Work Text:
Time isn’t necessarily linear, see.
There are whole lives that pass in sunlight. Whole lives where the lotus has no more significance than a waft of perfume that turns Alma’s eye. A tattoo spiraling down his shoulders. An illustration in a storybook. There are whole lives that pass in peace; in partnership; in prosperity. In hands meeting hands on a glowing parquet dance floor. In steel against steel cutting teeth on broad grins; in fencing for sport. In bus tokens and plane tickets and phone calls that wind static and soft breathing through the small hours of the night.
Time, like magic, hope, and all other unkeepable things, will do as it will.
It will end in the sand. It will end pale and shattered. It all will end in a blurred vision and an impossible whisper.
Then, after it ends—to some understandings, to atlas maps of souls, to a punch-clock grasp of the cycle of reincarnation—after it ends, Kanda Yuu opens his eyes, runs his hand down Alma’s back breathing slow and healthful beside him, and sets his alarm clock back an hour.
In a chamber far underground, forests of wrapped bodies lay interred untouched and wrapped in seals and prayers. Consecrated, sanctified, left to rest; Bak Chang delivers every Innocence to Hevlaska with his parents’ blood beneath his nails and holy fire in his eyes. Never again, he says, unable to meet that child’s eyes. He never returns the bodies. An uncounted number of exorcists given over to science never give their ashes to the braziers of their forbears. The lab remains sealed with a magic deeper than any Bak himself could know.
Fou felt a bit beholden to the extra mile, in this case.
In the case of Kanda Yuu, he walks in clarity. Throbbing stigmata on his wrists remind him of the pulsing of his heart. His chest stays silent, painted over in ink. His dreams are clean of mud and clear of thunder. At Allen Walker’s back, purpose tolls like a bell, a straightline road to consumption and eternity.
In the case of Alma Karma, who can know? Stripped of the halo and wings that she carried to her last death, her body lies cold as brown stems and barren seeds. The laws of souls and scales demand the balance of his utter eradication, but his counterweight draws breath still.
And he’s ordering a pizza in parallel. Lives laid upon each other like tracing paper and proof and negatives on film, following no sequence, tethered to no points but the two circling each other in a space wide enough and deep enough to contain an infinite of possibilities. Love, like time, like the delivery boy, like birds half-migrated home—it passes, and it passes, and it passes, and it ends in ruins, and it ends in eyes rolled back, and it ends in the place where it began all those many milliseconds ago.
And Kanda hums a few bars of his favorite song on the long drive home.