NIOBE'S VIOLETS
by Ashura
DEDICATION: For Dan, for his 1x2 School fic contest
DISCLAIMERS: The usual. I don't own any of the characters, names or places from GW, I've just warped them.
WARNINGS: Yaoi (3x4, 1x2), Yuri (HxC, RxD)
AUTHOR'S NOTES: AU, Humour, Drama. Contrary to what you may think, the inspiration for this actually came from watching "Real Genius" for the millionth time, but influences include the X-Men, Harry Potter, Escaflowne, the Young Ones, and the Heralds of Valdemar. The title...well, that should be explained later.
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Chapter Six
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Warmth spread like a blanket over Duo's body, light prickling insistently at his closed eyelids and prodding him into drowsy wakefulness. Without opening his eyes, he couldn't pinpoint exactly where he was—too hard to be a bed, except for what felt like another human body pillowing his head. A low groan sounded from the space behind his head, and reluctantly he pushed himself up onto his elbows.
"Mmff...morning," mumbled Heero sleepily.
Was /that/ whose chest Duo had been resting on? A blush suffused his face, but he smiled a good-morning greeting. "I don't remember falling asleep out here," he admitted.
Heero shrugged, pushing himself upright as well. "Neither do I, really, or I would have taken you back inside. My neck's stiff, how d'you feel?"
"A little sore," Duo conceded, rubbing at his neck. "I think you took the worst of it though."
"Hn," Heero muttered noncommittally, picking himself up off the balcony and stretching wiry limbs—a motion Duo couldn't resist watching through his bangs as he picked bits of fallen leaves out of his hair.
"What time do you figure it is?"
Heero peered up at the sun, squinting. "Nine-thirty." Duo just started at him incredulously.
"Are you serious, or making that up?"
The faintest flicker of a smile crossed Heero's face, so quick and subtle it might only have been a fabrication of Duo's over-evolved imagination. "Of course I'm serious. Why would I make up what time it is? You'd only have to look at a watch to know I was wrong."
Duo made a face at him. "I'm hungry."
"Let's go to breakfast then." Heero ran a hand through his wild mop of dark-brown hair. It did absolutely nothing to tame it, but it gave him a fey aura, almost a surreal one—the delicate, fragile-
seeming, but incredibly strong body, the mess of hair that flew haphazardly from his face in all directions, the piercing, impossibly deep blue eyes. A memory of that moment, upon waking, when Duo realised he was snuggled against the other boy's chest brought another blush to his face, but if Heero saw it, he refrained from comment. Duo followed him back inside and through the labyrinth of hallways toward the dining room.
"Stop." The voice, while commanding, barely reached his ears, a whisper carrying itself on the air to touch his ears. Duo turned, and Heero paused as well, as Sylvia slipped into the hall from behind them.
"I want to talk to you," she said softly.
Duo swallowed. "What about?"
Sylvia shrugged, noncommittal and indifferent. "I just want to know who you are. And show you something. Will you come see me after breakfast?"
Duo realised abruptly that he was afraid of the consequences should he refuse. "Sure. Where?"
Her head tilted. "The basement. I live there. Heero can show you." And then she was gone, faded into the corners and shadows as if she had never really been there.
Heero touched his elbow briefly, and Duo started as if he'd been shocked. The other boy smiled dryly. "Looks like we know what we're doing for the rest of the morning, then. Come on, let's get you fed."
Duo discovered he could barely keep his mind on a breakfast of pancakes and syrup, let alone on the chatter that flew round his head at the table. Catherine was entirely too solicitous, too, and every time he looked at her she met his gaze with a conspiratorial—and frighteningly predatory—smile.
"What're you doing later?" Hilde asked, reaching across his plate for the syrup. "Practicing with Mr. Treize again?"
Duo shook his head. "He didn't tell us to. Anyway I ran into Sylvia in the hall, she wants me to come talk to her."
"In the basement?" Dorothy asked cautiously, and Duo nodded. "Oh, lucky you."
"Stop scaring him," Hilde told her crossly.
Dorothy shrugged. "I'm not scaring, I'm warning. Hell, that place scares me, and I've known her most of her life."
"Guys," said Duo, hinting, "you're not making me real comfortable here...."
"Don't worry," Heero told him, his voice low. "It's not that bad. Besides, I'm going with you."
