Archive of Our Own

The first task of the morning is, of course, getting out of bed.

He can easily remember a time when he didn’t consider getting out of bed to be a task at all. But that was then, and dwelling on the past isn’t going to make crawling to a standing position any easier right now.

He checks himself over first. Stretches and shifts and tests to see if anything’s really going to kick at him when he tries to stand. Back? No worse than usual. Knees? Crackly as ever, but nothing special. Shoulders?

Left shoulder has still not forgiven him for trying to lift that box of books. It wasn’t a huge box of books, for fuck’s sake. He just lifted at the wrong angle.

He lifted at the wrong angle a week ago, and the shoulder shows no sign of ever letting him forget it. It’s ridiculous.

He heaves himself onto his right side, and successfully navigates his way to the floor with only minimal pain. Aches, nothing stabbing. Which is just as well, because he’s completely finished with visits to stupid doctors who only tell him that his problem is that he appears to be twice his actual age.

No shit. That is a problem, isn’t it? How many years did they have to study medicine to tell him that?

Christ.

He manages to get to his feet without falling over, which is lucky, because if he did fall over, he’d probably break his damn hip. And if he broke his hip, he’d probably die before it healed.

He shuffles his way into slippers and to the bathroom. No ambitious big steps. You have to be realistic about what you can get away with. Not as young as you used to be.

Ha ha.

He’s achieved the bathroom. That’s task number two. Task number three is by way of punishment: looking in the mirror.

He glares through a curtain of white hair, and studies the wasted body reflected back at him. Wrinkled, scowling face, sunken chest, a tattoo that used to be ominous, but has gone pale and feeble with time and abuse. Much like the rest of him.

Who are you? he thinks at the old man in the mirror. And what have you done with me?

* * *
* * *

Having finished the upstairs tasks, Kanda carefully struggled down the stairs (which should really count as two tasks, if only because it included the possibility of horrible death) to the smell of eggs just starting to burn. Which meant Allen had fallen asleep again while cooking breakfast. Someday he was going to catch his hair on fire and burn the house down and kill them both.

And the Vatican would be spared the price of two pensions, so it wouldn’t be a total loss for everyone.

He hobbled at his highest speed into the kitchen and snatched the eggs off the fire, scraped them onto the plates already sitting out. Slightly burnt, but still edible. An improvement on some mornings.

He turned to the destroyer of eggs with a sigh.

Allen had managed to curl up in a straight-backed chair and fall asleep. Kanda dearly wished he still had that kind of flexibility. Although, looking at Allen, it might be that Kanda had never had that kind of flexibility. Who could fall asleep in an upright chair?

Well. Allen, obviously.

He looked frail, now, when he slept, where he used to look innocent. If you didn’t know the truth, though, you’d say he was aging gracefully. His crow’s feet and laugh lines gave him a look of gentle good humor, and it was impossible to tell by looking at him that he’d been burnt out from the inside.

If he hadn’t been thirty-one years old, he’d have been looking good. But that was what a parasite-type Innocence and random Noah possession would do to you. Old before your time. Kanda, at least, had the satisfaction of knowing he’d done this to himself. He’d drained his life of his own free will. It was a bitter satisfaction, but he’d take what he could get.

It still pissed him off that wrinkles from scowling weren’t as attractive as wrinkles from smiling like an idiot all the time. Funny how he’d never been vain about his looks until he didn’t have them.

“Wake up, Walker,” he said. “You tried to burn us to death again.”

Allen slept peacefully on, and Kanda uncharitably suspected him of going deaf. He set the eggs down on the table and reached over to scratch his fingers roughly through Allen’s hair.

It always woke him up, which was something that shouting his name, throwing things at him, and shaking him didn’t necessarily do. That was Kanda’s explanation.

The real explanation was more complicated. It was an excuse to touch him, and if Kanda had touched him, then it was almost proof that he was real. That Kanda was real. That this life, complete with pain and burnt eggs and horrible stairs, was more than a fever dream or a nightmare. Kanda didn’t know why he found that comforting. Surely he should want it to be a nightmare.

“Kanda?” Allen asked, blinking slowly awake. He eventually registered where he was, where Kanda was, and the fact that there were scorched eggs sitting in front of him. “Oh. Sorry.”

“Death, Walker,” Kanda told him. “Painful death by burning.”

“I’m sure I’d wake up if they were actually on fire,” Allen said blithely and like the idiot that he was. Still. After all these years.

“Or maybe you’d suffocate in the smoke, and the first I’d know of it was when it got upstairs.”

“Don’t worry,” Allen said seriously. “I’m pretty sure you’d suffocate from the smoke, too. Before you figured out what was going on, I mean.”

Kanda grunted and sat down in front of his charred eggs. Allen could out-morbid him any day. He didn’t know why he felt the need to keep proving it.

“So what are you doing today?” Allen asked brightly, so spry that you’d never believe this was the guy who couldn’t stay awake long enough to cook eggs.

For the first few years they’d lived together, it had driven Kanda insane that Allen couldn’t just let him have his breakfast in peace. Around year four, his spirit had broken.

“Working on that damn baby thing,” he muttered. The neighbors were having a kid, and they’d unfortunately heard that Kanda was capable of making furniture. How they’d arrived at the conclusion that he’d be willing to make them a cradle was unclear. But hell. They’d offered a lot of money for it. And he’d never done a cradle before.

“Still?” Allen asked.

Kanda pointed the fork menacingly in his direction, and Allen smirked and lowered his eyes to his eggs.

“You?” Kanda asked, because he’d learned through hard experience that Allen would sulk all day if he wasn’t asked. And when you were the only two people in a small house, that could be damned uncomfortable.

“I’m visiting the Carvers,” the baby people, “and then calling Miranda.”

Kanda frowned. Allen generally filled his days with nosing into everyone’s business, so that wasn’t unusual. But Miranda…didn’t always take well to hearing from them. She’d stayed with Krory until the end, and it had done her mind no favors. She didn’t want much to do with people who were about to self-destruct. It was the first thing about her that Kanda had ever understood.

“That a good idea?” he asked. Not because he cared about Miranda particularly, he assured himself, but because if she was miserable, she’d make Allen miserable. And if she made Allen miserable, he’d be impossible to live with.

“Lenalee said she wanted to hear from me,” Allen said reassuringly, as if Kanda needed reassurance.

“Whatever,” Kanda mumbled. Allen allowed him to have the rest of his breakfast in blessed silence.

* * *

Kanda spent most mornings in his workshop. At least, he stayed there until it hurt too much to be hunched over the bench. That could mean anything from two to four hours, depending on the weather and his health.

Woodworking had started with Allen, so it had that in common with just about everything else Kanda had done for the last, say, eight years. The first year after they’d moved to this house, Kanda had walked past a door to the hallway (restless, he’d always been restless back then), and overheard Allen talking to someone on the phone. Once he’d realized they were talking about him, he’d stopped and listened, and had quickly become appalled.

“He has no sense of purpose,” Walker had said, hushed. “Before, he always trained four hours a day unless he was too busy fighting for his life. Now he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He can only spend so much time throwing knives at the wall. He feels useless.”

Having his mental problems rattled off to random phone people by Walker. Fantastic. That must have been the last of his dignity dying.

“So figure something out; you’re a genius, aren’t you? Something he can do with his hands that won’t hurt him. No. No, he’s never been artistic, and that would only remind him…”

Of Theodore. And that would hurt.

…Just how well did Walker know him?

“Woodworking,” Walker said, quietly pleased. “Yes. I think he’ll like that.”

Kanda had never made anything out of wood before. He had no idea whether he’d like it or not. And he didn’t want to encourage Walker to interfere in his life like this.

“What am I doing?” Walker said to the phone, sounding surprised. “What does it matter?”

That had pulled Kanda up short, for some reason. In fact, he was so thrown off that when Johnny came to teach him woodworking, he learned with minimal fuss. He was too distracted by thinking, off and on and at odd moments, What does it matter?

What the hell was that even supposed to mean, what did it matter? How could Walker have gotten so much older and been through so much and still be this annoying?

The very first thing Kanda had carved was a cane for himself out of oak. Simple. Heavy. Deliberately top-heavy, in fact, the better to beat people with. Not that he’d actually needed to beat anyone with it (yet), but he felt better for being prepared. He could do some serious damage with that cane, even taking his feeble old-man arms into consideration.

Now, though, he was making a cradle. Of all ridiculous things. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d seen a baby up close. A living baby, anyway. Not since he was a boy himself, probably. First there’d been those years as an exorcist, then all the traveling, never stopping anywhere. As for here…well, the people in town called him a bad-tempered old codger and kept their brats away from him, and that suited everyone fine.

