Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ My Shinigami, My Hamburger ❯ For the Sake of Heaven ( Chapter 25 )

Chapter 25

"For the Sake of Heaven"

Heero sat astride his father’s motorcycle and the engine growled as if it were impatient as well. The secretary stood at the edge of the driveway, as cautious as ever behind her cat-eye glasses. She was silent as Heero slid the helmet over his head. The sky was starting to grow dimmer and the threatening twilight was taking hold. He knew that it was going to be dark long before he’d be able to scour half of Tokyo’s sprawling cityscape and his severe expression reflected that knowledge. He looked up to the nervous blonde Divine standing at the edge of his driveway, told her, "Make sure she comes here," and decisively pulled down the visor. That’s when he revved the engine and it thundered like an animal ready to run. Nadette nearly opened her mouth to ask him one final thing, but the impulse waned as Heero turned and pealed out of his driveway and out into the street at what was most likely an illegal speed.

That just left the apprehensive secretary to stand at the end of the driveway, watching the sun creep toward its nightly resting ground, alone. Nadette realized then that she had no mode of transportation to return to the entrance to Valentine from which she had come other than walking there with her own two legs. She glanced tentatively back to the direction Heero had disappeared in a roar of engines, bit her lip, and slowly forced herself to begin the long trek ahead of her. The sooner she began, the sooner she’d be able to reach Iria, who no doubt was having a very adverse reaction to the whole situation. She had been able to hear their conversation, after all, and disrespect from humans was not something she tolerated well.

But it’d been Nadette who’d been forced to stay late and work on researching the unknown beautiful mortal face Shinigami had seen, while Iria was out painting the town. Her supervisor would be furious, she knew, and she’d be snapping out at nobody, denouncing him for disrespecting him after all the "work" she did to bring him the blessing that was her son. And, as she timidly walked by all the Japanese homes, feeling self-conscious, she was right. For at that very moment, the Goddess of Love was ripping through her office with a ferocity that could have made Ares stop and flinch at the doorway.

While the assault raged, violence inflicted on whatever sat in the way, her imp attendants cowered in the shoeboxes in the closet, her stiletto heels evicted from them.

"That worthless, snot-nosed, ungrateful brat!" came the scream when the lamp was knocked from the table and fell to the floor. The bulb shattered and the light flickered out. And then she kicked it, sending the broken thing to burst against the wall. "I can’t believe it! The nerve, the absolute nerve! Arrogant Mortal, you can burn in Hell for all I care!"

She let loose another aggravated snarl that would have sent a griffin slinking back to their rocky nests, could have turned the Minotaur around whimpering, and descended upon the day planner that sat on the corner of her desk, filled with doodles and random little notes and tore it to shreds upon her red carpet. Listening the animalistic rage coming from their supervisor, who was supposed to be the motherly patron of love and affection, as she tore through the room with more reckless abandon than a bull in a china shop wearing a bathrobe and hair turban, the two imps lifted the lid of the shoebox. Only seconds later they slammed it shut, as an empty martini glass smashed into the closet, becoming tiny pink shards that flew in the air. Her bejeweled makeup cases went next, and her eyeliner and blush managed to slither and crawl away and escape.

Whoever tried to enter the office for the lengthy frenzy of frustrated cursing and destruction that followed either stood timidly at the door, his or her ears assaulted by a colorful and angry tirade against some mortal, or attempted to enter and found themselves with a face full of paperclips or crumpled up memos that had never been read. She simply kept going and going. Centuries of trying to shelter and nurture her homeless son, her innocent refugee, her well-meaning hellion, sorting through unreliable and short-lived caretakers, being bossed around by Hades’ decrees and rules, nursing Shinigami’s wounds when he was bullied in his younger years, dealing with an overemotional confused creature when he accidentally killed, trying to reign in his curious and dangerous inquisitiveness—each and all came out, triggered by the insolent phone call. And, unfortunately for her beloved chic office, it just happened to be the location where those frustrations had been unleashed.

There was a small, stunned crowd huddled around the door to the Goddess of Love’s office when Nadette came breathlessly up the stairs, carrying her high-heels in her hand. At the same time, Iria had taken to bashing something loudly against the wall and the secretary’s eyes were wide as she thought she heard the chair crashing into the window.

"What’s going on?" she gasped, almost stumbling on her long legs in shock. She gaped around at the few creatures gathered there, and they just looked cautiously back at her. The situation spoke for itself, really.

