Chapter Twenty Two
I
He crept along the edge of the building, keeping low to the ground and moving in complete and perfect silence, clutching the gun in his cold-numbed hand like the chain of a rosary, as though it were his salvation rather than a tool designed to commit murder. The shadows that engulfed the place were both his silent allies and his enemies, shielding both him and the one who followed him from each other's sight. Not being able to see his enemy was no hindrance, of course, nor did the prospect of this shadowed blindness intimidate him. He had learned how to overcome such situations a long time ago.
Dekim. That accursed name. That accursed face. Those accursed hands lowering the black cloth over his eyes when he was still but a child, tying the edges tightly at the back of his head.
"Let's see if you truly are as skilled as they say."
Running at him, throwing strengthened but childish punches blindly at Dekim's moving form. He could still taste the blood in his mouth.
"Your mother was a disillusioned whore and she did better than this! Do it, boy!"
His mother. He remembered her still, the woman he had known so briefly and would soon be forced to forget. How beautiful she had been, so beautiful that often he referred to her as 'tenshi' rather than 'mother.' How she had held him whenever he cried, how she sang to him to sleep each evening. Her face stained with blood as she lay on the burned ground amid the wails of the dying all around her, paralyzed by the bullets from Dekim Barton's gun, his mother dying in front of him, his mother—
At last hitting him. The pain shooting up his injured arm as he realized that underneath his uniform Dekim was wearing something to protect himself. Dekim grabbing him by the hair, all but throwing him across the room, still blind-folded. Footsteps, rapid and authoritative, impending drum beats of doom, approaching him. Dekim's breath against his half-covered face.
"Are you yet afraid of me, boy?"
Swallow the blood. Imagine that it is Dekim's. "Omae o korosu."
Heero fell back against the wall, shivering suddenly, overcome by these images as he could not be by the darkness. The gun slipped slowly from his hand.
"Damare," he whispered, his voice a frightful, panicked rasp. "Damare, damare, stop this, please stop it…"
Something moved in the darkness to his right. He leapt up from his slumped crouch and the girl laughed, a high, clear sound in the cold wind, running forth again in the shadows, teasing him, beckoning him.
He straightened against the wall and waited.
She had been playing foolish games with him throughout his journey to Thessaloníki, and now that he had reached the base, she was preparing to strike.
The faint sound of quickened footsteps, first to his left, then again to his right. Her laughter rang out again in the eerie night, the glassy tolling of bells bidding the superstitious living come to a funeral, bidding him come to her.
"What the hell are you doing," he muttered. The sound of his voice echoed back to him: hollow, empty. One word from your lips could terrify the devil himself, Relena had once told him, but he thought she had really meant that he terrified her. If she could hear him now, would she maintain that opinion? If she could see him in this state, frozen in a half-crouch by an icy laugh, weaponless, shivering from an inner cold that would not be appeased, like the blue of a flame, would she still feel that terror, or would she perhaps begin to understand?
He felt something approach him, felt the passage of air as the girl came within only inches of him. His hand shot out in the darkness and closed around nothing.
Her approach had not been without purpose, however. When he felt about the ground beneath him he found that wherever the gun had fallen, it was gone now.
His sense of her presence abruptly ebbed. Further away on the wind he could barely catch the sound of her breathing, harder and faster now, as though she were suddenly forsaking her stealth and breaking into a run.
Heero gave chase without hesitation.
Then out into the night she went, and stooping, crept by hedge and tree…
The darkness in all its dreary perfection fell away to a hazy moonlit glow, illuminating the ruins of the base. He wondered vaguely how many lay dead in its desolate rubble.
He caught a brief glimpse of her as she left the sheltering shadow of the ruins and fled toward the vast courtyard, where she again disappeared into the trees that had been spared in the siege. Something trailed after her, like the hem of a coat or the train of a dress, white and gleaming in the moonlight.
He ran into the courtyard after her. All thoughts of Treize and what Odin had said about interfering fled from his mind as he pursued her, as devotedly as she had once pursued him. He was without a weapon and terribly defenseless in the open, yet somehow he ceased to notice these things. The only thing that concerned him at the moment was finding her and eliminating her as a threat. How he would do this without a gun was not even yet a priority.
After some time he became aware that he had lost her trail; this was followed by the second epiphany, that he had become lost himself. He had been running far too long to be still within the confines of the courtyard, and yet as he looked around where he stood he saw that the great landscaped field was still behind him, though he had long since passed the last statue and fountain, and that the woods were still far before him, and beyond them, the coast. Was this what she had intended when she had started him on this path, that he should become hypnotized by the bleak monotony of it and would not realize it when he left the courtyard and came into the plain beyond? That he would eventually lose his sense of where she was while she escaped? Or perhaps she was still nearby, waiting, watching him with a wicked feline smile upon her face, gun in hand—
A light wind blew in from the shore, chilling him, penetrating his flesh to the bone, it seemed. A cold droplet rolled down the side of his face and he realized he was sweating.
Something was not right about all this. It was all too convenient for her, impossibly convenient. He was allowing her to win by entertaining the thought that perhaps she had already defeated him.
