There are spoilers in this up through just after the "Timothy" arc. You have been fashionably warned.

Just to clarify: This chapter jumps back in time and is set just after chapter two. The chapters revolving around Allen and Link are completed for now, and now we look into "everyone else."

I did a whole bunch of editing on this and it became 34 words longer. Lol, I fail at this game.

Then again, I've never been one to do things in the expected way.

Anyway, I hope you like this chapter. It's been so long in coming.

(And sorry the dashes are so short. It's a file conversion error.)

Dance of Shadows chapter 4:

Ash and Life

Kanda stared at his hand, black burned over his skin, a laceration of pink and bleeding red striped down one side of his palm through his forearm. The distinct fumes of charred flesh, the crackles of the flames in the background din broke through, abruptly. The rivets on the elevator's floor dug into his wounds, making it harder to think, to see around his curtain of singed hair, and then, came the sour plume of akuma poison.

Alone, he wasn't sure it had a smell, had a taste or sound, but in his experience it was always accompanied by the flesh with which it had taken. It drowned out all his other senses now, a wave rolling over, breathing heat into the air as the chemical process broke down the last of the humanity around him. Around Komui.

He looked up, just in time to see the piles of ash growing in front of those black arms he had.

That look on Komui's face-

And to Allen: Soundless words which had no meaning. But which would have to carry them through.

Hang in there.

It had seemed like the necessary thing at the time.

And then Komui had the gall to apologize.

It hadn't been a fun thing to see. It confirmed the reality of their losses. There would be no gentle hand to assure them of the point to their sacrifice, that the images that would haunt them weren't really as bad as they thought. There would be no hand to make the memories fade, no hand to lead them to their safe place, and no one to make the tremors stop.

And this time, the memories were not fading. As time went by, they grew steadily more vivid each time they overcame him and left him alone wherever he happened to be, his muscles twitching.

They did that, sometimes. Some things never left you, no matter the struggle against them. They would still take you without notice in the daytime, and trap you when did manage to sleep.

This time, there would be no one to pick up the shards of hope strewn about the shadows on the floor.

In that moment of bowing his head, Komui had left them all alone.

"You're all we've got right now-"

"Kanda Yuu..." It was one of the doctors, bending down to clasp the hand Kanda had been flexing incessantly. The fact that he called him by that name either meant he'd been trying to get his attention for a while, or he thought it was the right thing to do. Kanda didn't particularly remember seeing the guy around, but he could have, though that sad, kind look on his face was nothing that endeared him.

"What," Kanda barked, jerking his hand back.

But the man was not deterred-that hand ended up on Kanda's knee, aggravatingly. "I think you can stop now," said the tired man. He had brown hair, was in his forties most likely. Aged, this man did. Ironies. "I think there's no one else that needs the blood."

Kanda looked around the cafeteria, becoming aware of the stiffness in his neck for the first time in a while. He must have been sitting there a while, for not only that but the large amount of empty tables that had appeared. The loti in his vision had piled up along the row of tables directly in front of him, some stationary and some spinning lazily on the top of tables and benches as though they were adrift in water. To his right, there were many that still moved rapidly-attached to the living, people busying themselves with . . . living things.

On the two rows of tables to his left there was a decided lack of loti, more than the last time he had been aware. Reality was still starkly reality, when it came to the lines of corpses.

Kanda grunted, reaching for the stint in his arm. "I see."

The man nodded, moving to assist. "Thanks."

"Whatever. I'm just surprised it worked." He shrugged, watching no more than two droplets make it out of the hole in his elbow before the wound clotted. Such a minor trauma as the stint was, he had been dubious that his skin wouldn't heal around it and either embed the thing in him, or continuously push it out. And as for giving people his blood in the first place. . . ?

He must have been staring for too long again, because the doctor felt it necessary to fill the silence and pat him on the knee again.

But he was smiling, and the loti always shined brighter when people did that. Even if it was, frustratingly, aggrieved.

"You've saved so many lives today kid, you don't even know."

Kanda didn't know how he could take that without retorting something highly to the opposite, so he didn't. He just stared, and found he had gotten rather good at tuning out people to their face.

The guy started saying something else just in time for Kanda to notice a particularly tiny lotus that was blooming on the man's comm earring. It cycled, slowly, constantly growing, losing petals and regaining them, in an effortless, brightly-glowing spin. The longer he looked at it, the stronger he could hear a melody ringing in his ears.

Such a little thing, making so much racket.

. . . A pleasant racket, but still.

". . . I hope it didn't hurt you too much," the doctor said by way of apology. He gave Kanda one long clasp on the shoulder, and then got to his feet with several containers of Kanda's blood in his arms.

Kanda stared after his retreating back.

There goes a little bit more of me.

And then he was gone.

Having blood drawn when it regenerated just as quickly was an interesting experience. He couldn't swear that he felt it down to the molecular level within his bones, but there was definitely a buzz from the energy in the curse itself. It swept out from a metaphysical reserve somewhere in his chakra, pooled into the curse mark and then spread its way over his cells-in some cases insulating and in others collecting hemorrhaging pieces-that went down to the mitochondria and proteins. And when there wasn't even that, it stimulated the cells that were still there to do things they shouldn't be, and that was another feeling all in itself.

