His eyes flutter closed, another kiss placed gently on the bone beneath his eye. "I remember everything," he says, and his hands clench tighter in the dirt. He knows, more than he has ever known anything in his life. This belongs to them. "But why?"

Allen's life had always been simple, despite its ups and downs; he worked for food, he travelled, trained, followed. After being abandoned for the third time in his life, he takes again to the circus, finding strength and comfort and the benefits of travel and anonymity, but he is soon pulled away from it all by a man claiming to have strange abilities and a message from gods.

Allen is mostly indifferent when he gets sent on a mission with Kanda, but he soon gets stuck with a lot more than he bargained for.

Allen and Kanda each struggle with their own personal demons, and are inadvertently brought closer together.

There is something scarred into the flesh of his chest, burned into the skin; a mark of power, he recognises, but he doesn't know where from. It is tender to the touch in a way that is not particularly painful, and he wonders where it came from, how recent it is. He files this away in his rapidly growing list of things he does not yet understand.

When most people begin to reach adulthood, they worry about jobs and houses and cars and taxes and finding a comfortable place for themselves in the world. When Allen begins to reach adulthood, he worries about whether or not he'll live to see the start of it.