A brief note: I had not originally intended to post any more of this, despite having more written for a multitude of reasons (it is absolutely AU now because it was written before the Alma arc, it is full of the skeevy cultural issues that go hand in hand with Lovecraft, nobody here actually seemed to be reading, and the hassle that goes into posting here), but since I got a review asking for more I'm (at the very least) putting up what I have, and may write more after all.

Siam Riep, Thailand

May 186X

Bookman got his next transmission from Shanghai in the middle of the afternoon, right after tea. English tea was one custom he'd picked up in the Order and never really broken himself of- not the rubbish black variety itself, but the meal in the middle of the afternoon that consisted almost entirely of things the old man hadn't wanted him to eat. It was mostly the fact that it was right after tea and that he was feeling exceptionally good-natured and lazy that he answered the wireless transmission at all; a truly staggering number of people associated with the order had mysterious bouts of equipment failure when Bak Chang called them. The truly strange part was how the Shanghai technicians could find absolutely nothing wrong with those selfsame systems when they performed routine maintenance. It was one of the great mysteries of the Vatican, truly.

"This is Bookman," he said, laziness stretching his words out into a drawl as he laid back over the settee with an arm thrown over his eyes, as if Bak could see his little gestures of annoyance over the wireless. "What is it?"

"There's a mission for you," Bak said, all business for once in his life; that alone made Bookman sit up and stop trying to nap through the transmission. This was definitely not the usual posing and spurious status checking, and he wondered for just one instant just how much of a coincidence his answering that transmission had been. He didn't like believing that things were laid out in advance, but the old man had been a big believer in prophecy. This Bookman didn't believe anything was laid down until it happened and he put it down, but old lessons were hard to shake in the face of a certain class of coincidence. "Have you got access to a good library there, or have all the books long since disintegrated in the jungle?"

"One of the best," he said. The accumulated collection of Angkor Wat was third only to Alexandria and Constantinople, superior to any forgotten vault beneath the Vatican by far. He was fairly certain that it wasn't (strictly speaking, at least) permitted for anyone to remove things from any of those collections, not even a Bookman, but if the Bookmen didn't want their far-removed successors removing things from their collections then perhaps they shouldn't have left said libraries abandoned to rot in the head and the rain. He had what he'd originally planned to be a small collection from Angkor Wat, but it seemed to inexplicably grow every time he visited the hidden library. Strange, that.

"What," Bak asked, "could possibly be worse than the akuma or the Noah?"

"Not much," Bookman said, standing up with an audible clink. Perhaps he should have worn less jewelry. "A more powerful akuma, or the Earl himself. Or it could be a rogue exorcist or wild piece of Innocence causing problems, which is obviously much more likely."

"Are you breaking glasses over there?" Bak asked when the bracelets jangled against one another again, but let it go. "I have an urgent request from Exorcist-Generals Klaud and Theodore. They're both stationed in Nagoya, and they claim to be dealing with something completely unknown to either of them. Theodore sent a drawing of whatever it was they found and a request for help to your predecessor shortly before his death, and never received a reply. Other than that, I can only give you a verbal account of what they know- it doesn't match anything in our records, or in Dr. Epstein's. I need your expertise, and that library in your head, in Japan."

"I'm pretty sure you can't do that," Bookman protested, but he was already walking down the steps to the cool, stone-walled cellar underneath the house. It had to be stone, to keep the damp out where earthen walls wouldn't. It was the entire reason he had chosen this building, because he could protect the library here. In fact, he suspected that some long-forgotten previous Bookman had probably had this place built in the first place, to keep books dry- it was, after all, otherwise a completely illogical structure to have in a part of the world with a monsoon season, because it required so much effort to keep from flooding. The golem followed him, wings fluttering so softly that Bak's voice drowned them out.

"Oh, but I can," Bak said, and Bookman could hear that obnoxious, almost perpetually present smugness get even worse. "You're officially under Asia Branch jurisdiction, because Rome doesn't want to deal with the baggage your other order brings now that the war is over. Either you surrender your weapon and leave the Order- which I wouldn't advise, from what I've heard about what happens to accommodators who separate from their Innocence for too long- or you bring your research to Shanghai and you get on the boat I'm sending you to Nagoya in."

The sad thing was that if he hadn't been so unbearably smug Bak would have been a good leader. He knew exactly when to stop playing the part of the brat who bought his way to the top of the heap and apply the real pressure, which was to say, exactly at the moment he'd done it here. Very few people could push a Bookman around, and Bak Chang had just proven himself one of them. Bookman was starting to understand why the old man had been so reluctant to join the Order and probably wouldn't have done so at all if he could have helped synchronizing with his Innocence. It made for a bond that was hellishly hard to shake, and that was something a Bookman shouldn't have.

At least the Order would be all but gone by the time this Bookman chose an apprentice of his own, though it might hang on in Asia until whatever still lurked in Japan was completely taken care of and there would probably always be a motherhouse in Rome. It would sit echoing empty around Hevlaska, forgotten by everyone but the Bookmen, but this Bookman wasn't going to keep up the association between the two orders beyond his own obligations.

