Kyuuketsuki Duo: The TV Series Episode 18
Shinma Micunde Flipside

Heero found his love sitting dejectedly on the back porch, staring at the late night, or was it early morning, sky. Duo had implicitly requested some time to himself when they'd gotten home from their latest job, but Heero judged he had had quite enough time to brood alone, and so seated himself silently next to his partner.

Duo sighed, and leaned his weight against Heero's solid mass, tipping his head over to rest upon Heero's shoulder. "Do you think this will ever end, Heero?"

"Hm?" Heero's arm reached out to encircle the youth's waist securely as he lightly rubbed his cheek against the silky crown of Duo's head.

"This... duty. I put them back. More of them come out. It's never going to end, is it?"

"It just seems like that right now, love," he tried to comfort. The past weeks had been rough. Not only had they been exposed to a few of the boy's human acquaintances, but they were still in the process of rounding up and returning those strays they had noted during their hunt for the Shinma cultleader, but had not returned, at the time.

Duo shook his head as best he could without dislodging his head from its resting place. "Not just right now. I know we'll get done with all these. But after that? There will be more. And--" He cut himself off before he could choke on the words, shutting his eyes and taking a few steadying breaths. "I'll never get them back, will I? Gods above and below, why do I even bother asking? They'll never release them. I don't think they'd let them all go even if I did somehow manage to put all the strays away."

Heero turned his head enough to plant a light comforting kiss upon his lover's head. "They may yet release them, Duo. It profits them nothing to hold them."

"Great." Duo laughed bitterly. "So they're just holding them all to piss me off? No, silly me. I and my antics are likely beneath their notice. No doubt they've forgotten all about them. Just stowed them away in a closet somewhere and misplaced the key."

Heero idly wondered what it was that had brought his partner to such a dark mood as his fingers stroked absently, distractingly over Duo's hip. The boy soon answered the unspoken question in his quiet, rambling soliloquy.

"I just realized tonight... I haven't thought about them for a long, long time. They're why I was doing this. Why I ever accepted the guardianship. And I can barely be bothered to remember them once in a while. I'm all they have, though. Even if the Shinma never let them go on to their eternal peace, and all I can do is remember them.... Father Maxwell, Sister Helen, all of them. If even the Shinma have forgotten them, then I'm all that's left. Their only proof of existence. And I don't think I'm doing a very good job with that."

"If they were here, right now, your Father and Sister... and they knew what you were doing, what you had become... how do you think they would be?"

"Well, that's the worst part of it. I'm sure they'd be proud of me. They're... just that sort of people. A priest and a nun, after all. Despite the blood I've spilled, I bet they'd still...." He trailed off, not really wanting to think about it anymore, yet forcing himself to, knowing that they deserved at least that much from him. "They'd probably forgive me."

"Do you need to forgive yourself?"

"No," he whispered in response, his own arm coming up to wrap itself tightly around his partner's waist. "I know I've done all I can. But it's an impossible task. I... I can't imagine how my forebears could have put up with the... status quo." He stopped himself before he could say 'futility'. He was accomplishing something. Maintaining the stalemate, if not making progress. So long as he was saving at least a few people from the strays, his actions were not entirely in vain.

"They lived and they died," Heero shrugged.

"And I get stuck with immortality. Well, I suppose it's not entirely a curse. I don't know how they could have been guardians, and still raised a child, settled down and lived a life. Hell, I can't even hold down a real life for a few months before it all falls apart."

"Just this once, Duo. It was just this one time. And it's okay. I mean, it hasn't fallen apart. They just know, that's all."

"It's just different, that's all," Duo finished, trying to convince himself with the words he knew Heero might say. "A change of pace. I'd think I'd be glad for a change of pace. This sort of thing doesn't happen every decade, after all. Maybe it'll be different in a good way. Gotta keep a positive attitude about these things, right? Just gotta believe..." He shook his head as if to shake off the mood. "Well, can't be all that bad, right? 'Cuz I'm stuck with you, too." He pecked his partner quickly on the cheek. "It's getting early. I should probably get some rest before school, ne?"

They took off to bed, but before settling down, Duo took his old necklace in hand, and stared at it for a long moment in remembrance before kissing it lightly and falling asleep.

*****

::I'm going on over to the library to check something out,:: Duo informed his partner after school the next day.

