soooo last year I got a series of wonderful drawings with my otps from @crouleek-art for v-day; this year, I had in mind to do something similar - but I chose the pairs we actually do ship together :D
I’m awful with words and wishes and you already know that, but - thank you, over and over again, for pushing me always to go further instead of giving up on my art; for being there for me and for all the awesome memories we made together. <3
Happy Valentine’s day, @crouleek <3
pssst let me send you the original watercolors, the quality is way better
🎶" Stay with me, no, you don't need to run Stay with me, my blood, you don't need to run""🎶🎶 5th inktober drawing for me and ofc the inktober madness couldn't exclude some lovely Lavanda ♡ in High school au 👌
Title: Of Storms and Sleepovers.
Fandom: D. Gray-Man.
Pairings: Laviyuu/Yuuvi.
Words: 3,176.
Summary: Kanda wasn’t afraid of storms. And the fact that Lavi was coming over had nothing to do with it. That’s what Kanda told himself, at least. (Modern AU)
Read on AO3.
Excerpt:
Lavi noticed, and raised an eyebrow. “You seriously afraid of storms then?”
“No,” Kanda replied, answer quick yet rigid. No, he wasn’t afraid of storms. He just didn’t like them. There was a difference.
Lavi’s expression was dubious, and for a second Kanda thought the redhead might press or tease him. Occasionally, Lavi was the taunting type; it was irritating, but what was even more irritating was how unpredictable he seemed to be about it.
Like now, where Lavi wasn’t pressing or taunting. Instead, he seemed to drop the topic oddly quickly.
Kanda didn’t mind though, and was relieved by this.
Note: Technically a follow up to the first part Between the Pages and takes place in the same universe, but can be read alone (though it would probably make more sense to read BtP before hand).
happy valentines day @usagi-no-renkon! i’m your secret valentine for @dgm-valentine ☆☆ i hope you enjoy this story!!
ship: lavi / kanda yu
word count: ~3k
Freedom does not exist; every man’s life is paved by his own choices, bricking him into a set narrative, a sentence of his own judgment. And like this we live, imprisoned by the consequences of our past decisions, under the assumption that we can still yet change what our history is destined to be. But the ink has already dried, and sometimes we regret; though for the most part we are indifferent to this apparent confinement, trusting the choice we made at the very beginning of the story.
Yet what of the man who was no longer who he was when he started? What of the man who has chosen to forsake himself, and wear the skins of other identities for the rest of his life?
What of a Bookman?
For the Bookmen, the choice they make terminates their journey at its inception. There is no personal freedom; only the duty to record the happenings of the world, and the privilege of having no single road to follow. It was a neat little paradox -- you’re free to be whomever you want, but at the same time you’re not allowed to be anything. It’s a rather fair tradeoff.
Prior to ‘becoming’ Lavi, the Bookman Junior was content with the consequences of his choice. He was not opposed to any of the requirements to becoming a Bookman --
his past was unremarkable and ordinary;
he was not particularly interested in anything other than his duty, for truly that was something momentous and wonderful to him; to have unfettered access to anything before his eyes, and to be tasked with telling the story of the world;
he was confident in his determination, and whilst he was in all other aspects not dissimilar to any other boy of his age, he was self-assured in his ability to control himself and devote himself wholeheartedly to the task in front of him;
and lastly he was pessimistic about the future that lay ahead of them all -- if this is the world that we live in and the people we live with, then there is no future he could possibly want outside of the one he had already decided on.
And to him all of that was certain; until he had become ‘Lavi’.
A heaviness was draped over his head like a shroud, and as he thumbed through the pages of the book on his lap Lavi found himself losing focus, nodding off ever so slightly; he looked up at the clock on the wall, and its fingers were, chastising, pointed at five and forty-seven. Lavi had been up since the ten the previous morning, updating the records that he and Gramps had diligently tended after, until his mind had gotten too weary from fatigue, and he switched to strengthening his background knowledge on several miscellaneous subjects.
Six in the morning was, also, usually the time Yu had gotten up to begin his morning exercises. Occasionally they would bump into one another as Lavi stumbled out of his room to brush his teeth before he went to bed and Yu sauntered out to the gym to drill, or something like that.
It displeased Lavi somewhat to find himself looking forward to these coincidental meetings. He had always enjoyed being around Yu, perhaps a little too much. Although he was loath to admit it, it went beyond simple curiosity in Yu’s person and his status as a second exorcist. It lay more in a genuine fondness for Yu, despite Yu’s generally terrible personality and foul attitude.
