Chapter 37

"Gift Horse Mouth"

Shini awoke with a start that sent him flying to his feet out of bed, kicking the sheets off in a furious tangle in the sunlight of another morning. It was a few moments of kicking and hopping before his mind bubbled up out of sleep to match his body and he realized that he was tripping over his own feet and Heero's tousled head was blinking at him from the bed. The Angel of Death fell to the floor, his great black wings beating once in vain—for Shini had not realized that flapping them would send him even faster toward the ground—before he landed with a thud.

He groaned and his wings, bruised and fluttering in a silent whimper, shrunk and disappeared between his bare shoulderblades, leaving tiny, sable down hanging in the air.

The sunlight poured in the windowpane, painting a square of light around the Shinigami where he lay, in a pair of his mortal husband's pajama bottoms and long tail of hair narrowly contained in a hair binder as it splayed out beneath him. He blinked silently for a moment, then looked down his nose to see Heero chuckle, crawl back over to his side of the bed, and stand up. As he started to stretch and pat down his wild brown hair in futility, Shini was suddenly plagued with memory and the cold and controlled smile of his so-called brother over an arrowhead.

Shini gasped and quickly felt around his chest for the deadly shaft that had pierced his blue-blooded heart, mind still blurred from thick sleep. He did not remember coming to lie back down with his husband, nor even lifting himself from the kitchen floor after he had fallen—and he certainly did not remember traveling to the Land of the Dead if the arrow had indeed pierced him. His fingers clutched around nothing but his unmarked skin and confusion crawled into his bright violet eyes. He'd felt it. He'd felt the arrowhead clack between his ribs and settle in flesh, but there was not a mark to hint that he'd ever known the point of any arrow. There was no hint of any outstanding emotion on Heero's face to suggest he'd found him on the floor in the kitchen, pierced cleanly, and no remembrance of returning to bedroom or otherwise leaving the kitchen.

Maybe it had just been a dream.

"Nightmare?" Heero asked, purring out the word as he usually did when speaking on a good morning. He strolled over to his husband lying on the floor and looked down at him with an amused tilt. "It must have been pretty bad to scare you out of bed. Are you alright?"

"Yeah, I'm fine, Teishu. Just tired, is all," Shini answered in a sigh, then let his head fall to the floor. His vision crept across the ceiling, though his mind flipped through a flurry of troubling and fresh memories.

Brother… Okasan had never mentioned any brother. She never spoke a word of any other children she may have had, and his only siblings were Shinigami. The being who had assaulted him last night—or not—was definitely not a Death God of any sort, whoever he was. Not of Darkness, not of Light. Not a Death or Life God, not a demon or empowered human spirit. Without noticing his husband's movements toward him, Shini plunged back into his memory and dredged up the image of that long, chiseled face and controlling smile, trying to tie to a name he might have heard in his long past.

But Heero crawling over him and uniting their bodies again quickly chased away all productive thought and he abandoned the mental search for a physical one, grinning and rubbing that grin on his husband's. When their lips parted for a breath of air, Shini had risen halfway off the floor, wrapping his arms tightly around Heero's thinly clad torsos and running his mouth along the curve of his neck. Heero's hand was touching the waistband of his own pajama pants, now worn (rather well) by a God of Death and breathing softly on the nape of his neck. "What do you want to do today?" he asked, and waited until Shini had stopped running his mouth lazily over his neck to receive the answer.

Shini leaned back, still wrapped happily around him, and arched a brow for good measure. "Is there something you had in mind?" he purred and reached up to rub noses. Heero smiled and laughed, shaking his head at the gesture.

"Actually, I did," he answered in a voice of low seduction, making Shini arch both brows and murmur an intrigued, "Hm? What, Teishu?"

"I thought we could go for a long ride, then go visit my mother's favorite shrine," he said, briefly kissing Shini, punctuating his list. "And I was thinking I could take you to a nice, crowded noodle shop for lunch so you could see one—they are your favorite, right?"

Shini enthusiastically answered "Yes," with another kiss, and Heero continued on. "Hmm. Then, I think I'll take some pictures with my anniversary gift. Do some work that maybe I could sell, some just for us to see." Shini grinned impishly at this, an expression that was of borderline resemblance to a more wicked expression of his mother, though Heero supposed a little similarity was inevitable and not necessarily unattractive—she was the famed Goddess of Love, after all, and what she sorely lacked in tact and refinement she definitely compensated with physical good looks. "And when we get home, I don't plan to be out of bed for a very long time. Not until the sun comes up tomorrow, that is," he added in a low purr, catching Shini's lower lip again.

The Angel of Death gladly agreed without a word, moving his arms to hook around his neck, and for a moment his lids flickered to glance at his husband's face, but that was not where they landed. Shini instead found himself staring up at the long, lean figure of his supposed brother standing over and observing with a cold, drawn smile. His body swathed in the classical white robe of myth and colorful wings drawn and fluttering in amusement, he kept Shini's gaze as he slung the bow of his shoulder and reached back into his quiver. That smile was almost cruel. A flash of blood red gleamed off the tip of his arrowhead as it moved.

