A/N—pretty much just taking a break from various stressful things and giving DGM one more shot.

The second time he had ever met up with Bookman, he was sworn in as the next successor to that title. He had been six and naive, but he'd also been brimming with gilded ambition, and consequently very forcefully soaped off every inch of what he thought was existence from his bones until he felt sufficiently unreal and Bookman was impressed enough to take him in.

He had been six, only six, when Bookman taught him his first lesson: "Watch."

"Watch?"

The sky was burning bright orange in front of them. The color of promises.

Bookman's voice was brittle but it flowed with subtly-calculated sagacity. "Just watch," he advised before pausing delicately. "You'll understand."

He considered. This was the Bookman – he had to be right, he decided. Because Bookmen had to be right.

"Okay," he obliged, still largely doubtful, before facing forward again.

Bullets arced—

And then red exploded.

Bookman had been right, of course.

Another three years, he turned nine; and while he didn't learn a whole lot about "the world", he had begun to see enough to start to realize that, perhaps, maybe there wasn't much to learn about the world to begin with. He was still too young to grasp at the sheer simplicity of that statement.

Eleven came, and Bookman gave him his first formal assignment. Bookman asked him to accrue all of his experiences thus far to evaluate what history, and the consequences, had to offer for the future.

He was all grins when Bookman finished talking. "Easy, easy," he shot back breezily. He'd been longing for recognition, for appraisal – for anything that added the slightest amount of weight to his existence. "Is that all?"

Bookman just gave him a long look. "Don't write about it right away," the elder warned before turning away to prepare for bed. "And don't use any of that flowery language you've been starting to write in. Be concise."

The redhead just rolled his eyes before flopping unceremoniously onto the mattress. "Yeah, yeah, whatever, gramps," he yawned.

But Bookman had been right, of course.

It had taken him another year and maybe a thousand more screams before he was finally able to pen down just one word.

Nothing.

He'd heard of loyalty. He'd read about treaties and compromises and their general eventual ineffectiveness, and he'd recorded countless, tragic war stories that were destined to be forever untold. And he had learned: God had not been so relenting.

He was now familiar – too familiar – with all the inevitable prompted stimuli that foretold impending death. There was a time limit that could not be bypassed or cheated. He now knew all the details to look for at the end of a life span: an involuntary spasm of a muscle, pupil dilation. Free nerve endings convulsed too, because pain was an invaluable indicator of life, and there were only so many life reminders a person could take before a body became completely submerged and unresponsive.

But there was more to dying than just the physiological signals.

There had been screams that ripped apart the heavens.

There had been tears.

There had been winter.

There had been children.

But there had been duty.

And duty had dictated that Bookmen existed primarily to see the things that must be seen.

So that we can learn.

So he had watched.

And he could not censor what he had seen.

Not that it mattered, though. Bookman had been pretty adamant.

"Don't even blink," he warned. "And don't pretend to forget." Bookman was not a man of sentiment, only one of duty.

Orange lit up the sky; and the red soon followed.

He watched. It was taking so much more to faze him nowadays.

He entered smile first at the pub; but the look in his eyes was already thick as glass, and the littered secrets slipped in his pockets were smudged and crumpled: thoroughly dissected and exploited. He was not himself, whatever that even meant. He was never looking for atonement or interested in salvation.

But neither was the bartender. "Whatcha want, kid?"

The glossy dark wood under his hand was moistened with distrust. He dragged out delicate letters in a language no one else understood. That night, his secrets could have been breathed flat on the glass, begging to be read and realized. Anything.

He withdrew a handful of bitter silver coins and cleverly smudged the almost words away instead. "Mix me your best," he challenged carelessly. He'd become too jaded too fast. "Make me an end of the world drink. Give me whatever you think that'd taste like."

The end of the world had taken only three minutes to fix. He crafted cranes out of napkins. And when the bartender turned back with the proffered apocalypse in hand, he crushed the paper bird under the dulled Irish glass.

He studied the liquid.

It was a brilliant red in color. He ran his fingers around the rim. It was the color of sunrises, he decided. And sunsets. It reeked of shattered promises and of badly-kept secrets. Of lies, of avoided truths, of illusions, of lust. Dead babies. Clockwork stories with no endings.

Lifted the glass.

What do you think, gramps?

He downed the concoction in one go, drowning himself in every last inch of this world of his. Drowning. At some point, swimming had become the same as drowning, and orange became red too often, too fast.

He didn't know what he'd been looking for anymore. But, well. He put down the empty glass.

Everything was just becoming much too red these days.

The city went up in flames the week after, kindling orange with promise.

God—

That night he shot down the stars, one at a time.

She bore all the injuries of a child who had been exposed to too much too fast. He looked at the battle scars carved deep and definite over her cheeks and he might have winced if she hadn't chosen to trade life for duty. Wounds like that didn't ever fade.

