Visitor
Summary: Allen gets an unexpected visit from Rhode, who insists that they aren't so different.
Written: June 2007
Disclaimer: D. Gray-man series and characters do not belong to me.
Allen woke up in a different room.
It resembled the narrow, musty room in the Black Order headquarters that he'd gone to sleep in, but the blackness around him was more spacious than it should have been, and light glinted off some indiscernable objects in the air. Allen propped himself up on an elbow. His left eye, recently healed, was calm, so there were probably no Akuma around. If only it could see in the dark, instead of forcing him to see the darkness in people, then it would really be useful.
The lacy curtains stirred in a breeze that brought a new chill into the room. Allen hesitantly lifted a hand to touch one of the dark wedges suspended in the air. Was it an optical illusion brought on by the dimness?
Wait...curtains? Allen bolted from under his sheets and half-tripped over one of the voodoo dolls on the floor towards where there was supposed to be a tiny window with bars. Now there was an open window with thin black curtains trimmed in lace. Moonlight seeped faintly through. Allen whirled back to face the door (still there) and the spiral shapes hanging in mockery of gravity brought that other room to his mind--
From the other side of the bed came a girl's familiar laughter. A match hissed alight. Illuminated were golden eyes, a row of crosses across a monochrome forehead.
"I thought I'd come visit you like I said I would," said Rhode from her small halo of matchlight.
"You--Rhode!?" Allen turned his left arm into its claw. In the room that wasn't Allen's was a human, and this was infinitely worse than an Akuma.
Allen's bed, which was by the wall in his proper room, was now in the middle of a new one. Rhode leapt on top of the cot and lit two midair candles before waving the match out.
"What are you doing here?" demanded Allen, and was unable to tell what mixture of anger and fear had emerged in his voice. He edged along the wall towards the door. Flickering candlelight showed that what he'd tripped over had been a stuffed bear and not one of the voodoo dolls Allen hadn't bothered to remove from his Order room. The teddy bear's grin was manic and stiched over with heavy threads. Allen shuddered.
"I just told you, didn't I?" replied Rhode. "I'm visiting you." She held a new match to a lit candle. "Close that window, the candles will blow out." She sounded half-bored. Hadn't she sounded that way most of the time she'd held Linali, Miranda, and Allen in that otherworldly room? Allen hadn't been in a state to notice details, but the tone of her voice and its implication that they were outworn playthings had been maddening.
"Get the hell out of my room. And away from the Order." He wanted to get the hell out of his room--or what had been his room when he'd gone to bed--but he couldn't leave Rhode where she could immediately go attack someone else at the headquarters. And yet, despite having witnessed her tormenting Miranda and committing other cruelties, he was reluctant to attack her. She was human like him. But superhuman enough that she'd recovered from stabbing herself with his hand within a minute.
"You're so impolite." Rhode lit a phosphoric swathe through the room, calling down candles out of her reach and sending them back up with a white-sleeved hand.
Or inhuman, thought Allen reluctantly. His left eye itched. It had taken longer to heal, but in the middle of a battle at Crowley Castle it had revived stronger than before.
Obeying his instinctual desire to leave, Allen had sidled around until the door was at his back. He would alert the Black Order, at least, that an enemy had appeared in their headquarters. He reached behind him with his right hand. Miraculously, the handle turned.
Rhode was skipping away from Allen, towards the far corner of the increasingly unfamiliar room. Without looking back, she called, "I hope you know it's impolite, but you can leave if you really want to."
Allen pulled the door open wildly. He froze. Outside the door was a miasma of nothingness, roiling colorlessly in a way that made his eyes ache and his stomach turn.
"Go ahead. It's perfectly safe."
Allen closed the door behind him. Dots of candlelight drifted in the darkness between him and Rhode like luminescent underwater creatures. Their flames no longer flickered overmuch; Rhode had closed the window. She regarded him from her seat on a tower of cushions on the other side of the room.