Which were to Exorcist-General Allen Walker and not to Asia Branch Chief of Operations Bak Chang so far as he was concerned, but that was apparently beside the point.

"Understood, Chief Chang," he said, with a formality he very rarely displayed even now that he was Bookman. There was always one thing about a man that persisted in all his personalities no matter how good an actor a Bookman or his apprentice was; Bookman's was his lack of formality, whether it was laid-back, friendly, or rude (because he had been all three, many, many times over). His master's had been his never-ending crankiness, or so it sometimes had seemed to his apprentice. "What exactly, pray tell, am I supposed to be researching? There's not exactly a volume here labeled things that are worse than akuma." Not that he would have objected to the challenge of finding that without clearer direction, of course— it was just that if there really was something worse than an akuma out there, Bookman probably didn't have the leisure time to head for a better-appointed library and make that search. That was a topic to pursue in Alexandria or Rome or Oxford, not in the mouldering remains of books abandoned years ago in the jungles of Thailand and Cambodia.

"From what General Theodore tells me, it's something powerful enough that the people living in and around what's left of Nagoya City made a bargain with it to protect them from akuma. Since these people are alive at all, it obviously must be something with the power to hold up its end of such a trade. If this is merely a belief in some local god, these people are the luckiest men in creation."

"And coincidences like that don't happen," Bookman agreed. "At least, not to people so accursed as the ones who didn't make it out of Japan. Could it be a powerful akuma that went rogue? We've seen it before, and not just in the ones General Cross converted. They have turned on one another, and some of them do keep herds when it suits their purposes. It could have been a level three akuma defending its food source from the others."

"Innocence appears to have no special effect on them, if you would let me finish," Bak said, that I'm-better-than-a-Bookman-and-I'll-prove-it impatience back in his voice, making his words tumble out so fast they almost fell over one another. "They're just like any other human to an anti-akuma weapon. Which is more than sufficient to dispatch them, obviously, but they are not akuma. And there has been no sign of anything not appearing in a human skin, whether it's an akuma or otherwise."

That would have more of an effect on some Exorcists than others, and which ones worked and which ones failed seemed to have no real rhyme or reason. Yuu could stab a man to death with his sword, but Allen's would go right through an ordinary human as if he were a ghost. And so on and so forth- small blessings that Theodore's team consisted of people whose weapons all worked both ways. Besides General Klaud, that was, but she was one of the few Exorcists trained in handling a weapon besides her Innocence. That was the price of having an anti-akuma weapon with a mind of its own, he supposed, that she would have to take her chances without it at some point.

"So far they haven't done anything to antagonize the team, but their behavior has been erratic and all of the team members say there's something off about them they can't quite place. Including Kanda, which would seem to preclude any ignorance of Japanese custom causing the confusion. And just today an apparent defector warned them that there would be some sort of meeting at the harbor the team has set up tonight and that the team should avoid it at all costs. I thought it prudent to get the contents of the message to you as quickly as possible, in case it had some other meaning that would be evident when you figure out what they are dealing with." Bak didn't sound smug anymore; quite to the contrary, he sounded frustrated with their lack of knowledge. That, at least, was a state Bookman could sympathize with.

"Ahhh, a midnight sabbat," Bookman said, only half jestingly. It sounded silly, but that could actually help point him in the right direction. Secret meetings at midnight, fires on the shoreline— that sounded western, which meant it probably wasn't a local cult. "I wonder if being by the sea is simply incidental. It's usually not, but they can't really help it in a place like Japan."

"You're the one who would know," Bak said, downright pleasant now that he'd gotten his own way and he knew it. "Wire back when you've got enough for me to report back to General Theodore. I'll have my receiver turned on, unlike the rest of you."

Then the transmission cut out and the only sounds around him were the soft snick-snick of the golem's tiny mechanical wings and the clink-clink-clang as bracelets of varying weights settled on his wrists with every movement. Bookman didn't like silence in the library, unlike his predecessor, and so he wore the bangles to break it. ...that, and gleefully irritating people was one of those qualities that, like his casual manner, he hadn't quite made up for a persona. And irritate people those bracelets did. Nobody could ignore Bookman when he was making noise with every movement.

Right off the cuff, he could think of half a dozen Chinese or Japanese gods that were little better than regional, and probably didn't have much in the way of real power even if one were given to believe in the polytheistic. The problem with dismissing them outright for their probably weakness was that people in isolated, akuma-infested Japan weren't exactly in a position for exposure to anything farther afield, except perhaps some ancient and esoteric form of Hinduism. Except in a few cities where foreigners had come to trade, that was, where the Portuguese and the Dutch had been stopping for centuries and the Jesuits had built enclaves. If the Black Order could slip into the ports at Nagoya and Nagasaki over the centuries, there was no telling what else could have come in.

