Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ My Shinigami, My Hamburger ❯ Administrative Red Ribbons ( Chapter 32 )

Chapter 32

"Administrative Red Ribbons"

"Dorothy Catalonia?"

Loki turned her head sweetly at the name, holding her dark sunglasses in her hand and flashing the border guard, who was no more solid than the empty lunar vacuum surrounding them but still turned her passport over in his ghostly green hands, squinting at her picture a bit. She worked hard to look unperturbed, flashing him an innocent blue-eyed look pass Dabriel and out the driver’s side window. Her driver, Clint Eastwood according to his identification, smiled nervously while the guard hesitated and read off her name. Apparently he'd been behind some rather famous mortal screenplays during his prime, and adopted one of the actors’ names. Not like these lunar-dwellers had ever seen a mortal broadcast.

Loki could tell Dabriel was about to break into a frantic sweat if they lingered at the border anymore. He hated identification checks; being discovered as Angels of Death, something that was very bad for tourism, often meant disposing of those clever or unfortunate enough to stumble upon their identities. Actually, she would be doing any of the messy work necessary while he stood back delicately holding his mouth and conferring idealistic criticisms on her methods.

The guard smiled at her. "You know, I think I knew a Catalonia back when I lived dirt-side. Not related to Gregory Catalonia, are you?"

She cracked an eerie mime of a cheery smile as she answered. She didn’t miss a beat. "I think he left me an old car in his will."

He laughed, then handed back the three passports, leaning coolly out of his solid tollbooth. The pin-up posters plastered to the walls around him shown cleanly through his hazy green body. "You guys enjoy your trip, now, alright?"

"Alright. We will, thanks," Loki said, waving femininely at him as Dabriel put the white van into drive, more eager than anything to be free of this charade, and the slight brightening of those ghost eyes as her chest bounced slightly with the movement was not lost on her. Pathetic things, mortals. Even in death, they cannot learn.

Dabriel nodded his taciturn goodbye, then quickly made his way out of the constriction of the booth and out onto the open lunar highway. He shuddered, and sneered, imitating the booth guard and his Southern drawl. "Y’all come back now, you hear? Luckily, we refrained from addressing him with long words, otherwise we would have been trapped for much longer than that. It must have taken him at least fifteen minutes to glance at the damn things."

Loki scoffed as she shuffled through the forged passports, flipping the covers open to examine the false names and return them to their fraudulent owners.

"They hire simpletons like him solely to irritate ‘intellectuals’ like you. And if you despise them so, why did you spend so much time meddling in their affairs? It’s not polite to project your frustrations onto innocents so, Dabriel. You’re only resentful you were suspended from Muse Inc. and you no longer can flaunt your dubious writing skills through a dumbstruck mortal vessel," she said, casually reading the top passport, then twisting to look into the back. "Orrin, come get it."

From the back crawled an identical copy of the angel in the driver’s seat, his doppelganger and assistant, with the same curled blonde hair and classical white wings, also hidden from view by a heavy sweater, similar to the cloak the Shinigami wore. Blinking his one clear, pumpkin-tinted eye and one warm brown one, he took the passport between his teeth and crawled back into the dog bed where he had laid a moment before without saying a word. Loki smiled at him and then turned that expression on Dabriel, who returned the look not so sweetly.

"You’re awfully cruel in the mouth, you know," he said.

She turned to look out the windshield, unflappable and smirking smugly. "I’m glad we’re getting to know one another so well, Dabriel."

She leaned down to put on the dark sunglasses, then flipped her long platinum blonde hair over her shoulder, and listened to Dabriel make a sound of frustration as he turned to pay attention to the lunar highway. As the green mileage sign passed, he read to himself, "Atrox Prison: 15" and cursed the day he’d ever agreed to this horrific apprenticeship in the first place.