"I liked your furnishings. I would have kept them in this room if it hadn't been to much trouble," said Rhode.
"Those weren't mine. They were left in the room I picked when I moved in," Allen said hastily. He didn't want to hear that from Rhode. Eerie stuffed animals (interrupted by the ocasional unassuming cushion) were piled along the wall where grotesque masks and peculiar pottery had been.
"Hmmmm." She regarded him thoughtfully, chin on palm, as if determining what this said about his character. Allen stared at her defiantly from the shadows by the door. At least she was on the opposite side of the room.
"You're more like me than I thought," said the girl who had named herself one of the Clan of Noah.
"There's no way--"
She traced the underside of her left eye, and he stopped mid-sentence.
"It healed two weeks ago," he admitted. "While I was fighting."
"You were fighting Akuma again?"
"I'm an Exorcist."
"You like Akuma, don't you? Why won't you fight humans? It's the same thing."
Allen bit his lip. He had been in Crowley Castle, his left eye wounded from Rhode's attack, when the woman dwelling in the castle, Eliade, had slammed him into a bookcase. Allen hadn't moved. She was a human being. Eliade choked him, and when Allen had woken up from the vortex of black where Mana was, his eye had healed and Eliade was an Akuma. Then, he fought.
If only his eye hadn't healed. He could have been like his fellow Exorcists.
Instead, his eye began making the Exorcists like him, showing them the nightmares hiding in human skin around them. His cursed eye was valuable for the Order's unending battle, but without it he could have lived (or died) oblivious to those nightmares.
And maybe its powers had given him a deceptively simple view of the world, he thought, looking up at Rhode, who looked down at him with a bored expression.
"Akuma murder human beings. Besides, they're...they're miserable things," Allen told her. "Akuma shouldn't exist in this world."
"I feel the same way about humans."
Allen's arm almost spasmed into its gun form as anger filled him. He'd experienced firsthand Rhode's opinions about ordinary humans, but there was a wall, bloody with graffiti, blocking any of his words that might persuade her that she was horribly wrong.
"You shouldn't," he managed to choke out.
"But they're so pathetic! All weak and flooding the earth with their weakness. Like I told you, I hate them," Rhode said easily. Also, you can sit down," she added.
"You also said that you're human too," said Allen, gritting his teeth.
"More human than you are, maybe." She chuckled.
Allen forced his claw back into his ordinary hand, ordinary as a red gnarled hand could be. He wasn't going to go on the offensive anyway. He hoped this showed his resolve. He glanced around the room again, into the dark corners, a habit born from scanning for Akuma; there were no apparent traps and no Akuma.
"You're not a very good conversation partner, are you? I'm the only one making an effort here. Still, you're interesting, for a human--and a little less weak."
Allen had watched as Rhode healed after stabbing herself with his claw. Her attack on herself had been so unexpected he hadn't moved to prevent it. Her skin had knit itself whole again; his eye had slept and stung for awhile only to revive stronger than before so he could be here now, staring at Rhode across the room, vainly looking for an Akuma's bound soul. Her humanity was all too clear to him.
Allen gave up and sat down on what still looked like his cot. His conscience didn't allow him to attack her without provocation, and her power might not allow him to win if he did. In place of fight or flight, what did one do when confronted with an enemy, staring at you golden-eyed and snakelike from across the room?
Gather intelligence? Yes. Um. Gather intelligence. "Why did you come visit me?" he blurted out.
"Because I wanted to see you," said Rhode, and for a moment she didn't sound bored at all.
Allen belatedly realized what a stupid question he'd asked. Rhode's change in demeanor had lasted only an instant, and the boredom had returned to her eyes. Allen couldn't think of anything to say that might elicit information about the Clan of Noah. In fact, the only thing he could think of asking was why she wanted to see him, like a child asking "Why?" to each answer in an endless string of questions.
Although Rhode looked younger than him, she'd known so much more than him. And all too much about him. His name, his past with Mana.
