Chronology, a d.gray-man fanfic

Chronology

He didn't like remembering things from Before, but they were imprinted onto his skin like a brand. Impeccable memory had its uses, but sometimes, it was downright annoying.

AN: This was written a while back, before I even knew about the fanbook, so please forgive any discrepancies. Also, not naming Lavi's name throughout the fic might be confusing, Lavi wasn't Lavi until the Black Order, so…

chro·nol·o·gy (noun): 1. the sequential order in which past evens occur; 2. the science of arranging time in periods and ascertaining the dates and historical order of past events; 3. a reference work organized according to the dates of events (from dictionary . com)

D.Gray-man belongs to Katsura Hoshino.

start

Searing wind. Shadowy nights. Grainy pebble dust under his feet or off the side of his head, if he was lucky; cold hard stone or rusty red brick if he wasn't. Threadbare rags chafed. Blisters and calluses formed from hasty scrambling.

A hollow empty feeling he never quite manage to get rid off, even on the rare occasions where his belly was filled with real, solid food, not sludge.

He didn't like remembering things from Before, but they were imprinted onto his skin like a brand he couldn't get rid off, burned right down into his very bones. Impeccable memory had its uses, but sometimes, it was downright annoying.

One day he was picked up by the tearing scruff of his shirt and shuffled into a room filled with other children. They stared with him with angry, weary eyes. Two girl huddled defensively to one side – the boys stood in solitary islands, a circle of uncrossed space around them.

He was the youngest, maybe, probably.

That night, a fire was lit in the ash-filled fireplace and there was a mad scramble as the others fought for the prime positions in front and around the brick opening. Ten minutes later and the pecking order had been established, the defeated ones slinking back into their corners.

He didn't bother moving. He was curled up in a corner just outside the firelight's circle, wedged between the cold wall and a wooden crate. He was the only one tiny enough to fit comfortably there.

Warmth lapped at his toes, and he curled them inwards. He stared at the fire as it flickered, lapping around the air like a restless dancer, sparks escaping onto the sooty floor. Logs crackled, shifted, snapped. Gold and orange left white imprints on the back of his eyelids when he closed his eyes.

He wished he could cradle some of those flames in the palm of his hands. He'd tuck it into the patchy remains of his pocket and carry it wherever he went.

Like any other homeless, parentless child, he was subjected to many of the stereotypes that came with his status – or lack of thereof.

Fiery hair and fey eyes – this one will give us trouble, the matron with the smooth soft fingertips said cursorily to her colleague as she quickly checked off the forms. She pronounced him healthy after a five minute 'inspection', despite the fact that she could run fingers up and down his ribs like she was playing some macabre instrument if she so chose to. Mind you discipline him well and good if he misbehaves, but I wouldn't expect any miracles for him.

He stared at her hands, unblemished and unmarred and free of inkspots, and bet in his heart that she had never burned herself making soup or stayed up soothing a sick child to sleep like the mothers he heard about in stories.

He was six, his limbs finally lengthening to allow him to run and kick and tumble. In the house, he was quiet and obedient, if only not to get thrown out in the streets again, but outside, he saw no reason not to live up to the matron's expectations.

Give them what they want, and they'll stop seeing you. You're as good as invisible.

He liked that. He wiggled or sneaked his way into every room in the large old building – even those that belonged to the other orphans. That was possibly even more dangerous than getting into the adults' rooms. If he got caught, he stared up at them and tugged on his fiery red bangs and said nothing. He got sent to bed without dinner more often than not. If he got caught by the older children – well, they were territorial. They all were.

There was one large room up in the attic that was locked under bolt and key. He couldn't find the key to get past the heavy wooden door – kicking it only produced a dull thud and painful, throbbing toes – and the burn to know what was within kept him up at night.

One afternoon, he stared up the window he knew lead to that room. And then he was up the sides, clinging onto the pipes and digging his feet into the wooden panels. Sheer momentum and adrenaline propelled him up a floor and a half before he consciously thought about it. Then he was placing his feet carefully, trying not to produce any thuds that can be heard from inside the house. He curled his arms around a wooden piece and the pipe and tried to stare through the grime in the window.

The shutters were wedged together unevenly, one jutting out from the edge of the ledge. He dug his fingers into the grooves on the shutter's side and tugged, almost losing his balance when the shutter flew free. He threw his hands onto the ledge and scrambled through the window, tumbling off the edge onto a smooth, wooden floor.

