Pandora Hearts © Jun Mochizuki
... ... ...
He gasped his terror into wakefulness, clutching constricting blankets while unseeing eyes snapped themselves open. He began to thrash his limbs in a moment of panic, trying desperately to unbind himself from the grasp of what he was certain was something vengeful and dead, noticed somebody was very near to him, noticed it was so dark and disorienting that he couldn't tell who, and noticed his mind wasn't in control of its own shivering self and he didn't even know fantasy from reality although it was still so dark he couldn't see even if he could. His heart leapt into his throat while he bit back a strangled sound of fright, and slowly realized that the hands which gently captured and guided his own were warm, fleshy, and not skeletal in the least.
A voice whispered through the dark, ghosting hotly beside his ear. But it wasn't dripping that chilling venom of hatred; it was soft, soothing, and comforting. "It's alright. It's okay."
His heart refused to compose itself, preferring to continue its thunderous journey through his head and his ears while visions of red sparked themselves before him in vividly screaming luminescence, seeming as if they were maleficent fireworks aimed at his eyes. The blood. A boy. A dark-haired boy covered in blood, tears streaming down his cheeks as he sobbed and screamed and cried with such brokenness that Eliot couldn't stand to face what he had done...what they had done...
"It was a dream, Eliot," Leo said. His voice was quiet, his grip firm. It was enough; Eliot finally woke.
"L-Leo?" he asked, shivering, sweating, hot. Much too hot.
"Yes. I'm here," Leo said as he helped Eliot's trembling hands push off a tangled layer of sweat-soaked blankets. "I'm here."
Eliot nodded, knowing Leo was blind to the gesture in the midst of a midnight dark living room. Regardless, he knew Leo had understood, and perhaps even seen (in his own way), for a comforting hand was placed gently upon his shoulder. It was hard for Eliot to slow his hammering heart (his dreams were always so vivid and real...his emotions raced right alongside them; calming down took forever), but with Leo's silent presence there to comfort him, he was able to focus his mind on reality and away from the nightmares. Eliot shakily drew in several deep breaths, calming himself while the fingers of his left hand absently unfastened the first three buttons of his nightshirt. He tugged at the collar, drawing it away from his neck, and lay on his back staring into the dark at what he presumed was the ceiling and not the light fixture, as the latter should have been located more towards Leo's side of the room.
Remembering Leo (for the first time, really, since he finally had his wits about him), Eliot slowly became aware of a foreign warmth encompassing his right hand. After a moment of sightless confusion, he determined it was Leo's smaller hands enveloping his own, softly stroking in a rhythmic, soothing manner. Eliot almost opened his mouth to chastise Leo (to tell him that holding hands wasn't in the least bit manly) but discovered he couldn't choke the words past a sudden problematically dry spot deep at the base of his throat. Coughing slightly with the hopes of dislodging the obstruction, he closed his mouth and decided to say nothing at all, instead choosing to squeeze his grasp in return, tightening their mutual grip as a means of shyly letting Leo know it was all okay now.
He would be okay.
...
The campus breeze whispered several secrets, but Eliot didn't know its murmurings. Deaf to its gentle gossip, all he knew was that it wasn't nearly as cool outside as he would have liked, and he still had three more classes to suffer through before he could go home and change. Growling about the inconvenience of their damned uniforms, and wondering why the hell summer vacation didn't just hurry up and arrive already, Eliot miserably shuffled along a concrete path connecting the building of the school proper to its disjointed, ill-designed gym.
"He's not who you think he is," Xerxes Break murmured silkily, absently fiddling with several strings of Eliot's hair between his long, playful fingers.
Eliot stiffened and swiftly moved away, doing his best to evade any further attempts at physical contact. "What are you talking about?" he asked, keeping his eyes focused on Break, not wishing for the creep to slither behind him again.
Break's chuckle was flippantly airy as he focused his own attentions on unwrapping a small lollipop. "Oh, you know. Some child named Leo~," he said lightly as he discarded the cherry-colored wrapper by tossing it over his shoulder in a most unconcerned fashion. (Eliot winced, thinking the man had simply thrown his garbage onto the campus sidewalk, but was surprised to discover the wadded paper just barely landed in a nearby trashcan after bouncing lightly off the rim. He wasn't sure how Break had done that, with the breeze blowing in the wrong direction.)
