Work Text:
The pain had traveled to his ribs by the time Kanda counted sixty days since he and Tiedoll had parted ways with Allen Walker, Howard Link, and Johnny Gill.
Unlike the stigmata on his arm that had long since hardened into a tough exterior, the skin on his stomach was instead dappled with bruises in various shades of purple. Some were dark to the point where they looked like splotches of ink against his pale skin, while others were like colorful brushstrokes against his otherwise hairless abdomen.
But the pain was the same. After all, Kanda knew the Innocence’s punishment better than he knew himself. Somewhere along the way, the Innocence that he’d drank from Lenalee Lee’s hands had hooked its crystalline tendrils into his digestive track, and left some other kind of evil inside. Nowadays, it wasn’t uncommon for him to throw up after a fight or even a particularly grueling training session. The pain was a hot and livid thing inside his gut. Sometimes Kanda felt like he was an incubator for some otherworldly creature birthed between the union between himself and the Innocence.
Before Zhu Mei Chan had ruined his life by saving it, Kanda had truly been artificial. Sure, he’d been able to eat and drink, but it hadn’t mattered what, so long as he found sustenance for the rudimentary digestive system they’d given him at the time of his forced rebirth. From poisonous mushrooms to improperly stored moonshine, Kanda had spent nearly a decade eating for the sake of eating because he hadn’t been real. He’d been artificial.
But now he wasn’t. The penis in between his legs and hair in his armpits and on his thighs hadn’t existed these past nine years. He’d been made to fight, not to reproduce, but because Zhu Mei Chan had restored life in him, he’d given Kanda his bits back too. After making sure Alma was turned to dust and their ashes scattered in places the Black Order wouldn’t even begin to dream of, Kanda had, had to learn how to be human again. To shit, shave, and sleep normally. To rest.
At first he’d thought that the aches were a culmination of all the years he’d spent eating poison on account of his regenerative abilities, but after the pain had started to sing, he’d realized that the mushrooms and moonshine couldn’t be to blame. Like the soba and the odd bottle of tequila, they were just food.
What was happening instead was what Kanda thought would happen later, maybe after he’d figured out how Cross Marian’s body had disappeared, but as usual, time simply wasn’t on his side.
The Innocence in his body was seeking to eat him sooner rather than later.
Because you’re sweet, his wife would have teased in one ear.
Because you’re stupid, Alma would have teased in the other.
If it wasn’t so comical, Kanda would have told the Science Division, but he didn’t trust anyone in that group except for one man, and that man was far, far away from him, exactly where he belonged.
And now, any food that wasn’t hot vegetable broth or plain lukewarm water made his stomach hurt worse. Kanda gritted his teeth and planned his infiltration into the Cardinal class for sooner rather than later, because if the Innocence was poisoning his stomach now, then it would his infect his brain eventually. He had plenty of secrets to unravel before that happened.
And it would – it always did. That’s how the Fallen Ones became. Kanda knew because they’d known even forty years ago, before his first death. The condition worked more like an infection than anything else. An Exorcist didn’t just become a Fallen One overnight. Being rejected by their God was a lengthy process. It happened slowly, but surely.
And the Black Order had always known, even from the beginning, who was more likely to turn first.
Because they all would, eventually.
He was throwing up hard chunks of something in the bathroom of one of the training rooms farthest from the bumbling personnel.
After stumbling through an Ark gate with two Finders after a harrowing battle in Greece, Kanda had left reporting duties to the staff while making a beeline for the training facilities not in the cross-hairs of Komui Lee or Head Nurse. It might have made sense to have emptied his guts back in Greece, but they’d been in a tiny village plagued by lower-level Akuma on account of the crippling poverty, impending famine, and a war that was as mundane as the mud on his boots, but one that would no doubt create more Akuma until the entire village was consumed with grief, hatred, and the inevitable cannibalism.
It’d happened before in the villages Kanda and his wife couldn’t save when they’d just been children themselves, barely sixteen but deeply devoted to their religion, their Order, and each other.