It wasn’t like Lavi wasn’t fond of any of his other peers at the Black Order; Gramps made it well known that he thought Lavi was far too attached to their subjects, and that Lavi’s now-biased perspective would impede the work that they were doing. Gramps wasn’t wrong; Allen, Lenalee, Miranda, Krorykins … they were all his friends. The fact of that statement weighed heavily within him; it made his existence as Bookman Junior burdensome and uncomfortable, but he could not bring himself to let them go.
Least of all Yu. Although Lavi had gotten along better with nearly any other person in the Order, Yu was the first person that he had considered his friend. Lavi was never sure if Yu understood who Lavi is, as the Bookman Junior, but Lavi understood Yu enough to know that they were both people with no pasts, and no real futures. Just as Lavi had been cut off from his past to devote his existence to history, Yu had been born with no past, and brought up only as a weapon against the Millennium Earl and his allies. In that way they were alike, and that made Lavi feel less alone.
Which only served to frustrate him more, as he was not supposed to mind being alone. Being alone was not supposed to less preferable to having someone understand you, or empathise with you. In fact, not being alone was an encumbrance, a disadvantage. Alone, gave you control. That was what he had always known.
Yet he found himself not wanting to be alone, more and more. He casually insinuated himself in Yu’s life, eating by his side during meals, and waving to him if they ran into one another somewhere.
Yu always seemed to find his antics annoying. Bookman Junior was in agreement; ‘Lavi’ is annoying. He is rather boisterous, cheerful, and invasive. ‘Deak’ would have probably hated ‘Lavi’. Yet Bookman Junior continued to accompany Yu as ‘Lavi’, usually with a fair amount of fanfare and hullabaloo; and gradually their relationship became less rigid and less like they were playing their ‘roles’, although Lavi was unsure who began to show more of their actual selves around one another first.
‘Lavi’ eventually began to resemble Bookman Junior more in terms of temperament -- he became more sarcastic with a darker worldview, rather than being happy all the time; he also became more serious and, at times, cynical. Bookman Junior had initially attributed these changes to ‘Lavi’ growing up, but really he was just getting tired of being ‘Lavi’ around Yu.
He knew that Yu didn’t like ‘Lavi’, but he wanted Yu to like him. More precisely, he wanted Yu to like him for who he was. Bookman Junior’s emotions -- which weren’t supposed to really exist in the first place, he noted with displeasure -- went through a little flip when Yu seemed to relax around him more, or at least when Yu didn’t actively try to avoid him anymore, or very obviously start walking in the opposite direction whenever they saw each other in the corridors at six in the morning. On a good day, sometimes he would nod, and Lavi would find himself more elated in that moment, than in those rare instances when Gramps praised him for his work.
Lavi was very much afraid of what this was becoming. In his limited experience of false friendships and, more recently, real ones with other members of the Black Order, he worried that this was progressing beyond what one would normally consider a ‘friendship’.
Well, not that it was in reality progressing much at all; but what Lavi had wanted it to become kept progressing. In his mind. Rather pathetically.
He kept looking at Gramps in paranoia, wondering if Gramps had picked up on whatever he was thinking of, because Gramps was surprisingly good at reading minds. Luckily, it seemed that Gramps’ heavily black-rimmed eyes did not look at Lavi with more disappointment than usual.
Lavi did not want Gramps to catch onto the preoccupation that he had with Yu, so he did not act differently around Yu than he did around anyone else. He simply maintained the narrative that ‘Lavi’ had grown up, and that was why his personality had taken a slight change. No one suspected anything other than that, since the acting skills of a Bookman in training were indeed impressive; however Lavi had been unable to escape the truth himself.
It annoyed him to notice how his heartbeat picked up whenever Yu called out his ‘name’. It annoyed him to notice the details on Yu’s hands -- blisters from training, dirt beneath his nails after a mission. It annoyed him to notice that his smile was genuine whenever he greeted Yu. It annoyed him to notice how much he liked saying his name, ‘Yu’.
It pained him to understand that Yu would never say his name back. It pained him to know that every pat on the back he gave Yu must never linger. It pained him to be so close to Yu -- to see him all the time, to sometimes be close enough to smell the boring soap that Yu used to wash his hair, to at moments be able to run his fingers through Yu’s smooth, straight dark hair, in jest, only to know that it wasn’t a jest at all, and he wished that he could do this all the time, but he couldn’t afford this kind of luxury -- in general. In pained him to know that he was falling for Yu.
For whatever reason he did not know. Out of all the things that Bookman Junior understood about mankind, Noahkind, and Akumakind, Lavi knew nothing about the matters of the heart. It was always a subject he avoided, and from an early age he would train and purge his emotions from his mind. They were all unnecessary. It was only dead weight.
