A short one this time! Still just laying down the railroad tracks ahead of me. Thank you one and all again for reading, hope the world is treating you well

IcyLady ah Kanda...he's such a good lad, even if he is a little rough around the edges (((': Who else could be a child experiment, a tragic lover, a mysterious badass, a good friend, and an inhuman knight in one go?

I'm glad the fauxshadowing worked out haha, I was afraid I was laying it on too thick with poor Magda! I was rereading the Matere arc a while back just for reference and I just had to wonder, if the Innocence can animate a doll, then could it animate a corpse? A bit morbid, but it is DGM after all lol

And you're so right about the akuma! It's hard to suspend your disbelief when Allen + Kanda are barely surviving the Level Twos in the Matere arc and then a few chapters later you've got Kanda killing a Noah, or Lenalee + Lavi + Bookman + Miranda fighting Eshi to a draw together after a long battle and Marie taking out Level Threes by the dozen during the Ark arc. Oh well! I guess it's one of the rules of shounen manga, everything is impossible to defeat until it is defeated, at which point it's incredibly easy. Hope you enjoy the read :)

Lenalee sank her teeth into her lower lip, letting the pain split her attention away from her burning legs. Her synch rate was wobbling dangerously at this point. For the last stretch, it had been all she could do to stay flying without dropping Daisya or passing out. Her vision wavered with the pulse of blood like at the end of a long-distance run, only Kanda wasn't here to help her up or tell her to keep going.

The sound around her didn't help the headache. She still didn't understand exactly how the Boots worked, but they hummed over and above the rush of wind around them loud enough to make her teeth hurt. The Charity Bell was even louder than that.

People were running out from sheds and stopping on the road at the noise this early in the morning. Any cover they could even pretend to have was blown. It was the only way, though.

Akuma had come pouring out of the woods like bees, chasing them down the first mile or so and still following, if at a distance. She could never have fought them, not without leaving Daisya behind. This was the one way they could both stay alive, Daisya hanging off of her with failing arms and her spending every ounce of the strength she'd built to move them forward, to regroup. The speed they were going was as fast as she'd ever gone, but the extra weight was still more than she'd trained with. Kanda was always her partner for this. But at least Daisya knew her too. He did what she needed from him.

The forest under them was getting closer as she lost height. As she noticed that, she noticed that her head had fallen. She forced it back up, eyes streaming in the wind. There wasn't really anything she could see outside of colour. Green fields below, blue sky blurred with white and…

…black spots. Ahead.

"Daisya!" she shouted in the storm.

"What?"

"Akuma! Ahead!"

"Shit!"

Gritting her teeth, she redirected the Boots' propulsion by a few degrees, catching the wind and spinning them around in midair so that she faced the akuma in pursuit and blasted backwards towards the town, letting Daisya face forward.

"I can't see!"

Face out of the wind now, she could. There were only a few hangers-on behind them. The tears that had flown off in the wind dripped right down her cheeks as she tried to keep her legs steady against the unbelievable pressure. Daisya was here. He needed her. If she gave out, neither of them could make it.

"Try!" she shouted.

"Okay, okay, let me—"

The deafening chime accelerated towards and past her as Daisya yanked the Charity Bell back on its rope tether, catching it in his hand to stop the sound for a moment.

Then nothing happened.

"What are you doing?" she nearly screamed. "This is a pincer attack, I'll drop you if I have to. You need to stop those ones."

All there was, was tinny ringing left over from the bell, wind and rushing blood, the sound of her and Daisya's loud breathing. What was he talking about? This wasn't any time for games. Two of them were in the fight, and there was one who could make it out if the akuma caught up. He should—what did he think she could do? Kanda was right, if she couldn't save him, then—

"Nope!"

"What?"

"When I say, take us down fast," Daisya ordered. "We can double back on foot. They'll assume we're going forward, we can buy us some time to talk with Kanda and Marie. The new akuma are just hovering over the town site and there are a lot more of them, so it's safer to go backward anyway."

"What about the Noah? They can think, you know!"

"I know, but it'll have to find us first. There's only one of it that I saw."

"Fine," she forced out. "I'll drop into the trees, but then we need to run back fast. We need them to overshoot us, if we both want to survive until tomorrow, okay?"

"Yeah, let's do it. Spin us back around so that they think we'll keep on going."

With another burst of power that almost wrenched her ankles out of their sockets, she twisted around to face the front. The tiny bit of reprieve she got from the wind was enough for her to spot four or five akuma and a few clouds of dust before they blurred out again. Those must be the ones Marie and Kanda were fighting.

The four of them would survive together. She'd saved Daisya. He'd stay alive.

Lenalee looked down, scanning for a good entry point. By now she was in a sort of haze. The patchier forest under them swirled like pond scum as they sped.

The first thing she learned in the tests with Hevlaska was that her body was going to work against her. Exorcists had to move in the space between hard work and fatal stress, where they needed to break the body's limits just to survive. The feelings were always the same. It was like her joints had been smashed through and there was nothing to keep her bones from grinding together as she moved. Her eyes would tear up, each time, and start to close.

Hevlaska had explained that her body could shut down parts of itself and focus on others, until it shut down completely and left her sleeping and vulnerable. When that started to happen, you had to help your body. If you told it what you needed and what you didn't, it gave you a few extra minutes that you might need. She should close her eyes if she didn't need sight, she should start counting if she didn't need to think, she should bite her lip if she didn't need to feel.