It was more comforting to Duo than he thought it probably should have been. Nevertheless, he finished his breakfast and, when Heero had scraped the last bit of drying maple syrup from his plate, he stood. "Lead on, then. I don't know where I'm going."
"I know," said Heero, leading him away.
The basement that served as home to Sylvia Noventa was a truly terrifying place. Duo followed Heero down a flight of spiral stairs, twisted black metal tilting in unbalanced curves into the depths of the ancient school. Then a long hallway, barely lit by pale, flickering flourescant lights that did nothing to banish the shadows playing on the walls...and finally, a wooden door.
Heero knocked.
It flew open. Sylvia stood in the doorway, her hand on the wooden frame, still dressed in the paint-spattered smock and wornout jeans that were her unofficial uniform. Her feet were bare, and her blonde hair twisted into a flyaway knot at the nape of her neck, secured there by a blue pencil stuck hastily into the tangles. Were it not for her surroundings, and the wild, lost look in her pale blue eyes, she would have looked no more frightening than any other reclusive artist.
"Come in," she said, stepping aside so they could enter. Heero passed her, and Duo followed—
His breath caught in his chest, his eyes widening in abject horror. Sylvia had decourated her den in a collage of murals, painted onto the walls in painful detail and larger-than-life aspect. And the images themselves were blood-chilling.
Pain seemed the primary theme through them all—but not simple, human pain that could have been endured. Even the most innocent of images—of which there were not many—was imbued with a sorrow so intense it bled from the walls, crying in tears of dried paint from the subjects of the nightmarish portraits.
The picture of himself, the one Dorothy had already told him of, was unfinished. As yet it was without background or detail—only an image of himself, dressed in black, with a silver cross dangling from his neck and a maniac gleam in eyes that he had never realised were so violet. Green energy, like that he'd been learning to call, pooled in his hands and formed into a scythe as tall as he himself. There was no target yet for his wrath, and no scene to form the background for it—it was all disconnected, even dreamlike, if a dream could raise the blood in his heart to boiling the way this portrait did.
Another painting caught his attention—the one next to his own. This was Heero, superimposed on a background of an angry red sky, the telltale shape of a mushroom cloud far in the distance. But it showed a different Heero than the one Duo had spend the night curled against—this one was naked, as frail and beautiful as he might have imagined the real one to be, but with his expression twisted into a despair more profound than anyone should ever be forced to know. White feathers floated around him, torn from the bleeding angel's wings spreading from his shoulders, and his hands and feet were dripping blood like the legend of the stigmata.
Beyond Heero was Dorothy, another painting entirely—kneeling in profile, her head thrown back in pain, her body stretched as her limbs disconnected from each other, joined only by thin bands of something that glinted like steel. Titanium bones protruded from torn parchment skin, and the top of her head fell back from the rest of her like a lid. Numbers swarmed from it like spectres, intent on escaping the confines of her brain—swirling around her, reflecting in her eyes as he mouth twisted into what could only have been a scream.
Then there was Wufei, hunched forward with his hands wrapped around the hilt of the sword that penetrated his gut and protruded angrily from his back. Blood dripped through his fingers and from the corner of his mouth, but his dark eyes blazed in feral, unforgiving fury, the entire sky behind him alight in flames.
There was Trowa, his body distended and distorted, limbs stretched far beyond even his capacity for flexibility. He was pinned through the shoulders and knees to a kaleidoscopic background of patchwork motley that made Duo's eyes spin, and he cradled his sister's body to his chest with painfully-stretched arms, blood dripping from his sorrowful green eyes like tears.
Near the painting of the twins knelt Quatre, wild-eyed, beaten to his knees, his naked body dark with bruises and crusted blood that caked his skin and matted his head to his skull. His wrists and feet were bound tight in tangled harp-strings, and sparkling trails of tears fell from his bowed head, his expression twisted with sorrow, betrayal, and simple physical pain far beyond the endurance of any single creature. The background to the segment was awash in blood-tinged water, deep red where it touched him til at last at the corners it ran clear.
There was Lady Une, her face split and divided into prismatic facets, none of them ever quite complete, each one missing something, her face dominated by the warring emotions of anger, fear, and desperate sadness.
