Chapter Text
He really did burn the goddamned house down, Kanda thinks in that single moment after he’s finally dead, nothing but his ashes and Allen’s ashes and the house’s soot left to mingle in the quiet morning. Stupid beansprout. He smiles, relinquishing his hold on this fucked up world. Allen’s not here anymore, afterall. No Alma, no Allen. No more regrets to chain him.
He wakes up in the middle of some godforsaken forest, absolutely starving. Kanda reaches for Mugen, and is betrayed by three revelations in short order. One. He, naturally, does not have his sword. Two. Comparing his memories (never a good idea) to the size of his hands, he is about nine years old. Three. In his hands, he is holding a stamped ticket that reads:
Soul Record
Soul: Kanda Yuu
Date of Death: //Error//
Cause of Death: //Error//
Requested Destination: Hell
The stamp itself is of a howling dog, but that isn’t the issue here. The issue is that Kanda hates reading Japanese characters. He had never been taught them, in his life. The scientists had feared that they would trigger unwanted memories. That wasn’t to say that he couldn’t read Japanese. Just that it gave him a headache and made him hallucinate ghosts.
Kanda blinks. He is a ghost now, though. He takes another glance around the forest, but it still doesn’t look like any Hell he’s heard of. Though perhaps his imagination is the failure there. If you got Allen drunk enough, he would talk about different culture’s idea of horror and how that manifested in their idea of what eternal torment was like until Kanda had no choice but to beat him over the head with his cane to make him shut up.
Kanda’s hands clench into fists, causing the ticket to dissolve into nothing. Apparently, it had served its purpose. Kanda had been kind of hoping that he would dissolve into nothing after serving his purpose, but apparently not. Or, more likely, Allen was also around here somewhere and so his purpose wasn’t finished after all.
Kanda considers what he’s wearing. It was what he had died in, wasn’t it? Loose shirt, loose pants. He shoves up his sleeve so that he can check on the stigmata carved into his flesh. Still there? It confuses him. He knew he was dead, because nothing hurt, and his stigmata had hurt for every second it pulsed within him. His curses had come into conflict within his own blood, killing him by inches as they sought to destroy one another. It had been one long battle, and they had all fucking lost.
Komui had thought that he could fix it.
Allen had smiled, and Kanda had punched him before he said something that made Kanda decide to actually kill him and everyone in the room. Should have taught that to Alma.
Speaking of curses-- Kanda yanks down the front of his shirt so that he could see what was left of his other legacy. Then he stops for a little bit. Sits down at the base of a tree, near a lotus flower bloom. Stares up at the sky.
Over his heart, there is an empty circle. It’s faded into scar now, just like his stigmata. Kanda brings his hand to his mouth and bites down with his tiny, nine year old teeth, harder and harder until he breaks the skin and draws blood. It drips down his skin, bright and colorful like a clown’s nose.
It takes minutes for the blood to clot, hours for a scab to form. Kanda watches, fascinated. He’s never healed like this before. First he was immortal, unkillable. Then he bled from every cut. Now he’s dead, and he heals like a human. He licks him palm again, tasting the blood. He’s never been human before, after all. He scoops up a lotus flower and blows it away across his palm. Then he
Rolls
As something crashes down behind him, snorting and growling as if it were a cadaver screaming through a pig’s lungs. Kanda drops into a crouch, eying the thing as it regroups itself from its missed jump. A white bone mask, shaped as if it has a beak. Its body is a solid black mass, its six legs and stubby wings flailing around as it relocates Kanda and crouches for another attack.
Kanda’s instincts scream that that’s an Akuma, that they missed one, but that’s wrong-- this thing wasn’t even trying to pretend to be human. Kanda jumps toward it, flipping in the air so that he lands on the creature’s back. His stigmata is inert, Mugen having crumbled along with the Ark, the Earl, the Heart-- so Kanda plunges his hands into the mass of shadows, yanks out the mass inside and tosses it away, hears the creature scream as black blood stains his hands.
That damaged it, but didn’t kill it. Kanda takes a hold of the bone white mask and pulls, ripping the mask clean off. The creature wails, but what was underneath that mask was human.
“Kill me...shinigami...” She whispers before the mask reforms once more.
This time Kanda rips its head from the main body, and it dissolves back into the atmosphere in much the same way as his ticket did.
Not an Akuma, Kanda thinks...but close. He had listen to Lavi once when he was ranting. What had inspired the Earl? Lavi wanted to know, for some reason. Because he was an idiot. The ingredients of death, tragedy and machine. Perhaps the machine was the only true innovation of those endless reincarnations.