"What about Leo?" Eliot demanded.
"Absolutely nothing, Nightray-sama!"
"But you just said-!"
A teasing laugh, a mocking crunch in response.
Annoyed, confused, and curious, Eliot pressed for answers. Xerxes Break craftily (happily) evaded, declining ever-so-politely to depart with any worthwhile statements. And although the older man laughed and continued to profess his sincerest ignorance in the most maddening manner possible, the grin which slid onto his slyly ambiguous face told Eliot they both knew otherwise.
...
"Break? Oh, ignore him," Reim said while readjusting his glasses. "He's only trying to cause trouble, like usual."
Eliot frowned, dissatisfied. "This morning Break told me something, but then he denied knowing anything about it! Is that a joke of his?" he asked, desperate for clarification, information, anything.
Reim paused a moment to consider, placing a gloved hand on his chin. "Well," he said, "that depends on the situation. What did he tell you?"
"That Leo isn't who I think he is."
Reim's face slid from contemplative to impassive. "Ah. Well." He paused to clear his throat. "I'm not exactly sure what Xerxes meant..."
"What?" Eliot asked anxiously. "Spit it out!"
A sigh. A shrug. A regretful glance. "I really don't know."
"Yes, you do."
Reim silently watched Eliot, his patient eyes searching. Weighing. Deciding. "If Xerxes Break didn't tell you outright, I'm not sure it's my place to do so," Reim admitted quietly. "I cannot betray his confidence."
"What a load of crap!" Eliot declared, incredulous. "You know something - you both know something - so say it! Why else would he bother to bait me?"
Reim sighed, but like his older friend, solidly refused to answer (he did so in a much less obnoxious manner, but to Eliot it was just as vexing). Still looking genuinely regretful for his inability to be of any further assistance, Reim slowly gathered his paperwork, briefcase, and coat, and gently maneuvered past Eliot to resume his own errands. He left one furiously frustrated Nightray heir standing alone in his wake.
...
Reim carefully latched the door and leaned against it with a heavy sigh.
"My, my, Reim-san," Break said from his perch atop Reim's work-strewn desk, "you've been doing a lot of that lately. If you keep sighing so heavily you'll run out of air and turn blue like Emily." As an added visual emphasis to his remark, Break poked his miniature companion's head gently, letting her lean to the side just far enough for the movement to catch Reim's attention.
Reim narrowed his eyes in annoyance. "Why did you do that?" he asked.
Break raised an eyebrow and crossed his legs, placing his hands, one atop the other, upon his dominant knee. "What? Compare you to Emily?" he inquired with a curious tilt of his head.
"The boy, Xerxes. You mentioned the boy."
"Ah~, the mysterious little boy."
"Well?" Reim prompted.
A single, colorful wrapper crinkled loudly in the otherwise silent office. Break patiently extracted the sweet from its flimsy packaging and placed it on Reim's desk before dexterously pulling out another from the orange pouch behind him. He unwrapped this one more slowly, fingers dawdling along the ends of the wrapper, seemingly either unconcerned or uninterested with their topic of conversation.
"Well?" Reim repeated, crossing the room in two strides to stand in front of Xerxes.
Break unhurriedly placed one candy on Reim's lips, forcing Reim to take it from his hand, and gave the second to himself. Reim frowned. He had known Break for too many (long and exasperating) years to overlook the absent portions of this routine. Firstly, Break had neglected to offer the candy, choosing instead to impose it upon Reim directly; secondly, Break wasn't crunching his own treat in his usual obnoxious manner. He was therefore contemplating how much of his schemes he desired to divulge, and the knowledge of once more being left out of the loop made Reim very unhappy with his white-haired so-called "friend".
