Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ My Shinigami, My Hamburger ❯ Take Me to Knock-off Alley ( Chapter 22 )

Chapter 22

"Take Me to Knock-Off Alley"

The Shinigami sat pouting to himself uncomfortably on the couch, his neck twisted constantly so that he could look over his shoulder at his quickly diminishing wingspan. Occasionally, you could hear him whine or open his mouth to complain about the unpleasant sensation of his bones withering away to half their size, nearing a fourth. The silky black flight feathers had long fallen to the floor, much too large to be supported by wings that were growing smaller and smaller. There was a trail of them scattered over the floor through the house of one Heero Yuy, caretaker and husband to that Shinigami. Currently, he stood in the living room, giving the Divine secretary also standing there the aggravated stare of her life. Even though he had to stare up to meet her eyes, it was such a withering look of vexation Nadette felt mere inches tall beneath it.

"Now, please," he ground out, "can you tell me just what the hell is going on here?"

Sure, he knew he was being impatient; he could acknowledge the unwelcoming sharpness to his tone, feel the scowl spread across his face. He’d been forced to rush the hiccuping Shinigami out of the restaurant—without paying, mind you—leave work early, and now he was probably looking at a new phase of unemployment for it. As soon as he’d been given a second chance, he’d blown it to hell. His supervisor occasionally displayed a streak of kindness, but he withdrew it as soon as he felt it was trampled on it. And no doubt, Takamura most likely assumed that he’d taken off with the bizarre husband he’d picked up in America and was canoodling around town with him somewhere. No matter how reliable Heero had been in the past, he was just not the man who could readily believe in the inherent goodness of people. His trust was probably sufficiently violated.

All of this was not adding up to a happy mortal at all, and his face reflected it. Nadette stood in the living room almost awkwardly, opening her mouth to inform the unhappy young man what supernatural affliction was upon them. "I came to warn you not to feed Shinigami any mortal food. Iria failed to mention it as a house rule. The Shrinks is a metaphysical disease," she started, a little uncertain of what to tell Heero, lest she rile him more. She wondered more and more why Iria had known of his temper, and overlooked it nonetheless. "Only Shinigami can get it, I think. When they violate the Divine rules and ingest mortal food, it will effect them immediately. Most cannot physically digest mortal food, and only the very oldest are immune to it. Most are wise enough not to touch it."

Behind them, sequestered onto the couch in uneasy silence, the Shinigami let out another hiccup. He clapped his hands over his mouth uselessly, as if it could stop them from coming. As if it changed what he’d done, and what he’d suffered because of it. The mortal and the secretary stood in counsel, and Heero turned his head to glance at him. He hiccuped again, beneath his hands, and his expression was worsening. He was starting to realize that he’d really done something now, and he looked to his arranged husband almost imploringly. Heero hesitated, and offered him an unsure smile of reassurance, not familiar with the gesture. Shini showed his appreciation for it in a hint of a week smile, and Heero turned back when Nadette continued explaining. She was still in the bad habit of wringing her hands.

"The first symptoms is excessive hiccuping, and immediately after that the wings will become nearly a sixteenth of their normal size. In the second stage, he’ll start loosing his balance and he’ll start hiccuping toxic bubbles for an hour or so, until the third stage. Then he’ll be too weak to stand on his own and most likely get a very high fever. Either way, his tail will start catching fire and there’s a chance he’ll loose it." By now, it had even begun to seep into Nadette how much trouble they were in, and she started averting her eyes when Heero looked more and more alarmed with the symptoms she listed. "In the final stages, there will be uncontrollable fainting and teleporting. He may even get the Drains, when all the Darkness will leave him, and he’ll be completely vulnerable, even to mortal diseases like common colds or influenza.

"The Shrinks is normally harmless to Shinigami if cured within a reasonable time, but for younger ones, like Shini—" The blonde hesitated, trying to choose her wording carefully. "—It could take his life within a few days if we don’t do anything about it."

Aforementioned deity groaned unhappily on the couch, but it was cut off by another hiccup. His wings were slowly fading away, becoming smaller and smaller almost in a comic way. It would have been much funnier to Heero if he wasn’t already so stressed out.

His brows furrowed in concentration. "But he’s immortal, isn’t he? How can he die?"

"If a Divine lives a perfectly safe life, then he could live forever, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be destroyed by disease or be killed." Nadette looked over to the Shinigami with concern behind her cat-eye glasses. She’d hardly been acquainted with him. Her supervisor had kept her personal life with her son and her ‘professional’ one, lounging in an office, separated. Both of them played second fiddle to her own self-absorption, anyway. "We need to cure him as soon as possible. There’s no way to tell how fast it’ll progress."

