Souls Disappear in the Snow

by Masamune Reforged

They crashland in the Artic. An unforgiving winter traps them relationships strain, tempers flare, old bonds are broken and new emotions boil to the surface. All too soon they become aware of something dark and sinister around, and perhaps inside, them.

9. 8 Mephisto

Souls Disappear in the Snow- GW fanfic
Masamune Reforged '06

Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Wing or any of the characters therein.
Warnings: yaoi (established 3x4, developing 1x2 and 5x2, angst, violence, supernatural, cursing, death?(see chapter 6 and 7 notes)
Archive: Anyone that wishes to archive this fic is welcome to.
Comments: to MasamuneEHShotmail

Part 8- Mephisto

Duo took on a strange attitude towards me. It was like he was paying extra attention to me, watching me longer than he should, speaking to me more than normal. I liked it at first, but there was something sketchy about it. His friendly ways cheapened into fakeness, like he was trying to stay close to me just to keep an eye on me. He smiled broadly at me when everyone was around, chattering my head off the way he used to Heero's. Then, in private, it would be a combination of constant teasing, rubbing against my leg like a cat or simply stretching out his beautiful form in front of me, and bizarre conversations. He asked me about some of the strangest things in the world. I tried to make conversation, if only to keep him around me for a short while longer. I felt as if it was physically impossible to stop staring at him, like my eyes were connected to him by a wire. Of course, I could still only see out of one of my eyes… but you get my point.

I kissed him one night, when we were alone in the library. The American's favorite spot was the big red lounge chair in the dusty library. I had gone in to see how he was feeling, and the damn tease had flirted with me so intensely that I was almost certain he had finally chosen me over Yuy. Duo went on about how nice I had been to him, how happy it made him, how much he wanted me... As a friend? Or as more?

"You're not like the others."

"I like that proud way you carry yourself, but without being arrogant like someone else I know." "Hey, have you heard the one about…"

"Hahaha! Stop it! You crack me up."

"You work out every day? It shows."

"Read this line here. It's all right, come a little closer."

I wasn't sure. All I knew were my feelings for him, how I wanted to run my fingers over his creamy white flesh, through his thick, long hair. I wanted him so badly it almost made me scared. In a reckless moment, I wanted him so much, that I didn't care if I could only have him for an instant. I leaned into him, opening my mouth to crash into his as he went to speak, surprised.

The taste of warm flesh, the slight moisture on his lips made me hungrier. His eyes were darting around the room, but mine were fastened to his. I drew in a breath, and his aroma consumed me. I sensed a strange, intense power running up and down him, even though his arms were slack at his sides. I made to wrap an arm around him, to pull him closer to me. But he broke the kiss, moving away. Within a minute, he excused himself.

We never talked about it. I mentally kicked myself for my stupidity. I knew I had made a mistake. But I told myself that there was no point in doubting myself. I didn't try to hide my real feelings for him. I wasn't like Heero. I wasn't playing any games. Nonetheless, Duo was taken aback by my blunt nature, and we didn't speak much the following day.

- - - - -

That was a special day; one everyone had looked forward to for a long time. All the days since the map had fallen out of the book in the library had been spent in search for some sort of guide to make sense of it. We finally managed to dig up something worthwhile. We found a notebook in an upstairs room. The five of us spread out, each taking a different side of the room and sorted through what didn't crumble in our hands. Only ten minutes into it, Trowa announced that he had found something.

It was a travel log, recently written. By recently, I mean it was approximately a decade or so before our arrival at the mansion. Duo began jumping in celebration, hugging Heero and I, as Trowa read a short section aloud. The writer had recorded how he and a group of men had come upon an Eskimo settlement out in the wilderness, then how they had reached the mansion. All we had to do was go backwards on the path they had traveled, and we would find help.

"This journal has a lot more written in it," Trowa commented casually.

To this I said, "We've been reading through crap for weeks on end. We have what we need."

There! Subject closed, search finished. This was the beginning of the end, live happily ever after.

- - - - -

The only reason that humans discover so much is because they are curious. That's not always a good thing; it can lead to trouble. If you dig too deep you could end up buried under a landslide created by your own prying hands. Some things shouldn't be looked into so deeply.

