Notes: Thanks to everyone for feedback, and to Arith for being my most wonderful muse, and helping me with this chapter, which didn't come very easily to me at all. ^_^;; If you see anything weird in here, it's my fault. If you see anything really really good, Arith probably helped or orchestrated most of it. *glomp*
PS: The Vocabulary Word Of The Day, "insidious", appears in this fic by demand of Arith, who thinks it's nifty.
"It's not like you to say sorry
I was waitin' on a different story
this time I'm mistaken
For handin' you a heart worth breakin'..."
--- Nickelback, How You Remind Me
"Back off, I'll take you on
Headstrong, I'll take on anyone
I know that you are wrong
and this is not where you belong..."
--- Trapt, Headstrong
"Waiting, for your modern messiah
to take away all the hatred
That darkens the light in your eyes
still awaiting night..."
--- Disturbed, Liberate
Requiem for the Sinners Part 10
Come Hither, Lazarus
The sun was warm on his face, and the smell of grass was sweet.
It didn't smell anything like the labs. The food was as tasteless as cardboard, and he ate it anyway because those were his orders and there wasn't anything else. The labs were as blindingly sterile and white as untouched arctic snow, and just as cold. Slick, hard surfaces were everywhere, nothing soft or giving.
They smelled like sickness, metal, rubbing alcohol... nothing at all.
The labs smelled like death.
The grass and the sun were life. They were the first real life he had seen and felt and smelled in fifteen long, hard years. The scratching itch of the grass against the backs of his arms, the feel of the blades pressing into his skin, leaving light indentations. It was the fragrance of earth, decay, warm and rich and so opposite of everything he had been raised in.
His objectives were accomplished. By nightfall, a base full of soldiers would be dead, broken bodies buried beneath tons of indifferent rubble and twisted metal. Heero laughed for the first time in fifteen years, a deep, throaty young boy's laugh.
No one was around to hear him. If they heard... if they knew... the thing he was laughing about would make their blood freeze.
Are you lost?
Her voice was like the hollow chime of bells, chilling and clear and high, and she giggled down at him, deep blue eyes gazing knowingly at him from under a broad straw hat. They were bright and strange. He couldn't help but smile at the sound...
...but she was dead.
That laughter was bitter poison.
Hey, mister, are you lost??
He tried to turn away, turn away from that treacherously endearing voice, the venomous words that had bound him in the barbed wire of his terrible fate. He knew what would happen. He tried to speak the words to make it different.
Change the past.
But nothing would come but the same truth he would repeat over and over for as long as he could remember the day.
...I've been lost since the day I was born.
She was dead.
Oh, poor thing. I'm not lost, I'm walking Mary...
...
Here, this is for you.
A little hand reached out to him, wilted flower outstretched, putrefying flesh barely attached to the bones of the fingers and hand, bones as fragile as a bird's wing. He could see them shining through the rotted skin like dull yellow sticks.
He took it from her, feeling the flesh slide off her fingers, merging with his.
Before, he had been amazed at that simple unthinking human contact, one unattached to pain or training or tests, the swift warmth of her skin against his. It was there and gone again, like a snowflake making contact with his skin.
But that was before.
Now there was nothing but the harsh chill of death.
He repeated the litany by rote.
He knew it by heart.
For me?
Everything changed. She was broken, freshly broken. Blood was slicked across her shattered face like warpaint. She was still dead. Reminding him it was his fault. Her dress was filthy, ripped and singed from the blast. One bright blue eye was gone, jarred from the socket by a terrible impact. The other stared down at him. But he couldn't look away. A charred teddy bear was tucked under one broken arm. Bones jutted from torn skin, gouged meat a stark contrast against pale flesh.
He wasn't afraid. Yet he couldn't forget.
He was the one who caused it.
...
Something appeared from the ash-covered snow and began to move towards him, something small...
It was the dog.
It came forward, staggering in an unnatural lurch until it was standing at her feet, slatted ribs sticking out beneath gore-matted fur, which clung in lumps to decaying skin. The absence of lips made the small creature's snarl a pure stretching of rotting flesh against bone, peeling away in the process.
Mission accomplished...
No.
"Breach of civilian parameters. Extensive loss of life."
He turned back to the girl, but it wasn't the girl anymore.