And they were in Nagoya. He would have to examine everything, because these people would be as ecumenical as any Japanese survivor could be. Actually, if this was as isolated as it sounded like to Bookman (it had been almost two years and Theodore had just now noticed something amiss? It was either new or contained to a small area they had just reached) then he might be better off examining the stranger things first. Something native would have spread further and faster; word would have gotten round about a well-loved god who suddenly protected his people from akuma. A foreign cult would have spread more slowly, a creeping protection most people would have dismissed or refused.

A powerful foreign cult, because something strong enough to contend with the high-level akuma in Japan wasn't some kitchen god or ancestral spirit. He was going to have to look at the better-known esoteric faiths, but probably not any of the major deities of a region. At least, not major deities that had reigned in the past few thousand years. Demons, Assyrian and Mesopotamian gods, Greek mystery cults, they were possibilities- the deities people had once paid lip service to but now only read about as literature and curiosity. None of the modern western religions' more esoteric and mystic practices had one bit of effect on akuma, and it was discouragingly difficult to bend the eastern ones into doing blasphemies. No, it had to be something old that had died out, some cult devoted to a god that wasn't a god at all but a monster. Gods didn't generally intervene on behalf of people when the Earl was involved; some more earthly monsters might.

And that wasn't even taking into account the fact that Bak wouldn't have called Bookman for advice had he thought some forbidden branch of a modern religion was involved. Bak Chang knew more about that sort of thing than almost anyone else in the Order- Renee Epstein and Cross Marian might known more, and Cross was dead and Bak refused to work with Epstein anymore if he could help it. He would have turned to his own library and given Theodore his own advice without ever calling anyone else. No, Bookman had to assume that Bak had already considered and discarded black magic. In fact, given the Order business Bak had covered up in the past, it had probably been the first explanation to occur to the man.

An alternate and perhaps more likely explanation was that it was a person with Innocence. Newly-synchronized accommodators could do some truly bizarre things; Crowley had been mistaken for a monster by his own people, after all. It could even turn more sinister; Bookman hadn't been there, but he'd heard from Allen and Yuu about when they'd found Timothy. If this was something similar that could control or frighten people, that would explain the devotion and fear it inspired among different people and how it kept akuma at bay. Miranda had been powerful enough to help stop Rhode Camelot even untrained, and Crowley had been killing akuma for quite some time before the Order found him. A rogue Exorcist who didn't know what he was and was abusing the power fit so well that he was sure that was the answer now that the notion was seriously in his head. Not that he was going to stop researching other avenues, of course, because a Bookman who got complacent was a Bookman who got wrong.

"Abaddon, Baphomet, Cybele," Bookman murmured, half to himself and half to the golem that would record what he was saying. That had been a bit of his own ingenuity, a moment of I'm-smarter-than-Bak-Chang that he couldn't help as a little bit of personal retaliation. It saved him a lot of time, repetition, and wrist pain in the long run, being able to record his thoughts aloud and play them back as needed. It would have probably given the old man a conniption fit, either because of the perceived laziness or the potential for the information to fall into the wrong hands, but the old man wasn't around and he wasn't right about everything. "Why am I even trying to make a list yet? There's no way I can go through every single minor little god or mythical monster that might actually exist, trying to find the one Bak thinks I need." He needed more information.

So he did something even faster than consulting his own memory: he began skimming through the books, in alphabetical order by author. An Abridged Edition of the Writings of Abdul Al-Hazred was one of the first volumes on the shelf, and that struck him as odd because Bookmen did not keep abridged editions of anything. If it was worth having, it was worth having in full. Either this was so rare and precious that even an abridged version was hard to come by, or it had been put in the library in error. So he picked it up and took it with the books he was actually planning to skim through, because he could peruse it later and decide whether it would stay or go.

"Bookman," Chief Chang told Marie over the wireless golem, the transmission so staticky that Klaud could barely understand him, "has come to the stunning conclusion that you have a rogue Exorcist on your hands who doesn't realize he's using Innocence, because Bookman is a moron."

"Tell us something we don't know already," she thought she heard Kanda mutter in the back of the room. Had he always been that mouthy? She remembered him just staying quiet most of the time, when Allen Walker and the younger Bookman weren't haranguing him. Then again, she hadn't been around Theodore's kids that much, and he did have a reputation.

"Fine, how about the fact that the man is going to be in Nagoya in a month's time, or less if he stops being contrary and speeds up the voyage?"That was unexpected, because what good was the Bookman going to be without his library? They might as well have sent for Crowley and the boywithout Lotte to keep them marginally competent; they would be of more use.

"If they haven't driven us from the place by then," Chaoji said darkly. He'd been in a nervous temper ever since Marie had announced that he could hear something going on at the beach, but it was too faint to make out. That had been perhaps an hour earlier, and she had spent most of that hour outside of the chapterhouse to avoid the unease his mood left in the room. Not that she could blame him, really; of them all, Marie was one of the hardest to rattle. Such a vague warning from him seemed to be dire, indeed.