Apparently the couple next door were stupid.

He saw that Allen had snuck in at some point and penciled leaves around the frame of the cradle. What was he trying to say? That Kanda’s cradle was too bare? That Kanda didn’t have the imagination to draw his own goddamn leaves? That Kanda couldn’t carve leaves?

Or maybe he’d just been bored. Surely bothering people and napping couldn’t keep him occupied all day.

Kanda worked on the cradle until almost noon, which was an accomplishment, but then the aching became too annoying, and he staggered into the living room and collapsed on the couch. The phone was in the hallway, so from the couch, Kanda could hear whoever Allen was talking to.

It wasn’t exactly eavesdropping. Allen could have moved out of hearing range of the living room if he’d wanted, but he always stayed there and let Kanda listen. If Kanda had been inclined to waste time fretting over Allen’s mental state, he’d have worried about what it meant that Allen was apparently too worn out to care about keeping secrets.

“I thought he was dead,” Allen said with the tight voice and edging-toward-gutter accent that meant he was talking about Cross. “If he thinks he’s coming here—”

Kanda pictured what that would be like, and decided that even Allen’s suffering wouldn’t make it worthwhile.

“I don’t care who you foist him off on,” Allen hissed. “As long as it isn’t us.”

Kanda knew exactly how this was going to go. Allen was going to whine and curse and possibly scream, but he’d give in eventually. He loved Cross. It was a love that was twisted and fucked up beyond belief, but it was still love. Kanda would have done the same for Theodore. Of course, Theodore had never been as much of a dick as Cross, but that wasn’t the point.

The point was, Kanda was going to end up with Cross Marian living in his house.

“I’ll kill him.”

Allen leaned around the doorframe into the living room and gave Kanda a grateful look. “There you go, Komui,” he said into the phone, vindicated. “Kanda says he’ll kill him. So we can’t take him. Make Lenalee do it. And remind him that I get Timcampy back when he finally does die.”

Then he winced and held the phone away from his ear, but he was smiling.

There, Kanda thought. Problem solved.

* * *

Lunch and dinner were both Kanda’s responsibility, because when you came right down to it, Allen couldn’t even reliably cook eggs.

“Can’t we have anything that isn’t soba?” Allen complained. “Anything! We are falling apart, you know. I mean, we’re frail. We’ll probably get scurvy. Our fingernails will come off. Something.”

Allen was an ungrateful asshole. And as far as falling apart went, that was inevitable. The way Kanda saw it, they were going to die soon and in pain anyway. All the leafy greens in the world wouldn’t give them back what they’d lost. So what was the point?

Lenalee had tacked a list of recommended foods onto the wall next to the sink. “For your condition,” she said. Kanda ignored it with what even he recognized as slightly demented glee.

“If you don’t want soba,” Kanda said for the nth time, “then cook your own damn lunch.”

“And dinner,” Allen muttered.

“Fuck you,” Kanda said. “Soba is easy. Like hell am I going to slave over a four-course meal for you when my entire body hurts. Get used to it.” You’d think he would have, after all these years. Christ.

“You’re such a whiner,” Allen said. “I think it’s because you never had to heal like a normal person in the old days, and now you’re healing five times slower than normal people.”

“I am not whining.”

“You are whining,” Allen insisted. “I’m not saying it’s not justified; it’s just strange hearing it from you. Daily threat of imminent death, that you can handle. Getting old, you can’t handle. What, it’s not enough glory for you?”

“Shut the fuck up!” Kanda snapped, edging toward outrage. “You think your way is better? Ignoring everything until you faint on the goddamn floor—”

“I didn’t ignore anything! If I’d seen it coming, don’t you think I’d at least have sat down or—”

“You didn’t feel dizzy? You didn’t lose your appetite? Felt completely fine, did you, you—”

“I told you, I—”

Daily lunchtime shouting match. Kanda had considered penciling it into Allen’s calendar.

* * *

After lunch, Kanda usually tottered down to the pub in town, so long as there wasn’t anything in the house that needed to be fixed. The middle of the afternoon was a good time; it was when all the old men congregated there. He didn’t run as much of a risk of having someone his own age hold the door open for him or otherwise treat him like a doddering incompetent. Besides, he enjoyed the old men. He listened to them discuss their various ailments with an avid curiosity that Allen assured him was sick.

Kanda thought it was perfectly reasonable. He wasn’t really an old man, and there was no better way to prove it than by watching real old men. Their teeth were rotting and cracking and their minds were going. They complained about incontinence and ungrateful children until hell wouldn’t have it. None of this was a problem for Kanda. Besides, the old men had lived a lot longer than he had, but they hadn’t seen half as much.

He didn’t see what was sick about appreciating what he had.

Allen went with him sometimes, though not today. Allen always said pointless things, compared how the various old men went about being old.

“That man used to be handsome,” he’d say, though Kanda didn’t see how he could tell through the wrinkles and the liver spots. “Being handsome was everything he was. He thinks he’s ugly now. He doesn’t know what he’s living for, and it makes him miserable. That’s why he’s so angry.”

Or, “That man must have grandchildren. He’s not thinking about himself at all; he’s thinking about the next thing he’s going to do for his grandchildren.”

Or, “That man’s been looking for an excuse to do whatever he wants all his life, and now he has one. He’s happy. He’s always wanted to be old.”

What Kanda saw was a bunch of old men getting ready to die. There didn’t seem to be any point in pondering how they were going about it. It didn’t hurt anything to let Allen ramble, though. It got his mind off of Kanda’s business for a while, and that was worth a lot.

Today, Kanda walked into the bar alone and found the old men burbling on about war. If he’d had any sense, he would have turned straight around and walked back out.

“Taught those Frenchies what for,” said a fat old man with one leg. “Made ‘em regret tangling with us, I’ll tell you!”

Kanda sat at his usual table and brooded to himself over the improbability of that statement. If they’d really given an enemy ‘what for,’ then the enemy should have been dead, and dead men don’t have regrets. Regret was a privilege reserved for the living.

He distracted himself by ordering a beer, but tuned back into the conversation in time to hear, “My son was in the Boer War. Terrible war, that one. Terrible. Still won’t talk about it, he won’t. Didn’t come back quite right in the head, did he?”

“Young people never come back right from a war,” another said sadly.

This was so much bullshit. At most, the guy’s grandson had seen three years of real combat, and he sure as hell hadn’t seen it starting from age ten. And yet Lenalee wasn’t a shell-shocked lunatic, and neither was Allen. Nor Marie, Theodore, Daisya, even the rabbit. They’d all managed to suck it up and deal, and Kanda had no patience for this kind of whining.

He gave up on his beer and left. He knew when he got home, Allen would ask, “Bad day at the pub?” and Kanda would want to knock him unconscious. It was still worth it to get out of there.

* * *

He passed a shop on the way home and stopped to buy oranges. They were not going to get fucking scurvy.

* * *

“Oh, you bought oranges!”

“Shut up.”

“Bad day at the pub?”

“Fuck you.”

Allen cut two oranges into wedges, which seemed like a waste of time to Kanda, because they made less of a damn mess if you just peeled them and ate them in sections. But whatever. Kanda cooked the soba. Allen complained about the soba. Kanda threatened to kill him. Allen made fun of Kanda’s old man temper. Kanda had to remind himself that Allen was breakable, and that attacking him was no longer allowed.

And after all, Kanda was breakable too, these days.

Allen insisted on asking about Kanda’s day over dinner, as if they hadn’t both done exactly the same thing every day for years.

This was the problem, Kanda thought, with living with someone too long. Eventually you ran out of things that needed to be said and instead talked endlessly about nothing. Out of boredom. Out of habit.

After dinner, they sat together on the couch, as they always did. Kanda was reading a book on carving that Lavi had brought him. He generally read when he wasn’t whittling experimentally, or sharpening knives, just in case. Allen was pretending to read a book that Marie had lent him, but, really, he was going to be asleep in less than ten minutes.

Kanda preferred this routine to the endless card tricks. When Allen did card tricks, he felt the need to fidget around and be irritating. Reading and napping were at least quiet, and Kanda had learned to cope with Allen’s tendency to fall asleep on him.

This might’ve been Kanda’s favorite part of the day, though it was without doubt the most uselessly unproductive.

* * *

Because of the way life is, Kanda’s favorite time of day was, of course, immediately followed by his least favorite. He looked up the stairs between him and his bed, and thought to no one in particular, You can’t seriously expect me to climb all of those.

“Want help, old man?” Walker asked cheerfully.

