A/N:
Dear "hi"
I can't reply to reviews left anonymously, but I wanted to say that yours really brought a smile to my lips amidst the adrenaline-fuelled panic of exams. ^_^' It makes me truly happy that you – and so many others! – enjoy the story; and believe me, I would spend every waking moment writing if I could. As it is, I write on the bus, on the train, during lunch break, every night before drifting off to sleep and every morning before I go to school. But I also study chemistry, physics, maths, and biology at a pace three times the normal, so when exams start raining down I can't write as much as I'd like to. ^_^' Any torture is entirely unintentional (…for the most part). ;9 I hope you can be patient with me.
/ Dimwit
Special thanks to Zeitdieb, for helping out with German and for the glorious Serving You, Serving Me! one-shot! Perfect idea, perfectly executed~ x3 All you people should go read it. Like, now. It's hilarious, it's clever, it's sweet, and it's all I could ever ask of a ShiroxMephisto fic~ ;9
I do not own or profit from any of what Kazue Kato has created.
"Gueh, I hate travelling like that." If Mephisto hadn't held a supporting arm around him, Shiro would've been on the ground by now. "Where are we?"
They were outdoors, that much was for certain. It was dark, and light rain quickly turned the warm summer night into a chilly, miserable place to be. Shiro untangled himself from the demon and let his eyes wander. He didn't recognise any of his surroundings.
"What is this place…?"
He squinted up at the towering shape through the raindrops on his glasses: a huge building cut its black silhouette into clouds lit faintly by city light, but the city was some distance away.
"Wawel castle is its name: one of the finest cultural treasures Poland has to offer – that and ptasie mleczko. Not that you are normally inclined to follow advice of any kind", he added with a meaning glance, "but I strongly recommend that you stay where you are for a while."
Mephisto snapped his fingers again, and the rain-dimmed light reflected off spotless glass and polished metal. High up in the sky above Wawel castle, there now hung a gigantic pendulum topped by an old-fashioned pocket watch of same proportions.
"I ask you a simple yes-or-no question, and you spirit me away to Poland?"
But Mephisto was already out of earshot, carried up to the top of the pendulum by his bat familiar. Four more glimmering shapes – which, after a quick wiping of his glasses, turned out to be huge skeleton keys – hovered around it at each compass point. Everything about this spoke of magic, and Shiro couldn't help but wonder what this looked like from the city across the water. Could people see this...? Or would that require a mashou?
Then Mephisto touched down on the giant pocket watch, and in that instant the machinery of the watch began turning slowly.
"Acht, sieben, sechs…" There was a compression of the air around the castle, a shift in density that made Shiro's eardrums quiver and hurt. And then it reached him, from far-away distances not measured in metres or feet: the muted rustle of Earth breathing. "...fünf, vier, drei…" The arms on the clock face turned backwards, and something- "Zwei, eins, null: Zurückdrehen!"
Shiro couldn't see anything in the dark, but he heard it. The ghostly sounds of mortar crumbling and stone shifting in the castle, as if it were a living creature stretching in its sleep. Ah, no; not sound. Not real sound, carried by compressions in the air: those were echoes, transported through the distant memories of the castle itself.
"Very little change since then, I admit." The rain stopped abruptly: the watch and the keys were gone, and Mephisto had landed beside him with the pink umbrella held over their heads while he admired his work. "But it's the inside that matters, as humans are so fond of telling themselves. Shall we?"
"Aren't you forgetting something?"
Mephisto halted, gave the matter some thought, and snapped his fingers: Shiro's crutches joined their company in a cloud of pink smoke.
Shiro followed him through a grand archway that seemed more like a small tunnel: and halfway through, they passed something.
There was no word for what it actually was. The best way of describing it was the feeling of walking from a sweltering hot summer day into a heavily air-conditioned room; or from a freezing winter night into the organic warmth of a house heated by fire. Something washed over Shiro's body, shocked it on a molecular level, and left it with the sensation that it had passed through an invisible barrier and ended up someplace vastly different.
Out on the courtyard on the other side, Mephisto brought his umbrella down: the rain had stopped. And it was mid-day.
"Sure, he's the King of Time, but…" But time travelling was only done in manga and anime. "This is freakin' insane…"
Shiro squinted and shaded his eyes as he looked around. Sunlight warmed the wear-smoothened pavement under their feet, bounced off the gilded tip of the umbrella, and painted the courtyard arcades an eye-watering white.
"Okay, that was cool", he admitted, spotting the smug, inquiring look on Mephisto's face. "When is this…?"
"Sixteen hundred and four: Sigismund the third is on the throne, and had the great taste to commission a Baroque style for the reparations after the fire a few years ago."
…freakin' insane.
"Like that pocket dimension of yours, but a pocket in time? Around the castle?" Shiro's head turned every direction to take in what the world looked like in the seventeenth century.
"A tremendously simplified explanation, but yes. A pocket of sorts."