Later that night, we were again gathered in the Hunt Room. I was playing another game of chess with Quatre. Over the course of time I had grown bored of always playing the Sandrock pilot. But recently he had changed his style of playing. His solid defense was abandoned for a much more aggressive method. The Arab never passed up a piece-for-a-piece exchange, anything to draw blood. I found myself losing pieces early in the game. So did he, and it ultimately worked to my advantage. He was very good with his knights; they seemed to guard against every strategy I would make. The horses always seemed to be in position to befuddle any offensive I made. Quatre lost them in an exchange (I gladly gave up my two knights for his) After I countered his initial lunge, I would wipe him out.

But it was getting boring again, each game so much like the last. I was soon lost to outside thoughts, scattering my concentration. Suddenly my queen was dead, and I began to focus more. I was just beginning a grand counterattack when Duo came into the room. I didn't know he had left.

"We need to talk about something," Shinigami's voice was serious, soft. Everyone looked towards him, none of us speaking. "This." Duo tossed the journal we had discovered at Trowa, who caught it. "Did you read the rest of it?"

Trowa shook his head, eyes darting to all of us (except for Quatre) like he was afraid he'd done something wrong. He, again, shook his head and remained quiet.

"Why would we want to read any more of it?" I asked, pissed at the interruption and the fact that I was losing to Quatre because of my overconfidence. "We have directions to a safe area an-"

"I was just curious, sorta bored, so I took a look at it," Duo was speaking strangely. He almost sounded like Heero, so unfeeling and calm. "It's by a vagrant. He came to this house some years ago, along with a large group, an expedition led by his cousin." This much Trowa had told us, having read it on the first page or two. What was Duo working at?

"You find it strange that anyone would come intentionally all the way out here," Heero ventured a guess. I thought he was talking out of his ass, but the Japanese soldier must have known Duo's thought process, because the braided pilot nodded. "That is strange," Heero agreed.

"I read the first part of the log before I knew it was useful to us," Trowa spoke slowly, trying to remember. "It said they came here because the writer's cousin heard a story from a man at a bar."

"Mephisto," Duo spoke the foreign word with heavy emphasis. It went right over my head. "A person only referring to himself as Mephisto asked some seedy thugs, ex-mercenaries and court-martialed soldiers to go out here in the Arctic and do a little job for him."

"It did mention about bringing some supplies here… I skipped around a lot…so…" Trowa looked at all of us (but not at Quatre), mostly at Duo, as if he were suspicious that we were trying to corner him in a trap.

There was something behind Duo, a force springing him into action. It made his gestures short and quick, rushed his speech. The light amethyst eyes were as tranquil and calm as I had ever seen them, but I could hear the gears in his head spinning, his thoughts coming almost dizzyingly fast. He took his long braid in his hand, looking at it as he sighed.

"Mephisto approached these men with an offer, a deal he himself had taken up many years before," Taking the tone of a storyteller about to recite a long tale, Duo sat down in a seat near Quatre. "Not much is known about who he was, but the writer of the log described him as an old man with too many years on his back. Mephisto told the men that if they performed certain tasks, they would earn themselves a handsome reward."

"Duo, is this going to lead to a point?" Quatre broke in suddenly. I was glad. This sounded like some dumb legend, a stupid myth. It was only going to poison our minds. "You're not just making this up?"

"This is important. Trust me Quatre!" Such a hard sound in the braided youth's tone, he must have felt very strongly about this. I wondered where Duo was getting this crap from? Where was the source? As Quatre and Duo argued for a minute, I got up and took the black journal from where Trowa had placed it. Opening it, I began to read.

"It's all in that book!" Duo yelled, cracking a wooden table with a pounding fist. He'd finally won over Quatre, silence filling the room. I began to read. The writing was big and spaced out; I scanned rapidly through pages.

"So," Duo smoothed out the wrinkles in his shirt, dropping his harsh tone, "This Mephisto dude said that if they completed certain repairs on the house here, they would be rewarded. Somehow he managed to convince the man that would lead the expedition, but he didn't tell them some things."

"The book is mostly about what happened after the expedition reached this mansion," Duo cut to the chase, just as I flipped through some boring, detailed pages and reached a passage that interested me. "They completed repairs, stocked up supplies. But, but then there was a problem. Nobody could find the great treasure they'd been promised, and the band of crooks wasn't about to leave empty handed."