There was Hilde, her body bent back at an unnatural angle, her belly impaled on a pole that jutted up from a ground strewn with the torn bodies of the fallen. Her eyes were closed, her fingers clenched, her face a mask of agony she refused to surrender to.
And finally Relena, naked as well and kneeling, facing outward, her hands cupped in front of her. Water poured in streams through her fingers, from her eyes, from the tips of her sodden hair. She was melting into the sea that comprised the background of the painting—her legs and the lower part of her body had already faded into transparent iridescence, her feet merged with the ocean til they had no more form.
Sylvia stood very still and quiet as Duo stared open-mouthed at them all.
"What—what the hell /are/ these?" he demanded, breathy, when at last he could speak.
She shrugged. "Sometimes the past. Sometimes the future. Sometimes nothing more than a representation of what is already in one's heart."
"But—they're horrible!" Duo stammered, realising only too late how that could be taken badly by someone whose lack of sanity was not even in doubt.
She shrugged again, delicately. "They are unpleasant images. But they are truth, in their own way, and the truth is seldom, if ever, agreeable."
"Then what do they mean?" Duo demanded, capturing her eyes. She met his gaze squarely, her expression blank.
"Do you really imagine that I know?" she asked him plainly.
"Then why paint them?" he continued, forcing the issue. "Why make them at all? They scare the shit out of me, don't they do the same to you? I assume you don't just make them up, that they appear to you or something—"
"And that," Sylvia interrupted, "is exactly why. Do you think I would have any rest from them if I ignored them?"
Duo sighed, defeated. "I suppose not."
"Sylvia." Heero said softly, and Duo's gaze swung toward him—til now he had been silent, observing the braided boy from a shadowy corner, his back to the painting of himself that he preferred not to see. "Is this why you wanted Duo to come down here, or did you want something else?"
"There is more," Sylvia confirmed, fumbling in her back jeans pocket until she retrieved a paintbrush and crossing to stand in front of Duo, her upturned gaze appraising him frankly. "Take off your shirt."
"What?" slipped from Duo's lips before his mind had even registered it.
She sighed tightly. "Take off your shirt."
Every braincell in Duo's skull rebelled at the idea. Not that baring his chest, in itself, was the sort of thing that bothered him, especially with Heero still watching him from the corner—wait, where did /that/ thought come from?—but letting this strange self-proclaimed Oracle anywhere near his unprotected body did not exactly leave him with a sense of comfort. He shot a quick look at Heero, but the other boy seemed as mystified as he. "Oh, all right," he agreed finally, overriding the rational parts of his brain and tugging his t-shirt off over his head.
Something thick and wet brushed across his chest, and he looked down. It was a curve of violet paint—Sylvia had wasted no time after his capitulation, and dipped her brush in one of the nearby pots to swirl it over his skin. Another line, added to the first—then another, til the brush no longer tickled and the paint was almost dry. He watched her moves, her graceful fingers flicking across his chest with an almost protective air.
"What is it?" he asked, when she was finished and stepped away. It was a design, perhaps something ancient, perhaps something of her own creation, a collection of swirls and lines forming an elabourate pattern across his pectorals.
"A charm," she answered with another of her delicate shrugs. "You're going to need it."
It was not the most comforting thing Duo had ever heard.
The girl smiled up at him warmly—the first time, he realised, that he had ever seen her smile. "Be sure to tell me when it wears off," she warned him—the smile, which had been comforting, faded as she seized his hand. "Your coming precedes a darker one," she warned, suddenly serious. "You are the final piece in a puzzle, but once it is completed, the true test begins. I promise, I will help you however I can."
She dropped his hand, and Duo, stricken, found himself searching for Heero over Sylvia's head.
"That's enough," the boy's soft voice said firmly, slipping from the shadows and resting a hand on the oracle's shoulder. "We appreciate it, Sylvia. Now you've scared the wits out of Duo enough for one day."
She smiled, apologetic. "I'm sorry."
"No problem," Duo promised her, pulling on his shirt. Relief flooded him as Heero took his arm gently to lead him away.
They climbed back up the stairs in companionable silence, the dried paint on Duo's chest feeling scratchy and odd. Wufei met them as they emerged from the stairwell, his eyes troubled.
"Meeting," he informed them tersely. "Dorothy's room, right away. We have a bit of a problem."