But for now, as he lay back in the chair like an invalid, there was just the beat of his heart, the thrum of the curse working, and a gentle warmth in his bones, making blood.

An internal source of warmth. . . . His Innocence created that as well. If the Innocence hadn't done that from the beginning, he would have given up on considering himself anything like human a long time ago.

Odd, that he managed to ground himself to his humanity only by something that was divine.

But what did he care. At least the screams around the room had died down. He was no longer touching blood whenever he set his feet down. There were probably still entrails about, but the flowers helped that quite a bit, at least where there were still the living next to the mess.

As it was, he had no idea how they were going to eat in here again.

He took a breath, and felt the tingle recede from the surface of his skin. That would be the spell deactivating, so it was time to go do something other than think of the doctor carting off his pieces. He was a little hungry, most likely, but ... ug. Had he really just thought that? Impressive.

The ceiling, he supposed, was about the color of soba in between the beams. Even if anything had been available and he felt like proving it to everyone that he could, his stomach didn't feel up to it. The curse was like that: it didn't heal its own after-effects. Like an end to expendable idiots and new recruits that just got themselves killed, it was too much to ask.

Kanda sighed and glanced at the main doors. Was there really anything else he could do at this point? He had a body that screamed, "Why bother learning medicine?", the fires were supposedly all out, and he wasn't exactly useful for morale. He was probably more useful for making people want to die to clear space, and he didn't feel like reminding himself that they deserved it, just now. So he could wait for something to happen, or - was that Miranda and Komui?

A white coat that most definitely was Komui, trailed by a cluster of Vatican guards, Miranda, Marie, and who the hell else that needed something, were just entering the far end of the room looking haggard. Komui was still decently upright, propelled only by the inner reserves that kept the furious grip on his clipboard.

Curious, Kanda sat up and followed their trek across the room.

Wait-Miranda?

Kanda skirted the back end of the cafeteria as Komui's group weaved in and out of his sight. He ducked around a couple of surgeons, slipped on some blood. By the time he got to the far row to spot them again, Komui and a series of people were clustered about one table, and his feet were sticking to crusted fluids on the floor.

A wall of white-coats were nearest him, but over their heads Kanda caught the end of Miranda descending from Marie's shoulder. She was standing gingerly on one leg.

No view of the patient was readily available, and Kanda already knew he didn't need to see it. So he hung back, trying to pick out those assembled.

Komui had taken up talking to the doctors; each greeted him, if curtly. One doctor turned to Miranda. "Please bear with us Miss, this might be . . . a little harsh." There was some reshuffling of bodies. "I'm sorry if you haven't seen a man exposed before. No one will hold it against you, rest assured. But try not to be too . . . surprised . . . at the condition of this one, if you can."

"How many stitches?" Komui's asked.

This had to be Allen, Reever, or Bak, Kanda realized with a start. There was no one else they would have this many people around. The older two had been relatively well, so then. . . .

Komui was surveying the table from over Miranda's head. He was frowning, furiously.

But-stitches? Kanda found himself wondering. Hadn't Allen's Innocence healed him last time? Or had that really been just blind rumors from people in need of faith?

The doctors shifted uncomfortably.

"Uhm...I dunno, 'least 150 in the upper region I worked on," said the first surgeon.

"Aaabout ... 75, maybe...?" came the second voice.

"At least 200 in the chest, at least. Both of us were working on it. And there's gotta be 250 in his legs alone," amended the third surgeon.

"His legs? What's wrong with his legs?" Komui demanded, looking up.

"Shrapnel, bone fragments...Oh, fuck, did anyone check his ribs? Oh, sorry miss. . . ."

Miranda glanced up out of her trance, looking confused. "Uh? Oh, its-it's okay. . . ." She moved back a bit towards Marie, hands clasped together for dear life.

The doctors turned to confer, and Komui frowned: "I did get to the hips, they actually seem intact, but I forgot about the rest . . . ," said the second man.

"You opened him up and you don't know about his ribs?" Komui swore.

You're surprised at such incompetence? Kanda wondered, his head darting back and forth as the parties spoke.

"It's not that," the third man assured him. "We couldn't turn him over. Even if he has broken ribs in the back though, it won't make any difference: we can't set anything with all the stitches in the front." He sighed, and motioned at Komui. "As it is, he's going to need to be doused with alcohol every hour, and that's the other thing I wanted to talk to you about. . . ."

He ushered Komui over to the side. In the parting of the white sea, Kanda saw Link, sitting on the bench. He was sitting far to the side, his head in his hand. After watching them go, he immediately ground his head into the heel of his palm, as if trying to stay awake. Or possibly giving them a false sense of security.

For just a moment between swaying coats, Kanda made out a slip of the arm on the table, peach and then red.

"We're out of morphine, we're out of everything," the doctor continued. "We're down to opium people had stashed around the place and contraband from I don't know the hell where. We got some stuff from a couple a science guys that knock you out but I don't know what the hell it'll do to you . . . but right now, I'd give it to the kid."

Komui nodded, glanced at everyone near him whom he knew to be listening, the back of Link's head included. "Yeah. . . ?"