::Research?::

::Just following up on a hunch.:: He laughed easily at something Quatre said and responded in kind without missing a beat in either conversation. ::Not really mine, though. You know that dog that Dorothy killed? Quatre always got a funny feeling about that dog. He kept spazzing out every time Quatre got near him. Guess the Shinma in him recognized Quatre's power. So this morning, Quatre tells me there's someone else, a librarian, that gives him a similar funny feeling.::

::Another stray?::

::Probably. I trust Quatre's senses.::

::I'll trust them more once he's fully trained and confirmed as being on our side for sure.::

::Be nice, Heero,:: Duo admonished mildly. ::Besides, it's just a feeling. It's not like he's drawing any conclusions from the information. I'm the one doing that, and you do trust me, don't you?::

Heero sighed mentally. ::Of course.:: It's not like Duo had to ask. And it's not like Duo really needed to maneuver him into a corner with it. And it's not that Duo actually needed to hear it. ::I know you trust your friends, Duo. And because I trust you, I'm willing to trust them. But that doesn't mean I'm not going to be cautious anyway.::

::I don't expect you not to be cautious, love.:: He blew his partner a kiss on the otherwinds. ::I do expect you to be you, and you are cautious, therefore I actually expect you to be cautious. I expect it, I accept it, and I love it.::

Duo and his companions arrived at the library, and the guardian extended his senses as well as he could without betraying himself, to either the Shinma or the spiritualist by his side. He glanced sidelong at the small blonde who was hushing him frantically, not wanting to catch the attention of the librarian that set him on edge. So down to earth, his almost comical distaste for the woman. Oh, what joy to have such mundane concerns. He sincerely hoped Quatre would have the opportunity to stay so innocent for as long as possible. Certainly, the power would catch up with him sooner than he would have liked.

He moved into a better position to observe the lady, ignoring Quatre's soft protests, and employed his second sight. The taint in her aura was quiet enough, just a darker shade here, a subtle tinge there. It was quite enough to have corrupted and twisted the spirit beneath. Quatre was sensitive, he'd give him that much. The Shinma presence was likely old for it to have so neatly worked its way into the woman's soul. But a librarian?

Silly boy, he chided himself. He knew better than to judge people by their surfaces. Everyone had a price. Everyone coveted something in the depths of his soul that he thought his own efforts couldn't grant him. That was why the Shinma made the human realm their feeding ground.

Shaking his head, he put away the random book he had pulled out as a cover and went back to his friends, mentally tagging the woman so he could track her down later.

*****

Later that night, Duo was in the library again, and his companion this time was Heero. It was after hours, but that had never stopped them before. Duo didn't think that they'd find anything of note at the librarian's desk, yet it was his standard practice to check out any Shinma's haunts. Unless the stray was currently present, it would likely not have parted with anything valuable by leaving it in the library. There may yet have been information about its human activities, however, or clues as to how it had gained access to the victim.

Duo ran a finger over the surface of the desk and inspected its tip critically, noting that he had not picked up a single speck of dust. Invoking his second sight once again, he saw only a bare smudge of Shinma taint picked up from his swipe at the tabletop.

"So it doesn't feed here," Duo noted, not whispering in the darkness, just because he could. It wasn't often that one could make noise in a library and not be reprimanded. "That's good."

Heero glided up beside him and started opening desk drawers. Mostly there was nothing there but standard librarian equipment. He was about to shut the middle drawer when Duo reached out and stopped him with a hand on his wrist.

"Just a sec," he requested, his eyes unfocusing just a bit as he concentrated on that twinge of feeling he was getting. Something in that drawer was emotionally charged and sending him an impression. He lifted a stack of manila folders, and beneath it, found an old photograph. Without lifting it out of the drawer, they examined it. "She's actually kinda cute," he observed, surprised.

Heero was no judge of such things, and did not comment.

The photograph depicted an undoubtedly younger Ann. Gone were the wire-rimmed spectacles and strict bun that lent credence to her tough librarian image. Instead, her unbound hair fell in shiny brown waves as she smiled cheerfully at the camera, seated closely beside a man that, to Duo's surprise, he recognized. "Hey, isn't that Q's math teacher? Mr. Khushrenada?"

"Hn," was his only reply. The question had been more rhetorical than anything.

"Hn, indeed."

*****

They showed up at her home a short while later. There was little else they could do, even if they disliked it. The woman was the stray's only energy source, so couldn't be caught while hunting, and taking care of it in her home was better than confronting her at her workplace.

They stopped in the living room, with Duo leaking just a bit of his energy to let the stray know they were there. The couple was sleeping in their bedroom at the moment, and he hoped to wake the woman and draw her out. In the meantime, his eyes passed over the odds and ends decorating the place.