"They aren't going to do that," Theodore said, the firm words of someone used to dealing with high-strung young men who needed to be turned to a calmer bent. "We'll be here when Bookman arrives, and he can see for himself what we're dealing with."

Klaud wasn't sure what to make of what she'd seen and heard on the beach. The man there definitely hadn't looked like the picture Theodore had shown her upon her arrival, and he'd certainly sounded frightened even to her uncomprehending ears. And whatever he'd said- because it had to be more than just the perfunctory summary Kanda had given- had spooked Kanda almost as much as her own speech to him had. And unless that man was actually rattling off a necromantic curse to loop one's life force and how to reverse it, they weren't scaring him for the same reasons. Whatever that man had warned them against, it wasn't something she wanted to meet after sundown on a deserted beach with no preparation or advance knowledge.

They stayed on the defensive that night and the nights that followed, taking watch in the chapterhouse in shifts and keeping as alert as possible during the day. There was no sign of any destruction on the beach in the morning- no planks ripped from the dock, and the small boat lashed there was fine. The carriage Klaud had brought with her stood behind the ersatz chapterhouse in the same condition she'd left it in, and the horse seemed just fine, if a bit frightened. That was a good word for all of them over the next month and a half: just fine, if a bit frightened. The lack of sleep thanks to watch shifts and nervousness was starting to take its toll on all of them, even unshakable Marie and inscrutable Kanda- especially Kanda, who'd taken a fever and started coughing. But they couldn't afford to take him off duty for something that wasn't debilitating, and so he went out and patrolled with the rest of them.

"Not this again," Chaoji said, with Kanda on the other side of the beach with Marie and out of earshot of the three of them unless the other Exorcist told him what they said. Chaoji sounded worried about his teammate, not annoyed with him; that was a change. "I thought he got over that."

"I had hoped he did," Theodore said, with a sigh. "But I'm beginning to think it's something he won't ever get over, not really."

She'd been right. Theodore knew.

"He's got consumption," she said, surprised despite herself. "That's the only thing I've ever heard of that goes away and comes back by turns. Besides the ague, anyway, and he obviously doesn't have that."

"I'd suspected," Theodore confirmed with a small nod. His eyes were faraway, looking out over the horizon. "We all did. But we hoped we were wrong. His curse is finally undoing, and I suppose that's the form his death chose to take. I just wish it hadn't chosen such a lengthy death for him."

"That's what curses do," Klaud said, the lie falling glibly from her tongue. Curses like that didn't pick the death, that was just stupid. But let Theodore think she disapproved. He would believe what he wanted to believe, especially in regards to his dying apprentice. "Take the worst form possible."

"That's all black magic, not just curses," Theodore said, tilting his head slightly to the right as if he were straining to see something on the horizon. "I know you didn't listen to me, General, and there's nothing I can do about that. I can only hope I've taught Yuu well enough to resist temptation."

It was easy to forget- with the glasses and the crying and the overwhelming need to save people- that Froi Theodore was a wily old bastard. He'd probably known all along that she planned to talk to his apprentice about switching Generals. And it was easy to forget- with the snarling and hissing and the overwhelming need to be alone- that Yuu Kanda had been with Theodore for most of his life, and owed the man said life more times over than Klaud cared to count. If Theodore had warned him so harshly against it, she would just have to wait for death to scare him more before asking again.

There was no sign of the sunset meeting they all knew had taken place just as it did every night. Every inch of the beach was pristine, from the water to the pier to where the sand bled into the death-choked scrub. No blood, nothing left behind, no sign of fire or flood or any people on the sand. The wind might have scrubbed that last away, except that the air around was dead still for the first time since they had arrived. There was always a cold wind scouring the harbor and everywhere else on the island, and this was the first time in twenty months it had been still. It was as if the lingering taint of the akuma sought to die for a day as if to prove that no one had met on the beach, so that they wouldn't erase the proof that no one in any cult had the power to stand up to them. Kanda would believe that of the akuma.

"Kanda," Marie said, "I think there's someone over there."

Kanda looked where he was told, because Marie was one of the few people who almost always knew what he was doing and was worth listening to. He wouldn't go off hearing phantoms and thinking he heard something around every corner. If he said someone was there, something or someone was there.

And sure enough, that someone stood a few dozen yards behind them. It was hard to tell with the distance, but he thought she was a woman- one of only a few any of them had seen since setting up camp in Nagoya. Most of the survivors they'd found were men, with a scattering of women and even fewer children, and none of the ones they had seen lurking about with strange airs had been women at all. Nor children, for that matter- only men in their prime. It had been much the same when he was a child, the normal distribution of survivors in hiding rather than a sign of something more sinister at work; a man in his best physical condition was logically the most likely person to outrun an akuma and make it to the questionable safety of the next hiding place. The problem with that was that logic tended not to be involved in situations like this. Particularly ones with unknown denominators that might have been monsters as hideous to behold as the Earl himself.

