I promised you battle, didn't I? Well, here it is! Lots of stuff blowing up. A few more secrets of the past revealed. Oh, and a bit of Duo-skin. Ash understands fan-service after all. *grin*
NIOBE'S VIOLETS
by Ashura Nagisa
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)
ARCHIVE: Desolation Angels (http://www.dreamwater.net/ashura)
AUTHOR'S NOTES: AU, Humour, Drama.
***********
Chapter Thirteen: Double, Double, Toil and Trouble
***********
The afternoon sky was scarlet with fire and
rage.
The battle had begun simply--Duo had seen the long
black car pulling through the gates, and raced down to Wufei's balcony to warn
him. From somewhere distant, they heard
Relena shouting to them that the other side had been breached as well. Wufei didn't know what happened to either of
them after that. He'd growled at Duo to
get away, to run and help the others somehow while he held the car away.
Flames licked at his fingertips and played down his
arms--they were his children, he gave birth to them, raised them, called them,
and then sent them forth. This was his
natural element, the one remaining legacy of his draconic ancestry, and he
reveled it in. The fire filled him, but
never consumed, and with the barest thought he sent it leaping from his hands
to wall the road that led to his fortress.
Lifetimes ago, Long Diwu, the Fifth Dragon, had
succumbed to the torments of his captors and loosed the firestorm that took the
life of his kin.
And for this, Chang Wufei would take revenge.
******
The mist rolled in from the forest, obfuscating
everything--and that was the first sign that something was wrong. Barely visible, the faint shadow-shape of
human forms jostled within it, an incoming cloud of roiling bone and
flesh.
What worried Zechs the most was that he sensed no
/life/ in any of them.
"Hilde, go back inside." She'd been sent to bring him back, he knew,
but he couldn't leave now. "Tell
them I'm holding off as many as I can in the garden, that Tsuberov's sent his
creatures in for us. Noin at least will
know what I mean."
She glared at him defiantly, her hands on her
hips. "All by yourself? You're going to need me here!"
He shook his head--he had no time to argue with the
stubborn girl. "Not half so much
as they'll need you there. Go!"
She gave him a last hurt look, but turned and
pelted back toward the main building. Zechs sighed, resting for a moment against the trunk of the willow
tree. "Well, old friend," he
said quietly, the rough bark comforting against his skin, "I need your
help on this one."
He could feel--the way he tried to teach his
students to feel, the way he'd always somehow been able to--when the ancient
tree sang to life beneath his hand, her warmth spreading through his
blood. "Thank you," he
murmured as he sank to his knees on the grass, fumbling for the Swiss Army
knife in his pocket. There was still
one sure way to protect his garden from Tsuberov's inhuman army.
A deft flick of the knife sliced his palm open
before his body had time to register the pain--first one hand, then the other,
more gingerly, before he let the instrument slip through from his tingling
fingers. That was not the weapon he
would use today.
Blood trickled down his arms and welled in the
palms of his cupped hands. He leaned
forward, his head bowed, and pressed his hands to the ground, watching
dispassionately as the sanguine stuff, still crimson and liquid, seeped into
the dirt.
Perhaps it should have hurt. It did not. Instead it was liberating, the power of this /joining/ with the
earth--he could feel the sun on his face though the clouds obscured it, and the
wind bore to him the scent of sea salt and desert sands. His skin tingled with the vibration of
being, of /life/, and he celebrated it, basked in it.
And then he called to it, and it answered. All around him, the grass began to grow; the
trees stretched out their leafy boughs and straightened gnarled roots, til they
had formed a wall between the golem army and the garden. Weeds sprouted, elongated, and wrapped
viciously around unprotected legs, trapping the invaders in unforgiving vines.
Zechs laughed, exhilaration coursing through veins
fast emptying of blood.
*****
Eternity in darkness. Trowa--or was he Trey-ti? Which name, which memories truly belonged to him? Or were they all his, part and parcel of
this creature he could no longer find form to be? Whatever it was, he had no way to judge the time. Epochs could have passed, and ice ages,
while he floated in this stygian void.
He was lonely, and emptier by the second. The memories, whoever's they were, came less
frequent now, as he lost his tenuous grip on whatever identity he had once
claimed. Flashes of blonde hair and
soft skin, of soft lavender-grey eyes and red curls, taunted him with their
proximity, never close enough to catch.
Now he was thinking of thoughts as tangible
things--he who was no longer tangible himself. Was this truly all there was left of him, then? Or was even this transition, and he would
fade before long to merge with the empty chaos of the cosmos?
//I'm scared.// He would have whispered it, had he had voice to speak.
And to his desperate, joyful surprise, an answer
came. Jumbled thoughts mingled with his
own; someone else's emotions and memories that remained inexorably linked to
his--fire, the char of burnt bodies and crying, the warmth of a scratchy wool
blanket, the fervent grip of a sibling's hand.