"Yeah," he said. "And besides, Iria will have my head on a stick if she finds out."

"He needs to have a meal of amrita to cure him of the Shrinks. It’s a drink that grants immortality and he must drink it to purge him of his mortal infection," Nadette told him. "Otherwise he can’t recover."

The mortal squinted suspiciously. "But we can’t just go to the store and get that stuff, I’m guessing."

"No, it’s only—"

Shini let out a pitiful whine and dropped his hands from his mouth. "He feels sick, Teishu—hic. He’s never been sick before. He doesn’t like it—hic—at all."

Nadette stiffened up when he let out the very unhappy noise after his words and started blinking rapidly, trying to hold back the abrupt fear he’d been struck with. She apparently was even less acquainted with displaying comfort or affection and almost looked frightened by the sound when Shini gritted his teeth and held back a sob. Heero wondered for a second if that had been him at one time or another, if he’d really been fearful of such an innocent being. But one thing was for sure, and that was his inability to sit back and watch someone cry. It was his weakness if he had ever acknowledged having one. It was why he was in this whole predicament in the first place.

He glanced once again at the secretary and knew she wasn’t going to move. He crouched down at the couch so that he could look the Shinigami in the eye and saw him watering up and doing his best not to be overwhelmed and cry. The end of his tail was clenched tightly in his hand, and the other one was clapped tightly over his mouth. He started hiccuping again, though it seemed this time from trying to stop crying. He watched Heero, eyes reddened.

The mortal felt his face softening up inevitably and he tried his best to look reassuring. "You’ll get better. Don’t worry about it and just get some rest."

Shini sniffled and mewled through his hand, "He’s sorry—he shouldn’t have broken Okasan’s rules, he knew she said not to—hic!"

"No, you probably shouldn’t have," Heero agreed. "But you did. You can’t go back and change that. I’ll make sure you get better, alright? It’s not your fault; it’s just a mistake. You didn’t know that this would happen, right?"

He shook his head enthusiastically behind his hand. Heero smiled a little, and reached up to pull his hand gently away from his face and let it fall into his lap before putting his own comfortingly on the back of his head. The deity sniffled loudly and looked at his arranged husband with blood-shot eyes. It made the violet of his irises even more vibrant.

"Are you going to be okay without me for a while?" He scratched his head a little and Shini nodded, letting his tail free of his own deathgrip. Heero gave him a final smile and stood back up to continue his council with Aphrodite’s secretary.

"Now, what were you saying?"

"There’s no place to get amrita on Earth. You’ll need to take a certain path to a shallow underworld just beneath Tokyo where they can sell it to you," she explained, readjusting her glasses once nervously. "Even then, they probably won’t believe you if you explain to them. No one just hands anything over to a mortal. Amrita is a very potent substance and can be dangerous in careless hands. So you’ll need to take one of Shinigami’s feathers as identification."

Heero waved a hand abruptly. "Hold on, hold on. What do you mean, ‘I’ll have to?’ "

The secretary smiled nervously. "You’re the only one who can—I can’t do it."

"You’re a Divine, aren’t you? Why don’t you go?" he asked. Unfortunately, Nadette was noticing that his temper returned soon after his attention was not focused on the young Shinigami and his impatience was not unaccounted for, either. "I’m not going alone."

"Oh no, no, I couldn’t! It’s far too dangerous for me," she admitted quietly. "I’ve barely been out of Valentine, I wouldn’t know what to do if I were threatened. There’s Demons and Dead Souls down there in that Black Market, things far too powerful for me to handle."

Heero’s blue eyes were taking up their fire again and had it at the ready again, arching an eyebrow at the tall blonde. "But you assume thatI can?" he ground out.

"Wait—" Shini squeaked out, his throat getting sore from the continual hiccuping and afflicted churning of his stomach, no longer feeling as glorious as it once had. "Don’t make Teishu go if he doesn’t want to. He can do it himself, he swears! He’s really fine." The Angel of Death attempted climbing to his feet to illustrate this point, but barely made it to his feet before he was struck with a particularly arresting hiccup, staggered, lost his balance, and swooned back into the cushions. At the same time, his wings gave another sudden shudder and dwindled to a ridiculous size on his back. He groaned as he kept a hand over his mouth, feeling the dull but unpleasant sensation of bones shrinking away.

"I said that I’ll do it," he told Shini immediately, pinning an inflexible look on him. "You just lay down until I get back and don’t try to move." Surprisingly, the deity complied silently and was more than happy to rest his dizzy head on the pillow at the end of the couch and curl up, closing his eyes tightly. He groaned, hiccuped, and his wings twitched a size smaller.

Nadette was mildly surprised, as well, that Heero had changed his mind so abruptly and turned to her. "Stay here with him and make sure he doesn’t try to walk around or anything. Watch him. There’s extra blankets in the guestroom closet if he needs them. He’ll probably figure out a way to get bored, too, so there’s a deck of cards in the kitchen. He’ll know where they are." He sighed to himself, contradicting the firm voice he used a little. The puff of breath teased at the bangs over his forehead and he ran his hand through them once. "Now, tell me where I have to go."

The walls of this particular alley, which was no one in particular or of any special interest, seemed to be constantly coming closer than they had appeared to the moment before, like the bodies of mammoth animals coming close to whisper a secret in their slow rendezvous. From these close skins there had been carved doorways to shops that had never truly seen the sun, never even been opened. There were traffic signs for a nonexistent flow, there were light poles that extended past the canopy of the buildings and almost went on forever, there were industrial lights hung over doorways, soon to glare like alien discs in the night. Running a silent, vigilant rows down the walls were decorative traditional paper lanterns, dull and dimly round in the hazy Tokyo light of that day. They waited. They sulked, anticipating their glow in the coming night. Heero could imagine how subtly sinister they might appear, alone—like they were grinning softly at you as you passed. Laughing because whoever came down this pitiful turn?

But thankfully, it was still far from twilight and the havoc they might reek on his imagination in the night. The sky itself in this cramped place seemed almost to be a close ceiling. It seemed to be following you, even when you turned around and watched it. Heero had twisted his head on more than one occasion, getting an inevitable sensation that the mammoth animals might have closed in behind him. Nadette’s instructions had brought him to a far and away corner of town, littered with old housing developments and a very sleepy neighborhood. Since the construction on the colonies in outer space had begun, the childish rumors that the inhabitants had been whisked away by the angry gods, who were upset that men would leave the beauty of Earth that they had created for them. Any events occurring near the area were swarming with superstitions and often became washed with absurdity. Heero had never paid attention to urban legends in the first place, and he was not going to be converted now by sleeping lanterns.

He moved quickly, passed shops that glowed faintly, but bore no signs of life. Somewhere far down the alley in the green blue wash of the distant lights a bicyclist would sometimes cross into an adjacent alley or a cat would mewl. As he walked toward the end of the alleyway that would seemingly never end, like a horrible hallway in a labyrinth, he was having trouble convincing himself that the walls were not coming together. The pitted blacktop path was seemingly growing narrower and narrower. It did not seem right, and even the sounds of Tokyo bustling were muted and awfully distant in this tight space.

He kept a piece of paper in his hand as he went, scribbled quickly on by the secretary who’d sent him. He hesitated after he’d walked down the alley for much longer than what felt right and consulted the crumpled piece of paper. Squinting at it in the misty grey shadow of his alley, Heero frowned and tried to find this strange address. There were no numbers on the doors, no way to know exactly where to find this "444" [1] that would lead him to a pocket universe that simmered under the busy Tokyo streets. There he should be able to find the divine amrita, which would cure the ailing Son of Shinigami that lay on his couch in his house, clenching his teeth and mumbling unhappily as his wings shrunk.

Heero wondered for a moment how Shini was faring without him. He wondered if his nature already found away around illness and straight back into his old mischief. No, he hadn’t been his usual youthful self. A more probable image came to mind as the mortal walked, one of the Shinigami holding a pillow against his churning stomach and calling out pitifully for his Teishu.

That thought settled heavily in his stomach. The mortality of a god was resting on his shoulders (and if he went, Heero wouldn’t be too far behind himself) and it hinged on being able to find the doorway that led to a Black Market supposedly seething beneath Tokyo. It wasn’t as though he didn’t believe it—he’d be a fool to doubt the existence of the supernatural, when it’d been right in his face and trying to sneak into his bed at times.

Somewhere past a boxed up and abandoned shop, another of the hundred anonymous ones he’d passed, there was a tiny plain door way in the left wall, followed by a clean expanse of three feet of cement. It was undecorated, and even the long line of illuminating lanterns skipped over the squat doorframe. The simple cadet blue paint was hazy and hardly noticeable in the cloudy light. There was a single tack in the center of the door, one without a knob, he noticed. And hanging from that lonely tack was a string, from which in turn hung a square slice of unmarked cardboard. Heero stopped immediately when he noticed the black cat sitting statue-still across the narrow alleyway from this door, sinisterly watching him.

The emotionless green eyes watched him like cold stone. It was perfectly unnerving. Heero momentarily suspected that it was trying to pry into his mind with its stare, when the guardian cat strolled toward the door, placing itself firmly between the mortal and the door. Then it curled up on the ground, laid its chin on its crossed paws, and promptly took a nap. This cat seemed self-assured that it was more than enough security for this unmarked door.