And he hadn’t wanted to further traumatize the surviving children. They didn’t deserve that after having to watch Kanda kill the village granny who’d turned out to be an Akuma feasting on starving widows and orphans. They’d trusted the old lady to look after their mothers and sisters while they worked the fields that hadn’t yet gone to rot. They hadn’t known that the Akuma was feasting on those pour souls. They hadn’t known that by leaving their women in the care of a monster, they’d doomed them.
The survivors were all boys between the ages of twelve and twenty-one. Kanda knew they’d all remember the Exorcist who killed the granny who’d eaten their mothers and sisters. When the humans waged the war that was already in the papers, Kanda had a feeling that all those boys would join the army. Not in service, of course, but for the inevitable death. Kanda knew because he wanted to die too.
So Kanda had instead returned to Hell to vomit to his heart’s content in relative peace, instead of further traumatizing a bunch of boys who’d never smile again.
Except now he felt like he might have thrown up his actual heart considering the chunks of flesh swimming in the toilet bowl. It shouldn’t have been possible, since he hadn’t had solid food in days because of the growing pains in his stomach, so the only answer left was that his body was finally expelling itself.
Kanda didn’t miss the irony.
He knew if he reached into the bowl and picked up a chunk of the hardened flesh, he’d find it the same leathery texture of his stigmata-ridden arm. The Innocence, it seemed, was turning his insides into crystals as well. Eating him from the inside out, bruising him in the process while laying black coals where they could tickle his throat and press against his chest before making him throw it all up.
It was like looking at overcooked meat. Kanda wanted to slam the toilet cover over the mess, but was too exhausted to do anything but sit in front of the toilet bowl and stare blearily down at the mess he’d made.
“Do you need me to help you to the infirmary?” He heard a pleasant voice ask behind him, leaving no room for argument on whether or not he’d end up in the infirmary, only that he could walk there himself or with the girl offering a hand.
Kanda thought about how it would feel to scoop up his mess and study it in the Science Division’s dreaded lab. He supposed it was inevitable that they’d ended up like this. Now that he remembered himself and all his past sins, he thought that maybe this time around, he could at least do some things right.
If only he’d had the time.
He felt her slender fingers slip around his wrist, partly reminding him that she was still here, partly checking to see how weak his pulse was. He hadn’t heard her sneak up on him at all. That alone should have told him exactly how bad things had gotten since he’d parted from his beloved and the clown they considered their friend.
But then again, Lenalee Lee was as quick as she was quiet. She hadn’t yet become a Fallen One because she was so good at compartmentalizing efficiently. Kanda would always give the girl her accolades. Girls enslaved by the Black Order usually died before they could become teenagers, but Lenalee Lee had made it age seventeen. Soon, she would be an adult, beating the last of the odds standing between her and her freedom.
And she would be free, Kanda told himself. If there was anyone on Earth that deserved to be free, it was the little girl he’d always known was real. Not like him. Not artificial for a decade, before being punished with life again because the worst of his oppressors had decided to grow a conscience at the last minute. Kanda would make sure Lenalee was free before the Innocence in his arm destroyed him for good.
“Yeah,” he finally gurgled with a small grin. He hated making children’s lives harder than they needed to be, and Lenalee was still six months shy of her eighteenth birthday. He’d do as she asked, even if all she’d asked was if he needed help.
Lenalee’s hand went from his wrist to his waist, and while watching as a particular piece of flesh cracked open in the toilet bowl to reveal a vivid pink interior, he felt her pull him up and away from proof that the Innocence was turning his insides into something infernal.
Or maybe it was turning him into a mockery of itself. Was that it? Was it planning to transform just enough of Kanda’s insides that he would have no choice but to choke on his own tongue one of these days? He wouldn’t die immediately. He might lose oxygen to his head, lose sight of what was real and what wasn’t, until everything finally crumbled away and turned him into what they all eventually turned into – a Fallen One.
He closed his eyes only for a second, but in that second, he was hanging off Lenalee’s back with his arms locked around her neck while she swiftly made the long trek to the infirmary where Head Nurse was probably already waiting for them. After all, distance was nothing to the fastest woman alive.
“Thank you,” he mumbled into her shoulder when he found that he could speak again without throwing up another mouthful of blood.
“You say that a lot now,” Lenalee said instead.