The pristine white van sat patiently at the security gate outside of Atrox Prison. High fences, all of which was rampant with curled barbed wire, rimmed its bleak white, impenetrable walls. Even the occasional poisonous serpent would wind lazily around a coil in the fence then disappear into the thick mesh of sharp barbs and metal. Dabriel sat in the driver’s seat, eyeing them warily from a distance, until the guard uneventfully returned the identification and let them pass. He nodded and managed to keep his nervous nature to himself. Loki gave him a sly, feminine wave before they drove through the opening gates and into the parking lot.

Once parked, Loki turned to reach behind the seat and pat Orrin on the head, curled up in his Angel shape in the tiny dog bed, the passport still in his teeth. "Watch the van, Orrin. We’ll be back momentarily," she reassured him, scratching him once behind the ear.

Dabriel shivered to himself, still clutching the steering wheel. "Stop it. That creeps me out."

"What, that I show ‘affection?’ " she purred at him slyly, with no sign of the aforementioned sentiment in her expression.

"Yes, that and he looks like me," he groaned, staring back into her eyes and wondering if there was anything behind those icy depths besides a calculating, Deadly mind.

"Let’s just get going," she said, and without another moment’s hesitation, teleported herself, so that she stood impatiently outside of the car, her eyes obscured by her dark sunglasses and a wide brimmed summer hat. Her slim black dress fluttered slightly in the lunar vacuum, no doubt a favorite trick of hers, and smirked at him, as if to say, "My, how slow we’re becoming." He frowned, slid out of the door, locked it, and followed her as she walked serenely through the prison doors, smiling genteelly at the guards as they opened it for her.

Loki—or Dorothy Catalonia, rather, as her false identification read—retained that unflappable, pristine smile, holding a black phone receiver patiently to her ear as their soon-to-be informant approach them on the other side of the glass. The sliding bars parted and let the demigod through, his hands bound by a pair of golden handcuffs and dressed in an amusing caricature of 1920’s prison garb, the black and white bars ranging greatly in size from head to foot in a seemingly completely erratic pattern. Gekka-O looked at them through a shock of disheveled gray and white hair. Obviously taken unaware by this visit, he glanced once at the guard before cautiously walking towards them, a beautiful blonde pair, one wearing a nervous and unhappy grimace and the other smiling icily at him. He sat down, his long and aging face looking pale beneath the bright lights, and regarded them for a moment before picking up a receiver himself.

Loki wasted no time. "Hello, sir," she practically purred, using all her feminine charms to immediately ensnare the targets attention. She did not want to dance around him; she wanted her answers. "We have a few questions to ask of you."

"And just exactly who are you two? You want a marriage? I’m kind of busy."

She smiled. It even unnerved Dabriel, who was sitting next to her, thumbing his receiver at his neck, not sure of what he’d be allowed to contribute to the conversation.

"Just someone who can pardon you from your crime. That is, if you should choose so."

Not suprisingly, skepticism crossed his face. He knew an offer when he heard one, and something low and sinister in her feminine voice and carefully articulated words told him she could and would deliver it, but not without exactly what she desired—immediately. "And if I do choose so? What do you want in return?"

"Only a precious few moments of your time, my good sir."

"Alright," he hummed, glancing over to Dabriel for a moment, then back into her icy blue eyes. "Sounds fair enough to me. What do you want to hear?"

"You Tied a mortal to a fallen Angel of Death," she said, pinning him with her stare, like she was surreptitiously trying to drain his soul with it. When he flinched slightly and looked flushed, not wanting anyone to hear this particular accusation, she smiled even more sinisterly. "And you’ve done it more than once. That’s why you’re here. They aware that you’ve been illegally Tying mortals and gods for years. And you know just as well as I that such offenses will earn you a good time in prison."

Gekka-O looked briefly to Dabriel, still unsure as to why he was there, for some kind of reassurance about this unnerving woman and her intention, but he could only offer him a nervous look in return. "Yes? And?" he asked cautiously.

"Tell me what you know of Heero Yuy."

"He’s a mortal."

"Well spotted," she purred, hiding her contempt, then continued briskly. "You Tied him to a Shinigami."

