Disclaimer: Saint Seiya is the property of Masami Kurumada, Toei Productions (anime) and Shueisha.

The Last Temptation

"I hope you didn't really think I would drive so carelessly."

Shun was wearing a colorless version of the Andromeda cloth, enveloped in a cold and muted glow that in no way resembled his cosmo. The chains were resting on the floor around him, quiet but buzzing with readiness. His voice was soft, lower than she remembered, and he looked inexplicably older. Everything about his appearance seemed off and a little less than real, except the kindness in his eyes and his smile.

"Shun!"

"Athena."

The word made her shiver; Shun never called her that.

"I— Are you really here?"

"In every way that matters, yes. Just not bodily."

"Are you…?"

"Dead? Yes."

"Was the accident..."

"Planned? Of course."

"I thought— we all thought..."

"You thought what I wanted you to think. What I needed you to think, Athena. I had to be by myself when I slipped back into Hades."

"Shun!"

At first he didn't reply, but even in his silence she could sense why he was here, and a heavy weight of anticipation settled inside her body. This was no social call to Saori. This was a message for Athena.

"The war is not over."

"Hades lost, Shun."

"Do you really believe that?"

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying we never really knew. There was always a possibility that he was waiting for my death. That was why I had to go on my own terms."

"You've been to the underworld?"

He nodded. "Of course. I really did die."

"But why?"

"He wouldn't risk taking me up here. You know he didn't, before."

"We defeated him."

"We've been wrong before, Athena, about the power of seals and the resilience of gods."

"What if that is so? What is your plan? You can't fight by yourself, Shun."

"I don't plan to fight. I plan to let him take me."

"What?"

The memories she had been keeping at bay flooded her this time: Shun's black hair and strange, deep eyes; Hades' robes on his body; Ikki inches from him, holding back.

"I have the strength this time. I've been preparing for this for years. He will take me, and I will overpower him. I will not let him go."

She gasped, horrified by the implications, but he continued, impassive.

"If what you fear comes to pass… you can't do it alone, Shun."

"My only chance is to do it alone. I need him to come to me and find that he can't control me anymore."

"But he's…" She struggled to find the words as her understanding of the world unraveled. "He's very powerful."

"He's not all-powerful. You know this. You know that I struggled with him, surely you remember that."

"Of course I do."

"Then you know that it is possible. But of course, at the time, I thought the ultimate sacrifice was my death. I understand now that it is not."

"What is the sacrifice? What happens if you succeed?" she asked, although she already knew.

Shun paused for a moment. "Then I will be the seal. For all eternity."

She cast her eyes downward and thought of Roshi in front of the waterfall, guarding the seal as the years went by, living in a shell of himself. It must have seemed to him like forever, but she knew that it hadn't been. The finiteness of death was not the ultimate sacrifice. There were no words, no measure that could circumscribe what Shun was offering.

"But if you fail?"

"Then it starts again, as it always has."

"So the war isn't over."

"The war hasn't been over since the time of myth, Athena. You need to be ready for whatever the outcome is. Do you understand?"

"I'm sorry, Shun."

"I am too."

He smiled then, and in that smile she saw everything that he was, his power and his kindness, the stuff of myths and prophecies. There was a world beyond the planetarium, beyond the city, beyond even the stars, a world where her actions echoed endlessly.

"Should I tell the others?"

"No. They will find out when it's safe. For now, I need you to be ready."

"But Shun, the saints..."

She trailed off, but he didn't need her to finish.

"Are saints of Athena. It is their duty, as it is mine." His eyes narrowed. "And yours, Saori."

She swallowed hard upon hearing her human name, understanding perfectly why he had chosen to use it.

"I don't want them to fight, Shun. They have a right to live, they have a right to love."

"They must love love itself."

"Shun, you've done so much already."

"We all have. But we must resist the temptation to come down from the cross."

She knit her eyebrows in confusion.

"I was tempted, you see. To untie from the rock. To come down from the cross. I thought that victory meant proving myself, extricating myself, returning triumphant. But that wasn't victory. You know that now, don't you?"

Saori shuddered. "Christ's last temptation," she whispered, to herself more than to him.

"Everything he worked for would have crumbled. Even though it seemed unnecessary. Even though it seemed like it was over. Do you understand?"

She shook her head lightly, hope mixed with fear now. "What do you mean, Shun?"

"I must complete the sacrifice, Athena. It's the only way for the cycle not to repeat. It's the only way for Hades to remain defeated and never rise again."

"You are playing with destiny."

"No, rather I am revealing it. This is the fate of Andromeda. It always was."

"Andromeda was saved, Shun." Even as she said the words, Saori thought of Ikki, and then she understood. Andromeda had untied herself from the rock. She had come down from the cross.

"She saved herself, Athena. And I understand now that she shouldn't have."

"Will I see you again?"

"No, my dear. Not if I succeed."