There was a bookshelf on one wall, pretty obviously divided into a his and a her side. One part was neatly organized, all the books standing upright and without gap, and impeccably alphabetized by author last name. The other part had the feeling of being much more used, with occasional colored paper tags sticking out of the slouching books organized only by subject.

He was just noticing that the room was boringly bare of photographs when the temperature seemed to drop a few degrees, and he turned. In a doorway stood Ann, wrapped in an old burgundy dressing robe, and yet nevertheless looking in command of the situation. "Leave this place, Guardian," she said, a deep authority ringing in her quiet voice.

"You know I can't do that, Shinma Micunde," he Named it. In the background of his mind, he noted that she even slept with her hair still confined in a restricting braid.

"I won't go back." She changed the angle of her head, and the moonlight through the window glinted off her glasses, obscuring her eyes from view.

Duo abruptly got the feeling that he wasn't talking to the stray alone. The woman was there with it, conscious and awake and responding, and for whatever the reason, she also didn't want to go back, presumably to what she had been before the stray had found her. "You don't belong here. Now release the woman," he answered calmly, hoping there was still enough of Ann left to survive on her own. Either way, the stray would be returned.

"She lends me her body. I give her strength. We both profit from our union."

"She thinks she's profiting from your union," the guardian corrected. "What strength you lend her, she can achieve on her own. She doesn't need you."

"She tried," it hissed. "Oh, she tried, in the beginning. She wanted so badly to give him what he wanted, but she couldn't. No amount of trying could make her fertile for him. So I came to her. I gave her what she needed."

Footsteps sounded in the hall. A moment before Mr. Khushrenada's head came through the door, Heero had laid the groundwork in his mind to prevent this night's events from settling too permanently in his memory. It was always much harder to erase something after the fact. It helped that the teacher didn't know Duo directly, for Duo was in another's class. "What's going on in here?" the man demanded, his voice still roughened by sleep, yet his countenance wide awake.

The three not-quite-humans paid him no heed. "You have given her nothing," Duo responded to the stray's claim. "Strength you may grant, but a true child of her body you may not, if that is what she truly needs."

"Who are you?" Mr. Khushrenada asked, disoriented, but somehow not frightened.

"She needs his love, weak as she is." The woman's face sneered.

"I think she has it. Don't you?" Duo directed the question towards the husband.

"Of course...," he answered, confused. "Of course I love my wife."

"No!" the woman shrieked in response. "You can't love her, Treize. She is worthless to you! She could never give you what you want. But I, I am strong for you. I am so much more than she ever was."

"No," Treize shook his head vehemently in denial. "All I ever wanted was for her to just... be her. I loved her as she was. If she was happy, then so was I."

"She wasn't happy," his 'wife' answered flatly. "She wanted to give you a child, but then she found she couldn't. What was left for her then? She'd given up her potential, given up her career to be with you, to raise a family with you. It was too late for her to go back to that, after the years she wasted."

"But she got a job--"

"Oh yes, and you were quite encouraging in that, weren't you? Eager, even, to toss her out of the house and make her earn her keep, weren't you?"

"I just wanted her to find a life of her own. I just wanted what was best--" The hand outstretched towards his wife was hastily withdrawn as she cut him off.

"Well, she was nothing before me! But then I came, and took away the pain of failure from her, and see where we are now? We're so much stronger now. You told her she had to be strong, after all, didn't you?"

"You're... you're not my wife. You're not the woman I married!" His shout echoed through the small room. "My wife is beautiful and happy, joyous and loving. I lost her years ago. You aren't my wife!"

::Oh dear,:: Duo commented to his partner, shaking his head. ::Looks like we got one with all the delusions and none of the Shinma.::

"All for you, dear," she hissed sweetly at him. "We did it all for you. But I suppose we don't need you anymore. If you're over us, then I guess we can be over you." She lifted her hand at him, and from her fingertips shot harsh crimson grains of power. Duo shielded him from the impact with his power, however, and the little sparks showered harmlessly to the floor around him.

"I think you forgot about me," he chided the stray lightly, before the scenery around them blurred and shifted, and they were transported to the place between places. He smiled mirthlessly at it. "I do so hate fighting indoors."