He did not turn and walk back toward the open courtyard. Instead he went onward, altering his own course to the left. The trees extended further inland as he proceeded, curving gently up a hill that took him back into the lawn, blocking from his damp face the wind. He could sense without questioning that Aphrodite was not hiding within them. Her trap had already been set elsewhere.
He crested the hill and saw, less than half a mile away, a light. As he neared it he saw that it came from within a tall white structure, one that looked more suited to be in the Imperial Palace of the Sanq Kingdom than a military base disguised as elegance, one that Heero certainly had not expected to see here.
The church was distinctly French in design, topped by high, arched battlements and slender steeples, all pointing toward Heaven like the spires of some antiquated device of torture. Its windows were long and painted, and the light that poured out from them was stained blue and gold, crimson and green, and it illuminated the images that were painted upon these large glass panels, religious icons he had rarely seen before.
Music, like the light, rolled out of the chapel and into the night, the clear resonant notes of a piano. He went toward it as though drawn by some outer force, some nameless will higher than his own. He was oblivious to this. Better to be oblivious than to acknowledge.
A letter from my love today,
Oh, unexpected, dear appeal.
His walk slowed to an almost dazed stagger, as though he were hypnotized. Hypnotized. Was that the appropriate term for it, this haze that fell over his mind, eradicating his concern that he was walking into her trap, eradicating his desire to do otherwise? Yes, hypnotized. Hypnotized and on some level, desiring to be so.
She struck a happy tear away,
And broke the crimson seal.
His hand clenched around a gun that was no longer there, loosened indifferently. His hand was trembling. He took no notice of this.
My love, there is no help on earth.
The music swelled, and with it, his mind ebbed. There was no clear thought in his head as he neared the chapel, no clear memory, only sharp, fragmented pieces, like so many shards of crushed glass. He saw the girl, the one with the small dog on the front of her shirt in the hospital, who had asked him if he was lost. He saw the girl before her, the one in the bright dress and the yellow hat, who had been the first to inquire this of him. He saw the corpse of the puppy.
No help in heaven; the dead man's bell
Must toll our wedding; our first hearth
Must be the well-paved floor of hell.
The woman, a Japanese physician seeming a bit out of place in a Grecian facility. Sakura. Another woman of the same name, so long ago now. Sakura, tenshi. Her slender form being thrown backward as four holes, lined in crimson, appeared down her body. Her body going limp in Odin's arms, her silent farewell. Dekim's voice, Dekim's face appearing now before him. A club, a fist. A stifled cry of pain.
Why these things, why think of them now, why remember them now why remember them at all?
Her eyes like ghostly candles shone;
The colour died from out her face,
She cast dread looks about the place,
Then clenched her teeth and read right on.
One last fleeting thought crossed over his shadowed mind as he stepped up to the doorway of the chapel, a vague wondering of what these things were that he was seeing, of why he should see them now. Part of him demanded, in this short moment, why they all suddenly mattered to him when in the past they had not; another part demanded why they didn't matter. Irrelevance, all of it.
His hand brushed against the partially open door, pushed it inward. The music rushed at him like a sword-bearing goddess of this ancient country. He hesitated in the doorway, unaware that he was doing so.
I may not pass the prison door;
Here must I rot from day to day,
Unless I wed whom I abhor,
My cousin, Blanche of Valencay.
He stepped out of the night and into the warm, candlelit alcove. The door fell shut behind him. He stood there motionless for several minutes, expressionless, listening to the strangely bittersweet song but not really hearing it. Somewhere farther off in the chapel, an unseen clock chimed the hour. Twelve brassy echoes.
At midnight with my dagger keen,
I'll take my life; it must be so,
Meet me in hell tonight, my queen,
For weal and woe.
The alcove was something out of a dream, softly arched above, large but not seeming so for smooth marble pillars were placed every few yards. At the center of the amber room stood a small fount. A baptismal. He was pulled inexorably toward the marble font; his footsteps made only the slightest sound as he crossed the room. There was water, untouched, most likely, in the curved basin. Floating above the water he saw a person, a dim, darkened figure, with an empty face and soulless eyes.
He allowed the tips of his fingers to graze the top of the water, destroying the image of the man.
She laughed although her face was wan,
She girded on her golden belt,
She took her jewelled ivory fan,
And at her glowing missal knelt.
Through the open doorway, the song reached a crescendo. He could not waste any more time with this. The song—a blade through flesh and a lover's caress—called him forth.
He went fully into the chapel.
The room was large and breathtaking, of a high, arched ceiling and of walls covered in images. He found himself surrounded by painted angels and painted saints, stained glass Virgins, bleeding Christs. Statues were placed all about the room, save for by the blood-red carpet that ran down from the doorway to the altar, carved and sculpted bodies of purity. A large crucifix, a tortured body of a tormented Christ, stood behind the altar by the tabernacle.
