Part 11

"We need to talk." Heero said the instant that Duo got back into the bed. "God, Duo, you're as cold as stone."

"You're not Heero." Duo said, looking at him with a little worry. "Heero wouldn't say that."

"Do you wonder about the other pilots?" Heero asked, changing the subject. "I think that they think we are dead."

"That tends to happen when you blow up." Duo said sadly, "I kinda miss them though, even Wufei shouting injustice at everything, and calling me a stupid onna, and Trowa's really dry wit, and the way Quat' just listened, ya'know. He'd probably think I was just plain loopy now, I mean, as I can hear the dead."

"You are not mad." Heero said softly, stroking Duo's bangs. "It is just new."

"Heero would never be so kind." Duo said, "and Heero wouldn't blow off an appointment to talk to me."

"I took you back last night, after you met Minako-sama. I," Heero stopped, uncomfortable with this. "Am I your friend, Duo?"

"Yes," Duo answered, "you're my best friend." Duo thought it was a stupid question, of course Heero was his friend.

"Then I want to help you. I do not understand what is happening here and it scares me, I can not even imagine how it terrifies you, I am your friend and I can not help you." For the first time in their acquaintance Heero looked vulnerable.

"You do help." Duo said. "You're there."

"Lady Minako-sama said I should be your rock and I do not know how to be."

Duo glomped him, throwing his arms around him and pressing his neck to his chest. "Sometimes, Heero, I really love you."

A pair of hands clapped loud just outside the curtains, "unless you boys are fornicating, I want you out of that bed." Minako said ripping open the curtain, "and if you are, I'm telling Aeka I got to see it." Upon seeing them she burst out laughing. "Were you fornicating?" She asked, she didn't look at all embarrassed, but pleasantly flushed as if from exercise. "Because I was only joking."

"We were talking." Duo said, "now will you go away for five minutes so I can put some pants on."

"If I didn't know you couldn't lie, Duo," Minako said with a really impish smile, "I could take that in so many ways." Heero threw a pillow at her. "Protected by your Senshisha, how quickly you learn the ways of Meirin." She said holding the pillow and affecting a rather lecturing tone of voice. "Anyway, I'm not here for you, this morning, I am going to kidnap your Senshisha and have my wicked way with him." Her expression was impish, but Heero's on the other hand, was terrified. "nothing to worry about, my little loves. Duo, I'll just be outside, let me know when you're done, but if you do start fornicating, let me know. Aeka will be so jealous." She turned around in a flounce of her elaborately pleated kimono.

"She's in a good mood." Heero said, sliding out of the bed.

"Suspiciously." Duo added. "She's as bad as Noin trying to pair us up so she can see us in bed together."

Heero made a sound that was suspiciously like a giggle. "I think she just did."

As Duo tugged on his pants his stomach groaned, a loud roar of a noise that brought a flush of colour to his cheeks with embarrassment, he didn't know whether to cover his face or his stomach. "Why don't you go to get something to eat?" Heero said, "and I will find out what Miss Minako wants of me."

"Be kind to her." Duo said, shocking himself, "she's very lonely, I don't think she realises just how much." He brushed Heero's hair away from his face, "she isn't very happy."

"I heard her last night." Heero said, adjusting the sweater that Duo had pulled over his head, tugging out the braid so it lay against the wool. "I have no intention of killing her, she wishes to talk to me, and I must admit that I am curious as to why."

"Just, don't be mean, with the death glares, and the Omae o Korosu and the hns." Duo said, gently. "I'll see you later, okay. Then we can talk properly."

Minako was in a good mood, a rather worrisome one, when Heero met her at the door, she looped her arm through his rather girlishly and said they were going to have a rather girly chat. Heero wondered if Duo had foreseen this when he had said not to kill her. "I have no idea how to proceed with this, Minako-sama." Heero said staring at the floor.

"It's fine." Minako said, "and call me Mina, all will make sense."

