Disclaimer: I do not own DGM. Obviously.

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Genesis

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Silver-grey eyes snapped open, staring out into the darkness.

Honed instincts flared up, sensing the danger, and he sat up, throwing a stray glance at the alarm clock by his bedside.

02:42.

He grabbed his clothes and put them on before liberating an already loaded Walther PPK from beneath his pillow along with a few rounds of ammunition, seeing that he would rather be armed than sorry the moment the shit hit the fan.

He stilled, listening.

Tick tick.

His blood ran cold at the sound, but he forced himself to remain calm as he put the safety back on the gun before putting it away. Picking up his backpack, he slung it over his shoulder, cursing his lack of bulletproof vests as he made his way up to the curtain-covered window. Reaching it, he carefully peeked through the slight gap between the curtains, looking for the telltale sign of assassins. However, luckily for him, the idiots responsible for the explosive device left outside his apartment door seemed quite certain that their bomb would finish him off and that there was no need for a sniper. On the other hand, there was always the possibility of them lying in wait…

He shook his head slightly to clear his thoughts before pulling up his hood. Waiting around really wouldn't do him much good anyway, considering that there was a bomb nearby waiting to go off, so he calmly reached up to pull the curtains aside before reaching up to open the window.

Tick tick tock.

He was already in the air by the time the explosives went off.

- o0o -

In one way or the other, he had always been living on the edge.

In one way or the other, he had always found himself in various life-threatening scenarios varying degrees of severity.

Then again, that was the life of a budding mafia operative.

People did say that most criminals started out young and he most certainly did, although not by his own choice. He had been little different from your average stray, ferocious in his struggles to get free and hissing at the man who'd caught him and brought him to the Noah's Ark, an underground nightclub which doubled as the Headquarters of the Noah Family. He hadn't wanted to go there; Hell, it had been the last place on Earth he'd wanted to be in, but the man had paid little heed to his protests and, once the man had finally gotten tired of listening to them, had proceeded to put him out using chloroform.

Upon regaining consciousness, he had found himself abroad, locked inside a sparsely decorated room in some old mansion, staring out through the barred windows at the widespread grounds below and beyond that a forest and a town which was unknown to him.

The first day he had done what most soon-to-be twelve-year-old children would, he had stayed in bed surrounded by a protective huddle of blankets, trying his best to keep from shaking; trying to keep from breaking down, as he had known such a reaction would not help his situation in the slightest. Besides, it hadn't been like anyone would be looking for him either, not with Mana gone, and it wasn't like his guardian Cross Marian would have taken note of his disappearance either as the man obviously hadn't given a damn about him to begin with.

At such a realisation, silver-grey eyes had overflowed with shameful tears and he had hidden beneath the sheets and multiple blankets stacked on top of them, pulling them closer to him, trying to muffle the sounds of him crying.

He had stayed that way for a while although he couldn't tell exactly for how long, but the puffiness of his eyes had already receded when there had been a knock on the door, soon followed by the sound of it being unlocked. He had pulled the blankets even tighter around himself then, forcing his eyes shut as he had willed his body to stop shivering so bloody pathetically; he had wanted to get away from there; he had wanted to pretend it had all been just some nightmare, some sick twisted figment of his imagination, something which wasn't real and something he would snap out of, awaken from, opening his eyes to Mana's smiling face and burying his head in his foster-father's shoulder while the man would try to soothe him, telling him it was all just a bad dream and that he was safe and that nothing bad would happen, even if bad things happened anyway and he wasn't safe and Mana was really dead and…

The mattress had shifted from the weight as somebody sat down on one side of it. A hand had nudged his shoulder, but he hadn't reacted; he hadn't acknowledged the other person as if he had hoped that the other person would simply go away if he did just that. As was quite obvious however, his attempt had been doomed to failure from the very start as the other person had merely heaved a sigh before grabbing hold of one of the blankets, starting the process of forcefully unravelling him from the protective cocoon he had sought to isolate himself from reality with. He had fought against it, of course, but what little strength remained in his already weakened child limbs had been nothing in comparison to that of a grown man.