"We don’t know—she just started going berserk all of a sudden!" one piped up.

"She hit me in the eye with her brush," the next added with a lamenting tone, pointing dumbly at his black and blue eye swelling shut. "And she chipped my horn, too."

The one standing beside him was awfully pale and growing fainter as he managed to swallow the lump in his throat and speak up. "I have an appointment in five minutes," he squeaked out, his conviction to that meeting obvious waning as the casualties racked up in the expensively decorated room.

Nadette quickly crossed the reception area, not even noticing that the chairs there, too, had fallen prey to her supervisor’s venting. The door was cracked open, and the flashes of color that were things being tossed from one side of the room to the other were getting quicker and the crashes louder, more frequent. The tall Divine crept by the huddled group, none of which reached much higher than her hip, and tried to peer into the room. But as soon as the door started to open, Iria snapped her head around viciously at the movement, and a supernatural wind whipped out at the offending intruder. Causing the door to slam into the face of whoever was opening it, and that person happened to be her beloved secretary.

"Ooof!" she squeaked, and the creatures huddling near gaped.

The door rattled from the force with which it had struck the unsuspecting blonde’s nose and swung back while she also staggered back, dropping the shoes from her grip to put her hands to her face. "Oh, oh my," she groaned through her fingers, feeling cool, sticky liquid start to trickle down from her dainty powdered nose. In a second, a tiny blue drop fell to the floor and she groaned again, pulling her hands delicately away. There was a growing bloodstain coming down her face. The secretary heard the crowd gasp and draw away as if she was poisonous to the touch.

The ridiculous crashing and thunder of Aphrodite thrashing continued in the room, unaffected by the drama caused just outside the door. Iria was thoroughly working out her frustrations and getting a good workout out of it tearing the room apart by the seams.

"How dare he! How he dare defy me! I swear, it won’t be the last thing I do, but I’ll get that sour-faced little sh—"

Nadette definitely felt the damage done to her dainty face, but she staggered back toward the door in determination. She stood to loose if Shinigami should really perish, too. Who knew what kind of destruction that her supervisor was capable if under the stress of her beloved son’s death at the neglectful hand of an arrogant mortal? She might even turn on her nearest confidantes. Would she hurt her secretary in rage? The answer was vague, and she truly did not want to find out the hard way. She straightened her cat eye glasses and again cautiously opened the door.

The blonde gaped as she stepped in, shoving the door completely open. "Miss Iria!" she cried out, another trickle of blue ichor running down her lip. "What are you doing?"

The Goddess of Love hesitated in her construction of a large pile of broken up furniture and paper to look up to her secretary’s shocked voice, the thumb of her left hand stuck in the air, emanating a little flame. She had been ready to torch the pile, riot-style, and the look she gave the intruder was one of misunderstanding. "What?" she asked, drawing her eyebrows tightly together. "What’s your problem, Nadie?" And she turned right around, sticking her flaming thumb toward the tinder of shredded documents at the base of the pile.

"No, Miss Iria, you mustn’t!"

As soon as the secretary approached her, she whipped her head up, growling like an animal. "Oh, shut your cakehole! I’ll do as I damn well please with this room, and I say it needs a good thrashing! If you’re trying to butt in on my fun, you can trash your own desk."

Nadette flinched at her supervisor’s harsh tone, but she went bravely forward again and gripped the deity by the shoulder when she had turned her back again. "I’m sorry, Miss Iria, I know that you are upset, but you must not waste your time here. Your son—"

"My son? How about the asshole I actually let take care of him!" she snapped back mindlessly, too absorbed in venting to actually consider the words spilling out her mouth. Still dressed in only her bathrobe and her wet, stringy blonde hair, she ripped her shoulder out of the grip and she withdrew. Her rage was surging again and she screamed furiously at the broken furniture heap as if it were the Arrogant Mortal himself.

"You worthless waste of a human body, you couldn’t even take care of a pet rock! If you just paid some attention to Shini and stopped only thinking of yourself, didn’t scowl at everything, he would have done whatever you asked him! You idiotic slimeball, I swear, if I wasn’t under a nonviolent obligation," she threatened vehemently, taking the leg off her chair from the pile and snapping it in two and tossing it carelessly to the floor.

"But, Iria, your son—"

"Oh, yes, my son! The horrible, ugly, intolerable monster. How could I ever have expected you to actually love such a beast!" she snapped, growling and kicking at the pile. "Oh, how irresponsible of me! I forgot. To err is Divine, to be fucking stuck up is human!"