She took him into the portrait gallery where long dead kings and queens glared off the walls at them. "No one ever comes in here, so we can talk as long as we like, I want you to tell me about Duo." She sat down on one of the velvet couches that were littered around the hall.

"He is a good soldier." Heero said, after stammering for a bit. "He is worried that I might offend you."

Minako laughed. "Do you know he calls you Hee-chan?" She asked.

Heero blushed bright red; he couldn't stop it. "I knew it, you love him." She exclaimed girlishly.

"It is of no matter." Heero said, "he is efficient, he would not care for it." Minako's face softened until she looked fond. "How is it that I was discovered? I had thought that my feelings were mine alone?"

"First of all," she said with a knowing wink, "it is impossible to lie to me, because your dead will just contradict you, I guessed at the opera, when you called him baka." She looked fond, like Relena when she looked at puppies or babies. "There is a legend in Meirin, where I was born, about a girl, and every time she said "by your command" she really told him "I love you," it was my favourite story when I was a child. So when I saw you call him baka I realised you weren't calling him an idiot at all, you were trying in your own way to tell him how you felt." Heero was stammering. "I think it's wonderful, you are his Senshisha, you'll be together till death, it is easier if there is affection between you. Mamoru and I grew bitter with the resentment between us, Duo cares for you a great deal, it is only a step from such care to love." Her smile was beaming, "and it was really obvious when you got so jealous about Tobin, he wouldn't have done anything. Tobin may be a tart, but he really does look like Avili."

"I would see this Avili that looks like Duo." Heero said stiffly.

"I thought you'd see it like that, so I brought you here." She stood up and took his hand, normally Minako wasn't as tactile but Heero just acquiesced to the demanding hand. The portrait she showed him was of a woman in shining golden armour with a long diaphanous skirt that fell around her ankles in swatches, it was more like she wore several pieces of fabric that had never been sewn together. The golden armour she wore hugged her figure and showed off the sword she held, but it was her face that caught Heero's attention, and her long streaming honey coloured hair. Apart from the colour of her eyes she really did look like Duo. "Tobin painted it, it's supposed to be the goddess Acuya but he took Avili as his model."

"She was beautiful." Heero breathed, caught unawares but the girl's beauty.

"Only when she laughed." Minako replied, "when she laughed the world laughed with her, she was always smiling, but inside she was as fragile as cracked glass. He loved her very much."

"She looks like Duo." He answered.

"And yet nothing like him." Minako said quietly, "she was vivacious, and was into everything, you couldn't keep a secret from her, if Avili was tempered glass, bright and shining, then Duo is tempered steel, flashing and deadly."

"This place has changed him." Heero said, "the dead torment him, he is normally full of energy, he does not walk he bounces and he laughs, he laughs all the time, at me, at the others, here he is frightened, and I fear for him."

"I know." Minako said, "that is why I wanted to talk to you, to show you Avili, to explain about Tobin. You are his rock, be there for him, Heero Yuy," she reached forward and kissed his cheek. "Protect him, he would never let anyone else, love him, as he loves you."

"He loves me?" Heero asked.

"I am the Lady of Meirin, I cannot lie." She said with an impish grin, "you are his dearest friend in all the world, he trusts you implicitly, of course he loves you, he just might need a shove to admit it. Come weeks end we are travelling to Dramathen for the winter fair and the Day of the Dead. The empress has demanded I attend and that I bring Duo with me, whilst there we will travel to Meirin and the Aegis will answer all your questions."

"Mina-sama." Heero said, looking for the first time into her hard grey eyes, "he really loves me?"

Duo looked at the plate of food that Rachel the cook had lain in front of him. "Why hello," a gravely voice said from behind him, "if it isn't my favourite tenno-sha?" It was the opera singer Tobin, and his friend, Josian. They were dressed for a day in the city. "I wanted to apologise for my behaviour, I was out of order." He said, it didn't look like he was prompted. "Your hair and well, it came as a shock and I was out of order." He held out his hand for Duo to shake. "Friends?" He asked with a winning smile. This Tobin was almost painfully attractive, he was very pale but did not look in any way sickly and the only thing that detracted from the perfection of his features was the scar across his face, but calm it was more like a line of make up, silvery in the light.

