Lotuseaters, a d.gray-man fanfic

Title: Lotus-Eaters

Fandom: DGM

Author: su-dama/tempusfugit3

Pairing: Kanda-centric, Kanda/Lavi

Rating: PG-13

Words: 5,334

Disclaimer: DGM belongs to Hoshino Katsura et al.

A/N: Cowritten with nitrojen on LJ. I thought it about time that I get it up before it collected too much dust. Hope you enjoy the solemnity.

-Lotus-Eaters-

Kanda is drowning.

When he opens his eyes, he is out of the well and on the land where things have died.

He is opening his eyes now, like he is shocked to be there. He is not shocked, just responding. He touches his face and there is no water. He sees a protrusion of stone in the distance, and he runs to it, maybe back to it, because there is a faint memory there tickling the top of his head. His hair catches in the air like things are slowing down and the past week floods back in.

He ignores it and stops running. He approaches the well. He approaches like he would approach an enemy; so now the well must be his enemy, stony and mossy and glossy and here before him. Hello, my enemy.

Kanda sniffs the air. There is a tinge of something, but he can't bother with it now. He peers down, tentatively, scared to see what awaits him at the bottom—

But all there is, is darkness. It is quiet. Soon, it calls.

He plants his hands firmly onto the edge of the well and ducks closer to hear the calling of children, what sound like children, what could be children trapped beneath the surface. He panics for a second before he waits again. All he hears is cold chilling the stones and the whispering of the wind echoing around, crawling up his earlobes. He balks, blanches.

Kanda jumps back and holds himself. He is scared.

The next moment he bites his lip to keep quiet, when there is a whistle through a field—

There is a field. Though, it's not a field exactly; it is farmland, where the harvest has died. It was never harvested. There are squashes of all kinds. There is pumpkin. There are colors of roots and dead plants. There is red and dark red and darker red. Kanda can feel it rising in his throat, for no good reason, and he wants to get on all fours to feel the earth through his hands and knees. He takes a breath, and waits.

He gets up again to feel his chest, pat down collar to fly. He is wearing what he's been wearing all week. There is a rip where a button used to be, on his white blouse. He frowns and touches his ass. It is damp from sitting on the ground for too long.

There was rain. There was weather. And there was him all week long.

Everyone here is gone, or dead, or not existing anymore. He bites back a spring of fear; his heart throbs, his body aches from waiting for too long and he steps, like a baby taking its first steps, toward the land out of his reach. He runs.

Kanda runs.

What Kanda sees when he gets there, to a stark tree in the middle of the field, is nothing but bark. Looking down, and around his feet, he is in the middle of fullness. Ripping at the seams. The field has grown since he's entered it. He finds his voice and calls out for someone, anyone, to come to him, to see what's happened to their farm. He picks up a yellow squash, holds it with both hands.

His stomach talks to him; he tries for a bite, but the squash is resistant.

He will go hungry for a while longer. Not that it will make any difference in his wait. He's been waiting for the enemy, but it hasn't shown.

He would throw the squash. He can't. He feels divested of all his wants and needs and can't begin to know what he wants or needs. He doesn't know if there is such a thing.

Kanda hears his name on the wind and realizes that's what he's been hearing all this time. His name, spoken by his past, faint but still there to flatter him, flatten him smack down. Though he's able to jump on his feet and run back to the well.

Kanda runs back.

(He had saved himself. That is what that is. That is what he sees in the back of his mind every time he thinks of the well.) No one is drowning today.

He grips the stones and peers down once again. He calls out to it, the enemy for his name. Give him his name. Give it all back to him. He knows what he wants now.

He screams. It echoes up to his ears. He stops. It echoes up to his ears.

He understands and tells the well to come back to him.

What comes back to him is a voice that desires to be pernicious; it sounds and tastes so hollow, like there is always some sort of underlying conceited pain there.

Kanda knows not what it is, but who it is. He sighs and laughs a little. He is waiting for Lavi.

It seems the longer he waits, the less likely it'll never come. Lavi will never come to him. Kanda twitches, stricken. He tries not to be; you can't help how you are.

