AN: Thanks everyone for reading and reviewing so far. I wanted to say that the dialogue in this chapter does serve a characterization and plot purpose (it's not just here as a theology/history lesson). Also, the numbers in parentheses refer to a few footnotes (they were superscripted, but I don't know how to transfer that to this setting).

Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing, Sleepy Hollow, or "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," by Washington Irving.

The remote chant of mystics in the adjacent chapel, muffled by the cool drafts that whispered through the expansive halls of gold, marble, and decadent stone, consuming the transcendence and capturing intimate revelation in the faded, smoky rings of sacramental incense. As though hesitant, dissipating then clouding in the reflection of lantern light, those hazy fingers reached towards divinity, caressing the stagnant night with sanctity in empyreal, hypnotic breaths. Stillness, disturbed only by footsteps, echoed as boot heels scraped across the tiles. But that resonance halted before the Madonna, with curls of brown spraying along the fringes of her deep blue veil, setting off those Europeanized cheekbones and milk-white skin with cobalt eyes. The Virgin held an infant Messiah in her arms, pressing his haloed head to her breast—watching. Her full red lips parted in prayer—hoping…

"You look troubled, Muslim," the raspy voice of Milliardo Peacecraft startled his guest, causing the merchant's shoulders to tense with the drawling syllables that echoed off the hall's lofty pillars. The guest's head jerked to meet his inquirer's eyes. "Could it be because you're immersed in orthodoxy?" The prince lightly snorted under his breath and quirked his lips in an anticipatory smirk at the Arabian's flinch. "Or face to face with your own heresy?"

"No— No, I…" Quatre responded with the downward turn of his face and partial stutter. Although there remained in his voice a rehearsed civility, his right hand fidgeted near his belt. "It's just that I— Well I've never…"

"You're much too kind, Quatre. I just blatantly called your religion a heresy, and you didn't even make a move for your sword. No wonder we Christians took Jerusalem for a time."

"At the cost of my ancestors' blood, of women and children, no less." The trader's fist began to shake with controlled resentment, twitching near his hilt. His chain of bronze and silver bracelets clanked around his wrist with his trembling, shrieking stifled curses up into the hollow of the bell swaying above them in a reverential slowness--sending softer wails of damnation into the night. "I don't see how you can stand there so casually and mock the past, without any remorse for the murders of your infidel fathers."

"Because, heretic," the blonde-haired reagent answered while he straightened to his full height before him, forcing the Muslim's attention with the ferocity in his crazed glare, "it was your damned caliph that desecrated the Sepulcher (1). He forfeited your privilege to the Holy Land when he destroyed Christ's tomb and so spat on the blood of martyrs—a challenge to the entire Christian tradition. Without him, perhaps the crusades could have been avoided."

"As a fellow man of the Book, I wouldn't think to hear such lies come out of your mouth, Millardo," the young heir murmured, a novel sadness to his voice as the sacrilegious banter in his friend's tone aggrieved him. Making his words breathy and prolonged. "Those wars were mounting for a while, and you know that. Your pope wanted Byzantine and the knights sought fortune." He swallowed, choking on the tingle that crawled up the confines of his throat and skittered around his gag reflex-- Forced to swallow again. "You Christians even stole from your own people— You wouldn't even return Constantinople to your Orthodox (2) when you reclaimed it.

"You opened your own wound, and now it's left a festering sore that'll never heal. The Eastern Patriarch will never reconcile with your pope again. "

The prince's pale gaze then traveled, almost torturously languorous, to the Thanatokos (3) hanging above them in that chamber full of nesting, anomalous shadows that stalked from crevices and cracks and corners, even manacled the flames from tallow candle wax. He lured with his optic trail the attention of the Arabian's own eyes, which instinctively turned away from the painted reproduction in disgust. Quatre narrowed his brow as his head bowed away, shutting his eyes against the memory of the image so fiercely that his grimace began to quiver. Her gentle, distorted features were a mockery to him--her rendered flesh enticing scorn.

"Is there something else, Quatre?"

"I find your ignorance about idolatry appalling, especially when it comes to constructing icons of Maryam (4). Do you Westerners really believe she was so fair and richly clothed? That she wasn't dark like the women in my homelands? Such delusions can only be the product of arrogance—that all people must be as you are."

"Perhaps, Muslim. But we create pictures of God, the Virgin, and the saints based on our perceptions of humanity, as an act of devotion and worship. It makes our God much more personal and easier to approach in prayer."

The mystics sang on, hypnotizing themselves in God's energies and visions of sought ecstasy--illusions they could never name; rosemary incense invaded the Arabian's nostrils, causing his chest to burn and eyes enflame and water.

