Teaming up against the odds
Year 746 AD, somewhere in northern Greece:
A rift to another dimension opened, and both the Gemini twins landed on the ground.
"If you do not mind, brother."
Snapping her fingers near both his ears, Sade once again checked how his hearing worked by his reaction. As she did so, Amari spread a Cosmo version of the Zodiac around them as a way to notice enemies.
"I can hear you, sister."
Over the passing years, they had noticed that Amari was slowly going deaf for real, and doing solo missions were out of the question for him those days for the honest reason of him being caught by surprise from an enemy that may realize his weakness.
"It is such a relief that you wearing the Gemini helmet, seems to protect the remaining hearing that you have left. If you go deaf now, just as the Holy War has started…it is not that I doubt your fighting ability, Amari, but I am scared of you getting hurt because you are not noticing an incoming attack from a different direction…"
He gave a light pat on her shoulder to let Sade know that he did not blame her for having those thoughts. Being the younger twin, part of her self-identity was to both protect him and also try to be her own person.
"They are following us!" Amari suddenly said, as they both sensed a group of massive Cosmos coming closer. The very same ones that had been chasing them across all of Europe. Worse, they both felt how the curse marks, over Amari's heart on the back and her left shoulder, was starting to feel like they were burning.
"Is it the Curse of Gemini that is attracting the Dream Gods!?"
Given the very nature of the curse in question, aiming to either try to kill one Gemini twin before the Holy War or separating them in the fighting, it was not an impossible scenario.
"No idea, sister, but we are NOT going anywhere near the Sanctuary and Lady Athena right now! Remember, they are serving Hades through their connection to Hypnos!"
Opening two separate portals into the different dimensions, the twins split up in an attempt to separate the Dream Gods from each other as well.
~X~X~X~X~X~X
"Finally in the mood for some playing, Gemini princess?" Phantasos smiled as the female twin appeared. Molding her face into a look of seriousness, Sade reminded herself to be on guard.
"I do not have time for playing around when I know that Lady Athena is needing both me and my brother at my side in this war."
But the god was only laughing.
"You are really devoted to that brother of yours, are you not. But…I wonder, have you never really desired a reality where he was not needing you guarding his back all the time? Is he not sort of dependent on you or others?"
Against her will, Sade twitched. That did strike deep into a very personal space inside her, and she knew it. Her fear for Amari and how his handicap affected his whole life.
"My brother is stronger than he seems! And I trust him to take care of himself when I am not around! GALAXIAN EXPLOSION!"
Unleashing the strongest attack of the Gemini Saint and then showing how flexible she was with her hobby of dancing and doing yoga in her free time, Sade hoped to make it harder for Phantasos to bring out her soul from her physical body.
In his own dimension, Amari was kept busy with Icelus. The nightmare god's ability to bend space was problematic, and the male twin knew that his hearing was a true weakness in this fight.
"Not good! Even with my Cosmo raised to try and trace his attacks, I am at a disadvantage!"
"You seem pretty desperate to keep that helmet on your head as you move around, Gemini. Perhaps…it is your weak spot!"
In horror, even with crossing his arms in front of himself in a desperate attempt of defense despite not wearing the Gemini Cloth, Amari was unable to avoid being pushed back with such force against his face that he was sent flying backwards.
Both the twins were pushed out of their respective dimensions, and slammed into each other's back from the force.
"UGH!"
Gritting his teeth from the pain after they had landed on the ground, both bleeding from some wounds that Icelus had caused with his claws, Amari could feel his weakened eardrums react to the attack despite the Gemini helmet taking most of the hit, as the sound waves were not stopped. In fact, it hurt so much that he could not stand up, holding his hands over the sides of the helmet as a non-verbal signal to Sade that the strike against his head was a bad one.
"Time to bring your heads to Lord Hades!"
All four of the Dream Gods aimed for the twins together.
"Amari, GET UP!" Sade screamed, rushing in front of him out of an old habit from their earliest childhood. Worse, both of them could feel their curse marks for the Gemini Curse burning like they were being branded with a white-hot iron, like a warning that death was coming.
"Die!"
Yet in that moment, a third Cosmo was sensed from a new rift in a dimension not of Earth, appearing at the side of them all. A African man in his mid-twenties, looking almost identical to how the twins had been in that age, wearing the Gemini Cloth and a massive scythe like he just had cut though time and space.
"That face…!" the twins realized, and the Dream Gods was surprised over this arrival:
"Impossible! A second Gemini Cloth?!"
Spotting the adult versions of his newborn children being in the face of death, Gemini Ayaan did not hesitate for a single moment.
"Amari, Sade! Get out of the way! GALAXIAN EXPLOSION!"
Giving a taste of why he had been successful in training his children as his direct successors as the Gemini Saint, Ayaan managed to interrupt the attacks intended to kill them as Sade threw herself over Amari, pushing them both down on the ground.
"Father…!"