Paintings of saints, paintings of purity. Men and women bleeding, surrounded by soft celestial lights. The Annunciation. A woman, dark-haired and plain-looking yet strangely beautiful sitting upon a great throne, a crown upon her head. An infant in her arms. Another picture of the same woman, crowned by the stars of the heavens themselves. Tiny lights like those of the colonies.
The images were placed all the way up unto the ceiling, portraits of saints whose names he had never heard, pictures of blood and of sacrifice, a morbid painting of a robed monk being assaulted by a legion of demons. Another form of war. Such an art it had become.
The room in all its spiritual beauty was lit entirely by rows of candles.
On the far side of the room, sitting at a black piano by a statue of the Virgin, was Aphrodite. She looked up only briefly when he entered. A soft smile flickered upon her face.
Then rose, 'And am I mad' she said:
She broke her fan, her belt untied;
With leather girt herself instead,
And stuck a dagger at her side.
She was strangely beautiful in the unearthly scene, a vision amidst a sea of things given life only by faith. Her auburn hair was loose and fell about her bare arms in a graceful mantle, like that of the Virgin Mary in the statue before her. She was dressed in white, in a long gown of some silken material that held the candlelight like dew on the petals of a rose. The neckline of the gown was low and exposing, baring the full curves of her white breasts. The embodiment of piety and a succubus in one.
Her eyes flew up from the keys once more, looked across the distance of the room directly into his own. Beckoning him, yes. Waiting for him. All this time, she had been waiting for him. His eyes darted to the unsheathed blade that gleamed upon the smooth darkness of the piano. Death in a single quick thrust. Perhaps he had been waiting for her as well.
She waited, shuddering in her room,
Till sleep had fallen on all the house.
She never flinched; she faced her doom:
They two must sin to keep their vows.
So be it then. So be it. Amen.
He began to approach the piano, his mind no clearer now than it had been. This was, after all, only another mission.
He was aware of one thing, however: he would not be walking away from this. Even if he were the one left standing at the end of whatever the hell she had called him here for, something within him (what was left after all these many years what could possibly be left?) would never be able to walk away.
But these thoughts, too, were fleeting. Irrelevant. All he knew—all that he knew now—was that he must go forward. Go to her. Go to her and her gleaming blade, yes, and let thy will be done.
Then out into the night she went,
And, stooping, crept by hedge and tree;
Her rose-bush flung a snare of scent,
And caught a happy memory.
There were no happy memories here, though. There were no longer any memories at all.
Surrounded, as he proceeded further into the chapel, by the images, the statues, the soft amber light. The vague scent of incense. So many candles, so many tiny flames, perhaps enough to rival the number of souls in hell. Reminders, constants, that no faith could be without sacrifice, that retribution comes in the form of blood. Always blood. So much of it. So much staining his own hands.
God, would this night never end?
He stumbled, caught himself by placing one hand loosely upon the base of a statue that rushed up to meet his dazed face. His knees went to the floor. He looked up and saw, emptily, the face of a robed man peering down expressionlessly upon him, arms outstretched as though to welcome a stained sinner into them. As though seeing something else entirely, he gasped and leapt away from the statue, staring at it as though he expected it to become animate and drag him into the pit of hell itself.
Aphrodite again glanced at him, a solemn dark being unnerved by the calmness with which he approached her.
She fell, and lay a minute's space;
She tore the sward in her distress;
The dewy grass refreshed her face;
She rose and ran with lifted dress.
She started like a morn-caught ghost
Once when the moon came out and stood
To watch; the naked road she crossed,
And dived into the murmuring wood.
The branches snatched her streaming cloak;
A live thing shrieked; she made no stay!
She hurried to the trysting oak–
Right well she knew the way.
What are you doing, he tried to say, but when he moved his lips to form the words he found that they would not come. An image arose behind his eyes. The other girl, the one that had perhaps sealed his mental state this evening. Cancer-bald and too young to endure such pain, too young to know it even existed. Are you an angel? No, no, but a murderer, a faithless assassin without a soul. Bathed in blood, not that of any kind of savior but rather the blood of all those whose lives he had ended. His own blood would be retribution for them. Was that what the girl's life, what her blood, would be then? Retribution? An offering to God on behalf of the world and its pathetic state? Please, take this body, take this blood, let it stand for my own sins?
Enough!
Without a pause, she bared her breast,
And drove her dagger home and fell,
And lay like one who takes her rest,
And died and wakened up in hell.
"What's wrong, Heero?" a voice rang out over the gliding notes of the piano, her voice, Aphrodite. She smiled at him, the feline smirk of one who is either truly evil or truly insane. "Why don't you try to kill me?"
He merely looked at her. He could not have spoken if he had tried.
The music swelled again. It was a song both passive and chaotic, tranquil and cacophonous, filling all the air with its cry, echoing in his ears until he thought the sound of it would drive him completely out of his mind, if indeed he had not yet reached that point. The notes fluctuated, coming quickly and forcefully for the length of a movement, then slowing to a mournful wail. A song for the blood of war. The blood of life. The dreary anguish of the lost. A ballad of war, perhaps.
She bathed her spirit in the flame,
And near the centre took her post;
From all sides to her ears there came
The dreary anguish of the lost.