"Basically they got conned into doing a job by this Mephisto fellow?" Quatre said. Duo shook his head. "But we've never seen anything very valuable here. This sounds like a method someone made up so this mansion wouldn't fall into complete disrepair. Why anyone would want to-"

"Dissent grew among the criminals," Duo started up right where he had left off. He was filled with energy, as if the best was yet to come. I continued to read. The writing in the journal was disjointed, scatterbrained. "Fights broke out. People got cabin fever. A faction desired mutiny and escape."

"That's what happens to weak minded criminals," I grunted from my corner. Then a thought hit me; I looked up from the book. Duo met my gaze. I licked my lips, asked, "Duo, you keep calling them criminals. Why are they criminals? It doesn't say anything like that in the book."

"It's one of the entries past halfway," Duo calmly replied. He smiled as he dropped the bomb; "The group kidnapped a bunch of people and brought them here."

Heero asked what all of us were thinking, "Why go to all the trouble, bringing hostages out here?"

"Sacrifices," Duo mouthed the word slowly, his grin stuck on tight. Was he getting a kick out of this? "Along with repair equipment and foodstuffs, they were supposed to bring sacrifices with them." A clammer rose up, everyone tried to speak at once. Duo shouted over all of us, "Mephisto ordered them to bring people as sacrifices!" Everyone stopped speaking, even Duo. An eerie silence came down over our heads. Something in the electricity generator popped, making a loud rattle.

"What for?" Trowa asked. Now he was sneaking glances at Quatre, to see how the estranged Sandrock pilot was reacting. I wondered why the tall acrobat would act like this every now and then. Most of the time Trowa and Quatre didn't speak to each other, wouldn't even look at each other. However, other times it appeared that Trowa would try to mend the gap, rebuild the bridge. Quatre still carried a gun on him at all times.

"I don't know," Duo shrugged, still retaining his air of confidence. "I'm guessing it was a sacrifice for the ghoul in the mansion. Mephist-"

"Wait! Stop right there," I waved my arms in the air, halting everything. I looked at Duo with a skeptical glare. "What are you talking about? Some stupid hocus-pocus-"

"It's not stupid!" Both Duo and Quatre shouted at me at the same time. I backed down, smacking the pages of the journal as Duo grumbled, "You just don't know."

Heero looked asleep. His head arched strangely against the high back of his chair and his eyes were shut. The exhausted Wing pilot spoke softly, "Duo, what else does it say about these hostages?"

"There were a bunch of them," Duo licked his lips. I turned another page. "A son and father, a couple and their two boys, a teenage girl, another young boy and his father and a little girl." The list was longer than anyone expected; this had been a serious incident. "Seems the closer relation between people the bigger reward they'd get."

"Is that for sure, or are you just-" Heero began to ask a question, but Duo stamped it out with his voice.

"No!" The American sounded perturbed, tense and anxious. He fiddled with his long brown braid. I felt he wanted to finish this up in a hurry. "The writer just wasn't sure if they'd get a bigger reward or not, but I think it's the reason why they chose victims that way."

"You take what this one man writes as if it's the undeniable truth," I shut the book partly, just enough to make eye contact with Duo. He was not pleased with my interruption. His foot was tapping on the floor. I noticed that Heero nodded in agreement with me. Or perhaps he was falling asleep. "I don't know if that's a very reliable source."

Duo didn't answer. I knew why. Maxwell had failed to mention a critical aspect of the journal. Although the writing was not incredible, it was literate and had a normal flow and tone… for part of the book… But, as I had found from flipping through a few pages, a huge change came over the writer. The penmarks became more scrawled, hastily written, smaller. Question marks and exclamation points towered over words, pages were torn out. The author seemed to deteriorate on paper. As the pages rolled on and on the sentences would get choppier by the line, words were crossed out everywhere... And the things he wrote about...