Using how the Dream Gods were distracted by his presence, Sade pulled out a wooden casket with the name of Athena written in Ancient Greek letters on the lid, made by Athena and Ishir, intended to seal away the Children of Hypnos until a later Holy War somewhere in the future.
"Amari! Help me here!"
Grabbing one of his painting brushes and focusing his Cosmo into it as a central point, Amari revealed a attack that was unique, created by him to make up for his slow loss of hearing alongside the Zodiac circle:
"STARS OF THE CREATION!"
Just like how the Big Bang had created the universe, this Cosmo explosion blending with the Galaxian Explosion of Ayaan was so powerful that the Dream Gods were caught in its blinding light.
"Impossible, a third Gemini Saint…?!"
Holding up the casket in the air above her as she opened the lid, Sade trapped the Dream Gods within it.
"Wrong generation. Father was the previous Gemini Saint before us, forty years ago!"
The blinding light was cut off as the seal of Athena was activated, and Ayaan knelt forwards from exhaustion as the gathered Cosmo of the four Dream Gods vanished, feeling how the scythe was slowly draining him of his lifespan the longer he held on to it. In fact, he was already aging rapidly as the twins looked at him.
"Not yet…not yet, I can not go back yet…the Curse of Gemini…I will not let it…take you! Above you…!"
Swinging the scythe again, Ayaan aimed at the dark shapes above Amari and Sade which had shown up as a sign of their incoming death, cutting those in half. As Amari and Sade already knew from their own past that he would only manage to twist the Curse to instead take his life, they knew that it was nothing they could do apart from letting Ayaan do this. After all, he was acting as a father fearing for his newborn children in his own timeline, not out of any personal desire for glory or anything such.
"Father! Please, tell Mother that we both are happily married at this age! Lady Athena asked us to let you know that she is grateful for this sort of action despite what it will cost you…!" Sade cried out, trying to reach out for Ayaan as the rift began to close.
Smiling faintly at them, Ayaan allowed the rift in time between their birth and current age to get closed again, his now whitish-grey beard and hair looking close to their earliest memories of their parents so long ago.
"Serve our Goddess well against Hades, my children!"
And he was gone.
"I am sorry that we can not help you, Father…Amari, what is wrong!?"
In fact, Anari was now kneeling over, almost touching the ground with his face from the pain that he had managed to avoid showing Ayaan to not cause their time-traveling father unneeded worry.
"Amari?!"
Carefully removing the Gemini helmet from her brother, Sade saw in horror how he was bleeding heavy from both his ears.
"Amari! We need to bring you home right now!"
Feeling that he was about to fall into unconsciousness while her terrified face became blurry in his view, Amari knew the last remnants of his hearing had been lost from how the Dream Gods had aimed at his head even with him wearing the Gemini helmet. The cost of Ayaan saving them both from death at the hands of the Dream Gods was him going completely deaf.
"...I wanted to hear the voice of Nasrin one last time…"
As he fell into the darkness of unconsciousness, Amari did not notice how Sade dragged him into the other dimension and landed in the Sanctuary, screaming in panic for the healers as the other Gold Saints noticed the beaten-up twins at the Aries Temple.
~X~X~X~X~X~X
Of course, the news of him losing what little hearing he had left, was a horrible thing to learn for the whole family. The sight of Amari with bandages around his head to stop the bleeding from his eardrums, seemed to hammer in what really had happened.
"Amari…my poor boy…my poor boy!" Fatima cried as she hugged her son, and Nasrin was also crying over how this battle injury would affect her husband in everyday life from now on. Even if he could not hear a sound of what everyone said, Amari knew why they were acting like this.
"So Ayaan managed to save you from being killed by the Curse of Gemini, just as he told me forty years ago, but naturally he would not know the outcome of your battle with the Dream Gods after that the rift in time was closed again…" Ishir said in honest sorrow when Sade had told him the full details of what had happened in their battle against the now sealed-away children of Hypnos.
"It is not Father's fault! He had so little, limited time to act, before he risked being aged so much that he would be near death himself from old age…Just this small time here in the future for him, caused him to age forty years, from twenty-five to sixty-five…the same number of years that we are now in age…!"
She was ranting as her way of showing how upset she was over Amari going deaf at the worst time possible. Seeing how Sade's closed fists were trembling from her emotions of shock and grief, Athena hugged her as a sign of showing support.
"You can still fight, both of you. We only need to help Amari avoid being taken by surprise because he can no longer hear someone attack."
"Thank you, Athena…"
The reborn Goddess was only twenty, but she still showed the needed support that both the Gemini twins needed now.
For now, Amari was told to stay in the infirmary while Sade took the role of fighting as the Gemini Saint along with the other Saints, so the healers could overwatch his ears and try to see the full damage that had caused his deafness from the injuries. But he was not alone there: Anshu was in the infirmary after nearly dying from blood loss after needing to use a massive amount of the Crimson Thorn attack on the army of Hades a few days earlier, and given the amount of blood he had lost, Athena had been very firm on her Pisces Saint to not fight anymore for now.