"Acquaintances." Duo said noting the man's hand but not taking it. His eyes were snake green and piercing.

"Well, close enough, now I owe you a massive apology for calling you a girl and slapping you, so how about you accompany Jose and I into the city, we're going shopping for the Day of the Dead, wanna come?"

Duo considered it, he had no other plans for the day, there was no reason not to, and he could probably find out more about his handsome man. "Deal," he said taking the man's hand.

Tobin opened the door with a wrench and a heavy creak that suggested it hadn't been used in a hundred or more years. He heard the silence like he never had before. It was more frightening than any noise could be. Adam had left him along to check these dark and simple corridors under the palace where the horses were stabled because he doubted that the Garvem had even found them and if they had Tobin could manage on his own. Here in this place even the birds didn't sing. The only birds he had seen were carrion crows who blotted out the sun when startled.

The air tasted of blood.

He turned a corner and saw a servant child. She had been cut down with a knife left in her throat and brightly coloured doll in her fat fingers. Her face had been hacked clear away with heavy handed slashes. At her feet lay a small dog. Its head had been bisected with a single down-handed motion. Without knowing why Tobin picked the child up in his arms, pressing her to the black jacket Adam had given him and went deeper into the corridor, careful of how he held her so she didn't drop her doll.

There was a servant from the stable on the wall. It was just a common stableman. The golden birdcage he had been forced into held him aloft. His arms and legs had been cut away with his face. Though they were absent. He was a man, that he had been left, but he was also only a torso in a cage. The same person had killed them.

He opened door after door to find corpse after corpse. All caught in terrible complicity as if they knew something they should not. All eyeless. All noseless. All lipless. Teeth smashed in. Faces unmade by knives. Knives lay blunted all over the floor like confetti. He began to cry. He could feel the hot tears along his face like fire falling unto the little girl in his arms. A girl who died with her favourite doll in her hands.

In one room someone had played skittles with several vases and a human head.

A table had been laid complete with candles and on the central plate, although now covered with maggots that seethed and writhed was a cat, complete with fur that had been slashed through.

A obscene rhyme had been written on the wall in blood, the brush and bucket still beneath it. It was crawling with flies now.

Tobin, thinking he might be sick, leaned back against the door behind him. It swung open under his weight and he stumbled, turning to catch himself before he fell. What he saw caused him to drop the little girl in his arms and lurched to the corner where he emptied his stomach with empty belching noises. A man, like the stableman in the cage, hung from the wall. A spike suspended him through his solar plexus. His face, like all the others had been removed, but he still had his eyes. His crotch was missing, He had insect bites all over his chest and it was seething under the skin with maggots. It was not that which made Tobin vomit.

Lying across the table in this room was two of the princesses of J'Dan. He knew that because they still wore their oak leaf crowns. It was their only dignity. They were naked. They still had their faces, though their jaws had been smashed. It was the rest of them unmade by the knife. Their breasts had been torn away and their ribs were showing in places. More disturbing, even though they were staring at Tobin, was the way their bodies had been arranged. Their eyes lay in gobbets on the floor.

He had dropped the child into the oily slick of blood and waste on the floor and the air was thick with flies. Before he knew what he was doing he was sprinting. His hand undoing the binasu he had looped about his waist and his face wet with tears.

Duo pulled back his hand and wiped at his face, he thought he might be sick. "I'm sorry," he said, preparing to run, "I'm so very sorry."

Josian caught him as it looked like he might faint, toppling from his stool. "Death vision?" He asked.

"One of mine," Tobin answered his friend ruefully as Duo lost all trace of consciousness. "Honeybourne I think."

"Rachel?" Josian asked, picking Duo up like he had no weight at all, "looks like we're not staying for breakfast, lets get this little man into bed."