Disclaimer: D. Grayman belongs to Hoshino Katsura.
Warnings: Rabi/Kanda pairing.

The Years

1.

"This one is pretty," said Kanda suddenly, bringing his small hand down on an ink illustration before Rabi could turn the page. He traced the delicate lines with the pad of his finger, following the outlines of the white petals. It was shaped like the sun.

Rabi looked down, dropping the frayed edge of the yellowed paper. "Yeah," he agreed, skimming the printed text with his quick eyes. They crouched over a heavy leather-bound volume spread open on the floor, and read by morning light. "Did you have it in Japan?"

The Transfer fascinated him. He had never seen another nine-year-old in the Order before. He had told Bookman that he wanted to be that boy's friend. The old historian watched his charge with sad eyes and warned, "Be careful with human hearts, Rabi."

Kanda answered thoughtfully. "I think so," he said, still stumbling over the English syllables. His brows furrowed whenever his tongue grazed the top row of his teeth to churn out a clumsy 'th'. "We call it, 'hasu.' What do you call it here?"

Rabi eyed the bolded label by the encyclopedia entry. "It's called a Lotus," he read.

2.

Kanda received the Mugen when he was ten and still a child. The scientists watched expectantly as he gripped the black sword in his hands. The blade glinted silver as it touched his clammy skin. He was shaking and they thought he was afraid. He felt the cold metal against his palms and only thought, I can kill with this.

Bookman held out a hammer to his student, and Rabi thought it was a toy. He juggled it from hand to hand despite the elder's protests and said, "Why're you giving me something to play with if you told me to grow up?" The mallet blasted through the roof. When Bookman dug him out of the mountain of rubble, Rabi grinned and shouted, "Whoa, that was cool!"

The Earl made forty-two-hundred new Akuma that year. Rhode was coddled and spoiled by her family. They held blue flames against her skin, watched it burn, and let it regenerate. The baby giggled because it was ticklish. Tiki got jealous and stole her kidneys out of spite, but they kept on growing back.

Allen Walker killed his father. He was picked up by a strange man with red hair and a black coat. "What an unfortunate fate, "said Cross.

3.

Rabi only visited the Headquarters after two years. He came back when he was eleven and found a dark-haired girl in Kanda's room. She glowered at him from where she stood with crossed arms in the doorway, frightening in her four and a half foot glory. "Uh," he said awkwardly, feeling shy and confused because she was pretty.

"What do you want?" she snapped. He thought it was charming.

"Are you," he asked carefully, "Kanda's girlfriend?"

She turned red in the face, and he guessed he had hit the nail on its head until she raised a foot and planted it in his stomach. He doubled over while she sneered down, indignant. "Watch who you're calling a girl, moron. Or I'll aim lower than that next time." Her 'th's sounded a little forced, so she frowned, creating little lines in her forehead from displeasure.

"Kanda?" Rabi tried.

"What do you want, I said?" Kanda repeated, exasperated.

Rabi stared, appalled. "No way!" he shouted, eyes wide. "You weren't a boy?"

Kanda did aim lower.

4.

He thought he was hearing things at first. He even went to the infirmary, only to be informed that he was worrying over nothing. It was still bothering him when Rabi deposited himself unceremoniously across the lunch table. "Aren't you going to eat?" said the boy, nodding at the fork Kanda was using to push around the carrots on his plate.

"I'm not hungry," responded Kanda moodily. Even at twelve, it was normal.

"That's not healthy, Yuu," cautioned Rabi, shoving spoonfuls of rice into his mouth. He looked up when he felt Kanda staring, and he mumbled with his mouth full. "What?"

"What did you say?" asked Kanda.

"I said it's not healthy," answered Rabi matter-of-factly. "It's not, you know. If –"

"No! What did you call me? Why are you calling me that?" snapped Kanda.

"Yuu?" Rabi frowned as if the answer was obvious. "It's your name, isn't it?"

Kanda opened and closed his mouth. It was. He had nothing good to say to that.

5.

They discovered girls at about the same time. While Rabi stalked the bottom of the stairs and looked up short black skirts, Kanda grew increasingly irritated with the second half of the human race. Because he got injured often, the nurses in the hospital knew him by name, and they pampered him needlessly. He hated their fussing and their smudgy, oily lipstick.

"They keep on trying to kiss my cheek," he complained with annoyance. He tugged at the bandages wrapped around his forehead because they itched. At thirteen, he was beginning to grow out of the genderless features that marked his youth.

"Yeah?"

Kanda reached for a knife and began to peel the apple he hadn't eaten at lunch. "So I don't like it when they try to kiss me." He flushed, feeling as though he were admitting something horribly embarrassing. He waited for the reaction with baited breath.

"Yeah?" answered Rabi distractedly, teetering on his toes. There was a blonde woman in a red dress leaning over the check-in counter. He could see down the front if he peered through the blinds at just the right angle.