Kanda snorted. She wasn’t wrong, of course. He’d said it to Head Nurse a few times, since she’d cleaned his wounds and washed his piss-and-blood-stained sheets. Before, when he was still fake, he didn’t make the kind of messes humans made, but now he loosened his bowels like the rest of them, especially when hurt or feverish. Always sick, always weak. He’d never been as strong as his wife – not in this body, and certainly not in the original.
Head Nurse deserved his thanks for what she did for him, since Kanda knew he didn’t deserve any of it.
And he’d said it to Tiedoll just once, when he’d agreed to go along with his lies that Johnny Gill and Allen Walker were in the wind.
And maybe, just maybe he’d said it once to Cash Dopp because everyone knew that she was Johnny’s woman and the one that he loved and would marry when he returned, and Kanda thought it was his duty to thank the younger woman for having faith in their tiny scientist. He thought it was his duty to make sure that she survived the crisis that was doomed to fall upon the Black Order so that she could see Johnny again. Johnny would need her when both he and Allen Walker went away for good.
“If only your brother worked as hard in the lab as he does when he feeds you gossip after a successful mission,” Kanda wheezed through the pain rebuilding quickly inside of him. If she didn’t get him to Head Nurse soon, he’d throw up all over her shoulder and ruin her outfit, which Komui Lee would hunt him down for.
“He thinks you were replaced,” she said cheekily.
I was, he wanted to say, but couldn’t because Lenalee didn’t know about the lotus flower that died forty years ago, and he didn’t want to burden her with that story. She was his friend, but she was also a kid, and she didn’t have to live knowing Kanda wasn’t Kanda, and that once upon a time, there had been teenage sweethearts who’d married at sixteen, died at twenty, and then were forced to return to the world of the living because Exorcists had no boundaries, not even when it came to their deceased.
“Maybe I was,” he mumbled into her hair.
“So who am I talking to now?”
Kanda didn’t say anything. They walked in silence for some time until they reached a bunch of junior nurses on loan from the North America branch. He heard them squawk in unison but couldn’t really see them, not anymore. He found that he was too tired, and falling asleep fast. If he tried hard enough, maybe he wouldn’t wake up again.
“They say you’ve been making jokes too,” Lenalee said softly when Head Nurse had appeared to lead Lenalee and her cargo into a room.
When Kanda was finally off her back and hooked up to an IV while Head Nurse rushed to take his stomach scans to the lab, Lenalee took his wrist again and thumbed the point where his pulse hummed soft and slow.
“Do you think I’m funny?” He asked her the silence was too much to bear.
“I think you’re sad, Kanda.”
He didn’t deny it. There was a lot he couldn’t deny anymore, now that he remembered who he was and what he’d done. Now that he remembered his real name, and that his wife was dead, that her ghost wasn’t real, that Alma was her even though Alma was their own person, and that Kanda was dead.
You’re disgusting, he remembered Allen shouting at him, his voice twisted with grief and disgust.
“I haven’t been happy in a long time,” he lied quietly, because he had experienced happiness again, had betrayed his wife and Alma in the worst way possible when he’d looked at Johnny Gill and found his lost love again.
But then he remembered the fear in Johnny’s eyes when he’d first told him that he’d escort him to Allen. The fear that then turned into a rigid determination to stop Kanda from picking unnecessary fights with Allen and everyone else around them. He remembered Johnny’s small hands and his thin arms holding back just one of Kanda’s arms, because Kanda was a brute, a monster, a good-for-nothing corpse who should have been burnt and scattered forty years ago.
Disgusting, echoed Allen Walker’s voice inside his head.
“Jerry told me you haven’t had a bowl of soba in days.”
He wanted to tell her that Jerry didn’t know shit from gold, but he didn’t have the energy to snap back at her the way he might have, the way he would have if he hadn’t remembered everything.
Lenalee said something else, but this time, Kanda couldn’t catch it, not while sleep stole him at last as Lenalee’s face was replaced with Johnny’s face blurring against Alma’s face blurring against his wife’s face. Because his brain, now dying, only had room for three people, two of whom were already dead.
But he loved them all anyway.
He loved them so fucking much.