"No, I didn’t," he answered, looking rather matter-of-fact on this.

If Loki was taken even the slightest off-guard by this statement, she did not show an ounce of it—no, thought Dabriel, that would be too human an emotion for her. "Explain." Her tone was unforgiving.

"The adoptive mother of that Shinigami—the Thirteenth—came to me a few weeks ago, before I had been arrested, and asked me to arrange an illegal marriage between her son and a mortal, Heero Yuy. I agreed, and I drafted her a copy of the official document binding them, but I never Tied them."

"The fact remains that they are Tied, though," she rebutted icily.

"They are, but I didn’t do it." He continued when she tightened her gaze ever so slightly, visibly dissecting each of his words remorselessly as they left his mouth in the search for truth. "I never joined Heero Yuy and the Thirteenth Son of Shinigami because they were already Tied."

Dabriel turned and looked at Loki, clearly surprised, mouth opening as if to ask her how that was possible, but her icy blue eyes were trained on the demigod opposite them, looking ready and willing to tear him apart for her answer.

"So to whom did you Tie Heero Yuy’s soul in the first place, at conception?" she pressed, managing to sound no less concerned than if they were chatting about weather, but her razor-sharp mind was moving quickly behind those eyes, calculating.

"I can’t remember that far back. He’s a very old soul. You’d have to look through my files to find that out, but they’ve all been confiscated by the High Council. There’s no way I could get to them now." Somehow he felt satisfied to not be able to supply her with the answer she so ravenously craved, but she did not budge an inch of emotion in his favor. She calmly smiled at him.

"No matter. Good evening, sir." One final smile, sweet and smooth, signaled the end of the conversation and she calmly hung up the phone receiver, never breaking eye contact. It sent a cold bolt of ice through him as he thought he saw a corner of her mouth twitch in a cruel smirk. He suddenly realized he’d been fooled and as she watched that realization cross his face, growing pale, she curled her lips back, smiling fully.

Gekka-O stammered a shocked word into the receiver, but only Dabriel could hear it. "Now, wait—wait! What about my pardon?" he asked, swallowing his nervousness to speak in a somewhat calm tone. But he could not disguise the terrible feeling he’d been the ignorant party in this unenforceable contract. "When will I get out of here?"

The white Angel of Death just nodded politely in thanks, feigning ignorance to his pleas, and femininely clasped her hands over the hat in her lap, standing up and waving goodbye to him. He’d suddenly lost all his Divine confidence and his skin shone whiter than his hair beneath the bright lights. She turned calmly on her heels and began walking out of the room, terribly smug with herself. Gekka-O’s eyes flashed to Dabriel, who was still sitting across the glass, still holding the receiver to the side of his face. He looked questioningly at him, and Dabriel quickly slammed the receiver down and ran quickly after Loki.

"No! I want my end of the deal!" he cried out after them, pounding a fist on the table as the door shut behind them. "Damn it, who are you? I want my pardon!"

As Dabriel finally caught up with Loki, nearing the end of the main hallway and the door leading to the outside, he looked at her curiously. "So," he managed out, catching his breath from jogging after her, "what does that mean? Already Tied to the Shinigami? That’s impossible! Wouldn’t it mean that he was—"

"I know very well what it means, Dabriel." She calmly reached into thin air and materialized her favorite pair of dark sunglasses and put them on as they neared the glass doors. "I believe we have an appointment at the High Council Building."

Dabriel suddenly felt his stomach toss, hesitating. Loki took no care and the doors opened before her as she set her hat on her head, tucking her hair behind her ears. "Goddamn it, Loki," he swore, "I’m not breaking into the High Council Building!"

A/N: Hmm, not as long of an update as I'd hoped, but been so busy lately my head's still yet to quit spinning completely. Sorry 'bout the delay with this chapter. The next one should be much easier to write because it'll be Heero and Shini. Not going to say anymore--you'll just have to keep reading to find out what happens!