"Xerxes," he said with a huff of impatience, forcibly stopping Break's fidgeting hands in the midst of their quest for another sugary treat. Reim certainly didn't want to grant Break any more time to stall; the Mad Hatter's contractor was known to delay his answers in the hopes that his conversational partners would become distracted by other matters and forget, thereby leaving Break with a perfect excuse to say nothing at all and change the topic of conversation whenever convenient.
With his fingers physically thwarted, Break simply looked at Reim, smiled a slow and roguish smile, and bit loudly through his candy.
...
It was several days before Xerxes Break tired of playing elusive and allowed Reim the opportunity to track him down; several days before Reim had any hope of extracting an answer to the question of why. Why had Xerxes leaked that sort of information? And why to Eliot Nightray? If his intention was to cause paranoia, why didn't he go straight for Leo instead?
As Reim approached, Break's sightless, pomegranate-jeweled eye twinkled in amusement; he had already anticipated Reim's forthcoming interrogation. "You really want to know about this, don't you?" he laughed, flapping his ridiculously oversized sleeves towards the location Reim was standing, acting sentry to Break's safely locked office door.
"I want answers, Xerxes."
"Oh~, you're being serious," he said in a melodious tone of voice that meant at least one of them wasn't. Reim remained silent.
"Oh, all right," Xerxes said, taking a moment to unceremoniously flop himself into a nearby chair and comfortably stretch his booted feet upon the cushion of the other. "What do you want to know?"
"Why you told him."
"That should be fairly obvious, Reim-san."
"You know you see the world differently. What's obvious to you is obscurity itself to everyone else."
"You're either being philosophical today or you're being sarcastic."
"You should know how to respond, either way."
"Look who's being vague now!"
"Answer the question, Xerxes."
"So forthright," Break pouted. "It's rather unbecoming of you."
"Don't change the subject."
Break folded his arms (his nonverbal concession of defeat; it meant he wasn't trying incredibly hard to win the argument in the first place) and regarded Reim with a glowingly mischievous grin. "You know, the Nightray brat is trying to discover the truth."
Reim sighed. "I am aware of that much."
"He's not getting anywhere fast."
"I know."
"I don't believe he's smart enough to figure it out on his own."
"And that's why you told him."
"And that's why I told him."
"Because you knew it would only frustrate him. You validated his hypothesis that something was wrong with Leo - "
"Oh, like that part was easy to miss." Xerxes interjected, rolling his eye.
" - but defeated him in the process because you never bothered to correct him and point him out in the right direction." Reim finished smoothly, quite unbothered by Break's perpetually sarcastic interjections.
"More or less."
"You're cruel, Xerxes Break."
Break's answering grin was shadowy and large, partially hidden behind his right sleeve while he chuckled. Glancing up at Reim with a gaze too direct and intense for a man as unquestionably blind as he was, he murmured, "Yes. I suppose that I am, Reim-san."
...
"Master," Reim said gently while he closed the library's grand double doors behind him, listening intently for the soft scrape of wood upon thick, plush carpet to end with a definitive click. Master Rufus never much cared for unlocked doors; he believed it was too easy for unwanted ears to eavesdrop upon private conversations. Judging by the staggering amounts of information which could possibly be leaked from an estate as mysterious as that in the center of the Barma Dukedom, the master's cautious judgement was not one made in error; the damage wrought from treacherously slithering lips could be catastrophic for their carefully guarded position as one of the Four Great Dukedoms.
Of course, Xerxes Break thought Reim's fastidious insistence of ensuring all doors were bolted before beginning any sort of private conversation whatsoever stemmed from an unwarranted sense of paranoia ("Oh, Reim-san, really. Who would bother trying to get information out of you? You don't know anything!" ...I'm aware of that, Xerxes), when in truth it was because his years spent as a servant to the Barma household had thoroughly ingrained the practice into his normal routine.
Receiving a distracted wave from one elegant hand, Reim was wordlessly bid forward to wait beside his master's desk until Rufus Barma finished whatever esoteric project he had chosen to place in front of himself today. (As it were, a certain fragile parchment was undergoing a bout of comparative scrutinization beside a sheaf of carefully scribbled notes. Another linguistic translation, it looked like, although Reim would be better able to ascertain its specific nature in an hour when the master left to take his evening meal in the small parlor adjacent to the dining room.)