Either way, Kanda wants a fucking sword, and it's not like he’s going to find one in the middle of the woods. So he wipes his black stained hands on the grass and then gets started on finding civilization.
By the time he finds something that passes for that, he’s already killed three more not-Akuma. He thinks they're attracted to how loudly his stomach his growling. It’s growling so loudly that he can hear Alma laughing at him, which is never a good sign.
“Get lost, street rat,” a shopkeeper spits at him. Everyone on the street is dressed in ragged, traditional Japanese clothing from before the Earl closed Japan off from the world, though some wear more modern but equally ragged attire. There are many shops that sell rags, or weapons, but almost no food vendors.
Kanda has never stolen anything in his life, because his whole life was the Order, and then slowly dying. Wait, he put that wrong. He’s never stolen anything because the Order paid for everything, since his whole life he’s been slowly dying. All humans spend their life dying, though. So isn’t that normal?
Lenalee had told him that, had come to him in the hospital and told him that he was dying by inches. She had been crying, then punched him when he laughed. Then she cried where he couldn’t see her when the bruise she left took a week to heal. He watches petals bloom over the shopkeeper’s eyes, and turns away.
If Allen were here, then the shopkeepers would be falling over themselves to give away everything they owned, because Allen made people stupid. Or maybe that was the smart route, because people that didn’t give Allen things ended up naked in a gutter, trying to figure out how an old man with a blind eye and a dumb smile had robbed them of everything they owned. Suckers.
Actually, he should be looking for Allen, shouldn’t he? It won’t be that hard, he just needs to find the worst and most disreputable part of the red light district around here and then listen for screams and breaking glass. Well, he might need to wait a bit for Allen to find it, since the stupid beansprout couldn’t navigate his way out of a soggy potato sack.
“Hey,” another voice tries to growl at him, but it’s clearly just another urchin, like many that dart in and out of the alleys around here. “This is our turf.” Kanda turns to face the kid, and then has to restrain the instinctive urge to strangle anyone with red hair.
“I don’t take orders from you,” he says instead. It’s the first words he’s said to anyone since he died. A good precedent.
“Oh yeah,” barks the boy, skin beginning to flush with anger. That’s enough for Kanda to be able to flush any associations from his mind-- both Cross and Lavi would probably rather die than show a genuine emotion to someone they want something from.
He catches the punch easily, even though that type of counter is flashy and useless.
“You’re too weak,” he says. “I don’t like you. Where is the red light district?”
“I’m not weak, you bastard!” the kid is struggling, but Kanda’s grip is strong. This kid has no training. He doesn’t stand a chance.
“You are,” says Kanda. People need to know where they stand in order to improve. “Where is the gambling district?”
“This is the 78th South Rukongai, the Howling Dog District!” The kid snarls at him. “Like hell people have enough money to gamble it away.”
Allen would say that people always have something to bet, something to lose.
“78th District?” Kanda asks. He has a bad feeling. “Are there--”
“Let go of my friend!” Another kid screams from down the alley. She’s holding a brick and dashing towards him. She reminds him of Lenalee, so Kanda immediately gives up on getting anything from her except death wishes and curses.
“Get out of here, Rukia!” The original kid yanks free of Kanda’s grasp, repositioning himself between Kanda and Rukia. “I’ll hold him off!”
“You can’t,” repeats Kanda, annoyed. “Because you’re weak.”
Rukia throws the brick at his head.
As if that will hit me, Kanda thinks, before realizing a second too late that he is in a nine year old body, and it will.
His stomach wakes him back up. He thought it was bad before, but now it feels like the hollow caverns he grew up in, empty and echoing and painful.
“Why are you so hungry, bastard?” It's the redhead. He’s crouched down beside Kanda, as he and the girl seem to have taken him to somewhere better than the marketplace with bright green grass and a bubbling stream.
“I’ve been hungry since I got here,” says Kanda. “What do you mean, why?” Now that he thinks about it, it is strange that he’s hungry now that he’s dead. If it turns out he needs to eat souls to survive in this place, he is going to do something that the beansprout would regret. Or maybe not, considering how much Allen loves the damned.
“Since you got here?” The kids eyes widen, then narrow in annoyance. “You know you’re dead, right?”
“Renji,” scolds the girl. She has dirt on her face, deliberately smeared to hide the fact that she’s going to be beautiful. So there are scum everywhere, even in death.
