Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ My Shinigami, My Hamburger ❯ Expiration Date ( Chapter 31 )

Chapter 31

"Expiration Date"

The Thirteenth Son of Shinigami sat on a black motorcycle in the heart of Tokyo’s hustle and bustle, listening to an organ riff and jazzy guitar pour from the near by record shop and letting his bare toes tap playfully to the beat. Youkai remained parked just outside a flashy thrift shop littered in punk lime green decorations while cars grumbled by in the narrow street. The sidewalks were a living, teeming creature of hundreds of teenagers, dressed in similar punk rock and Gackt apparel as the strolled by, swinging colorful shopping bags on their arms. In the empty seat where his husband would have sat instead lay his helmet, gleaming in the sun between Shini’s knees. He had disappeared into one of the nearest shops with a wallet full of money and a determination to match the gift he’d been given.

The God of Death remained there happily while the sun rose over Tokyo, soaking the streets in brightening morning light. Little was he aware at that time of one particular pair of eyes watching him so strong was the feeling of contented love. It had washed over him some time ago, and only now that Heero had accepted him into his life could he let himself drown pleasantly within it, growing wistful as he stared at the bustling street and a smile splitting his face. He could not feel the sensation of eyes carefully sizing him up, nor pay attention to the conspicuous blonde in the masses of dark hair and almond eyes who stood across the street. Had he simply turned his head, he might have seen her cautiously adjust her dark sunglasses, peering at him as if to make sure he was real, and then quickly compose herself and stroll off at a determined pace with a cellphone in hand, disappearing into the crowd.

Shinigami continued humming happily, oblivious to this. After a moment, still wearing a lovestruck, dreamy grin, he casually looked around, pulled by an invisible, hardly noticeable instinct, and blinked at the sidewalk where the blonde had stood, only moments ago.

The guitar riff was peaking, and slowly dying down as the song came to an end over the speakers, giving way to the din of the streets, of hundreds of mortal voices meshing together. He suddenly noticed an odd sound in that clamor—one that sang to the tune of ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?’—and sat straight up. The Shinigami quickly scrambled to grab the cell phone his mother had given Heero from where it sat in the pocket of the jacket he wore. It was his husband’s of course, for that’s all he really cared to wear nowadays, not the piles of designer clothes his mother had lopped upon him when he had moved into his husband’s house.

He finally wrestled the petite pink cellphone out of the pocket and flipped it open to see his mother’s name displayed in gold text, with a tiny cupid shooting an arrow into the final letter with a wink. Shini quickly pressed the ‘answer’ button and lifted it to his ear. "Moshi-moshi, Okasan," he greeted eagerly.

But it was not his mother’s voice that greeted him in return, at least not immediately. Instead a low, gravelly voice croaked at him, "Hold on a minute," and in the background he could hear the familiar temperamental rhythm of his mother’s words, screaming, "No, you idiot, I said put it on speakerphone! Can’t you see that I’m busy here? For Hell’s sake, the red button!"

The imp, who had probably been wrangled into the unlucky duty of tending to Aphrodite’s will that day, mumbled shyly back to his boss, "Colorblind, ma’am."

"Only one of the many reasons I dislike you today. You’d better hope I won’t remember your name so that I can’t fire you, literally," she growled back, finally spending the energy to tear away from her dress fitting to hit the button herself, then toss her nose indignantly at the humble imp and order him out of the room before she lost her patience. Then, as if someone had found a switch in her and thrown it, she cooed back at her son, who was sheepishly grinning on the other end of the line. "Hi, Shini, sweetie. How are you doing?"

He smiled mischievously, choosing to respond with, "Good," instead of, "Unbelievable," or some other glowing adjective he could think of. Mortal words could not quite express the ecstasy he felt.

"That’s great to hear, honey," she purred back. "Everything’s going fine?"

Shini nodded, his grin undiluted. "Uh-huh. Perfect."

"Did you like the clothes I picked out for you? And what about your husband—is he treating you nice?" At this point, Shini’s blissful smile had waned. Something was distinctly amiss. His mother never referred to Heero with any name less caustic than Arrogant Mortal, let alone admit his status as Shini’s lawful (and decent) husband willingly. The poor bewildered Angel of Death had to glance once up at the sky to make sure it wasn’t falling or raining fire and brimstone without his notice.

"Yes." He hoped she didn’t pick up the surprise or wariness in his tone.

"Oh, and how did the gift delivery go? Did he like it?"

Shinigami hesitated, biting his lip, looking rather perplexed. "Okasan, what do you want?" he asked cautiously, eyes darting back and forth as he tried to figure just what that sinister ulterior motive was. "You never talk like that about Heero."