After a few more strokes of an aged, feathered quill (a modern ballpoint pen, actually, but antiquated with a cleverly designed façade in the fashion of those old dip-pens his master was so fond of as long as they never splotched, and this was as close to the perfect, non-splotching, old-fashioned feathered quills as his servants could unearth for him) Rufus Barma laid aside his accumulation of decrypted documents and turned to silently regard his servant. This was Reim's invitation to begin.
"Master," he said, standing smartly at attention and offering a salute, "Xerxes Break has - "
"I know," came the soft interjection. Barma's half-lidded brown eyes slid their focus from Reim's youthful face to alight on something far beyond the view afforded by the library's large windows. Reim recognized it as his master's preoccupied face, knowing it was one he frequently adorned when he was in a pensive mood. Rufus Barma had a habit of resting his eyes on unseeable places far past the physical iron latticework and creeping vines of the garden perimeter when he was mulling over intriguing pieces of information, searching for a way to file and categorize newly acquired knowledge into the larger, more elaborate scheme of things.
"Yes sir," Reim replied. He shifted his weight nervously and gave a quiet cough, trying his best to not appear as flustered as he felt. When Xerxes Break interrupted him, it was no big deal; ignore it and move on. But when it was his master (and it didn't matter how long Reim had been his servant, it was still awkward whenever this happened), Reim couldn't help but feel ill at ease; one never perceived himself as someone entirely, uselessly redundant until he was hired to report on the happenings of the world around a person as knowledgeable as Duke Rufus Barma. (It also helped that the Duke had a touch of foresight, but nobody discussed that openly. It was considered rumor within the great halls of the Barma estate, one of those stories that made up the mythology behind living in such an eerie manor with an illusionist for a master. Reim was fairly certain he was the only living servant to know such rumors were, indeed, true, even though the talent required no glassy pools of blood or lover's stolen tears in order to manifest: an idea which was so contrary to popular household belief that Reim was viewed by the other servants as naïve and unimaginative whenever he attested to its falsehood.)
"Would that be all?" Barma's quiet voice cut through the growing thicket of Reim's mental wanderings with sliding, razor-like ease.
Reim sighed and struggled to articulate his ideas into ever-elusive words. Finding the feat difficult, he pulled off his glasses and began rubbing them vigorously on his shirt, trying his best to not make them squeak in front of the master. (He needn't have bothered; Barma was still entranced by his view of nothingness beyond the restricted window of visible sight.)
"You desire to understand why," he sighed, voice soft and contemplative.
Reim's head shot up and his hands ceased their nervous, twitching attack on his lenses. Replacing his glasses with a serious countenance upon his face, he straightened (almost imperceptibly, but his master was always watching; that bit of household rumor was very truthful indeed) and cleared his throat. "Yes sir," he said.
Barma shifted in his seat and idly fingered the decorative fan which he had hitherto ignored upon the glossy surface of his writing desk. Fingers playing lightly on the scrollwork edges, he said almost absently, "The child is a peculiar anomaly."
Reim frowned. That much was obvious.
"As such," Barma continued, "there remains a fair possibility he is linked to an intrigue of great interest to our friend, dear Mr. Hatter. Especially considering the origins and manifestation of his condition; the interaction between Enigma and his host is invaluable to Xerxes Break, should we say."
"...Sabrie," Reim whispered.
"Exactly."
"But we don't know if Leo really is connected to it."
"No," Barma agreed, dark eyes sliding from the window to once again rest upon his servant, "but the fact remains: this child has been tainted by such curiosities. He very well may have been involved, one way or another, and Xerxes Break will not stop until he discovers his truth."
"He's trying to speed up the process by pushing Eliot, isn't he? Trying to use their friendship to get as much information out of Leo as possible."
Barma smiled faintly, wordlessly encouraging Reim to continue, half-lidded gaze watching with amusement as the pieces clicked into place for the younger man.