That fall hurt, and he spent a moment nursing his wounds, before the absolutely stillness rang in his ears and the dust clogged air made him sneeze, just once. He wiped his tearing eyes to clear his vision. And then he just stared.

Books, rolled up scrolls and large leather bound tome adorned every possible space, filling up the shelves one either side of the room and a good half of the third. The other half of that wall was taken up by the door. A large mahogany desk was wedged to one side. The cabinets were adorned with silver knobs and a stack of parchment and pens and ink bottles of every shape, length and color lined the corners of the desk.

The middle shelf on the left wall only came up half way, leaving an empty space in the wallpaper framed by book-laden ledges. There was a slightly tarnished plague hanging from it, a message written upon in golden, metallic letters.

His speech was fluent – he had a knack for picking up words and slurred vocabulary from the adults around him as he pretended to be a quiet, obedient child while within the confines of the house – but he didn't have much experience with letters. No one gave a child books. Those were for adults. Or for the educated. He picked up certain facts, of course; their names, simple words for groceries and the name of the home they stayed at and the street they lived on. Necessary things, practical things. He knew the alphabet, but they didn't teach him how to read.

He stared up at the large blocky words, trying to sound the syllables out. They were combined in a strange pattern – consonants next to consonants instead of next to vowels like easy words, and he knew they were important. Why else give the message such a prominent spot on the wall?

Slowly, he pieced the sounds together, mouthing jerky bits together until they smoothed into recognizable whole. He worried at the idea for a moment, because it sounded stupid, until something clicked.

And he threw himself at the wall, climbing up the shelves and hanging precariously off the side to reach the plaque. He ran his fingers up and down the gilded, raised letters, memorizing the message in his mind's eye and with his fingers.

A man of knowledge increaseth strength. And under that, a simple translation: Knowledge is power.

He never forgot that.

When the matron stood outside the door and screamed for the strays to come in now or I'll shut you out, brats, he slammed his head into the back of the wall in shock as he jerked upright. The large, elaborately bound book fell from his knees and fluttered through images of small villages tucked into sides of mountains, valley-towns with their large meadowy fields and large stone and mortar cities until the pages settled onto a page cluttered with heavily detailed images of flora and fauna.

He could barely read, couldn't even begin to decipher the spidery script many of the tomes were written in, but that didn't mean he couldn't see and learn. He flipped the books in wonder, running fingertips down spines and leather-or-cloth-or-papery covers with reverence and pulled some out on a whim. That's how he found the heavily illustrated book.

The book hadn't left his hands since he dragged a cushion to a wall and curled up upon it, his eyes already absorbed by the book's contents.

He crawled to the window and peered out, watching as the other orphans slipped back into the house in trickles before he clambered out the window, carefully wedging the window shut with a bark of wood for easy reopening before sliding to the ground.

And because boys were boys, and he was a redhead at that, he threw himself on the ground, rolled around in the fallen leaves and grass. He thoroughly muddied his hands and for good measure, ran a circle around the bushes and once through it. He continued running until he tumbled through the door just before the matron arrived to lock it and yelped even as he ducked nimbly under her swatting arm.

No one noticed the crumpled edges of old paper on his clothes or the way his eyes gleamed with more than self-satisfied mischief that night.

He rarely forgot things, but that didn't mean he didn't misplace them; memories were conveniently irretrievable or simply shoved into a corner of his mind when he couldn't – or didn't – want to face them.

Curiosity killed the cat.

The memory of that night was quite aptly blurred out and he never cared to bring it into focus, but the conversation resultant from that event was imprinted quite neatly into the back of his eyelids.

"I've been looking for you, brat. Couldn't keep yourself in one piece until you were found, could you?"

Raspy, elderly voice, stiff with disapproval and aged wisdom – yup, yet another stuffy old man here to tell him off for his stupidity. He struggled to open his eyes to study the possessor of that voice, but the sharp, burning pain from the right side of his face, from his eye, almost made him scream.

There were hands – wrinkly, covered with calluses but strangely fine-boned – holding his face down and his hands away and sharp cold pin-pricks on his skin, and for a while his mind drifted until a muttering voice brought him back.

"You dun sound 'ight," he slurred through the haze. He cracked his left eye open and saw a blurry figure, clad in black, kind of short for someone who was suppose to be an old man and who wasn't withered.

"Why don't I?" the old man challenged back.

"'cuz you don't have that weird clippy way of speaking the way that other person – looks kinda like you, but not really. Like you have the same features. Shape of your face or somethin'? Maybe. Can't really explain."

"Hm," was all he got for that haphazard comment for a long time. Then – "They almost left you on the street. After you heal, they'll throw you out."