He stepped toward her, took another step. He was only yards away from her now.
The devil started at her side,
Comely, tall, and black as jet.
'I am young Malepsina's bride;
Has he come hither yet?'
"You are such a fool, Heero. Or may I call you Takeru Hanasaki? That is your name after all, is it not?"
He could not respond.
Her fingers slid up the keyboard in a clamorous glissando. "Such a dreary fool. The spawn of an anarchist whore. Tell me, Takeru, do you believe in the end of the world? The great Apocalypse?"
'My poppet, welcome to your bed.'
'Is Malespina here?'
'Not he! Tomorrow he must wed
His cousin Blanche, my dear!'
She continued on, unabated by his failure to respond. "If I were a believer in such things and, hypothetically, were such a fundamentalist that I did not look for symbolism but rather concrete evidence and literal truths, I could almost come to the conclusion that your mother was the whore of Babylon. Or what do you think, Takeru? You probably see her more as the woman of the crown of stars. Do you?"
'You lie, he died with me tonight.'
'Not he! it was a plot' . . . 'You lie.'
'My dear, I never lie outright.'
'We died at midnight, he and I.'
She met his eyes again, smiled. "My, my, you're hardly the one I met in the woods that day in Spain. You look as if you've died and returned from hell. What's happened to you, Yuy? Did some enticing seductress play Delilah for you and cut off whatever it is you draw your strength from?" Her eyes narrowed and her lips curled up into a devilish grin. "Or did you give it her? Did you? Would you have given it to me?"
His consciousness flickered for a brief moment, long enough, however, to grant him one realization, that the girl was indeed insane, insane and delusional, and more dangerous because of it. If any trace of a rational, sane mind had once existed within her, it was gone now.
"Answer me, damn you!" she screamed, allowing her hands to come down upon the ivory keys in a shrill, discordant bang. "Would you have given it to me?"
When he did not reply, she flashed him a malicious expression and returned to her song.
The devil went. Without a groan
She, gathered up in one fierce prayer,
Took root in hell's midst all alone,
And waited for him there.
The song ended. She merely sat upon the elegant bench in a slump as the final notes echoed on above them, her head bowed, her strange eyes closed.
The silence that ensued was perhaps the longest he had ever experienced.
She dared to make herself at home
Amidst the wail, the uneasy stir.
The blood-stained flame that filled the dome,
Scentless and silent, shrouded her.
At last she stood. Her eyes burned deep into his as she faced him, driving him senseless again as his mind fell away, as a shadow, into some darkened chaos. The gown clung to her body in all the necessary places, swelling around her half-exposed breasts and her hips, and then it flowed out away from her, making her appear, as she stood before and stared at him with all the force of an army, a goddess, ready not for the hunt or for the battle but rather for another act that was simply part of the nature of the human being. The goddess for whom she had been named had been skilled in such arts.
How long she stayed I cannot tell;
But when she felt his perfidy,
She marched across the floor of hell;
And all the damned stood up to see.
She made one single step toward him, as tentatively as he had approached her only minutes ago. The smile lingered upon her face.
The devil stopped her at the brink:
She shook him off; she cried, 'Away!'
'My dear, you have gone mad, I think.'
'I was betrayed: I will not stay.'
"Heero Yuy," she said softly. The candlelight flickered upon her beautifully sinister face. "Shall we at last put these foolish affairs to an end?"
So be it, so be it, amen.
Another step she advanced, another. She would be close enough to touch him soon.
Across the weltering deep she ran;
A stranger thing was never seen:
The damned stood silent to a man;
They saw the great gulf set between.
"I think," she said as she came closer to him, smiling still, "that I will drink your blood once I've killed you. You would have to give it to me then."
Blood is everything.
To her it seemed a meadow fair;
And flowers sprang up about her feet
She entered heaven; she climbed the stair
And knelt-down at the mercy-seat.
"Yes, I think I will enjoy this very much, Takeru."
Seraphs and saints with one great voice
Welcomed that soul that knew not fear.
Amazed to find it could rejoice,
Hell raised a hoarse, half-human cheer.
Without any forewarning, she leapt to the side and scooped the dagger up into her hand. From her throat erupted a loud cry and she lunged at him, slashing at him wildly with the dagger as, above them, flocks of painted angels looked on passively. His mind was torn from whatever distant reverie had entrapped it earlier and, almost too late, he dodged the wicked blade.
She did not cease in her advancement. She lunged at him again, again, a demented woman with an insatiable longing for death, for his death. Maybe for even her own.
"Do you feel anything from this, Yuy?" she cried above the clashing of their frenzied footsteps, driving the blade forward again and missing. She gave a high laugh. "Do you feel anything at all? This is the truth behind the lie, Takeru: that we"—slash—"as human beings"—thrust—"are nothing more than mere animals, that inwardly we desire nothing more than to satisfy our own lusts!"
He fended off a certain wound by blocking her wrist with his own. The tip of the blade scratched through the thin fabric of his shirt and across the flesh of his arm.
Angered, she ripped her arm away from his and brought the dagger down at his thigh. He leapt away just as he felt the blade rend the air over him.
