New Year, old me! I caught the flu and was incapacitated for a week, then I've been recovering for another week and I'll probably have symptoms until the end of January. Whoopee. Hope everyone had a better turn of the year than I did!
Daisya's hand shook slightly when he turned the doorknob. So what if he was excited! He'd had weeks of energy pent up, and now he'd finally had an entire night to say everything that passed through his head.
He pushed through the door.
"Come on in," he said.
"Hm."
Daisya swept his arm around for Kanda grandly, like there was something more to the room than a single bed and half a shelf. He kicked the wadded-up bandages under the bed to clear a path for them to step through. Through to where? He didn't know. Kanda was going to have to figure that out.
He collapsed on the bed while Kanda stood in the middle of the floor like furniture.
"So, we heading out tonight?" he asked casually. If Kanda said they were, he was going to throw him right back out to the window into the street. It was a long day already and he had so much stuff to do that wasn't just walking in silence. "Sounds like it's real urgent, for you to come all the way out here."
"It is," said Kanda. "Pack up."
Daisya buried his face in the bed and groaned. "I don't want to," he answered.
When Kanda didn't fire back, he risked a peek. His young old teammate wasn't even trying to argue, he just was rounding up all Daisya's things and shoving them back into his bag. He rolled back up to sitting.
"Hey! Hey, I spent money on this place. You want to leave, get me a refund."
"Fine," muttered Kanda.
Daisya bent over his knees and tried to get a good look under Kanda's bangs. "You serious? I thought you seemed pretty relaxed down there. Unless you heard something by golem…"
"It's serious," Kanda said dully. "Yeager died."
Daisya's train of thought came shuddering to a halt.
"Huh." That was something to chew on. "Is one day going to make a difference? I don't know a single thing about where the old man wandered off to," he said.
"We can sleep on the road," said Kanda. "Just start walking."
Daisya paused for a moment. "You don't wanna hang around people?"
"It's risky."
Damn, he did have a point there.
Daisya folded his arms, tapping his fingers. "Tell me that before I eat half a cow. If I get tired, you're going to be carrying me."
Kanda nodded. "We're not going far."
He stood up over Daisya and the bed. In one hand he had his backpack, sticking out in odd places from the hasty packing job. The other hand was just hanging around without anything to do.
Daisya reached for the free hand and let Kanda pull him up, still holding the bag. Well, he'd complain about it, but he did want to carry it himself. He wasn't that weak. Sometimes he just wanted to see what Kanda would do. It still sparked interest whenever Kanda moved against what he expected like flint on a file. There wasn't a lot in the world that was interesting from the start. You had to look for cool stuff. Daisya lived tending those sparks to fire.
"At least take some of the load," he said, to rub it in.
Kanda ignored him in favour of the door. Hah! What a sucker. So he was going to do what Daisya asked after all.
Stretching, Daisya took stock before they hit the road again.
He was glad he had his boots on, at least, and one set of bandages. It was a pain to have to get going once you'd stripped down for the night. Not that he hadn't had his share of midnight exercise. The fuzzy dinner haze was also starting to lift. An Exorcist General, dead, and Kanda really was scared it was going to be two of them.
Kanda…
Hey, the bastard just left!
Daisya straightened up. Fine. Let Kanda wait for him, if he was going to be so impatient. He was going to finish limbering up. He heaved an arm over his head.
That should do it.
When his shoulders gave a satisfying crunch, Daisya ran after Kanda out the door and down the inn's stairs.
"All right, all right, I'll carry it," he complained. "You know you can just say stuff like 'no', right?"
He caught up to him on the ground floor.
"Yeah," said Kanda. "I know."
Their boots clomped across the softwood floors past murmuring drinkers. So, Kanda wasn't going to go for a refund? Daisya was going to put that in his next allowance claim. See Lee try to argue with that. He'd know Kanda was the type to just walk out on a handful of good marks.
"I know! Didn't think you'd forget."
Making grabbing motions as he chased him out the door, Daisya finally got Kanda to hand back the rucksack. There! Was that hard?
While Daisya reefed the straps around his arms and tied an extra just over the hips, Kanda waited for him. They were standing just outside the pub's entrance, on the so-called main street of this crossroads of a town. It was a good few hours since Kanda first turned up to his table at the meeting place they'd arranged.
Daisya had waited for him the night before, all night in front of the cut-price tallow candles. He'd written almost an entire report and it had been better than just sitting there tapping his feet and feeling like his skin was going to go dancing out the doorway. They'd talked about the witch's village and the delay. Daisya didn't know if it was better that he got another story out of it, or worse that Kanda was one day late.
He settled the pack's weight down below his shoulder blades. That'd last another few hours.
"Ready," he said, but Kanda was already walking away.
What a jerk.
Grinning, Daisya chased after him.
The day had already been cooling off by the time Daisya settled down in the common room earlier this evening. Now it was getting to the be the full chill of night. He felt the wet wind on the end of his nose that told him it'd be raining somewhere tonight, soon.