Silence.

"Will you choose to stay within this village? There are some that still sympathize with you. They pity a young child for receiving such a seemingly ghastly wound."

He knew. His subconscious heard the words thrown over his head – over his bleeding body – even if he didn't want to admit it. Freak, one of the pale orphan girls mock-whispered and the adults… kept making the traditional ward against evil in his direction even as they shuttered the windows and bolted the doors against what went on out outside.

"Why'd I stay?" he said, and the moment the words were spoken aloud, the realization hit him like a physical blow. Pain radiated from his wound as if reveling in the sharp pang in his heart. "No one wants me. They don't like me, and I don't like them. Humans are selfish. They're… ugly."

The old man nodded, his hands disappearing into his voluminous sleeves. "Very well. My turn, then. I don't go around saving little foolish boys for no reason."

That night, he heard his first proper history from someone who knew his facts inside out, about a clan that drifted around the edge of humanity, whose primary purpose was to watch, to learn and never to influence. In turn, they remained unaffected by the touch of humanity – free from the taint that made humans so unique from the rest of the world's living.

He didn't understand very well, his head and that eye still throbbing, but he knew what he wanted and when the old man finally gave him the opportunity to speak instead of listen, he simply said yes.

The old man – Bookman, he corrected himself hastily, and I'm Kay – had already climbed several lengths away, but he stood almost rooted to the ground.

The wind swept in his ears and flung his hair backwards, out of his eye. The cloak he wore caught at the wind, almost threatening to send him tumbling head over heels, but he braced his feet against the ground and stared upwards, upwards, upwards at the infinite sky and the infinite wind and sound of rustling grass and soft booming of air sweeping past his ears.

He had never been outside the confines of the village before. He touched one hand to the eyepatch Bookman gave him and that he himself decided to wear.

There was a whole world out here to discover. He didn't have any regrets.

Sometimes he missed the books, like the lovely rare ones in the library at the place he stayed from Before. He managed to divide them into broad piles, meticulously sorting them by category and theme based on what he could gleam from the painstakingly pieced together titles and whatever illustrations found within. In the end, he managed to teach himself to read – barely – but there was no way a six-year-old could even begin to decipher the meanings of the texts. All he could do was pronounced words. Understanding them was beyond his means.

Too bad Bookman had requested usage of that attic library, searching for an original scroll or some other and happened upon his efforts. But if Bookman hadn't been curious about the evidence of handling of books far too advance for a young child – and proof that a young child had been rooting around the texts, like tiny childsize foot and handprints in dust – Bookman wouldn't have be there to save him and made him an apprentice of the Bookman clan.

So it worked out, in the wonderfully straight and linear logic the Bookmen so loved to utilize.

He itched to set her story down on paper, of yet another silly woman with her head in the clouds and the stars in her eyes, doomed only to fall as far as she dreamed. The thing that set this lady apart from the others was the sheer amount of self-denial she employed.

"The people love their Lady," Juliet confided in him in a conspiratory voice, her voice low but pitched the carry. "And they avoid me because I hold the Lady's favor. It's almost as if they're afraid to talk to me because they might cause me insult, and that'll I'll bias the Lady against them! Imagine that. I don't bite, I do profess. I'm one of the sweetest girls around – I'm taking good care of you, aren't I, Tom?"

He smiled at her and nodded, picking at his tea and digging into his sandwich with gusto the way all well-meaning twelve-year-olds should. Let Ms. Juliet talk herself out – she never knew how much he disdained him in the confines of his mind.

But it wasn't his place to judge, no. As a Bookman he had to tell the tales as straight as they came, which was to say, never. And since he wasn't the Bookman yet, he could do nothing but write tales upon tales in his head and file them into his internal library, cataloged and indexed.

There are methods to manipulating memory, to mold the transient ties and mental connections that manifested in memory. They say that one's long term memory is limitless, but some liken it to a deep void of darkness. Throw whatever you wished inside, but it didn't mean you could claim it back easily.

Human brain processing capacity placed limits on most members of the population, but it seemed to have skipped out on him. He wielded his mind like a weapon, and like any good swordsmen or master of martial arts, he practiced his art until the moves were instinctive.

To him, some memories were like beautifully colored butterflies. Each facet of the memory, the who, when, where, what and how were like the tiny gilded inlays upon the butterfly's gossamer wings. Bookman and he once passed by an avid animal collector's house in their hunt for the truth, and while there were antlered heads and the maws of ferocious animals mounted upon plaques on his wall, the young man in question were most proud of his insect collection. Upon felt cases lay hundreds of butterflies, their wings spread wide to catch the light, their bodies speared down with small silver pins.

