Chapter Text
“Hey, Lenalee?”
“Hm?”
“Just so you know, I just did it to test the rumors.”
“Alright, Lavi.”
“No, really. Cake isn’t a Bookman kind of thing, you know. We like protein, meat, stuff for the road and wanderers.”
“Mmhm.”
“Lenalee! Really. Just for the record (which I get to write anyway), it’s not like I like cake. Or that I don’t. The red meat’s just the thing for me. One hundred percent.”
“Did you talk to Kanda about the cake?”
“No! Or, well, maybe I did, but that doesn’t have anything to do with this. There he is, Yuu! What are you doing here at the main gate?”
“Hmph!”
“Where are you going, Kanda?”
“Let’s catch him! Up, up, and away!”
“Get away from me!”
Just outside the Black Order’s headquarters, a carriage waited silently in the murky fog. Two stiff guards in vertically striped surcoats stood unmoving and rigid by its door, hands clasped in front of them. The air barely stirred when they breathed, and their eyes were obscured behind identical glasses as they faced the tower without a hint of what was going on within the walls of one of humanity’s last bastions in the war against Destruction.
A gravelly wordless cry and the sound of screeching metal announced the opening of the main gate to the Order. The guards didn’t so much as flinch, their positions already perfectly held. A dark figure emerged at a brisk walk from the ramp down to their level, and as it grew closer, the face of Malcolm C. Rouvelier grew clearer long after they’d identified him (though they’d never tell him) by his crisp brown suit and distinct toothbrush mustache.
He was carrying a briefcase in his hands, but he was holding it like one might a tray. Though neither asked what its contents were, the one that hadn’t opened the door for the Chief Inspector offered to take it for him. That offer was ignored as Rouvelier marched up into the carriage and took a seat wordlessly, waving a hand to signal his readiness for their departure, and then an outturned palm to signal that neither guard was to enter the carriage with him.
Both bowed, then closed and locked the door from outside. Rouvelier waited within for the carriage to shake heavily twice as they both climbed up from outside and sat heavily in the drivers’ seats. As the carriage began to roll forward, his hands slowly slid down the sides of the case lying flat on his lap. When he heard the wheels spinning on the path down from HQ, his thumbs popped open the clasps on either side of the handle and he nearly reverently opened the lid of the case.
Inside, an entire circular chocolate cake, sliced into 10, minus one slice, sat in perfection on the tray of a cake display pan. His eyes seemed to light up, even in the dim lighting, and had anyone been in the coach to witness it, one might even say he smiled in delight. It was a fine, fine cake, and it had really been nothing like anything he’d ever made before. There was some sort of new technique to this, and its chocolatey richness was now his subject to study and crack. He’d heard the rumors, too, though how exactly was his secret to tell.
But before all that…
Rouvelier pulled off his white gloves for the second time that day, folding them and leaving them on the seat next to him. He picked at a slice until it had slid away from the slice directly adjacent to it, and made to lift it onto his other hand, like a plate, when suddenly the entire carriage rocked violently. His jaws parted slightly in horror as the slice jerked from where he held it at the end and rolled over the rest of the cake and out of the case, onto the floor of the coach. A soft, wet splat sound that only he could hear signaled the demise of his newfound treasure, and only crumbs and a mess were left in his grasp.
We serve a cruel and capricious God, don't we? he thought bitterly, spilling the crumblings from his hand into the case. He slowly and deliberately, dusted them off, slid his hands up the sides of the lid, and then slammed it down, hearing the clasps catch with the force of his motion. He put his gloves back on, almost muttering under his breath foully, and thought carefully of what to tell the footmen when he reached the next leg of his journey back to Central.