She sat in the dark stillness of the planetarium for a long time, hours perhaps, after he was gone. When she emerged at last, a faint grayish light had taken over the horizon, and she stood on the roof watching, vigilant, until the sun pushed away the night to reveal the world that she had vowed to protect.

Ikki paused in front of the gate, giving the night guard a chance to recognize him through the cameras he couldn't see but knew were there, and walked in slowly as the doors opened. There were other ways in, but they involved a whole class of problems that he wasn't interested in right now, that were most decidedly not his reason to be here, even if he couldn't quite say what that reason was. The tree-lined path to the house was about a quarter of a mile, ending in a circular driveway around a large fountain. It was late enough that the darkness was beginning to recede from the horizon, and looking east towards the house he could see a thick red band of hope. For a moment, he's seven years old and Shun is gripping his hand tightly as they both look at this mansion for the first time: so massive, even from this distance, that they don't understand at first that this is somebody's house. He had known at that time that he was standing on the threshold of his life, and that the next step would change everything. Not taking that step would have made for a very different story, one he was vaguely aware of, like a figure in the dark he couldn't quite make out.

That quarter of a mile looked longer than it should have, considering he'd already walked quite a few whole ones — far enough not only for dawn to break night's hold, but also for the effects of ten shots of whiskey to have worked themselves mostly out of his body, except for a tired and sickly feeling that he knew would stretch through the day.

He hadn't had this much alcohol in a while. He'd started drinking the way kids start, greedy for the buzz to make him somehow more of a grown-up. It wasn't until he met Li that he actually learned to drink like one, eventually finding he no longer had to memorize which whiskeys were supposed to be better than others, because he could honestly taste the difference. He found that a drink of whiskey or a drag of a cigarette relaxed him gently without transporting him. He'd tried a few other drugs over the years, mostly whatever the woman he was with expected him to partake in — smoke passed in a kiss, pills licked off fingers, lines off the curve of a waist. Only the legal ones had stuck, in part because some of those experiences had confused him. They felt too much like cheap counterfeits of the sensations he knew well from battle, when his cosmo burned so bright that he could touch the very edge of his humanity and feel — no, become — limitless, boundless, selfless. He could understand perfectly why the promise of those feelings, precisely dosaged into little pills, would be compelling to people who would never experience the real deal. He also understood he was not one of those people.

Of course, this very thought confused him too, because the truth he rarely admitted was that he was never quite sure which world was real, or which self was real in it. Was it the immortal phoenix, sowing nightmares and reaping mayhem as it plunged into the depths of hell? If that was what was real, what kind of shell of a life was he living now, this caricature of a bad boy, leafing through menial jobs and forgettable women like a book that didn't interest him? Or perhaps it was the microscopic and thoroughly human joys that gave texture to most of his memories: riding motorcycles, teaching martial arts, sleeping in next to his wife on Sundays? But if that was real, why did he feel this ghostly ache for the thrill of war as one might for a missing limb?

He had once asked Shun if he missed war, and his brother — his brother who had a tendency to start coughing if Ikki had smoked within an hour of meeting him, and a knack for sipping a beer without ever making it less than half full — had twisted his face into a rare scowl and quietly said "Ikki," in a tone that made him feel ashamed. Ikki understood, of course. Shun hadn't been thrust into sainthood by the death of his first love, hadn't been forced to kill in training, hadn't even completely understood what it meant when they stood here in front of this house as children. He'd been too secure in his grip of Ikki's hand, his faith that someone must know what the hell was going on. Shun had managed to hold on to the string of his own compassion, threading it through the war, weaving it into his life. Until the end.

He kept having to breathe this in, that Shun was dead. Everything else was so distracting — Saori, Li, Seiya, whoever else was involved in this nonsense — and he kept letting himself get distracted, because it was easier than focusing. He took a deep breath of morning air and forced himself to think the thought: Shun was dead. He could only hold it for a second; any longer and he found himself gasping for air, rushing to the surface of his mind.

It made him happy, in a way, to know that Shun hadn't missed war and couldn't imagine what it meant to miss war, because at least it showed that Ikki had succeeded in some way. He had protected Shun from the horrors he himself had experienced, absorbing the worst of it in ways that were far from figurative, and eventually provided his brother with enough momentum to pull through to peace with the conviction that it was real. Meanwhile he himself was left to sort through the memories and the nightmares, heart too cluttered with the past to leave room for anything more.

It made him happy, but it also made him lonely. Ikki remembered Saori and Seiya at the mansion, scandalized at his drinking, his smoking, his existence. "What happened to you?" He wasn't sure how to begin to explain; in fact, he wanted to ask why it hadn't happened to them. Had they come out of the war with limbs unscarred, hearts whole, minds sound? Was he the only one that found the prospects of returning to battle or never going back equally intolerable? He'd stretched his life far beyond the Kido estate, seemingly endless though it may have been, and found a world there. Yet after all these years and everything he'd known, here he was, circling back to the start. Back in this damn mansion, still mad at this girl, still crazy about her. Caught up in a debt that he wasn't quite sure if he was meant to pay or collect.