"Can you do the same thing the other way? Like, winding us into the future?"
That would be even cooler. He had, though he wouldn't admit it, checked who Jules Verne was after Mephisto had frowned upon his lack of education. And if Verne wrote about going to the moon nearly a hundred years before it happened, then maybe in the future there would be things that only existed in fiction today. Like teleporters and clones.
"A future", the demon corrected. "There are infinite possible futures branching from the present, each one shaped by choices made in the fleeting moment you call now."
Shiro understood that. Part of it. On a vague, theoretical level: as soon as the human mind is confronted with the concept of "infinite", thoughts tend not to go too far into understanding.
"So… you can't travel to the future?"
"Who do you take me for? I can travel to any future", he snorted. "It's bothersome, however. Even more bothersome to explain to a linear mind. The path to the future is strewn with endless forks, and constantly shifting such: arriving at exactly the future you want is nigh impossible. The past is much easier: each dimension has only one, and it is fixed."
"And how many dimensions are there?"
Mephisto granted him an amused look before he twisted his brain one more turn:
"One for each branch of the future."
The porch swung open for them on heavy, creaking hinges, and they walked right into the castle. Not a single servant to greet them. Not a single guard to question what the two most bizarre guests were doing there.
And it was so quiet. The air in there was completely still, the way you could imagine a grave chamber to be. Their footfalls echoed strangely in the painted, coffered ceilings of the lifeless rooms and gave a not entirely pleasant feeling that there was someone walking behind them, even if the castle… was completely devoid of life.
"Looks like a place you could live in", Shiro observed as they walked through yet another extravagant room, where the tiled floor was polished like a mirror and the carvings on the great stone hearth reached higher than the doors.
"So I did, for a short time." With a snap of his fingers, all the candelabras flared up to light their way through a grand ceremonial hall hung with tapestries that each must have weighed at least twice as much as Shiro. "It was quite pleasant, as long as you had your own chef. The Polish cuisine is so…" A grimace marred his attempts at maintaining his refined manners. "…Polish."
"Awful?"
"No – and yes. The food tastes wonderful, but it looks like it has been eaten once before."
Shiro laughed aloud, and felt the eyes of gossiping maidens, working carpenters and Oriental sultans turn to him from the woven images. That wasn't natural silence.
By the time Shiro neared the top of a long – far too long, if you were on crutches – staircase, he was breathing heavily. Mephisto simply waited at the second floor, one hand on his hip and the other on the handle of the umbrella, whose tip rested against the floor: put a frame around him and he would look just like the castle's other royal paintings. He was already two-dimensional, even.
"Think you could light me a smoke like that?" Shiro snapped his fingers the way Mephisto had done to light the candelabras. "C'mon, it's not your house", he tried, but knew it was a lost cause when that inrun-frown formed over the green eyes. Oh well. If the cause was lost anyway: "For a cripple facing fate uncertain: have you not the heart in you to ease my agony a tad before the final verdict falls…?"
"Oh my; the beast can talk?" Mephisto picked up on his theatrics with feigned astonishment. "And where is that nimble tongue when you aren't making mockery of it?" he asked, tilting his head to the side with an amused look.
"At the far back of the wardrobe, with your suit", Shiro smiled back and hopped up the last few steps. "Right, you unhelpful bastard: can I at least have my lighter back?" Poofing his lighter away had become so much habit that the demon did it subconsciously every time Shiro entered his office: Shiro had a vague memory that he had thought of putting it in a different pocket. He really should do that.
"Straight back into the wardrobe, is it?" Mephisto tapped a forefinger on his lip contemplatively. "We have one more flight of stairs to ascend; after that, you can have your lighter back."
"There's a catch, isn't there?" Shiro stated with an eyebrow raised. "I don't trust that smile of yours." Especially not after his humiliating loss in the bet: the only thing Mephisto was ever generous with was payback.
"And wisely so~" And with that, the demon turned on his heel and led the way through the next line of lavish rooms. "Do you find anything amiss with Wawel castle, Shiro?"
"There's no people", he said, casting glances left and right at huge portraits of stiff, royal Poles that ought to live in the castle right now.
"Quite so, quite so. Any idea why…?"
"'cause they're all- That's the staircase?" Shiro stared at Mephisto, and at the very high steps of the stairs behind the door he had opened. "Oh you smug little bastard…" Not just a staircase: a tower staircase. On crutches. "…any chance I could get you to poof me to the top?"
"You certainly could; but then you don't get your lighter." He tipped his upper body in a mock bow, accompanied by a sparkling grin. "I'll hear your answer at the top~"
*poof!*
Shiro started climbing the stairs with a stoic promise that he wouldn't let Mephisto get any fun out of this.
A/N:
Ptasie mleczko – "unobtainable delicacy", a chocolate-covered meringue manufactured by the Wedel confectionary company (whose logo really does look like Willy Wonka's) since 1936.