The trip to Allen's villa is long, silence descending in awkward curtains. Well, Lavi amends, watching Allen fiddle with his gloves, around Allen, at least. Kanda watches as well, a frown of consternation marring his features. After a few moments of this, Kanda closes his eyes.

"So Cross is dead, yeah?" Lavi asks, more to break the silence than anything else. Allen's hands spasm in his lap.

"Yes," he answers. "He named me as his heir."

"How did it—" Lavi makes a vague gesture with his arms "—happen?"

"S-some kind of wasting disease. It started in his eyes, like Maria. He went blind first."

Lavi remembers black butterflies across a corpse's eyes, wings so dark that they swallowed all light. "The necromancy?"

Allen nods. "Not that it prevented him from swiving everything attractive with breasts within a twenty-mile radius until he couldn't walk anymore," he adds. Lavi hides a smile; on that turn of phrase Allen's voice loses a little bit of its culture, the way it used to do back in the Order when he was too incensed to remember to speak properly. Lavi has never quite been able to place it. Kanda cracks an eye open. "I don't even know how he could tell! He was blind."

"Did he do this often?" Lavi asks, taking one of Allen's hands in his own and fanning his fingers over it. The cloth of the glove is soft against his skin and he notes the contrast of white against inkstains. "You can tell a lot about people from the way their hands are. He was probably looking for thin wrists and unwrinkled skin."

Allen's eyes go wide and his hand curls warm into Lavi's before he blushes and tugs it away, folding it underneath the other one in his lap. He won't catch Lavi's eye. "Yes, he did."

The silence descends again.

After an hour, the carriage rolls to a halt outside the villa; an impressive building, but no one would would have expected anything less of Cross Marian. They all peer up through the windows at it, Lavi and Kanda with the perfunctory curiosity of the unfamiliar, Allen with something entirely different. Lavi's eye slides back over to see if he can decipher what it is, but all he can make out on Allen's features a strange kind of breaking. The ruins of the walls, Lavi realizes, can be just as incomprehensible as their faces.

"Cross called it Le Remède," Allen says, bringing the knuckle of the hand Lavi had held to his lips in a nervous gesture. "I think it was some sort of private joke."