"Shirk worship," the foreigner condemned amidst the tears, pulling a cloth from his robes and blotting his eyes and covering his nose from the pungent assualt. Though his eyes immediately softened, effects of the stench forgotten, when Milliardo's brow raised in question of the Islamic term. A small but definitive victory in the Muslim's eyes, with the sovereign's reaction a subliminal reward for submission and attempted, surrogate jihad. But to be on the receptive end of Allah's wrath wasn't a desirable position, he knew, and so Quatre found himself pitying his poor, culturally illiterate friend. Had enough compassion to relieve the Westerner of his ignorance and elaborate. "Trying to associate Allah with man—or anything else, for that matter."

"No— Trying to associate God with man, for He became one once."

The heir shook his head resignedly and chuckled, darkness entwining in his fair strands. "Allah and your God are the same deity. We just view it differently."

"Then why are we arguing?"

"I…" and with mouth awkwardly agape, Quatre smiled, defeated—for a moment allowing the incantations of the mystics to hover as a remonstrative lullaby over his senses, like the faint yet intense, consistent whispers from his meditations that dictated solace from his irreligious practices of late, and inspire his soul to stillness and quiet hesychia (5). Wetting his lips with his tongue as the sacred pitches surrounded him and left him yearning for his own session of contemplation.

His head fell to his breast. "I suppose I don't really know." And in that admission his face grew suddenly sober, returning his gaze to the prince while his hands smoothed out the creases of his garments. "But as you know, I didn't come here to discuss my culture with you, but to learn yours."

"Then you've just had your first lesson: how to confront an apologist (6)."

"And you consider yourself one?"

"When the need arises."

"I see…"

The young Arabian trailed off and averted his eyes to the far wall, waiting for the reagent to continue their conversation—the silence somehow eerie as the shadows of the candles' flames flickered upon the limestone, casting them in a sated, warming radiance that left Quatre in a gleam of drowsiness. Mesmerized by the mirrored, dancing fire that slid between the ridges of the stones in rhythmic crackles, as the gypsy whores stripped for a few pieces of copper and kept their beats with the jingles of tethered tambourines. Their sheer scarves flailed like smoke around their exposed, nimble bodies, wrapping them in hues of obsidian and voluptuous streams of burgundy and crimson...

"Highness," a cold voice interrupted his trance. "Midnight approaches. If my services are no longer needed, I'll take my leave for the night."

"No, thank you, Trowa. You may go. But before you do," the soldier halted in the doorway at his master's request, though never turning back, "please look in on my stepmother and the princess— She's been anxious to see you well."

The sentinel bowed low before the doorway, his voice muffled by his obstructive position. "Of course, my lord." Then left with the reverberant shutting of the sanctum's door.

With the departed safely out of earshot, Quatre looked over to his comrade with wide eyes and unfurled a timid smile, a hint of amusement lacing his remark. "He's a character, isn't he? Trowa, you called him?"

"Yes, Trowa Barton… but why do you say so?"

"Well, because as he escorted me to the palace, he mentioned something about ghosts, and heads, and a horseman and all such nonsense," the tradesman remarked flippantly with a trifle wave of his hand. "He claimed that the 'mercenary,' as he referred to this horseman, was about lately, scouring the highways for suitable heads to replace the one he originally lost. What childish fairytales."

A hand reached out and clutched the young man's shoulder, Quatre locking bewildered eyes with the prince that regarded him with that stern grip reflected in his countenance—the light from the wicks withered and dying on the elder's face. "Don't."

"What?"

"Don't speak profanely of the Hessian demon. Or next he my decide to come for you."

"A head-thirsty Hessian, Milliardo, really? Tell me you don't believe in such superstitions as ghouls and goblins and…"

"He's not a Hessian," a whisper echoed through the deadened, guttural halls, its tone nearly coital as those syllables mated--so tortuously stroking the rustling drafts--with the credence of the mystics' panting. The carnal breath resurrected the candlelight and illuminated the face of Relena Peacecraft—the princess of Cinq. Burnishing the intensity in her dove-blue eyes and grazing the edges of her lips like the flicking, consuming tongue of a lover. "He's a good Christian man."

Footnotes:

1) One of the religious causes of the crusades was the desecration/destruction of the Holy Sepulcher (Jesus' tomb) by Caliph Al-Hakim.

2) When Western Christians reclaimed Constantinople, they refused to return it to the hands of the Eastern Orthodox—a transgression that is still remembered today.

3) Greek word meaning "Mother of God."

4) The form of "Mary" found in the Qur'an.

5) Christian form of meditation (trying to achieve inner stillness) usually associated with the Eastern Church. However, I'm using it as a general reference, of simply Christian meditation.

6) One who defends Christianity (explaining beliefs and the validity of those beliefs in terms others can understand).