I read a passage out loud, " 'Mesa's been looking for the cellar all day. I don't think he'll come out of the basement. The furnace swallows people.' " I stopped, looking around to gage the reactions. Only Duo didn't look confused. He looked scared. " 'Arty's been so strange, but he still hasn't found it yet. Half of the NahYo's are mutinous. They want to leave, go back to their turf in the Colonies. I don't understand. Why won't it let us go? We're being turned against each other by it. I think Edgar enjoys watching us fight. He's with the Devil. I saw him crawling on the graves in the middle of the night last night. His eyes glowed yellow, I thought he had a tail. How'd he get outside with Marco and C-Up guarding the door? Home is so far. We never---' "

The writing became illegible. I was done anyway. Nobody spoke. Below us the generator clattered with a rumble, but it soon softened to a normal hum. Duo was looking straight at me, the look of a sore loser. He had ceased fidgeting. Trowa looked exactly as he had all evening, miserable. A puzzled look creased Quatre's brow. He was hunched over, thoughts running around inside. Heero was looking up at the ceiling. What was his problem anyway?

"This man sounds insane to me," I got Heero to look over in my direction as I spoke. Duo let out a sound, but no words. He wanted to speak. "How you can take anything in this book seriously is beyond me."

Heero's eyes broke the wait as Duo saw that the Wing pilot and all of us were looking for a response from the him. Duo said, "I think this man was driven insane by whatever demon lives in this house." Was he serious? Heero rolled his eyes, but they still came to rest on Duo, making him uncomfortable, pressured to speak. "He was sane in the earlier parts of the diary."

"Simple." Heero got up from his chair. The Wing pilot's shoulders were hunched over, his feet stiffly sliding over the wood floor, cobalt eyes locked on Duo. "The man went insane just about the same time he started rambling in his diary about goblins and demons. Disregard what he says when you reach the passage about yellow-eyed devils leaping over tombstones. Now, since this has wasted enough time, I think, I'm going to bed."

I chuckled. Heero was funny when he was exhausted and bitterly sarcastic.

"Heero!" Duo, I guess, was not amused. He snapped so loudly that Heero spun around like a top to face him, the quickest I'd seen him move all day. "You think I'm fucking joking about this?"

"It shouldn't be disregarded totally," Quatre was much calmer than both, and the peacemaker in him intervened as Heero's face turned quite red. "I think there might be some worth in seeing what the writer had to say about all of this." I glared at Quatre fiercely, but he absorbed the dark glower without even flinching or pausing. "Those that came here before us might have been able to uncover something that we've been ignorant to this whole time."

"Or they might lead us astray," Heero snorted.

"Look," I was going to speak, but Duo beat me to the punch. "There's still one important thing we can ALL agree about. Just, just drop the ghost issue for a second! You don't want to believe it? Fine! The important things is that there's still people being held hostage in this mansion!"

I could hardly believe my ears. I was sure Duo was going to discuss our plans to leave the mansion. This was unexpected. I decided to stay quiet and see where this led. However, everyone else decided similarly, and a hush fell over us. Heero eventually shrugged, "What do you want to do about it?"

"Rescue them!" Duo yelled, balling his fists up. He did that every time he got angry, as if he could pummel the world with his frustration. "Jesus! Have you all gone insane? It says there's still peo-"

"If by 'it', you mean this journal," I cut in, watching Duo's wrath wheel around on me, violet bearing down at me like chariots. "We can't be sure whether or not they're still alive. This was written quite awhile ago."

"Fucking doubting Thomas Wufei," Duo grated out the words through clenched teeth. "All you've ever done since we've gotten here is doubt every single thing that's happened. 'The map is too old.' 'The generator makes strange noises.' 'We can't handle the Arctic weather.' I'm sick of your excuses!"

"Duo," Quatre's voice was soft, but dry and emotionless, "it won't help if you just get angry."

"It won't help those people, suffering in the dungeons of this place, if all of you keep sitting around here like the worst cold hearted bastards in existence!" Duo was waving his arms again; he should have been an air traffic controller. "All of you, even you Quatre, something's changed in all of you! I don't know if it's from being stuck in this cage for so long, but you've all lost your humanity to this place."

"So you're saying we should try to help these prisoners?" I asked, hoping my sarcasm would show.

"Of course!" Duo thrust his left arm at me as if to pierce me with a sword. "Fucking Christ! Where are the 'courageous' men I fought with not so long ago? Don't any of you remember the heat of battle? The rush of excitement despite the sleepless nights and nightmares? Have you forgotten what it means to help others?"

