Title: System

Pairing: Lavi/Lenalee

Prompt: Smile

Summary: Lavi cannot face her.

Notes: A character study and veiled pairing fic in one. Turned out far more angsty than I thought it would be, but hope you all still enjoy it! (: Written for woodrokiro at livejournal.

Word Count: 939 words

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There was a careful system to be kept when it came to expressions.

Junior knew how to smile so that people would be encouraged to keep talking to him, how to tilt his head just right so that the ladies would fall all over him, how to keep the conversation going, light and curious, so that nobody would know what he was really thinking about. Junior only needed to be able to keep his calm, polite face and he would be able to get any information he needed or wanted.

When he took up his 49th name, he learnt how to smile in different ways.

The Scientists know him and are wary of him, because whenever he came across them doing something interesting, he would give that creepy smile of his, that spoke of how he knew what they were up to, and how he would not let them go until he found out every single thing about that experiment, or about what they were hiding.

Then there was the one he used with the Finders. Light, happy, friendly, but ultimately it only meant that he would get along with them because he knew they wouldn't live long enough, and he knew, and they all knew, that he wasn't one of them.

With Bookman he used his teasing smile. Constantly calling him Panda-jiji, just to see him get furious, and just to convince himself that Bookman too had emotions and would react to insults and the like, and maybe, just maybe a little, to convince himself that maybe Bookman did care for him.

But when it came to the Exorcists, all these started to fall apart.

He tried the Scientist smile on Kanda, to try to get to know him, his little secrets, his mysterious past. Kanda bulldozed over all that and resolutely did not speak to him or react to him, except to nearly slice him open when Lavi, in a stroke of genius, decided to call him by his given name.

Kanda knew him as Bookman's apprentice. Even so, he hated to see more Exorcists dying, and literally dragged him out of a danger zone when Lavi was too blind to notice his surroundings. Lavi avoided him for two weeks after that, because he was unsure what he should do, what expression he should adopt in front of someone who had shown that he possibly hated Lavi, but hated the idea of him dying even more.

To Krory he was reassuring, and so he thought maybe the Finder smile could work on Krory. But Krory proved resilient, strong, and genuinely nice and willing to learn and unafraid of showing affection to him and Allen, the first proper friends he had known in a very long time, especially as Allen proved that they were not the illusions that Eliade was and that they would always look out for him.

Miranda first knew him as her saviour, and then she saw him break a window in anger. Just over a few days, and she already saw him as a comrade in arms, and he had no idea what he should do when he's with her, when she already saw him so vulnerable, so open.

He thought Allen would be alright. With Allen he practiced all of them, the Scientist smile when trying to ferret out Allen's past, the Finder smile to tease and get along with him. But then he saw the soul of the akuma, and the world Allen lived in, and he wasn't sure any longer what he should say. He realized that Allen smiled just as he did, to hide something, to reassure people, and he was so sure that Allen would be able to look through him at any moment.

And Lenalee…

Lenalee he met through her tears, the direct gaze of her grief knocking him askew, shocking him for a while before he could think to turn away and follow Bookman and Komui down to their room. Then a proper introduction, Lenalee all bandaged and hurt, but still smiling sincerely as she learnt of him as another comrade in the fight against the Millennium Earl. Not as Bookman, or as Bookman apprentice, but as Lavi, her comrade.

She did not know how to hide, as Allen did. Nor was she like Kanda in any way, her affection outpouring and overwhelming. When she was selfish, she knew it, and she did it anyway, because it was what she believed in.

And so when she smiled, she always meant it. And when she was angry, she always meant it as well. When she was angry with Allen, of which the details were still being kept from Lavi, she refused to gaze directly at or smile at him. And so when she punched Lavi out of relief and out of her frustration over his stupidity, Lavi felt better, because he knew she was angry with him and unafraid to show it and perhaps that meant that he was forgiven.

But he cannot face her smiles. Her face full of the belief that he would always remain a part of her world, her eyes full of concern for the pain that each of them carried, her hands imploring as they touched his arms – stay careful, whenever he had to go on a mission.

Her, unknowing of his thoughts, unknowing that maybe one day he will just up and leave her, a piece of her world broken just like that, not by fault of the enemy, but by his own choice.

And so he cannot face her, because she believed in a him that was made up of lies.

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Comments and reviews highly appreciated (: