Yami No Matsuei Fan Fiction / Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Living Shinigami ❯ Welcome Home ( Chapter 8 )

"Living Shinigami"

Chapter Eight

Welcome Home

It didn’t take long to decide that Duo and Wufei would stay the night in Meifu before passing into the imaginary world, but that Kijin would be sent home ahead of them to tell the others.

“I didn’t expect things to look so much like earth,” Wufei commented, looking around as they left the gates marking the edge of the ministry property, which topped a large hill. From there, he could see Sakura lined streets with white painted houses and office buildings. On the other end of what appeared to be a main street, a large manor spread out over impressive yards. “Who lives there?”

Tsuzuki shivered. “The Count. That’s the hall of candles. Each human life is connected to a candle in there. When it goes out, they die.”

“The Count is obsessed with Tsuzuki,” Hisoka explained, smirking. “He insisted on watching Hijiri every now and then when he was younger, and spoiled him rotten every time.”

“We’re lucky that that’s the only thing the pervert did to Hijiri-kun,” the brown haired man insisted, shooting a glare toward the manor.

“Hey, I liked Ojii-san,” Duo protested. “He always gave me all sorts of goodies, and I had a blast exploring that place. Never let me go down to the basement though.”

“Good.”

The Tsuzuki-Kurosaki household wasn’t very far down the hill because of their position in the ministry, according to Hisoka. It was just a little bit bigger than its neighbors, and Wufei could see a cat curled up in the window.

Unlocking the door, Tsuzuki slowly opened it, all the while keeping his eyes on his son. “Welcome home, Hijiri-kun.”

As he passed over the threshold, Duo almost had tears in his eyes. Any evidence of them was quickly wiped away with the heel of a hand, but they remained shiny. The emotion bleeding off of the braided boy, Hisoka was forced to burrow into his husband’s arms as they watched their only child return home after being missing for such a long time. Even Wufei was affected, a giant lump forming in his throat.

Even if the former pilot and future shinigami couldn’t find his way around the ministry building to save his life, he needed no guidance to move through the halls of his childhood home, and didn’t pause until he found himself standing outside a red door. Violet eyes fixed upon the small sign hanging just at eyelevel, its messy hiragana faded with time. ‘Hijiri’s room.’

“Wufei?” he asked quietly. “Would you mind if I did this alone with my parents? I’m not-”

“I’ll wait in the living room,” Wufei said, nodding. “I understand.”

Smiling softly in thanks, Duo began to push the door open as the Chinese pilot turned back to the main room. Coming in, he’d been too focused on his friend to examine the multitude of pictures hanging on the walls.

From what he could tell, which wasn’t much seeing as Tsuzuki and Hisoka never seemed to age in any of the, the photographs were arranged in chronological order, the first dozen or so not even including the younger looking man at all, but rather what he took to be friends and coworkers.

In the first of them, Wufei only recognized Tsuzuki and the oldest looking of the people who he’d seen when he had first woken up in the hospital ward, Konoe, or something of that matter. The clothing clued him in to the age of the photograph, old calendar 1930s Japan, with an even mix of kimono and western business suits. Just how old was Duo’s father? The others began to show up in later portraits, though Wufei noticed a visible gap in time after the man he’d heard being called Tatsumi appeared, with Hisoka at last in one dated 1997, leaving almost none of the original group present.

It was at that point that the pictures began to change, with next to no formal pictures of the assembled group. Vacations, dinners and simple pictures of the two together dominated a large portion of the wall before being superseded by images of what was clearly a wedding. One in particular wasn’t a photo, but a painting. Dressed in traditional kimono, Tsuzuki and Hisoka knelt before a curtain that only showed the faintest outline of whoever sat beyond it.

He passed by the next series of snapshots until one in particular caught his eye. A considerably large group of people gathered together around the couple, Tsuzuki’s arm around the shoulders of his younger husband, and in Hisoka’s arms… Wufei swallowed around the lump once again forming in his throat. Hisoka was holding a sleeping infant, wrapped in a large swath of cloth. Even though its head was cover and its eyes where closed, he knew the exact coloring that the baby had.

One wall seemed to have been reserved entirely for pictures with Duo in them, or, rather, Hijiri. It probably would have been safe for Wufei to bet that every single picture that anyone had ever taken of the young shinigami was there on that wall. Baby pictures, Duo as a toddler, wearing an oversized lab coat that dwarfed the child completely, blowing out candles on a birthday cake, riding on the back of a very peculiar man with long hair and a scar over one eye, flying, climbing one of the Sakura trees, playing with Wakaba’s hair-

Wufei’s brain did a mental rewind as he almost ran back to a picture that he’d passed. No, his brain hadn’t been playing tricks on him. A four-year-old Duo was reaching for his father, who was hovering a full ten feet from the ground, reaching back encouragingly. The child’s sneaker bearing feet were four feet off of the ground, and he wasn’t jumping.

The last two things were a poster and a picture from a newspaper. Wufei recognized the type of poster. He didn’t even need to read it to know that it said ‘Have you seen this child?’ Six-year-old Duo stared out from the paper with a grin, his hair only just past his shoulders and a smudge of dirt on one ear. He recognized the newspaper image too. The same picture had been delivered to his front door the week previous, accompanied by an article about a war orphans’ benefit dinner that they had thrown the night before, with four of the pilots and Lady Une dead center behind a bunch of kids. The last of them to have gotten there for the photo, Duo had jumped in with the kids and had one clinging to each arm as well as a smaller boy sitting on his lap. Their names where clearly stated in the caption below, Duo’s circled.

So that’s how they found him, Wufei thought. Footsteps approaching made him turn around to see Tsuzuki entering the living room.

“Hijiri’s taking a short nap until dinner,” the man explained. “Hisoka’s staying with him until he falls asleep.”

“We had always thought that this was all lost,” Wufei said, his fingers brushing against the class on a picture of Duo waving finger-paint covered hands at the camera, a gigantic blue thumbprint on his nose. “What was he like?”

“Like I wished that I could have been when I was young,” Tsuzuki said, his smile wistful. “Innocent and happy, though he definitely had a mischievous streak that I’m not quite sure of where it came. Maybe Kurikara or Byakko.”

“That part hasn’t changed at least,” Wufei smiled. “Back during the war, he had the habit of hacking into our computers and booby trapping emails to play the most irritating music he could find, loudly and repeatedly. I also had to repaint my gundam three times because of our troublemaker.”

The older man slung an arm over the Preventor’s shoulder. “So, Wufei, tell me about yourself and what my son has been up to for the past fifteen years.”