A lost twin
Sitting on her throne and with the Pope at her side, Athena waited with deep anxiety over news of Lydia and Elena. She had seen the amount of blood on the ground around the landslide as Darius and Julia hurried away with the young Gemini sisters for acute medicinal treatment, despite the Gold Saints trying to cover the horrible injuries from sight with their white mantles.
"I hope that Baihu was able to give Elena treatment in time…"
She knew that Baihu had demanded the assistance of the healers trained in India and Egypt to help him in a surgery that needed to be done on Elena.
"Lady Athena."
It was Tiamat and Utu who came into the chamber, and their pale faces from what they had witnessed earlier, revealed that it was not good news that they came with.
"Yes?" the Goddess asked, unable to hide how her closed hands in her lap were trembling in fear for what they would say.
"We regret to confirm the death of Gemini Lydia. The cause of her violent death was the Galaxian Explosion aimed at her back, and…it ripped both her heart and lungs into pieces because of how powerful it was from the emotions of sheer rage and bloodthirst from the Italian twins…"
All that blood in the ground, and it could not be solely from Lydia.
"I see…and Elena?"
If both of the sisters were dead, then the Sanctuary would have to restart the search and training for a new set of twins that could become the Gemini Saint, because there was no way they were going to let Romulus and Remus get away with murder. But just as the previous search had proved over the years, any success was not promised. There was a good reason for why twins were so rare as the Gemini Saint outside the Holy Wars.
"Still unconscious after the thankfully successful surgery to carefully try to place the broken bones of her shoulder and arm back in place without her losing too much blood, but Baihu is afraid that she will slip into a coma that lies between the border of life and death. We do not know if she will make it…"
It was not the news she wanted to hear, but it was better than the worst.
"I am glad that Baihu was able to use his past as the youngest son of a physician from China who sent his son out into the wide world to learn as much as possible about the human body…his long training from India and Egypt have already proved useful in the past, but now…"
Rubbing her tears away, Athena stood up from the throne.
"Even if Elena does manage to survive those horrible injuries she got, I want Romulus and Remus executed for the murder of her sister and for seriously injuring several Silver and Bronze Saints who tried to protect the sisters. I want their lives to end at dawn, and for Capricorn Darius to be the one to separate their heads from their bodies!"
The choice of executioner was not surprising, because it was Darius who lost one student tonight and risked losing the other.
"As you wish, mylady!"
With this command from the Goddess, the Pope addressed the Gold Saints as well:
"Make sure that the Italian twins are unable to fight against anyone. Paralyze them as much as possible, but not to the point of killing. That is for Darius to do in a few hours."
"Yes, your Holiness!"
Bowing to them both, Tiamat and Utu went to gather some of the other Gold Saints to start this order.
"That reminds me…Agi has not returned yet, right?"
Tiamat shook her head, giving a quick glare in slight worry towards the Cancer Temple where they could not sense the Cosmo of the current Cancer Saint.
~X~X~X~X~X~X
At the edge of Yomotsu Hirasaka:
"Bloody Romans, indeed!"
In fact, Agi was pretty busy at the moment with preventing the soul of Lydia from falling out of reach, quite literally. He had not found the right line of dead people directly, and had found her just as she was about to fall into the entrance to the Underworld. Right now, he was half-way over the edge himself, trying to pull her back up.
"Agi! Do not let go of me, please!" Lydia screamed in understandable panic as he felt how something invisible seemed to pull on her. It had to be the call of death that all humans felt the moment their lives ended.
"What in the name of Athena do you think I am doing?! Elena would never forgive me if you were alone in the Underworld with those two bastards who murdered you!"
His hold on her was already difficult with all the blood from the injuries that she had gotten before her death, but Agi refused to give up. He knew that the Gemini sisters had a very strong sibling bond because them together honestly had been the only guaranteed belonging they had during their life, when everything else could be taken from them or denied on the ground of them being slaves.
"Oh, just come up already!"
Using all his strength to jerk himself upwards, Agi finally managed to pull Lydia along. Not the most comfortable landing perhaps, but now he focused on picking her up and trying to get her away from the edge as far as possible.
"My body…I could feel my heart and lungs get destroyed…" she whispered as he hurried away.
