I do not own -man and author notes are at the bottom. The prompts from the countdown used for this story are deception and innocence.

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless
garden when the flowers are dead. – Oscar Wilde

It was well past midnight and silver light shone in lazily through the windows of the orders infirmary. Bathing everything in its gentle caress.

Lavi took in the sight with his one eye and listened to the nurses care for patients in the next room over. There were plenty of wounded after the level four attack and the wounded exorcists had been separated from the other members of the order. From there they had placed the younger exorcists away from the generals and Bookman.

Kanda had long since left the infirmary and with him Lavi's only source of amusement. Miranda was no fun to tease and Marie was almost impossible to get a rise out of. This was also on top of the fact that the two were soundly sleeping.

Lenalee was fast asleep, surrounded by a mountain of pillows and paper work that Komui had ferreted in. Lavi watched as she snuggled deeper into the pillow that she had curled against and settled back into quite sleep.

Lavi sighed and wished again that the nurse would let him wear his bandanna and that everyone wasn't asleep. The memories of the past few weeks wouldn't leave him alone. They demanded his attention and he wasn't sure that he wanted to face them. Instead, he was lying awake, unable to sleep, trying desperately to stay away from those thoughts.

It was surprisingly difficult to do when some his thoughts and questions were connected to his fellow exorcists. The hardest to ignore were the ones connected to Allen.

The white haired boy was sleeping fitfully; cheeks flushed rosy with fever and breath ragged in his chest. A day had passed since the level four attack and with the order now calm, it had become clear how much was lost and the price they had to pay to survive the attack. Of all the exorcists Allen had paid the highest price to stop the attack, pushing himself beyond what anyone thought him capable of, except, maybe his master, General Cross. He was paying the price for it, all layered over a series of pushes that had driven him to where he was at now.

The nurses and doctors had assured them that Allen would heal and be fine. That he had already healed more than they thought he would in a day and that he had just pushed himself too far. Their assurances were a little hard to take when the boy looked so broken and battered. It was even harder to take when the only sound in the room was soft snoring and the sound of the boy's heart monitor, beeping steadily but with an odd rhythm.

When asked about it, Komui had explained, that it was because of the shard of innocence filling in the hole in his heart.

'It was odd,' Lavi thought, 'That in the whole history of the war only two pieces of innocence had ever saved their accommodators. What made them so special?' The thought of no answers made him look away from Allen's sleeping form. It made him uncomfortable, there were too many unknowns about his innocence and its goals. It appeared, in its own way, to have a will of its own.

If Lavi had questions concerning innocence before the last few weeks, the number of questions and concerns had double by this point. They left him feeling uncertain towards his own innocence, especially after Suman's fall.

According to the Order, Suman, had turned in his fellow exorcists and his innocence condemned him for his betrayal against it and God. 'Allen had said that the poor man had just wanted to return to his family,' Lavi remembered. 'The innocence had used his own soul to feed its rampage and to end the man's life.'

Lavi turned to look at the stack of papers Komui had surrounding Lenalee's bed. Both Komui and Lenalee had mentioned other fallen ones. People destroyed by the order, non-accommodators eaten alive by innocence during forced synchronizations. The thought alone made him shiver. It had been pure luck that he was an accommodator for innocence.

He couldn't imagine being consumed by his own innocence and the pain it would inflict. He'd been burned once out of his own foolishness to escape Road and he would forever have the burn scars to prove it.

Up until recently it was thought that only non-accommodators, forced to synchronize, could fall. In the end, not even the cherished accommodators were free from betraying God's will and that worried Lavi.

He wasn't even sure what that will was. He had no clue what drove the innocence, what commanded it, and why it acted the way it did. Lavi wasn't even sure why innocence had chosen him as an accommodator. He didn't believe in God, not with the sights he had seen. Even now he didn't believe, regardless of his standing as an accommodator.

If innocence was really a gift from God, why would innocence choose and accommodator that didn't believe in faith? That was probably the smallest problem he had with innocence.