“Die, Walker,” Kanda snapped.

“I’m working on it,” Allen answered, cheer undiminished. “Don’t be so impatient.”

Kanda ignored Allen and struggled up the stairs. It took a little longer every day, and Allen kept saying very reasonable and therefore very annoying things about how Kanda should give up and sleep downstairs.

He’d die on those stairs before he’d let them win, dammit.

Stairs finally overcome, he staggered through his nightly routine, until there was only one more task before he was allowed to sleep. He sat in bed, and turned to stare at the lotus, behind him and to the left. He supposed he should be grateful that there was only one. Or did quantity really count when it came to hallucinated flowers?

The lotus was a scraggly, pitiful thing. As long as the tattoo had worked, there had been an alarming number of flowers, but at least they had been flawless and beautiful. Now the last flower was shriveled and browning, and petals didn’t fall so much as crumple.

Kanda sneered at the correlation, and turned off the light.

* * *

And that was the daily routine, give or take errands, visitors, travel, and illness.

* * *

Kanda’s problems might have been the more visible, but Allen’s were every bit as dire. His Innocence had apparently decided to honor his personality, and had made all of his ailments obscure and subtle; easy to hide. Easy to hide from people who didn’t live with him, anyway.

Kanda came down the stairs one morning to find him unconscious on the floor (and the eggs burned). Another morning, Allen had doubled over on the walk into town and started vomiting blood. Yet another time, he’d spontaneously developed an appallingly high fever, and Kanda had stuck his head in a tub of ice water and tried not to panic over the possibility of brain damage.

And so on and so forth. Each crisis more creative than the last.

None of these things seemed to have any medical explanation. Kanda believed that, because their doctor these days was Lenalee, and if there had been any medical explanation, she and Komui would have found it. Unlike the quacks in town, who’d probably bust out fucking leeches or something. (Kanda knew all about those quacks. He’d gone through a phase of marching impatiently to local doctors instead of waiting for Lenalee. He was never making that mistake again.)

The result of all this was that Allen could and did help Kanda in a hundred ways every day, but Kanda couldn’t do anything for Allen. It was irritating. Not least because some of Allen’s “help” was diametrically opposed to what Kanda actually wanted.

* * *

Kanda’s first experience with Allen’s help had been on the morning of his twenty-third birthday. He’d woken up to find himself hurting all over and Komui standing over him with a grim face and a sharp knife.

It wasn’t the first morning of his life to start out this way, but it also wasn’t an experience that improved with repetition.

“What,” he said carefully, “the fuck.”

Komui held the grim look for a moment longer, then broke into his annoying fake grin. “It went very well,” he announced, like that was some kind of comfort.

What had gone well? Kanda couldn’t remember coming within a hundred miles of Komui any time recently, let alone giving him permission to be holding that knife and smiling that smile.

He tried to remember what had led up to this. He’d been in Sweden, hadn’t he? Sweden with the beansprout, and everything around them had been bleak and cold, from the landscape to the people. It hadn’t felt like spring at all. Kanda had been an idiot to even imagine that his sister would be in a place like that.

They’d been staying in Stockholm. On a boat, of all ridiculous things—a boat that functioned mostly as a brothel, what was more. If Kanda had had any idea that this was what Walker had meant when he said, “I found a cheap place for us to stay,” he would have thrown him in the water.

And then…then they’d gotten into a fight—another fight—about Kanda’s tattoo. They’d had this same fight every time Kanda’d used the tattoo since Walker had found out what it did. As always, Walker had ordered Kanda to stop using it, and Kanda had told him to mind his own goddamn business. Walker had been pacing the room, Kanda had been ignoring him. But then?

Ah. Someone had slapped a cloth over his face. Walker, obviously. And he must have passed out. Fuck knew what Walker had poured on that cloth.

“I’ll kill him.”

“Now, now,” Komui murmured. “He only wanted the best for you…in the long term. I admit that the short term looks pretty grim.”

“What did you do?”

* * *

The second time Kanda woke up, it was Allen Walker hovering over him, dark circles under his eyes, hair sticking up everywhere. He looked pathetic.

“I’m not sorry,” Walker said defiantly.

Of course he wasn’t sorry. Why would he be? He had no idea what he’d done.

Kanda had had a plan for his life, which, much like everything else about Kanda, had been none of Walker’s business. He’d been planning to keep himself useful for as long as possible, and to die the instant he wasn’t useful anymore. Simple, elegant, efficient. There was dignity in that.

There was no dignity at all in lingering on interminably after you’d fallen apart. Walker had taken a life with a lot of good years left in it and rendered those years useless. And he wasn’t sorry.

Kanda studied Walker’s pathetic face and set mouth, and when he couldn’t stand to look at him anymore, he closed his eyes and tried to will himself dead. It worked about as well as he’d expected.

* * *

At first, it hadn’t seemed as bad as all that. Yes, he was a little fragile, he looked a little older than his age, and he would no longer be able to work through any injury, no matter how dire. But he was still perfectly capable of looking for his sister. He’d thought.

Walker came with him because he couldn’t be driven away. He ignored insults, stony silence, and outright attack with unvarying grim determination. Kanda did his best to work around him.

A month later, Kanda jumped down from a wall and broke his femur.

His femur. Komui assured him that the femur was the strongest bone in the body, but failed to explain why it had been the first to break. And it refused to heal. It refused to heal for almost a year.

Komui responded to Kanda’s rage and frustration by throwing him into a house with Walker, cheerfully ordering them to get along, and running like hell.

Kanda refused to accept Walker’s help. Walker refused to let him do anything alone. The first three months were filled with so much silent, raging resentment on both sides that it was a wonder the house hadn’t collapsed under the pressure.

It might have ended that way. Once Kanda had been able to hobble around on crutches and more or less take care of himself, Walker might have left the house. They might never have seen or spoken to each other again, if it hadn’t been for Walker’s nosebleed.

It hadn’t seemed like much of a problem at first. Everyone got nosebleeds. After the first day, it started to seem like more of a problem, and at the end of the second, Kanda called Komui in spite of all of Walker’s arguing. It turned out to be lucky timing, because after Kanda hung up, Walker started bleeding like it was going out of style, then fainted.

Komui called it a “temporary bleeding disorder,” then smiled. Apparently that was some kind of medical joke. Allen would be a medical joke.

It hadn’t just been the nosebleed; he’d been bleeding internally, too. He’d been covered in bruises, and the idiot hadn’t said anything about it. The bleeding had stopped as suddenly and mysteriously as it had started; nothing Komui had done had had any effect.

“This may be an effect of the Innocence,” Komui said. “Or of the Noah. Either way, it’s likely it will get worse over time. It will almost certainly kill him, in the end.”

Kanda looked down at Allen’s unconscious, pale face. It was hard to picture Allen dead. He’d always been so annoyingly alive.

Of course, it had been the same with Daisya. Everyone died, sooner or later.

“How long?” Kanda asked.

“Impossible to know,” Komui said sadly. He put a hand on Kanda’s shoulder, as if to offer comfort.

Komui hadn’t actually said that Walker needed to be immobilized for a week, but it had seemed like common sense. Common sense, and a perfectly good opportunity for payback.

It wasn’t easy to take care of an invalid when you were an invalid, though. The crutches were an endless pain in the ass. Luckily, Allen was an idiot, so when Kanda managed to dump an entire bowl of Lenalee’s disgustingly medicinal food-of-the-day into Allen’s lap, Allen responded by laughing.

It was an unspeakably stupid situation, and maybe that was why it put everything else into perspective. It would be ridiculous to go back to ignoring Allen after having dumped a plate of random gruel and sliced apples all over him, after weeks of following him around making sure he wasn’t bleeding on the sly or fainting in strange places.

And thanks to perspective, here they still were, ten years later, same damn house. One as useless as the other. Proof that you could get used to anything.

Komui had eventually informed Kanda that Walker had talked him and Reever into looking for a way to disable the tattoo as soon as the war had ended. (“We would have done it anyway,” Komui said, which didn’t earn him any points with Kanda).

Kanda wasn’t sure whether or not he felt betrayed. He shouldn’t; Walker had never made him any promises, tacit or otherwise. It was hard, at this point, to feel anything above resigned, anyway.

* * *

Very few people had died in the final battle. Ridiculously few. The exorcists were free, which no one but Komui had ever really believed would happen.

They were free to die slowly and in pain, in the case of the parasite types and Kanda Yuu. At least, Kanda often thought, they were a political and financial nightmare for the Vatican. That was a comfort. All those bored exorcists running all over the world, getting diseased and beaten up and arrested and every other damn thing.