Kanda hadn't quite believed his ears when he heard that theory. It was the only alternate theory Bookman had given Bak to his preferred answer of a rogue Exorcist, and if he'd been there in person Kanda would have probably throttled him. None of them really understood, not a single one of them- they'd all spent their lives fighting the Earl and none of them understood what akuma could really do to a place, do to people. They saw the shadow of it here while they cleaned up after smaller incidents as best they could, and Theodore had seen a small measure of the horror during the months he spent in Nagoya trying to ferry people out of Japan before that became impossible, but not a one of them had sat huddled in a long-abandoned house or a brush pile or a cove on the sand with his mother's hand pressed over his mouth to keep him from making a sound. No, Kanda had seen firsthand more real horror by the time he was nine years old than any of the rest of them had during the entire war, and he knew that there was nothing out there to equal what had been done here. There couldn't be, or there wouldn't be any heaven or earth left for anyone, so much would be the destruction. For the sake of everyone there could only be one earthly being of the likes of the Earl of the Millennium.

"Hello, there!" She called out to them, voice making it obvious she was indeed a woman, and gave them the jauntiest wave he'd ever seen from anyone in Japan either both before he'd left or after he'd returned. She spoke in Japanese, obviously, and Kanda realized suddenly that with Marie so far down the beach from him and without his coat, he must have looked like one of them. As he walked closer and so did she, he could see that she was young, maybe around his age. Her dark hair was cut short around her face, and he remembered that, too: his mother cutting off all of her hair when they couldn't hide in one place anymore and had to run. A long tail of hair was something that an akuma or a traitor could grab onto in a chase; that was most of the reason he wore his hair so defiantly long even now, let them try to take hold of him.

When he didn't answer her immediately, she stopped waving.

"You are the one who speaks Japanese, aren't you?" She asked, and she sounded a little uncertain.

Clearly she didn't think he was one of them. He was an idiot for thinking he could ever fit in; of course they'd be able to tell. Kanda's father had been able to tell when a man had been in hiding and when he was a traitor pretending so people would reveal their hiding places, and so could most of the other adults he'd been around as a child. It was a necessary skill for survival in the Earl's Japan; placing the stride and clothing of a foreigner- and the long hair, of course, because no one in Japan would wear such a blatant taunt the way an Exorcist would- would be easy for her.

"Yes," Kanda said, suddenly connecting that she couldn't be from the people who spoke to Theodore and Chaoji or she would know there was more than one man in the expedition who spoke her language. She must have been from the same place as the man who'd warned him, the one who'd only seen Kanda and General Klaud and thus could neatly divide the Exorcists he knew by sight into the one who speaks Japanese and the one who doesn't speak Japanese. It would have been nicer to have been called Japanese instead of simply someone who spoke the language, but that was likely too much to hope for in any case. "I am." The tiny unnecessary words that made up polite, personable conversation were always the first he skipped when he spoke English or French, but they came to him easily enough in the language he'd gone years without speaking except as an occasional way to communicate clandestinely with Theodore. It was so strange, how things like that worked.

"Good," she said. As the gap closed between them he could see that she looked healthy, flush, with no pockmarks or pallor or shivering- no pox, no consumption, no ague. It was rare to come across a person so utterly healthy-looking here, where there was no sun and so little rain and nothing but the incessant dry wind and twilight that never lifted. She didn't even look like she was starving. "We were afraid you'd all been scared off. No one has seen your people come around since my uncle went raving at you."

"Raving?" Kanda echoed. That man hadn't seemed crazy- quite the opposite, actually. He had totally lacked both the mad wrongness of this new mystery and the old madness of those who'd broken under the strain of living in this godforsaken place. This cheerful-looking young woman's so-called raving uncle was absolutely not a madman to Kanda's memory, and working for the Order meant that one saw a great many and varied forms of madness. Some of them were subtle, some of them had to be looked closely for, but none of them looked so horrifically lucid as that man: someone who had seen the face of evil but had not the fortune to go mad from it. It was the same lucidity one saw in so many Finders and Exorcists alike after any amount of time in the field. He'd been as desperately, unfortunately sane as any of them in the chapterhouse.

"We thought it was good not to ignore him until we were sure," he said slowly, hating that he must have sounded terribly young or unlearned in Japanese. He'd have been much more proficient talking to her in his second or third languages, having spoken them more often and in greater complexity than the one of his childhood- we thought it prudent was something he couldn't phrase properly in his first language, because he just didn't have the complexity of vocabulary. He... had, well, the vocabulary of a nine year old boy, if he were in the mood for total honesty, because of course there were no teachers and precious few books outside of Japan in which to expand it to the vocabulary of a learned man.

Her hair was warmer brown than his, a little lighter. It was the first time he had come so close to someone from his own country in years and years without her recoiling, except for the very, very few times he saw the few Japanese personnel at the Asia Branch motherhouse. And that had been a brief, harried stay where Kanda had spent most of his time either a prisoner of the infirmary or listening to Bookman-the-moron (as opposed to Bookman-not-the-moron, who had unfortunately seen fit to die right after the glory was had and the dirty, demanding cleanup work began and had thus lowered himself immeasurably in Kanda's esteem). Kanda had not exactly spent any of that time scrutinizing the handful of Japanese refugees employed by that branch of the Order.