//Cathy?//
A brush against his consciousness like the faint
touch of her hand--a sorrowful flash of deep blue eyes, and the memory of the
curve of an adolescent breast--and warmth, suffusing him, lending him form.
//Trowa! It's all right, I'm here.//
If he'd had proper eyes, he would have cried. //Cathy...I can't feel my body...I can't
find it...it hurt, and they I couldn't get back to it...//
//That's all right,// she whispered. //You can share mine.//
*****
Another door, another empty room. Despite his ever-dignified appearance,
Treize Khushrenada was quickly becoming extremely pissed off. Yes, dammit, that /was/ the only way to
quite word the anger bubbling in his blood.
The ruse had been an utter failure--he still wasn't
sure how Dekim had recognised Trowa, but he had, and had dragged
"Mariemaya" off to some other wing under the pretense of a routine
medication. Treize had a reasonable
idea of what had really been in that syringe--unfortunately he hadn't figured
it out early enough, or neither of them would be in this mess now.
He hurried down a long corridor--the walls had
turned from wood to metal some time back, and he seemed to have reached the
laboratory wing at last. He kicked open
another door, though he was beginning to expect nothing but empty gurneys and
shelves full of tools.
This time, though, he opened the door directly into
the surprised face of a young man in a lab coat and goggles. A body lay prone on a table behind him,
covered with a sheet, but Treize caught sight of a telltale strand of escaped
red hair.
"What the--?" the man began. Treize
ignored him, pushing past to throw back the sheet that covered the body.
Mariemaya--or, he suspected in this case,
Trowa--lay strapped to it, blue eyes open and vacant, all her muscles lax. He had just reached for the fastenings to
the restraints that held her down when the young lab assistant interposed
himself between the angry warlock and the table.
"You can't do that! What the hell? What are
you doing in here?"
Treize leveled him a dark glare. "What's your name?"
The man blinked. "Mueller--why?"
"Well, Mueller," Treize said calmly,
"you have three choices. You can
help me. You can walk out that door
quietly, and /now/...or you can not walk out at all."
Mueller's eyes hardened, and he reached a hand into
his pocket--probably, Treize thought idly, he truly believed he was being
subtle. And intimidating. "Or," he said, "I can keep
you from walking out."
Treize sighed. "I had a feeling you'd say that." In one smooth gesture he raised his hand--light burst forth from
his palm, momentarily blinding even himself. Mueller flew backward, hitting the wall with a solid thud and sinking to
a crumpled heap on the floor.
The headmaster of the St. Gabriel Institute spared
the man's body no more than a glance. He set about hastily freeing Mariemaya's--no, Trowa's--body and slung
the unconscious doppelganger over his shoulder. There would be time to worry about recovering him later.
Finding Mariemaya after that was a good deal
easier, but that might have been because Treize decided to employ less discreet
tactics. Anything that got in his way,
he destroyed. By the time his daughter
came hurrying up to him to cling to his side, there was little left but rubble.
"It looks like they had an earthquake,"
she observed, sounding pleased. "But shouldn't that other part fall down too?"
Treize glanced at her. "I suppose you're right." He freed his hand from her grasp and leveled it toward the
remaining buildings. With one murmured
command, Oz' entire laboratory wing tumbled to the ground in a heap of smoking,
dusty, shattered debris.
*****
Duo was trying--and barely, slowly managing--to
climb up the roof. He'd abandoned his
post to run and warn Wufei that a hearse was arriving. And the firestarter had done an amasing job
of holding them off for a while, all the way up until the moment when a thick
black cloud appeared above the Romafeller car and Dekim Barton had stood on the
roof of it, his arms spread wide. He
called something, perhaps a name, and a shockwave had ripped from his hands to
shake the school down to its rattling stone foundation. Wufei fell back, his head connecting solidly
with the wall behind him. Dizzily, he
managed to stand, but by the time he could coax fire from his fingers again,
Barton, Dermail and Tsuberov had breached the perimetre and reached the
courtyard.
Things had gone steadily downhill from there. Most of the others were had joined battle in
the courtyard--Tsuberov had apparently brought with him an army of golems,
artificial people he'd build and animated. Duo cringed to think was /his/ power must be. He understood now that there was more to this than just wanting
to close down a school and use the students as weapons--there was something
running much deeper, something that made all the memories of his previous life
important.
And he'd figure out what it was, /after/ he got to
the roof where Dekim Barton had cornered Heero. He wasn't sure how either of them had gotten up there in the
first place, but there they were, and he was left clambering up the side of the
building to reach them. His head
crested the gutter just as Heero turned and noticed him in time to offer him a
hand. Duo grasped it, and Heero hauled
him effortlessly up onto the roof.
"So it's you." Dekim seemed more pleased to see Duo than surprised. "I should have known you were here as
well. Why else would all the points
converge at once to give me this?"