“I know,” says Kanda. “I’m looking for someone who died at the same time as me.”
Pain flashes across Rukia’s face, while Renji spits in disgust.
“If they even remember you,” Rukia says, quietly. “They could be anywhere in the 320 Districts of the Rukongai. North, South, East, West-- it’s....unusual. For family members to end up anywhere near each other. A one in a million chance.”
Kanda stares at her, then closes his eyes. Of course. He should have known better.
“But you’re starving,” says Rukia. “That means you have...spiritual power. Anyone who needs to eat has power, and the more you need to eat the stronger it means you are.”
“The head of those assholes who are crossing our turf-- the Rust Fang gang-- eats three meals a day then vomits it all back up,” says Renji, viciously. “That son of a bitch Inomata, walking around with a shinigami sword even though everyone knows he got it by sending the black robe into a Hollow nest.”
“So this guy has food and a sword,” says Kanda. He wants to be absolutely clear.
“Are you crazy!” Renji yells, loud enough that birds take off from a nearby tree. Yes, thinks Kanda. There are lotus blossoms in the river, and when he looks at them for too long they multiply.
“Don’t follow me,” he says instead. “You’ll just get in the way.” He knows even as he says it that it’s the wrong thing to say, that they will ignore him, because Rukia will do anything for family and Renji will do anything for Rukia, and they took him to safety and took care of him while he was unconscious, even though they shouldn’t have. Lenalee would adopt these children in a heartbeat.
If Allen were here, he would smile, and come up with some other important task that the kids could do, and then sneak away while they were distracted.
Kanda hates lying to children above all else. Maybe he even hates it more than he hates the Black Order.
“I can’t protect you,” he says instead, because these children are old enough to make their own choices. What are they? 10? Older than him, or Lenalee, or Timothy. And there’s no such thing as too young to die. Or die again, as it is.
“We know where Inomata’s hideout is,” says Renji. He bares his little baby teeth. “We’re the only ones who can take you there.” He’s still bargaining. He should leave the bargaining to Rukia. She knows better.
“Okay,” says Kanda. “Lead the way.”
The way appears to be through a lot of back alleys that eventually open up to reveal a building guarded by two men with rusted knives and a smell so awful that Kanda seriously considers if it's an intentional secondary weapon. Neither Renji nor Rukia do more than wrinkle their noses at it though, so maybe it’s just him who hasn’t acclimated to the Howling Dog District. Kanda takes a deep breath, and then immediately regrets it. Now it feels like his tongue is covered in rotting garbage. He’s been bathed in blood and felt more clean than this.
Having learned from previous mistakes caused by arrogance, Kanda approaches the two men with his hands behind his back, doing his best to seem harmless. As he has zero experience with this, he assumes that he comes across as more dead eyed and indifferent than anything. But he’d been underestimated a lot, when he’d looked this age before. Every Akuma in entire cities would seek him out, seeing the child in the uniform and mistaking him for prey. Understandable, as that was also what Kanda saw when he looked back at them. He’d killed a lot of Akuma dressed in mother’s skins, those first few months outside.
“What’s a pretty little thing like you doing out here?” One of the guards laughs. “Got lost on the way to the whorehouse, girlie? Or your mama waiting til you’re older, so she can get a better price?”
It’s been awhile since Kanda has been mistaken for a girl. It happened less as he failed to age gracefully, and the frown lines radiated out from his eyes in a cross pattern with his cursed tattoo.
“Leave her alone, Yoshiaki,” says the other one. “You know what the boss thinks about leaving the gate when you’re on duty.” He drags a finger across his throat, makes a gagging sound.
“Nobody needs to know, Niou,” Yoshiaki says, lazily beckoning Kanda to come closer. “Isn’t that right?”
“No,” says Kanda, and throws a brick at his head. The piece of shit staggers and falls, bleeding heavily from his temple. The second one opens his mouth to sound the alarm and Kanda kicks him in the crotch, hard enough that he hears something pop. The almost yell turns into a quiet, horrified gasp for air. That one might live, but Yoshiaki is never getting back up again.
Kanda continues past them into the main building. It’s mid morning, and Kanda has been assured that most of the men of the Rust Fang gang will be too busy trying to sleep off their hangovers or general sickness to do anything but groan in his direction. Kanda bypasses them for now, resolving to figure out if it’s worth killing them once he actually has a sword to help him do the job.