It was strange, because he was here and all he could do was compare how he looked to how she looked. He was almost assessing his own state of being Japanese by comparing himself to her, like he was afraid that somehow it had all osmosed out of him and been replaced by something Chinese or French or English.

Her hair was a little lighter, a little warmer brown. They were both pale, because they'd both spent years under the sky without sunlight, but as he'd observed at first she was flushed and healthy instead of ashen. Her eyes, though- he remembered dark eyes, black and brown as everyone he'd met in China, as dark as Chaoji or Lenalee had. Even his own— which had been strange enough to draw comments when he was young— were a very dark blue, close to black if the light was low or someone wasn't looking closely. Hers were pale and watery, like where the slate sea met the slate sky in one depressing, unchanging line on the horizon. Pale like Allen Walker's good eye, or Theodore's eyes, or those of any number of people he had met while living in Europe. They were not eyes he had ever seen before leaving Japan, and they certainly looked out of place on her. His first thought was that perhaps she was part foreign— this was what had once been a port, after all- but she didn't have any other look of it about her. She simply looked like a young Japanese woman with out of place eyes.

"You don't have to worry," she said, giving him a smile that was probably supposed to be reassuring but just looked bizarre. Everything about her, from the smiling to the out of place eyes to the fact she looked so healthy to the fact she was talking to him at all-

Wrong. She was wrong, and now that he had realized that it was the only thing he could see when he looked at her. All he could think about was that somehow where she left off and the world around her began was such a jump from what was and what should have never been that it was completely and totally jarring. This girl didn't belong here, maybe didn't belong anywhere, just like the people Chaoji and Theodore had told him about but whom he'd never had the chance to see for himself up close.

"There is something very wrong here," he said, in a perfectly normal and level voice that didn't say anything as to how horrifying he suddenly found looking at her, how unbearable it was to stand so close to her that she could almost touch him.

He said it in French.

"What?" She asked, still in Japanese.

"Nothing," he said, in Japanese once again. "What were you doing on the beach, then? We heard you out there, and you never went out there until he told us about it."

"Celebrating," she said, smile growing wider in relief that it was something so easily explained. At least, that's what he thought she meant; it was hard to judge her facial expressions and body language when everything about her screamed that she wasn't like him at all. "Wouldn't you? Didn'tyou, when everything started getting better?"

Kanda had seen and heard innumerous victory celebrations and been roped into attending no few of those, and not a single one of them had been a midnight sabbat on a beach that might have still been in danger of a stray akuma attack in a land where the weather and the earth and the water hadn't yet recovered from the pollution. Not even the seediest ones that Ravi (because he hadn't been Bookman yet back then, and the real Bookman hadn't known about all of those parties or else Ravi would have been on a train to a monastery in Kathmandu before he could blink his only remaining eye) had sought out on the Mediterranean. People who were that bad off hadn't stopped to celebrate the end of the Earl; instead they'd used the hope and assurance that nothing else would happen to them like that again as inspiration to finally take action and begin rebuilding their lives. They planted gardens and bought cows and let their children go outside; they didn't gather on a desolate beach at midnight and do God only knew what. And their neighbors certainly didn't go around spouting mad warnings- warnings of that sort wouldn't have been seen as mad. Had this been any other place just recovering, that man's words would have been heeded, not ridiculed.

"I didn't," Kanda said, his grin more teeth than reassurance. That smirk was the closest thing he ever gave anyone to a smile in anatomy, though its meaning was quite the opposite. "I was busy."

"I suppose you would have been," she said, leaning forward. Where was Marie? He hadn't been that far away; there was no way he didn't hear Kanda's intentional lapse into French. He should have been here by now. "You should come the next time we meet. I don't think they would mind if it was you."

"Yes, that's why they spit on me and won't talk to me, except for the one you say is completely mad," he snapped, clinging to rudeness as a barrier that might put space between the two of them. If she was offended by his words then perhaps she'd step back and not touch him. He knew for some reason that he didn't want her to touch him even more than he usually didn't want people doing it. With most people it was a dislike of them getting close, of the waste of time, of his own weakness, but this- it was like a fear he hadn't known he had, racing through him at the thought of her touching him.

A lot of people in the Order back during the height of the war would have said that Yuu Kanda was fearless, and they would have been dead wrong. No one fearless lived long in Japan, not even under the care of cautious parents; he feared a break in routine, some dangerous deviation in his life that meant his world was being threatened. Disturbances in the night, unheralded storms, strangers with no logical reason to speak to him- these were all the sorts of things that made Kanda very nervous, though he had grown very adept at hiding them from ten years living in a land where such fears were irrational and subject to ridicule rather than absolutely necessary for survival. And the very thought of her laying a hand on him frightened him more than half-imagined Noah outside the window ever had when he was small, back before he'd learned the hard way that fearing such things would earn him jeering from Deesha and a promise of more ridicule to come when he gleefully told the little girls who would eventually grow up to be General Klaud's team. It terrified Kanda more than the thought of dying useless did.