"I am not so stupid as going to placing your soul back in a body that can not function, Lydia! I saw those fatal injuries on your body before Julia covered it up with her mantle! I am going to place you inside the Gemini Cloth so you can still be close to Elena even as a spirit!"
Baihu was not the type to enjoy causing torture in others with his Scarlet Needle, since that went against his originally intended training as a physician to heal people, so once he had given fourteen such poisonius stings to both Romulus and Remus, obeying the order from the Pope to leave the killing strike to Darius, he returned to the chamber where Elena was kept under watch.
"Has she woken up yet?"
"For a few moments once in a while, sir, but then returned into her coma."
Not that the Chinese man could fault Elena for it. She had just undergone a massive trauma that left its marks on her body, and he was very worried about how the loss of blood would affect her chances of survival.
"Try to give her willow bark tea whatever you can. She is going to be in massive pain from those injuries and those are far too fresh for me to try using acupuncture to lessen the pain."
The sound of running footsteps was heard, and Agi appeared in the opened door, gasping for breath.
"Oh, you are back, kid. We others wondered where you went earlier."
"As if I would let the soul of Lydia having to deal with her murderers in the Underworld, doctor!"
After telling Baihu what he had done earlier, and the older Saint nodding in confirmation that this was likely the best solution for now since the body of Lydia was far too damaged to function again even with her soul returned to it, Agi walked over to the bed where Elena laid and carefully placed her non-injured right hand and wrist into the hand protection of the Gemini Cloth for that side. Inside that part of the Cloth, was the soul of Lydia, in the hope that her spiritual presence would help Elena.
"Do not walk in and out of here all day once we know that Elena is out of danger of dying. She needs peace and quiet if she is to recover to the best of her ability once she wakes up for longer periods."
Since the Scorpio Saint was infamous for using his Scarlet Needle on people that disobeyed his orders when he was in this mood as a physician, Agi held up both hands in the air as a sign of hearing the unspoken warning.
"Not everyone are dumb enough to disobey a person who are trained in a wast field of medicine outside basic first-aid and can prove it too, doctor! I will pass on your request to Utu, alright?"
Giving the Scorpio Saint a wide space because the older man was glaring in the manner that promised pain if he was not obeyed, Agi left to report to Athena about managing to bring the soul of Lydia back from the edge to the Underworld.
~X~X~X~X~X~X
Once Romulus and Remus were executed by beheading from Darius in the wee hours of dawn the following morning, the Sanctuary worked to clean out all their followers and other people who believed that Lydia and Elena had usurped the Italian twins of their right as the wearers of the Gemini Cloth.
"What? Two of the girls from the village hanged themselves earlier this morning after hearing the news of the execution?!" Julia wondered in shock and horror when one of the female Silver Saints came with an unexpected report.
"Yes, Tiamat and I have just performed a autopsy on the two bodies to confirm a suspicion of the most likely possible motive for suicide, because her ability to control cold helped me to avoid too much blood, and it was what we both dreaded to find," Baihu commented, carefully uncovering something that he held wapped in a cloth.
"Is that…?!"
Tiamat nodded, her face showing honest discomfort over this discovery.
"Two fetuses around six weeks to two months of pregnancy, yes, based on what I have seen when helping the midwife perform abortions for both young girls and married wives in the village for various reasons. One from each of the two girls who hung themselves this morning in separate places. It seems like the Italian twins were going to become fathers this coming spring, had the mothers not chosen to kill themselves in despair over losing their lovers, and we have heard the older villagers talking and be very worried about those two girls firmly believing that Romulus and Remus were the real Gemini Saints."
Darius, on the other hand, showed no regret over what he had this dawn, but he looked sorrowful over hearing that it had led to the deaths of two innocent girls that deserved far better.
"I will tell Athena and the Pope about what Baihu and Tiamat have found, but please, can we bury those fetuses in an unmarked grave and let the parents of the girls not have to learn that they were going to be mothers out of wedlock? Because I very much doubt that either one of the Italian twins ever intended to marry those two girls in the longer run, pregnancy or not. It would have been a case of those marriages where one spouse turns abusive over time, because sexual lust and youngful attraction from how handsome or beautiful someone is, tends to not be very good bases for a sucessful life together."
