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31_days2008-01-30 10:46 pm
sophiap.livejournal.com) wrote in 31_days2008-01-30 10:46 pm
[Jan. 30] [D.Gray-Man] End of Days, Part 30
Title: End of Days pt. 30
Day/Theme: Jan. 30/the formula defining the concept of existence
Series: D.Gray-Man
Character/Pairing: Ensemble, with a few OCs.
Rating: PG-13
Part 29
Pieces of metal ripped themselves from the stairs and the handrails and pelted past Reever. One clipped his cheek, missing his eye by less than an inch. He cursed loudly and hunched over, covering his head with crossed arms as the metal hit the door with a sound like...
Lavi knew that sound. Loathed that sound. And it went too well with the cries and scream that came from the other side of the door. But he had no idea where he had heard it before. His hand felt like it was on fire, and he had no idea what was happening to him.
The metal embedded around the door flowed around it like solder, sealing it shut. The sounds from the other side diminished but did not die.
Reever wheeled round and gaped at Lavi, face pale and blood streaming down his cheek.
"What the hell was THAT?"
Lavi had collapsed, rump hitting the edge of the metal stair hard. His hand slid down the wall as he fell, and the jolt from the strange (familiar) power made his arm numb.
Reever came storming back up the steps. "My men are fucking dying in there! What the hell are you playing at? You undo whatever that is," he yelled, pointing behind him, "and let me in there right now!"
"There's nothing you could do for them," Lavi heard himself say. "You'd only add to the body count."
Reever looked positively murderous. "Well you can obviously do something, even without your hammer! Tapp's in there. So's Johnny. I thought they were your friends."
Lavi had pulled his hand away from the wall. He stared at it a moment, closing one eye, then the other. He was (not at all) surprised to the fading seal on his palm. A seal with the symbol for metal. "Bookmen don't have friends," he said without thinking.
He heard a sharp intake of breath, and then Reever spoke a little too slowly, a little too coolly, his accent a bit thicker than normal. "I should pop you one in the jaw right here and now, friend. And I will if you don't undo that seal."
What the hell was he doing? Lavi tried to stand up, tried to remember what on earth he was thinking when he locked that door. He couldn't just lock all those people in there with Akuma, could he?
"No... no... You're right," he panted. He slapped the wall again. And again.
"What the hell are you waiting for? Do something!"
Slap. "I can't! I don't remember what I did!" Slap. That one felt closer, and he felt a slight tingle in his hand the way he did when he activated his Innocence. Almost there.
Reever kept on yelling at him to hurry up, and Lavi at once wanted to apologize for screwing up and to haul off and deck Reever the way Reever had threatened to hit him.
Lavi struck the wall one last time and wondered what had gone so wrong.
* * *
Lenalee hit the floor, hard. The pain rippled through her, but still wondered what was going to happen next. Reever--or was it Lavi?--had told her to help Allen, but had she? Had she helped him enough? She hated that he had to go back into the Ark alone. Someone needed to be with him, but it couldn't be her.
She recognized the feel of broken ribs, she had a broken wrist, and the pain in her legs was worse than when she'd pushed her Innocence to its limit. She thought she could feel them unraveling, their undoing spreading up through her nerves, through her blood. She lay there, motionless, trying to focus on the cold stone against her cheek.
If she didn't move, if she didn't get up, she'd be killed. She tried to focus on that. Tried not to think about the crackling, cracking sensation running up her legs. Tried to ignore the cold lump in her stomach when her thoughts took her to Suman Dark and to the boy who'd had the Innocence forced upon him. That was not going to happen to her. It was not.
So, when darkness covered her and muffled the sound of battle, she was almost relieved. She closed her eyes and waited for oblivion.
Strangely enough, oblivion sounded a lot like a little girl tremulously asking "Are you okay?"
Lenalee opened her eyes. It was dark, but not pitch black, and a wide-eyed little face peered down at her. Sickly golden light occasionally showed dimly beyond the black shield covering them, and Lenalee could make out shapes rushing to and fro.
Lenalee did her best to smile. The little girl did look so worried, and she fought to keep her mouth closed as her throat bowed out with suppressed coughs. "I'll keep you safe until the medics get here." It had the sound of something she had said many times before.