"I'm glad this kid's alive Komui, don't get me wrong, but every moment this kid's awake within the next month is going to be another moment he's either going to want to kill himself-God forbid," he added quickly, as if Komui cared, "-or is going to run himself down that much closer to dying. He needs to be in a coma, Komui. Needs to be, for how many reasons I can't even begin to explain to you. But he woke up on the table, while we had him open. Innocence is one hellofa thing, but it's gonna kill 'im if it keeps that up. He's got one fucked-up chance, Supervisor Sir, and I don't even think there's anything we can do from here on out but watch him do what he's gonna do, and maybe hold his hand a little."

The man grumbled and wiped at his eyes, his forehead, his neck, too frustrated for words. Eventually he sighed, apologizing even as he threw his arm down in exasperation. "He needs to be under, I'm sure there's two-hundred other people that need the same, but there's nothing left to do it with. Please help us."

While they were speaking, a bit of green appeared to his left. It was Lavi; as the doctors moved to the side to confer with Komui, he came to the edge of the table as silent and smooth as a ghost. Whatever he was looking at, he seemed to be taking it in with a detatched, macabre interest, judging by the angle of his head and tight set of his shoulders.

Kanda frowned, and found himself finally walking there, too.

Without a sound, he took his place next to Lavi. The man took no notice of him, but Kanda easily discovered why: with equal parts fascination and horror, he found the thing on the table.

The table stretched out in front of him and on it, at first, all he saw were legs. What had to be Allen's legs, which he realized had never really seen. They were pale and a bit knobbly with scruffy white hairs, and currently, stitched together like a ragdoll's.

The bottoms of his feet were cut up somehow, and the lashes only continued upwards. His ankle was probably twisted, given the swelling; dark bruising bloomed from his other ankle up to his thigh, and embedded in his flesh were mountains of wires.

It was impossible to see wounds in the charcoal-black arm, but the congealing blood near it indicated it was seriously damaged. There were slightly glowing white marks just beginning to appear, but it was slow and thin: even when his arm had reattached, it had been with still-open wounds, not knitted clots.

The rest of his skin, usually pale anyway, was powder white, and if he was breathing it was hard to tell. He was as still as a corpse. Cuts and bruises littered him from head to foot, and they were interrupted only by patchwork black skewers protruding from the ribbons of red and purple flesh they held closed. A massive and hastily-done track of stitching went from his shoulder, down his chest, and into his abdomen, ending just above the only bit of clothing they left on him-a very shortly-cut part of his trousers. The rest of his legs looked like a mine field, but Kanda couldn't particularly force himself to look away. Down Allen's far thigh was a long, clean cut left hanging open, mounds of swollen flesh protruding. It was nothing but purple around it, as well, so it wasn't hard to guess why it was there they'd cut open. The amount of swollen flesh protruding in wrinkled heaps like mashed meat or crumpled rags meant they weren't going to do anything with it for a while-if he lived, they'd let the swelling go down and cut out what wouldn't got back in.

. . . Allen was in there somewhere.

He was going to be useless after this.

At Kanda's shoulder, Lavi didn't really bother acknowledging him, staring at the boy on the table in exactly the fashion he had been. He almost lazily traced the tracks of stitches and discoloration with his eye, analyzing how Allen's fight must have gone-

-during the amount of time he had been passed out or incapable of moving, lying in a pile of debris as twisted as he was, watching the monster fly overhead. Streaks of glittering light and heat played not far above, visible through the kaleidescopic levels of massive, black metal walkways, any one of which could collapse and impale him with the next crackle of fire that was growing too close.

The sound of each time Allen smacked into the walkways played through his head-the sickeningly dull impact, then the metallic reverberation in the grates coming nearer, and then finally the shudder of the supports above his head, resonating the floor underneath him. It was followed by the ghostly laugh of the akuma; the acute, cold lack of his own Innocence; and a span of time in which Allen would lie like the dead, a silhouetted heap that he prayed would move.-

The sound played over, and over, and over, to as many under-exposed images as he could remember of Allen's forsaken form smashing into the floor, the walls, the railings, the support collumnade. Repeated, to the feeling of watching an akuma slice him open, knowing it would be fatal soon, and yet feeling nothing in his own body but to know that he would be next.

Komui had cleared his throat and shifted; Lavi was still beside him, gaping at the giant red river down Allen's front. The room seemed silent and small at first, and then the sound of saws started filtering in again. The thing in front of him didn't really look like Allen.

"Wow," he whispered slowly, automatically, in his home tongue. "Son of a bitch."

Next to him, Lavi nodded, his dead stare unchanging. ". . . Scar. . . ."

There was a long silence between the two of them, in which the doctors conferred and the sensory information was dimmed. After a while, Kanda swore further, the words coming out on their own.

Not that Allen would care if he had another giant scar. Allen had enough already, and he hated them all. It was sort of fun to watch the flowers wilt when people talked about them and Allen heard it. Not fun for Allen, Kanda did understand this, but it varied up life a little bit. And surely, that was a good for both of them.

He wondered, suddenly, if he'd even get to see Allen's face turn red in anger, in embarrassment, in pain, or anything, again.

At the far end of the table, Link was still taking in the conversation from under his hands, and behind him, Komui took a moment from one of the surgeon's explanations to run his hand over Allen's head. It was a strangely gentle movement.

Komui's fingertips skirted over a line of stitches he found in Allen's hairline. They hadn't had time to cut the hair back, it seemed, and it was caked in red, stuck to itself and the skin as well as Komui worked around parting it.

