Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ My Shinigami, My Hamburger ❯ No. 0998271 ( Chapter 34 )

Chapter 34

"No. 0998271"

After a time of silence, Loki had begun to understand this was Dabriel’s way of coping with the horrible emotional cocktail of mortification and absolute terror he was facing. A terribly amused smirk lilted across her face, out of sight, as they continued silently down the empty corridors. The hall was impossibly long, stretching for what seemed eternities in every direction, systematically marked off in empty classrooms. Each and every they passed was filled with scattered papers, vacant desks, and thousands of boxes and file cabinets. There was not a guard in sight, nor any sign whatsoever of living activity, Divine or not. It was an abandoned shell of a school, as if the bell had sounded on an eternal summer vacation and the eager students had thrown their papers down immediately, never to return to tidy the clutter. The lights were dimmed, and all the windows drawn and dark, only letting in dusty sunlight in thin outlines. And across the checkered floor, two intruders traveled intent on procuring the information they desired.

The Angel of Death continued down this hall clad tightly in black, her platinum blonde a vibrant splash of color against her back as she moved. It was this that Dabriel fixated on as he forced himself to keep pace despite his awfully short legs—which, Loki had reminded him on more than one occasion, better belonged on a plate with some homemade mashed potatoes. After traveling a ways down the eerily silent halls, Loki turned and glanced back at him.

He looked up at her in return, a squat twelve inches high, and frowned with his eyes.

"What?" he asked impatiently. He knew she could never be up to something good—he worked for her, he knew her far too well for comfort.

"Don’t go chicken on me, now," she purred.

"Okay, enough with the goddamn poultry jokes! Alright?" the little red and white rooster tailing her squawked at her, a pair of peach-tinted goggles barely hanging on his head as he strutted along behind her. If he were capable of blushing beneath his snow white feathers, he would have been doing so furiously. "I realize what the hell I am, okay? What escapes me is just exactly why I must be this humiliating creature."

She tossed her hair with a bone-chilling laugh. "You are quite the observer, I must admit, Dabriel. You don’t even remember why we left Orrin at the gate? Or were you too perplexed by your new form to notice?"

He glared at her over his beak, pinched tight. "I just want to know why the hell am I an uncooked dinner, Loki," he growled.

And again, he had the distinct feeling that there was not an ounce of fear in her voice only because she had not a soul or warm and beating heart for which to fear. "This place," she purred casually in response, sweeping one hand out beside her, gesturing at the eerily silent scene, "is never empty. As you can see, all the workers have gone home, but it’s not without its defense. At this very moment, there are unimaginable numbers of basilisks slithering the halls and pipes above our heads. They sense your footprints through the floors and can smell the blood of an intruder from miles away. And, as you know well, one look would be enough to turn the both of us into nothing more than Divine dust."

"You never told me that!" he clucked at her angrily. "You could have at least warned me before dragging me into a veritable snake-pit! It also doesn’t explain why you choose this mighty form as defense, either!"

"Hopefully I won’t have to explain it to you, either. Keep your fingers crossed, Dabriel," she purred.

"What, and suppose we do meet one? What then? You want me to cluck the forty-five foot snake to death?"

Loki laughed. "Something like that. [1] We’ll worry about our lives when the time comes and for now you’ll just have to trust my judgement." The scoff in Dabriel’s following cluck was not lost on her. "First, the files." With one final glance behind her, down the empty halls they’d traveled, she turned into one of the doors. It was a seemingly completely random choice, but she moved with too much conviction for any of her actions to be a guess.

She threw open the door to Room 49867, revealing a nearly identical mountain of file cabinets, scattered with loose, blank papers and thousands of misplaced pencils, pens, and paperclips. A few old-fashioned desks lay scattered about the metal pillars of files, some nearly scraping the ceiling, stuffed with insane amounts of papers. The windows provided little illumination—they were covered with a plastered layer of still more papers, these stamped a thousand times over with the High Council stamp reading, ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ in unwelcoming letters and offensive red ink. What sickly light did manage to crawl in lit up long, thick columns of dust congesting the entire space. The door and walls were carved ragged with names and numbers, and the blackboard filled with even more in canary yellow chalk.

Loki slipped in silently and immediately strode confidently across the room, leaving Dabriel at the door. He nearly got caught in the door as it swung close and, feathers ruffled, squawked loudly and dashed inside, just escaping getting pinched. It earned him a withering blue gaze as Loki turned and pinned a baneful look at him for making noise.

"Sorry," he clucked at her, frowning internally. "Christ…"

Her voice was icy. It betrayed nothing of her nervousness. "Just keep watch." She turned back around and began tracing her way quietly around the room, running her hands over the carved names and numbers scattered about without a seeming trace of logic. The small, feathered creature wearing a pair of peach-tinted goggles then hopped his way up a stack of boxes to stand on a file cabinet and look out the square window in the door. And with a rooster keeping watch, the Angel of Death continued her search in the dead of night in the most highly guarded building in all the Higher Spirit World.