Shini yelped in alarm and dropped away from his husband, parting their happily engaged lips with a musical pop! and landing heavily on his back.

"Shin?" Heero asked a moment before his husband threw him to the floor, sheltering him with wings that burst through his shoulder blades and arched like a scorpion's tail around him. Heero made a confused noise as his chest hit the floor, knocking his jaw squarely in the process, and felt the Darkness whirl out of Shini's pores in a nasty, twisting barrier that glowed with a cold heat. He felt an odd tug all over his skin respond with a clean, icy cold and quickly sat up, rubbing his chin.

"Shini—what are you doing?"

The Angel of Death, currently crouched over his barely-clad husband in the middle of the floor, wings arched at full spread and nearly touching the ceiling over head, sat panting and staring starkly into the air. His inhumanly violet eyes flickered and colored light with confusion. Heero watched his expression distort back and forth from confusion to fear, smeared with outrage, then put a hand on his shoulder. Shini looked back over at him, blinked, and started looking again.

"Hey." Heero sat up, running a hand through the soft down near the base of his left wing. "What's wrong?"

The clean cold that washed over him told him something was wrong, poking at him like tiny frozen needlepoints delicately drawing over him. Something was there, he knew suddenly, from the panicked, searching eyes that crawled across the room. His hand was clutched around a solid, invisible mass, with white light crawling over his fingertips and dissolving in sparks. He ran his tongue nervously over his lips, then looked back over his shoulder again at Heero's hand. "I don't know," he said finally, then surveyed the room again, easing to his knees, then sitting down, dropping whatever invisible weapon he'd clutched at so that Heero could hear a noiseless thud.

Heero rubbed his shoulder for a moment, but did not want to sit in silence for too long. "How long has it been here?" he asked.

Shini didn't turn to look at him. He knew he'd been mildly caught. "A day, I think," he answered. "Sorry that I didn't tell you. I felt guilty..." He purposely excluded his mother's visit, realizing it probably would do little good at this point and dreading the feelings of guilt and regret it would still up.

"I could tell," Heero muttered in reply, remembering the poignant way Shini had looked at him, pulling away from his touch the day before. "Is it dangerous? Do you know what it is?"

"I don't know. It's my brother… I think." It was then that he looked back at Heero, who was quickly succumbing to his own expression of confusion and surprise, with a worried grimace. "Can we make a stop at the library?"

Dabriel greatly regretted his decision to spend the day with his boss, especially on this a day tormented by her wrath. But there was nothing else productive to do he came to realize. Ever since his writing license as a muse had been revoked, his days had grown much longer and become much less peaceful. After he'd stood before the Hippocrene Directorate and stared into the beautiful but mercurial faces of the Grecian Muses themselves and watched them put the gavel down, he'd been banned from acting as any sort of inspiration. In days past he would hop from mortal to mortal, pouring inspiration into them and watching the words come to life through them, but in frustration he'd shown himself to one who had refused to undo his terrible revisions. Hitting the little damn Epicurean had felt good and made him change the title to The Portrait of Dorian Gray like he'd wanted, but earned him his indefinite banishment from the literary realm.

So that was how he'd landed here, hired out to a white Angel of Death as Bookkeeper of Deaths and (greatly degraded) assistant with his faithful doppelganger tagging along behind him, physically identical except for his dual-colored eyes and eccentric choice in clothing. Wandering about Loki's habitation held little entertainment, and Dabriel ended up trudging to her room in absolute, soul-consuming boredom. Maybe there was something to be done.

If there was thing about serving underneath this vassal of Heaven, it was never boring. To say the least.

Dabriel found a very sick mentality behind Loki's choice in décor as he traveled down the smoothed stone floors to where he thought he might find his employer. Loki, despite her Heavenly origins, was the last person he thought reverent enough to live within a house modeled after a Buddhist monastery. He'd seen her icy personality and violent tendencies first hand enough to know her behavior was non-compliant with her divinity, but the stories and rumors left boiling in her wake were worse than that.

As he started up a series of cracked stone stairs, the smell of incense burning brought his attention to the series of burners and candles set on the far sides, spilling over every step. The sight of the tiny flickering flames was soothing, but did not prevent his thoughts to straying to the many tales of Loki's exploits that had kept him awake many a night, carefully eyeing the door to his room and wondering how quickly she might be able to attack.

Some told stories of her mercilessly taking mortals from underneath the nose of authority simply to sate her thirst to exercise her powers. Of smiting her colleagues, of killing her would-be successor in order to retain her station, of tormenting those whose deaths were to be her responsibility. Those who had trained with her refrained from any involvement with the rumor mill when asked, only adopted a grim, white expression and gave warning to avoid her if at all possible. Legend said she was the soul of a murdered woman parading as an Angel with the aid of the Light-Bearer himself, said her eyes were made of ice, said she sought out the pain of deaths to sustain her own emptied and ravenous soul.