And then, as he pulled back his hand, there were hairs coming with it.

Komui stared at his hand, bloodied once-white strands and all.

"Son of a bitch," Kanda muttered. Lavi, beside him, paled dramatically.

The supervisor was stunned into thinking, as per normal, and it was going to take a while to get him out of it. Kanda thought he saw Link giving him the eye for it, but the blond shrugged slightly and went back to staring morosely at the wound nearest him.

If Allen died, he was going to get his ass kicked . . . and for just a second, Kanda almost smiled.

Though . . . Kanda turned his eyes to the ruined chest. It was no worse than wounds he had suffered before, but, seeing it on "first-timers" was not something he was used to. He ignored the jolt in his stomach, looking for the lotus that was probably supposed to indicate Allen's life force. It was sitting just above his heart, as it usually did. There were others stacked about the table, but only a few. The number of lives dependent on Allen's survival at this moment, he could count on one hand.

In this case, simple was so much, much better.

As Kanda stared, no one in particular payed attention to him or Lavi; one of the doctors gestured in his speech to Komui, and his hand swept right through one of the flowers, none the wiser. The flower itself, as always to anyone but him, was unperturbed.

"Are those cigarette burns?" Lavi asked, suddenly, tipping his head just a bit. The movement caught Kanda's attention, and he followed the line of the redhead's gaze. All along Allen's hip and disappearing into the swollen flesh that was too discolored to see through were small, round burn scars, pale with time, several of them cut through by other scars that looked suspiciously like fingernails.

Kanda grunted in answer, shrugging. Allen's Life Lotus was not going to give him an answer as to his survival, and the shining flower was still being a frustrating thing. Even now it taunted him: the thing that bothered him about it was that it was strangely closed. Like a bud, not quite alive and not quite a dead one, either; no matter what time of day, what sort of circumstance, Allen's particular life flower was closed off. It never lost a single petal as far as he could tell. And that, which he could not understand, annoyed him the most of all.

And even now, it sat there, furled and unassuming.

"Yuu. . . ?" Lavi's hushed voice cut through his reverie.

Kanda didn't bother changing what he was staring at, just tried to tune out the flowers a little bit more.

"That was good fighting back there," he offered. Lavi was almost ready to accept it as a compliment until the icy stab: "So why are you here right now?"

Lavi shut his mouth and nodded, once, and then again, before answering. "He told me to come down here." Meaning Bookman. "To see what becomes of the kid."

Kanda nodded. There was always this blue lotus that bloomed by Lavi's patched eye when he lied, or half-lied, gently pressed into his vivacious hair as if someone had tucked it behind his ear. Today was no exception, and Kanda felt that he should have been able to find some comfort in that. But he never did.

"Ah." he agreed, and then went back to staring at the table flanked by the many labcoats.

Ah, those memories that wouldn't leave him alone. They were flooding again. . . .

". . . And so, that's why you want Miranda here?" Komui asked the men around, slowly. The woman was still staring in shock, and at the other end of the table. Ah, so Kanda and Lavi had come-

-and were looking for all the world like they weren't there. Great.

He had half a mind to shoo them away like the unfortunate children they were until the Inspector belayed him.

"No," answered Link, from the bench space beside Miranda. He had his face buried in his steepled hands, but when he made an effort to speak, he actually had the decency to try to face him straight. He had probably seen Kanda the moment he came, and that was probably a portion of the scowl on his face.

"We've done everything we can to help him for now, and we would like to transfer him. But because of the ribs, and the fact that he's currently held together with string, we have no way to move him." Link rubbed the bridge of his nose at that admission, as if he couldn't get over the sheer level of debacle.

"He'll freeze to death if we leave him on the table like this," added the doctor. "Eventually."

"And so what do you suggest . . . ?" Komui asked. For some reason, his mind could not piece together how Miranda tied into this. Not in any practical fashion, anyway.

"We were thinking," Link offered between heavy breaths, "if Miranda could use her Time Record. To . . . assist us in the matter." He spoke with grumbled but civil tones. Komui was rather surprised he was putting up with any of this, and it made his mind start turning on things he hadn't thought of in a while.

Link sighed and started rubbing under his eyes. "Using Time Recovery might be too hard on his heart when the wounds return, and we're not sure if the stitches will come with it, as they're not technically part of his body. . . ." He gave Miranda a questioning look, to which she bit her lip. "But if she could use the Time Out, we would at least be able to transport him without fear of him dying on the way." He shrugged, actually shrugged, he was so exhausted. "Nothing's going to keep him alive but his own power, but at least we could not work against that. Either way, it needs your authorization."

Komui frowned. "And why would that need my authorization? Save everyone you can."

The inspector returned him an incredulous stare. "None of us are exorcists. We can't make that decision."

The blond looked to Miranda, and, he must have been having a nightmare, because Komui saw a moment of kindness there. "You are a precious resource," he said, softly. "Will you help him?"

The woman, by all accounts, appeared horrified. She turned to Komui, then Link, and then Allen, and then to all the rest assembled. And when she got to Kanda, she stopped, suddenly realizing he was there.

There must have been something especially vicious-looking about his expression, because when Kanda tipped his head at her, she practically yelped.