He woke up to Lenalee reading a book next to his bed. She was wearing her hair differently, which meant Head Nurse and Lee had managed to get her to rest before returning to her vigil.
Kanda wished she’d stayed gone. It would have been easier to succumb to the Innocence’s deadly song without her, but now that she was here and Kanda no longer sleeping, he had no choice but to tell her the truth.
She can help, said Alma.
She understands, said his wife.
“Please,” he started hoarsely, tearing her eyes from the little brown book with no inscriptions on the front or back that Kanda could see. He watched as she quietly shut the book and slip it into some pocket on her uniform before leaning forward, her undone hair cascading like a waterfall against Kanda’s feverish face, shielding both their faces from peering eyes, although the nosiest of visitors would think Lenalee was kissing him.
She wasn’t. Her lips were at his ear, and his face was covered in dark hair that smelled like smoke. Maybe he hadn’t been asleep one night. Maybe days had passed and the Innocence had made its way into other regions of his body while Lenalee was called away to fight a holy war that wasn’t even holy.
But she’d returned, because Lenalee Lee was his friend, and Kanda’s friend deserved to know the truth. She could handle it. Not like Tiedoll and Komui Lee who still couldn’t stop their tears whenever Kanda went to war with a fever and bloodshot eyes.
“It spreads like a virus,” he croaked through the blood and mucus coating his mouth. “They know but they don’t tell us. Suman probably thought he was getting sick with a cold before he turned. You can’t just wake up one morning and decide God turned His back on you. They make you think it’s your fault, but it’s not. It happens to all of us because He hates all of us.”
“What, Kanda? What happens?” Lenalee asked him coldly, mechanically.
Good. Good that she’d shut off her heart for good. Good that she cared enough to sit with him, but not enough to let him sleep Death’s sleep and become a Fallen One while dreaming of Johnny kissing him sweet and soft.
“It eats you,” he rasped through blood and pain and a hundred other things. “It consumes its Accommodator. That’s why they created artificial bodies for the Second Exorcist Program. If the bodies aren’t real, then it won’t want to eat them. But the old man put life back into my body. It’s been waiting to finish eating me for a long time.”
Forty years, his wife sighed inside his head.
It’ll be over soon, Yuu, Alma said after.
Lenalee was quiet then, so Kanda finally closed his eyes again. The smoke in her hair, the blood in his mouth, Johnny’s kind, warm eyes glistening with love. For him, even if it was imagined. He would have liked to hold Johnny one more time. Let him lead him around again. Pick up the smaller man, throw him onto his back, and take him for a stroll. He would have liked to see other parts of the world with Johnny Gill the scientist. He would have liked holding his hand and standing beside him.
Not in front of him, not behind, but right beside him. So they wouldn’t be on their own. So the distance between them was measured in instants instead of inches.
He snapped his eyes open when he felt Lenalee’s hand grip his wrist so hard that he knew there would be bruises in the shape of her fingers when she was done.
“How long?” She asked, her voice a pitch higher, on the verge of tears now.
Their eyes didn’t meet. Her hair was still smoke, his mouth still coated with the taste of vomit and old blood.
Kanda cried with her. “I don’t know.”
“Soon?”
He closed his eyes again, hoping she did break his wrist. She deserved to as much as he deserved it. “Soon,” he confirmed softly, and then fell back asleep.
When he woke up again, he was alone. Kanda stared at the ceiling in silence for a full minute before flexing his fingers to see if this was still real, if he was still real. When he determined that he was, in fact, flesh and blood and not a writhing mass made of Innocence and flesh, Kanda finally got up.
After he was cleaned up and dressed, he stepped out into an empty corridor. He waited just outside the door so he could see who would come running first. Usually Head Nurse, but maybe Tiedoll instead. Lee then? His sister?
But minutes passed with no thundering of footsteps, no squawks, no squeals. It was just Kanda in the hall.
No Mugen, and his arm didn’t hurt. He was unblemished, unbothered. Nothing in his hand.
Not even his heart.
“Oh,” he said out loud, even though there was no need to.
“Took you long enough,” he heard a familiar voice. He turned to look at the slender woman striding towards him in a black and gold dress, her blonde hair tucked into a hat he’d gotten her for her eighteenth birthday.
