For this light momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. –2 Corinthians, 4;17-18

You were too careless, they tell him, voices gentle and scared in the dark and the hurting, but no. They should not have sent him, not with just the two of them. He and Miranda both remember vividly the first time they had done this, and even with her nervous warning, the fear in Allen's eyes and the twitch in his scar, they had sent him out again, Kanda at his side and rumours of the Noah at his fore. His own screams still echo in his mind, tearing hoarse through his throat until his consciousness left him, and he is told that he kept going even then. He had woken, days later, to pain hot and sharp behind his eyes and the sound of someone sleeping beside him, and then they were gone and replaced by a few voices he recognised (Komui, the head nurse, an exhausted Miranda) and many he did not, telling him in hushed whispers of the damage. His left eye had a chance, however slim, of healing again, but the other he has no such luck with. She had taken both of them this time, and he has been powerless to do anything about it.

He is incapacitated for months, first while he recovers from the searing agony in two sharp pinpricks in his skull, and then as he learns how to move, fingers dusting along worn stone walls and footsteps echoing in his ears. He has always tried to imagine, after meeting a blind man at the circus so many years ago, what it would be like living in the darkness, never seeing the vivid blues and reds and yellows of wild flowers or the sun setting behind the mountains or the cold, hard grey of the earth, and now he has so unwillingly become a part of that world, fumbling like a newborn calf through halls he used to know by heart.

He still dreams in colour, the only place now where he can see as he used to, but he knows that with every day that passes, every night he sleeps, even the vision in his mind is fading, losing its clarity and its brightness and, one day, leaving him in true nothing. The grief is slow in coming, but when it does it is all at once, the weight of it hitting him deeper than any blow and stinging in what is left of his eyes, and it is then that Kanda returns. He smells of earth and rain and crisp morning fog, his hands rough and cool as he takes Allen's shoulders, and his voice is clearer and sharper and more defined than Allen remembers a voice ever being when he says, "This is not who you are."

Kanda shows him a new perspective. He takes Allen outside that day, the air fresh and cold and biting his skin as he is led through the grounds, walking with Kanda's hand gently around his wrist until they stop in what feels like a clearing, closing around them but keeping its distance. "Open your ears," he tells Allen, "And tell me what you hear."

"The trees," he begins, because that is the most obvious, "A few different kinds of birds. Some other animals in the bushes. The wind against the rocks and the trees, in my hair."

He feels content listening to it, far more natural and far more full than the halls usually are, but then Kanda says, "No," and he frowns. "Nothing in this world is perfectly silent. It all makes noise, and you need to learn to listen to it. Try again, and focus not on the world as a whole, but on the individual parts that make it such."

He takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly, and then he listens. It is like a whole new world, the gentle quiet of the woods taking on a meaning so much bigger than that, full of so much that he had never even thought to consider. It takes him an age to list off all that he can hear, every bird nested in the trees and every branch that touches another and every hollow that the wind blows through around them, and Kanda stands there in silence, but he is not, his clothes rustling in the wind and moving as he breathes and the gravel shifting underfoot as he adjusts himself, and Allen feels that maybe he can finally begin understanding what it means to feel the world.

He spends much of his time after that wandering the grounds of the Order, through all the corridors and grand open halls and bustling labs and quiet offices and across the woods beyond, listening to all that he can take in. Sometimes he stays with Lenalee, following the hollow echoes of her boots as she goes about her day, carting coffee and papers and speaking with various people as errands for her brother and his team, bustling with life. Sometimes he spends time with Lavi, sitting in the quiet of the library as candles crackle and flicker and pages are turned with careful, gentle fingers, brushing over the covers and filling his lungs as he breathes deeply of them, seeming to soak them up in their entirety. Sometimes he places himself in the crowded dining halls or science labs, sitting in the shadows of the sidelines and listening to the people around him, individual conversations and collectives and fields of existence.

Sometimes he simply sits, alone in his room, face angled up at the ceiling or down at his hands as he tries to remember where he went wrong. There was nothing he could have done, surely, short of refusing the mission altogether, because they had underestimated the Noah again, they had fallen in the deep end and struggled to swim, and a part of himself had drowned in the process. He presses the heels of his palms into his eyes, bringing back the harsh echoes of pain in the hopes of seeing anything, flickers of colour or starbursts of light if he puts enough pressure on them, but there is always nothing, and he tries to tell himself that it will always be this way. He must leave that life behind him.

Kanda unwittingly becomes a fixture in his life, a rising element like the sun used to be, a gentle touch to guide him away from a collision when they pass in the walkways or a murmured greeting when he sits across from Allen in the dining hall, a gentle tap on his wrist in invitation. They spend a lot of time in various places on the grounds whenever Kanda is not away on missions, sitting and listening and learning. "He can swing within an inch of you blindfolded," Lavi tells him once Allen has found the gall to ask, unsure of what exactly his training entails but aware of the skills it leaves him. "It isn't so strange for him to know how to help you," and Allen is suddenly not so sure.