But Dabriel knew most of them were just fearful fictions. The danger was in the small kernel of truths he knew some must contain, for he knew he had not seen her full wrath. There was something definitely not Angelic behind that cold look, just waiting for the moment to show its teeth.

And here he was, seeking her out.

Orrin kept close to his back, sensing his original's nervous emotions on edge again, and continually scanned the walls for signs of danger through his peach-colored goggles. Dabriel was pretty sure that in this case, Loki's sword would be much mightier than his pen, should she take offense to him tromping up into her more private quarters. He could only hope she might be in a good mood. Writers didn't train for battle.

He stopped at the top of the stairs and saw that the door was slid slightly open, leading into her unofficial office. Orrin squinted momentarily, peering through his ensorcelled goggles, and nodded to his original. She was in there.

"Loki?"

No answer. Dabriel did his best to squash the unbecoming expression of fear on his face before he stepped forward and pushed the delicate paper door aside.

What had once been a moderately sized room with dusty books on Death and the Afterlife the last time he'd laid eyes upon it had lost every hint of furniture and additions and had grown into a large, open training room. The walls were decorated in scrolls scribbled out in languages Dabriel couldn't read and punctuated by ancient and deadly looking weapons. They hardly appeared to be standard issue equipment, judging by the dark and ragged stains covering the blades of a few and the living eyes plastered to them with an equally unpleasant-looking substance, turning and looking at him. In the center of the room, barefooted on the tatami mats and wearing a strange black dress he'd never seen before, stood Dabriel's boss.

Her long blonde hair was tied taut against her head, pulled back into a bun, pulling her face into a terrible, focused concentration. At her side she held a naginata, a pole armed with a long, curved blade at the end. Her entire body cocked it behind her, ready to be brought swinging through her enemy.

And across from her stood the Thirteenth Shinigami. Black wings arched like a hissing cat's back, edges boiling with Darkness, face lowered to her like an animal about to charge, his face curled back into a horrific manic grin of bloodlust. With the whites of his eyes during black and his arms twisting and clawing the air as if in the throws of horrendous convulsions, he was a completely wicked sight—not at all similar to that which Dabriel'd seen consorting with his mortal husband.

He jumped in shock and nearly let out a noise of alarm. He was stopped from doing so by Orrin's hand on his shoulder, who silently pointed in the direction of the fallen Angel of Death.

Though fierce in appearance and menacing in actions, the Shinigami was transparent from the feet downward, disappearing completely where his toes would have gripped the stone. He made terrible noises, demonic noises, trying to egg on his opponent. His tail had elongated and writhed behind him in anticipation. Loki had not unfolded her wings to match his, a fierce and bright white to counterbalance the deep and sinister black, but remained standing, weapon ready and breathing deeply but sharply.

Dabriel hesitated to call out, though he was rather sure his presence was already known. Very little got past his employer. Orrin remained silent as well, taking his cue from his original.

Dressed in a simple black dress which ended at the middle of her calves, the hem torn in places and the sleeves short and worn, Loki stood absolutely stone still except for the intent flare of her nose as she breathed harshly, eyes fixated on the replica Shinigami she faced. Her body was taut like cord, arching the pole behind her and holding it as still as death. Then, without warning, she was streaking across the room, the room resonating with the noise of the faux Shinigami screeching out in pain. His body crumpled and fell to the floor in four different directions. Even the small amount Darkness imbued to give him life shrieked and screamed in outrage, rising from the evaporating body in thick, black spores which imploded suddenly with a gasp and thunder crack.

She stood, carried by her momentum to the other side of the room, panting against the stone with one hand pressed against the wall and head bowed.

It was only now that Dabriel dared speak up. "Loki?" he asked, not knowing if he had spoken loud enough to carry across the expansive room.

But she turned and locked on him like a whip, glaring at him as he'd never seen before. Her eyes were wide in a genuine look of surprise, but they soon turned to hissing ice blue, angry and agitated. Apparently, entering without knocking was a rather grave offense in her book. She turned her body, still taut from violent intents, and clutched her weapon loosely at her side, not so subtly implying she just might turn it against him if she judged him offensive enough.

"I-I'm sorry. I should have knocked or something," he amended quickly. "I was just wondering if you needed anything done, I didn't mean to—"

"Get out."

Dabriel flinched and hesitated, although he did turn a frightened shade of pale. "Excuse me?"

With more raw emotion he'd ever heard from her throat, she hissed at him, pushing the words through her gritted jaw, "Get out before I tear you apart, you damned thing."

"Alright," Dabriel gulped, already feeling Orrin tugging him away. "Sorry, sorry!" And they both turned and quickly took their leave.

No, never boring.