Before he had really known what had occurred, he had found himself liberated from most of the blankets and pulled into a somewhat awkward embrace as the man had whispered soothingly to him in some language he didn't understand, but he had still felt oddly calmed by it and had ceased his struggles to get free in favour of collapsing against the other's frame due to sheer exhaustion.

It had been the feeling of somebody stroking his white locks away from his forehead that had brought him back into wakefulness the second time around and he had opened his eyes to the stranger from earlier – the strangely familiar stranger – who had once again been sitting at his bedside. Long tresses of curly black hair pulled into a simple ponytail along with a pair of oddly-coloured eyes had greeted him. The eyes had been the colour of amber, reminding him of a cat or an owl, and they had been a great contrast to the man's tanned complexion and facial structure that both indicated that the man was likely a Southern-European, maybe a Spaniard or something to the like. "Are you okay now, anjo?" the man had asked, retracting his hand.

He had frowned lightly at the unknown word, something which the man somehow found amusing. "It's Portuguese for angel, Allen," the man had said, snickering at the boy's somewhat startled reaction at the mention of his name. "So, are you?"

Allen Walker had looked questioningly at him, silently contemplating whether the man was an enemy or not, while he had also tried to recall why the man – whom he was sure he'd never met before – had seemed so oddly familiar to him the first time he had laid eyes on him.

A cracked frame displaying an old photograph had flashed before his mind's eye for a moment and his eyes had widened in shock for a moment before he scrambled madly to get to the other side of the bed – away from the stranger – who wasn't having any of it as he had simply grabbed a hold of his arm and hauled him back, pulling him into his lap and staring down at him with a both surprised and amused look in his eyes. Those strange amber-coloured and nearly gleaming eyes…

"Uncle Neah?" Allen had breathed out before he was able to stop himself, watching as the other's eyes widened comically at the mention of a dead man's name.

"No," the man had finally said. "Tyki Mikk."

- o0o -

The Tyki that Allen had met on that day wasn't very much like the one Allen came to meet on a more frequent basis, the infamous hitman known for his multiple ways of killing people as well as for the fact that he took great pleasure in putting people to death in an as creative way as possible. Hell, nowadays Allen was fairly sure that the man regarded killing as an art and he wasn't late to admit to himself that although morbid, Tyki's hits generally did turn out rather like pieces of art for the people who were actually able to look at them without throwing up.

Still, Allen supposed that the lack of likeness could be attributed to the fact that Tyki Mikk was in one way or another rather fucked up mentally already, as he had not only one but two different personalities that he kept on switching between; one perfectly reasonable and mildly sarcastic and one sadistic and partially psychotic. Nowadays, Allen himself got along quite well with both actually, at least whenever Dark Tyki was not planning to kill him.

On the other hand, being in the mafia really did help to keep him on his toes and Allen's finely honed instincts had kept him alive for the four years that had passed since he had been brought before the Millennium Earl, the illusive boss of the Noah Family, or "reclaimed" as they preferred on seeing it, seeing to the fact that both his real father and Mana had been members at some point. That is, until his real father, who he had only ever known as Uncle Neah, tried to assassinate the Earl in a gamble to become the leader of the Family himself, an endeavour which had obviously failed and consequently been the death of both him and his wife while his brother Mana had taken Allen and fled to England.

They had somehow managed to stay hidden for about ten years, but once he knew that they had been discovered Mana had called in a favour from one of Neah's acquaintances, Cross Marian, begging him to take care of Allen while Mana himself went to lead their pursuers away from their trail. He had never returned, of course, and Allen assumed that he was sleeping with the fishes on the bottom of the ocean or something like that.

Allen had then stayed with Cross for a couple of months, somehow making a living through playing poker and other sorts of gambling, as Cross had obviously been far more concerned with attaining more alcohol than actually taking care of him. He did teach him to shoot a gun however, which was a skill that Allen found very useful later in life, especially after he left Cross and went to live on the street, finding a fairly comfortable place to stay beneath one of the bridges in the area. He hadn't been there for that long however, a month at most, before the Noah Family tracked down and captured him, putting him out with some drugs before shipping him off to one of the Family's houses in either Portugal or Spain, to be able to induct him into the Family without disruptions from other mafia organizations or national authorities.

