Reality Storm: Chapter 9
by K.Huntsman
released 5th February 2006
Trapped. In darkness. His sword swung, cutting off a scream. Water dripped near him, its echo confusing near with far. Electricity cut across his body, causing all his muscles to tense at once. He hung there in pain, unable to see. Before his eyes was a stone wall, and in his mind echoes, endless echoes of others' pain.
He was tired, just so tired of fighting--
The pain came back and he couldn't bite off a whimper.
He'd been left alone, all alone, in the dark, and not even Kourin could light his way.
All was darkness....
Seiji woke with a gasp, biting his lip against the scream of terror that wanted to escape from him.
"Seiji?" Touma asked, the deep blue glow of his virtue lighting the room they shared. "Are you all right?"
Seiji shook his head vehemently rather than try to answer the question. He looked at his hands on top of the blanket. They seemed knotted together, broken.
These hands....
He heard sheets whisper and the soft sound of Touma's feet on the floor before the other boy sat behind him, one arm around Seiji's chest, the other threading through his bangs. Touma's body felt hard against Seiji's back, lithe and muscled, the sinews of his arms capable of drawing a bow whose shots punched through armor.
"Close your eyes, Seiji," Touma whispered into his hair. His fingers drifted down, a light blindfold. "Trust me."
Leaning back against Touma, the back of his neck resting on Touma's shoulder, Seiji obeyed. His breath gradually slowed.
"What was it?" Touma quietly asked.
"I was... trapped again," Seiji managed without breaking his calm. Touma's body was warm against his. He could feel the sweat on his body beginning to dry. Touma was patient, waiting for more. Seiji took another breath and obliged. "There was only darkness. Even Kourin--" He couldn't continue.
"Shh," Touma soothed. "It was a dream. It's over now. You're here. I'm with you. Kourin is with you. Feel it. Feel Kourin."
Blindly, Seiji reached out for his armor, for that other part of his soul. A smooth wash of green greeted him, welcoming, bright, a shining soul.
"Grace," he whispered, feeling the virtue shining through his body, emblazoned in light upon his forehead.
"Wisdom," Touma whispered, welcoming Seiji. They stood linked, the two of them and the two armors, shining through one another.
"Have faith in yourself, Seiji of Kourin," Touma whispered, "and Kourin shall have faith in you."
They fell asleep like that.
Ryou rose slightly before dawn, stretching as he woke. Byakuen wasn't in the room, but Ryou's other roommate was also awake. Wufei greeted him with a nod, rolling out of bed and grabbing his sword in one smooth measure. Ryou reached for a pair of shorts and popped his armor sphere into the pocket after putting them on. Shrugging a t-shirt over his head, he went for the door, shadowed by the silent Chinese boy.
Seiji wasn't waiting for them outside his door.
Blinking at this oddity, Ryou eased the shut door open, then stopped and blinked again at the sight before him.
Touma and Seiji slept together in the same bed. They were cuddled up together, Touma's head on Seiji's chest, Seiji's arm thrown around Touma's shoulders.
It was cute.
Ryou eased the door back shut.
Wufei had a surprised look on his face. "I didn't know they were... like that," he said as they headed down the stairs.
"Like what?" Ryou asked, before buying the clue. "Oh, like THAT. They're not. At least not that I know about. Seiji... has nightmares sometimes."
Wufei raised an eloquent eyebrow.
Ryou sighed and held the screen door open, looking at Wufei. "I want your word this goes no further than you and me, okay?"
Silently, Wufei nodded. Ryou looked away, outside at the waking summer world. "During our war, Seiji, Shin, and Shuu were captured. It was weeks before Touma and I could get close enough to free them. If they have nightmares, it's not without cause. And I can't do anything to make it better for any of them, but I'd give everything I have to make it so it'd never happened." He looked back at Wufei, at those calm dark eyes.
"Shall we practice?" Wufei asked, and Ryou knew his confession would never go beyond the stoic warrior.
Trowa held the loaned history book reverently, turning pages slowly, trying to absorb every word. He knew he'd likely only get the chance to read the work once before returning to his own time, and it wasn't very likely that there he'd ever find another printed copy outside of a museum.
War was his profession. It was all he'd known for as far back as he could remember, the nameless child raised among mercenaries. He'd been training to pilot a mobile suit before he could even read. It was, in some way, all he knew.
Others might not think so. Quatre certainly didn't, seeing his skill with the flute as an indication that there was more to "Trowa Barton" than the silent nameless pilot of Gundam Heavyarms. Kathy, the circus performer, also seemed to think that he was more than just a child of war.
The nameless one knew them to be wrong.
His fascination with history was as old as his realization that the battles he fought in and traveled to were linked to one another in a chain, each springing from the last and giving rise to the next. As he could not follow that chain forward to its result, he followed it backward, attempting to find its origin.
"What'cha reading?" Duo asked, leaning over Trowa's shoulder to take a look.
"History," he answered. "Japanese wars."
"Educational stuff," Duo pronounced, enlightened. He scanned a page, then stood back up. "Me, I'd rather watch things explode."
Trowa watched Duo wander out of the living room. He shook his head in bemusement and returned to his reading.