Allen had the unpleasant feeling that if did ask the next stupid question of why she wanted to see him, he'd hate the answer. That answer could make things very complicated.
The conversation had quickly shuddered to a halt. In a wild stab at repairing this impoliteness, Allen said, "I--uh--I'm sorry I don't have any tea!"
Rhode giggled. "I could make tea," she said, "but I won't. If you eat the food or drink the mead under the hill, you can't go back home."
He didn't know what she meant about a hill, but he caught her meaning. "I'm going back," he said firmly, and tightened his hands where they rested on his knees.
She nodded slightly. "As am I. To my own home."
Allen felt a peculiar sensation creep through his chest at the thought of this monster of a human having a home. He inclined his head as if half-acknowledging something he didn't quite understand.
A quiet moment passed, a tense moment between two enemies, but a little less awkward. On the other side of the room, the candles sharp as stakes clustered closer to Rhode perched on the top of her tower of cushions.
"You know," Allen said carefully "just because people are weaker than you doesn't mean you should--"
Rhode's shriek of laughter interrupted him. "I didn't visit you to be lectured. If you don't quit preaching I just might visit some of your weaker friends instead."
God, how he hated her. He felt a surge of fear for his companions at the Order, and wondered if the Noah Rhode had brought an entourage of Akuma, who were attacking as they spoke. Allen looked her straight in the eye and held up his left hand, invoking his Innocence. He stood.
He had no desire to flee now. "Don't," he said, "you dare come for my friends again." Or anyone else, he thought. He cracked a smile, laughing for a moment. "You'll get my attention well enough by showing up beside me. If you have to, come visit me."
Rhode's too-wide grin verged on the inhuman. "Maybe I will," she said in a dangerous tone. "Maybe next time I'll find out how you can be so dull and so interesting at the same time." She leapt down from her perch, scattering pillows. Her candles followed her like a swarm of malevolent insects. With one hand she pointed to the window of his un-room. Black lace curtain hung still at its sides. Candlelight glinted off a black-painted nail.
"That's the way I came in, and I can come in again if I really want to. I can come in anyone's window, even if they're as far away from my home as you are. Leave it open for me...?"
Allen looked at the closed window, then looked at the closed door across from it. His actual window was smaller with bars across, but the door looked the same. The frame, at least. Who knew where it led. If Rhode had told the truth, it didn't lead to where she came from.
Allen ached to check on his friends and allies, still in the true tower that was the Black Order's home base. He refused to fight Rhode here and now. If there were Akuma in the Order, that was where his battle was.
"Goodbye," he told Rhode, and wrenched open the door and stepped through.
There was a disorienting twisting sensation in his gut (he'd closed his eyes) and he was standing in the hallway outside his door.
She was telling the truth. This thought flitted across his mind as he looked down the hallway in both directions, starting to panic despite no signs of conflict. Miranda had been housed near the center of the tower, probably safe, but Linali wasn't--and where was Rabi's room? The Science Department could be in danger, some of the Finders--
He had hurried no more than three paces down the corridor when Kanda rounded the corner in front of him, glowering suspciously right and left.
"Kanda! Is everything all right!?" Allen cried out.
"I thought I heard a noise. Is there some reason things shouldn't be all right?" Kanda's look showed that he was more than ready to pin the reason on Allen being a moron.
"There are no Akuma, no enemies here?"
"There had damn well better not be."
Thank God, thought Allen. "I...I thought I heard something too. Maybe it was nothing, but I'm going to check it out."
Kanda made a sound of annoyance, but muttered something about how he'd search more carefully and swept back the way he came.
Allen agreed to take the other stairs up so no potential Akuma could slip by them. He passed by his room on the way to make sure Linali was all right, then Miranda, praying that Rhode hadn't taken a particular interest in them as she had with him. His room was empty, as he'd sensed the moment he stepped through the doorway. Empty, and the window barred.
Rhode had gone home. Allen considered this, but his concern for the people at his newfound home pushed it from his mind.