Kanda had better pull out one of the good bedrolls. If he dragged Daisya out in the dark of night on to an adventure, that was fine. Great! He just hated lying awake too tired to do anything and too wet to sleep.
Huh, that reminded him—
Daisya looked up to see if there were any stars.
"What is it?" asked Kanda.
"It's cloudy," he said. He kept walking, chin tipped all the way up to try and pick something out from the blue-grey.
Kanda grunted. Of course he didn't remember. It was cloudy a lot of nights. Especially up here, Europe got so much cloud it was like always sneaking around under a blanket. Daisya still remembered one night running around under that wet mass with nothing between, trying to find one spark of light in a maze of identical streets.
Oh, well. Daisya flipped his head back down.
"You got a camping spot planned out, or do I just have to lie down on the grass wherever?"
"It's close," Kanda said. He squinted at Daisya like he always did when something confused him. That was most things.
"Hey, this isn't the way you came, is it? Why're we backtracking? Just ask me to come back to HQ next time, that's faster."
The town passed by them as they got to the edge of the last stable before the fields started again. Daisya started to pay attention to how the dirt felt under his boots. Slipping in the mud now was really going to ruin everything else until he got to a clean river or another inn or something.
"You know where the old man is," Kanda said, like that explained anything.
"I know where he was."
"Yeah," said Kanda.
"I'm saying, he could be off in Asia! He never says anything to me, just comes through and gives me a lecture about the beauty of human fragility or whatever. The Order's who should have his reports filed. If Lee didn't lose them in his dumb paperwork pile. Anyway, I don't get why Lena doesn't just burn it."
Daisya skipped around a dip in the road, grabbing Kanda's shoulders for balance.
"He doesn't know. The old man doesn't check in."
They stumbled together like a pair of twins in a three-legged race. Daisya got back his balance easy by stepping on the end of Kanda's boot.
"Well, how come he always seems to know where I am?" he asked. "I bet he does that to you too."
"Tch." Kanda just shrugged, but Daisya was pretty sure that was to avoid saying something instead of avoiding having to say something. There was a difference.
"I guess it works. If we can't find him, the akuma are going to screwed."
Daisya slowed down to stare at a lit farmhouse in the middle of a field they passed by.
"They could always follow us. That'd probably work," he thought out loud.
He felt Kanda's hand on the inside of his elbow as he tried to tug him back to the path.
"Except you didn't have a clue. You had to come to me. Hold on—not like that! Geez."
Daisya flapped his hand at Kanda to shoo him off. There wasn't any way he was going to break the grip he had on him by his own effort.
"You're scared they're going to track me down!"
"Hmph."
Goal!
"Aren't you sweet," he teased. "Little Kanda wants to follow me around."
"It's the only lead," Kanda said.
He still hadn't let go of his arm, Daisya noted patiently. Man, could Kanda be overprotective sometimes. Didn't he remember Daisya was older? He was only embarrassing himself.
Daisya patted him on the shoulder to make him feel better.
"No, no, I get it, I'm a hot commodity. I can stick to the back roads to make you feel better. Old man."
"Shut up." Kanda finally let go and shoved him.
Cackling, Daisya fell back in by his side. The farmhouse long gone by, they were heading off into the total darkness that might have bandits and wolves, if this wasn't the middle of country that had been razed for farmland and didn't have better thieving opportunities in the trade cities.
He put a hand up over his eyes as he stared forward anyway, out of habit. Who knew, could you get cataracts from moonlight? It would make some kind of sense if the moon made your eyes all milky instead of the sun. There wasn't any moonlight out to check that theory.
"It has been a while since we did this."
"Huh?" asked Kanda.
"Walking around in the middle of the night. Makes you feel like something's going to happen," he explained.
"It's not," said Kanda.
"You don't know that! It could too," he shot back.
"Yeah, what."
"Beats me. What do you want to see?"
They strolled on without Kanda giving any answers or any non-answers. Daisya tried to give him a sly glance, but he couldn't even see well enough to do that. Probably he was grinning right at his collarbone. It still pissed him off how he could only stare into Kanda's chin these days. He'd been taller!
He heard Kanda breathe out. Not sigh, just exhale a little louder than his usual creepy quiet. Aha!
"Oh, I get it, you're already seeing me. Pick something else!"
Kanda just grunted in defeat as Daisya skipped ahead.
"Y'know, I've been going out on solo missions way more this year."
"Hm."
Daisya peered around the graphite-black scenery trying to make out the edges of the windbreak bushes that lined the trail. It was like cloudspotting, you could see the shapes mash up and drift if you stared long enough.
"It's kind of a pain that I've got to pace myself, save my strength, whatever. I'm just saying, if I'm on a road, I just want to keep walking. Always feels like there has to be something fun if I go far enough. Because there usually is."
"You didn't want to start walking" said Kanda.
"Yeah, I had you for a night! I told you, it's solo missions where I can't slow down."
"You're not bored?" Kanda asked suddenly.