"Of-Of course I can help him! I'll do anything for him. But. . . ." She turned down to him, his naked collarbone, and then looked away quickly, reddening. For some reason, this visibly aggravated Kanda where nothing else had. "He's . . . still alive, right?" Miranda asked.

"He's breathing," Link noted, looking at Allen's chest. He frowned. "Though it's hard to tell."

"Well, then, it's settled," Komui said, harsher than he-and everyone else, apparently, given the way they flinched-was suspecting. "We are not going to lose any more exorcists today. Do whatever you have to towards these ends."

". . . 'More'?" Kanda asked suddenly, from the other side of the cluster of bodies. All attention was turned on him, and it was as if he had grown another head. The explosion in number of flowers from that attention was so overpowering that he nearly swore and shaded his eyes; his frown certainly deepened in a way that made him no friends.

"Someone's died?" Link clarified, genuinely concerned.

For a moment, there was a very awkward silence, and a cold feeling trickled down the back of Komui's spine as he had to actually take the seconds to count who he knew to still be among the living. That was right, the generals were all still kicking, weren't they.

". . . Do you need some sleep," Lavi asked, gently, entirely unhelpfully.

"I was speaking as to the situation of the war," Komui answered stiffly, glaring at each person in turn, and to Link in particular, until there was some sort of understanding dawning across his face. The realization the inspector had, however, was not one Komui wished he had the opportunity to see about himself.

"Have you found Lenalee yet," Lavi piped up again, his red eyebrows turning down in a much deeper fashion than need be, like he too was having trouble thinking.

". . . No," the supervisor answered, lowly.

Lavi nodded, and then looked to Kanda. Who seemed, by all assessments, completely vacant. "Yuu?" he asked softly, nudging him in the arm.

"It's better that Lenalee's not here," Kanda grumbled, almost snapped. The doctors near him all turned, and Lavi frowned. Kanda glared at Allen quickly; then at Link, posed on the table with his head in his hand like a frustrated doctor; at the near-crying woman standing next to him and behind her, his training partner who was in silence schooling a downtrodden expression; at Komui, arguing with a doctor; and he didn't bother with the other wall of previously-white coats and unknown soldiers milling about looking on; nor with Lavi, who was, as always, useless and utterly predictable. Kanda shrugged off Lavi's hand and spun on his heel. "Leave the wake until after the damn funeral, would you? Let me know when he's just a pile of ash in an urn. Then I'll try to care."

"If you're going to leave, Kanda," Komui's voice cut through, without any honorific and decidedly sharper than normal, "Go find Lenalee, would you?"

Kanda jerked to a stop, made absolutely no motion for a second, then ticked his shoulder with a scoff and kept walking.

Lavi watched after him, hoping he wouldn't have to make a certain record after he found her. And Kanda understood this, without seeing the look on his face, without the loti of Lavi's aura opening slightly wider from the sincere energy Kanda didn't need the flowers to know was there.

As he left, Lavi took a few haggard breaths and shook out his head, returning to the measure at hand. Well, if he fainted, there were plenty of people around who could help him. Which was more than he could say for Allen.

Komui gave the white-haired boy one last smooth over the head, and everyone else backed away from the table to give Miranda room. Lavi sighed, and tried not to breathe too hard. As Miranda's Time Record grew to life, Marie distressingly close to her, Komui hung back for only a moment before he left. Link, the doctors, and two remaining soldiers stayed on the other side of the table from where Lavi was, and in the space between them, Lavi was reminded again that this was not his life he was seeing.

But when a heavy Timcampy sunk down into his shoulder, pushing into his neck for solace, he could not deny that this was the one he wanted.

Lenalee's loti were white, like Kanda's own. It wouldn't be too hard to track her down by going to the last place she was known to be and then following the trail, assuming it hadn't been too long. It was possible, as she was spent and had lost pints of blood to the Innocence, that there wasn't far that she would have been able to go. If someone moved her, there were only so many places that that would have been, plus someone would have known. But still? No one had found her?

Even after all that her Innocence had done, all the chances that she was the heart, no one stayed to look after her?

Kanda walked along the shaded corridor outside the dining hall, past people still moving bodies and bodies that were still missing pieces. Sticky blood was yet caked to the floors; there were a few people trying to end that at last, but far too few of them. Everyone that was standing was from the Asian Branch; maybe that morphine (and opium) had arrived by now.

Though, if you wanted opium, you went to the British, like out in town, not that they were going to be seeing that place in a long time.

Kanda came to the last place he had seen Lenalee and found a small circle of white loti of all sizes waiting pleasantly on the floor, near the sand. So they had just left it there, Tapp's remains, because they didn't know what to do with it.

Kanda stared at it for a while, silent. It could be poisonous, it could be. He had never really encountered the skulls before. At least not . . . dead ones.

. . . That he had known in life, anyway.

And yet, they too returned to dust.

He hadn't known how they were created. He really rather wished he hadn't needed a reason to know. Though . . . knowing the Earl, why was he surprised it came from harvesting humans somehow?

And yet, he was. And disappointed.

He sighed, and tipped his head at the fairy ring of loti as someone walked by, nothing more than boots at the edge of his vision. They did not stop, they did not care; they were looking for someone or something, and - that was right, he was looking for someone, too.