The young man's wife smiled and stroked her fingers down a glass case. Harold preserves his beauties this way, she said. They're safe from the wear of age and the damage of air.

Ms. Juliet's memory-butterfly had a nice thin black body, he decided, with long curly feelers and its feet carefully proportioned, a humble background to go with Ms. Juliet's humble beginnings, a base-personality with absolutely nothing of interest. The wings were large and elaborate, but held none of the complexity that a swallowtail or the exotic Mexican butterfly's do. The wings were painted bright purple and blue and green, a medley of colors inlayed with black, as outrageous as Ms. Juliet's tales. From afar, the Juliet-butterfly shined with intrigue, but come close and the glossy inkiness faded to plain black and the wings were showy and too large for the body to support comfortably.

He smiled at the completed butterfly-memory and tucked it into the corner of his mind to join the hundreds others. He tuned back in time to exclaim dutifully at Ms. Juliet's overly tacky and bedecked jeweled brooch.

War after war. Ruins of buildings, brick, stone, mud, blank marble – he'd seen it all. The crack of a gun, clatter of blades and steel, that odd ring a hammer made against a flat surface all faded into the background for him until he pulled up their memory if their significance was particularly important. He'd seen those long, polished sticks women used to pin their hair up used as weapons, or the long ribbon from hair or around an apron used effectively to strangle and gag. Wars encompassed all. He'd even learn basic hand to hand combat and was quite efficient with the blade tucked up in his boot, even if he wished he had something like a bat to really whack someone with sometimes.

Just because he was a Bookman apprentice didn't mean the world thought any differently of him. Thugs and pickpockets targeted him as much as any other person. He and Bookman had even been active participants in quite a few skirmishes, to see as the combatants did from their secret little trenches.

As adept as his mind was at catching minute differences, however, there was one thing he could not distinguish clearly from scene to scene, from record to record.

Blood looked the same, crimson red before fading into dark scarlet and dirt brown, whether it was spilt in Africa, Europe or Asia.

"Pick a name," Bookman said, so he did. Or tried to, at least. Bookman rejected a good dozen of them, the old man's eyelid twitching briefly when he threw out Alexander the Great on a lark before accepting the very next thing that came out of his mouth, which had been a gurgled mix of Hebrew-Latin-and-Spanish thrown in as he scrambled backwards away from the irate and dangerous old man.

"For this record, you're Lavi," Bookman told him, tucking his hands into his sleeves and staring at him with dark glinty eyes, practically daring him to object.

He was fifteen – fine, almost sixteen – and trained to a strict regiment, but he was fifteen, and really, Bookman had traveled the world that enough even if the panda didn't read any parenting books, Bookman should have known he'd stick his foot in his own mouth.

The nicely purpling bruises on the side of his face made winning passage to Europe from a rich, overly fawning widow easy, since she was enamored by his role as an ill-treated page-boy who'd be killed if he didn't manage to secure a seat for his master this very weekend. What was considered truth was in the mind of the beholder, after all.

Frivolous and kind, Bookman said. Frivolous, like a puppy with a bone to chew and sunshine to bask in. Kind, a rough-tongued but soft-hearted teen, awkward with his attempts but making up that lack with an abundance of exuberance.

Frivolous, he could do. If he had a base personality at all, frivolity was one of his traits. Frivolity allowed him to switch from persona to persona to persona with the skill of a master Chinese mask-changer, flick-flick-flick from a purple swirls on pasty white mask to garish red on black in half a second. Frivolity was sibling to impulsiveness, and both traits were cousins to flexibility and adaptation.

Kind? That one he wasn't so sure about. It was easy enough to plaster a smile on his face, to lend a helping hand to someone he saw for two or three months and never saw again. For this record, however, they'd be right there in the front lines amongst a very exclusive group and he wasn't going to get away with politely detaching himself every so often when certain emotions threatened to creep up on him.

"Lavi!" Bookman barked, and he jumped, more from the volume and implied irritation than in recognition of the name. He got a fist to the head for that.

"What the hell, panda!" Lavi yelled back, glad that "frivolous" meant getting to retort back without going out of character.

Bookman aimed a look at him. It didn't even have to be a glare – just the weight of his master's unblinking eyes on him was enough to make Lavi sigh. "Pay attention. We gained attendance and a tryout for compatibility with these Crystals of God because we are of the Bookmen clan, but I'll tan your hide if you lose your chance because of inattentiveness." Bookman paused for a moment as the little boat they sat upon touched lightly against the small stone port.