Reim continued, eyes brightly wide and excitedly lit. "He knows what Enigma is, and that he only appears for a reason! And specifically to Eliot, at that..."
"Go on."
"But that leads to the part which doesn't make any sense whatsoever. He's influencing Eliot... but he's doing so in entirely the wrong direction. He's letting Eliot believe Enigma appears because of a Nightray Chain. He hasn't told Eliot the truth."
Barma chuckled as he flipped open his fan and began cooling the air, gentle rolling motions of his wrist swirling stray wisps of his long, red hair away from his face.
Reim blinked for a moment and sighed. There would be no more answers this way; Rufus Barma was obviously quite finished speaking, preferring to let events transpire without Reim's interference. But there was one thing he knew for certain: the Duke of the Barma household knew exactly which answers Reim sought.
He just wasn't sharing.
...
Eliot sighed heavily and slid down his seat, unbelievably bored. It appeared as if Leo was late for their customary after school chat. That was unusual. Well, no, it actually wasn't; he was probably wrapped up in some book or another, and had lost all track of time. Eliot halfheartedly clicked his mouse on several random discussion threads, trying to find someone interesting to talk to while he waited for Leo to show up. Discovering a topic of relative interest, he joined for a few moments, blasted a few Edgar-lovers (doing so always made him feel a little better), and logged off when he noticed his old rival, ZZ, had joined. Bastard, Eliot thought smugly. Looks like you managed to steal today's code. Too bad you don't know I've got permanent access, thanks to Leo. He laughed a short, barking laugh which resonated with bitterness for his former rival, and began searching some more for Leo.
...
You are such a nerd, Eliot typed the moment he discovered Leo had logged on.
/And you're a bozo, but I don't complain about that all the time.
Eliot laughed, happy to know nothing bad had happened to Leo. He must have been captured in the enticing embrace of the arms of some novel. Hey, did you hear about the school's debate club? They're thinking about picking apart book three of the HK series, just as a fun challenge to end the year.
/You'd like to join, wouldn't you?
So would you!
/No. Too much work.
It's not work! You already know everything in it! Plus loads more!
/But I'd have to argue with idiots all day. I already do that; you won't leave me alone.
Eliot glowered at the screen. Yes, it appeared as if Leo was feeling just fine.
...
A dark blue dress swept over cold stones with nary a whisper of a breath. Black-tipped high heels clicked as the woman made her way down the erratic twists and turns of the dungeon halls, never stopping, sure of her way though she'd never actually traversed it before. Her white-laced gloves reflected mildly in the flickering torchlight, and she was thankful they hadn't become sooty. It was terrible finding such beautiful gloves in her size; however her host had come by them she was entirely ignorant, but no less grateful. His generosity towards her had been nothing less than kindness itself for the entirety of her elongated stay.
Reaching the end of a corridor which looked identical to several others in this forgotten corner of the underground, she paused to reflect. Remembering, she slid her fingers into a crevasse hidden in shadow, discovered a subtly concealed notch, and strode through a thereby revealed door. It immediately slid shut behind her with a sound only a bit louder than the hissing of the dragging hem of her dress as she made her way across plush carpeting (scarcely a minute late for their meeting) but still early enough to seat herself comfortably; her host had yet to arrive.
Humming softly to herself, she glanced around the subterranean library, cooly taking note of various objects of interest: glinting, archaic swords; obscure samples of darkly painted artistry; wax-coated skulls of various beasts, some of them human; lovely, lifelike dolls skewered with rusted pins and needles; and other miscellaneous artifacts used for clandestine, cultist rituals. A younger version of herself may have shivered with trepidation for being left alone in such an isolated place, surrounded by mysteries of the forbidden. But she was a sagacious woman now; the eerie, decorative clutter only provided her with insight as to the nature of her host, not to the nature of their discussion and her possible role in it all. No, she had nothing to fear from these collectors items, nor from their eccentric collector, but now that she knew he had a particular weakness for such things...
Her smile was sweet as she rose to meet her benefactor. Through the profusion of his apologetic exclamations he never saw the mischievous light kindling behind her shrewd, slate-blue eyes.