"Miss Iria!" Nadette cried out after, growing cautious at her violent actions. Again, her thumb lit up with a flickering flame like a cigarette lighter. "No, stop, Iria!"

"I can’t believe him, doing that to my son—! The nerve of that prick!"

Again, the secretary lunged at her supervisor, taken prisoner by her fury, and tried to prevent the entire building from going up in flames. Again, she was shaken off by a raging Goddess of Love, who let off another stream of cursing at the insolent mortal who had betrayed her trust by turning out to be probably the most frigid-hearted creature she’d every encountered.

"For what he’s done to Shini, I’d tear him to pieces if I could, I swear—!"

"Miss Iria, you need to go to your son—"

"I mean, of all the cold-hearted shit to pull, breaking Shini’s poor heart—"

"Miss Iria!" Nadette finally cried out in frustration, feeling her words were only echoing back to her off a brick wall.

"How dare he think he could get away with that, hurting my son!"

Slowly, the Goddess of Love’s hands went slack, letting the piece of broken wood clatter into the mass of broken furniture at the center of the whirlwind that had once been her neatly organized office. Her frenzied bitching and screaming waned away to nothing by the time she had turned her head to face her secretary, out of breath and her eyes smeared with tearing makeup. Abruptly, the understanding had hit her, and the shoulder of her extravagant bathrobe slipped slightly down her shoulder, matching the disarray of her damp hair. She gaped at Nadette quietly for a second.

"M-my son," she fumbled out, finally struck with the realization. "He’s…oh, shit. Why didn’t you just say so, Nadie?"

The blonde secretary was gasping for breath from yelling over Iria’s monstrous voice of rage and could only dimly shake her head in response, forced to sit down on the carpet from exhaustion. Running from the mortal world to Valentine and immediately trying to tame her supervisor after doing so had taken its toll on her. So when Iria dashed out of the door past her and thundered down the stairs in worried frenzy, she remained there, catching her breath, relieved but still astonished at what had actually just happened. The nervous group peered in around the door at the scene of destruction and the tall woman sitting on the floor in fatigue.

The sun had crept behind the clouds low to the horizon, and it looked down on the streets of Tokyo with a hazy shine. Streets that bustled and moved in their usual fashion, hummed with activity, overflowed with people. Streets that were painted with the burning of the slowly setting son. Streets where one could find a young Heero Yuy on his father’s motorcycle, thundering and weaving through traffic with little diplomacy and violating many of the city’s laws of decent driving with little care. The only reason he had not yet been flagged down by traffic police with a hefty fine was that he simply roared past anyone who might have been trying to stop him. He navigated the streets without direction, only with an outstanding purpose.

And that just happened to be trying to pinpoint, in the bustling streets at sunset, a young God of Death who was, ironically, dying. Or, at least, he would be if he were not found quickly. His death would mean just short of disaster for Heero Yuy, as well. So it was natural for him to be a little edgy when he pulled up to a stoplight, waiting impatiently behind a squat gray Toyota, and snapped the visor up on his helmet. It was just his luck that Shinigami wouldn’t happen to be sitting on the corner restaurant, and make this frantic search a thousand times less difficult. No, he probably found it much more entertaining to lead him on a wild goose chase, he thought while grinding his teeth.

Youkai growled beneath him, seemingly chomping on the bit. He swung his head back and forth, seeing more and more but finding even less and less confidence in himself that he’d actually be able to pull this stunt off. While he sat at the stoplight, his uncertainties had the time to catch up with him and fill his head with doubt. The odds of finding Shini in the densest city of all the Far East were slim in the first place, and factor in a crippling disease that would every few seconds again throw the poor deity to another distant corner with apparently no rhyme or reason. He was not just looking for a needle in a haystack; he was searching for a needle that flew from hay bale to hay bale.

And he was not happy with it at all. As he remained there, seemingly waiting for an eternity for the light to change, his hands were gripping tighter and tighter around the handlebars. His knuckles were burning white.

