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Kanda dies.
A stray bullet caught him – he heals from the disease akuma spread but he won’t heal from a bullet through the forehead and he dies quickly enough that he doesn’t have to watch his friends watch him die.
Then he sits up. There’s a ghost in front of him, a shape that he can’t quite see when he looks straight at it.
“What the fuck,” he starts, and then he’s in a vat of goop, being pulled out by Alma Karma.
He’s repeating his life, it seems. He’s living out the same nightmare as he did last time – Alma remembers again, and Kanda kills him again.
He tries a bit harder this time, cuts off his head and dismembers the body and when the Order’s goons arrive there are bits of Alma all over the observation room. He ditches them and finds Marie, who reacts much the same as he had last time.
He gets foisted off on Tiedol again, meets Lenalee and the rabbit and the beansprout again, and dies again. This time it’s a steel claw through the chest, into his heart.
At least he dies fast. Anything that would kill him slowly he could heal from, he supposes.
The ghost is there. Kanda scowls at it.
“Who the fuck are you,” he snarls. He doesn’t have his sword, and even if he did, his hands feel foggy and cloudy and he suspects that if he tried to hold onto it, he’d pass straight through it.
“Hello, Yuu,” the ghost says. Its voice hurts to listen to. “Sorry, there’s been a mistake.”
That’s all he gets before he wakes up in the vat again, Alma’s hand in his own.
This time he cuts his losses immediately, tells Alma they have to go, and runs from the Order as soon as he's able to stand. Alma doesn’t really know what’s happening, but he does as Kanda asks, because he’s that desperate for a friend.
They make it six months as street orphans before the Order finds them again, and they separate the two of them and put them through the same hell as the last two times Kanda lived this. Then Alma goes crazy and kills dozens of people, but he’s killed before he gets to Kanda.
Kanda knows perfectly well that the Order are harvesting Alma’s cells to make third exorcists. He just doesn’t know how to stop it. He dies six weeks later, age fifteen, from a stray piece of shrapnel that pierced his throat. It takes him a little longer to die this time, long enough that he has to watch Lenalee start crying.
The ghost is there again. Kanda tries to kick it, but can’t move fast enough that it would cause any damage even if he were corporeal.
“What is this?” he tries. The ghost hums, and Kanda clutches his ears. His hands don’t quite touch his head. It’s like his outlines have been erased.
“A mistake,” the ghost calls it again. “You were forced into an unnatural reincarnation. I’ve lost my grip on your soul.”
Kanda snarls. “You fucked up?”
The ghost doesn’t seem amused. “Humanity is overstepping its boundaries. You are paying the price for their hubris.”
Kanda doesn’t think that’s very fair, but before he can tell the ghost that and also to go fuck itself, he wakes up in a vat of goop.
This time he tries telling Alma exactly what they are, exactly what happened to them. Alma believes him – Alma always believes him, Alma is barely a month old and has no one else to talk to.
Kanda cautions him against retaliation and holds him awkwardly whenever he remembers anything of his past life and they go through the torture that is forced synchronisation together, and they’re both given to Tiedol so he can teach them both.
Kanda is enjoying this lifetime more than the others. He meets Lenalee, and then the rabbit, and then the beansprout. Alma and the beansprout get along far better than he’d like, but otherwise this version of events isn’t so terrible.
And then he dies, violently, when the beansprout is possessed by the ghost hitching a ride in his head. Walker tears his heart out fast enough that he doesn’t even feel it.
The ghost is there again. Kanda is getting sick of its featureless face.
“So you God or something?” he asks. The ghost – God, apparently – is not impressed.
“Have you no respect for your creator?” It hisses. Kanda grins at It, slowly and with the weight of five lifetimes of hell behind it.
“I didn’t ask to exist,” Kanda tells It, and then he wakes up again.