"Thank you," Lenalee said, although she suspected that the medics would not be here any time soon. She did not want to be the one to tell the girl it was probably too late, anyway. "What's your name?"
"Dolores."
"That's a lovely name." Lenalee could barely speak. Her eyes drifted closed again. "You have very pretty hair, Dolores."
Long and black, much like Lenalee's had been. She wanted to tell Dolores to be sure to keep it long, and she wished she had something to give the child, but staying awake was too hard.
Her last thought was that her brother was going to be so, so sad.
* * *
Lavi's shout of "Kin Ban!" turned into a howl of pain. He doubled over, clutching at his wrist. Reever saw the seal waver and twist, to be replaced with the honey-comb pattern that he recognized with cold clarity.
"When did your innocence become parasitic?" he demanded. "And how did you get hold of it? Hevlaska--well, it's locked up in the lab." They should have given it to Hevlaska for safekeeping until they could rebuild Lavi's hammer, but with Hevlaska being ill, Komui hadn't wanted to risk it.
"A few... a few years ago." Lavi wondered what the hell he was talking about. He sat down hard, cold with shock. "I don't understand, Reever, oh shit this hurts. I remember it, but it never happened. So why do I remember it?"
Reever reached out to grab Lavi's hand. Lavi pulled back reflexively, but was too weak to evade Reever's grasp.
"I don't understand, either. This is strange..." The anger from before was still there, but for the moment, an urgent curiosity pushed it back. Reever knew that a balky Innocence was more of a threat than any Akuma. "This pattern should be surrounding an Innocence, but there's nothing there. You shouldn't be able to invoke your Innocence from a distance like this. They're not like wireless golems..."
Reever went very quiet and very still. Lavi was about to ask him what was wrong, but he saw the way Reever was concentrating on some unseen point between them, and knew that the man had thought of something, something critical.
"That's right... we had that problem with them when we first deployed them."
Lavi was about to ask him what he meant, but that was when Kanda came running down the stairs and straight past them both on the way to the labs.
Reever's eyes went wide. "I think I just saw something. Please tell me I didn't see what I thought I just saw."
* * *
Jamie felt a sharp tug from somewhere, and between blinks she could see two rooms at once--the one she was in now, and the version she knew from 1918, the one with dwindling piles of crates cluttering the floor: crates of munitions and crates of tinned beef, along with too few boxes of bandages and Dakin's solution.
Later, she wouldn't be able to explain it, but when she saw Walker vanish through that glowing door, his golem going right along with him, she knew she had to follow. She slowed only a second, trying to spot the other. No sign of Misha. No way to pick Rondine out from the other Finders in this chaos. Big black dome in the middle of the room--Dolores playing turtle or sheltering someone. Probably Misha, so that was okay, then.
She shrieked, clearing a path in front of her as she ran. The battle continued. Light and darkness and strange sigils flashed up near the catwalk, but there was no telling if the red-headed exorcist up there was winning or losing his battle.
She ran, exulting in a strength she had never known before the Innocence had nested in her throat. She smiled with feral glee as she saw Lau Jimin twist the head off an Akuma, and then she leapt, grabbing onto the bottom of the edge of the gate and swinging herself up.
It was crazy, and she knew she shouldn't be leaving the battle, but that tug told her this was what they had come here to do. This is what they had come here to stop.
Also crazy was a memory that she knew was not hers, a memory of Walker desperately reaching down to her, trying to save her.
If she felt any shock at emerging in a sunlit city, she tamped it down and focused on following the cloaked figure. She had a world to save and a debt to pay off.
* * *
Halfway down the stairs, the nearly invisible image of Kanda flickered out. Reever shivered in relief; in their line of work, seeing the dead come back--even as just a shade--was never a good thing.
"He was here! That was Yuu, wasn't it? He was really here," Lavi stammered, and the desperate, heartbroken hope in his eyes was enough to make Reever forget his earlier desire to dislodge a couple of Lavi's teeth.
"Yeah. Sort of." Reever's mouth was completely dry. A transparent figure who looked remarkably like Allen--complete with a ghostly Timcanpy flitting along behind him--walked across the landing below and effortlessly pulled open the door that Lavi had welded shut.