The conversation dragged on for two full hours. Duo yelled and gestured and stamped his foot, but even after breaking down and then declaring himself the only sane one among us, he refused to quit until each and every last one of us agreed to a full search of the mansion.

Thus we wasted another three days.

- - - - -

I awoke to darkness everyday. The generator was constantly humming, steadily louder every day, to combat the frigid climate. Trowa said it was getting colder. However, I could not tell the difference between subzero and fifteen or twenty degrees below subzero.

It was decided that Heero, Trowa and Duo would go scout out the village. Quatre bitterly agreed that some of us dying in a sudden blizzard was better than all of us. I had very little desire to go, I'd grown comfortable in the mansion. The only thing echoing in the back of my mind was that I wanted to keep an eye on Duo.

He had been looking slightly better since the travel log had been unearthed, but looks can be deceiving. He certainly had lots of energy. Daily, hourly, he led us about the dark mansion, swinging a flashlight and casting shadows with his arms while he speculated about all the secrets that nobody would ever find. One would think he were leading us on a grand treasure hunt. My heart was not in it. I had zero faith in any of these people being alive after all these years, if they'd even existed in the first place...

Duo would crawl on his hands and knees, slinking through crawlspaces and, against Heero's orders, scaling a rope into the dumbwaiter shaft. He was Sherlock Holmes, loudly scrutinizing every little mark and niche in the walls, feeling for trapdoors in the ground. But, while the Deathscythe pilot was doing a great job of handling the search, he seemed incapable of accepting that we might never find the "sacrifices". He even openly cried one night, banging his fists against a hidden door that had turned out to be a half finished bathroom. More and more I began to feel that everytime he cracked a silly joke, put on a smirking grin or tried to raise our spirits he was burying a part of himself from view, hoping that if he kept on pretending he'd become the person he was pretending to be, a person without any problems.

"You'll keep looking for them, won't you?" I walked around a corner to see a very puffy black trenchcoat with one arm on Quatre's shoulders. Squinting under the two hoods and a baseball cap, I could see amethyst eyes glinting out pleadingly.

"Leaving already?" I asked casually, as if he were going across the street for something at the A&P... Gods, I hadn't been to a store or any earthly place in so long... "Where are Trowa and Heero?"

"They're just securing the map and the diary so they don't get wet and ruined," Duo rattled off an answer and turned away. I watched him go to the front hallway and put on a pair of snowshoes. They looked like gigantic tennis rackets with boots in the middle.

- - - - -

Quatre and I were alone for several hours. It took me about half that time to realize that he was the one I was least close to. I felt a sort of unspoken friendship with Trowa, and even some kind of bond with Heero, who I constantly feuded with. But after three hours of talking with Quatre I realized I didn't know him very well, and that if we weren't stuck alone together I'd probably never want to get to know him...

He was simply not the type of person I would normally get along with. My first impression of him had been that he was too soft and that he might get someone killed on the battlefield because of it. But I quickly saw that he had a gift for strategy and a very level head, when he wasn't so flustered by his feelings. He also doubted himself too much.

He had been reading the travel log for some time. I believe he intended to finish the entire book in one sitting. For lack of anything better to do, I made chitchat with him.

"Weren't you going to keep looking, for Duo?" I asked casually, remembering back.

I expected him to ask me what I was referring to. We'd been spending a hefty share of our time searching for something or another over the past… weeks, months?

"I was hoping to find more about that in this book," Quatre said immediately, not blinking away from the smooth pages. "But Arty, I mean, the leader of this expedition took all these people away to a part of the mansion without telling any of the men where. He kept a lot of things from his friends, about what was going on."

"Don't you think a bunch of scum would probably just rape the women and leave the rest for dead?" I asked, speculating out of sheer boredom. "Or do you think they were all left alive?"

"I have no, actually," I saw a flash in Quatre's eyes for a brief moment, but he still kept them glued to the words. "Actually I don't think they're dead. I just get that feeling."

"How do you figure that?" I wondered aloud. "From what I read, that diary was written by a very ill person, very mentally ill. I could hardly read some of the entries, and none of them made any logical sense."

