Fandom: DGray-Man
Title: Unborn
Author: hana-akira AKA rurichi
Genre: General
Character: Allen Walker
Rating: 17+
Warning: OOC, doesn't-really-follow-Canon
Prompt: Child!Allen before he meets Mana Walker.
Summary: In a rhythm of heartbeats, a child sleeps as though he wasn't born.

A/N: Because Allen Walker is my favorite character from DGM and I love him very much. Oh yes I do even though this makes it seem like he's not. The works by the user tsubaki-hana from Fanfiction (dot) Net played a great part in this, too.

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1: What are the names of the unborn?

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He doesn't have a name, the unwanted child. Hair the color of mud and eyes the color of caked dirt, the boy is always dirty, always the color of earth.

He is a child—an unwanted child—but still, a child.

Children should always have names. But the unborn don't and neither does the earth.

Scratches mar the boy's face, making his appearance always scruffy and ruffled, and he is always a mess with dried blood all over him. He is given titles—child, boy, brat, punk—but no name.

It would have been better off if he had been one of the unborn, one of the aborted, one of the babes who are murdered behind closed doors. It would have been kinder, easier, but he's not, unfortunately.

The earth has only titles—terra(1), gaia(2), tsuchi(3), tierra(4), mondiale(5)—and no true name that it actually goes by. The only thing that people truly know it by is that it has no worth, no value because it can be stolen just as quickly as it is bought and so the boy, too, has no worth.

The boy is both earth and child and he has no name. He wears abandoned clothes and the frame of his body is starved, his legs as thin as sticks and he has coat hanger arms.

A child should have a name, but none of the unborn do.

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2: In a rhythm of footsteps, a boy runs as though he hasn't run before.

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The boy learns to run long before he learns to talk although every time he runs is as though it's like it's only his first time running. Always he's stumbling and tripping and desperate as if what he's running from is the Devil himself.

In his case, it usually is.

As a child with no name and therefore no home, he is forced to find other ways to survive—illegal and ugly ways, but necessary ones if he wants to live to see the next day. Pick-pocketing, stealing, and generally any and all forms of thievery is one of the more common ways the boy uses to just stay alive.

The people that more often than not that he steals from are the ones who have already thrown the things he's after away. He just digs through the garbage for food and somehow the people who own said garbage think he's stealing from them and so they shout and let the dogs loose after him.

They say that another man's trash is another man's treasure. In this scenario, this is not true.

So the boy runs and long after the footsteps that were dogging after him recede, the boy will finally take the bread that he had in his arms out and eat it quickly and he would still be hungry. He will be exhausted and famished and he will think that there has to be more than just taking and running. That there's more than this.

There has to be.

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3: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, life in the eye of the mourner.

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His left arm is an abomination. He himself is a sight for sore eyes. No one finds him beautiful and neither does he.

It's a sickly red, his left arm, wrinkled like an old man's skin and his nails are as black as the few leftover paper that's left after being burnt by a fire and it's ugly beyond belief. Like blood and coal or red roses and black roses.

The worse part, though, is that there's a cross nailed on the backside of his palm, like the stigmata except neither his feet nor his right hand are marked.

He always covers it with bandages, tying it and choking it up no matter how much it hurts and how much harder it is to use it because it's better to be thought of as a cripple than as the Devil's follower. And it's definitely better to not make the stigmata he already has partly finished actually complete.

Snow falls and his breath comes out in puffs of air, like smoke, and his cheeks are reddened from the chill of the December wind.

The trees are bare and as black as soot and the air are mists like ghosts that travel lightly in a stillness that's suffocating, promising death in its frosty whispers. The sky above is a dead gray and the town the boy is in currently is like a fairytale village with its roads of cobblestone slate and its wooden houses with frames. Untouched and unmarred from Winter's unforgiving touch, life moves on despite the fact that it should have stopped to mourn the dead months that are sure to come.

The unnamed child does not see beauty and so life sees no reason to mourn the deadly.

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4: In a rhythm of heartbeats, a child sleeps as though he wasn't born.

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At the end of the day, the boy with no name sleeps on the streets and counts his heartbeats until he falls asleep.

There's a rhythm his heartbeats follow, and his fingers tap along with it on the wooden bench he's lying on because it's fun and it passes the time away. It's sort of like humming to a long forgotten tune, skipping stones across a pond, or picking up a stick and dragging it across the iron bar like prison fences in the park two streets down from where he was now. It's a hollow sound, an empty noise, and it's calming in a way that's sort of like a lullaby.

Like a music box or a lull the heart makes when it's too tired to stay awake.

The nameless boy of the color of faded hazelnut coffee stains counts his heartbeats away and falls asleep like he was never awake.

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A/N: Footnotes ahoy!

(1) "Terra" is "earth" in Latin.

(2) "Gaia" is "earth" in Greek.

(3) "Tsuchi" is "earth" in Japanese.

(4) "Tierra" is "earth" in Spanish.

(5) "Mondiale" is "earth" in French.