Work Text:
The flick of a match, the smell of pungent tobacco, the sound of pages being turned were all usual things for a Bookman and his apprentice.
“You’re getting awfully close to that Campbell boy.” Bookman says, breaking the heavy silence that had filled the room for the past twenty minutes, but that was also nothing unfamiliar. Both Bookman and apprentice tended to get quiet whenever focused.
A pen is set down, a chair scrapes against wood flooring, and a head is lifted. Long red hair that hangs loosely is brushed away and tucked behind an ear. Intelligent but still naïve – they were always so naïve at this age, no matter how many wars they fought or how detached from humanity they felt – eyes meet his own from above a pair of thick round glasses.
“You told me to get close to him, Bookman.” His apprentice says with a roll of his eyes, returning to his work. “It’s my job to get close to him, remember? Are you finally becoming senile?”
Bookman takes a few steps in order to smack his apprentice’s head, but the young man barely gives him a reaction, other than a grunt.
From over the young man’s shoulder, the old scribe sees that it is not a book his apprentice is reading, but what seems to be a score and a code, spread between several different pieces of paper. His mouth curls in an unpleasant manner and he keeps a suspicious eye on his apprentice’s back as he backs up to where he had been before.
“Don’t do anything you’re not supposed to be doing, brat,”
“Yes, yes… Why would I do anything like that, Bookman? Would it kill you to have faith in your apprentice?”
Bookman had seen the way his apprentice and Neah Campbell tended to linger around the ark. He had seen the warm smiles and the way their heads had bowed together as they whispered secrets over a book or some paper, the way Neah sent his apprentice secret looks that he didn’t even send his own brother. He had seen the way that his apprentice’s eyes seemed to gleam whenever the young fourteenth Noah was mentioned, even if it was in passing, and the way Neah smiled to his apprentice in ways he didn’t to anyone in the ark besides Mana. Most notably, he had noticed the way that the two seemed to vanish into thin air at times, unable to be tracked down by the akuma.
If only he could have more faith.
Having more faith in his apprentice would have just made things worse Bookman concludes only months later.
His apprentice had been competent and intelligent – every apprentice had to be, along with other things and he had fit the bill perfectly – but Bookman had underestimated this foolish boy quite drastically.
He realizes this when he watches his apprentices’ shoulders heave, body curled up into a ball as he clutched onto his hair by the root as if it were his lifeline. Across the room, Neah Campbell lies in a pool of his own blood, eyes no longer golden and heart no longer beating. Nothing but a memory now, hardly even ink on paper and only then was it the brief mention of a traitor Noah who had killed all but two of his ‘brothers and sisters’ in a reckless and shoddily planned coup before dying himself.
“I… I forfeit my position as bookman apprentice.” The youth announces in a voice thick with tears before Bookman can even say a word. Even through twenty-eight wars and other conflicts, Bookman had never seen his apprentice so distraught.
“What did you do, you utter fool?!” Bookman snarls, angrier than he’s been in ages.
“I am no longer qualified to become the next Bookman. Neah implanted his memories inside of me. Someday, he’s going awaken again.” The determination in his apprentice’s – ex-apprentice, he wouldn’t stay by his side after this, not after having a leading role in deliberately tampering the course of history and letting his feelings come first before duty – voice and eyes is startling and, again, unlike anything he’s heard from the boy before. It makes him wonder just how close he and Neah Campbell had gotten on the ark and on the run. What could have inspired this such devotion that would make his apprentice – quite literally – throw his life away?
“You idiot. You have failed as a bookman,” is the last thing Bookman says to the utter fool that was his apprentice for just over fifteen years before turning on his heel and marching off, planning on never seeing the young redhead again. That is, not at least until Neah resurrects himself in his body, which could take months or even years. Maybe, if years go by, it will staunch the betrayal that burns in the old man’s blood.
He dwells on his old apprentice quite a bit on his downtime. It takes quite a few years for him to find a suitable new apprentice, but when he does, they scarcely stop moving. His young apprentice who is already on name number 49 despite his young age, reminds him a bit of his first, but their differences become clear to Bookman after the first few weeks. Bookman hopes this one turns out to be less of a fool. He doesn’t know what would happen to the Bookman clan if he isn’t.
Thirty-five years after he had seen last seen his former apprentice, Bookman finds himself meeting his old apprentice once again, though he does not realize this at first. It takes him a few weeks to realize just who this Allen Walker is. His hair is white now and he’s acquired an innocence that overtakes the entirety of his left arm, not to mention an akuma curse mark, but the most shocking thing is the fact that he had only grown younger over the past thirty-five years. It’s a mystery surely how the young ‘Destroyer of Time’ came to be in such a manner, but Bookman doesn’t suppose Allen knows himself. He doesn’t recognize Bookman or even seem to be aware of the Noah inside of him, a bomb just waiting to go off.
A bomb that he himself had planted thirty-five years ago out of devotion for another.
A bomb that will only cause strife for a young man who knows nothing and just wants to help the akuma of all things.
Bookman doesn’t think he will ever fully understand why his first apprentice had done such a thing or why Allen Walker fights, though he has long since figured out why. Both had started with love and both will end with death.
But in truth, that is what war was – death and devotion – not always in equal parts, sometimes one more cruller than the other. It was not a bookman’s place to take a place on the front lines in a war, unless it gave them the best source for information or the situation was desperate and they were being attacked. A bookman’s sole job was to observe and record without a bias. Something that his first apprentice hadn’t be able to do and something that his second was having increased difficulty with.
History was rarely ever simple. In all of his days as Bookman, he had seen the damage that history could wreck. It could save lives just as easily as it could start a war and end them. A curse to some, a blessing to others and nearly always complicated. Battles lost and battles won, empires and oceans and every single star in the sky. Every single word written and every word spoken, the living and the dead, everything weighed on this single war that would either see the end of humanity or just the beginning.
Now all of history, past and present, was looking towards Allen Walker; a young man that was never meant to be ink on paper and probably wouldn’t be alive for much longer because of the love in his heart.