Thank you to the people that reviewed! I really appreciated it. Now if I could get more to do it, and while we're at it, those beloved people can review this chapter too. Heh.

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Inheritance: Part Two

If there was one thing you couldn't do in dreams, it was actually feel something. You could imagine and you could fantasize all you wanted, but you couldn't really feel. Dreams couldn't just appear out of your head either, but apparently that wasn't as true as Zechs had thought it was.

The blonde writer had suddenly lost his appetite. Lena was talking about something in that smooth, practiced tone of hers. Duo was staring as Zechs with a strange look in his eyes. The others were either talking to one another, listening to Lena, or both. Zechs ignored them all, slowly tapping the refreshment table with his fingers.

Nightmares weren't real. Zechs should know. He had been having nightmares for as long as he could remember about death and burning and things so horrible that he tried to block them out as soon as he awoke. Treize Khushrenada shouldn't be real.

Zechs took a moment to wonder whether this was another dream. He could tell that it wasn't, but he could only hope that when life turned as disturbing as a nightmare that he was still asleep.

Still, every time he blinked he kept seeing a red and black humanoid machine explode. And no matter how much he wished it would stop, his heart wrenched each time.

--

Zechs stepped into his apartment and Persephone blinked at him for so rudely interrupting her nap. Having done that, she jumped on the counter next to her food dish expectantly.

Cats were such demanding creatures.

Sighing, Zechs poured her some of her dry food and kicked off his shoes. She didn't even let him take them off before "asking" to be fed. It was a wonder she wasn't fat, but of course, as a cat she was above such things as weight. That was the way cats were.

Zechs understood cats.

Walking over to his new laptop, Zechs pulled off his coat and threw it over the back of his desk chair. Ever since he had published his first novel Zechs had always gotten a new laptop every two books because by then the technology probably needed upgrading. Zechs was recently back from his tour, thank God, and this laptop was so fresh that he still had some documents to transfer over from his old one.

Cracking his knuckles, he stared at the screen. The screen stared back benignly. Zechs glared.

"You hate me, don't you?" he asked it. It said nothing. Zechs sighed and pillowed his head in his arms. "Treize Khushrenada..." The thing was, he knew the stupidest things about the man. That he always put on his left boot before his right. That he had a weakness for hurt animals and fast cars. That he liked cucumbers but hated pickles. They were the kind of things that couldn't be dreamed up, were too stupid for something like that, yet Zechs still knew them.

Nightmares didn't jump out of your sleep, even if you weren't sure why some of them were so terrifying. Zechs understood why some of them scared him, but some of them were just downright... pleasant. Gentle. Soft. Those were few and far between, mixed in with his constant dreams of blood and murder, but they terrified him more than the others.

And he didn't have the slightest clue why.

"I love you, you know that?"

Zechs smiled, lying back against the pillow with his pale gold hair forming a halo around his head. "I thought that you might." He turned over. "But war still comes first," he said bitterly.

He could almost feel the sadness vibrating from the man laying next to him. "...I suppose you're right."

Zechs knew that he was right. Treize's ideals were bigger than the two of them and so were Zechs'. All that mattered was a little girl with wheat gold hair who he no longer had the right to touch and a country that he was too blood-stained to rule.

"I love you, too."

Because happiness, fleeting as it might be when a war was close enough to touch, had to be grabbed even if you no longer deserved it. And also because that at those words, Treize smiled.

The apartment was silent again. Persephone was very majestically gifting the world with the small sound of her scratching the doorway. Zechs was lying in bed, on his side with his head supported by one folded arm. His eyes were cricked open just a bit, a sliver of blue staring at the wall.

The silence was so loud.

--

When Zechs had been young, his parents had taken him to a series of psychiatrists because of his nightmares. He had always woken up screaming names that he didn't know, seeing things that weren't there. Like most normal parents, they had been terrified.

Zechs, though scared initially, hadn't been. He had been thoughtful.

The psychiatrist had diagnosed Zechs as bipolar. One of the things that he had advised doing was for Zechs to write out his feelings, write out the dreams. That was the first time that Zechs had ever spread the true horror in war to someone else.

Eventually, Zechs had faked it. He had said the dreams had stopped, that he no longer saw a specter of giant robotic machines behind his eyes, that he no longer felt the screams of a little girl who was torn from the arms of her dead parents. He had to pretend. He poured the frustration and the fear into writing, into filling the page with words that were so full of pain they dripped with blood.

People wondered how he had been able to publish his first short story at sixteen and his first novel at eighteen. They didn't know the half of it.

Zechs cracked his back, staring at the laptop's 15" inch screen. He didn't like big laptops, but for some reason that screen seemed to be eating into him. He usually didn't dream so often, but seeing a nightmare walking had knocked him off balance. When he was off-balance, he couldn't write, and when he couldn't write, he dreamed.

He brought his fingers to rest once more over the keys, a delicate touch barely more than a whisper over the warmed plastic.

- The Sanq Kingdom had stood for just little over a thousand years, built on the wishes of one noble family to get away from the pain and suffering that was brought on their people. Their own large bit of land they made into a small kingdom, a promise torn from the lips of the other Europeans that they wouldn't be harmed as long as they kept their unassuming ways.

In A.C. 182, a young boy was taken from his bed in the middle of the night. There were explosions and noise, fire lighting the sky like paint dashed across a chalkboard. The royal retainer grabbed his arm, heedless of all protocol, and the boy felt his stomach clench. The sped through the halls to the old throne room, feeling like their skin was being peeled away to reveal a horror that neither had expected to know.

King Dortain and Queen Nortay lay in a pool of blood. Dortain's head was blasted open, the hole smaller going in than coming out, blood and other fluids seeping out as his eyes stared sightlessly up at the ceiling. Nortay wasn't much better, her dress torn to the waist, her blood covering her like a robe.

The young princess stood next to them with her head buried in her knees. It took a while for the boy to hear her over the explosions, but her high, keening scream soaked into the walls of the room. His stomach heaved and he reeled backward. Her blue eyes caught sight of movement, but she didn't seem to be seeing him. She didn't seem to be seeing anything but death. –

Zechs laughed and closed the laptop, banging his head on the table. "Out, out, out," he murmured darkly. "Just go away."

Names changed or not for stories, real or not, he wished they nightmares would stop haunting him.

Persephone hopped onto the desk and rubbed against him, gray fur filling his nose. Her wide green eyes stared at him coolly and he rolled his own. She was deigning to grace him with her presence and try to cheer him up.

He got cats. He understood them. Dogs were harder. They were unfailingly loyal, but they had no grace, no composure.

"I'm guessing that you want more food for trying to help me?" he asked her. She looked at him innocently, trying to convince him that she had absolutely no ulterior motives. He wasn't buying it, but that was all right. "I'll give you tuna fish when I make my own lunch," he told her. She purred joyously and headed back to the grandfather clock to sleep until then.

He closed the document after saving, standing from the chair to get their lunch ready.

He understood cats and, for some reason, he understood a person that he had never knowingly met. Treize Khushrenada. Treize usually worked through lunch, but he always had a large breakfast.

Zechs never wanted to know that. He just did.

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Just so you all know, it's not my style to do horror. It freaks me out. I thought it was necessary for this, though. Anyway, feel free to review.