Over there, he had not only gotten to know Tyki Mikk, but also come face to face for the first time with his father's and likely also his foster-father's killer, the man going by the name of the Millennium Earl, mafia boss, criminal mastermind and his paternal uncle to the boot, who for some reason had ordered his men to bring him into the Family. Maybe it was because Allen had shown some sort of promise or maybe it was because the Earl suddenly felt some sort of twisted attachment to his nephew, his own flesh and blood almost, even when said man had killed his own brothers in cold blood.

Even with a fairly big Family, the Earl still didn't have any children of his own and wasn't very likely to conceive any either. As such, Allen himself was by blood the closest thing to an heir the man would ever get, even if very few of those high up in the hierarchy of the Family would stand for that; Allen himself hadn't paid much attention to this though as it was pointless either way to worry about such things when he already had his hands full when it came to living a reasonably normal life, balancing his studies with his duties as a member of the Family.

At fifteen, he was not only an accomplished scholar but also a fairly accomplished gatherer of intelligence and gunner, although his sniping skills still needed some work, mostly since he was rarely able to utilize them; the Earl seemed to be planning on keeping his hands as clean as possible at least up to that point, as if the man himself wanted some sort of safeguard.

Even so, Allen had killed for the first time when he was thirteen, like a baptism of fire as he shot a bullet through the head of a traitor to the Family. Since then he had killed at least ten people, most of them by gunshot but also a couple by stabbing and poisoning; he had never been given any high profile assignments though, as he was to stay low while a person like Tyki took care of the flashier ones, like politicians, police commissioners and members of rival families.

At first, during the time following his first kill, Allen had honestly thought he was going to go crazy; he was seeing shadows on the walls and in mirrors, constantly stalking him with these big grins on their faces, and he had come pretty close to an actual breakdown before Tyki – the sane one – finally caught on and pulled him aside, telling him that the shadows were not there to hurt him at all, that they were mere figments of his imagination or there to protect him or whatever. Allen did calm down somewhat after that, but more likely because of Tyki's voice rather than anything the twenty-something-year-old had actually said.

Allen still saw them sometimes however, the shadows, and couldn't help but wonder if they were something more than mere figments of his imagination, like ghosts of his victims or whatever or demons or something, but in the end he supposed that they were irrelevant as they did not hold the key to his continued survival within the Family.

For a person with supposedly so little to live for, seeing to the fact that he had already lost everything he might've been even remotely willing to die for, Allen was surprisingly adamant when it came to his resolution that he wouldn't die no matter what, at least not until the Earl himself was dead and buried six feet deep and stayed that way for at least ten years during which Allen would make it an annual tradition to dance upon that bastard's grave.

The Earl himself had chuckled when Allen had presented this scenario to him, cleverly disguised as a joke of course, but Allen knew that it wasn't very likely to become anything more than that since if and in such case when and how the Earl finally bit the dust would be of great importance to him and his continued survival, which was the main reason as to why he hadn't tried to kill the bastard yet, because Allen himself wasn't suicidal enough to try as he was well aware of what would likely happen to him in case the Earl met his unfortunate – although certainly well deserved – end, especially if it was by his hand.

- o0o -

To some, he was merely Allen Walker, a teenager with a talent for languages and getting himself into trouble, along with getting himself out of it with most people none the wiser. Also possessing a certain aptitude in terms of technology, he was capable of constructing working electronic devices from what most other people had discarded as trash although his skill of his, like many others, had obviously gotten a bit rusty since he hadn't gotten to use it for a while.

To some, he was merely the successor to the Fourteenth, or as some put it, the "New" Fourteenth. Allen simply couldn't help but snort at the irony of him carrying the same title his father had during his time in the organization, especially when said father had eventually planned a coup d'etat and gotten executed as a result.

To some, he was merely known by his codename, a rather cheesy one if he had be able to say so himself, Silver Bullet, because of his white hair, pale complexion, silver-grey eyes and firing accuracy, along with of course the fact that Tyki liked the drink and that Allen himself had been forced to choose between the names Silver Bullet and Bloody Mary. And obviously, there was no way in Hell Allen would ever refer to himself or let others refer to him as Bloody Mary.