"Of all the times for you to go completely deaf, during the Holy War has to be the worst timing possible!" Anshu muttered, before using a simple wax tablet to write the same thing for Amari to read. Due to losing his left arm in battle during a mission a few years earlier, he had grown quite flexible in using his feet and toes to reach for things so as not to be limited in that he only had his right arm left.
I am rather deaf than dead, you know.
Sighing over that his ten years older foster brother had a very good point about how things could be far worse, Anshu switched positions in bed so they could take the ordered rest instead of getting scolded by the healers for disobeying orders from Athena herself.
~X~X~X~X~X~X
As always when it happened every 250th year, the Holy War was brutal. Many Saints fell in battle, Lihua and Nasrin being among those to die when they defended Athena from attackers.
"Grand Pope Ishir!"
Athena and the Pope had teamed up for a barrier around the Sanctuary, even ordering the evaluation of the local villages to be gathered within the Sanctuary itself to avoid that more people died at the hands of the Specters.
"You will not come anywhere near Lady Athena this time either, Emperor of the Underworld!"
Even at the cost of his own life, Ishir showed the power of a survivor from a previous Holy War, using himself as bait to have Hades come close enough to force the Godly soul of his current host body.
"Ishir!"
Yet Athena saw a new danger, two of the Judges coming towards her, intending to kill her now when no Saints were near her as protection. Even with her own Cloth, it was a danger to her life.
"Did they aim for the moment when I had just removed the soul of their Lord from his host…?!"
"ATHENA!"
Out of the blue, she fell into a different dimension that opened up below her feet, only the firm hold on her Nike staff across the hole preventing Athena from falling into it completely, and Amari rushed forwards to face the Judges instead.
"Not alone, brother dearest!" Sade called, showing up right next to him.
Capturing Rhadamanthys and Aciacos straight on and pulling those with them up into the air above the Chamber of the Pope,, the Gemini twins made a suicide attack by combining their Cosmos for a better chance of success:
"Mother, we are sorry for leaving you all alone, but this is why Father took the risk with the scythe of Chronos all those years ago! For us to ensure that Lady Athena won the war once again!"
Somewhere in the distance to the ground far below, they could hear the horrified Fatima screaming their names as she saw what her children were about to do, and Athena saw the whole scene as well when she managed to climb back up from the dimension hole that Amari had sent her into.
"GALAXIAN EXPLOSION!"
~X~X~X~X~X~X
Feeling dumb over how her victory against Hades came at the cost of losing so many Saints, somehow Athena did expect what she found at the Gemini Temple:
The empty Gemini Cloth, and only a few personal items left of Amari and Sade to bury as substitute for their real bodies, a paint brush and headscarf.
"My babies…! My babies…!"
With her violent crying as she knelt in despair in front of the Gemini Cloth, Athena could not blame Fatima if the old widow felt like Athena and her Saints had robbed her of her whole family. First the husband that she had loved so dearly, and now the two children that she had borne him.
"I am proud of you…I really am…for you and Ayaan to protect humankind to the cost of your own lives…I am really proud of you all three…" Fatima whispered, trying to not let her raw grief overwhelm her common sense. Coming closer, Athena laid a hand on the shoulder of the kneeling woman.
"I never intended to steal the Saints from their birth families or anyone else who holds them dear. I want them to join me by a free choice, not as something against their own will."
Feeling her tears start flowing again, Fatima could only give a weak nod in understanding.
"Anshu," Athena addressed the Pisces Saint, who used a pillar for supporting himself as he still was not fully recovered from his earlier blood loss, "I am afraid that you are the only Gold Saint left. You know what this means, do you?"
Allowing his trembling legs to give out below him, Anshu knelt in front of Athena while her human body began to fade away.
"I swear to lead the Sanctuary and the new generation of Saints over the coming 250 years as the Grand Pope until your next rebirth, Lady Athena."
Smiling sadly over that she once again had to return to the realm of the Gods, Athena kissed Anshu on the forehead as a blessing for the future until their next meeting.
"Live on to the best of your ability during your last years here on Earth, Fatima, with my blessing to return home to Africa if you want to get away from all the memories here in the Sanctuary, and know that both Ayaan, Amari and Sade did this so you could be free from the reign of Hades."
Handing Fatima the same family drawing of them all four as a family which Amari had done so many years ago before Ayaan had brought his wife and children to the Sanctuary as a sign of his ten years in exile coming to its end, Athena smiled a regretful smile at the Muslim widow as she faded out of sight.
"I will not leave. I will have my final rest beside my husband and children…" Fatima responded as she tried to not have her tears strain the drawing of her family. Coming over to his foster mother, Anshu hugged her, neither one saying anything in their shared grief over those who were now lost to death.
~X~X~X~X~X~X
Author note: Amari's and Sade's shared suicide attack are a nod to how Gemini Kanon died by taking Rhadamanthys with him in death in the 1986 manga and Hades OVA series