The stray wasted no more time in attacking the math teacher, and instead concentrated its efforts on eliminating the guardian. With a screech torn from the woman's throat, the stray separated from its human host, for in this realm, its incorporeal form would grant it more power. Ann crumpled to the ground as the smoky gray entity left her and coalesced into a strangely flat sort of creature approximately twice the guardian's height. It moved like a giant worm towards the boy in black and lunged.

Duo leapt out of the way to avoid the assault, the creature's head crashing upon the ground with a splash of shadows. Almost immediately, the blob that made up the head of the stray reformed itself on the other end of its elongated body and renewed its attack.

The guardian lured the worm just a little farther away from Treize, from where he knelt on the ground next to his unconscious wife, before he launched his own counteroffensive. With a natural ease and the speed of thought, he formed a translucent globe filled with a bright red flame in the palm of his hand and flung it at his opponent.

The shadows split around the incoming fireball, forming a hole through which the sphere passed harmlessly. With a tiny frown on his face, Duo threw two more spheres filled with power at it, spread far enough apart that if it tried to split itself again, then the second globe would strike one of the sides anyway, but the worm used a different tactic this time, turning to the side and presenting its thin profile to the guardian, and the two balls went gliding smoothly past it on either side.

The worm charged the guardian once more. Duo quickly communicated a plan to his partner, waited half a moment for Heero to get into the proper orientation, and then threw another set of flames at the stray, the pattern forcing it to once more turn its side to the guardian to dodge. Heero was ready for this, however, and attacked it from a tangential vector, his own energy crashing into the creature and into its broad side.

Another shrill cry rent the air as the creature faltered and fell harshly to the ground. Before it could rise, the dark pair had woven a trap around it, and with another thought, a portal to the Dark opened and swept the stray away.

Treize barely noticed that the fight was done until the fey youth appeared by his side. Nudging the man a little more upright from where he was bent over his wife's body, Duo passed his hands over her, lips parted slightly and the tip of his tongue between his teeth as he concentrated on separating out the last of the Shinma stain from her aura and whisked that away into the Dark as well. There was a time when he simply would have bitten the woman and let his own power overwhelm the taint, but he had decided to stop that, for his own sanity, if nothing else. Too many moral issues kept him from sleeping well at night.

When he was done, his amethyst eyes slowly warming back to violet looked up and met Treize's staring morosely back at him. "What just happened?" the man asked, a little too calmly.

Duo smiled in soft reassurance as the landscape blurred once more, and they were returned to the Khushrenada living room. "Your wife has been sick for a very long time, Mr. Khushrenada."

"Oh." He looked down at Ann again, smoothing back the hair that had fallen out of its tight braid. "Is she... better now?"

"Time will tell." There were too many factors to be able to determine for sure how much of Ann was left, and how much had been irrevocably corrupted.

"My wife died quite a few years ago, you know," Treize murmured, still absently stroking his fingers through the soft, wavy locks. "She was sweetness and light personified, when we were wed. But this... I don't know this person. I've been living with a stranger."

"People change," Duo said gently. "Given time and hardship, people can change, Treize."

"No," he denied fiercely, glaring at the shadowclad boy. "No, this wasn't my wife. It was... it was that thing you just killed! My wife wasn't--! She would never have--"

"Your wife let that thing into her heart. She may have been acting under its influence, but she welcomed it. The Shinma can not feed upon what is not there."

"But... no..."

"This is your wife, Treize. And now we see if you really love her or not. Can you accept that? That this is your wife? That she's lying there, right now, in your arms, breathing and alive?"

A series of aborted answers and half-words spilled thoughtlessly from his lips, but in the end, he nodded wearily, staring down into the face he had once known so well. "Ye-- Yes."

"Then she needs your help, now. And may you find peace together."

Treize looked up to ask more of the mysterious stranger, only to find that the strange boy he had been addressing was no longer there, and that the night was already fading from his memory.

*****

"People will always believe what they want to believe, won't they? Especially when the truth is hard to swallow."

"Except you, Duo. You don't seem to believe anything."

"Except you, love. I believe you. You are my truth." A naughty smirk appeared on his face. "And I do love swallowing you, my love." Heero reached out and tugged lightly on his braid in reprimand. Duo smiled anyway. "Well, can you blame me? With my senses the way they are...." The smile faded. "Na, Heero?"

"I promise, Duo."

His smile returned, but it was softer this time. "We'll just call it my human weakness."

"We all have our weaknesses, Duo. Human, Shinma, and demon alike."

"But we all have our strengths, too, don't we?"

"Aa."

TBC...

golly gee. acceptance of people as they are seems to be the theme of the day.

 

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