He calls out, and he's surprised by the sound of his own voice. It is a drag, a sob that's been nurtured for too long. He calls again and hears his name. He hates it so much that he loves it with his core. He swallows a dam of spit and tries to make contact. He drops his beads into the well, without thinking how much they mean to him. They fall albeit as if they are weightless.

Kanda knows they weigh a lot on the heart.

Then, after growing scared from nothing, the levy system pulls up on its own, and Kanda decides to help it go faster. The levy pulls up a bucket, mossy, full of putrid water. He wrinkles his nose and drops his gaze. A sparkle on the water. He looks up to grab it. His beads had fallen into the bucket.

Kanda now thinks the levy pulling on its own is fucking cracked up.

He takes the beads and pockets them instead. He looks again to see something else.

A lotus on the water.

Kanda watches the lotus as it speaks to him with its princess lips. He starts to tear up. He can't do this, he can't.

He curses Lavi's name and pushes the lotus out of the way as he returns to the field, boots sloshing across mud and bleeding vegetables. He hears the bucket plunging back into the depths of the well.

Lavi. Kanda wants Lavi. He's saved himself. He wants Lavi to save him now.

It's always him. It's always that majesty, caressing his bones. He shivers. Shudders.

He stops where the field is alive. He picks up the same squash and tries to take a bite. He can't.

He cracks it upside the tree and seeds spill. He will make them grow.

Kanda plants the seeds in a circular motion and waits for it all to be over so everything can begin again.

May it be. He drops to his knees.

"I'm not," Kanda starts, to his audience of bark and the sticky orange-yellow matrix of seeds and that something he's sure is listening with a grin. He feels that the lack of life here is not quite natural; not timely, and Kanda feels some hollow thing. He's sure it has holes for eyes and gray skin that doesn't quite cover the decaying musculature underneath, some tortured thing that draws near and reaches out.

Kanda feels it like a breath of ash and tosses his head, reaching for the sword he couldn't leave behind. Mugen gives him a feeling like clean water in his mouth, and Kanda's on his feet, his eyes flitting around past the blade's light. The thing, the hollow invisible thing, it decides not to take the chance. This one's not like the family that lived in the house, there, to the northeast of the well. And this one, he's not really of the living, anyway, and that's not worth the trouble.

Kanda feels it when it departs, like a whisper in reverse until the dead leaves are quiet, until the only sound comes from the sword shaking in his grip. He sighs and brings a hand up to rub his eyes, and suddenly he remembers his thirst. He takes a few tentative steps, but he doesn't know where he's going.

Kanda keeps his eyes warily on that well as if he expects it to spew his life up like some geyser, and picks his way across the field. Rotting pumpkin-pieces picked clean of their seeds rasp out last protests under his worn boots; thunder hums in the distance. Kanda holds onto the invocation at his side, with his right hand, and with his left he checks once more for the presence of the beads in his pocket.

He counts his steps in German, lest he forget the beginnings of the language Lavi had begun to teach him on nights and mornings when neither of them could sleep. Kanda holds on to the numbers one-through-one-hundred as if they are a part of something. He tightens his grip on the sword's hilt.

It's getting windier when he sets foot on the creaking patio of the farmhouse, and he ignores the whispers in his ear. To his left, a home-made wind charm clinks and plinks; hello, traveler, welcome to our home. Kanda tries the front door's handle with fleeting fingers, respectful and wide-eyed the way children are respectful and wide-eyed at funerals. The way he sometimes ran his fingers down a warm spine.

People used to live here, Kanda thinks, and at first he refrains from touching anything else. But Kanda has been to many an empty house, and Kanda knows well this kind of suffocating solitude. He presses his lips together and makes his way to the kitchen's cupboard, where there is stored some dried fruit and grain, and reminds himself that he is Not An Exorcist Anymore. He has no obligation to investigate here, despite the residual scent of Something not of this world that keeps making Mugen prickle. He has no obligation.

