Chapter Text
When the two of them crested the hill, he had been turned the other way. It was a touch on his arm from a Finder that startled him, a murmured name that made him turn, and the look in her eyes that dug a deep pit into his core. Somewhere in the back of his head he felt himself plummeting, down, down, down, even as he knew he had his feet planted on packed dirt and a tangled carpet of wires. He was sick with the feeling of déjà vu pressing down on him.
His heart began to pound to the solid beat of the wings of golems hovering overhead.
Nothing else had happened. Most everyone else was still looking another way, focused on other work. None of them could have read that tremor to her lips, as she fought to press them steady, or that rise to the corners of her eyes, not like he could. She knew where she would see him, perched in the very center and flanked by two men, and long before she reached the base of the camp they had already finished a conversation with their eyes. In between, the others had noticed the approaching figures. Two volunteers ran over to take Walker from her shoulder. The boy was bleeding heavily over the unscarred side of his face, and with his blood dripped bitter tears. His teeth were grit too tight to protest against their help, his fist too tightly clenched to push away their hands. The spotless white cape draped over his shoulders trembled with him, unnatural and bright in the midst of grime and metal.
“Sir?” the Finders prompted. He marched down between them, his feet heavy with dread. To ask of her to say it for him, to put it to words heard aloud, to make it real, he didn’t have the nerve, not while she looked through him like that, with her attempt to disassociate clear in her unfocusing eyes.
“Lenalee,” he whispered, but she heard.
“We had to walk over. Allen missed when he opened a gate for us,” she said quietly. “He took a direct hit to his head, he’s… he’s not thinking straight.”
A strangled noise came from Allen. He choked back tears like he was still fighting them, and they all heard it. Lenalee’s expression didn’t change, but the tears began to pool and drip, sliding over the curves of her cheeks and falling by her feet. She trembled from head to toe, but what made her pause as she spoke were the gasps for air in between. She was drowning in her own way and there was nothing Komui could do to reach in and take her up.
“It was a direct attack, right from ahead. The three of us lost track of Bookman and Miranda going through the trees, but we kept running because they would, too. We ran and ran, and then we ran right into the akuma. Of course we fought, fought in practice formation, but Allen was right in the front and they hit him straight on. There were limbs, explosions, akuma gas, there was no space for flight so we ran… We could barely see through it and that was what they must have been expecting.
“From below, or was it the side? Past the other level 3s there came another one, moving nearly as fast as me, and here it came and we thought we were ready and we shifted but we had already lost. It made a suicide dive right towards him, its hands closed on his wrists and everything smelled like electricity and I dove at them, I grabbed him. I had his shoulder in my hand!”
Lenalee gripped Komui’s sleeve tightly. He pulled her in against him and let her rest her head against the badge upon his chest. He was dimly aware of Allen sitting heavily on the ground, his eyes pressed into the palm of his hand as he wept. Gazes turned, mouths whispered. He held her closer yet, fending off the stares.
They had been deployed as a force of five.
“I held his shoulder and then he was gone! I lost him, I lost Lavi.”
***
Lavi had no fight left in him. There seemed to be no space in his skull left for thinking and analyzing the blur of memory that looped over and over in his mind’s eye. A speeding darkness, a myriad of wild, rolling eyes, two hands on his wrists and Lenalee at his shoulder. There had been no time for farewells, no time to think about what to tell her, and then he’d felt the pain of being pushed apart from the inside. He heard the wheeze of his lungs and the creaking of his ribs, the soft squelching of his flesh as he was pressed through a pinpoint for the briefest of moments, and then he was through it.
The pain of a moment ago already felt like a distant memory. Akuma, he whispered to himself. A cognitive check would help. Invasion. Team. Exorcists. Bookman. The old man was going to kill him for this, he already knew it.
A gnarled root was stabbing up painfully into the small of his back, and he felt cold, smooth soil beneath his palms. Maybe he’d been knocked into a different section of the forest, too far to hear the fighting. His muscles were like jelly and tingled fiercely if he tried to move, so he lay still, breathing as deeply as he could without a sharp pain in his side. It was comforting to feel the expansion of his chest cavity again. The calls of a lone songbird came through the silence, sweet and clear but distant, and slowly, Lavi opened his eyes.
Overhead, instead of foliage, a curtain of blond hair as long as he was tall blocked out the sunlight filtering through. A disproportionately wide mouth that stretched from ear to ear on a giant face began to peel apart its lips and as a hand the size of a wagon cupped over him, Lavi had the strangest feeling he wasn’t anywhere close to where he thought he was.