When he looked up again from the long path to the house, she was there, looking out into the sunrise from the edge of the roof, in a long gauzy dress that betrayed the quiet breeze. Panic surged in his heart before he could name it, and ebbed only when he told himself, clearly and determinedly, she's not going to jump. She wasn't — he knew that, even if he knew there were scars forming right now on her wrist, scars that spelled his name and every unspeakable thing he had said to her — and yet he was forced to admit, was forced to remember, that these were her own battle scars, just as much as his criss-crossed his back and his chest. He could never have loved her if he hadn't realized that.

He still remembered, clear as day, the first time he had foreseen what was going to happen to him. Up until then she had been Miss Kido, uncaring instigator of pointless martial arts tournaments and clueless leader of a rag-tag band of second-rate saints. When Seiya had tried to punch him inside the command center, walking away had been as easy and satisfying as dodging his attack and mirroring it back. He'd had nothing to stay for. "Are you not satisfied with my leadership?" Even now, it made him smirk. So good-looking, so insecure.

But the next time they met, the woman he found in that ravine was somebody else entirely. He saw her first from behind, staring down Dante and Capella, and before he could see the look on her face he heard them mock it, malice dripping sickeningly. But it was covering something else. They were unsettled by her. One unconscious saint was crumpled by her feet, another two hung rosary-like from a rock face. There was no reason for two silver saints to be standing back and trying to convince her to join them. By all accounts, they had already won. She was defenseless and outnumbered.

She was also wholeheartedly, stubbornly unafraid.

Whatever stirred within his heart when she smiled at his arrival had never quite unstirred. It wasn't love yet, not then; but it was something novel and foreign, an impulse to gather her in his arms. Because the confusion made him bristle, he was hard on her that day — rough when he shoved her out of harm's way, unforgiving when she asked him to help his own brother. He walked away from his own unfinished fight because he needed to leave as fast as he could. It wasn't love then, not yet; but when he heard her say, "I want you to stay," he had to remind himself, for the first of countless times to come, that she meant the Phoenix saint, not him.

Things were different now; it was him that she asked to stay at the cabin, it was him that she had lay beside on the grass, looking at the stars. Suddenly he remembered what she had said to him there, when he asked why she knew all the stories of the sky. "They're our stories," was her answer. "Cycles that we reenact with each incarnation. Different people. Same passions." Ikki paused at this, playing idly with her hair spread his chest, gaze fixed on Aldebaran, left horn of the bull that kidnapped Europa. Consort of Zeus. Mother of the judges of the Underworld. Sister of Phoenix. The myths fit together like puzzle pieces, bound and tangled in that red string of fate, and yet he found that he could not make the bigger picture come into focus. What was the moral of the story? "But don't you think… that we can change our fates?" She sighed at this, deeply, and propped herself up to look at him. He touched her face without thinking, thumb along cheekbone, wanting to make sure she was there, real. "Yes," she answered, finally. "But we must be wise enough to know when not to."

He knew that he could take a step, walk into this house, climb up on the roof. He could touch her hand, her face, her waist. Explain, apologize, plead. If he asked her to trust him, would she tuck herself against him and close her eyes as he jumped them both off the roof?

As if to answer, she was now finally turning, slowly, long hair moving first, dress twirling around her legs. She saw him immediately and there was just enough light that she could look him in the eye. The distance and the half-light and the scotch in his head made her difficult to read, but as far as he could tell she did not move a single muscle, as if she had expected him to be there. He relaxed his features to match hers, his own mind just as difficult to read. He was again caught in between, at the threshold of his life, peering over the edge, even if she was the one on the roof.

Behind her the band of red had stretched and thinned, making way for a swath of golden light that cut through the darkness. He could feel her cosmo, gentle and mighty, lingering softly just on the horizon. He had known for many years now that she was a goddess, but he still thought of her as a woman, broken and beautiful. But now here she was, and she didn't look like that short girl lying on the grass, burrowed under his jacket to hide from the nip in the air. She didn't look short from this angle — a trick of the light and the floor-skimming nightgown. She didn't look cold. She didn't look real. No, in that first light of dawn she looked like a goddess, exquisite and fearsome, both more and less than human, and the light that exploded around her was so bright it could set fire to the skies, so bright it could chase away the stars, so bright that his entire life flashed before his eyes and almost made sense.

A.N.: This chapter took me a while because I wanted to go back and watch some of the Hades episodes to remember some stuff, which required watching time in addition to writing time. :) The next chapter is shorter and almost ready, so I'm hoping to post that this week. And don't worry, these two are finally going to do some talking pretty soon. They just had to think about some stuff first...

(Oh, the line "So good-looking, so insecure" is from a Tom Petty song I love that I was listening to a lot when I first drafted this!)