Hell, yes. God’s chosen ones.

If you caught Allen in the right mood and sufficiently drunk, he’d wax quite poetic on the subject of how God had let them survive because He was a fucking sadist. Allen liked to cite key passages from the Bible and his entire life as evidence.

Jesus had had some nice ideas, Kanda had to admit. But in their experience, God had been a lot less about infinite love and a lot more about using humans as pawns. Old Testament living.

“What do you mean,” Allen said to the phone, “Timothy’s been deported? He can’t be deported! He’s a citizen!” A pause, then Allen sighed, put his hand over the phone, said to Kanda, “He was pretending to be French.”

Kanda shook his head in disgust. Allen shrugged.

To the phone, he said, “Didn’t they check his paperwork?” A pause, then to Kanda, “He forged his paperwork.”

Kanda was impressed in spite of himself. He’d never have thought Timothy had enough patience to do more than a completely half-assed forgery.

Or maybe it was completely half-assed, and the government had just jumped at any excuse to ship him to France. Who could blame them?

“Sure I know people in France,” Allen told the phone. “They’re exactly the same people that you know in France, though. Isn’t this Link’s job? Well, whether he’s busy or not, it’s not my job. I’m not Timothy’s keeper. I’m too old for this.”

Just as it was obvious when Allen was talking about Cross, so it was obvious when he was talking to Komui. Actually, it was obvious when anybody was talking to Komui, because Komui had been foisting responsibility off onto absolutely anyone who held still long enough ever since the war had ended. Not even Lenalee had been spared. And Allen seemed to be his favorite.

“Anyway, Lavi said he was heading to France the last time he was here,” Allen muttered like the sullen little sellout he was. “Make him do it. Yes, he says he doesn’t work for you anymore, but he owes you and he knows it.”

As far as Kanda could work out, Allen resented Lavi for being able to run away, and punished him accordingly.

“Good.” Allen smiled, good cheer restored. Apparently he’d won. Again. These people were weak, letting him bowl them over like that. They needed to stop encouraging him. “We’ll see you and Lenalee next week, right?” Allen went on, shameless. “Please don’t call me before that. Please. Komui!”

He sighed, studied the phone, then hung it up with a shrug. “Why me?” he asked rhetorically.

“Because you’re the nosiest man alive.” Kanda didn’t believe in rhetoric.

Allen huffed, offended, but didn’t bother to respond. Instead, he wandered over to fuss with the curtains, back toward the hall to check the phone, over to the fireplace to inspect the ashes, then finally plucked one of Lenalee’s medical books off of the coffee table, curled up on the couch next to Kanda, and leaned against him for warmth.

It was like watching a cat settle.

As Allen read, Kanda thought about the rhetorical question. He knew his answer was right; Allen kept in touch with everyone, and even if he was completely (bafflingly) unwilling to leave the house for any length of time, he always knew someone who would help, no matter where the problem was.

It was just that, ten years before, the answer would have been different. Back then, it would have been because Allen was an obliging pushover. Somewhere along the line, that had changed—drastically. Allen didn’t defer to anyone anymore. No formal language, no “chief” or “sir” or even “mister.” Everyone got the same treatment: first names, plain language, and Allen’s point-blank refusal to leave the house for anyone’s benefit but his own. And possibly Kanda’s.

Kanda knew better than anyone that brooding over Allen was a mistake. Brooding over Allen only gave rise to more things to brood over. Such as the strange fact that Allen called everyone by given name except for Kanda. He felt almost left out.

“You’ve never tried to call me by my given name,” he said. No sense in brooding in silence. “Why not?”

“Hm?” Allen looked up from the book, eyes not quite focused on the real world. “You didn’t want me to.”

“I didn’t want you to help look for my sister, either,” Kanda pointed out. “I didn’t want you to move in with me or burn the eggs every morning. What’s the real reason?”

Allen shrugged, his shoulder sliding against Kanda’s, his eyes drifting back to the book. “I don’t like it.”

He was, he thought, actually offended. “What do you mean you don’t like it?”

“Yuu,” Allen muttered at the book. “Too soft for you. No consonants. And I don’t know what it means, and that bothers me.”

It was a name without kanji; it could mean almost anything. Courage, gentleness, evening, friend, help. Otherworldly. It was just a name. He didn’t see why it should matter.

“What does Allen mean?” he asked.

“That my parents were British.”

Kanda was about to fly completely off the handle when it occurred to him that that might be valuable information to Allen. It might be as much as he knew about his parents: that they were British. That they’d named him Allen and disappeared. If he’d had parents at all, which sometimes seemed questionnable.

“You don’t know what Kanda means, either,” he pointed out.

“God field,” Allen told the book.

“Why do you know that?” Kanda demanded.

“I don’t remember.”

“You lie so much I don’t know why I bother to ask you anything.”

“Maybe Komui told me.”

“Maybe the pixies did.” Despite appearances, Komui was very careful with anything that might be considered secret. Telling Komui personal information was like dropping coins into a bottomless well.

“Okay, so Noise told me.”

“Marie needs to learn to mind his own fucking business.”

“I asked him.”

“And obviously you need to learn to mind your own fucking business.”

“Oh, Yuu,” Allen cooed, and Kanda bitterly regretted having had this conversation. He’d never heard anything as unholy as the sound of his name in that tone of voice. “Your business is my business.”

And with that, Allen got up and bolted; the block of wood Kanda threw after him bounced harmlessly off the doorframe.

He might be a bastard, Allen Walker, but he was no fool.

* * *

Kanda had never experienced peace, not that he could clearly remember. He suspected it must feel something like this. It couldn’t exactly be called happiness, but he was…comfortably resigned. Resigned to his failures and his aches and even his companion. It was a nice balance of guilt and punishment. Plus Allen, who was something else again.

This wasn’t the death Kanda had wanted, but it wasn’t turning out to be as disgraceful as he’d thought it would.

* * *

“Excuse me?” said a voice. It was such a familiar voice. Something from a dream.

And peace evaporated like smoke in the wind. Kanda should have known better than to trust it.

He knew he couldn’t blame getting old for this. There was nothing wrong with his brain; it was his body that was going to shit. Senility was no excuse at all. But this voice…was impossible. Maybe he had gone senile. The power of suggestion.

“Excuse me, is anyone home?”

Allen frowned at him on his way past. He wanted to know why Kanda hadn’t gotten the door, but Kanda didn’t have an answer. No, he did have an answer: out of fear. It just wasn’t something he was willing to tell Allen.

“Hello. Can I help you?” Allen’s polite voice. It’d been so long since Kanda had heard it, he’d almost forgotten how irritating it was.

“Oh. Ah, I’ve been asking around the neighborhood, and…I’m very sorry to intrude, but. Someone told me I could find my brother here.”

Impossible.

“Really?” Allen sounded worried. Of course he did; the owner of that voice had always looked like the female version of her brother. Kanda imagined she still did. Only younger. “What’s your brother’s name?” Allen asked, as if he didn’t know.

“Kanda Yuu. Or, you would say, Yuu Kanda.”

“I see.” A silence. A long, long silence. Before Allen had exiled himself to the sticks with Kanda, he would have had more social grace than to leave a silence that long. Kanda had ruined him.

“Is he here?” the voice asked once the silence had stretched well into uncomfortable.

Allen hesitated a bit more, then said, “Why don’t you come into the living room with me?”

What the hell was he thinking? Kanda was in the living room, and if she—

There she was. Undeniably, no mistake. She must have been…God, she was the same age as Allen. She looked just the woman Kanda had imagined she would grow to be.

Kanda Miri. The most beautiful child in Kyoto, once upon a time. Little sister to Kanda Yuu.

All those years of searching. After the war had ended, after they’d escaped the Order, Lenalee, Allen, Miranda, most of the science department, and even Lavi had helped him look. Not that he’d asked them for help.

He’d have sworn they’d looked everywhere, even in the strangest, most unlikely places. In Sweden, for God’s sake. They’d looked until there were no more leads to follow up on. They’d looked until Kanda had been physically unable to look anymore, and then he’d come to this place to die, and Allen, for whatever reason, had stayed with him. Like a fool. And now, after Kanda had given up on everything and was too weak even to properly commit suicide—she’d found him.

Of course she didn’t recognize him.

“Hello,” she said, smiling but confused. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Hajimemashite,” Kanda replied, pleasure to meet you, more or less. It was more polite than he’d been to anyone since childhood. He was lying, though. This wasn’t the first time they’d met. Maybe Allen had ruined him, too.

Miri smiled again. She still had dimples. And this was unbearable.