It had been half an hour’s worth of hurried searching and he’d been greeted with street upon street, boulevard upon boulevard of divinity-free crowds. And with each passing road, with each building that whirled by without a sobbing young man in odd, black silk robes, the stakes of this situation drove themselves a little tighter into his brain and added to the pressure. He didn’t need to be reminded that should Shini perish, his quality of life would most likely suffer at his highly vengeful mother’s hands. Even in death, he wouldn’t be safe. So it was up to the mortal to preserve the god’s life, and it would have been a simple task had there been anyway to find aforementioned deity. It wasn’t like his fuel tank would remain full forever, either, or that his eyes wouldn’t tire, or that his deadline wouldn’t strike him in the face and he didn’t have the chance of coming across the withering corpse of the Thirteenth Son of Shinigami splayed out in the middle of a street somewhere, a starburst of blue blood surrounding him.

For a second, his head remained empty except for the morbid reverie he’d thought up. He could picture the once young, once grinning and once ruddy face of the Shinigami absolutely pale and still. His hair would be scattered on the ground around his head, soaked with water and blood and dirt. And his wings, shrunken and mangled, would still flutter lightly in the breeze, while the unbelieving faces peered down at him. Heero suddenly shuddered at the violence of this vision, and realized, from the courteous blaring of a horn from behind him, that the light had finally changed to green. He neglected to flip down the visor as he gunned it forward in the lane, passing through the intersection with his resent and his disturbing vision lingering hotly in his brain.

The sun had finally begun to touch the horizon, it’s nightly bedmate. The vibrant, bleeding colors of sunset spread across the streets. Neon signs were warming up for the night, and windows glowed like sheets of pure gold and fire. None of that provided any solace, as Heero was far too busied trying to find a dying god to notice the beauty. Youkai rumbled down the road and came to a stretch bathed in the orange light. Heero squinted at the brightness, and lifted his hand to his face to pull down the visor.

Somewhere, a god must have smiled on them, for Heero caught a fleeting glimpse of fire red coming off his pinky finger and leading off into the distance to the right. The vibrant string caught the light for an instant, flashed, and then disappeared as quickly as it had come. It was a momentary thing, and no commonplace mortal would have even been able to see it. But Heero did, and his eyes moved up to the horizon to where it had led, and slammed on the brakes out of shock.

The car behind him laid on the horn angrily as he made a sudden stop in traffic and swiftly turned his motorcycle to the right, to face the setting sun. He disappeared in a peal of roaring engines, dodging through the oncoming traffic to get through the intersection as fast as his machine would take him. Youkai’s thundering cry went speedily off into the distance and the confounded driver behind Heero glanced out the window to the right, saw the Parisian silhouette of Tokyo Tower, shook his head, and went on.

At that moment, a certain distance away, the Shinigami lay panting on the ground where he had fallen into existence a few moments ago. Throughout the teleportations, his mind and body had been steadily weakening and the very substance that animated him was slipping away into the mortal twilight. He slipped in and out of unconsciousness with each new placement, and he was lying on his back when his hazy, pained eyes opened again. He squinted, blinked, and squinted again. He tried desperately to focus, to be able to see the burning clouds moving overhead, but a second after he’d woken up, the pain set in on him again.

"Mnnnhhh—hurts, Teishu," he grumbled unhappily. "Tell the pain to go and bother someone else; he has had enough for today, he has."

The God of Death lay motionless on the cold blacktop for a few idle, pained minutes before his draining brain began to register that he was somewhere new. And with that knowledge, a little more fear came seeping into him. It was getting cold, he felt dimly, and his head ached and spun. He was hungry again, but he knew that was a more dire kind of emptiness, one that would not be quenched by the sweet human food that had put him in this position in the first place. He groaned again, and blinked blearily around. "Where is he?" he rasped.

His joints felt like they were filled with burning sawdust as he tried weakly to sit up, then staggered and slipped. He struck the ground again, and whined lowly. "Come on," he drawled towards the heavens, "let him sit up. He only wants to sit up. Please." And when he did manage this feat with or without divine intervention—tenderly, carefully, slowly—he crumpled to the side, vomiting.

It was a horrifying experience in his frightened state, to feel warm, sticky liquid rushing out of him like an ocean wave and his body arching up tensely. His aching muscles burned again as he coughed. Darkness oil dripped from around his lips into the greasy, twitching pile he’d tossed up while he sat there, helpless to the new pains and aches taking hold of him. He’d never thrown up before. It was not very pleasant, and it scared him. Shini groaned and sat up, trying to get the sticky substance off his mouth, nothing like the chocolate he’d tasted that morning.