"Do you feel any lust for this?" she continued, her teeth bared like those of one of the predatorily instinctive creatures of which she spoke. She rushed at him, driving him backward into a marble statue of a cassocked saint. "Do you feel it? How can you not! This is what you want, isn't it?"
The blade sliced through the air, grazing the skin of his chest. She was toying with him with these new ineffective attacks.
"What drives you to fight? What drives you to kill? You kill because you want to, because it satisfies you! Doesn't it, Yuy? Doesn't it satisfy you in ways that nothing else can? Doesn't it make you want to cry and beg for more? Doesn't it make you want that ultimate pleasure, that of your own death!"
She drove the dagger at his throat. He ducked and rolled across the floor away from her, but in less than a moment she was looming over him, smiling deliriously in the flickering candlelight, gripping the hilt of the dagger like a talisman.
She knelt down over him, her knees burrowing into his bleeding chest. She lowered her face until it was only a few short inches away from his own, their lips almost touching.
"Tell me, Yuy," she purred in a disgustingly seductive whisper. "Have you ever made love to someone you were about to kill? Have you ever done it to someone while you killed them? That is the only one thing better than obtaining your own death." She lowered her face further, brushed her lips against his. "Do you want me now, Yuy?" Again, her malicious smile. "Do you want me to stay like this and control you? No, that wouldn't be like you at all, would it? Do you want me to play the part of your whore, as your mother was to the assassin? To play the part of the whore, and then kill you. You want death, I can see it in your eyes. Would you like for me to give it to you?"
"Get off me," he growled, and in he pushed her away from him. Utterly unprepared for the assault, she tumbled back, and the back of her head connected with the marble base of the statue. There she lay motionless.
Dear God, had he killed her so easily?
Of course not. Nothing was ever that convenient for him.
He moved toward her, slowly, quietly. The dagger had fallen from her hand when she hit the base and he took it into his own, keeping a steady eye on the slow rise and fall of her abdomen as she continued breathing even after the injury.
He tightened his grip on the hilt and waited.
"Did you really think it would be so easy?" she mumbled after only a minute. How could she have remained conscious after that? Her green eyes fluttered open and she smiled. "Did you really think it would be so simple?"
Before he could move to stop her, she sprang to her feet and delivered a swift kick to his ribcage, trying to topple him back onto the floor. It occurred to him only briefly as she lunged down at him that he had never, in all the years since he had lost his innocence and humanity and first stained his hands with blood, killed so closely, so personally. There was no mobile suit to shield his face from that of his enemy, nor was there a gun to focus on, a gun that would allow him to carry out this vile business from across the room. There was only this blade and her vulnerable flesh.
The thought departed as quickly as it had come.
He drove the blade upward as she came down upon him. She saw the arc of his hand in time and swiftly moved to the side, but not in time to save herself from injury.
The blade ripped into the tender flesh of her arm, tearing away a tatter of skin with a rending sound that almost induced a more permanent insanity. She cried out and fell to the floor beside him, clutching at her arm with a bloodstained hand, gritting her teeth against the sudden pain. A thin layer of flesh hung loosely from the cut.
Immediately she sprang at him again, fearless of the blade and ignoring what it had just done to her. With a loud grunt he slashed at her again, tearing open part of the reddened gown and slicing into the firm skin of her hip, missing her vulnerable abdomen by mere inches.
The blood that issued from the wound was dark and rapid. The blade—though Aphrodite seemed unaware of this—had cut into something inside her, something more vital than she realized.
His mind, from that point, was surrendered again unto a great void.
Saints all around them. Staring. Praying. Loving. Accusing. Condemning even with the most serene or compassionate of expressions what was taking place under their watchful gaze. Tormented by their own demons, too tormented to care that a battle went on before them. All different. All one and the same.
The blade again found her flesh, burying the first inches of itself into her right shoulder. She hissed and, weaponless, attempted futilely to shove him back into the railing of the altar.
Blood soaking her now. Blood soaking both of them. The gown was torn and ruined, the body beneath it severely wounded and perhaps dying. Blood flowed down her arms and was smeared across her face as she continued her assault on him, heedless of the blade. Perhaps on some level she sensed his hand's refusal to use it.
"Do you think this hurts, Yuy?" she shrieked, trying to dodge the blade and tackle him at the waist.
He brought the weapon down. The blade pierced her upper back as intended but not either her heart or lungs, scraping instead off of her scapula.
"Do you think…do you think this actually hurts?" She, gasping suddenly, pushed herself away from him. The dagger ripped up her back, laying open the tissues inside, with a sound rivaling and defeating that of it tearing open her arm.
Such an accursed violence. There was nothing poetic about this, nothing that could be romanticized for the sake of the glory of a war. Nothing but sheer, animalistic violence, an instinct to kill, to drive the dagger into her quivering, blood-soaked body again and again until she at last lay still, to soak his hands in the blood that flowed from the gashes he himself had inflicted. Amazing, how significant the blood is. The strongest body can be taken down with the right shedding of it.