It was Duo. The reflection from the snow made his violet eyes the color of ashes. The Deathscythe pilot's pupils were two different sizes. Heero tried to look away, but couldn't. The fear came softly with a swift chill, sinking into his bones like bloodied snow. Duo's hair was soaked with blood; the right side of his head was a ruin. Blood was bright on his pale lips.
But still Shinigami smiled, holding one mangled hand out to him.
::Give me your knife...Heero...::
::Give me your knife...::
::Give me...::
::..the knife...::
::...I'll cut it down the middle.::
Nn... no...
"Civilian sacrifices are inevitable."
Relena was lying in the snow. The knife was sticking up out of the back of her blue dress, blood soaking in an uneven circle into the silk, beading on the sequins. The note was wrapped clumsily around the hilt. Her head was turned to the side, glazed blue eyes staring in disbelief. Snowflakes were catching in her eyelashes.
::Give me the knife, Heero.::
I...didn't mean to hurt anyone...
"This is war!"
Noooo!!
The world exploded in screams and fire.
~*~
"No!!"
Heero sat straight up on the hard, narrow bunk, eyes wide in the darkness, his heart thumping in his chest like a wild animal beating itself to death on the bars of a cage. Somewhere in the prison, a low siren was echoing through the corridors.
The lights had gone out, leaving only the emergency lights bathing the halls and the cell in an eerie red glow.
There were a few muffled explosions, and then a screeching noise as the door at the end of the hall raised open.
His face covered with a fine sheen of cold sweat, Heero pushed himself up against the cold flat wall, eyes gleaming feverishly in the darkness. He panted silently through his mouth, unable to see around the corner where his enemy lay in ambush. There was a distinctive clatter as an empty magazine hit the floor, and a sharp snick as another was inserted into a gun and the gun was cocked.
A dark form moved to the front of the cell bars, only a dim figure in the insidious shadows.
The voice that spoke was an uncertain whisper.
"Heero?"
The wounded Wing pilot pressed himself into the darkness, as far from Duo as he could get. He didn't speak.
"Pally, you awake?" Duo asked, his voice soft.
::Pally...::
When he spoke, Heero's voice was a harsh whisper.
"Come to finish me off?"
Even in the shadows, Heero could see Duo recoil. Duo turned his head a little, the red emergency lights catching in his hair, and Heero remembered the bloody mass Duo's head had been in his dream... brains slicking his neck, pieces of crushed skull flecked against his black habit...
Heero's stomach gave a slow lurch. Bile rose in the back of his throat. He closed his eyes, swallowing hard.
"Only if you want me to..." Duo whispered. He pulled a stolen keycard out of his pocket, sliding it into the lock. The light flashed a quick friendly green in the dark, and the door swung open.
"C'mon, Heero," Duo said, looking down at him. Heero was covered with bloodied bandages, his face marred with bruises. His dark blue eyes shone feverishly out of his pale face, looking black in the darkness.
Duo held out his hand to his partner.
::Give me your knife... Heero...::
Heero flinched back, eyes wild. "No."
Duo's voice was a harsh, desperate hiss in the dark as he misinterpreted the action. "Fine. You can sit here and rot in prison while the people you're trying to protect spit on you before your execution, or you can come with me and fight for something that actually fucking matters. Either get your ass up and come with me or I'll drag you out. I don't have all fuckin' night."
Heero was silent again, just looking back at him. Duo was swearing... breathing. He was alive. Not dead.
So why did it still feel that way?
Heero couldn't see Duo's face as clearly in the darkness, but the edgy tension in the other man's body was obvious.
"You have to the count of ten, buddy. One, two, ten."
Before Heero could even think to react, Duo had grabbed him by the arm, flinging it around his neck to steady him, dragging him off the bunk. The Wing pilot let out a low moan, partly because his wounded side brushed roughly against Duo, and partly because he expected Duo's neck to be slathered with blood and brains, wet against his arm.
"Sorry, buddy, sorry," Duo whispered, helping him keep his feet.
Heero closed his eyes as Duo dragged him along.
::Sorry, Heero...::
*thud*
Quatre fell forward, a cloud of blood in his wake.
*thud*
He could feel the full weight of Mariemeia's body in his arms
*thud*
As the last bullet hit him he had only one thought.
Don't call me buddy...
And he faded into darkness
TBC...
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