He tells Alma again, lives through the agony of forced synchronisation again. He’s already been synchronised with Mugen, in all of his previous lives, so he knows how to do it. Alma never remembers, so he has to go through the torture even though Kanda knows for a fact it won’t help him.
Alma eventually gets it, eventually figures out how to talk to his innocence. Kanda holds his hand when he’s done.
This time they’re split up for training, and Kanda goes to Klaud instead of Tiedol. He’ll be fine, and Alma probably needs someone kind to train him. Alma is a lot younger than him – Kanda is on his sixth life that he can remember.
It’s getting easier to see through the bookman – the first couple of lives, Kanda just ignored him as best he could, but he’s learned to tell where Lavi ends and the bookman begins. Lavi doesn’t much like that but he can hardly stop him from seeing it, and Kanda has no interest in talking about it so Lavi leaves it alone.
He feels old. He’s tired and the war seems no closer to being won and all the shit Walker is in looks insurmountable no matter how many times he sees it. But there’s nothing to do but fight it all so he kills akuma until he dies again. It’s a poisoned bullet, or several hundred of them, and his body can’t expel the poison and knit itself back together in time to stop him from dying. This is his slowest death yet.
God is waiting for him again. Kanda glares at It and wishes for his sword.
“You get hold of my soul yet?” he snipes. God glowers at him, and Kanda feels like his eyes are about to melt out of his non-corporeal skull and drip down his surfaceless face it hurts so much.
“You will come to know humility,” God tells him. Kanda doubts it.
“Whatever,” he says, and wakes up in the vat of goop again.
This time he gets Tiedol again – Klaud must have been a fluke – and Alma and Walker get along just as terribly well. Lenalee is sweet and terrifying and Lavi doesn’t trust him but does like him, and everyone else he’s been forced to get used to live and die with varying degrees of importance again.
Walker gets captured by the Order and has to run away, and this time Kanda is in a position to go with him, rather than to chase him down like he had to the first time he lived this life.
“Can it, beansprout. I need to know how to get rid of your stupid curse,” Kanda tells him, and Walker shuts up and lets him come. They make the others stay with the Order, and hope they’re not tortured too much.
Walker has a Noah in his head. Kanda didn’t stab the Noah awake this time, but he woke up anyway, and they have a limited amount of time to get it out.
Kanda thinks that maybe if he went back in time far enough, he could stop the Noah from ever possessing Walker, and then everything would work out fine for them. But then the Noah would just possess someone else, and they’d be back at square one, and he doesn’t think he’s reborn early enough to stop it from happening anyway.
“Maybe we can become one again,” Walker says, which is a creepy as shit thing to say and not something he’d say in front of anyone else, but Kanda is Kanda and doesn’t care about Walker’s morbid tendencies. “Maybe we can become one and I can remain in control.”
Getting weirder. “Would that work?” Kanda asks.
They never find out, because a level four tears them limb from limb. Kanda gets to watch it feed his and Walker’s limbs to the level ones frothing at the metaphorical mouths around them.
Kanda is in front of God again. God has not gained any more clarity of form in all the times Kanda has seen It, and It has not deigned to make Itself less painful to see or hear.
“I have your soul again,” It tells Kanda. “You will rejoin the flow of life and be as you always should have.”
Kanda cannot actually fight anything as a disembodied cloud of being, but he’s going to fucking try if he has to. “One more time,” he snarls. “One more. After that you can stick my soul in hell for all I care, but one more time.”
God regards him with cool disdain. “You may not make demands of me,” It says. Kanda laughs in Its face.
“You lost my soul, you shitty excuse of a God. One more time.”
God’s very presence is going to drive him insane if he’s exposed to It for much longer, but Kanda holds his ground, head pounding and ears ringing and eyes burning.
“As penance for my mistakes,” It says. “You may have one more lifetime as you have been living.”
Kanda just has time to stick two fingers up at him before he phases into wakefulness in a vat of goop, Alma’s hand in his own.
He can’t afford to make any mistakes this time.