The sound of her falsely innocent laughter came through the speaker a moment later, only serving to further confirm that suspicion growing within him, that she was attending to some higher agenda through this conversation. Though he loved his mother dearly, he was not so naïve anymore to put something of that nature past her. "Want something?" she repeated, injecting incredulity into her feigning sweet voice. "Why, Shini, sweetheart, darling, I—"

"Talk about me how?"

The Shinigami jolted at the sound of his husband’s voice, nearly dropping the tiny cellphone as he started to see that the blue-eyed Japanese man was standing just a foot away, running his gaze carefully up and down him and seeming to be careful to keep his purchase hidden carefully behind his back. Around his neck, on a skull-decorated black strap hung his polished camera, the sun glinting off the silver trim and catching in the iridescent flash bulb. The corner of his mouth smartly twitched into a smirk as Shinigami blinked at him in surprise, and then threw his own hand behind his back.

"Hey, Heero," he greeted, grinning overly wide. "Got my present already?"

The mortal lifted an eyebrow. "Maybe I do. What do you have?"

"Nothing."

Heero didn’t cease smirking at him as he simply reached over and tilted the nearest mirror on Youkai and tilted his head with a sly expression as he read the screen to himself. "Your mom called, huh? What did she want?" He smartly raised an eyebrow. "Did I do something wrong already?"

"No, no, no," Shini was quick to answer, finally pulling his hand out from behind his back and staring at it oddly. "She wasn’t angry. But I don’t know what she wanted."

"And you didn’t care, either," his husband finished for him. "Because you were too excited about my gift to pay attention to your mother."

His crafty smirk grew as he reached up and placed a pair of glossy black sunglasses on Shinigami’s nose, surprising him even further. Shini flinched, taken off guard by the movement and blinked at the sudden darkness of his vision. When he reached up and pulled them down, so he could peer over the rims, Heero was smiling smugly at him, the second gift sitting waiting in the palm of his hand. It was an opened little black velvet case, a simple gold ring in the center shining up at Shini.

A quiet gasp leapt happily out of his mouth before he could clap a hand over it, grinning madly behind it, the glossy black sunglasses slipping to the tip of his nose. Before he gave the mortal a moment to say anything more than, "I know we’re already married, but I wanted to give this to you, too. It was my mother’s," he had stood up and kissed him excitedly, pushing the sunglasses up on his face as their lips met. And while Heero and the Thirteenth Son of Shinigami stood together at the edge of the busy street, they were pleasantly oblivious to the fact they were still being watched, as a sleek white dog sat beneath a nearby sakura tree, eyeing the pair with the same intense, simmering stare of the blonde woman who had disappeared.

"Orrin, move over to the left," came the crackling command over the line, and obediently the white dog bowed his head, craning his neck in the ordered direction, ears flicking forward attentively. His commander gave him an affirmative when he had provided the appropriate angle, and the iris of his one pumpkin-colored eye, as translucent and clear as water, focused in closer on the pair. Not far away, the signal was being received on a pair of crooked bunny-ear antennae. The television set crackled once, twice, then the image finally stabilized and provided the two sitting intently in front of the pristine with a crystal-clear black and white image of one Heero Yuy standing beside his father’s motorcycle, smiling at his companion with an expression no less than sublime.

"He hardly looks suicidal. What is that?"

"That’s the target, Loki."

"I was referring to the thing next to him, Dabriel."

The blonde woman wasted no time in rolling her eyes at the man sitting in the chair, squinting at the screen, and reaching over his shoulder to jab a finger directly on the image of the young man sitting on the motorcycle, smiling back up at their target as he thumbed a precious ring on his finger. The screen gave a dull, hollow tink—the two had begun talking happily to one another, their lips moving silently in black and white. "This thing. You tell me, Dabriel."

The being called Dabriel, which spoke with the voice of a raspy young man, was a white dog identical to that which currently stalked the two young men, a pair of pilot goggles, the lenses a fluorescent peach over his eyes, which squinted at the screen. "I’d be damned if I knew, and frankly, my dear, I don’t give a d—" he answered her, the woman who had only moments ago been navigating the streets of Tokyo, earning himself a prompt and impatient tap to the head, setting his goggles askew. He yapped unhappily and turned to glare at her. "That happens to be a very popular line of mine!"

Loki leveled a pair of blue eyes colder than ice at him, contrasted by her soft, pale face and long, feminine platinum blonde hair.

"Let’s get to some actual work, Dabriel," she told him, drawling just the right, frightening syllables. "Don’t forget the reason you’re here in the first place. It’s obviously not for your mastery of technology. Look closer. That’s no human being." She let her finger fall from the black and white display; the longhaired figure was whispering something in his companion’s ear as they got situated on the motorcycle again.

Dabriel again looked skeptically at the image. "I see nothing inhuman about him."

