I promised you battle, didn't I

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.

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Chapter Thirteen: Double, Double, Toil and Trouble

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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!"

****