The real kicker was when Allen walked through the very solid door that was still welded in place. Reever turned back to Lavi, the set of his face demanding some sort of explanation.
Lavi could only sit there in pained confusion, arm crossing his face as he pressed the heel of his left hand to his right eye.
Reever wanted to press him to try once more to open the door, but he knew it would do no good. He bowed his head for a second, eyes squeezed shut and wondered if he could ever forgive himself. Every second that passed, more of his people were dying--or worse.
"This never happened, did it?" Reever said quietly, head still bowed. "In the timeline you--part of you--remembers, Kanda didn't die until a few years from now. Allen may have destroyed the Ark, but he wasn't doing it now. You and I never had this conversation. And you didn't trap my people in there."
"It was already too--"
"Shut up. I was wrong. I thought your future self had traveled back in time, had possessed you somehow. But that's not it."
The look in Lavi's uncovered eye was unusually sharp. "You're the expert. You tell me."
Reever forced himself not to react to the hateful, sniping tone. It was made easier by the fact that Lavi looked shocked and offended enough at his own words for the both of them. If there was time, Reever could ask what the hell had happened. Or maybe he'd be better off not knowing.
"Fine. I'll tell you. You're seeing two timelines at once, aren't you?"
Lavi nodded, shifting his left hand to cover his eye even more. That slight movement all but confirmed Reever's guess.
"Maybe it's a Bookman thing, or maybe it's just you, but I'd bet everything I own that you can see these divergences you were talking about. Real ones, maybe even possible ones. That's how you knew to send everyone back to now. That's why you keep your eye covered."
Lavi said nothing, but Reever knew better than to read the silence as denial.
"Miranda didn't send Rondine and the others back on her own, did she?" Reever reached down and lightly touched Lavi's right hand. The slight graze of skin against fragmenting skin was enough to make Lavi whimper in agony. "Your future self did something with your Innocence."
"Stuck it into the Time Record. Used the Heaven Seal. I think." Lavi shook his head wildly, still covering his eye. "This is all crazy. This is worse than what Road did to me. I think she broke me or something. I'm coming apart."
Reever looked at the decay pattern creeping up Lavi's wrist and decided it might be best not to say anything about how that last part looked as if it might be literally true.
"This isn't Road. This is you. And Miranda." Reever hunkered down in front of Lavi, trying to get the boy to look at him. He wasn't sure how much of this Lavi understood. "And I think we may be able to undo some of this. Dear God, I hope we can undo some of this. If I'm right, the portal you and Miranda opened from 1918 is still open. Maybe that's why Miranda isn't waking up. Maybe it's why you can activate a parasitic Innocence you don't even have yet. You're pulling it from your future self, and sometimes it's you speaking to me, and sometimes it's him. It's like the problem we had witht the wireless golems at first. If frequencies were too close to each other, transmissions would overlap each other, and you'd be hearing two separate conversations at once."
Again, it was like being on a runaway horse. The reasoning carried him along so fast he could barely keep up with his own mouth.
"Maybe that's why you got sick in this timeline when you didn't in the other. Your future self pushed his Innocence too far, and it's tearing him apart." Here, Reever reached out and carefully held his hand a scant inch above Lavi's. "Problem is, you got hit by it, too. I remember how trashed you looked, coming off the Ark. When Krory drained your blood, it probably left a few traces of the Akuma virus in you. I wager your Innocence would have been enough to suppress it. Or maybe it's only toxic above a certain level. That doesn't matter. What matters is that you were weakened enough where whatever was left in your blood could become something else."
Lavi was quiet for a while, and Reever thought he could guess at what the boy was thinking about. So many dead in so little time, and while Reever could go hoarse telling him it wasn't his fault, he knew it would do nothing to ease the guilt.
"So what do we do now?" he asked softly. "How do we fix this? How do we even know what to fix?"
* * *
This was how he could save them. This was how he could end it, fix it. Allen knew what he had to do. It was so simple, he almost laughed for it.
He could destroy the Egg. And if he couldn't destroy the egg, he would seal it away deep withing the Ark so that no one could get to it and nothing could emerge from it ever again.