Like so much here, I doubted everything in the ancient mansion. Time has a way of destroying and warping what once was true. Here time hung heavy from the beams in the ceiling and drifted off the tundra as it had for millions of years, piling on top of itself, further burying the past underneath.

"Ever since we arrived here I thought I felt something strange," Quatre finally looked away from the travel log. His azure eyes had a dreamy, distant glaze. "It seemed so natural and inconspicuous that I thought it was just my being unsettled from the crash. But some sort of thing..." Here, Quatre shivered, "...it began to sink into my bones, deep. This aura filled everything. This entire place seems so forgotten and neglected, but so painstakingly crafted and decadent that the..."

He drifted off. I shifted in my chair uncomfortably. I glanced around into the dark shadows gathering in the corners and silently agreed that the setting had an almost unreal characteristic. The wind had died down for almost a solid week. When it was quiet here, it was like we were frozen in a deathly smothering silence.

The daydreaming blonde snapped out of it. He glanced at me from under his bangs as if he was surprised I was still here. "Never mind," He shook it off, shook me off. "A few years ago I went to a funeral for a relative on L3. It was right after the gang warfare had reached its highest peak and some of the cities were almost totally abandoned. The people left were almost the same as the dead, so it felt like everyone was already dead. No hope, only cruelty and animal instinct left. It was so sad."

He trailed off, lost in a memory.

I don't know why I asked it, "Are you going to make up with Trowa?"

Quatre's vacant gaze turned to one of shock. A blush came to his cheeks but quickly faded. His eyes narrowed at me and the color drained out of his face. Blue and white, like thick ice.

"How does that concern you?" I could tell the Sandrock strategist was holding back, being civil. Why couldn't he ever just be honest with me? He added a stinging remark, "Are you giving up on Duo?" I hadn't expected that. He was getting more cold-blooded than I'd ever seen him before.

I ignored that comment and replied sincerely, "If we do get out of here, I don't want any strained relations between us pilots. Our lives are constantly in each other's hands. I just don't want it to affect the mission." Quatre was still glaring, and I realized he could put up as thick of a mask on himself as Trowa or Heero or Duo, if he put his mind to it. "Also," I decided to try to change my approach, "It's uncomfortable to see you both acting like this."

"He's so cold… calculating but always acting on instinct and feeling," Quatre gulped on the last word. He put the travel log aside. "But he's still like that even when not in battle. I thought I could get through to him. I saw something incredible inside him."

Wow. Give him a little nudge and Quatre would totally pour his soul out to you. The wealthy warrior put a brave smile on his cherub face as he continued, "But he didn't let me in. He locked me out with his shield. Maybe he realized he didn't love me. But-"

Quatre's face fell ashen. The pale sickness was still present, but the callous had worn out. Through chapped lips he choked on his speech, "It's not his fault our love faded. Maybe – I-" Doubts consumed him. I held my breath, as if the slightest inhalation would suck the wet trail of sadness down his face. "Maybe I wasn't the right person for him."

The great wooden structure creaked and groaned under a strong blast of wind. I felt I needed to say something, "So it won't alter your relationship with him or affect you in battle any way?"

"Everyone's been affected," Quatre mumbled.

I wasn't going to ask him what he meant by that. The blonde was so intelligent, well schooled and naturally street smart. But he could not explain his train of thought to save his life. He was too filled with concerns and worries to hone his skills properly. I bit my lip and stared at the floor. It squeaked as Quatre stood up suddenly.

My eyes met his. Horror dwelt there.

"What's wrong?"

"I-" He gasped for air. He clutched his chest but ran past me towards some unknown beacon.

"Where are you going?" I yelled after him, rising as well. But Quatre didn't get far. He seemed to stagger, then sprint to one of the doors in the library. He threw it open. The elements howled outside, but unblocked sunlight drifted in with windswept snowflakes. Quatre stood in the open doorway for a moment, looking down the hall towards the kitchen, then rushed to another across the room.

This one he also threw open, and a gigantic pile of pure downy snow poured in.

"What are you doing?" I asked. I was following the Arab out of the library and into an unlit hallway.

He threw open another door, but hesitated for only a moment before hurrying off.