She stared quietly at the smoky horizon slowly giving way to a too stark, too blue sky. She'd been so wide-eyed and unwavering. She didn't run fingers over her scars. They both knew – if this was war, then this had not been the first time, nor will it be the last.

She looked at him – through him, maybe – and he drank in her devastation all over again.

"Lavi," she said suddenly as if she just remembered that he had been there too.

He was relatively new to the Order, and duty had still been duty. But he'd never been looking for salvation. He'd be damned before admitting to something as wishy washy as that.

"It couldn't be helped," he breezed lightly before she could manage another strangled cry—he didn't know how to deal with weepy little girls. "Isn't this what happens in war anyway? People die. It happens, and at times like these you just gotta keep your own chin up, you know?"

It hadn't even been an eighth of a minute before she slapped him across the face. "How can you even say something like that?"

She broke down.

"Do you even care?"

He watched her, holding his face, stunned.

He hadn't ever quite imagined swallowing down the salt of her tears.

He hadn't ever imagined it to sting so much, either.

A year and a half.

He looked down at the pieces standing proud and erect on the table. They were handcrafted: painstakingly sculpted little figures of white and black coated wood fashioned to compress or mimic life to a checkerboard. A king. A queen. Knights. Rooks. Ponds.

By now, he'd already figured out the hierarchy, somewhat.

The black players had been superficially easy to put in place. The black king was the Earl; the nobility, his Noahs; and the ponds, his Akuma.

His eye glazed over the white pieces. That required more thought. Kanda was either a knight or a pond, he decided. That was for sure. And the rest...

Bookman rapped his knuckles on the checkerboard, impatient. "Make your move, Lavi," he reminded him idly of the task at hand. "And do it sometime before I fall asleep."

He'd never been any good at strategy or thinking more than two steps ahead or having to worry about domino effect consequences. And he was still no good. Bookman took out the rest of his pieces with ease before placing a regal black bishop before his own decrepit white king.

Lavi could only stare. The pieces were resolute. They didn't move.

Bookman gave him another long look. "You still have a lot to learn," he finally said before sweeping all the pieces off the board and exiting the room.

On another day, he turned that black bishop over and over again in his hand. He'd gotten too used to the feel. And if he were an artist, he thought, he might have been able to re-sculpt the little figurine down to every last geometric slant and cut. And maybe then, he might have been able to understand.

But he was not an artist and he was not a dreamer.

She watched his hands. "What're you doing?"

He dropped the bishop unceremoniously onto the board and watched its defeated black head gleam under the lights. He smiled an easy smile, one that had incorporated just the right amount of teeth. "Nothing, really," he admitted.

She thumbed at the white queen's crown, familiarizing herself with the cut, before picking up the rest of the white pieces and carefully arranging them on the other side of the board. "Do you want to play?"

Her plays were nothing like Bookman's. When it was her turn, she would touch the head of a piece and hesitate, as if she didn't want to subject even a pawn to virtual defeat. The pattern repeated for a while before he paused and positioned a knight an L-step away from the last of her ponds.

He looked into her porcelain face, unsure of what he was even searching for. "You know," he finally settled with, "the point of the game is to get to the opponent's king. To win."

She maneuvered the pond. "I know," she said. "But I should still have to protect my pieces, right?"

He froze, somewhat, before catching himself and readjusting his knight's position. "I guess so," he said quietly.

The pattern went on again. He took out her last pond and her knight with an ease that reminded him of what tragedy had looked like. A few more moves, and he found himself ready to dispense her queen. And maybe a few more moves after that, he realized, he could probably take her king as well. Checkmate.

She noticed too, but she didn't make any moves to protect her queen or her king. The pieces marched on. With a sinking feeling in his stomach, he shakily captured the stone monarchs and called game.

"Checkmate," he said reluctantly and wondered if this was what Bookman might have been talking about. Suddenly, for the first time, he wasn't sure if this had been what he wanted to understand.

She cleared the scattered pieces off the table. "That was fun," she said, smiling, looking up at him. "Let's do this again later, okay Lavi?"

He waved away her request. "Why did you let me take your queen?" He demanded. "And your king?"

She didn't answer his question. "I can't stand losing someone important to me," she said instead, looking down at her two pale hands. She understood the point of the game. But— "Everyone here now means so much to me and—" she broke off. The war was only seconds away now. This was not an hour, a minute, a second for conversation. "And when this is all over—when we can all be together again—you should stay around Headquarters more often, okay?"

And the words she hadn't said: happily ever after, forever.

Forever.

Bookman had asked for forever, too. The black bishop stared at him mockingly; its hard curved mouth, insolent. Do you see what's happening? Do you understand now? He quietly dug the piece deep into his pockets and didn't answer her question directly.

He was starting to understand.

The sky was drowning in bright orange again.

The sun was starting to melt from behind him. It's like clockwork, huh? 'Cause—forever was a word he could never even say out loud. He turned the carved chess piece over in his hand.

"I'm sorry," he wrote instead.