His right hand was useless, but the fingers of his left hand were already wiggling in anticipation of the tune he was only just starting to hear. The melody was seductive, and even though he could only hear fragments of it, he knew he could play it. Even one-handed, he could play it. All he had to do was figure out the missing bits. Or maybe Timcanpy could supply those.
He was so caught up in the music that he couldn't hear the harsh, piercing voice calling out his name over and over.
* * *
Reever stormed into the infirmary. "You and you," he said pointing to a pair of medics who were carrying another body down to the makeshift morgue, "put that down and go get Lavi. He's two flights down, near the entrance to the labs."
"'Put that down?'" one of the medics echoed, brows drawing together. His compatriot had gone still with indignation.
"The living take priority over the dead. Now, go!" Next, he grabbed hold of a nurse who had the misfortune to be standing too close to him. "We need to wake Miranda Lotto."
"We've tried," she explained. "We can rouse her for a few seconds but--"
"I need more than a few seconds. Have you tried stimulants."
"Only in small doses. They only work a little."
"Then increase the dose to something that will work. You," he said to another nurse, "go start doing whatever you need to do to Miranda to get her ready."
"Mister Wenham," the first nurse said, speaking to him as if he were an idiot, "if we increase the dose too much it could lead to a damaged heart or even brain damage. You can't just go increasing dosages the way you'd increase power supply to a machine."
"I don't care! Do it!" The only problem was, he did care. And he did know the risks. He knew all this, and he also knew he had no other choices..
The nurses looked at him in open shock. None of them moved.
"What the hell are you waiting for? Go on!" he barked, waving harshly towards the dispensary.
One of the nurses--the one who had initially objected--did not move, but one of her fellows hurried off to the dispensary and the other quietly said she would get the patient ready. Her accusing glance said nothing that Reever wasn't telling himself ten-fold.
When the nurse came back from the dispensary, Reever stepped in front of her, blocking her path. She was a small thing, and she looked up at him so fearfully. He held out a hand, and when he spoke, it was with a gentleness that scaredher more than his earlier anger did.
"I'll take it. This'll be on my conscience, not yours."
The nurse placed the syringe into his hand, laying it in his palm so tentatively he thought she might snatch it back again. He didn't give her the chance. He went straight into Miranda's room and sat down in the visitor's chair, watching her sleep and wondering how long it would take the medics to bring Lavi.
TBC
Day/Theme: Jan. 30/the formula defining the concept of existence
Series: D.Gray-Man
Character/Pairing: Ensemble, with a few OCs.
Rating: PG-13
Part 29
Pieces of metal ripped themselves from the stairs and the handrails and pelted past Reever. One clipped his cheek, missing his eye by less than an inch. He cursed loudly and hunched over, covering his head with crossed arms as the metal hit the door with a sound like...
Lavi knew that sound. Loathed that sound. And it went too well with the cries and scream that came from the other side of the door. But he had no idea where he had heard it before. His hand felt like it was on fire, and he had no idea what was happening to him.
The metal embedded around the door flowed around it like solder, sealing it shut. The sounds from the other side diminished but did not die.
Reever wheeled round and gaped at Lavi, face pale and blood streaming down his cheek.
"What the hell was THAT?"
Lavi had collapsed, rump hitting the edge of the metal stair hard. His hand slid down the wall as he fell, and the jolt from the strange (familiar) power made his arm numb.
Reever came storming back up the steps. "My men are fucking dying in there! What the hell are you playing at? You undo whatever that is," he yelled, pointing behind him, "and let me in there right now!"
"There's nothing you could do for them," Lavi heard himself say. "You'd only add to the body count."
Reever looked positively murderous. "Well you can obviously do something, even without your hammer! Tapp's in there. So's Johnny. I thought they were your friends."
Lavi had pulled his hand away from the wall. He stared at it a moment, closing one eye, then the other. He was (not at all) surprised to the fading seal on his palm. A seal with the symbol for metal. "Bookmen don't have friends," he said without thinking.
He heard a sharp intake of breath, and then Reever spoke a little too slowly, a little too coolly, his accent a bit thicker than normal. "I should pop you one in the jaw right here and now, friend. And I will if you don't undo that seal."
What the hell was he doing? Lavi tried to stand up, tried to remember what on earth he was thinking when he locked that door. He couldn't just lock all those people in there with Akuma, could he?