But Kanda wants it back. He takes back the command of his body and the whisperings blowing through it, the plinking behind him, the prickle of his sword; and when he has entered the front door and stepped through, when he has breathed in the old dust of the place, when he has felt his stomach sink to his feet, when his feet laden with his stomach are entering a bedroom, and when he stops to see what he has entered, Kanda's eyes are stuck on what he is either seeing or what he will see.

What lies before him are ashes, the smell of decay creeping up until he can't wrinkle it away with just his nose. He keeps his mouth shut lest he swallow something he shouldn't, and kneels down beside the bed. An arm. He fingers the arm, which is made of cotton and yarn, attached to a pinkish dress that resembles that of a teacup, frayed. He lifts the doll in the air by the hand to study the dress, but when the gray light hits it, he stops squinting and opens his eyes fully to the reminder of what he's known.

His fist tightens on it before he drops it in a pile of ashes, probably of the young girl it belongs to in death. He is blinded for a moment by these ashes. They cover him. They make him sneeze, so he has to sneeze his way out of the room and run. He is thinking about Mugen and how it is this limb, this phantom limb.

But this can't be right. Because Lavi is this phantom limb.

He trips over the threshold and goes down. His boot catches in a wild vine, for he is panicking and not knowing how to stop once it's started. He doesn't do this often; it's not in his vocabulary. It's a form of abuse the world is now providing. He panics faster and makes a strangled yelp, that of a dog that's been hit too many times. He pauses to hold his head between his hands.

He counts in German again. It's going to help.

Lavi is knocking on his brain and he wants to call for him but he doesn't know how to end this attack and begin something else.

He thinks, the seeds, they're growing without him.

Somehow he makes it to the seeds in the ground, his feet hitting the ground, where it rushes up to meet him, startling him. He is taken aback by how much they have prospered. In actuality, they have infested the field with all he has known, everything he has loved and lost. Or not loved at all.

The lotus.

The air goes still in his throat and he ascends to heaven. It's not a cloud. It's not a ray of sunshine. It's not a snowy whiteness that bundles him up for an eternal winter.

He feels a hand upon the back of his head, petting his hair to the ends of it. It is—he arches—what his mother did. He didn't always have curtains of hair. And when he did grow these curtains of hair, for whatever vow he made, Lavi was there to pet it from crown to tip. He would pet Kanda behind the ears, where four legged creatures liked it. Kanda liked it.

He still does as he arches and fools himself. God, he doesn't know what Mother has to do with Lavi. God, he doesn't know anymore. He can feel just the smallest morsel of secrecy slip away into oblivion. Left. Into oblivion and he is left.

Alone.

But he can't be left to his own devices at this time. It is a crime at the beginning of things. He must start somewhere; so he spits blood from his gums into his hands, rubbing them together to gain some inspiration.

A door from his conscience slams shut and it's not until he's walking that he realizes it had slammed open against the wall, rattling and breaking down his soul. He thinks of all the turning points, the missed looks and places.

Furthermore, he remembers Lavi: guiding, feeling Kanda into the water. There is nothing but stillness all around, cornering them both into broken-tooth chattering. There is hardly play; yet they make time to stare at each other as if they held all the answers to the universe within their eye span. Within their locked eyes. They have never been so fortunate.

The door has slammed open, ready for him to come. Kanda is waiting.

Perhaps waiting for nothing. Everyone is dead, there is no one left here, on this farm, in this field, except for Kanda. He had been done, and walked away.

For the final time?

The last time had been flowing with blood, rivulets through the countryside of Kanda's brain. He had checked his head for damages and found that he was not dead after all.

There was always a next time.

Before departing, Lavi had not said a word, and especially would not have if Kanda had not come at the last moment.

Lavi shakes his head in Kanda's mind, licking his lips for avoidance of the issue. Kanda only shakes his head back at him and sees the field for what it is, or what it is doing: growing more and more lotus.

His flower, his peach, his life, his motivation, his positive energy.

Everything, everything. For him.

Kanda runs back to the house to cover the bodies of the unknown. While there, once again, he meets a cat, and it follows him around as he drapes sheets and curtains over the dead. It meows only when given attention, and only then.

The dead do not stir.