Allen knelt by his chair, looked up at him with a big smile and desperate eyes. “Shall I tell her about her brother?” he asked.

This was Walker code. There had been a time when Kanda wouldn’t have understood it, but he’d had plenty of practice by now. What Allen was really saying was, “Do you want me to invent a story and get rid of her?”

He was giving Kanda the option of being a coward. Kanda had never been a coward in front of his sister, and he wasn’t going to start now.

“I’ll tell her,” Kanda said. Allen put a finger gently against Kanda’s lips. One of a thousand little gestures they’d picked up over the years. It hadn’t seemed remarkable until his sister had arrived to see it; now it seemed appallingly intimate.

“Let me,” Allen said, eyes pleading. “You can’t tell a story for shit.”

Oh, yes, they had grown more alike. How had Kanda missed it?

He tugged Allen’s hand away, noted with some disgust that he’d been gentle without even thinking about it. “Fine,” he said. “But don’t lie, for fuck’s sake.”

“Lie?” Allen’s eyes went wide. “Me?”

Kanda snorted, amused despite everything. They’d had a two-year argument, once, on the subject of whether Allen could make it through a single day without lying. They’d finally agreed to end it in a draw: Allen maintaining he could do it, Kanda maintaining he’d never seen any evidence to support that claim.

“So. The truth then,” Allen said to his sister with the pleasant, for-strangers expression that Kanda had never trusted. “Your brother joined the Black Order when he was ten years old.”

“The Black Order,” Miri repeated with the reverence of one who knew exactly what they’d done for the world. So there was one thing that didn’t need explaining.

“He was an exorcist. I met him when he was eighteen. He was the most hostile person I’d ever met.”

Kanda considered pointing out that Allen had been the biggest lying sack he’d ever met, and that not much had changed. But it would probably mess with the flow of the story.

“My brother was never…hostile, exactly,” Miri argued quietly. “He was a little gruff, but…”

“Eight years of fighting for your life and watching your friends die will do strange things to a person,” Allen told her. He said it gently, but Kanda thought he could have found a more gentle way to put it.

“He was always looking for you,” Allen went on. “The scientists said they’d found a way to make him stronger, and he went along with it without arguing. To survive. To survive long enough to find you. But guinea pigs run a pretty awful risk.”

Kanda kicked Allen gently in the back, and scowled when Allen slanted a dangerous look his way. There was no need to drag out the details and stare all the stupidity in the face again. Allen considered Kanda’s expression, and reluctantly nodded.

“He paid a high price to be strong,” Allen went on, because he could gloss over things with the best of them when he wanted to. “In the end, all they gave him was a way to use his own life to heal his wounds. God knows how much he shortened his lifespan.”

“He’s dead,” Miri said in a blank, bleak voice. Kanda recognized the tone from the talks he’d once had with himself in the mirror of his room at the Order before he’d gotten rid of it, in the window before he’d broken it. Talks in which he’d told himself that his sister was dead and he had nothing left to fight for.

“Not quite,” he said.

A pause, long and horrible.

“Oniisan,” she whispered. Brother, in that proper way their family had had. Once.

“I couldn’t find you,” he said, for lack of anything better to say, for lack of anything to say at all.

“What…what did you do to yourself?”

“I’m sorry,” and he heard Allen not quite gasp at that, and he knew, he understood. They’d known each other for years, and Allen had never once heard him apologize.

“Don’t be sorry,” Miri said. When she’d known him, of course, he’d thought nothing of apologizing. “Don’t be sorry, if you’re not dead, then that’s, that’s better than I—”

She froze, and put one hand to her cheek, bewildered. She was crying, though she didn’t seem to believe it. Maybe her tears had gone the same way as his apologies.

“You made her cry, Kanda,” Allen stage whispered. Kanda didn’t know what he was trying to do, but it was annoying.

“I’m sorry,” Miri said, laughing, wiping the tears from her eyes. And maybe Allen had been right again. “I’m sorry!” Then, to Allen, “I didn’t even ask—does this mean you were an exorcist, too?”

“Allen Walker, his name is,” Kanda cut in before Allen could bullshit his way out of answering. “The Destroyer of Time.”

“Oh,” Miri said with wide eyes. Yes. She knew all about them, didn’t she? Why was that?

“Never mind. It’s all over now,” Allen said with a smile that no one could mistake for happy. “And, if you don’t mind my asking, what did you do during the war? You seem to know a lot about it.”

“Oh,” she said. “I was working for the Order in China.” She blinked at their stupefied expressions. “What?”

“What!?” Kanda echoed in a shout.

* * *

She’d been at an outpost of an outpost in the middle of Gansu Province, almost at the exact center of the country. She’d been a nurse, and nurses, unlike exorcists, weren’t carefully recorded—some were never mentioned outside their home bases. Komui couldn’t have known she was there.

In the most isolated bases, the lack of information went both ways. Because small outposts weren’t closely vetted, the staff wasn’t considered all that trustworthy. They weren’t told much unless they needed to know it. They were never told the names of exorcists unless an exorcist was nearby and in need.

Miri hadn’t thought to wonder if her brother had become an exorcist; she’d thought he was dead. Her goal had been to hurt the things that had murdered her family, and to stay as far away from other people as possible. She’d cut herself off deliberately, and hadn’t heard the name Kanda Yuu at all until the end of the war. Even then, all she heard was that he was alive and somehow connected to the Order. It had given her a place to begin, though, which was more than Kanda had ever had. He’d been looking too far afield all along.

Miri, more optimistic than her brother, thought their parents would be proud that both of their children had helped in the fight against the Earl.

Kanda missed all of this explanation on the first go-around, seeing as he was extremely busy hurling wild accusations at Komui Li over the phone. It was the first time he’d willingly called Komui since Allen’s nosebleed.

After half an hour, Allen wrestled the phone away (Kanda waited for Miri to laugh at the sight of the two old men squabbling, but she never did), and asked to talk to Lenalee. Miri sat Kanda down with a mildly alarmed expression and repeated her explanation.

By the time it was all over, Allen and Lenalee and Miri had agreed that Miri would stay in the house for a while and look after them. Kanda suspected this “looking after” would entail a lot of tattling to Lenalee, but didn’t bother to comment. It was temporary, in any case; only until Miri found her own place.

For the first time, Kanda was grateful to Allen for routinely rearranging his entire life, because he wanted his sister to feel welcome. And thanks to Allen, he’d become very good at hiding unsettled bafflement.

* * *

Miri wasn’t nearly as disruptive to routine as Kanda had thought she’d be. The only meal she took over was lunch (though Kanda might have wished for breakfast). She cleaned occasionally. Once in a while she broke up an argument, but more often she stood by and laughed at them both. Most of her time seemed to be spent studying medicine and showing an annoying level of interest in Kanda’s health—and in Allen’s.

None of it was anywhere near as strange as it ought to be. She’d snuck into their lives like a ghost, and on bad days, Kanda wondered if that was what she really was.

* * *

“Brother, what are you doing?”

“Dying,” he answered absently, most of his attention on his fifth failed attempt at a box joint.

“In the short term, brother. What are you doing in the short term?”

He frowned up at her, then turned back to the wood. “Goddamn Walker wants a cabinet with box joints. He would; it’s a complete pain in the ass.” And it had seemed so easy. It had seemed easy until he went to fit the bastard pieces together and they hadn’t fit.

“Can’t you tell him it’s too much trouble?” Miri asked, leaning a hip against his workbench and smiling down at him.

His frown turned to a scowl. “He doesn’t tell me what to make in my own shop. I make what I want.”

Miri’s smile was getting steadily more delighted. He didn’t know why. And he didn’t like it, either. “Does he even know you’re making this?” she asked.

“It’s none of his damn business,” he muttered. If she laughed at him, he would hurt her. Long-lost sister or not. Old man body or not.

“How did you even know he wanted a cabinet?” she asked, not quite laughing.

“It was obvious,” he huffed, bad-temperedly wishing she would just go away. This was his room, for fuck’s sake.

And she clearly didn’t believe him, but it had been obvious. Allen had a fascination with one of Komui’s cabinets that was getting embarrassing. He never said anything about it, but every time they visited the place, he had to wander over to the cabinet and prod at the joints and stroke the finish. Kanda had hoped that making him one of his own would get him to stop making a spectacle of himself.

Of course, that was before he’d found out what a hassle it was going to be.

Besides, he wasn’t happy with the wood he was using. He’d gone with pine because it was easy to work and cheap, but it was a boring wood. He couldn’t see Allen going strange over the grain on pine.