His wife.
“I missed you,” he said pathetically.
Her hand was warm against his cheek. In her eyes, he saw himself, and he didn’t look like the Asian man he’d been forced to become, but instead the stocky man that’d been his true self, the one with the round belly and dimpled cheeks, the one who’d died young.
Who should have stayed dead.
“It’s over then?”
Her smile was sad, which he hated, because she’d never been sad. Angry, yes, but never sad. “It’s not,” she told him.
“So I can’t stay?”
Her face told him everything he needed to know. When he tried to speak again, he felt that he couldn’t open his mouth.
Then someone yanked on his hand, pulling him away from his wife.
He turned around and saw Alma before they’d killed all those Exorcists.
“We have to go,” Alma said.
“I want to stay.”
“You can’t,” Alma and his wife said in unison, bringing tears to his eyes.
“Who are you kidding, darling?” He heard his wife chuckle into his ear while Alma tugged him towards oblivion.
And then he died again.
When he woke up for the last time, he found himself completely naked and in Lenalee’s arms while she was weeping into his hair.
He supposed all semblance of privacy had finally disappeared. She was clutching him to her chest, his back against her chest while his own nudity was open for all the world to see. He only wished he wasn’t so weak that he couldn’t cover himself with a piece of wood. It was all very comical. He should have laughed. Naked and confused and at the mercy of a girl who could kick him to death in an instant.
He coughed when really he tried to talk. Lenalee’s sobs skipped a beat, and then she was forcing him to look at her, which pissed off Kanda even more because she didn’t need to burden herself with his woes.
He wished he’d died.
“You’re alive,” she wept, because all the world ever did was make Lenalee Lee cry.
“What did you do, idiot?” He groused with a pained grin.
And finally, she smiled.
“I didn’t stop it, I only slapped you awake. OK, maybe I kicked you. A lot. But there was something else! Kanda, did you know that you were throwing up flowers? Nii-san couldn’t believe it at first, but after you slipped into a coma, we intubated you in case you threw up in your sleep. You did. Those black shells were filled with flowers of Innocence. They weren’t crystallized like the stigmata in your arm. They were pure. So pure that when we ran tests, we found that it could take on an Accommodator – a new Accommodator. Do you know what that means? It means you’re the Heart. It means it’s been inside of you this entire time! It means that it’s been waiting to possess you, and it almost did! Your heart stopped and Mugen went crazy! It attached itself to your stomach like some kind of shell, and then it covered you in pink flowers. Nii-san called them lotus flowers, but they weren’t flowers, Kanda. They were you. That’s why I did it. I didn’t have the courage before, but after you left with Johnny, I realized how futile everything was. I can’t save myself and my brother. So I chose to save him. He and the others think we’re dead. They think we killed each other. You blew up the entire wing with your flowers, but thankfully Marie was there to help evacuate. General Tiedoll wanted to help me, but I told him he shouldn’t have to take responsibility for your death. I think I scared him, but it’s the truth. If anyone deserves to take the blame, it's me. If you’re worried they’ll find us, don’t be. I kicked you to death and stopped you from killing us. But you killed me too. I cut off parts of our flesh. Don't worry, it'll scar over. Plus, Reever made us masking devices. Only he knows the truth. We’ll be OK, Kanda. We’ll find a way to get the Innocence out of both of us, and we’ll help Allen put an end to this holy war. I’ll bring you back to Johnny, I promise. Yes, I know. Tiedoll told me while you were in a coma. He told me it happened while you were traveling, and that it was pure. Purer than the Innocence. I think you should tell him when we see them again. You have too. He deserves to know. It doesn’t matter that you have the Heart. You’re my best friend. I love you. See how easy that was? Now you can tell him. But don’t tell him it’s because you’re friends. We’re all friends, but it’s different between you and Johnny, and that’s a good thing. Love is a good thing. It’s the best thing. I think it’s the only thing, Kanda. I think it’s all we have left. So let’s go. Let’s find our friends. Let’s tell them the truth so we can finally end this war. And then maybe you and Johnny can get some coffee together. Wouldn’t that be nice? I think he’d like that. I think he’d like that a lot.”