"No... no... You're right," he panted. He slapped the wall again. And again.
"What the hell are you waiting for? Do something!"
Slap. "I can't! I don't remember what I did!" Slap. That one felt closer, and he felt a slight tingle in his hand the way he did when he activated his Innocence. Almost there.
Reever kept on yelling at him to hurry up, and Lavi at once wanted to apologize for screwing up and to haul off and deck Reever the way Reever had threatened to hit him.
Lavi struck the wall one last time and wondered what had gone so wrong.
* * *
Lenalee hit the floor, hard. The pain rippled through her, but still wondered what was going to happen next. Reever--or was it Lavi?--had told her to help Allen, but had she? Had she helped him enough? She hated that he had to go back into the Ark alone. Someone needed to be with him, but it couldn't be her.
She recognized the feel of broken ribs, she had a broken wrist, and the pain in her legs was worse than when she'd pushed her Innocence to its limit. She thought she could feel them unraveling, their undoing spreading up through her nerves, through her blood. She lay there, motionless, trying to focus on the cold stone against her cheek.
If she didn't move, if she didn't get up, she'd be killed. She tried to focus on that. Tried not to think about the crackling, cracking sensation running up her legs. Tried to ignore the cold lump in her stomach when her thoughts took her to Suman Dark and to the boy who'd had the Innocence forced upon him. That was not going to happen to her. It was not.
So, when darkness covered her and muffled the sound of battle, she was almost relieved. She closed her eyes and waited for oblivion.
Strangely enough, oblivion sounded a lot like a little girl tremulously asking "Are you okay?"
Lenalee opened her eyes. It was dark, but not pitch black, and a wide-eyed little face peered down at her. Sickly golden light occasionally showed dimly beyond the black shield covering them, and Lenalee could make out shapes rushing to and fro.
Lenalee did her best to smile. The little girl did look so worried, and she fought to keep her mouth closed as her throat bowed out with suppressed coughs. "I'll keep you safe until the medics get here." It had the sound of something she had said many times before.
"Thank you," Lenalee said, although she suspected that the medics would not be here any time soon. She did not want to be the one to tell the girl it was probably too late, anyway. "What's your name?"
"Dolores."
"That's a lovely name." Lenalee could barely speak. Her eyes drifted closed again. "You have very pretty hair, Dolores."
Long and black, much like Lenalee's had been. She wanted to tell Dolores to be sure to keep it long, and she wished she had something to give the child, but staying awake was too hard.
Her last thought was that her brother was going to be so, so sad.
* * *
Lavi's shout of "Kin Ban!" turned into a howl of pain. He doubled over, clutching at his wrist. Reever saw the seal waver and twist, to be replaced with the honey-comb pattern that he recognized with cold clarity.
"When did your innocence become parasitic?" he demanded. "And how did you get hold of it? Hevlaska--well, it's locked up in the lab." They should have given it to Hevlaska for safekeeping until they could rebuild Lavi's hammer, but with Hevlaska being ill, Komui hadn't wanted to risk it.
"A few... a few years ago." Lavi wondered what the hell he was talking about. He sat down hard, cold with shock. "I don't understand, Reever, oh shit this hurts. I remember it, but it never happened. So why do I remember it?"
Reever reached out to grab Lavi's hand. Lavi pulled back reflexively, but was too weak to evade Reever's grasp.
"I don't understand, either. This is strange..." The anger from before was still there, but for the moment, an urgent curiosity pushed it back. Reever knew that a balky Innocence was more of a threat than any Akuma. "This pattern should be surrounding an Innocence, but there's nothing there. You shouldn't be able to invoke your Innocence from a distance like this. They're not like wireless golems..."
Reever went very quiet and very still. Lavi was about to ask him what was wrong, but he saw the way Reever was concentrating on some unseen point between them, and knew that the man had thought of something, something critical.
"That's right... we had that problem with them when we first deployed them."
Lavi was about to ask him what he meant, but that was when Kanda came running down the stairs and straight past them both on the way to the labs.
Reever's eyes went wide. "I think I just saw something. Please tell me I didn't see what I thought I just saw."