"Linali! Linali! Are you all right?"
Written: June 2007
Disclaimer: D. Gray-man series and characters do not belong to me.
Allen woke up in a different room.
It resembled the narrow, musty room in the Black Order headquarters that he'd gone to sleep in, but the blackness around him was more spacious than it should have been, and light glinted off some indiscernable objects in the air. Allen propped himself up on an elbow. His left eye, recently healed, was calm, so there were probably no Akuma around. If only it could see in the dark, instead of forcing him to see the darkness in people, then it would really be useful.
The lacy curtains stirred in a breeze that brought a new chill into the room. Allen hesitantly lifted a hand to touch one of the dark wedges suspended in the air. Was it an optical illusion brought on by the dimness?
Wait...curtains? Allen bolted from under his sheets and half-tripped over one of the voodoo dolls on the floor towards where there was supposed to be a tiny window with bars. Now there was an open window with thin black curtains trimmed in lace. Moonlight seeped faintly through. Allen whirled back to face the door (still there) and the spiral shapes hanging in mockery of gravity brought that other room to his mind--
From the other side of the bed came a girl's familiar laughter. A match hissed alight. Illuminated were golden eyes, a row of crosses across a monochrome forehead.
"I thought I'd come visit you like I said I would," said Rhode from her small halo of matchlight.
"You--Rhode!?" Allen turned his left arm into its claw. In the room that wasn't Allen's was a human, and this was infinitely worse than an Akuma.
Allen's bed, which was by the wall in his proper room, was now in the middle of a new one. Rhode leapt on top of the cot and lit two midair candles before waving the match out.
"What are you doing here?" demanded Allen, and was unable to tell what mixture of anger and fear had emerged in his voice. He edged along the wall towards the door. Flickering candlelight showed that what he'd tripped over had been a stuffed bear and not one of the voodoo dolls Allen hadn't bothered to remove from his Order room. The teddy bear's grin was manic and stiched over with heavy threads. Allen shuddered.
"I just told you, didn't I?" replied Rhode. "I'm visiting you." She held a new match to a lit candle. "Close that window, the candles will blow out." She sounded half-bored. Hadn't she sounded that way most of the time she'd held Linali, Miranda, and Allen in that otherworldly room? Allen hadn't been in a state to notice details, but the tone of her voice and its implication that they were outworn playthings had been maddening.
"Get the hell out of my room. And away from the Order." He wanted to get the hell out of his room--or what had been his room when he'd gone to bed--but he couldn't leave Rhode where she could immediately go attack someone else at the headquarters. And yet, despite having witnessed her tormenting Miranda and committing other cruelties, he was reluctant to attack her. She was human like him. But superhuman enough that she'd recovered from stabbing herself with his hand within a minute.
"You're so impolite." Rhode lit a phosphoric swathe through the room, calling down candles out of her reach and sending them back up with a white-sleeved hand.
Or inhuman, thought Allen reluctantly. His left eye itched. It had taken longer to heal, but in the middle of a battle at Crowley Castle it had revived stronger than before.
Obeying his instinctual desire to leave, Allen had sidled around until the door was at his back. He would alert the Black Order, at least, that an enemy had appeared in their headquarters. He reached behind him with his right hand. Miraculously, the handle turned.
Rhode was skipping away from Allen, towards the far corner of the increasingly unfamiliar room. Without looking back, she called, "I hope you know it's impolite, but you can leave if you really want to."
Allen pulled the door open wildly. He froze. Outside the door was a miasma of nothingness, roiling colorlessly in a way that made his eyes ache and his stomach turn.
"Go ahead. It's perfectly safe."
Allen closed the door behind him. Dots of candlelight drifted in the darkness between him and Rhode like luminescent underwater creatures. Their flames no longer flickered overmuch; Rhode had closed the window. She regarded him from her seat on a tower of cushions on the other side of the room.
"I liked your furnishings. I would have kept them in this room if it hadn't been to much trouble," said Rhode.