"Now? Nah." Daisya humoured him. "I'm going on a quest to save the old man from certain death. Nobody's telling me where to go. We've just got to go find him. What a blast! I'm a detective, now. A detective exorcist. A detexorcist."
The big meal he'd just downed was starting to send his legs wheeling like a water mill, blood racing out to the ends and back again. Kanda said it was only a little ways to the campsite. He'd make it a long ways. Daisya was already settling in for the half-day hikes he was used to.
"Hm."
"Let's go into the the mountains," he decided. "I want to see some rocks."
"You already could see them from that village."
"I know that. I'm talking about the other ones! I haven't been south forever."
The trees were getting taller, sticking saw-toothed up into the dull black sky on either side of them. It was like they were both getting eaten up.
"I came south," said Kanda.
Daisya clasped his hands behind his back and stretched out mid-stride.
"Ah! Fine, okay, we only ever go southeast. Are you happy?"
"Yeah."
Daisya pounced. "So I was right! Hah, you're less bitchy when nobody can see you."
He got a coat-shifting shrug, which was about the answer he expected. When he looked, he could see Kanda join him and stared up at the sky as well.
"You said Tiedoll went to the North African branch," he said.
"Eventually, I said he's getting there eventually. I don't know what he's doing on the way."
Kanda grunted. "You didn't pay attention."
"Hey, I'm not his tour guide! He can go where he wants. I just remember, he said he'll be crossing on foot. That guy really doesn't like boats. So, that's the Rock. Unless he's going through home."
"He would tell you."
"Yeah! That's exactly what I thought."
Both of them could see the canopy close over the small grey cap of sky. Daisya snapped his head back to the ground as the dizziness got too much, but he'd forgotten that it was also too dark to the see the ground.
Whatever. He'd got good balance. Stumbling on, he waited until the waves sloshing around his head subsided.
"We're close," said Kanda.
"What? It's been like, five minutes, and you already want to stop?"
"Mm."
"I'm going ahead. I'm up, I'm walking, you've just got to keep up."
Daisya hiked his bag further up his shoulders and plunged forward to the dirt in one big step. Now that was cheating. He'd been sure there was some solid flat around down there. They'd just taken it away when he wasn't looking.
He didn't struggle as he went down. Just like he knew was going to happen, Kanda grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and hauled him up before he hit anything.
"You're tired," said Kanda.
"I am!" he said.
Daisya scratched his spinning head as he tried to watch the pitch black patch that could've been Kanda's face.
"Let's keep going. I want to see how far I get. You can tag along."
Sighing, Kanda snapped into his own ground-eating stride. The pace of the footfalls that Daisya only heard when he strained for them had picked up to something a lot faster than he should be able to follow on shorter legs.
He jogged to catch up. They were doing that, huh? Daisya could stay with him shoulder-to-shoulder. They'd see who dropped out first!
Daisya kept up for the next hundred-odd metres without even feeling a little bit tired, so it was a surprise when Kanda dropped out first into a slow stroll that didn't suit him at all.
"Sayonara, I win!" Daisya called over his shoulders.
"Wait," Kanda said back.
"What?"
"You won't get to sleep if you run more."
"Well, wouldn't you know."
"What?"
"You never sleep. Did you seriously never notice before?"
"Shut up."
"Hey! Doesn't change that you're trying to put me to bed like a kid."
Kanda muttered something.
"Huh?"
"Nothing."
"Come on, you know you can't do that. What'd you say?"
"Whatever."
Daisya kicked the dirt.
"Hah! I bet I can get it. Sounded something like…" he mouthed out the sounds. "'Bed,' 'won', wait, 'one'? 'You are one?' No, that's not it."
Beside him, Kanda was making some kind of noise that sounded like a hot pan cooling down. Hah! He bet he really regretted hiding anything. Didn't Kanda know, if he dangled something in front of Daisya, he was going to go for it?
"'I want to go to bed', maybe, I don't think so. Say, Kanda, why don't you tell me?"
Daisya snickered at the wall of silence he got.
He smacked Kanda's face with the back of his hand and let it sit there. It was warm. For Kanda, that meant he must be steaming.
"Or are you too embarrassed?"
One, two, three. Daisya kept his freezing-cold fingers pressed against Kanda's cheek.
"Go on, I wanna know what you said about me."
Kanda didn't answer him and didn't pull away either, until Daisya's hand was warm again.
"Fine. See if I care," he said, lifting it off with a flourish.
Kanda caught it mid-air before he could bring it back to his pocket and got it under control quickly. He had to have good night vision, with those black eyes of his. Daisya wondered sometimes if it was all pupil.
Trapped between Kanda's thin and iron-hard fingers—they really stung when he wanted them to—Daisya gave up on his hand as a lost cause and let it fall down between them.
"Is this some kind of way to make me stop when you want to?"
"No," said Kanda.
"Okay. Then tell me when we're stopping."
Kanda hummed. "Why?"
"There's something I want to do before."
Sighing in resignation, Kanda didn't say anything to that.
My kids...I'm going to miss them.