Lenalee's flowers were always tipped a little sharper than some other variants; they also came in all sizes, which wasn't true for everyone. Occasionally, she'd have budded ones in the bouquet around her aura, as well, which had always fascinated him when he was young. He hadn't understood, at the time, what that was for, and she was the first person like that he'd met.

He kicked a few pink flowers out of the way and bent down to survey the ones he cared about. Anyone who saw him would think he was grieving or something ridiculous like that, but the less the enemy knew about you, the better in the end. It didn't matter, he repeated to himself, as his fingers skirted over the ground.

What mattered was the white flowers, stretching down the dark hall like lanterns on the water. A trail so easy to follow it triggered warnings.

The hallway was dark and tiny down the way. The flowers lead to a side hallway, which she'd have no reason to be in. At the dead end of the short side-way, there was a closed door, against which several loti were trapped. Kanda thought he smelled them, the scent of flowers, as he traced his fingertips down the metal fastenings to the doorknob. It was all in his mind, but it was there all the same.

Slowly, Kanda put his body against the door and popped the latch. The room inside was dark, and he let the door swing open on its own. Revealed was a small chamber, a bed, and a bunch of strange things around the walls and floor. Masks, chains, and hiddeous paintings. Kanda stared at the macabre trappings; it was following the long line of a set of hand shackles that brought him to consider the bed-and the shape within it. A shape that was, most decidedly, Lenalee.

He'd never been in this room before, why the hell was there a bed in it? A storage room of one of the deranged scientists? By the cafeteria? But there was only one bed. It wouldn't be just for storage of hatchets and creepy masks...?

Or maybe...it was some secret collapse-room for the kitchen staff that was supposed to be for contraband, who knew? The axe on the wall didn't endear it, and he certainly didn't want the girl there any longer than absolutely necessary.

Now that he was here, it was definitely time to leave.

Kanda checked back once and entered the room. Lenalee was lying on the bed clutching the pillow, in a way that left nothing to the imagination. She had wandered off to cry in the first place she could find where no one would see.

Kanda brushed the fallen hair away from her face. She was still warm, . . . but there was no sign that she felt the touch. He pressed the back of his fingers a little harder into her cheek, and then placed his whole palm on the crown of her head. The locks were glossy, soft, punctuated by the bump of the bandages and crust of blood. It was too dark in the setting sunlight to figure out anything else, so he didn't try, not that he really could tell.

She was . . . fragile. He knew acutely his own workings; had felt so many times the moment of death onsetting that he had memorized it, knew what it felt like when he could get a few more swings out of shattered arms the curse was keeping together before he'd spit out blood and his heart would rupture.

But other people, he would never fully understand their fragility. Only that they broke, and they didn't get back up. He couldn't remember what it was like to be like that.

They became piles of ash, and he did not.

Kanda let his hand slide down her short, tangled hair. How much longer would it continue, that he would lose the scars that they had to try to hide, that he would be the one without proof that he had lived, breathed, and experienced just as much as they had?

He bent down, sliding his arms under her knees and neck. Her scent mingled with dust, sweat, akuma ash, blood, and a little bit of a male body from the bed. The years of the Order, coming out through the cracks the moment you let your guard down.

There is going to be a day where I am not the one standing aside, watching all the rest of you grieve. But if it will be before the moment in which I die for good, I have no idea.

He lifted to his feet with a sigh, and even though his mind told him that he should be burned, should be broken in fifteen places whose ghost pain for a moment struck him, he held Lenalee up and it was like lifting a child: no weight at all but the burden of responsibility.

Kanda cradled her close, and left the darkness behind.

He returned to the hallway, cloaked in layers of black so deep not even the flowers helped him. They were grey in the dark, the last vestiges of light disappearing out of the sole window behind him. It was night, but there would be no peaceful sleep.

I suppose, he thought as he shifted the weight a little, feeling the silk of her nightgown slip against his fingers and wondering what his heartbeat sounded like in her dreams, I should help with the living.

A lotus had appeared on Lenalee's chest at some point, cradled against the protective shell of his stomach like she was. It lay there, the most innocuous and pretty thing in the world.

. . . She would want me to see the flowers.

Kanda's emergence into the main lobby was not one he would have thought much of. It was dark, he was draped in and emerged from slicing shadows as he walked. Lenalee was in his arms. There was no thought in his mind about how this would affect Komui, who was just stepping out of the double doors; nor of how Miranda would take it, who came just after the supervisor; nor of the doctors, Marie, and that prick inspector who were delivering Allen upstairs to the hospital wing. Not that he could see anything beyond Allen's pale arm and a tuft of white hair on the litter anyway, with the amount of people in the way and the loti draping off his snowy form like a soundless waterfall.

Komui turned and, like a sixth-sense, stared straight at him; the idiot Centralite Link even stopped for a second, looking between all the parties involved. For that moment, there were a few people across the massive expanse for whom time stopped, and in the background, the funeral procession continued on like it should-without acknowledging anyone's existence.

There was no point in him even being there. This was for her, the one that made the warmth in his arms.

For a moment, Kanda cradled his bundle closer, a reflex from times long gone.

Komui rushed for him, just as Kanda spotted a flash of green in the gray hues by the cafeteria door.

"Lenalee!" This was not Komui the raving lunatic but Komui the brother, scared into remembering he was mortal. There was a look on his face that Kanda tried not see.