Saints all around them. Images of blood, of crucifixion. A dying man nailed—in some pictures through the palms and in others through the wrists—to a crude board of wood. A dying man groaning in the pains of death. A child sleeping. A woman, rich and beautiful, clutching a scepter as a flock of angels knelt around her. A woman, poor and ordinary, holding an infant that had been washed of all the blood that accompanied birth.
Eyes all around them. Watching, unblinking. The host of heaven and half of that of hell watching as the sanctuary was defiled by human blood.
She had not yet recovered from her most recent wound and he advanced upon her, dagger kept low at his side, then swiftly brought it up in an arc, burying its full length in the vulnerable flesh of her abdomen. Blood erupted from her lips and began to course down his arm. Such dark, dark, dark, vital blood. Blood as dark as ebony. Her entire figure shuddered and fell over his arm and he drove the blade further upward, rending her flesh and all the vital tissues beneath it. Savagery under the watch of the vigilant saints.
He withdrew the dagger and she collapsed. There she knelt upon the floor for what seemed to him like the end of one eternity and the beginning of another, and then she began to laugh. Her voice, this time, was quiet and shaky. He didn't think she could manage anything more than that.
So quiet was her laugh that he could still hear drops of her blood running down the blade and falling onto the floor.
"Please, Yuy…Takeru," she began, and laughed softly under her slowing breaths. "Don't underestimate me so much. You're repeating the…the sins of your mother."
Another laugh. If he could hear the sounds of the demons depicted in some of the images, he had no doubt they would sound like she did at this moment.
"Don't underestimate me."
She pulled herself, slowly, to her feet. He thought she would collapse again and for a moment she almost did, then quickly, as he fell for her illusion, she pushed herself forward, driving him back, driving his arm with the dagger behind him. She rushed at him with what had to be the last of her energy back toward the piano where he had found her earlier, a pagan goddess, toward the statue of the Virgin.
Eyes, everywhere eyes, angels with drawn swords.
He slashed wildly at her, slitting the skin below her neck. The white of one of her collar bones showed through the seeping cut. He slashed again, again, unaware that he was screaming as he did it, attacking her as fiercely as she had attacked him but with a deadly accuracy, slashing her, cutting her, bathing himself in a river of her blood as his own dried, don't look at her, don't look at where the blade is cutting her—
She stopped moving in her futile assault of him. The scream died in his throat and his eyes widened, as his hand fell limply away from the dagger he could no longer withdraw.
She was impaled upon it, the blade having been driven between her breasts and turned. The hilt was all that protruded and her hand, suddenly delicate and trembling, grasped it loosely as though trying to pull it out. Blood gushed over her lips and she gave a low, tearless sob, then at last she collapsed. He caught her as she fell for some ungodly reason that seemed unknown even to his own mind and he lay her gently upon the floor at the foot of the statue, as though leaving an offering for his own transgressions. She stared blindly up at him, gasping, bleeding, and he saw that she was crying now but the tears were red. Blood ran down her face in crimson rivulets, tears of sacrifice, blood tears to wash away the fear from her eyes, tears that ran down onto his own hands. If she had been a goddess earlier, now she was merely beautiful, as the crimson stained her cheeks and lips, beautiful in a way that he had never seen before, in a way that he hoped to never see again. So very beautiful.
"Please don't…don't leave me…here like…this," she pleaded as the tears began to come faster, sacrificial streams of red. "It's so cold."
He merely stared at her. Was this always to be his mission in life, to watch death, called forth by his own hands?
His eyes, unable to look at her, wandered upward to the statue, and he almost released her. The marble Virgin's face was red, streaked by blood as was Aphrodite's, blood that issued forth from her eyes. He felt, for one moment, the last shreds of his mind trying to rip away into the same insanity that had engulfed Aphrodite so long ago, then he realized that the blood did not pour down from the eyes but rather had been splattered there, God only knew from which of her wounds.
Further upward, the centerpiece of the ceiling. The face of Christ, the eyes of God looking down upon him. The eyes of God looking down upon him.
Aphrodite gave a hitched sigh and fell limp in his arms. The dagger ceased to move with the rise and fall of her chest.
His eyes fell closed; his body fell back onto the floor. When he regained consciousness hours later, the candles had all gone out as though on the breath of God Himself, darkening against his vision the images and the bloody statue, and the corpse in his arms lay cold,
II
Where am I? she thought again, perhaps for the millionth time, perhaps only for the second. After all this time she should have known the palace well, well enough at least, to find her way through it to the rooms she was searching for, and here she now was, wandering through its empty, silent corridors lost and frightened like some forgotten child. Was that what she was, she wondered, a child forgotten and forsaken, deserted in the heat of the battle as she'd been so many times in the past? A child left to walk amongst these ruins in search of something that was more likely to be her damnation than her savior. A lost, scared child. She thought of the last time she'd seen Heero, after the Mariemaia incident—had that not been what he'd tried to tell her, that she was only a broken child, that he himself was one, too?
Relena stumbled over a large stone of marble from a fallen pillar. She let out some incoherent wordless cry and as her own voice echoed back to her she thought she heard the underlying sound of approaching footsteps.