Kanda stared at Rabi's back and rolled his eyes.

6.

Kanda found That Person when he was fourteen. A week later he lay in the hospital bed everyone had thought would be his deathbed and stared at the ceiling. Komui was newly-promoted and already sorting through paperwork when the door to his office opened and knocked down a stack of books nearby.

Komui pushed up the bridge of his glasses. He didn't look up. "Kanda."

"Komui," said Kanda by means of a greeting. "How do you revive someone from death?'

Komui stilled. "As an Exorcist, I'm sure you know the answer to that."

Kanda left without answers. A month later he fell mysteriously sick. Whey they took off his clothing to examine the cause, they found the tattoo emblazoned over his heart. Bookman's eyes grew grave, and explained why the Japanese boy would not wake up for another half a year. "He is killing himself so that nothing will be able to kill him later."

Rabi visited his friend every day, studying the peaceful face and hating the lotus flower.

7.

On the last Sunday of June, Kanda opened his eyes. It was seven in the morning and the room was yellow-glazed. He sat up, feeling awkward in his own body, because it had grown without him. There were still flowers by the bed, left over from a somber fifteenth birthday. There was something else too, and Kanda leaned down, placed a pale hand on Rabi's forehead.

Rabi mumbled, rubbing his eyes. He pushed himself up and looked at Kanda.

"Ohayou," Kanda said softly. His voice cracked, deeper than he remembered.

Stupefied, Rabi wondered if it was a dream. Three pinches confirmed that it wasn't. Kanda looked down at him with a weary adult's eyes, framed in sunlight and morning glow. "Yuu?" he said, awestruck. His vision blurred, and only realized after tasting salt that there were tears. Kanda smelled like sterilized cloth and sacrifice when Rabi wrapped his arms around him. "I missed you," said Rabi. "I missed you so much."

8.

Rabi left with Bookman for Eastern Europe in September and returned two months later, with an eye patch. Rabi wouldn't speak about it and Kanda didn't ask, but he noticed the blind spots, the barbed humor, the new indifference. "Why do you talk," demanded Kanda, leaning across the table and forcefully shutting the book in Rabi's face, "like you don't care about what the Order does?"

The redhead smiled a smile that was like a frown. "Because I don't."

Kanda stared at him, crushing the beginnings of hurt under his heel. Drawing back, he twisted his lips into something cruel and cold. He had mastered the expression long before he turned sixteen. "Oh." He left the library.

When he realized he was being followed, he turned and drew his sword. "What?" Kanda hissed, all venom and ire. Rabi looked sad, reluctant, resigned. He pushed the blade away from his throat and put their foreheads together, lacing his fingers through Kanda's shaking fist.

"I'm sorry," apologized Rabi gently, closing his eye. "I care. I care about you."

9.

Kanda had never been kissed. While he didn't much care about the matter, Rabi thought it absolutely scandalous. "Well," defended Kanda testily, seeking to appease the redhead into silence and not yet realizing its impossibility, "I told you about the nurses hanging over me when I was little. They kissed me sometimes."

"Where?" prompted Rabi. Kanda pressed his finger into his cheek, and Rabi sighed with exaggeration, throwing his hands into the air. "Then that doesn't count!" he said loudly. "You're seventeen! And you've never been kissed! That's so sad!"

"Who kissed you?" Kanda shot back angrily. He was offended, bristling like a feline, and did not notice Rabi staring at him strangely. "Your mother?" he scoffed haughtily. "Do you even know how to kiss someone?"

When Rabi grabbed his wrists and pinned him against a wall to answer that question, Kanda dug his boot heel into the other boy's toe until they parted, and wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. "What are you doing!" His face was red, his lips were wet, and he ran away. It was the first retreat of his life.

10.

Rabi buried his face in Kanda's neck and breathed in the familiar scent of sweat and sex. They were tangled in wrinkled sheets, discarded clothes and sore limbs. Tomorrow, come dawn, Rabi would follow Bookman to Italy in his research, and Kanda had an assignment in a cursed forest town. Slowly, surely, their fates were closing in.

"What are you laughing at?" muttered Kanda tiredly, throwing a hand over his eyes.

"You ran away the first time I kissed you," Rabi whispered, breath fanning close to the other's ear. Kanda could feel the grin against his jaw rather than see it, just like the low rumble of the redhead's chuckling. Rabi trailed his mouth down the bare neck while the body beneath him squirmed. Chuckling, he added, "You still do."

"Why are you remembering things like that?"

Rabi smiled, expression soft with an emotion they were still too young to fully understand. They were eighteen, barely adults. Within a week they would meet Allen Walker, and there would be no time for this. "Let me stay tonight," murmured Rabi, taking Kanda's wrist and locking their hands together. He brought it to his face and kissed the fingertips before leaning down.

"Do what you want," the Exorcist said, but he met him halfway.