The air seemed to be still and thick with an ominous feeling, amplified by the guardian’s casual assertion of control, and Heero stepped right over that sleeping cat a second later. It bolted up, twisting with a yowl of indignant surprise. It tried to claw his leg as he went passed but Heero ignored it and the cat was forced to get to his feet and chase after the intruder. This had to be the place, the mortal thought to himself, noting how enthusiastic this obviously unearthly creature was to make sure he didn’t find the right doorway. It was pawing sharply at his heel when he raised his hand to push the door, hoping it would open even without a knob.

It did, in a way, and in a way, it didn’t. His hand went straight through the illusion of a door and the change of dimensions was enough to help drag him forward with momentum and he tripped into the doorway.

It became instantly different. There was noise in a dozen assorted languages, many of which where not originally from the mortal world. There was a thick, heated, aromatic air that boiled and crowded overhead, teeming with sounds of foods being cooked in other worldly skillets. Loud, ogre-like voices advertised loudly, booming in foreign tongues and impossible animals squawked and bellowed. Heero lifted his head from the dirt floor, spit the stuff off his lips, and pushed himself off the ground. Then he could see the difference, as well as hear and smell it as it threatened to overwhelm his senses. He sat on the mounded rim of an immense bazaar, completely contained beneath Tokyo. There were shops narrowly forced together that stretched in irregular lines for much further than his eye could see. The air was dusty gold, and from the mortal-looking stands creatures and other mythical things poked their heads, bargaining loudly, exchanging gold, and slapping things like caged harpies and otherworldly robes into customers’ hands. Bronze birds flittered overhead, blood red cobras slithered underfoot, and from every possible corner another voice was extolling sales.

Heero felt his jaw slacken a little. He was just beginning to grasp just how much went unnoticed by the mortal eye and how unusual it was that anyone like himself would ever see it, let alone know it was there. It helped him realize the fact that Shini wasn’t normal at all even more. In turn, that amplified the fact that he was in serious need and Heero got to his feet, brushing the dirt off his knees.

Abruptly there was a thick shadow hanging over his head and a hefty set of nostrils heaving breath through his hair. He saw the large clawed foot out of the corner of his eye, before he straightened up slowly, coming face to face with an ugly grey oni, the Japanese villainous ogre of myth. His crusty, surly eyes settled on him sharply, tapping that aforementioned bulky foot on the dirt so that it puffed into the air impatiently. As Heero straightened out fully, he frowned up at the looming creature, which had a good three or four feet on him. He was a massive, unattractive thing and he looked very displeased with him.

"What’re you doing here? Get out, human!" He commanded in broken mortal tongue. "No place for your kind!"

Surprisingly, the massive creature did not immediately force him out, as he had expected him to do so, toss him easily out on to the cement with the muscles on his arm that were as wide as Heero himself. He simply sidled over to put itself between the intruding mortal and the expanse of shops below them in the dusty golden valley that hid beneath the city. Heero’s face was set into its usual outward show—a tiny, disgruntled frown that promised it could and would turn sour with provocation. So far, he’d found it.

"No place! Get out now!" came the forceful grunt. And along with it, a large, heavy hand turning him around by his shoulder as if he were no more than a wooden doll that’d fallen out of place. "Get, I said!"

Heero sidestepped the oni’s hand and stood his ground firmly. "I just need one thing, then I’ll leave. I promise."

The monster lifted the ugly hand and made an ugly face at it, disbelieving. Then he growled and slapped his hand back down on the breakable mortal shoulder. "No, out now. You can’t be here, so move it." When the young man repeated the motion again, easily finding away out of the oafish grip, the brute let out a frustrated bark and whirled heavily to glare down at Heero, standing firmly off to the side. The face was ugly, yes—but it did not scare Heero Yuy anymore. He’d seen Death, and it’d been a young, frightened, impressionable child. There was not a lot left to fear anymore once you’d unmasked that.

"Listen, I don’t want to be here. I’ll be more than happy to leave," he said matter-of-factly, "but not until I’ve gotten what I’ve come to get."

The oni growled and swung an arm at him, jabbing at the door. "Get going now," he threatened in broken English, "Or I will break heads. Yours will be first!"

"No, I’m not done. Tell me where I can find some amrita and I’ll be glad to leave this whole place alone. It smells, anyway," he asserted, with blue eyes that did not give an inch in the face of dumb brute strength and mulishness.