The palace of Thessaloníki was supposed to be deserted but if there were to be one who remained there, it would be the man she had come here to find.
"Treize?" she called into the dark corridor behind her. "If you're still here, answer me."
Nothing, no reply. She shook off the feeling that she was being followed and went on.
The palace was silent as the house of the dead, still and dusty as though it had not been occupied in years. It had been practically overrun by soldiers only days ago, she knew. The dust had come from the walls and the ceilings when the palace had been attacked, bombed by the counteroffensive and temporarily seized by a battalion of mobile suits. She had not heard of a Gundam being sighted during the siege. There was still a chance that her brother had not been there.
She came at last to a corridor she recognized, the one that would curve and end in the staircase that would take her to Treize's suites, to the room he used as his office if he could not be found there. He had to still be here, the dramatic leader falling with his kingdom. There was nowhere else he could have gone.
The carpet that ran the length of the corridor was ruined, coated in dust and ash, blanketed in fallen shards of glass and crystal. A painting lay torn and scratched on the floor.
"Treize?" she cried out again, unable to mask the desperation in her voice. It bled from her tongue as though from a mortal wound. "It's not too late to stop this. This battle is completely meaningless!"
Still no answer. Dear God, if he were still here, surely he could hear her.
She went on through the corridor, unaware that the skirt of her dress had been ripped as she pushed and fell her way through the rubble, that one side of her hair was caked with drying blood from a fresh scratch on her cheek. She looked like a disillusioned wanderer stumbling toward the gates of Hell.
My poppet, welcome to your bed.
Is Kushrenada here?
Not he, tomorrow he must lose his life to war, my dear.
"Treize, you must withdraw. There is no point to this war."
Something sharp pierced the blue silk of her dress and grazed her leg. She gave it no notice.
"Treize, please, if you can hear me, answer me!"
Her vision blurred suddenly, forcing her to stop. Something warm started to drip down her face. Blood. No, not blood. Tears. She couldn't cry now, not until she had found him, not until she had made him break his infuriating silence and tell her why he was doing this. Had he been planning this whole gruesome war when he had appeared to her in Sanq and made her aware of his survival, when he had told her that she could now be the kingdom's salvation? Had he known when she had so silently, without hesitation, accepted him into her bed?
"Treize, Milliardo is out there fighting at this moment! Do you want him to die along with those soldiers?" Could she really rely on his past friendship with her brother to elicit a response from him?
The corridor curved up ahead. Ignoring the sudden pain in her leg, she ran to the end of it with fleeting thoughts of them all running through her tired mind. Treize, hiding in the shadows perhaps, or maybe following behind her—
–for one brief moment, those footsteps again—
Milliardo, fighting in a worthless battle outside the kingdom, placing his life on the line for her and her precious pacifism once again, the beautiful brother she'd never really known. Miss Noin, wherever she was now, still able to conceal the fact that she carried the prince's child, willing to follow him into the inferno of Hell just to be near him. Rhyn, still in the palace at Sanq, unable to fight but clinging nonetheless to some inexplicable sense of loyalty. All of them, all the others, all dying in a meaningless war. Miss Dorothy, hurriedly returning to Morocco despite the order to ground all aircraft, perhaps flying over the scene of a battle—
She reached the end of the corridor. Her feet came together in an abrupt halt, the heels of her of her shoes making a loud, hard clack that echoed in the silent palace. Her hand went to her throat; her mouth fell open and her eyes widened so much that they felt as though they would fall from their sockets. The staircase that should have been on the other side of the great lobby was gone. The southern wall had been knocked out and where the splintered marble floor ended lay only the cold, burnt ground of the palace lawn. "My God, " she whispered reverently, then she repeated it. Moments later she would become aware that the words were still leaving her lips, that she was yelling it now, her own voice carrying back to her on the chaotic emptiness that surrounded her: my God, my God, mygod, MYGOD MYGOD—
She found herself kneeling in the ruins, her knees cut and bleeding, her dress torn, her hands running through the ashes that coated the floor. Her white, porcelain pacifist hands dusted in the bloodless remnants of war.
"My God," she cried again, and now the tears did come, hotly acidic, burning her face as they rolled down toward her gray-powdered hands. "I didn't…I can't…I cannot…Milliardo…"
"Stop it, Relena."
Her breath caught in her throat. That voice—
"Heero?"
She turned and indeed he was there, Heero, her dark one, looking as soulless and empty as ever he had.
"Heero." She tried to stand, could not. The pain in her legs was too much.
He stood only a few feet away from her, like some angel of death waiting to bear her away. His eyes were still cold and calculating as they had been the last time she had seen him as he looked down at her. It was only then that she realized he was covered in blood. His throat was smeared wildly with it, his white shirt was torn, shredded even, and the bloodied tatters of it—like those of her own dress—floated up toward his face in the slight wintry breeze.
He knelt down before her and after a moment of reluctance, he took her into his arms. She sank into him willingly, never fully realizing that this was their first real embrace, holding him to her as she had so longed to do in the past.