Frightened aquamarine glanced back at me momentarily. The pale face now seemed like a statue, a grotesque sculpture of a man petrified in absolute fear.

"There's something wrong." He murmured. I hardly heard him as I rushed past the open door, a blast of chilled force blowing in my ears. Such wind... even without a cloud in the sky.

"What!" I screamed. Quatre rushed through the kitchen, straight past a door that also led outside. He did not open this one. I was following at a frantic run, wondering why we were running.

I was close enough to hear my shaken friend mutter in dread, "Something's wrong with Trowa."

He threw open a door in the hallway. We both stopped. I looked out but the wind was whipping around so much that it appeared to be a blizzard. But the sun still shone low in the western sky. I looked outside, then at Quatre. He was staring intensely into the icy chaos. I looked back outside.

Pure, blinding white.

"What's going on Quatre?" I growled angrily. He didn't reply, but his body leaned to the exit. I raised my voice, confused and scared because I had no clue what was going on or why Quatre was acting this way. "What is-"

I was cut off as forms emerged from the depths of the windstorm. Heero threw himself into the hallway, his hair and most of his body covered in white. He staggered under the weight of another.

"Fucking move," He grunted as he tripped in the doorway and pushed right past Quatre. We followed into the next room. I looked back at the door, amazed for I had never seen any sign of life outside of the ma- Where was Duo? Heero was laying Trowa down in the next room. A snow caked leg bent out at a bizarre angle.

"Trowa!" Quatre cried out.

"He needs some treatment. It's not critical but its best not to wait," Heero advised. He seemed to be looking around for something.

I helped fetch some materials with Quatre. He took over as medic. After I came back with a thin board to use as a splint, I noticed that Heero was gone again. How many minutes had gone by since they'd first come in? Where was Duo? I left Trowa with Quatre and went back to the door. I heard voices shouting at each other. One of them, I sighed in relief, was Duo's.

"I didn't fucking hallucinate Heero!" Duo screamed directly in Heero's face. "I saw a town!"

"Duo-"

"Right after we saw that dog sled!" Duo was waving his arms. He had a glint in his eyes that creeped me out. His cheeks and nose were bright red, but his black trenchcoat was like Heero's, covered in melting snow. "I'm going back there!" Duo said adamantly, drowning out anything Heero could protest.

"Don't be hasty!" Heero shouted even louder, trying to calm Shingami's wrath, seeming to realize he was losing the battle. "We can't get lost out there, we'll be absolutely lost at nightfall! We need to go slow and coordinate-"

"I remember the way there! I can get back there! I'm going back. Right. NOW!" Duo was having none of it. He stamped his leg.

"I'm not letting you go alone," Heero yelled. I felt my cheeks blush, in jealousy. Heero was always trying to warm up to Duo, always playing the white knight on horseback. "Trowa will be fine as long as he gets rest."

Duo just stared at Heero for a while. A sane appearance took over his face, then he smiled and it disappeared in a loopy grin. "You mean that?" He asked. "Then come on, because I'm leaving now."

"I'm coming with you!" I shouted, surprising the two brown haired youths, and myself. I stood there while both gazed at me. "I- I-" I realized I needed some gear. "I'll be right back! I just need to get changed, wait for me. Please, just… three heads are better than one. Somebody needs to keep the map, someone to watch for pitfalls and fissures and-" I couldn't finish my thought, but rambled on at neck breaking speed until Duo shouted:

"Then hurry!"

I whipped around the house like a tornado. I had thrown together a pretty decent outfit and had even figured out snowshoes before Duo's patience ran out. I got to the hallway and was just glad to see him still waiting. He pulled his hood up, chestnut brown locks trailing down over his profile, but I saw him smile at me.

"Follow me!"

I stepped outside into the infinite stretch of winter. The sharp cold air pierced my lungs. With a little difficulty I shut the door and ran out into the steppe.

- - - - -

An hour into the trip the sun had set and even Heero decided we should go back and try tomorrow morning. The wind was furious and the temperature freezing right to the bone. Duo protested and yelled and screamed, but he eventually gave in and we returned to the mansion for another night.

-end "Mephisto" Part 8 in

Souls Disappear in the Snow

Masamune Reforged '06

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