"Those weren't mine. They were left in the room I picked when I moved in," Allen said hastily. He didn't want to hear that from Rhode. Eerie stuffed animals (interrupted by the ocasional unassuming cushion) were piled along the wall where grotesque masks and peculiar pottery had been.
"Hmmmm." She regarded him thoughtfully, chin on palm, as if determining what this said about his character. Allen stared at her defiantly from the shadows by the door. At least she was on the opposite side of the room.
"You're more like me than I thought," said the girl who had named herself one of the Clan of Noah.
"There's no way--"
She traced the underside of her left eye, and he stopped mid-sentence.
"It healed two weeks ago," he admitted. "While I was fighting."
"You were fighting Akuma again?"
"I'm an Exorcist."
"You like Akuma, don't you? Why won't you fight humans? It's the same thing."
Allen bit his lip. He had been in Crowley Castle, his left eye wounded from Rhode's attack, when the woman dwelling in the castle, Eliade, had slammed him into a bookcase. Allen hadn't moved. She was a human being. Eliade choked him, and when Allen had woken up from the vortex of black where Mana was, his eye had healed and Eliade was an Akuma. Then, he fought.
If only his eye hadn't healed. He could have been like his fellow Exorcists.
Instead, his eye began making the Exorcists like him, showing them the nightmares hiding in human skin around them. His cursed eye was valuable for the Order's unending battle, but without it he could have lived (or died) oblivious to those nightmares.
And maybe its powers had given him a deceptively simple view of the world, he thought, looking up at Rhode, who looked down at him with a bored expression.
"Akuma murder human beings. Besides, they're...they're miserable things," Allen told her. "Akuma shouldn't exist in this world."
"I feel the same way about humans."
Allen's arm almost spasmed into its gun form as anger filled him. He'd experienced firsthand Rhode's opinions about ordinary humans, but there was a wall, bloody with graffiti, blocking any of his words that might persuade her that she was horribly wrong.
"You shouldn't," he managed to choke out.
"But they're so pathetic! All weak and flooding the earth with their weakness. Like I told you, I hate them," Rhode said easily. Also, you can sit down," she added.
"You also said that you're human too," said Allen, gritting his teeth.
"More human than you are, maybe." She chuckled.
Allen forced his claw back into his ordinary hand, ordinary as a red gnarled hand could be. He wasn't going to go on the offensive anyway. He hoped this showed his resolve. He glanced around the room again, into the dark corners, a habit born from scanning for Akuma; there were no apparent traps and no Akuma.
"You're not a very good conversation partner, are you? I'm the only one making an effort here. Still, you're interesting, for a human--and a little less weak."
Allen had watched as Rhode healed after stabbing herself with his claw. Her attack on herself had been so unexpected he hadn't moved to prevent it. Her skin had knit itself whole again; his eye had slept and stung for awhile only to revive stronger than before so he could be here now, staring at Rhode across the room, vainly looking for an Akuma's bound soul. Her humanity was all too clear to him.
Allen gave up and sat down on what still looked like his cot. His conscience didn't allow him to attack her without provocation, and her power might not allow him to win if he did. In place of fight or flight, what did one do when confronted with an enemy, staring at you golden-eyed and snakelike from across the room?
Gather intelligence? Yes. Um. Gather intelligence. "Why did you come visit me?" he blurted out.
"Because I wanted to see you," said Rhode, and for a moment she didn't sound bored at all.
Allen belatedly realized what a stupid question he'd asked. Rhode's change in demeanor had lasted only an instant, and the boredom had returned to her eyes. Allen couldn't think of anything to say that might elicit information about the Clan of Noah. In fact, the only thing he could think of asking was why she wanted to see him, like a child asking "Why?" to each answer in an endless string of questions.
Although Rhode looked younger than him, she'd known so much more than him. And all too much about him. His name, his past with Mana.
Allen had the unpleasant feeling that if did ask the next stupid question of why she wanted to see him, he'd hate the answer. That answer could make things very complicated.