He wonders with a full concentration unrivaled by man about his whereabouts. Where exactly is he? Had he lost his way, despite knowing it briefly? Can he at least take a hint from which way the wind blows?

Not exactly, for it has stopped, and all he has is a field awakening from a dark slumber, a dead household, and a nosy cat that has a propensity for kissing his ankle. He also has a sky promising him drear and desolation, things he's well-acquainted with.

He searches high and low for matches; the fire in the hearth had died out long ago, an empty lot. He continues his search in the shed, amongst the tools, keeping an eye out for the most obvious, like candle wicks. These people would have made their own candles. They would have also been the kind to sit in their rocking chairs on the veranda. They would have stuck their wet fingers in the wind—if there was one.

Without a word Kanda waves the cat away from his feet; but it returns.

Again.

And again.

Until Kanda is forced to pick it up and stroke its back just as he had stroked Lavi's inner thigh once upon a time.

He rips a piece of lace from a doll and ties it around the cat's leg. Now it won't be hurt.

Now they may start the healing process.

Silence passes and Kanda is prompted restless. This is proving to be a waste. When had it been better in this life? When had he smiled and taken in the air against his teeth? That would have been good. That would be good right now.

He plants his ass on the well's edge, knocking a few pebbles overboard, a few leagues below. Definitely not a stone's throw, and definitely not somewhere Kanda wants to be. He looks at the cat, tisks for it, and it limps up to him. It sits. It waits.

Of all the things to be waiting for, Kanda doesn't know. He wipes the crust of blood from his lips. He glances over at the house, at the chimes that hang idly. They do not glint. They are rusted over by fear and by bloodshed, and this had been Kanda's final destination.

The cat thinks the same, apparently, as it head-butts Kanda's foot. Maybe back then, Kanda would have dropped the cat into the well. He would have shaken his head at the indignity, the animal cruelty he caused.

At this thought he can't help but hang on the levy.

But the levy must break.

With a fresh near-death experience on hand, Kanda is open to a little vacation that involves finding the matches and playing with them. Though first, finding them is top priority. He has a schedule; he can get his things in order, always has, always will. Nothing needs to change.

His breath does not comfort him as he lives to see another day. His own steps on the floorboards do little to remind him that he had better appreciate this other day. All he can ponder is how long he has left, how much time till he feels the wrath and the abrupt stop.

The now doll-less child must have felt that wrath and abrupt stop.

And he remembers that there are already ashes about, and no bodies. He has been feigning the bodies since square one.

When had that been?

When will it end?

He remembers wrestling for a life, in another life.

There has to be an end.

Lavi gets on his knees, in this vision, getting on his knees not to beg, but to clamp himself to Kanda's knees and – never let go. It is close to begging. It is close enough. And it aggravates Kanda in the present, where he listens for Lavi's footfalls, for the rustle of his scarf on a coat. The memories of wool make Kanda freeze in place.

He draws his knees up to himself on the ground, peering over them, up toward the skyline, the crying gods.

They were crying before, but now they are done. Such as it is for him.

While too shaken to move, he is still able to bring the lotus from the well to his lips and eat. He pulls one petal into his mouth, satin, pure, yet sinful, right into his mouth until he is forcing himself not to choke on its presence. He swallows it with his eyes screwed tight, thinking of better times.

The turning point in his life when everything had been veiled in what he would call, nice.

It had been nice, for Lavi to see him for what he was. Is. Of course it had been cruel of Lavi, but all the same, a niceness of the thought. Kanda had been given a certain domesticity, the chance to pretend they all weren't weapons. They were stripped of their powers instead, and maybe that had been the best thing to happen to any of them.

Particularly those who didn't need the responsibility of being needed.

However, in the faint shadows of their kind, Kanda still felt the responsibility, and it killed him inside.

Lavi is now standing over Kanda, because Kanda can feel his penetrating gaze, unbalanced on his head. It cuts right through to his sinuses and he must pinch them.

"Don't do it. I never gave you the chance," Kanda says.

Lavi remains there, and Kanda can hear him shifting to his other foot, maybe leaning on his hammer. That cursed thing. Lavi doesn't laugh like he usually does. That nuisance.