The last room of the hideout is so utterly strange that Kanda has to stop for a minute in order to convince himself that the entire thing is more than just him seeing things. Inside the room, the light comes from unstably burning candles that flared and guttered at random intervals. The sleeping gang boss keeps two dogs chained to the wall on opposite sides of the room, both wearing animal skulls carved to resemble the not-Akuma masks along with polluted, spiked collars. The one closest to Kanda is awake and watching him, but has made no sound to alert his master of the threat. Its skull mask is actually a huge fish head that bobbles over the dog's mouth in a way reminiscent of a muzzle. The other dog has one ridged like a lizard. Inomata himself sleeps in the center of the room on a mound of fur, mouth open as he snores. The sword lies in easy reach of his hands, should he be suddenly thrust from his sprawling slumber. At least he is alone in the bed.
Stealth has never been a strong point of Kanda’s, so the fact that he’s gotten this far without having to deal with anyone other than the outer guardsmen is so much better than how he thought this whole thing would go that he doesn’t really have a plan for how to get the sword without fighting the man, the dogs, and the entire organization for it. Kanda shrugs, dismissing the issue. Whatever. As long as he has the sword, he doesn’t care if he does end up fighting the whole organization for it.
He’s been barefoot ever since he got to this afterworld, so he doesn’t need to change anything in order to make himself as quiet as possible.
The dog huffs a bit as Kanda draws close to him, so Kanda stops to pet him. On one hand, he regrets this because the dog’s fur is matted with black blood and fish guts. On the other hand, he’s going to make Inomata regret it even more. He crawls over to where Inomata is sleeping, carefully staying below the bed’s line of sight until he can reach up and grab the sword. He feels a short second of
Resistance. Who?
But it's nothing to him. The sword trembles ever so slightly in his hands, reflecting the dim light of the tallow candles that line the room and add to the giant stink. He kills Inomata quickly.
The dogs are both up now, pacing and tugging at the end of their chain leashes. Fishbone is still silent, still watching him. Lizard is growling deep in his throat. Kanda turns next to him, where she is laughing at him, calloused hand reaching up to hide her mouth.
Allen always thought that it was how he was made that sentenced him to a life of ruin. Kanda knows that’s just Allen projecting. Dying, chaining himself to the Order, Falling-- he doesn’t need other people to damn him.
He breaks Fishbone’s chain first, then Lizard. The sword works better than it should, cutting through the wrought iron with only a couple of chops. He’s expecting the dogs to attack him, to howl and wake the base so he can fight his way out properly. Instead, one of them sticks its cold, slimy nose into the section between his throat and his collarbone, and he’s the one that shrieks.
He’s going to skin these dogs alive and then use their coats as laundry rags. Lizard opens up its jaws and lets its long, gross tongue loll out of its mouth. It’s laughing at him, Kanda knows. He hadn’t realized that dogs could be used to so expertly stand in for that dumb rabbit.
“Where is the food kept?” Kanda asks the dogs, not having any high expectations. But maybe they're better at standing in for Lavi than he thought, as they both immediately start trotting towards a door hidden in a cluttered corner of the room. At first glance it looks rusted shut, but when Kanda kicks the door it creaks open to show pantry full of fermenting alcohol and food just on the edge of rotting.
Kanda gives the alcohol a dark scowl. Chasing Allen through the red light districts of Eastern Europe while nursing a throbbing hangover had managed to slip right into the cracks of his nightmares to the point where he point blank refused to touch the substance anymore. But he can’t ignore his hunger any longer, and he goes through the stale, spoiled food so fast that Allen would be jealous.
He is still hungry, when he pauses. But it is ignorable.
The dogs have eaten their fill behind him, gobbling up dropped crusts of bread, bones of meat, fish heads and tails and other less pleasant things that cover the ground. Some of them are things that dogs probably shouldn’t eat, but Kanda makes no moves to stop them. There is nothing living in this strange world beyond. He can taste the food as he eats it and it tastes like the air and the dust and his blood-- it tastes of when he drank down his Innocence and chained his fate to Allen-- it tastes of fate, his enemy above all others.
What are Akuma made of? Death, tragedy, machine.
What is he made of? Death, tragedy, persistence.
It will have to do.
He paces back out of the room, sheathe tied over his back. It knocks against his knees every time he takes a step, an annoying but necessary reminder of his current stature. The blade itself he wields, its steel still dripping with Inomata’s blood. The dogs follow behind him, their broken chains dragging along the ground.
The gang members are awake now. They watch him.
“You’re new around here,” one of them says. “Come from the 79th?” There’s still an edge of bravado in his voice, but he’s scared. Kanda can see his pulse beating in his throat.