"Kanda, what's wrong with her?"

Strangely, Kanda found himself snorting at his leader. Not that he hadn't done it before, but never when Komui was bent over enough to shadow him, clutching at his shoulder like a drowning man.

"How should I know?" he answered, because he simply didn't. His lips felt numb, even as he said it. "I found her like you said, though."

"Is she breathing? Lenalee, Lenalee-"

Komui's hand came around the side of her face, and in the process of trying to rouse her, he had to bend down far enough that he was under the height of Kanda's head. At first, he wondered why he couldn't just put the girl down, but in a split-second, Kanda realized something:

There were no loti.

Just Komui, Lenalee, and him, not exactly a family because the two were in fact Chinese, but the closest thing to that he was ever going to get to that again. A feeling stirred in him, warmth in his chest beyond just the heat of his body and Lenalee's, something that had nothing to do with the tattoo, the Innocence. It was a feeling he had tried very hard not to have for the last ten years, and he did not like it. Did not like it suddenly intruding on his life like this-

"Anything I can do to help?" Lavi's voice suddenly piped up, the redhead appearing around the other side of Komui's shoulder. "Yuu, where did you find her?"

Kanda scowled, and Komui ignored them both, going for a pen light he had stashed in his pocket.

"Here, hold this," he said to Lavi, handing him the clipboard.

Kanda considered completely ignoring the devil-head for the hell of it, for bursting his little lotus-free bubble of pleasant thoughts, but the look on Lavi's face stopped him. Really looking at him, he indentified something troubling there, another something he did not like one bit:

Grief.

And . . . flowers, flowers everywhere, rapidly dropping petals.

Kanda blinked, and he must have flinched, because finally both of them were looking at him.

"Lavi," Kanda said, eyes wide. "Lavi, you're . . . you're. . . ."

"Spit it out, you," he grumbled, and he did not say "Yuu" but "you." A slightly different accent, a slightly different speech pattern.

"Lavi," Komui demanded suddenly, grabbing him by the back of the neck and shining the light in his eye.

"Ah! Ah, sonuva-wha's this for?"

"Lavi, you're bleeding," Komui said, clicking off the light and watching as Lavi, predictably, objected and went for his head wound.

"Not there," Komui said, shaking his head slowly. "Can't you feel that?"

"Feel wha?" the red-head asked, backing up slightly, wincing the entire way. He wiped the trail of blood from his nose, without seeming to recognize that it was there. "Ihv fine, Komui, what's all this, guyss?"

"Come with me, right now," Komui demanded, getting his hand under Lavi's arm and propping him up on his shoulder.

"Ah! Ah, ribs ribs ribs," he gasped, buckling immediately. He hit the ground hard on his knees, gritting his teeth and coughing out swears that didn't quite manifest as he folded against Komui's arm.

"What the hell was that for?" he whined, or at least thought he did, because the next thing he knew, the light was shining in his eye again, flashing back and forth. It was stupidly bright, stupid thing. . . .

"Kanda," Komui growled from the ground, "Put Lenalee down and go get me ice. Lots of it, enough for both of them, something to put it in, and you!" He pointed at one of the guards, a second bystander in the hall behind him, and a golem. "Find me a surgeon that knows how to use an ice pick and a knife to cut into heads. Do it!"

The two men, after a second of looking to each other, ran per the instructions. But Kanda did not move. He just stared somewhere near Lavi's head, stark still.

"Kanda!" Komui barked, coming to his feet and scooping Lenalee out of his arms. "Stop seeing things and go!"

The fleeing weight snapped him out of it, someone taking his prize and his warmth. By the time Komui had settled Lenalee on the ground, Kanda was shaking his head and had run his hand over his face several times.

"Right, freezer," he muttered in Japanese, shifting away. He was shaking, when he broke into a run.

Komui spared him as much of a sad look as he could, as he went back to Lavi, to Lenalee, alternately ministering what he could. "Jesus, Lavi, Bookman'll kill me if you die," he whispered, "and from a damn brain injury, God damn it. Lenalee, Lenalee honey, wake up," he added, going for her pulse as he snapped the fingers of his other hand in front of Lavi's face. "Stay with me, Lavi, the longer you're in there the better it'll be. . . ."

What is this, Komui? Lavi wondered. He was not registering what he saw before him; more or less, everything was either lights or blackness, steadily becoming the latter. I don't think I can remember this, the old man's gonna kill me.

What am I seeing, anyway? This can't be anything good. . . .

I don't think I can breathe. Oh, this isn't good. . . . Komui, you still out there somewhere?

Komui?

. . . Anyone?

Are you there?

Komui recognized Kanda's return first by the sound of racing steps. He skidded into view, landing on his knees before he arrived. He planted one foot when he reached Lavi's head, and spun around to face the Komui, situated in between his comrades' heads.

"Here," he breathed, setting down two large buckets of ice and several dish towels on top of them. "What do you want me to do?"

Komui grabbed one of the towels and began filling it with the broken shards. "Pack ice around their heads, especially Lavi."

Kanda mirrored him, making a cacoon of cold for the youth as Komui did for his sister. The ice, he noticed, would have had to have come from Jerry, and he did not want to think about what that conversation had been like.