Finally: "And what chance was that?"

Kanda can't say. Instead he just keeps talking like someone he used to know. "I kissed you on the bed. You wouldn't shut your mouth so I kissed you. I wrestled you to the floor and I pinned you. I kissed you. You smelled of something I wanted to eat."

He eats a petal now, chewing it with his eyes closed.

Lavi shifts again. "Yuu. You were always easy to manipulate. Well, not always, never mind."

"I wish you'd leave me now, for good." Kanda wipes his lip. "Now."

"But I can't. I'm in your head. I'm all around you. You see the sky? I'm watching over you. You see the ground? I'm buried beneath it."

"No you're not."

"Why does it matter? You see. Your body, I'm in that, too. I'm always inside of you, tearing you up."

"Stop it."

"I will always be with you."

"Stop it. You're such a—you rat bastard."

"Speak to me, Yuu."

"You're such a bastard. You're such a fucking rat, living in me like this. Stop eating away at me. Stop making those noises."

"What noises?"

"Those." The kinds that scurry in and out of Kanda's subconscious. The kinds that run up his spine when his guard is down. That kind. The nausea, nervous ticks.

He can feel Lavi hopping on both feet and then , just standing there. Lavi is probably thinking very hard. He is probably. . .

"I will bounce around forever in your mind, and there will be nothing between us. Or rather, your attempt at forgetting me does in no way imply I will be forgetting you. You have sunken low, my friend, so low that I can no longer hold your knees to my cheeks."

Lavi is like red wine flowing into the stream. He is a Victorian lattice work that imbibes the propriety he never sought. Climb on up, don't look down into paradise lost. Kanda expects to see bad things; he is rewarded with good.

What has he done?

Lavi keeps drilling him with baleful words. "I am the flea on your flesh." Lavi is a parasite. "I am –"

"Stop."

"I am the glare in your eyes. I am the hum in your ears. I am the sugar on your tongue."

"Stop."

"I am the smoke in your nose."

"No."

"And I, I am the hand in your hair."

Kanda opens his eyes to the sunlight glaring down on him. He blinks it away until he sees spots, feeling that hand in his hair, all the way to the crown, to the tips, to the crown again. He is being petted. The hand is full of emotion, lacking in voice. And he reeks vice.

"And yet, still, I am nothing," Lavi whispers.

Kanda blinks up at him, at air.

"You know, they say the eyes are the windows to the soul. But in your eyes, all I see are blue skies and the blue birds that fly through them."

Kanda stares. "I can't see you anymore."

"I can see you, Kanda Yuu. I told you, I'm everywhere you want. Need me to be. Believe in me."

"You are not my god. You are no god to me, Lav—" Kanda is cut short by a sudden movement in his peripheral vision; then he is touched on the side, held, tucked in.

"My haunting is a blessing in disguise. You are ill, and when you wake—yes, wake up, I will still be here."

"Are you waiting for me?" Kanda asks in a hush. He can hear the well dripping. He is the one waiting for his delusions to answer.

Lavi holds him heavily. "I wait for no one." He sounds like an asshole, Kanda's glory hole, Kanda's outlet.

"I've never been so tired in all my. . ."

"So lie down, Yuu. Sleep, Yuu."

"I must be dying."

"Perhaps."

Kanda can hear the smile in his voice. "I will be as dead as these people."

"No chance."

"The war is over, Lavi. You must have seen."

"I know. I know."

"Tell me, when you were watching, did she die?"

"Who?"

"We both know who."

"She did. Her brother suffers."

"I thought so. I could feel her, slipping from me."

"We all have to die."

Kanda bows his head and crushes the remaining petals in his fist. He blows the debris from his palm, scattering it in the air. It flies over him toward the empty space.

"I was supposed to die first."

"You had your chance. Chances, really."

"I let it slip. I let her slip. How could I have let her slip?"

"Yuu. Yuu, come back to me. Open your eyes. She had her turn, yeah?"

Kanda nods at the unwanted truth. He shakes his head. He falls forward to put his ear to the ground. The dead grass prods him. He listens for footfalls and finds none.