"We have Asians within this organization. The oriental and romance languages are off-limits. We'll converse purely in English unless there's something urgent." Bookman alighted the boat with a leap and nodded his head at a man dressed in travel-worn garments, complete with hood and a strapped on portable telephone. "Come, Lavi," Bookman continued in English, "we must not keep the Head Chief waiting."

Something tingled-burned uncomfortably in his chest, and Lavi swept his hair upwards with both hands, flinging drops of sweat away with every movement. They had shut him in one of the advanced training rooms, an absolute maze of obstacles and traps that boggled even his mind. Without his impeccable attention to detail, he might be laying at the bottom of a pit somewhere painfully nursing a broken leg or two.

That burn in his chest spread. Tingles ran down his limbs and his head throbbed with the beginnings of a migraine as his body tried to cope, adjust or ultimately purge whatever was causing that disequilibrium.

"You absolutely have to get to the end of the maze before we let you in to see Hebraska," the Chinese Head Officer said, a big floppy grin on his face. "We've got to root out the worthy ones or we'll be jumping at strings for compatible partners for the rest of our lives."

Well, Lavi had been here for three hours, twenty-six and a half minutes, outright avoided eleven obstacles and narrowly escaped six and he judged himself to be only about three-fifths of the way through the maze.

In the midst of his mental calculations, Lavi forgot that the second black block amidst a sea of blue in each new corridor triggered a trap. This block was red instead of black, and wasn't it just his luck that red really did signify danger?

Oh shit, Lavi had time to think, and maybe he said it out loud too, because his mouth was full of dust and the floor was collapsing under him like a well timed bomb, cascading in a way that prevented him from getting a proper foothold to propel himself to safe ground. He latched onto a crumbling block that steadied him just long enough for him to look down and thoroughly memorize the pointy, deadly way those spikes glinted in the training room's artificial light.

You've got to be fucking kidding me, Lavi spared the time to think. He couldn't believe that this was the way he'd be going, after spending years recording wars and skirmishes, getting used to the eye-patch that made him walk funny and into things for weeks and before he became an official Bookman, damnit!

The one dominant thought beneath the brash Lavi-personality in his head was a vague regret – Bookman would kill him for wasting a decade's worth of training by dying so uselessly.

Something crystallized within him, snapped shut with a clink that sounded suspiciously like the ends of a chain and padlock bolting together. A smooth, pleasantly cool pole materialized under his fingers and Lavi clutched on instinctively. He jerked to a halt as something caught on, and suddenly the pole shot upwards as it retracted. He flew over the top of the hole with a startled shout, the weapon-pole-head still clutched in his hand. He landed with a heavy thud and rolled until he hit a wall. His head spun and his vision was hazy, but Lavi stared down at the weapon in his hands. A hammer. A hammer?

He could have sworn it was several times larger a moment ago, but right now the weapon sat comfortably in the palms of his hands. It glowed with a brightening green light the more Lavi concentrated on it, and he couldn't help the brief shiver that ran up his spine when the glow burst into sparks and left a miniature model of a hammer, sleek and black and strangely aesthetic in its simplicity while moments ago it had but the crude shape of a hammer.

Lavi had a sinking feeling that something had gotten its claws on him the way he hadn't wanted emotions or identity to touch him.

There's no way I'm letting this-

"Extend!" Lavi screeched in sheer instinct even before his mind fully registered what his senses told him. The science department obviously took full liberties with making the training room their testing ground for their creations: a robot came crashing out of nowhere.

"Oho, it worked after all!" Chief Officer Komui's voice grated cheerfully in Lavi's ears even as Lavi tried to stop the world from spinning around his head. "It's a wonderful day indeed, to bag two accommodators in one fell swoop!"

Lavi glared for a moment, and then remembered – frivolous and kind. "I thought God's Crystals were supposed to be, you know, more crystalline," he said wryly. "Does this mean the panda got his hands on one too?"

"Indeed. Bookman conformed with his Innocence about an hour ago. He was muttering something about having words with the way you handled the maze."

"Ah shit," Lavi muttered to himself. Trust the old geezer to one up him even with this.

"So, Lavi," Komui reached over and pulled him upright, "do you accept the responsibility of an accommodator?"