Then she put her hand on his wrist. Even through the fabric of his shirt it was uncomfortable, and where her bare hand touched his, his skin positively crawled. He actually flinched, when he had been training himself for over a decade not to have such obvious fear reactions.

"Don't," he said, a break between the words as he fumbled to find his voice, "don't. Don't touch me." He pulled his hand away, heedless of how rude he might seem. She shouldn't have been talking to him in the first place, she shouldn't have been anywhere in the first place. Wrong, wrong,wrong. It was so wrong that it set off every single fight or flight reflex in Yuu Kanda's body and they had all come down firmly on the side of flight. Where was Marie? He took a stumbling step backward, desperate just to put some space between himself and this feeling of something that shouldn't exist.

"Are you all right?" She asked, a parody of wide-eyed curiosity and concern. Wrong. He took another step back, and she reached forward, so whip-quickly that she surprised even his fear-honed reflexes. "What's wrong?"

"What's wrong?" Now he was hearing the same thing echoed in different languages- no, that was Marie, not a hallucination born of adrenaline and terror. It was Marie, finally there. What had taken him so long? He hadn't been far away, and he was more than close enough to hear Kanda signal distress in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice.

"We're leaving," he managed to croak out, taking another step back and another until he stumbled right into the broad obstacle of Marie.

"Kanda?" Marie asked, putting a hand to Kanda's shoulder rather than stepping back as he normally would. "Are you all right?"

"I'll be fine when we leave," he said. Marie might not have been able to see her, but couldn't he tell from the way she breathed or the way her feet shifted or any of the other hundred tiny things no one else could hear that she didn't belong? "Don't touch me," he warned her again, and Marie dropped his hands. Oh, had he spoken in French or English? He'd thought it was Japanese, so he repeated it again in Japanese just to be sure that she understood.

"Kanda, who are you talking to?" Marie asked, taking him by the shoulder and turning him around so that his back was to the dreadful woman.

"Can't you hear her?" He asked, trying to pull away and finding that, disgustingly, he couldn't; Marie was a strong a man as his size implied, and evidently had a much better- or more determined, at least- grip than the girl. "She's right behind me."

"Kanda," Marie repeated. Couldn't he do anything besides say Kanda's name? He was being as bad as Walker or Theodore, Kanda, Kanda, Kanda or worse, Yuu, Yuu, Yuu. Then he was getting shaken; Marie had him by both shoulders and was shaking him like he was trying to wake him from a nightmare. "Your pulse is off, and your fever is back."

"I haven't got a fever. And even if I have, we have more important things to worry about," he said, and it wasn't like Marie to worry about things like that when there was more important business immediately at hand. Couldn't he hear her? "She's off, like the ones Theodore met."

"Kanda, there's no one there!" Marie had stopped shaking him and actually sounded alarmed, and didn't relinquish his grip on Kanda's shoulders. "All I've heard is you talking to yourself in Japanese, and then all of a sudden you saying there was something wrong."

"She was there!" He held up the arm where she'd grabbed him, as if that would tell Marie anything. Not that it would tell a man with perfect vision anything, either- no, wait. There was a purple bruise ringing his wrist, as if her grip had been tight enough to cause it. It certainly hadn't felt like that, and she hadn't looked anywhere near strong enough.

"We're going back to Theodore," Marie said, holding fast to Kanda's shoulders and forcing him into one stumbling step and then another, until they were walking away. "You need to rest."

"Kanda, she doesn't-"

Bookman was exceedingly careful with the volumes he packed in the waterproof trunk, both because he needed to be selective in order to fit the most helpful information possible into the smallest space possible and because he was not about to take anything irreplaceable on a ship anywhere. Let alone into Japan, where it was liable to be dropped into the ocean or lit on fire or sliced into innumerable tiny pieces the first time he really said something to set Yuu into a strop. The Bible and its common Apocrypha were out, because even if they were needed (and he rather doubted that they would be, because those sorts of things tended to be connected to the Earl and Bak seemed convinced that this wasn't, theory of rogue Innocence or not) General Theodore would have a copy on hand he could look through. A devout man, Froi Theodore. So were the more common volumes of Sumerian myth and religion, because he had committed their salient facts to memory a very long time ago. There was no need to bring the books of Chinese ideas, because Bak would be able to procure his own copies in Shanghai and that meant Bookman wouldn't have to risk the ones his predecessors had gathered here. The less esoteric Indian volumes were the same, but the sole book dealing with the more arcane gods and monsters of the Japanese archipelago was carefully wrapped in oilcloth and placed into the trunk; it was very possible that even the seemingly infinite capital and prestige of Bak Chang could not procure what did not exist anymore, what the Earl and the akuma had long ago stamped out.