The only vibrations there are come from that well.

Lavi is speaking very quietly. "I will let go of you now."

Kanda listens.

"I will let go and you will get up. You will open your eyes to your life and freedom. There it is, don't let it go too far. Keep it on a leash, or you'll never get it back. I promise you. Go back yourself, toward people, toward a life. Leave behind the dead, but keep them in your head, nice and locked away for a rainy day when you'll need them."

"I have no choice."

"Right."

"And if I don't believe in you?"

"Then. . ." Lavi's fingers unhinge. "Then it would be as if I never loved you."

Kanda's heart aches with screaming speed; a dry sob peels out of him until he is crawling on his hands and knees. Don't abandon me, he wants to say. Don't expect me to abandon you.

He doesn't look at the figment of his imagination as he crosses the field to the well, toeing the dead vegetation. He begins to drop the petals in, the ones he had recollected while on all fours. They disappear into darkness. His hands are muddied, his body caked in grief.

So he will bathe.

He finds a pail. He finds a round tub. He uses the water from the well for the tub, first heating up the water in the hearth, one at a time, waiting for the sun to return. Then there is nothing left but to strip. He burns his old clothes and uniform to heat up the rest of his water. May this life be washed away.

Before stepping into the tub, he considers finding a hairbrush. He finds a ratty comb on a dresser instead. A couple teeth are broken. He walks through the house, combing his hair, naked, and very cold. The tub is filled to his elbows, and he must crouch in it for better effect. His hair is so long that it swims around his elbows, soaking up the surface, black as night, silk in water. He combs his bangs.

The curtains keep out the sunlight.

They must be taken down.

Kanda drips from the tub to the kitchen to the tub again, knife in hand. He does not bother to look for shears.

The knife is perfect for cutting meat. He is hardly careful when sawing off his locks, but they are coming off, no way to ignore the problem another day. He cuts his forehead with the back of the knife. He blindly takes off the back, close to his nape. It is messy. He is desperate.

That hand in his hair will have no business there. Kanda is solving the problem.

Only Yuu would do something as rash, Lavi would say.

Kanda splashes water into his face and cuts a few more strands. Hair and blood and iron filth swim around him, swimming over the side of the tub. He claws at the metal and looks over the side to admire his silk on the floor. A part of his body. He feels like a kid again. It is all sour grapes.

But it is a homecoming.

He gathers himself from the tub, wraps himself in a sheet from one of the beds. It clings to his groin and ass.

He has been cleansed.

And now he must wake up for real.

The cat follows him to the well. Its calls have gotten raucous and miserable. It hops around Kanda's legs. He threatens to throw it into the well.

The cat stares at him as if—under the circumstances—sensibly disbelieving.

What have you done, it says, look what you've created. You are going to burn this place to the ground. You will do this.

"I will do anything I set my mind to," Kanda says aloud. He flinches.

You have loved, and you have lost it all.

Kanda takes a chance. "Lavi, if that's you in there, shut it."

The cat narrows its eyes, sniffs the air with importance, and motions for Kanda to follow him. It flicks its tail like a fishing line, hooking him to the house.

Kanda knows where he is going: the hearth is just a few timbers. There are embers. They are plenty.

"They should suffice. Because you want me to forget you, I won't. I am going to smite you," Kanda warns the cat.

It just watches him poke at the fire. He sweeps some of the embers onto the rug.

Poof.

"It is about time I ate without death inching near."

The cat tilts its head at the rug's tiny blaze.

"It's about time, you prat," Kanda says, going to the clothes line on the side of the house. He picks the manliest clothes there, to reassure himself he is in fact of mankind. One of the sweaters there looks a little too feminine, though. Ah well.

Shh, it reminds him of the general.

The cat is climbing his back without much notice. It settles its bony bum on Kanda's shoulder. It bites his ear. It demands that he leave forever.

Take me with you, it says with its claws.

"Lavi."

Kanda wraps the cat in the damp sheet. He sets off down the road.

He will never return to this place again. And it seems not even in his mind.

Meanwhile, the blaze is in the past.