His half-lidded eyes scanned the blurry setting around him and he settled his back against something solid, cold, and metal. He could barely make out the lines of parked cars surrounding him, and the distant hustle and bustle of the roads. There were no voices, no music, no unknown noises. Sometimes he would hear flutter of pigeon wings as they settled to the parking lot blacktop to peck at scraps. Once, a crow cawed from the branches of the tree, but Shini hardly paid notice to any of it. While he sat in the empty parking space, leaning against the bumper of a parked car, the sun continued to set, and the great shadow of the structure towering overhead moved across the mass of cars.

Shini had his hands limply placed over his stomach, heaving with heavy, blocked breathing, and from between his fingers wisps of darkening smoke would curl into the air, as if he were burning from the inside out. His face, now dirty, smudged, flushed, and dripping bits of Darkness, turned slowly toward the sky as he felt the shadow moving over his face. He was, after all, Keeper of the Shadows, and he felt the cool shade move over his face like a breath of fresh air on his fevered skin. A dim, bemused smile crossed his face. And, in the presence of the soothing shade, began to move slowly toward it, partly staggering, partly crawling, and partly stumbling over the ground like a dying animal.

And in reality, that was what he was. The indescribable fear of death in an immortal’s mind was waning as his body went into a certain numbness and all he tried to feel was the cool shelter of shadow. He moved forward with agonizing slowness, stumbling and having to stand himself up again over and over, but the numbed, blissful expression he wore never changed.

A certain time later, when the sun crawled contentedly beneath the rim of the earth and the heavenly glow faded, the parking lot showed another sign of life. The sound of an approaching motorcycle quieted as it slowed and rolled into the lot between the motionless lines of cars. For a moment, the engine rumbled idly, as the rider sat upon it, uncertain where to turn next, and it quickly began to make a line straight for the tower. As it went passed parked car after parked car, it finally came to a lane of empty blacktop that curved around to the doors and the rider slammed on the brakes abruptly. He quickly tore the helmet from his head in order to stare more clearly at the sight before him that sat calmly beneath a planted tree in a grassy median.

He sat between the bumpers of two parked cars, a small patch of divinity beneath the shade of a young tree in a bustling metropolis in a technology-dominated future. Smiling blissfully at him from the distance, the Angel of Death seemed to be secluded in his own little realm, centuries from this city, and it felt like only Heero could truly see him. He remained motionless on his motorcycle and just stared, not sure if the deity lay dead in the shade, smiling at something he could no longer see. And all around him, like a divine aura, hung a thin mist of black.

He opened his mouth to call out, found it fearfully dry, and spoke around the lump in his throat. "Shini?"

Hardly moving at all, the only sign of life was the demonic tail that weakly began to thump against the dirt, covered in a string of flame and the new warmth in his distant violet eyes. As if to say, "Yes, I’m still kicking," he hiccuped once.

The fear passed and Heero quickly jumped off Youkai to rush toward the dying deity. As he came closer, he could see just how badly the disease had waged its war on him. He was pale, bleak, and cloudy-eyed. The thin black stain running down from his lips was evaporating and he hardly moved. As Heero knelt before him, putting a hand cautiously on his shoulder, he did nothing but smile gently at him, soaking in the comfort the shadow and his husband’s presence brought him.

"Shini—" Heero said, almost breathless and uncertain of even what to ask. "H-how are you?"

He smiled back. "He is better, now," he answered with a chuckle. "But he’s not great."

"Yeah, I know," he answered with his own little nervous laugh, "that was a stupid question. You look as bad as you feel, I’ll bet." But the humor had to make room for concern and he quickly put his hand to Shini’s forehead, and it nearly burned his skin. He recoiled, shaking his fingers from the pure heat, and Shini was so distant and numbed that he paid it no attention.

"Teishu, he is very tired and he doesn’t really want to see any more of Tokyo, and Tokyo doesn’t want to see any more of him, alright? So let’s go home," he murmured wearily. His eyes widened slightly and the slivers of fear were growing more visible, no longer hidden by a vacant smile. "You’ll take him home, right?"

"Of course I will," Heero promised him immediately, in turn struck and frightened by the expression on the Shinigami’s face. The skin even beneath his hand was beginning to warm up to a feverish height and his face continued to pale and flush with an eerie blue-violet tone from his blood. Before he could open his mouth again, to sooth him in order to help usher him onto Youkai’s back, Shini leaned forward and pressed his face into Heero’s collarbone, holding onto the clothes at his side with weak fingers.

He groaned, muttered something vaguely in Latin, and sought to curl up in his shadow, against his skin. "Please—Heero? He just wants to go home."