* * *
Jamie felt a sharp tug from somewhere, and between blinks she could see two rooms at once--the one she was in now, and the version she knew from 1918, the one with dwindling piles of crates cluttering the floor: crates of munitions and crates of tinned beef, along with too few boxes of bandages and Dakin's solution.
Later, she wouldn't be able to explain it, but when she saw Walker vanish through that glowing door, his golem going right along with him, she knew she had to follow. She slowed only a second, trying to spot the other. No sign of Misha. No way to pick Rondine out from the other Finders in this chaos. Big black dome in the middle of the room--Dolores playing turtle or sheltering someone. Probably Misha, so that was okay, then.
She shrieked, clearing a path in front of her as she ran. The battle continued. Light and darkness and strange sigils flashed up near the catwalk, but there was no telling if the red-headed exorcist up there was winning or losing his battle.
She ran, exulting in a strength she had never known before the Innocence had nested in her throat. She smiled with feral glee as she saw Lau Jimin twist the head off an Akuma, and then she leapt, grabbing onto the bottom of the edge of the gate and swinging herself up.
It was crazy, and she knew she shouldn't be leaving the battle, but that tug told her this was what they had come here to do. This is what they had come here to stop.
Also crazy was a memory that she knew was not hers, a memory of Walker desperately reaching down to her, trying to save her.
If she felt any shock at emerging in a sunlit city, she tamped it down and focused on following the cloaked figure. She had a world to save and a debt to pay off.
* * *
Halfway down the stairs, the nearly invisible image of Kanda flickered out. Reever shivered in relief; in their line of work, seeing the dead come back--even as just a shade--was never a good thing.
"He was here! That was Yuu, wasn't it? He was really here," Lavi stammered, and the desperate, heartbroken hope in his eyes was enough to make Reever forget his earlier desire to dislodge a couple of Lavi's teeth.
"Yeah. Sort of." Reever's mouth was completely dry. A transparent figure who looked remarkably like Allen--complete with a ghostly Timcanpy flitting along behind him--walked across the landing below and effortlessly pulled open the door that Lavi had welded shut.
The real kicker was when Allen walked through the very solid door that was still welded in place. Reever turned back to Lavi, the set of his face demanding some sort of explanation.
Lavi could only sit there in pained confusion, arm crossing his face as he pressed the heel of his left hand to his right eye.
Reever wanted to press him to try once more to open the door, but he knew it would do no good. He bowed his head for a second, eyes squeezed shut and wondered if he could ever forgive himself. Every second that passed, more of his people were dying--or worse.
"This never happened, did it?" Reever said quietly, head still bowed. "In the timeline you--part of you--remembers, Kanda didn't die until a few years from now. Allen may have destroyed the Ark, but he wasn't doing it now. You and I never had this conversation. And you didn't trap my people in there."
"It was already too--"
"Shut up. I was wrong. I thought your future self had traveled back in time, had possessed you somehow. But that's not it."
The look in Lavi's uncovered eye was unusually sharp. "You're the expert. You tell me."
Reever forced himself not to react to the hateful, sniping tone. It was made easier by the fact that Lavi looked shocked and offended enough at his own words for the both of them. If there was time, Reever could ask what the hell had happened. Or maybe he'd be better off not knowing.
"Fine. I'll tell you. You're seeing two timelines at once, aren't you?"
Lavi nodded, shifting his left hand to cover his eye even more. That slight movement all but confirmed Reever's guess.
"Maybe it's a Bookman thing, or maybe it's just you, but I'd bet everything I own that you can see these divergences you were talking about. Real ones, maybe even possible ones. That's how you knew to send everyone back to now. That's why you keep your eye covered."
Lavi said nothing, but Reever knew better than to read the silence as denial.
"Miranda didn't send Rondine and the others back on her own, did she?" Reever reached down and lightly touched Lavi's right hand. The slight graze of skin against fragmenting skin was enough to make Lavi whimper in agony. "Your future self did something with your Innocence."
"Stuck it into the Time Record. Used the Heaven Seal. I think." Lavi shook his head wildly, still covering his eye. "This is all crazy. This is worse than what Road did to me. I think she broke me or something. I'm coming apart."
Reever looked at the decay pattern creeping up Lavi's wrist and decided it might be best not to say anything about how that last part looked as if it might be literally true.