He would kill for some zebrawood. Then again, that was both expensive and a bitch to work with, but that was okay, because it stank when you cut it. And Kanda didn’t want to encourage Allen by getting something like ebony (which was also impossible to work with). Maybe he could get bloodwood; it was striking, though he heard it was finicky. It would suit Allen.

Maybe he’d demand that Lavi provide him with bloodwood. Idiots who could still travel should make themselves useful. He agreed with Allen on that much.

It meant he’d have to wait for Lavi to visit, though. And he’d have to start over. Maybe he’d practice on the useless pine until then.

“Take a break,” Miri said, tugging at his shoulder. “I want to brush your hair.”

How she could be so quiet and so pushy at the same time was a mystery. She’d had this tendency even as a child, and in the years since, she’d really polished it.

“I can brush my own damn hair,” he snapped.

“I love your hair,” she said. “Let me brush it.”

“It’s white old man hair.”

“It’s silver; it’s beautiful.”

“It’s getting weird and crackly.”

“I’ll be gentle with it.”

“I’m busy.”

“It’s not healthy for you to go all day without a break.”

“I’m fine!”

“You’re going to lose,” Allen commented, passing by the open door.

“I am not going to lose!” Kanda shouted after him.

* * *

He did lose.

He lost, and to add insult, he had to admit (if only to himself) that he was enjoying having someone else brush his hair. He could feel Miri being smug about it. She was too wise to say as much out loud, of course.

Not that her chosen topic of conversation was any better.

“I like him,” she said, gently picking apart a tangle. “Your lover.”

He almost sneered, almost told her that she was living in a romantic dream world, that he worried for her sanity. Did she think they were sleeping in separate rooms for the sake of her delicate sensibilities?

He almost said all of that. But then he made the mistake of thinking about it. Of wondering why she would think they were lovers.

He and Allen had never slept together, no. But they had fought together, traveled together, gotten old together. They’d spent most of their lives together, even after everyone else had split away.

For ten years, Allen had cooked him breakfast every morning, and he’d cooked Allen dinner every night. The only break in this routine had been four years before, when Allen had gone to visit Miranda on his own for a few days. Kanda had pined; it had been ridiculous. He’d tried to tell himself he wasn’t pining, but of course Allen had seen right through him. Since then, they’d traveled together or not at all.

Allen liked to curl up against him on the couch and read until he fell asleep, and Kanda pulled him close because he chilled easily. Kanda didn’t really feel comfortable until he’d touched Allen in the morning and made sure he was real. Allen always knew when the pain in Kanda’s legs turned vicious, and he knelt and rubbed them and mocked Kanda continuously with no bite to it at all.

God, they’d been married for a decade and Kanda had been too stupid to see it.

Allen, on the other hand, had always been better at people and relationships than Kanda. Allen had probably known what this was all along.

No, it was more than that. All of this had been Allen’s idea from the start. Not the femur, of course, but the tattoo, which amounted to the same thing. And he hadn’t needed to be the one to take care of Kanda—Lenalee would have done it. Allen had deliberately chosen this.

But if that was true, then…

Hadn’t he ever wanted anything more? Hadn’t he ever wanted sex? It was out of the question at this point (Kanda’s back and shoulder twinged at the thought—mind willing, body weak), but when they’d first moved to this house, after Kanda’s leg had healed—they’d been falling apart even then, but not so much as all that. They’d been in their twenties, for God’s sake. Why had he never asked…?

No. Allen never asked for anything; asking for things just gave people an easy way to hurt you. And Kanda could have hurt Allen over this. Kanda could have destroyed Allen over this. And at the time, when he’d still blamed Allen, when they’d still thought of themselves as young…yes, he might have. And so Allen hadn’t taken the risk; Allen had settled for less.

They’d both taken enough horrible risks in their lives by then. And gained precious little from them, for the most part.

“Did I say something wrong?” asked his sister, who always had been the perceptive one.

“No,” Kanda assured her. It wasn’t her fault that she had to explain his life to him. “I’m glad you like him.”

He remembered, now, the peculiar tilt of Lenalee’s smile when she watched him and Allen sit together and bicker—fond, but something more than fond. He remembered Lavi’s surprise at the fact that they slept in separate rooms. He realized that Komui’s packages addressed to “The Lovebirds” were perhaps not the sick joke he’d thought they were.

Everyone had known but him.

Allen, with his usual impeccable timing, chose this moment to walk into the room. Kanda had no idea what expression he was wearing, but whatever it was, it alarmed Allen.

Allen glanced up at Miri, who leaned down to brush a kiss over Kanda’s hair. “I’ll go do the shopping,” she said. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

She set down the brush with a quiet click, collected her coat and their money, and whisked out the door. She and Allen were similar this way: masters of subtle, silent communication. Whereas Kanda couldn’t see what had been right in front of him for ten goddamn years.

Allen stepped forward and knelt at his feet, looked up at him, worried. How could Kanda possibly not have noticed this?

“What’s wrong?” Allen asked. Allen, come to think of it, had always worried about him. Just like a good…spouse, or whatever. God.

“My sister said she likes you,” Kanda explained, feeling overwhelmed.

Allen quirked his eyebrows. “Well,” he said. “I can see where that would be traumatic.”

“Allen. She said, ‘I like him. Your lover.’”

Allen’s face shut down completely, in a way it hadn’t since they were teenagers and most of the Order had thought Allen was a traitor. A smiling mask. Allen the Clown.

“And you told her that she was insane,” Allen said. He was trying to sound like it was all very funny, but Kanda knew him too well. He could hear the brittleness behind the light tone.

“I told her I was glad she liked you,” Kanda corrected, wishing that he’d learned, at some point, how to deal with emotions other than rage.

The mask cracked a little, and Kanda could see the confusion behind it. “Why would you let her go on thinking that?” Allen asked. Unsure. Maybe even afraid.

Kanda folded his arms uncomfortably and glared off to the side. “She’s not exactly wrong, is she?”

“She’s.” Allen stopped. Took a breath. “What do you mean, she’s not exactly wrong?”

He was taking no chances at all, then. And Kanda had been unbelievably stupid.

“You never said anything,” Kanda said, feeling helpless. “And I—” am an idiot. “Clearly it wasn’t obvious enough, the way you moved in with me and made me food and took care of me when I was sick and—”

“Kanda,” Allen interrupted, smiling now. A real smile. The mask had melted away to wherever it went when Allen didn’t need it, and that, at least, was a relief. “I never expected anything.”

“You could have.” That was the point. Allen couldn’t possibly think that Kanda was coming over self-sacrificing at this time of his life. Him and his idiotic what does it matter. “I was stupid, not unwilling.”

“Oh.” Allen said faintly, and dropped his head against Kanda’s knee with a thud. Kanda was just starting to worry about him when he looked up again with his expression of extreme self-mockery. “Then we’re both stupid,” he said. “Maybe that’s why we get along.”

Kanda snorted. “Maybe that’s why nobody else can stand us.”

“Hey, lots of people like me,” Allen said indignantly. “I’m personable!”

“Lots of people think they like you,” Kanda told him. “But these people, they don’t actually know you.”

“So I’m sleeping in your bed, now,” Allen said. He always had had guerilla conversation tactics.

Kanda liked having a bed to himself. There was virtually no appeal to sharing a bed when the benefits were going to be minimal at best. But maybe he owed Allen this much, to make up for the years of idiocy. Besides. Allen got cold easily.

“I kick,” Kanda warned.

“Whatever,” Allen sighed, and leaned his head back against Kanda’s knee. He looked as content as he ever had, which made Kanda feel obscurely guilty.

“I’m glad we sorted all of this out right when we’re about to die,” he sniped, because he’d always responded to guilt by sniping.

Allen laughed.

“If you puke blood onto my sheets, I’ll be pissed.”

Allen laughed harder.

“You’re going to wake me up every morning when you go to burn the eggs, aren’t you?”

Kanda thought he’d better stop, because if Allen laughed much harder, he wouldn’t be able to breathe, and then he’d probably faint again.

It was good that Allen was laughing. Apparently it hadn’t hit him that this had just turned into a race to see which of them would wake up to find the other one dead beside him.

Or maybe it had hit him, and he thought that was funny, too. He was crazy, after all.

* * *

The baby lady from next door came over the next week to pick up her damn cradle, and it all turned out to be just as much of a fiasco as Kanda had expected it would.

“Thank you so much for doing this for us!” she said with, for fuck’s sake, tears in her eyes. “It’s so beautiful! Of course we knew you’d do an amazing job, but we had no idea—”

“We’re glad you like it,” Allen put in before she could drive Kanda to say something hateful. “Miri did the birds.”