While he clung to his husband, the black mist was thickening in the air around him and his entire body was beginning to feel much like an emptying drainage pipe sucked dry by a punishing summer. His tail, still aflame, thudded weakly on the grass as the strength to do so ebbed away.

The mortal had to resist the urge to put his arms around Shini’s back and carry him to the motorcycle, to get back to the house as quickly as possible, but he forced himself to sit the Angel of Death back up. His head weakly rolled back with the movement, his eyes barely open. His arms were limp and acted almost boneless. Heero gently shook him, urging him, "You stay awake. You hear me, Shini? Don’t fall asleep. You need to take this before you can think about falling asleep on me."

Now very sleepily perturbed, his closing eyes squinted tightly. "Mnnnhhh—why not, Teishu?"

"You need this. Trust me," he answered, taking one arm away to reach into his jacket pocket and pull out the tiny gold vial that had, only a few hours ago, been sitting in a market bazaar in a reality neatly buried beneath the Japanese soil. It had passed through the brutal claw of an oni before coming to rest in Heero Yuy’s pocket. He brought it up to his mouth and pulled out the cork with his teeth. He lifted the Shinigami’s hand from where it lay motionless on the grass and curled his fingers around the vial, telling him to drink it.

When his fingers slackened feebly and he groaned, stubborn to anything but sleep in his husband’s arms, Heero picked it back up and gave the drowsy, divine face a stern look. "You’ll be sleeping on the couch at this rate," he threatened, though the sickly thing was to weak to really respond. "Now, drink this, please. You need it and I didn’t go through all the trouble of finding it, and finding you for it go to waste."

Shini’s face screwed up again. "Fine, fine," he mumbled, lifting his heavy head from Heero’s arm. He licked his dry lips and reached for the little glass container again. He felt it press against his mouth and tasted the familiar sweetness of immortal food, the sickeningly sugary taste that he’d been raised on, partly the reason he had so heavily coveted mortal cuisine, so diverse in every corner of the world. For a second, he resented it, and peeked open a heavy eyelid to see if Heero was looking, wanting to spit it out, but realized that he was the one who’d caused the trouble in the first place and swallowed it obediently.

Once he was done, reacquainted with the substandard taste he’d always known, he sighed and was quick to clamp back onto Heero’s chest. "He has eaten all of his vegetables, Heero," he said firmly, insisting that he should be free to sleep now. His head rested against his collarbone, and he could hear the thudding of the mortal’s impermanent heart beating in his chest. It was a perfect lullaby, as far as he was concerned, for he was nearly asleep as soon as he leaned into him.

"No, no, Shini," Heero told him gently. "Not just yet. Just wait until we get back home, then you can sleep all you want. Just stay awake until then. To be safe."

Shini snorted against his skin. "Silly mortal. Worried about a god dying," Shini whispered, breaking into an exhausted yawn.

"Yeah, well, that’s not as farfetched as you think, Shini," Heero mumbled, more to himself than anything, for the God of Death he cradled to him was defiantly falling asleep against his chest. He decided that he should trust that Shini could tough it out, that he’d be able to crawl back from the edge of destruction safely, but his heart still drummed as he picked him up and carried him carefully back to Youkai. He sat his snoring bundle down on the seat in front of him and swung his legs over, keeping the sleeping deity carefully close to him as he revved the engine again, and slipped on his helmet, concealing the wearied, adrenaline-drained smile on his face.

The sun had already stepped down from the stage and gave the heavens to the moon for the night to do with it what it would.

A/N: Eek! We're getting so close to the end, I can taste the angst in my mouth. -_^. Oh yes, only three or four more chapters left before this arc can be called complete and I'll have room to flex my poor carpal tunnel-ridden fingers and finish more Twelve and Barbarians in Rome. I think you'll guys will be happy to know that I've done a little sorting out, writing down, and I've made a list of priorities to finish so I can keep my writing semi-on schedule and Twelve is listed at the top and I'm determined to finish this sucker! I will...! Eventually! (and oh yeah, I made another list to sort me out, and I realized there's at least seven arcs of MSMH I want to cover. What am I, crazy?) I'm also starting on a entry for another contest, though the idea is still hazy. I'll also be writing the other idea I had for that contest, but didn't quite make it into the works, but that's probably much later in the year. Oh, and I'm extremely flattered at all the reviews I've gotten, and they're all so nice. Readers are more of an inspiration than I can describe. So thanks, and I gotta go.