A crackle out of sight brought her mind back into focus. Fly. Fall. Run. They had a plan now.

It was going to take everything she had left to make this landing. The moment she saw a gap in the branches, she cut the power to the Boots. They dropped like a stone. Then, in the tiny gap between the canopy and the ground, she channelled full power into them and sent them both hurtling in the town's direction. Pain still lanced out along her legs with metre they ate up. At this pace, he Boots channelled the power, not her, and they pushed up with twice the force of gravity as her own weight and Daisya's crashed down into them. They kicked up dirt and dust from just inches above the ground, grinding two ruts into the forest floor.

"What are you doing?" Daisya hissed. "I thought we were going back!"

"We are," she answered.

And lowered her speed again, the sharp sound of the Boots falling to a faint rumble as she slowed to a hover, rose, then gently turned around. They couldn't go anywhere near top speed, but it was still fast enough to get back to their original position and past it, as if they were coming back to their camp site. The low power and height kept them from making any mark on the forest that any human could track them by. Now that the sun was high, it was dark and cool under here. The bright light of the morning was blocked out by branches.

Finally, she relaxed.

"Nice." She was only vaguely aware of Daisya anymore. "You didn't even crash us."

There were already black spots opening up in her vision as her head got light. Forest. Akuma. Noah, or so Daisya had said. She started counting to keep consciousness.

"Can you keep flying, or d'you want me to carry you?"

Lenalee breathed in and out fully a few times, trying not to throw up. It was cold, she realized.

She stared at the musty ground, counting in and out. Daisya almost died. She was almost fine.

"I don't think we could survive," she said. "If I had to carry you longer."

Kanda was right. She would have to choose someday, who was going to live and who she was going to let die.

"Oh, not you too," Daisya complained, somewhere nearby. "Can we at least land? My arms are getting sore and this is not comfier for me than it is for you."

More than any other exorcist, she knew she had given up herself to become skilled. Every spare hour she spent training, following Komui's paperwork to try and make sense of things, every hour—every time—each time—the times they dragged her off screaming for synch tests that burst blood vessels in her legs and sent her to the infirmary, none of that was enough to save even one person when she needed to.

In the end, it was for herself.

"Hey, Lena!"

But wasn't that what she already knew? Even when she saved a life, it was only one of the ones that she saw when she closed her eyes. She hated to lose part of her collection. There was no love there, just happiness. What was Daisya when he wasn't telling her a story and getting so carried away he slapped Marie's soup right off his plate with a backhand sweep? Was he even alive when they weren't running neck-and-neck towards the goalposts in the courtyard? Maybe not. She didn't know. The only thing she knew was that she liked it when he was around, grinning in the background of her life, never really as close as Kanda but a lot more noticeable.

Suddenly, a shooting pain ran through her temple. Someone had flicked her. "Ouch!"

"Where've you been? We can hit the ground now, I think they went past overhead," Daisya said, shifting his weight awkwardly. "Also, I'm getting a hell of a cramp from hanging here."

Oh, that was right. Yes. She was carrying him. Most of her body felt numb, so that was why she hadn't noticed him.

"Hold on, I'm going to touch down slowly."

He did. He could be a nuisance sometimes, but he knew when things were serious.

Careful not to disturb anything, she moved them over a patch of bare dirt and landed softly. Daisya jumped off her just before she cut power, coming down with a heavier thud right behind her.

"Say, Lena," he said. "Are you okay?"

"I'm just tired," was all she could say. One foot at a time, she tripped into a jogging pace. She could taste blood in the back of her throat.

"Woah, hey, slow down!" Daisya got ahead of her quickly, turning so that he could frown at her. "You were pretty out of it. I don't think it's a good idea to start running when we might be out here the whole day."

She huffed, easing into her usual pace as her legs and shoulders relaxed.

"I don't want you to get tired out, either," she said. "I can always fly away, but you could get really hurt if they find us."

"Okay, okay, then we'll walk. If either of us hears or sees any akuma, then we can book it, but otherwise we should both save energy. Does that work? I can also carry you," he said.

A short puff of breeze came at them, making the tears and sweat still stick to her feel icy. She shivered. She didn't even mean for her eyes to well up again, it was just the cold and the dusty wind.

"Is that okay?" Daisya asked again. He flicked her again, on the shoulder this time. "What do you say?"

She slowed down before she answered.

"Yes."

"Great. Okay. We'll walk, and then we'll call Kanda and Marie. I'm sure they're done fighting by now, Kanda's amazing."

"He is strong."

They didn't dawdle, Daisya set a steady pace for them through the forest.

"I guess you could say that, too."

Sorry if the logistics took up too much of the time here, still figuring out how to get everyone to the right place! I like to think that Daisya and Lenalee sort of view each other as siblings in a literal way, since Lenalee's older brother is more of a father to her and Daisya resented his younger siblings and left them behind. Lenalee sees Daisya as the annoying, immature, but fun brother she might have had if Komui didn't have to raise her, and Daisya sees Lenalee as the sister he actually wanted). Or maybe not! The characters are always in flux, and who am I to say what they think of each other? I only remember that Daisya pops up in Lenalee's collage of 'her world' and that it's after he dies