"No mortals! That’s the rule," he thundered back, again swinging his great arm. He would just not learn that Heero was quick enough to simply move away before he could be struck down and he grew more and more frustrated when he continued to do so, starting a little dance between oni and mortal. He swung again and again. "Stay still, you lowly cur! And get out!" To Heero’s back was the dirt walls that encased the entire bazaar, which never took notice to the guard and the intruding mortal at the entrance, and the brute’s fist bashed into it as he missed the young man’s head by little. Dust and pebbles rained down onto the dirt floor, scattered with hoof, claw, and footprints of all shapes and sizes.

"I have proof. I was ordered to come here. Normally I’d never set foot in a place like this," Heero droned impatiently, still circling as the ogre refused to let him by in peace. Now, the creature had little idea anymore whether he was truly getting mad at the fact he wanted to intrude, or that he kept insulting the market he’d worked for his entire existence.

"Ha!" he scoffed loudly. "You do not!"

Heero calmly reached into his back pocket and pulled out one of the Shinigami’s jet-black flight feathers, pristinely unruffled and gleaming eerily. He knew that the ugly oni would be able to sense its Divine source, perhaps even recognize its Deathly origin, and he was right. The brute hesitated to lift his heavy arm to strike again and squinted with his ugly eyes at what the mortal held. A moment later, they flared a little with realization, but his face hardened with disbelief after that.

"So what? You cannot be here, no matter what you have stolen from a god!" he accused throatily, feeling victorious in thinking he’d outwitted the mortal he could not strike. "Get out, or I will make you!"

"I didn’t steal anything," Heero growled back. He was beginning to think mortals couldn’t get a scrap of respect from anyone these days. "And no, I won’t leave until I’ve gotten what I came for."

The ugly thing took a final, double-fisted swing at the smaller mortal and for a moment, Heero could not find his feet and it was enough to be caught by the large, balled hands. He still clutched the feather in his hand when he flinched and flung his hands up to catch the blow, slipping out of the path of one of the ogre’s hands and wrapping his hands around his thick wrist. He could judge from the weight and momentum that he’d be unable to hold him back and get a hard hit to the head, but abruptly, the oni jerked his heavy arm away as fast he could. Heero lifted his head and opened an eye cautiously, then both, and watched the brute shake his hand a little. Mystified, the mortal frowned, while his fingertips felt unnaturally cold and almost empty.

The creature rubbed his sore hand a little, then begrudgingly grunted and relented. "You say you have proof?" As he rubbed his skin, Heero could see wisps of black coming off it. It smelled suspiciously like Darkness, but how would he have—?

The mortal shook it off and presented the feather again, still perfectly unruffled.

"Fine. He will get you what you want. Just don’t move. You are not to be here at all. I will take the blame, you understand? Do not move and do not touch."

Heero had to smirk a little at the way he was being warned to behave. "Don’t worry. I’m not my husband," he told the oni cryptically before he told the beast he needed a bottle of amrita and the thing lumbered off dumbly, but reliably, into the pulse of the bazaar, moving amongst similar unearthly creatures. Heero watched him lumber to the nearest cluster of stands and move lumbering between them, his ugly eyes squinting at the items. He stood near a collection of bottles, so he didn’t worry about that for a moment, and instead lifted his hands up and curled his fingers as they warmed up again. He suddenly had to think of ice cream and the night rendezvous on the roof of his house. He stood and waited, and wondered if maybe he had—?

No, he told himself. Just worry about getting home before there’s more trouble. And lucky him, he would be more right than he knew about that, while the Shinigami lay sprawled out on his couch, sniffling and hiccuping, wings shrinking all the while.

[1] ‘4’ in Japanese also is the word for death, so it’s the equivalent of the Western unlucky 13. It’s also like the 666 of the devil. Other Japanese superstitions; always hide your thumb when a funeral car passes, never lie down immediately after a meal or you’ll be turned into swine, and don’t clip your nails in bed or you’ll be bitten by a snake or you won’t be with your parents when they die or something like that. Kind of harsh punishment for a minor offense, don’t you think?

A/N: Well, this one not so quick, eh? But the plot's buliding up, so that's a good thing, right? The chapter title is a play on the Knockturn Alley from Rowling's Harry Potter books, which basically sparked the whole idea. See, I'm not too dramatic to be tongue-in-cheek sometimes. Anyway, I feel really bad leaving poor little Shini alone, because I know that he's definitely not going to be safe and sound, but you'll have to wait 'till I finish the next chapter to find out. And you know what? I've gypped Heero in all of my other AU fics and he's never gotten any special abilities, so I've given him a little taste of it. Well, I'd better shudyap before I go on and say something to spoil it. Getting closer to the end of the first arc!