"Then you’ve lost your touch and you should be ashamed. You should be able to spot one of your own kind," she told him, leaning over his shoulder and flicking a switch on the side of the pristine white television set, labeled "Auras" and smirked as Dabriel sat up in shock. The entire screen had filled up with bristling black energy, engulfing the image of a pair of lovers on the Tokyo streets in darkness. His canine eyes filled with shock, both ears pricked and goggles hanging half off his face.

"No way," he said. "That’s an Angel of Death."

He reached up, white paw resting on the screen, and saw that the other lover had not completely disappeared, instead preserved in his original image. He glowed lightly white against the thick black cloud of Darkness, seemingly unaffected by the massive amount of Deathly energy so close to him. If anything, he looked exhilarated to be embraced by Death so tenderly.

Loki’s nearly pitiless blue eyes did not flicker. "A fallen Angel of Death."

"A descendant of Shinigami? No, it can’t be. He can’t be."

The white dog with human eyes adjusted the peach goggles onto his face, examining the image even closer still. Even as the former patron angel of writers—currently unemployed and working as a reluctant temporary—Dabriel found himself forcibly lost for words at the sight. Tokyo had been completely obscured, every bright soul hidden by this sheet of jet-black energy. It stunned him. Inside the white van, parked, invisible to mortal eyes, in the middle of Shibuya crossing, all of the many television sets and radio dials began to hum with dark electricity and the stacks of books with torn parchment paper began to flutter, revealing infinite lists of names, birthdays, and scheduled death days. He could taste it on the air now, in his borrowed body’s acute nose. The energy from the mere energy was so powerful it was sending the aroma of death through the supernatural wires and filling the van with the scent of lilacs and dirt.

"But it is. You and I can both know it," Loki said, with a chilling tone to her voice. But lingering beneath the smell was cinnamon, a distinctly mortal death-bouquet—a personal scent that would be given off at death as a sign of passing.

"Shinigami don’t look like that," he disagreed. "I could never forget a horrific face like that. He looks perfectly mortal to me—at first glance, that is."

The white Angel of Death had returned with one of those thick books, flipping through the dusty pages to a page delegated solely to the son of Odin and Yumi Yuy, his handsome, grimacing face etched in the corner at his current, youthful appearance. "Yes, that is the curiosity. More curious still is why it is there with our target, who was scheduled to die today."

"And just exactly how was that to pass, Loki, seeing how Death seems rather indisposed to let go of him at the moment?"

"Suicide. He was scheduled to slit his wrists in the bathroom at exactly 11:36 this morning. Alone."

She closed the book and it obediently flew back to its previous location, turning to face the back doors of the white van, ducking beneath some silver and crystalline wires running along the ceiling. "Call Orrin back, Dabriel. No need to make rash decisions now about his termination. This Shinigami is the most interesting thing I’ve seen in a long time, and I think we may upset him if we kill his mortal so soon."

"But how in the seventh ring of Hell is a fallen Angel here on earth with a mortal?" Dabriel asked, speaking through his canine disguise.

Loki leveled an even look at him. "I’m not even going to waste the sarcasm on that inquiry," she told him. "Would I be puzzled if I knew the answer?"

"Rhetorical question," he responded. "I’m beginning to understand why you were designated as Angel of Death, Loki. Your sense of humor becomes your vocation."

She simply looked straight through his divine soul with those eyes, giving a cobra’s smile.

"Death is no laughing matter, Dabriel. Now, if you would please make contact with Gekka-o. I have a few things to inquire of him before we can finish our assignment."

"Who?"

"Minor demigod, spends his time making contracts between lovers. He's under indictment for accusations of fostering forbidden relations between mortal and Divines, and currently occupying a cell in Atrox. If he had a hand in this, he’ll give us information in exchange for my official pardon."

"Right."

The other angel nodded and his dog shape soon disappeared, taking that of a more conventional angelic image, his wings unfolding over the back of the cramped chair and the peach goggles buried in his dirty-blonde curls.

The back doors of the white van swung open in the bright Tokyo sunlight. Not a single mortal turned to look, for none of them could see the angelic relic sitting in the middle of the world’s most crowded intersection, nor the white dog that came trotting obediently towards it and leapt through the opened doors. Loki glanced warily out into that world for a moment before closing the door. It abruptly disappeared and not a mortal batted an eye.

She sat silently down at the television set while her assistant took the wheel, watching the mortal and the fallen Angel as they sat arrived at a small, unoccupied park and sat on the grass. Even with the "Aura" filter flicked off, she could feel the energy humming through the wires, coursing through him. He smiled at the mortal with a powerful inner energy shining through, but it was not like the Shinigami she had encountered before. And as they sat there, the mortal explaining with a slightly shy expression as he talked about his mother and father, she could smell the cinnamon, too. The curiosity was killing her and her unsettling smile was growing.