There are times when his hands itch and the darkness grows too thick, filling his lungs like so much black smoke, and it is then that he takes to wandering the halls. He walks through the darkness until he finds a wall, and then he places the rough palm of his left hand upon rougher stone tile, following the corridor wherever it wishes to take him, muted beneath still-numb fingers and his boots echoing on the worn old tiles. Sometimes he will step just loud enough for the echo to fill the halls, flowing through open space and into his ears like oil on a canvas and he feels as though he can see everything at once, but then the sound fades and he is left alone, a blind man down a forgotten pathway, nothing but the vague memories of whispers in his mind and a small, guilty wish.

He hears Kanda coming long before he feels him, footsteps falling in cat-like metronome. His eyes follow the sound in sense memory of what he has lost, and he clamps them shut before the pressure of it changes as Kanda turns the corner, the barest moment of hesitation before he continues around it. "Are you lost?" Kanda asks as he steps near, voice husky and low the way it sounds in the mornings; Allen is not the only one who wanders in wakefulness. He turns his head away, mouth kept resolutely shut, and something flutters deep inside him as Kanda makes a very familiar huff of distaste. "I'm tired," he says then, a note of hesitation to it. Allen wonders why he has felt the need to voice as such until there is a feather-light touch at his back, fingertips guiding him into motion, and he falls into step behind him.

He has never been allowed to see behind Kanda's door, and it is not so different now. There is a small gaslight flickering quietly to his left, a cool patch of air where the window must be, and there is the creaky whine of wood as Kanda sinks down to the bed, a small tap to Allen's elbow inviting him to follow suit. It is quiet for a moment, their breaths filling the silence that their words have left, and then Kanda takes his hands, rough and cool compared to Allen's own frail heat and the soft leather of his arm, lifting them up and running the pads of his thumbs across the palms.

There is a brief moment of panic, of misplacement, like this is not something he is supposed to witness, but then Kanda brings their hands to his face, laying Allen's fingers splayed across his cheeks, his eyes; closed, their lids like soft filament, he can feel the trembles of movement beneath them. Allen brushes his thumbs across the bridge of Kanda's nose, and it is then that he understands – this is Kanda displaying his trust, trying to tell him without the words they have forgone that this, this is what he is, what they are. He feels the warm smoothness of the skin of Kanda's brow, the membrane of the eyes that reflect what he cannot use, and presses his forehead softly between his hands, reminiscent of the bow that Allen has only seen him do once but knows means so much more, Kanda's hair sitting like strands of silk between their skin as he exhales, hands dropping from Allen's own back to his lap.

Allen reaches down to take them again, brushing his stone-dusted fingertips over the callouses of Kanda's palms, tracing the grip of his sword, then brings them to his own face, pale white and dusted with scars, and Kanda's fingers play gently over these in trepidation, the old wound across his temple and the small mark below his cheek and the fresher cut over his eyebrow and the long jagged scar of his curse, raised and dark and ugly; Kanda brushes his thumb along the length of it, from the pentacle on his forehead down over his eye, tracing the pronounced scarlet river over his cheek to the edge of his jaw, then across again from his nose to his ear.

He leans forward, his fringe dusting over Allen's as his breath catches quietly in his throat, and then he presses gentle lips to the soft lids of Allen's eye, once, twice, right then left then lingering, uncertain, and Allen tilts his head up to meet Kanda's lips with his own, brief and sharp to his piqued sense of touch, and there, he thinks, do you see now?, and a smile touches his lips as Kanda breaths out, long and thin through his nose.

"Sleep," he murmurs, and Allen complies, fingers tangling in Kanda's as they settle themselves down, every touch hot on Allen's skin before it becomes a comforting warmth, and he has not slept so easily in a long time.

He dreams of the sound of a waterfall and the scent of blood in the trees, stinging sharp and musky in his nose, and he thinks, just for a moment, that he can hear music, lilting piano and melodious voices drifting to him on a wind he cannot feel, but he can hear it, can understand the way it moves through him like morse code underwater. It tells him of a life he has forgotten, a song he has never heard but knows how to play, a world he has seen through eyes more gold than grey, and then he is staring blankly at the insides of his eyelids.

"Allen," Kanda breathes above him, and it is then that he notices the lifeline grip on his arms, loosening as Kanda is satisfied of his awareness. His face feels wet, itchy with drying moisture; Allen lifts his hand to rub at it and feels it come away almost sticky, rubbing it between his fingers and beneath his nose. This was the blood he could smell, but he does not have long to wonder before there is a hand held tight around his. "Allen," Kanda says again, and he notices only now that he sounds scared. "Look at me."

Allen opens his eyes, and he sees the skewed portrait of a man bathed in sunlight and shadowed by the dark hue of a soul that does not belong.