places. You couldn't get knowledge out of rocks or rain. The apprentice didn't see the sense in gramps' theory when it came to himself.
He took his fingers out of his mouth when the taste of blood stopped. One hit was enough to split the skin.
Maybe the Innocence just changed itself so that what appeared to be the user's own strength was...accommodation. Innocence acting with the body as a conduit
The apprentice cast a wary eye on the spindly firs around them.
Well, whatever happened with Innocence, Kanda Yuu was a machine beyond that. His body transmuted food into power without ever passing through muscle; he stayed wire-thin even as he was able to lift Noise Marie with one hand in training and slam them both to the mat. When you looked closely at his skin, which passed for pale most of the time, it was networked with more scar tissue than it should be possible to heal from. You couldn't cut him with a kitchen knife.
Leaving that aside, the one time he'd snuck into Yuu's room, all that was there was a bare bed and...an eggtimer, full of flower petals.
The apprentice had seen people holding their own intestines. It took a lot to put him off. Yuu did.
He'd committed the scene to memory and brushed some dust around to hide that he'd been there, leaving by the door. He was never curious enough to go back in there and look at the pulsing, living thing.
The path turned as a hill rose up under them, disappearing into evergreens.
Gramps had kept a lot close to the chest when it came to the Order. Something he had told his apprentice was that they dabbled in alchemical experimentation, tested the behaviour of Innocence at its limits. His apprentice had privately decided before then that Yuu couldn't be human. One option was he was some kind of Innocence come to life, as pale as Hevlaska.
Which meant that he was out here, two days' march from the last town, knowing too much about Yuu, knowing not enough about the Order, and even though he wasn't on a solo mission...he was completely alone.
The apprentice wasn't afraid. By challenging Yuu this often, he'd confirmed that Yuu was going to need a reason to kill him. They even had a bit of a thing going on. He said something, Yuu glared, he said something, Yuu scoffed, he said something, Yuu grumbled, he called him by his first name, Yuu shouted. There weren't a lot of ways this could go any worse than them getting to be friends. "Friends." Not for the apprentice, but getting to the point where Yuu thought they were friends.
Except for that one look.
It complicated the sketch the apprentice had of him an easy mistake to make. Bookmen weren't supposed to be curious. They didn't look into things on a whim, they systematically gathered all available information. Gramps spent time teaching him that. Researchers who were too invested in unanswered questions would spend more time on hypotheses than evidence-gathering. They'd make their own answers instead of finding them.
The apprentice didn't want to know what Yuu was. He would identify him. Simple as that
That expression. What was it? It was hard to pick out for the second before Yuu hid his face. Surprise, definitely. The other part was regret, maybe. Sadness. If he had a dog that died, that'd be useful. Spot. Rover. Daisy.
He doubted Yuu ever lived in a place where a pet would've been allowed that wasn't a Parasitic-type. The way Yuu acted, all the tears he could have cried were dried up before he knew it.
The apprentice understood himself. He could only call tears up on cue. That meant there had to be something more specific than bad memories
"Yuu, how long is it? My feet are getting tired."
He barely even meant to say it that time, though his eyes picked out Yuu's fingers drumming over the hilt of his sword.
"Keep walking."
The apprentice shrugged like this was just a spat between friends, brothers, the type of people who'd make a threat for a joke. Or so he'd heard. That was the mildest Yuu had ever acted when he called him that. Actually, it was like he didn't even notice.
Whatever the Order wasn't telling them about this mission, it couldn't be simple if Yuu let him push that far. He had something on his mind.
Sorry to ignore our favourite main character for two chapters, but I promise we're getting there!