Back in the days, the Fourteenth had also been known as the Pianist or simply as the Musician, likely for the man's talent when it came to handling musical instruments; it was either that or his rather nasty habit of using piano-wire to strangle people he didn't like. Either way, Allen himself had seemingly inherited at least a part of the man's talents, at least in terms of music because he really hadn't tried his luck with the piano-wire yet; maybe mastering that would become his next side-project or something.

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Arriving home from school around half past four in the afternoon, Allen swiftly went up to the rented apartment he had been more or less referring to as his home for the better part of the latest three years, unlocking the door and slipping inside before locking it behind him.

He immediately went to his laptop, plugging it in and putting it on before entering the apartment's kitchenette to fetch a bite. He came back into the room with a bag of crisps under his arm and a bottle of coke in the other, having decided to screw the healthy alternative since he had this feeling that he was going to need the additional energy. Putting the food items down, he swiftly typed in his password, leaning back in his office chair while the computer loaded; it was getting a bit too slow to his liking and he was thinking about asking for a new one, as a birthday present or something like that, or as he' would probably phrase it, as a necessary expense for him to be able to continue being somewhat useful in terms of cyber terrorism.

You have one new unread message.

It had been classified spam mail by the filters in the program handling his emails, but Allen knew it for what it was and clicked on it, even if it did look a lot like the ones that would possibly contain a virus or a Trojan, a worm or just anything that could be considered as remotely harmful for one's computer system or bank account or both, but Allen knew that the layout was perfectly intentional, because obviously it was rather hard to send secret encoded messages to people in today's society with all these watching authorities and all, so what better method was there to secretly contact someone than by sending them and a lot of other uninvolved people a lot of spam-looking mail?

To say the least, the system could be seen as fairly ingenious, as it had been used for years and hadn't been discovered yet, mainly because the Family sent their "secret" messages out to a whole lot of people that were completely uninvolved which in turn made sure that their actual members could easily hide within the mass of people who'd no basic idea about what the mail actually contained, especially so if the system somehow got discovered for what it was. The mails were basically spam to begin with, if one ignored the small and barely noticeable symbols that appeared all over the pictures featured in them, although they were put in places where they were either not noticed by someone who wasn't looking for them or simply put in such a way that they looked like a decoration, like they were part of a fancy background or something.

The symbols themselves had once upon a time been created as a joint project by Mana and Neah Walker back when they were mere children as a way to send secret messages to each other, and were further developed later on when they had needed to communicate about matters that they didn't wish for the other members of the Family to know about. Later on, after Neah had died and Mana had spirited Allen off to England, the Earl had apparently uncovered the full extent of Neah's encoded information and had apparently attempted to decode it without success.

It was Allen that had provided him with the means to do so, soon after he'd been brought back into the Family. Although Mana had never actually taught him about it or intended for him to learn it in the first place, he had still managed to pick it up somehow from somewhere and in his childlike and terrified mind he had simply given the Earl the information the man had needed simply because the man had attempted to coax it out of him. As such, he had – without ever intending it – indirectly provided the Family with a way to communicate without the authorities ever knowing about it as only high ranked and trusted members of the Family knew how to decipher the symbols and piece together the message they conveyed.

Having finished decoding the message – it took really no time at all because he was fairly used to reading it – Allen couldn't resist rolling his eyes at it, before he swiftly deleted it and hunched forward, leaning onto his elbows. Damn… I think I'm going to need at least a Barrett M82 for this one… I have to check what they have in stock…

Checking his watch, he swiftly calculated that he needed to do so in the next three hours or so if he wanted to have time to get where he needed to be in order to make it before his deadline. He devoured whatever food and drink was in his immediate vicinity before having a swift change of clothing before continuing with other small preparations. When he was nearly done, he made his way towards the door, catching sight of his reflection in the hall mirror.

A dark shadow was hovering over him and his hair looked unusually messy with white tresses having collected themselves into what looked like a fair impression of the gravity-defying spikes certain anime characters liked to pretend was their hair. Yes, Allen had watched anime at one point, though mostly in order to make sure he wouldn't forget his Japanese and have to relearn it all over again, and not because he found it utterly enjoyable or anything like that.

Allen sighed, smoothing out the worst of it before pulling on a jacket and making it out the door, slamming it shut behind him and locking it.

His steps echoed in the otherwise empty stairwell before he disappeared out into the twilight zone.

- o0o -