“And Allen did the leaves,” Miri said from immediately behind him. Apparently Allen had been teaching her to creep up on people. Fantastic.

“Oh.” Baby lady looked between Miri and Kanda with wide eyes, and Kanda felt the chill before she even opened her mouth. “Is this your daughter?”

Allen leaned firmly against Kanda’s shoulder and whispered, “Thou shalt not kill,” which was a stupid thing to say because there had been a time when killing for God was their job.

“Well,” Miri was saying, voice wobbling with the effort not to laugh. “We’re certainly related…”

“She’s my sister,” Kanda snapped. “Do I look that goddamn old?”

Allen sighed his you’re-taking-it-out-on-bystanders sigh. Kanda scowled at him.

“I’m so sorry!” Baby lady gasped. She looked completely horrified, like she’d never said an embarrassing thing in her life before, which Kanda doubted. “I didn’t mean to offend you!”

“Don’t worry about it,” Allen said blithely. “It’s true he’s aged badly.”

Kanda thought wistfully back on the days when he could have elbowed Allen viciously in the side and not worried about causing serious internal damage.

“Whereas the years haven’t touched you at all,” he muttered instead. “Beansprout.”

Allen turned to give him an incredulous look, and Kanda thought, for one terrifying second, that Allen was going to kiss him right there in front of God and the baby lady and everybody.

There had come a point, a few years before, when he’d stopped calling Allen beansprout. It just hadn’t fit; Allen hadn’t been a young, naïve kid anymore, and he looked like an old man. It was inaccurate. And depressing.

Typical that Allen had been telling Kanda to stop calling him that for years, and then when Kanda had stopped, Allen had missed it. Idiot.

“I look like a kid compared to you,” Allen eventually got around to answering.

“You look like one massive scar compared to me,” Kanda said.

“Only because you cheated!”

“It was not cheating, you—”

“Allen’s only got the one scar, hasn’t he?” Miri put in curiously. She’d learned this trick of interrupting them from Lenalee. She’d been raised to be polite.

Then again, so had Kanda.

“That’s the only one you can see when he’s standing here,” Kanda said. “Different story once you’ve got his clothes off.”

Allen choked.

It was only once the words were out of his mouth that Kanda realized what he’d said, what it implied, and that Allen might as well have kissed him, because then at least the staring would have been Allen’s fault.

It both was and wasn’t what it sounded like, and either way, trying to talk his way out of it would only make it worse. But what the hell. It wasn’t like he gave a damn what baby lady thought of them.

Her mouth was hanging open. And she’d just thought she was going to pick up a cradle. Little had she known.

“What happened?” Miri asked Allen in defiance of the awkward silence that was trying to descend.

“What? To me?”

It was ridiculous that he could still drive Kanda to want to kill him in the space of three simple words. “No, idiot, to the other white-haired jackass made of scars.”

Allen scowled at him. “I was just surprised she’d want to know. The stories aren’t that interesting.”

“You’re right, your life has been so damn boring. But tell her about the time you stabbed yourself with your own sword. I always liked that one.”

Allen’s eyes flashed. “Maybe I’ll tell her about the time you sent everyone away so you could take on the Noah by yourself because you’re a freaking bloodthirsty savage.”

“Or you could tell her about the time you seduced the robot.”

“Who cares? It was a robot.”

“Yes, Walker, exactly. It was a robot!”

“Anyway, I didn’t get a scar from that.”

“No, I did. Mental scars.”

“You’re so sensitive, Kanda. I never knew.”

“What about the one on your face?” Miri cut in desperately, with a nervous sidelong look at baby lady, who had apparently reached a horror overload point. “Where did that come from?”

Kanda could see every muscle in Allen’s body go tense. And Miri had thought she was doing a good thing.

Some memories you didn’t get over. Kanda knew all about that.

“He fell down the stairs,” Kanda said. Allen blinked at him, startled, and smiled.

“Sharp stairs,” he said.

“Lined with nails,” Kanda agreed.

Miri pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed.

Kanda looked around and noted that the baby lady had run away at some point. Which was fine, but…

“That woman owes me money,” he snapped.

Allen laughed, because Allen had the habit of laughing at things that weren’t actually funny.

* * *

Lenalee had found a house for Miri. It was next door to the Lis, so they would all be nearby. Kanda was pleased with it; not too close, not far away. The only thing that worried him was the thought of what Miri and Lenalee would get up to together.

“I’ll visit on Sundays,” Miri said, casting worried eyes over both of them, to Allen’s evident amusement. “And whenever you call Miss Li, I’ll—”

“Please call me Lenalee,” Lenalee said for at least the fifth time.

Miri eyed her warily. “Miss Li,” she repeated.

“So it runs in the family,” Allen muttered, and Kanda elbowed him. Gently.

“I’ll come, too,” Miri concluded. “Call if there’s anything you need in the meantime. Oh, or if you—”

“Miri,” Kanda interrupted, and she shut up. She and Allen both gave him a strange look for no apparent reason. “Get lost.”

Miri beamed. “Okay,” she said, and leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek. He almost thought that he’d miss having her brush his hair, but caught himself before the idea was properly formed. A walking corpse had no business holding on to anything.

* * *

Kanda had been under the foolish impression that things would settle back down after Miri moved out. And yet no. Miri must have felt that she couldn’t interfere in their lives too much while she was their guest, but now that she wasn’t their guest, she had free rein.

In her own passive aggressive way, she was actually worse than Lenalee. The two of them together were a mild catastrophe.

As if this weren’t enough, Allen and Kanda were abruptly hit with a flood of visitors. They usually had about one visitor every six months. Kanda didn’t know what they’d done to rate a visitor a week, but he wished all these people would get the hell out of his house and leave him alone. He wondered if it was some kind of punishment for this…whatever…with Allen. Maybe he was only permitted so much happiness.

Marie was no trouble, at least. Though he had a tendency to smirk at odd moments, which was quietly irritating.

Komui was almost as frequent a visitor as Lenalee and Miri. There were no words for Komui at the best of times, and once he’d caught Kanda working on Allen’s cabinet, he’d become utterly impossible.

Timothy came through like a whirlwind, broke half of their possessions and attempted to steal most of the rest, then announced that they were boring and flounced out to wreak his havoc elsewhere.

Reever, Johnny, Jerry, Bak, and Wong all trooped through their living room, followed, inexplicably, by some woman Kanda didn’t know from Asia Branch, whose only goal was apparently to follow Allen around and moon over him. This despite the fact that Allen looked old enough to be her father.

“Lo Fwa is a brilliant scientist,” Allen said.

“Good for her,” Kanda replied. “Get her out of my house.”

And then, last but not least, there was the rabbit. For all his claims of wild and free Bookman independence, he still managed to inflict himself on Kanda at least three times a year.

* * *

“I don’t know what you two did, but the sheer volume of weird rumors about you in town has shot up by an order of magnitude,” Lavi said as he walked, uninvited and unannounced, through their door.

Kanda squinted at him from across the kitchen counter. It was possible that Allen had a point when he said Kanda needed glasses. Fantastic. Amazing how there was always one more thing that could fall apart. Next he’d be pissing himself.

“Baby lady has a big fucking mouth,” Kanda said, and went back to chopping vegetables. He hated vegetables, and on top of that, he resented them. He wouldn’t have to be eating them at all if Miri hadn’t tattled to Lenalee about their diet.

“Baby lady,” Lavi repeated blankly.

Kanda grunted. Lavi could just bully that story out of Allen, because Kanda refused to think about it anymore; it was a waste of brain space.

“Baby lady?”

Rabbit never had been able to take a hint. “While you’re here,” Kanda said. “I want bloodwood.”

Lavi blinked at him. “And? This has what to do with baby lady?”

“You travel. Bring me enough wood for a cabinet. Or two, in case I screw up the first one.”

“Let me get this straight,” Lavi said incredulously. “You want me to carry bloodwood back from…what, Brazil? What, you want that in 2 x 12s? 8 x 8s? How am I supposed to fit that in my luggage?” At least he’d been successfully distracted.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Kanda snapped. “You can have it shipped.”

“Oh yeah? And how much will that cost? Look, Yuu, I don’t even want to think—”

“Get the Vatican to pay for it,” Kanda said carelessly.

“How? ‘Yuu really needs bloodwood for his health?’”

“You’re the Bookman. You’re supposed to be good at this.”

“Good at conning exotic wood out of the Vatican? I’m touched by how much you think of my abilities, Yuu, but Jesus…”

“What’s he trying to make you buy?” Allen asked, wandering into the kitchen and making a face at the vegetables. “Why are we standing around in the kitchen? The living room has couches. Hi, Lavi.”