No, Lavi wanted to tell him, because he didn't want attachments the way being the Bookman apprenticed promised he wouldn't, and why are you bothering with this because Lavi knew the moment one of these beastly crystals choose you, there was no getting out of the job. He remembered that little Chinese girl with her long hair and the tears running down her cheeks kneeling before a coffin amidst a sea of coffins and knew she was an exorcist – there was no other reason why a child would be with the Black Order. He didn't want to end up like her.

"Yeah," Lavi said, and clutched his hammer tighter. "We came here of our own will, didn't we?"

Miss Lenalee is the Chief's younger sister, so you'll have to be wary of her, but there is another exorcist here, a young man from Edo who is your age. Befriend him and study him. Such ties might be critical later on.

Lavi watched for a while, looked for the exorcist Section Head Reever had described as "quiet, aloof, and for god's sake, Lavi, don't provoke him, we need you alive" and the person Lenalee had briefly depicted. She refused to say much, telling Lavi to make his own judgments, but…

"Don't push him too far, Lavi, or he'll just lash back, but you need to push. It's Kanda, he's just like that, and maybe he'll take it better from someone like you."

"Hey, I'm Lavi," Lavi said with a smile, fingering Oodzuchi Kodzuchi lightly and eyeing the long blade sheathed at the young Japanese's side with open curiosity. "You're Yuu, aren't you? Want to spar?"

And the glare, the first of hundreds, clued Lavi in to Japanese customs he'd forgotten and the liberties one did not take with a person's first name at first meeting. And when Kanda proceeded thoroughly wipe the floor with a half-trained Lavi, Lavi had reassessed his first impression of the Japanese exorcist.

Lavi had expected a cold, icy teen too rebellious and set on his high pedestal to care about the people around him, and that's what he got, for the first meeting and the second and the third. And then he'd seen someone who was fierce of will and strong, who rejected attachments with a fervor that rivaled Lavi's own cynicism of humanity, who was by all appearance a strong pillar of cold marble consisting of duty and one-minded determination. The more Lavi dug, the more he discovered a genuine but very prickly person within. Lavi found himself intrigued and captivated and caught in a way he hadn't been since… well, since a long time.

He first realized how much Kanda had affected him when Lavi found himself still calling Yuu just that, and Kanda snarled and threatened and stormed but never quite followed through with said actions.

Lenalee was dangerous not because of her young feminine curves and her large almond eyes but in the way she held herself strong, the way she fought for her convictions and that soft, vulnerable look in her eyes that she reserved for her family, which had somehow come to include Lavi. Lenalee was dangerous because she had the power to draw Lavi back to himself and make him feel guilty when he smiled an empty smile, but Kanda was deadly because he made Lavi curious and curiosity always made Lavi feel, not just guilt but pleasure and smugness and frustration and anyway, curiosity always killed the cat. Always.

And it was satisfying – very, very satisfying – to draw a rise from Kanda by simply being an obnoxious teenager. Call it a guilty pleasure, but now that Lavi had gotten a taste of it, the power of a few simple syllables and a casually thrown arm around Kanda's shoulders (effectively pinning his sword hand down, of course) he couldn't quite let go.

"Yuu," Lavi called and scrambled after dark haired man. He resisted the urge to bat at Kanda's long ponytail like a cat tempted by a dangling string because there were three things sacred to Kanda and his hair was one of them. "You're back!"

"Shut up, idiot," Kanda said automatically and his hands twitched towards his belt where Mugen hung before he blinked once and glared. "Don't irritate me, I've had to deal with a greater annoyance than even you."

"Yeah?" Lavi said, propping his elbow on Kanda's shoulder and propping his chin on his hand. "Another exorcist? You wouldn't even notice otherwise."

"Bean sprout," Kanda sneered under his breath, and stalked away, leaving Lavi to stumble in the sudden absence of his support.

Lavi had a feeling he'd open Pandora's Box the moment he'd step into that training room three years back, fell through the science department's devious traps and felt the Innocence clink around his soul. If this new exorcist was anything like Lenalee or Yuu – well, there was always long, important trips away with Bookman to reestablish his neutrality. Of course.

"Are you coming, bunny-idiot?" Kanda growled from a corridor down, not even bothering to turn. "Bookman is looking for you."

Meanwhile, Lavi'll continue to study these fascinating individuals to compile a complete record of the exorcists who fought in this secret war against the akuma.

"Yep, coming!" Lavi called back and ran to catch up.

Besides, Lavi thought wryly, as he watched Kanda's long tail of hair flick in his wake, humans made the most interesting histories, and interesting histories were what the Bookmen lived for.

end

AN: Con/crit and comments are really welcome.