The conversation had quickly shuddered to a halt. In a wild stab at repairing this impoliteness, Allen said, "I--uh--I'm sorry I don't have any tea!"
Rhode giggled. "I could make tea," she said, "but I won't. If you eat the food or drink the mead under the hill, you can't go back home."
He didn't know what she meant about a hill, but he caught her meaning. "I'm going back," he said firmly, and tightened his hands where they rested on his knees.
She nodded slightly. "As am I. To my own home."
Allen felt a peculiar sensation creep through his chest at the thought of this monster of a human having a home. He inclined his head as if half-acknowledging something he didn't quite understand.
A quiet moment passed, a tense moment between two enemies, but a little less awkward. On the other side of the room, the candles sharp as stakes clustered closer to Rhode perched on the top of her tower of cushions.
"You know," Allen said carefully "just because people are weaker than you doesn't mean you should--"
Rhode's shriek of laughter interrupted him. "I didn't visit you to be lectured. If you don't quit preaching I just might visit some of your weaker friends instead."
God, how he hated her. He felt a surge of fear for his companions at the Order, and wondered if the Noah Rhode had brought an entourage of Akuma, who were attacking as they spoke. Allen looked her straight in the eye and held up his left hand, invoking his Innocence. He stood.
He had no desire to flee now. "Don't," he said, "you dare come for my friends again." Or anyone else, he thought. He cracked a smile, laughing for a moment. "You'll get my attention well enough by showing up beside me. If you have to, come visit me."
Rhode's too-wide grin verged on the inhuman. "Maybe I will," she said in a dangerous tone. "Maybe next time I'll find out how you can be so dull and so interesting at the same time." She leapt down from her perch, scattering pillows. Her candles followed her like a swarm of malevolent insects. With one hand she pointed to the window of his un-room. Black lace curtain hung still at its sides. Candlelight glinted off a black-painted nail.
"That's the way I came in, and I can come in again if I really want to. I can come in anyone's window, even if they're as far away from my home as you are. Leave it open for me...?"
Allen looked at the closed window, then looked at the closed door across from it. His actual window was smaller with bars across, but the door looked the same. The frame, at least. Who knew where it led. If Rhode had told the truth, it didn't lead to where she came from.
Allen ached to check on his friends and allies, still in the true tower that was the Black Order's home base. He refused to fight Rhode here and now. If there were Akuma in the Order, that was where his battle was.
"Goodbye," he told Rhode, and wrenched open the door and stepped through.
There was a disorienting twisting sensation in his gut (he'd closed his eyes) and he was standing in the hallway outside his door.
She was telling the truth. This thought flitted across his mind as he looked down the hallway in both directions, starting to panic despite no signs of conflict. Miranda had been housed near the center of the tower, probably safe, but Linali wasn't--and where was Rabi's room? The Science Department could be in danger, some of the Finders--
He had hurried no more than three paces down the corridor when Kanda rounded the corner in front of him, glowering suspciously right and left.
"Kanda! Is everything all right!?" Allen cried out.
"I thought I heard a noise. Is there some reason things shouldn't be all right?" Kanda's look showed that he was more than ready to pin the reason on Allen being a moron.
"There are no Akuma, no enemies here?"
"There had damn well better not be."
Thank God, thought Allen. "I...I thought I heard something too. Maybe it was nothing, but I'm going to check it out."
Kanda made a sound of annoyance, but muttered something about how he'd search more carefully and swept back the way he came.
Allen agreed to take the other stairs up so no potential Akuma could slip by them. He passed by his room on the way to make sure Linali was all right, then Miranda, praying that Rhode hadn't taken a particular interest in them as she had with him. His room was empty, as he'd sensed the moment he stepped through the doorway. Empty, and the window barred.
Rhode had gone home. Allen considered this, but his concern for the people at his newfound home pushed it from his mind.
"Linali! Linali! Are you all right?"