They put more around Lavi, and when Komui sat back on his heels to match Kanda, the Japanese was left holding the edges of the cool, lumpy ice around Lenalee's head, letting it burn off into his fingers until they shook.

"And now what?" he asked, breathing hard. He looked to Lavi and double-took when he realized that his eyes weren't open.

Kanda swore, and Komui took a breath.

"Well . . . ," the elder sighed, and Kanda looked up to find his answer. For just a moment, his eyes flashed wider, and he was staring long enough that he was sure Komui noticed.

The man sat in the middle of his field of vision, Lenalee and Lavi's bodies spread out between them, and the rest of the Order spread behind them, people still running here and there. Others, slumped against the walls, completely unaware of what was going on around them. Two exorcists could die right here and the rest of the world wouldn't even notice.

And everywhere, were loti, glowing in the cavernous blackness.

"We hope they wake up," Komui answered, a blank canvas through the haze. "And pray."

". . . What?" Kanda found himself asking. There were so many flowers, he wondered if the sound really got to the man. If the sound, the view, any of it, would ever get to him, or if he would just be swallowed up like everyone else.

"We hope they wake up or else Lavi gets a pick to the head," Komui said, with a completely straight, if slightly shocked, face.

"So we just sit here. . . . And wait for them to die?" Kanda wondered, in an equally dull voice. His gaze fell, to search the two faces on either side of his knees.

He was fine . . . a minute ago.

But that was the way normal humans were, wasn't it? The way it would be when he, too, finally, finally died. He would be there, and then he would be gone.

Kanda closed his eyes, letting himself sink into their darkness.

And it would feel good.

Komui sighed and rubbed the side of his head. It was quiet, no screams in the night, no sound of raging fires or blaring alarms. Just this lobby of the home he was supposed to be protecting, the guards standing around him, two of the children that were his to watch over laid vapid at his knees, and Kanda, sitting like the statue he always was.

"Why."

Komui's brow ticked down, as his ears processed the sound. He looked up, not believing what was before his eyes. "Why is it always like this?"

Kanda was staring at his fisted hands, staunchly refusing to acknowledge the twin lines of tears steadily dripping down his face whenever he blinked, made black by the ash caked on him. "I don't deserve this," he sucked back a sob, and shook his bowed head. "...To be the one left alive. Who decided that fate for me, over and over!"

His hands came up and just as natural as anything, wiped at the eyes Komui could no longer see. "Can't the world just . . ." He shook his head, in and out of sobs. "Just. . . ."

Komui stared at Kanda, and very slowly, found his own hand clasping around Lenalee's as he did so. There wasn't anything he could say to him, that wouldn't dig the wound deeper. Kanda didn't want him. He wanted to be alone, utterly and completely.

"Yuu..."

Does the world look different when you let it see you cry?

"Supervisor, Sir." Komui jerked his head up to find two men in rusty-red splotted lab coats behind him, the nearest with a particular set of sharpened tools in hand. "Someone needs some pressure relieved?" It would have been a joke, any other day. The doctor even forgot to smile, this time.

The tools in his hand happened to be at Komui's eye level, and he couldn't stop looking at them. They were not pleasant. But they were clean.

"Ah . . . t-that's what we need to find out," he offered, beckoning them down. "This one may have passed out some time ago, but I'm less sure about her case. Lavi, he just lost responsiveness, I saw the hits he took and I'm sure there's hemorrhaging going on, as you can see from the bleeds, but we thought he was all right before this. . . . Though I shouldn't have, the signs were all there. . . ." Komui chanced a glance at Kanda as the doctors found places to kneel between them. "Kanda," he whispered, leaning a hand on his knee. "What do you see?"

The youth sighed suddenly, and even though the water kept falling out of his eyes when he blinked, there was no other emotional response. He didn't seem to notice it.

"Nothing we can do anything about," he said, blankly. One lotus near his leg looked particularly pathetic, so he flicked one petal to send it spinning. It was about all he could do: sit, and watch the flowers grow, bloom, and wither.

"All right, excuse me, Kanda Sir," said one of the doctors, a Brit by the sound of it.

Kanda merely nodded and scooted off to the side, sitting with his back against the wall and his obsidian hair getting in the way of everything. The doctors went about their business and Komui only gave him fleeting glances now and then, that he was at the same time both annoyed and glad for.

Kanda sighed and pulled over a couple of loti, one from Lenalee and one from Lavi. He put them in his lap, along with a small one that had appeared to his other side, down the direction he and Lenalee had come from. It was a flower from his own aura, delicate and unbreakable so long as he was alive. Together, the three, fully-blooming, took up his abdomen, and he sat, slowly stroking the tips of the petals as he tuned out the doctors.

The buds were secrets. Parts of their emotion they hid, and would never entrust to another person, even if asked.

Kanda had no buds. He'd never had them.

The petals felt real, to his hands.

How long would it be before they too turned to ash, falling through his fingers?

"Tell me if you need any blood," he said, as the blooms drifted into the dancing shadows.

A/N: Did you like the PSTD? I tried hard to make it as confusing as it is for them. I'm looking forward to your reviews: I want to know what you think. :)

Beta'd kindly and enthusiastically by Hoenheim-of-Light-51. I like this having-a-beta thing. :D

Last edit: 8/2/10