Shin hummed softly as he cooked, grating daikon with which to season the miso soup. Snatches of Touma's pop music darted through his mind, transformed into nursery songs, changed again into the music of kabuki theatre, notes like sun sparkles on waves of water, always changing, shifting, masking the depths of thought. "We are the virtues of our armors," he replied eventually to the question he'd been asked. "Inasmuch as the concepts may be applied to a human soul. Seiji--his entire life is like a work of art. He's the consummate host and friend. In battle he moves like poetry. He writes in the most beautiful hand, and performing a tea ceremony with him is bliss. His dress sense..." Shin laughed softly. "He puts the rest of us to shame sometimes. He is grace incarnate."
Heero frowned. "Do the armors cause this?"
Shin set the grater down and turned back to the stove, where the soup simmered softly. Reaching for the bowls, he began to ladle the soup into them. "No. We've always been this way. Or at least I have. Trusting--and trusted." He looked at Heero, who seemed so painfully young and vulnerable, arms crossed as he leaned against the wall, hiding his confusion badly behind a frown. "When I first received my armor, it was like the world had snapped into focus. It was all right that I was this way--there was a reason for it, and for my water affinity. I was born to this purpose."
The other teenager's face softened minutely at that, understanding the feeling.
"I don't want to say that it was fated that I be this way," Shin continued softly, arranging the bowls on a tray now, "because I like to believe in free will. But on the other hand, all five of us, born within a year of one another in the same country, matched perfectly to our armors? I suspect the gods of meddling."
"You think there are gods." Heero's voice was flat as he stepped forward to pick up the tray.
"I trust that there are," Shin answered, catching and trying to hold Heero's eyes. Because it was very important, somehow, that Heero believe him in this. That he try to save.... "Just as I trust my friends and my family and try to be worthy of their trust myself. Because, yes, my armor is a perfect match to me, but that doesn't mean I can let things slide. None of us can. We always have to live up to these virtues we've been given." He brushed his fingers against his forehead, where Suiko's virtue always burned within even if it did not show from the outside. "Because if we fail in being what the gods have given us to be, who else will take our place?"
Heero did not let his thoughts show on his face as he carried the tray into the dining room. Persuasion. He'd had people try that before, try to change his beliefs, his very core. He knew himself. He was a blade in the hand, and no words, no matter how pretty they were and how pleasing an illusion pacificism was, would change that. To have Shin try it on him... it was just the latest in a long line of failed attempts. He acknowledged the small part of him that wanted, as always, to believe, to have people save themselves through pacificism, to let magic be real, to let everything have a purpose, a reason. He acknowledged that part of himself and set it aside as he began to set the bowls of soup on the table.
If the world had been different... but it was not.
Resolutely Heero turned aside and went back into the kitchen for the rest of the bowls.
Even though the five of them knew one another on the deepest level and were in and out of one another's minds constantly, they didn't treat one another the same. There were certain unwritten rules: you didn't tease Seiji too much, you didn't ask Ryou for help with homework, and heaven forfend Touma's presence in a kitchen. So it was that when Shin's heart was troubled, he knocked softly on Ryou's door instead of any other, and was admitted. Wufei was elsewhere, but Byakuen stretched out between the two beds and purred encouragingly as Shin poured out his worries, his pain, and found it shared and eased. Rekka's wearer, too, had felt the emptiness that drove all five of their new friends.
"I just don't see what we can do about it, Shin," Ryou said. "It's not like they're letting us help them. And it might be that's what they need, in their world, to keep them alive. There's a certain advantage in desperation."
"Doesn't mean I have to like it," Shin choked. "They all deserve better. Heero deserves better. Have you felt his heart?"
"Yes," Ryou answered. His brilliant blue eyes closed. "Yes, I have." Shin watched as his fingers buried themselves in Byakuen's white fur, scratching. The great cat rumbled in pleasure. "I don't want to know what's been done to him, to any of them, to make them that way. I don't want to believe they're from our world. What happens to make that right?" Tears glittered behind his closed lashes, threatening to break free. "Shin, where--" His voice broke off.
"Where did we go wrong?" Shin finished for him, softly. "I don't know, Ryou."
Duo woke in a panic in the middle of the night. He twisted upsight, staring blindly out the window at the full moon. Something... he needed to be doing something. If only he knew what it was. It had slipped away from him in the moment of waking, the sure knowledge he'd had, dreaming, of how to fix things and return to his own right time. He'd had it... and now it was gone.
His eyes closed in frustration.
Silently, he dressed and slipped out of the room, feeling but not acknowledging the eyes watching him. It suddenly felt like time was running out, and if he only ended up falling back asleep, it wouldn't be the first time he'd napped in his Gundam's cockpit.
Shinigami waited for no one, and the light of a full moon was more than Duo needed to keep working on his partner.
Author's Notes:
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Another chapter after a very long wait. This one is thanks to Senshi no Earth, whose e-mail asking for more prodded me to get off my duff and finish the chapter. As for the opening... is Seiji remembering the past or the future? Because, really, his life sucks like that. Getting captured and tortured in both the TV series and Gaiden...? One begins to suspect that the writers had it in for him.