"Relena," he said quietly. His voice was still utterly monotonous.
"Heero, you're hurt," she was finally able to say, pulling away from him just enough to see the blood that stained his half-exposed chest. "You're bleeding."
"The blood isn't mine."
She started to ask where it had come from then stopped before she could speak a word. She didn't want to know what had happened, didn't want to know whose blood it was or how he had become so drenched in it. She only wanted to remain there among the ruins with him, safe in the circle of his arms.
"Had you been following me, Heero?" she asked, allowing her eyes to fall closed. Don't look at the ruins, the broken debris, the ashes that covered everything like the shroud of death. Best not to ask. Best to think of only Heero, of this embrace. Don't ask questions. Don't wonder why. Don't remember what it was like to watch him before any of this happened, not knowing who he was, intrigued by the very sound of his name. Just be here with him, for whatever it all means. Just—
Believe in me, Relena.
The comforting human heat of him, the warmth of his arms as they held her, warm but still somehow cold. The only real sign of humanity in him.
This is meaningless, she thought, letting her face fall onto his shoulder. The warm scent of blood all around him. This is just as meaningless as the war that was bred here. This will neither begin nor end anything. In the span of our lives, this moment will not matter at all. This is nothing.
Lying against him now. My poppet, welcome to your bed.
Utterly meaningless. Worthless. So worthless, yet I would give up the rest of my life to stay here like this. Perhaps this is why Milliardo cannot separate himself from war. He has fallen in love with its meaninglessness.
Heero.
"You shouldn't be here, Relena," he said.
She didn't reply. She didn't need to.
I'll never hurt anyone ever again.
"Heero," she whispered. She was crying again, harder this time, and for once she didn't care.
"Don't do that." As if to contradict the coldness of his voice, he reached up and brushed away a fresh-fallen tear from her cheek.
So meaningless, all of it.
She met his eyes again finally. They did not change as he leaned forward, nor did they when she allowed herself for one brief moment to touch the side of his face.
He leaned in until his lips were almost touching her tear-streaked cheek, then at the very second before he could kiss her he lowered his head and brought his lips to hers. She stiffened in his arms but only for a moment. Her arms pulled tighter about him as though to let go of him would be to let go of her own life. She returned his soft, chaste kiss with all the unrestrained emotion she had felt for him in the past, and he did not try to pull away.
At last the kiss ended. Heero's arms fell away from her immediately and he stood up as though to leave. "Heero?"
"Hai."
"Why did you do that?"
No hesitation. "Because you needed it." He took her hand assisted her to her feet. "Do you think you can walk now."
She nodded, no longer able to look him full in the eye. "I think so."
He released her, walked toward the great gaping opening in the palace's walls.
"Heero," she called after him, taking a few steps forward.
He halted, waited.
"Where are you going, Heero?"
"Where I'm needed," he replied simply.
"Are you going to Sanq?"
"The battle is never supposed to enter the kingdom." He started to walk off. She lunged after him, catching him by the wrist.
"Heero, please, tell me where you're going."
He looked down at her. After a minute or so he replied, "Vólos. That's where the battle will continue to take place. If you're that concerned about Zechs, you can find him there."
He pulled away from her, and this time she did nothing to stop him. She watched silently as he left her, perhaps for the last time.
Go after him, her mind raged as his figure became little more than a shadow in the encroaching twilight. This is Heero, leaving again, the same Heero you so dearly loved those short years ago. Go after him.
But in the end, she did not. He disappeared in the darkness, and soon all that could be seen outside was the lights from the city below. It didn't matter anyway. Whatever she had once felt for him, it was gone now, and she could now freely admit this to herself. She didn't love him anymore, and perhaps she never had, not in any way that counted, at least. This cause was simply too meaningless to chase after.
By the time she left the palace, this ruined queen, the wind had begun to blow and she could feel, strangely enough, a slight smile upon her face.
It was all about to end, for better, for worse, it was all about to end. She could feel it somehow.
Author's Notes: It probably goes without saying that this was my favorite chapter to write. Aphrodite was my favorite original character, and many times I debated over whether or not Heero should actually succeed in killing her; it was really quite hard for me to part with her. As are most of my violent death scenes, this one was written to the Beatles' "Long Long Long." There is a bit more involving Aphrodite in the follow-up to Ballad that I wrote two years ago, entitled "The Remnants of War," which will probably be appearing on this site once I've re-edited Ballad.
This note was originally attached to the previous chapter for some reason, but will be removed upon re-editing: The scene betwixt Relena and Heero is not meant to be interpreted as a romantic interlude. It is my personal interpretation from the series that Relena's feelings for Heero were never anything more than a simple (albeit melodramatic, on her part) schoolgirl infatuation with the dark, mysterious new boy, and that Heero never requited her. What happens in this chapter is simply an act of subtle desperation, not for each other, but merely to attain the sense that they are both, in fact, still alive after what they have both just respectively seen and experienced. On a side note, however, I must say that I've always rather liked the idea of Heero and a saner Aphrodite as a couple . . .