"I don't know what the fuck you're talking
about," Duo said, holding tight to the hand of a fiercely-glaring
Heero. His mind registered, without
consulting the parts of him that might have to act in a hurry, that the man's
eyes were glowing a deep red, and his skin looked like leather and flaking
parchment.
Dekim cackled. "Of course you don't. You're the cause of all this, after all. What power your dear lover could have had, if he hadn't given it
all up for you--misbegotten creature that you always were! He couldn't have fallen from grace any harder
if I'd planned it out myself!" His
sinister smile widened wickedly. "But I didn't. You do all
the hard work for me, Bin a-k'San, I only pick up where you leave off."
"That's enough!" Heero snapped, wrenching his arm from Duo's
grasp to strike at Dekim's face. The
taller man blocked it far too easily, laughter welling up in his throat.
"See?" he pointed out to Duo smugly. "Because of you, that's all he's capable of!" He shook his head. "Do you know why almost all of you here have attractions for
people of the same sex, Bin a-k'San?"
Duo paced forward, growling. "I don't see why we're having this
conversation--"
"To keep any of you from breeding," Dekim
hissed, halting Duo's advance with an upraised hand. "I thought it would have been the end of your whole bedamned
line, when the last of you died, but not even that--no, you were all
reborn. But at least there were no more
of your spawn to deal with. I could find
you all...gather you in one place, watch you, and wait for the right moment to
make you mine, or destroy you once and for all!"
Duo gaped at him open-mouthed. He may have suspected things ran deep, and
he still didn't completely understand what was going on, but he was starting to
feel way in over his head. But at the
same time, the answer came to him.
//Feel it. Become it.//
He stood completely still, and began summoning his
power to him.
"Now," Dekim finished, clapping his hands
together, "I know just what to do. Get rid of Heero first, and he can't call the rest of you back--without
him to anchor you, once the rest of you die, you'll never have a body
again!"
And Duo's Power answered. Heat seared through him; the remnants of Sylvia's painted mark
blazed to brilliant life on his chest. Green light burst from his hands, coalesced into the tenuous curved
likeness of a scythe. He swung it
toward Dekim, and as it touched the man's shoulder it burst from even that
insubstantial form, cascading around their feet in a shower of sparks, exploding
everything it touched. The ground
beneath them crumbled--Heero jumped back and Dekim plummeted off the side of
the building, bony fingers scrabbling for purchase at the wall before the
single hold he found collapsed as well.
Duo himself hovered for a moment, suspended in air,
buoyed by his own power. It emanated
from his very form, burning his skin, dissolving his clothes, illuminating his
eyes with an unholy glow.
And then it faded, and the painted mark vanished
from his chest, and he fell.
"Heero!" He flailed, tried to catch the hand that reached for him, but now
emptied of Power, his body was too weak to control. He felt the rush of air against his body as he plunged toward the
courtyard. //Well, that's that...hope I
killed the bad guy, cause in a moment I go 'splat'--//
A shadow fell across him, higher in the air, and he
forced his head up--a human, male form, only a little smaller than his
own--"Heero! You are an
IDIOT! What the hell are you--"
Then his words broke off as shadow and body
both...changed.
Wings burst forth from Heero's shoulders, tearing
through bone and skin, his blood raining down on Duo and spattering his bare
skin. He reached out his hand as they
unfurled, shedding feathers of white and pale blue and a shimmery
almost-gold. He caught Duo's arm, slowing
the long-haired boy's too-rapid descent, and bore him easily to the ground.
"Holy shit," Duo whispered, when he could
breathe enough to find his voice again. "I didn't remember /that/--why didn't you tell me--"
"Ssh. It wasn't time yet," Heero answered, a blush tinting his cheeks,
silencing Duo's protests with a quick kiss. "Now you know why I wouldn't let you take my shirt off."
"Well now I know," Duo said firmly,
"and now when this is over I get to."
"When this is over," Heero promised,
"you can do anything you want to me. But we have to end it first."
Duo nodded agreement, struggling to his feet. "Dekim--Heero, what the hell is
he? What was he talking about? Is he like us?"
"No," Heero answered. "He's a demon, Duo. I don't have time to tell you the whole
story right now."
Duo grinned. "Back to the battlefield, huh?"
Heero rolled his eyes. "One thing first. No more fighting for you
til you put clothes on, lover."
Duo glanced down at his body, and the tattered
shreds of cloth still dangling from him in places. "Huh. That never
happened before."
Before Heero could answer, before Duo could ponder
the dissolution of his clothing any further, their attention was caught by a
sharp cry from across the courtyard. Dekim was struggling to his feet--and a few yards from him stood Sylvia,
her sword naked in her hands, her eyes blazing with ill-contained fury.
"Enough, demon!" she challenged. "You want to finish this? Come then, and fight me!"
****