“No,” says Kanda. He flicks the sword, watches the blood spatter. “I’m new.”
“Thought the shinigami gave you a sword once you joined up,” says another, speaking from the back.
“I wanted this one,” says Kanda. Shinigami, shinigami- what are the shinigami? Angels? If they have wings, he won't be able to restrain himself from trying to kill them.
“Let us go, you stupid shitstain!”
“Yeah! Drop dead, ugly!”
Kanda hears some familiar voices coming from the front of the hideout, and has to restrain himself from actively grinding his teeth. Lavi is going to find out about this and then laugh in his face.
“Don’t touch them,” Kanda says, loud and cold enough to carry.
“Or what?” Another man enters, dragging the kids in behind them. He has a grin on his face, a ‘I hold the cards here’ type of expression that matches the infected scar that curls over his lip.
“Or I kill you,” says Kanda, already bored of him. Allen taught him to play poker with Tyki Mikk's cards. “Wait,” Kanda continues. He could almost smile. “You’ve touched them already, haven’t you?”
Now the sword truly needs a good cleaning before Kanda can feel comfortable sheathing it.
He looks at the silent room.
“Don’t take things beyond your means to keep them,” he says. There will always be more scum. It’s not worth it to soil his blade with their blood.
Renji and Rukia follow him when he leaves along with the dogs.
“I didn’t bring any food for you,” he says, once they’re far enough away.
“Bastard!--”
“Here,” Kanda says. He hands them an emptied wine flask filled with coin. He had found it, or rather he had kicked it and stubbed his toe. It should be enough, he hopes. He doesn’t know how often they need to eat.
Renji grabs at it, then nearly drops it as he tries to compensate for the unanticipated weight.
“Clumsy fool,” says Rukia, absentmindedly watching him. Renji scowls.
“We can’t take this--” he starts, but Rukia cuts him off.
“We have a lot of mouths to feed,” she says, low enough that Kanda pretends not to hear her. He doesn’t want to know. “Our friends need non-rotten food.”
Renji doesn’t argue.
“You’re not staying,” he says to Kanda instead.
“I’m looking for someone,” Kanda says, and feels the weight of those words that have always doomed him. “I can’t rest until I’ve found him.”
Rukia is watching him again, with her dark blue eyes. Like Lenalee, he had thought at first. But she has no Komui, to base her world around. No chain strong enough to anchor her. It will come, Kanda wants to tell her. But maybe it has already come, and broken.
He hates metaphors.
“You should go to the Seireitei,” Rukia tells him. “If your friend is as strong as you, he won’t be able to stay in the outer districts, no matter where he is. There’s not enough food here.”
“Why don’t you go, if there’s not enough food?” Kanda asks. He already knows the answer, though.
Renji and Rukia shake their heads.
“It’s not just us,” Renji says. “We have other friends here, not strong enough to take the Academy test. And the distance between Districts....” He trails off. It’s clear he’s thought about this a lot.
“What is in the Seireitei?” Kanda asks. Why is it better?
“The Seireitei is the center of Soul Society,” says Rukia. She crouches down, tracing circles in the dirt. They’re worse than Allen’s. “The only ones who can live there are the nobles and the shinigami.”
“So why would beansprout go there,” Kanda asks, repeating his question.
Rukia spasms in front of him.
“To become a Shinigami, fool!” She spits out. She’s not very good at explaining things.
“What is a Shinigami,” says Kanda, deciding that as long as he has a direction to go in this line of questioning is actually pointless and he should just get going.
This time it’s Renji who loses control of himself.
“The Shinigami maintain the balance of the world!” He gets out, voice rising. “They hunt the Hollows that come to eat us, and they maintain order and strike down the guilty, and they wield their zanpakutos to unleash the power of their souls! Everyone wants to be a Shinigami!”
He sounds so much like Alma that Kanda has to look away.
So. Not-Akumas are Hollows, probably. And the Shinigami are the Exorcists. The Seireitei is sounding like a better bet for finding Allen by the minute. Kanda’s gone back to the Order for Allen before, which. If he gets fucking promoted again he’s going to make Allen regret burning down that stupid house.
“Which way to the 77th District,” He says instead, and Rukia points.
“Just go north,” she says, softly. “And if you see someone who--” She stops herself. “Nevermind. Good luck, weirdo.”
“My name is Kanda Yuu,” Kanda tells them.
He hates telling people his name.
The dogs follow him, when he leaves.