“Hey, Allen. He’s trying to make me buy bl—”

Kanda could have aimed that fork to maim, if he’d wanted to. Luckily for Lavi, he’d mellowed with age.

Lavi swallowed carefully, considered the fork sticking into the wall an inch from his face, then visibly made the choice to be a dick. “It’s a secret present for you, Allen,” he cooed, which was true, though Lavi didn’t know it. “He’s trying to win his way to your heart through gifts! Ah, try to be kind.”

Lavi, Kanda thought with satisfaction, was behind the times. A few months ago, that little speech would really have bothered him.

Now, though, Allen sauntered over to Kanda, snuggled up, and said, “Well, that seems like wasted effort on his part, Lavi.”

Kanda dropped an arm around Allen’s shoulders and thought he could get used to the stunned ox expression on Lavi’s face.

“When?” he gasped. “Wha—I mean, you were obviously—but. Why now?”

Allen tipped his head back against Kanda’s shoulder and eyed the ceiling. “You could say it’s been a busy summer.”

God, hadn’t it. And Kanda still hadn’t worked out whether Miri had just happened to be the start of the flood, or if all this social activity was, in fact, her fault.

Speaking of whom, he heard her at the door as Allen steered them into the living room. He would bet anything that she was going to walk in bearing green, leafy things.

“Hello!” Miri called from the door. Bags full of green, leafy things in both hands. Kanda scowled and Allen sighed. “Miss Li sent me with more groceries, so I—oh.”

She’d spotted Lavi, who was sprawled over the couch and not immediately visible from the doorway. She seemed unduly interested in him. But he was, Kanda reluctantly conceded, rather attractive.

And Miri was beautiful.

“I’m the Bookman,” Lavi said with a slimy smile. “And you are…?”

“Oh, hell no,” Kanda snapped. “Get the fuck out of my house.”

Allen snorted unattractively, then proceeded to laugh until he’d collapsed on the floor out of weakness. And Kanda was going to let him rot there, the unsympathetic bastard.

“Brother, I promise not to run away with the Bookman,” Miri said, fighting a smile, looking like she’d be on the floor next to Allen if not for her upbringing.

“Brother?” Lavi repeated, caught off-guard for the second time in a day. Messing with Lavi had never been so easy. “Kanda, this is your sister?”

Kanda didn’t know why his life so often had to be ridiculous. “Yes.” Wasn’t that what Miri had just said? “She’s my sister.”

“I thought you couldn’t go looking anymore…?”

“Oh, she came and found us,” Allen put in, wheezing a little from the laughter. “How embarrassing is that?”

“Really embarrassing,” Lavi said in a wondering tone. “That is really embarrassing, Yuu. Damn, how did we miss her?”

Allen went back to laughing. Kanda tried to remember what it was he saw in Allen.

“I’ll, um.” Miri was still trying not to laugh, still not having much success. “I’ll put the groceries away.”

“I’ll come with you,” Allen gasped, holding up a hand. Kanda pulled him to his feet, and watched as he and Miri wandered to the kitchen together, snickering. And what the hell had been the point of leaving the kitchen anyway? If Miri and Lenalee got their way, eventually their entire lives would revolve around food. They might as well put the bed in the kitchen and have done with it.

“If you’re going to say anything stupid,” Kanda said to Lavi, “tell me now, and I’ll go get my cane to beat you with.”

“Nah, it’s kinda cute, Yuu,” Lavi said quietly, with an uncharacteristically serious expression. He looked, for once, like what he was. The Bookman. The bearer of all of the most unspeakable stories in history. “I never pegged you as the one who would get the happy ending.”

Kanda studied the liver spots on the backs of his thin-skinned, arthritic hands, and thought about that. He thought of his daily aches and pains, thought of how damaged Allen was and how much time they’d wasted, thought of everything he’d failed to save Miri from. Thought of how much it sucked to be old. How much it sucked to be so much older than everyone else his age.

So this was what a happy ending looked like.

According to the old-man-at-the-pub philosophy, you were supposed to live until you were nothing but a broken, tired burden whose friends were all dead. Then you could die and be relieved about it. As usual, Kanda had everything ass-backwards. He’d never had much use for his life until now, when it arguably wasn’t worth living.

Happy ending, indeed.

“Shut up, rabbit,” he said.

* * *
* * *

It takes him longer every morning to remember where and who he is.

He’s no one, an abandoned kid asleep on the street—

No, he’s in the circus, he’s Mana Walker’s son—

No, he lost that. He’s Cross Marian’s apprentice, traveling—

He’s an exorcist in the Order—

He’s a traitor to his family—

He’s a broken, dying man—

No. No, he always remembers eventually. He’s retired now. He’s in charge of Kanda Yuu.

He pushes carefully onto his elbows and smiles at the cranky old man whose bed he’s finally managed to trick his way into. He leans down and gently kisses Kanda on the forehead, and thinks, not for the first time, that he can’t wait to see Cross’s face when he finds out about this.

He eases out of bed, careful not to wake Kanda. It’s easier than he would have expected; Kanda is a far cry from the tense, hair-trigger professional paranoid he once was. He claims it’s because he’s falling apart. Allen thinks it might be because he’s finally calmed down.

Allen naturally wakes earlier, which is how he ended up responsible for breakfast. He is also—how the tables have turned—quieter, because he moves more freely than Kanda does. Kanda seems to believe this is because Allen isn’t in pain, but that’s not quite true. Allen’s pain is relentless; it makes no difference whether or not he’s moving. It’s a burning in his bones that never fades, though on bad days it radiates outward into his muscles. Sometimes even his skin feels swollen and hot, stretched, like it might burst open.

He tried, once, to outrun the pain, on the theory that moving quickly might siphon off the burning. It had almost seemed to work, at least until he collapsed in the road a few hours later, vomiting blood and scaring the hell out of Kanda.

So much for that idea.

The two advantages to constant pain are that he can move easily and hide it easily. As long as he doesn’t push himself too hard, the only outward sign that anything is wrong with him is his tendency to fall asleep whenever he holds still. It turns out that continuous pain is exhausting.

He doesn’t think Kanda knows why he’s always sleeping. Then again, it isn’t easy to tell the difference between what Kanda doesn’t know and what he’s firmly ignoring.

Allen ambles through his morning routine, checking periodically to be sure that Kanda hasn’t stopped breathing. It seems unlikely, but still, neither of them can be called healthy. Allen has watched Lenalee’s concern move gradually from joking to near-frantic. He wonders how many years they have left.

With any luck, Kanda will die first. If Kanda dies, Allen will finally have no one left who needs him, and he’ll be able to give up on life without guilt. If Allen dies first, though, Kanda is guaranteed to stubbornly go on living until his body won’t hold up anymore. And why? Only because he hates giving in to anyone. Even God.

It’s not that Allen is a huge fan of God, it’s just that hating Him is like hating the sun. Pointless, among other things.

Kanda is all about doing pointless things, though, Allen reflects as he walks down the stairs that will probably turn out to be the death of one or both of them. For instance, what the hell is meant to be gained from climbing these stairs? Is there something wrong with the downstairs bedroom, which is bigger, brighter, and on the ground floor?

Allen is still pondering the stair question and how best to phrase it to Kanda as he prepares the eggs. By order of Lenalee and Miri, the eggs must now have tomatoes to go with them (‘At the very least, Allen!’), so they require more attention than they used to. Knives and that.

He puts the eggs on the stove, and curls up on the chair nearest it. If he stayed standing, he wouldn’t fall asleep, he knows. But this has become a habit, left over from a time when the only way he could get Kanda to voluntarily touch him was to threaten to burn the house down.

He isn’t sorry.

Now, of course, he’s allowed to molest Kanda whenever he likes, which is pretty amazing. The trickiest part turned out to be convincing Kanda that neither of them would break. (Sex doesn’t have to be as physically demanding as Kanda seemed to think it did, and Allen is creative).

So there’s no reason, now, for Allen to let himself fall asleep while he’s cooking. In fact, it’s probably an insane thing to do. He understands that.

He closes his eyes and lets his mind drift anyway. Inasmuch as this makes any sense at all, he does it because he wants Kanda to wake him up. And if Kanda doesn’t wake him up, then he doesn’t care if he burns the house down.

The thought of what Kanda would do if he knew about this particular train of thought is a little terrifying, but luckily, he’s never been a mind reader.

The next thing Allen knows, there are fingers running through his hair, a voice sighing, “You are such a dumbshit."

He smiles and opens his eyes.