Lavi was a bookman. They existed to record the secrets of history. They had no need for friends or relationships. To a bookman, everyone was ink on pages, just another footnote in history lost to the depths of time. Every second that he spent with the order was an act of deception. They were only working with the Order to record a war that would disappear into obscurity, forgotten by the world it ravaged.

Lavi shifted uncomfortably on the bed. The night and relative quite was stifling. He didn't want to be there anymore, stuck between Allen's broken form and the overflowing love that Komui exuded from Lenalee's bed. He flinched when Allen shifted in his fevered sleep and started to pick at the fuzz on his sheets. 'Actually,' he thought, 'The night wasn't even stifling because of them. After Road, after everything, he wasn't even sure who he was anymore.'

Was he even still deceiving the Order? He wasn't even sure. The lines between him, as a bookman, and the people at the order had blurred. He cared too much he realized. Even now he still had Allen's bloody playing card hidden in his room. If Bookman found out he'd pull them from this job. Lavi wasn't sure if he could handle that. Road had drove her way into his mind and shipped away at every crack in his mind. In the end she had gouged canyons between Lavi, the 49th persona of a bookman, and Lavi the exorcist. The distance was just close enough to allow him to see the other side, but too far for him to tell the differences between the sides to determine which one he was on.

He thought he might be on the exorcists' side but he didn't know. He hadn't fallen yet, so maybe that might be a point towards the exorcists. But he couldn't tell how far his deception ran with the innocence. If he was truly deceiving the innocence like he thought, then he should have fallen. He was sure the innocence wouldn't tolerate such an act, not with the way it had struck Suman down for wanting to return to his family over winning the war and the non-accommodators that just wanted to help. What did they harbor in their hearts to require being smote down by innocence? 'Surely,' he thought, 'it couldn't be worse than deceiving innocence with a fake heart.

"I am a bookman," Lavi mumbled into the night, "we have no need for a heart…or for friends." He rolled on his side, pulling his limbs in as close as his injuries would allow. "We record secret history. We are not participants in events."

His new position left him staring at Allen's sleeping form. To try and corral his thoughts he counted Allen's ragged breaths, splitting them by minutes. The count helped settle his thoughts but it didn't do anything to get rid of them.

A nurse opening the door to their room broke him out of his count. As the nurse moved around the room checking the rest of the exorcists Lavi slowed his breathing and closed his eyes. When the nurse finally came around to his bedside he appeared fast asleep, but his thoughts raced. Road had opened up too many doors for the matter to settle.

Each innocence seemed to have its own will and personality. It chose accommodators for reasons unknown to humans, but for reasons known only to the innocence. At points innocence was remarkably similar to their accommodators.

'Like Allen.' Lavi thought listening to the nurse gently woke the fevered boy up to drink water and medicine. 'Both Allen's love for the tortured souls trapped in akuma and for humans was mirrored in his innocence. He couldn't harm humans with his sword but could bring salvation to tortured souls.'

"As the nurse fussed over Allen who was quickly falling back to sleep exhausted, Lavi realized that while Road had been wrong to invade and drive open his mind and to cleave his soul, she hadn't been wrong. He wasn't much of a bookman anymore. His 49th persona was too real, too much a part of him.

Lavi had chronicled many wars but he had never been a participant until now. It was too hard to keep his exorcist and bookman duties separate everything was too convoluted. But now, the murky waters that cut a chasm in his hidden heart were finally clearing and the path was becoming clear.

His, innocence had chosen him for a reason. His and even Bookman's deception had been a worthless charade in front of the innocence. It had known all along what had lain hidden and secreted away in their non-existent hearts.

'Maybe,' Lavi thought as his thoughts started to calm and his injuries and the late hour started to drag him into sleep. 'Hammer knows me better than myself and that when shown the opportunity innocence presented he had wanted innocence not to record history, but because he had thought humanity foolish and had deep down, desperately wished to save it.

Hello everyone. This is the first story for the DGM Hallow countdown and I hope that everyone enjoyed it. I don't think it came out as great as I imagined it but I hope to do great things with the coming prompts. The rest of the stories for the countdown might be late but they will be posted./p
"If there are any glaring mistakes or errors, please let me know. I don't normally write much but I couldn't resist contributing to the fandom I heavily browse and love so much.