"This isn't Road. This is you. And Miranda." Reever hunkered down in front of Lavi, trying to get the boy to look at him. He wasn't sure how much of this Lavi understood. "And I think we may be able to undo some of this. Dear God, I hope we can undo some of this. If I'm right, the portal you and Miranda opened from 1918 is still open. Maybe that's why Miranda isn't waking up. Maybe it's why you can activate a parasitic Innocence you don't even have yet. You're pulling it from your future self, and sometimes it's you speaking to me, and sometimes it's him. It's like the problem we had witht the wireless golems at first. If frequencies were too close to each other, transmissions would overlap each other, and you'd be hearing two separate conversations at once."
Again, it was like being on a runaway horse. The reasoning carried him along so fast he could barely keep up with his own mouth.
"Maybe that's why you got sick in this timeline when you didn't in the other. Your future self pushed his Innocence too far, and it's tearing him apart." Here, Reever reached out and carefully held his hand a scant inch above Lavi's. "Problem is, you got hit by it, too. I remember how trashed you looked, coming off the Ark. When Krory drained your blood, it probably left a few traces of the Akuma virus in you. I wager your Innocence would have been enough to suppress it. Or maybe it's only toxic above a certain level. That doesn't matter. What matters is that you were weakened enough where whatever was left in your blood could become something else."
Lavi was quiet for a while, and Reever thought he could guess at what the boy was thinking about. So many dead in so little time, and while Reever could go hoarse telling him it wasn't his fault, he knew it would do nothing to ease the guilt.
"So what do we do now?" he asked softly. "How do we fix this? How do we even know what to fix?"
* * *
This was how he could save them. This was how he could end it, fix it. Allen knew what he had to do. It was so simple, he almost laughed for it.
He could destroy the Egg. And if he couldn't destroy the egg, he would seal it away deep withing the Ark so that no one could get to it and nothing could emerge from it ever again.
His right hand was useless, but the fingers of his left hand were already wiggling in anticipation of the tune he was only just starting to hear. The melody was seductive, and even though he could only hear fragments of it, he knew he could play it. Even one-handed, he could play it. All he had to do was figure out the missing bits. Or maybe Timcanpy could supply those.
He was so caught up in the music that he couldn't hear the harsh, piercing voice calling out his name over and over.
* * *
Reever stormed into the infirmary. "You and you," he said pointing to a pair of medics who were carrying another body down to the makeshift morgue, "put that down and go get Lavi. He's two flights down, near the entrance to the labs."
"'Put that down?'" one of the medics echoed, brows drawing together. His compatriot had gone still with indignation.
"The living take priority over the dead. Now, go!" Next, he grabbed hold of a nurse who had the misfortune to be standing too close to him. "We need to wake Miranda Lotto."
"We've tried," she explained. "We can rouse her for a few seconds but--"
"I need more than a few seconds. Have you tried stimulants."
"Only in small doses. They only work a little."
"Then increase the dose to something that will work. You," he said to another nurse, "go start doing whatever you need to do to Miranda to get her ready."
"Mister Wenham," the first nurse said, speaking to him as if he were an idiot, "if we increase the dose too much it could lead to a damaged heart or even brain damage. You can't just go increasing dosages the way you'd increase power supply to a machine."
"I don't care! Do it!" The only problem was, he did care. And he did know the risks. He knew all this, and he also knew he had no other choices..
The nurses looked at him in open shock. None of them moved.
"What the hell are you waiting for? Go on!" he barked, waving harshly towards the dispensary.
One of the nurses--the one who had initially objected--did not move, but one of her fellows hurried off to the dispensary and the other quietly said she would get the patient ready. Her accusing glance said nothing that Reever wasn't telling himself ten-fold.
When the nurse came back from the dispensary, Reever stepped in front of her, blocking her path. She was a small thing, and she looked up at him so fearfully. He held out a hand, and when he spoke, it was with a gentleness that scaredher more than his earlier anger did.
"I'll take it. This'll be on my conscience, not yours."
The nurse placed the syringe into his hand, laying it in his palm so tentatively he thought she might snatch it back again. He didn't give her the chance. He went straight into Miranda's room and sat down in the visitor's chair, watching her sleep and wondering how long it would take the medics to bring Lavi.
TBC