The Greek volumes stayed for the same reason the Sumerian ones did, but a few of the more arcane Sanskrit works went into careful oilcloth bundles the same as the Japanese had. He briefly considered a few works on the more arcane aspects of Cybele (the obscure works of an already obscure cult, which made them both truly valuable to this investigation given the tiny chance that such an investigation was necessary and truly irreplaceable even in the vast annals of the libraries of the Bookmen) and ultimately decided against them merely because there was so much risk for so little potential gain. It was more than passing strange, to be the one who had to worry about the safety of the tomes under his care now; he could understand now exactly why the old man had been so furious whenever he felt that his apprentice hadn't taken proper care with a book.

Would that he could focus on the duty that was supposed to be his primary- even sole, since he didn't have an apprentice to care for yet- responsibility now that the war was over. But no, Leverrier and the rest of them in the Vatican weren't finished with him yet, and as his conversation with Bak a day previous had shown him they still had the ultimate leverage over his head. By the time he could safely flout their authority because he had a suitably trained apprentice to take his place should they make good on their threats and allow him to Fall because of a refusal to follow their orders over his own, it would be nothing more than a moot point because they would all be dead or at the very least their order defunct. There were fewer and fewer akuma anywhere to be found; even here in the jungles and in such close proximity to the akuma factories of Edo, he hadn't found anything after his first seven weeks in Bangkok and only a few scattered rogues in the jungles when he ventured deeper. Truth be told, he had spent most of his assignment after that in Angkor Wat, content to study what he found there at the same time he acted as a beacon to draw any remaining akuma away from the cities. Eventually he'd decided it was safe to take up semi-permanent residence in Siam Riep and immerse himself in the libraries of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, poking his head up from his Bookman duties only at the scattered credible reports of akuma.

Yes, credible. If he was a Bookman first and an Exorcist second, he was going to act like it, and that meant triaging his time. Credible threats had to be investigated because he owed that to the people he was protecting, and possible threats warranted further study and a reasoned decision whether or not to actually deploy himself. Unlikely or impossible reports he ignored, and so far no one had reported any ill effects from Bookman's less than due diligence in Order matters. Besides Bak Chang, that was, and his ill effects mostly took the form of borderline apoplexy. That man was going to work himself into a very early grave if he didn't calm down.

Allen would have had his head, had he heard his old friend talking like that. He liked to think that didn't bother him, because he wasn't technically speaking Allen's old friend (even if he knew that was an absolute lie), but it did on some level that a Bookman wasn't supposed to have. Lenalee wouldn't have taken his head off, but she would have looked at him all disapproving and sad like she was truly more grieved about the state of Bookman's soul than she was about the theoretical dead civilians. Yuu would have understood, though; he would have done his damndest not to have to do it, going for two or three days or more on end without sleep or food if he had to, spending every instant of every minute of every hour attempting to investigate every single threat as thoroughly as he could. When that inevitably failed, though, he would admit that the triage method was for the best. Yes, Yuu could admit that they had to choose who to save and what to follow up on the way Allen refused to and Lenalee liked to pretend she didn't have to.

Now he was performing triage on his library the same was he was with missions. The old man would have probably had his head for the former as much as Bak would have for the latter- though perhaps not, what with the abridged editions lurking around this library. This had been one of the countries they hadn't spent much time in when he was a child, Thailand; he'd been here once or twice for a few months at a time, but the previous Bookman had preferred drier climes where the pages of books wouldn't moulder and rot if not impeccably cared for in ways that obviously did not happen in long-abandoned libraries. But even with that in mind, how a Bookman of any sort had allowed less than the true, real history into his library was completely and utterly beyond him. He hadn't had the chance to read Abdul Al-Hazred's work, but given the fact it was likely junk it would make for safe reading on the voyage. And on the miniscule chance that it was something valuable, perhaps it could even help. At the very least it was a work that Bookman had never seen cross-referenced in another volume by an author Bookman had never seen attributed, quoted, or refuted anywhere else, and that was intriguing in and of itself. Almost every other book had at the very least a mention of why it was wrong and ignored in some other reference.

Abdul Al-Hazred was a ghost. His works might as well not have existed outside of that one abridged volume that had narrowly escaped water damage in Angkor Wat. So Bookman wrapped it in oilcloth and set it on top of the volumes in the trunk for easy removal, since he was going to be looking through it long before he landed in Nagoya.

setting notes: Siam Riep and Angkor Wat were in Thailand at this point in history and thus are referred to as being in Thailand in this story; they didn't revert to Cambodia until 1907. Kanda's backstory: 100% non-canonical now, obviously (this was written in 2009). And on a setting note, in my headcanon (and thus in all my -Man stories), the Asia Branch HQ is located in Shanghai. The other branch locations are Inverness, Beirut, Mexico City (pfft, you think a Catholic paramilitary organization would have been allowed large-scale operations in the United States in the 1860s?), and Port Moresby.