"Fair points for not telling this to the couples who have to bury their daughters, Darius."
With this agreement about keeping those pregnancies a secret, the older Gold Saint went in different directions.
It took two long weeks before Elena finally defeated the fever and infection in the massive wound on her left shoulder that threatened her life, and even then, she was alarmingly unresponsive to the news that her sister was dead.
"I…could feel her…in here…so I understood…what had happened…" she finally managed to whisper as she trembled in her whole body, letting her tears fall freely and screaming in raw grief as she hugged the hand protection of the Gemini Cloth close despite how much pain it must cause for her damaged shoulder.
"I am really sorry that we did not manage to arrive earlier…"
Darius could feel Elena twitch at his touch, and he did not doubt for a moment about why she suddenly stared at her trainer with such honest terror in her wide eyes: Back at their first meeting, the young twin sisters had already shown a fear for men after witnessing how their male owner would let his guests and other male visitors use the bodies of the female slaves past a a certain age for their own pleasure, and it was a open secret in the farm that this was the origin of any pregancies among the female slaves.
And the attack from Romulus and Remus must have instilled an absolute fear of unknown men in Elena. For her, any men that she did not know personally, was now assocalied with being attacked in a manner that borded on sexual assault and being reminded of her former status as a slave.
"I will order that the servants in the Gemini temple must be all female for your own comfort," Darius promised in a low voice, not touching her again because of the distress it would cause. On the table next to her sickbed, he left behind a new face mask for her to wear during training if she would desire it, painted with the Gemini symbol.
~X~X~X~X~X~X
But something else was found out in the months following the burial of Lydia and the slow recovery of Elena:
"She has both muscle AND nerve damage in her left shoulder?!"
Baihu had watched over Elena over the past months, and even personally treated her so he could confirm what he now told the rest of the Gold Saints, Athena and the Pope.
"Yes. Her left shoulder blade was literally fragmented, and the ligaments to the whole shoulder joint were torn apart. The same happened with her muscles because it would be like they all were cut apart with a dagger. She is half paralyzed in her whole left arm, and can not move it over her head...or even lift her arm past the chest area because the damaged muscles and ligaments can not support such a move. In short, our young Gemini Saint sadly is crippled from the same event that murdered her sister and we can not expect her to make a major involvement in the Holy War when it begins."
More than one of the gathered Saints looked uncomfortable at this information. Elena herself said nothing from her place with her eyes down to the floor, where her left arm was in the sling that she still needed. She barely spoke to anyone outside the servants in the Gemini temple or Gold Saints those days, becoming more or less mute from her trauma. And then the Pope broke the silence:
"And we must be prepared for another uncomfortable thing; that Romulus and Remus likely have joined Hades. Their anger and resentment over being rejected by the Gemini Cloth is something that he would like to use against Lady Athena and her Saints."
Now mutterings of annoyance and frustration were heard instead.
"Damn, can those two just stop haunting the Sanctuary?"
"As if we would let them try and kill Elena as well, for she must be the target!"
"Just how much can they refuse the plain truth that they were unacceptable as Saints despite their long training and everything else?"
Suddenly, Elena chose to speak:
"If they are going to target me…so let them come into a trap with me acting as bait. I know already that I will be unable to face them on my own, no matter how many years that passes before the Holy War starts."
It was not a favorite solution, but unless they found another way, they had to plan how to do this.
~X~X~X~X~X~X
Author note: I just like the idea of some Saints having medicinal training because not everyone can arrive fast to the Sanctuary for treatment from healers, ok? And that one of the previous Scorpio Saints is among those, because with the Scarlet Needle using poison to the nerve system to cause death or madness, some skills in controlling the dose of poison may be useful for numbing pain or stop bleeding after injuries.
The Ancient Egyptians knew how to do surgery thanks to the whole mummy part of their culture, and during the sixth century BC, an Indian sage known as Sushruta, called the "father of surgery", documented more than 1,100 diseases, cataloged the use of various medical herbs, and wrote directives for performing surgical procedures including rhinoplasty and skin grafts. So Baihu have studied how to do surgery in both India and the city of Alexandria to get his skills