And Lavi felt like he was drowning. He was sinking into a terrible quagmire, dark and opaque like a clouded night sky.
He did not know why he felt this kind of regard for Yu. As always he was never optimistic about the nature of man … and Yu was, in many aspects, the opposite of a good man. Yu was not particularly well-learned or polished, and although he was sometimes capable of providing some kind of insight, for the most part Yu was a childish and artless boy. Yu was not someone who usually showed kindness, compassion, or even niceness. Certainly Yu was physically attractive; he was almost as tall as Lavi himself, well-built, possessing a particular grace in his person, with an almost unworldly handsomeness, worthy of a born-for-the-Order clergyman but also comically at odds with Yu’s decidedly less beautiful personality. However that alone was not enough for Lavi’s attachment to be so strong.
Maybe it was the honesty. Yu never felt the need to lie or pretend around others, and to an extent maybe Lavi was jealous of that.
Perhaps jealousy was not correct the word, as Lavi had not minded playing different ‘roles’ as his duty had required; in fact he probably would not have liked to be his actual self at many times. But he was mindful and appreciative at the fearlessness of Yu Kanda’s honesty. It was sharp and uncomfortable, but it was Yu Kanda’s truth, and whomever disliked it could fuck off. Yu was straightforward and confident to an arrogant level, but to Lavi that was never a fault. It was only ever courage in facing the world, and faith in who he was as a person; and no one else Lavi knew possessed that sort of attitude. It was rather hot.
His thoughts of Yu had sent him reeling with guilt. It was like crossing a line, betraying an oath, turning his back to a knife; it went against everything else he had wanted for himself until that point, and a rejection of the path he had chosen to take himself. He couldn’t possibly have a future with Yu -- after all he would leave the Order after the war, and adopt a new alias to examine some other phenomenon. ‘Lavi’ would be dead and Yu would be left in the dust. Also, his partiality to Yu would possibly compromise the quality of the Bookmen’s work. There was no way for Bookman Junior to pursue Yu Kanda in any way; yet he desperately wanted to. The ink in his book had already dried but he still wanted to add Yu to the pages.
He wanted to rewrite his history to fill pages and chapters with his memories of Yu: the way he spoke like rocks falling into water, clipped and resounding; the way he moved like water, a soldier too graceful to take one’s eyes off of; the way he smiled to himself, when he thought no one was looking, like sunlight hiding behind the leaves. Lavi wanted to record all of that, and remember it for himself.
This was unlike anything he had wanted before. It was no longer about writing history for anyone else, or anyone at all. It was all for himself and only himself.
The idea appeared to him as something terrible and vaguely sickening, like the thought of burning down an entire library, watching the pages curl and blacken, the words crumbling into to ash in the painful ardency of flame. It burned his heart to think of throwing away everything he had devoted himself to for Yu. Yet the thought of leaving Yu, and the Order, which would inevitably come should they survive the war, left him feeling cold.
The morning light was beginning to slat through the crevices in between the curtains, and the clock’s fingers had moved to six o’clock. Lavi closed his book and wedged it back into the shelf, which was groaning with the weight of too many books and papers. Silently Lavi wished that it would one day just give in and topple over him, crushing him beneath the tomes so he could die instead of living with this god-awful crush Yu Kanda.
But now he had to go to bed, so he could focus on doing his actual work later, whilst he still had some downtime before the next mission for him and Gramps came along. Dragging his exhausted body to the door, Lavi grabbed his toothbrush and towel on the way, and pushed open the heavy oak door to the Bookmen’s room.
The Bookmen’s room was in a quieter quarter of the Order dormitories, closer to the libraries and the laboratories than the mess hall or the dojo. At this hour of the day there were a few people walking around like zombies, with pale faces and drooping limbs, but the hallways were mostly empty, and coldly lit by the light from the windows. It was going to be cloudy today again.
Lavi sauntered to the bathroom, where he brushed his teeth vigorously and scrubbed his face with his towel until he felt like he had half-woken up from his sleepless stupor. And in this sleep-deprived but slightly more alert state, Lavi mistakenly thought that he didn’t need to go to bed just yet.
Just a while longer. It was six o’clock in the morning.
He draped the towel around his neck and walked out of the bathroom to the other end of the hall, which was railed rather than walled, and looked down at the sprawling complex below his floor. Not everyone had woken up yet, so the Order was quiet, in an almost chilly way. There was no science division bustling around to do Komui’s work for him -- most of them might still be unconscious in a post-caffeine crash blackout -- and no finders and exorcists going out on and coming back from missions, or training themselves, or just hanging out with their friends. If Lavi had yelled ‘Hello!’ into the yawning depths below the floor, he could probably hear an echo greeting him back. It was lonely. At six in the morning, the Order was a lonely place.
For Bookman Junior, it couldn’t be anything more than that.
‘Oi, Lavi.’
Lavi spun around to catch Yu looking at him. Yu had tied all of his hair up, and was wearing the standard exercise uniform for all members of the Order. His hands were wrapped up in protective bandages, and he was holding a wooden katana. So Lavi hadn’t missed him going to his morning training session from hell.
‘What are you doing?’ Yu asked again, and Lavi had found that he did not actually say ‘Good morning’ to Yu, and was in reality just staring at him.
Lavi shook his head. ‘Nothing much, just observing.’
Yu walked over to him, and leaned against the railing next to Lavi. It embarrassed him to admit that he couldn’t resist letting his eye flicker over Yu’s lean body. How he wished he could look at Yu with both eyes. ‘What is there to observe? No one’s doing anything out there,’ Yu pointed out.
Lavi grinned like he knew a secret. ‘How would you know? We Bookmen see more than you’d think,’ he winked.
Yu scoffed. ‘Right, like your dense head ever picks up anything.’
‘Hey, what’s that supposed to mean?’
Blink and you could have missed it. Yu Kanda was smiling. Well, smirking, more like. But it was something. ‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’
Lavi could scarcely believe his eyes. Was Yu Kanda in actuality jesting with him? Was this reality, or some strange side effect of one of Komui’s experiments? Lavi found himself staring at Yu more, who regarded him with an aloof smugness as he said, ‘I’ll leave you to figure it out. I should get going and you look like you need some sleep.’
But Lavi didn’t want him to go. Not yet. On the other hand, a rabbit knows when it’s been caught in a trap. Lavi felt a coldness within his ribcage, an instinct telling him to run before he does something stupid.
An important thing to note for the future: Yu Kanda is capable of making Lavi forget his most basic survival instincts. Approach with extreme caution.
Present Lavi did the exact opposite.
‘Wait!’ he called out, and grabbed Yu’s elbow. His mind went blank as Yu turned back around.
‘What?’ he asked, his face placid and, as usual, perfect.
Lavi said nothing. The flames were roaring in his ears again. Yu’s eyes were the colour of charcoal ash in the morning light. Had the pages already burnt?
‘Lavi, get some sleep.’
He didn’t like to hear ‘Lavi’’s name in Yu’s voice; but he did not have another name to give him. Yet there are some names that are said without a voice. So Lavi leaned down and kissed him.
The clattering of Yu’s wooden sword against the marble tiles was loud as a thunderclap in the empty dorm. Lavi quickly let go of Yu as the ricocheting echoes taunted him for his admittedly impulsive action.
‘S-sorry about that,’ he began to apologise, unsure of what else to say. He didn’t dare look at Yu. ‘I should be going back, haven’t slept all night,’ he mumbled to himself before turning away. Lavi felt his entire body go cold; all the fire had left him, and the reality of what he had done was like the shock of ice water.
He felt Yu’s fingers wrap around his elbow. ‘Wait.’
Lavi turned back and looked at him. ‘I shouldn’t,’ Lavi admitted to himself. He had lost the grip on his plot. Bookman Junior’s history had already been written; he couldn’t write another one. That would be too selfish. He had already made his decision years ago, before he was ‘Lavi’, before he was ‘Deak’ … when he was still someone with an existence, a past, a name.
‘You shouldn’t what?’ Yu asked him. ‘I don’t care.’ He looked at Bookman Junior in total seriousness, unsmiling and stern as usual. It would have been rather funny if Bookman Junior were not still stunned by what he had done. Lavi was scared of what Yu was going to say next. He was scared that he would do something stupid again, that he would jeopardise everything that he’d worked for, that he’d burn under the price of this self-indulgence and the Bookman would be no more. But how would avoidance change what he had already felt? How would what he would do damn him further than what they’ve already done during this war? How would this matter when as ‘observers’ the Bookman have already changed and rewritten the possible history multiple times?
Yu’s voice was like a stone dropping in the water. A million thoughts rippled through Lavi’s mind, and then everything was still.
‘Kiss me again.’
Decisions be damned. Duties be damned. Rationality be damned. In a world where every tomorrow is not guaranteed, where children are soldiers and souls are weapons, where each day seems bleaker than the next, if Lavi were to die then he wanted to at least die without regrets. Let the pages burn; it will warm up our cold hearts even if it blackens our fingers with ash.