She ran her hand along the wall, scrutinizing each of the jaggedly carved words and its corresponding file number. They had no rhyme or reason to their placement, written at all conflicting angles to one another, so at times she was reading upside down and backwards to find what she wanted. As she climbed along the edge of the hellish store of paper, she stepped over more piles of miscellaneous papers, stapled, printed, blank, and smiled to herself. There was a reason bureaucracy was so infuriatingly slow and she was currently knee deep in it—she may have laughed, could she feel true humor.

And then she ran her fingers over the first letters of ‘Gekka-o: Confiscation by Arrest; #216’ and her lifeless smile stretched a little further.

"Well, perhaps we will not have to fight for our lives," she purred, brushing her fingertips over the carved letters. She then turned and quickly headed into the jungle of file cabinets and towards #216 as if it were outlined in neon lights.

"Just hurry up," Dabriel told her, bobbing his head as he looked out the window nervously. "At the risk of sounding cliché—I really don’t like it here."

She pulled the latch of the middle drawer and casually stepped aside as it shot open to reveal ten feet of files in this drawer alone, nearly knocking over another cabinet in process. Without missing a beat, she began filing through the massive collection of records, each marking the union by supernatural red ribbon between two beings in plain manila files. The only problem was Gekka-o had chosen to join certain beings so even when such unions were a felonious crime in the High Council’s eyes. And that had landed those hapless files here, in the annals of the High Council’s Confidential Library as evidence for his impending trial.

Carefully running her nails along the tops of each folder, momentarily flicking them open to read the long serial number displayed on each before moving onto the next, she scanned through the files, not breathing a word of sarcasm nor malice as she did so. The silence was nearly as eerie as the soft, distant sounds Dabriel could pick up with his avian ears. They sounded awfully like scales softly sliding through the ceiling and he started nervously shifting his weight back and forth, ruffling his feathers.

She stopped abruptly, and her hand backtracked a few folders, settling on one that seemed to have suffered some time more than the others, its edges slightly crumpled and scuffed around by years of use. Her cold smile returned with a chuckle. She’d found it. Clawing at it once with her long, red nail, she pulled it out from the drawer, receiving no more than a small puff of dust in protest.

"Number 0998271," she read, her lips curling. "Ah, finally. The mortal who cheats Death right beneath its nose. I finally have all your secrets in the palm of my hand."

Her curiosity urged her to open the file and begin pouring over the records of her mysterious target, but cool, even reasoning won out advised her against it. Of course, just a peek couldn’t hurt. She leaned against the file cabinet and casually opened the manila folder, arching an eyebrow to herself.

On the very top lay the dossier on her subject’s soul, his eternal and metaphysical manuscript that would carry with his soul through its various incarnations. Loki paused from reading it for a moment to reach down, paging through assorted other files archiving his past lives, to the collection of glossy photos buried at the bottom of the file. She lifted the papers out of the way and gazed down at the moving picture of blue-eyed mortal, smiling just to the side of the camera, watching someone. The invisible party must have responded with something humorous, for his face brightened in a soft laugh. She wondered to herself the irony of gazing so lovingly upon the face of Death, and even more so how it came to be they had already been Tied before Gekka-O’s hand, as if by some untraceable force.

The photos beneath it were motionless, depicting him in his previous youths, each face slightly different, but the intense blue eyes always constant. Attached to each was a small Polaroid snapshot depicting him at the moment of his death in each of those lives. He lay alone on the floor of a cramped apartment, worn book open and unattended next to a glass of milk on the table beside him, clutching at his chest, young and unfortunate. He lay alone in his bed, cold, bluish feet poking from the bottom of the blanket, old and finally freed from lonely suffering. He lay rotting, halfway out of a foxhole, skewered by a enemy’s sword. His body crumpled against the wall, blood splattered in a beautiful and sick corona of red, shotgun laying crookedly in his lap.

Loki did not smirk at these. She did not show a flicker of true emotion, but her wicked tongue was silent as she flipped through each of these, slowly traveling further and further into the past with each image, she began to wonder how many lonely deaths he could suffer if he had been Tied to Death. Surely, at least once, he should have the Angel of Death beside him, or at least some sign of human company at the time of his demise—but for nearly a thousand years worth of lives, she saw no sign. Just as she began to seriously doubt the actual existence of his Tie, she came across one photograph—a very young, blue-eyed man, hair dark, tousled and slightly wavy, his jaw more deeply set than Heero Yuy’s currently very Asiatic countenance, suggesting stronger European-blood influence, and beneath it, the picture of his death. Loki quite nearly skipped it over—after all, she expected him to die alone in some miserable fashion, and she’d gotten quite tired of seeing it—but she stopped. There was someone with him there.

The photograph was dimly lighted, as if taken within a locked room with only a miserable sliver of light coming through the boarded-up window. But whatever light there was was enough to show her Heero Yuy’s young incarnation lying in a straw bed on the floor, motionless, his face sickly and mouth lined with a crust of blood. But it was the figure that lay over his side, weeping and clutching at his shirt, legs splayed out on the cold stone floor, which truly fascinated her. And that long hair, nearly as long as hers and braided that ran down the back, piqued her curiosity as well. So he did have a Tie—a human one.

Loki quickly abandoned the photo and flipped back to the front page. Her eyes scanned briskly over the words and settled near the bottom. There sat an unassuming box, reading ‘Tie Number (Perennial)’, and beside it, another number.

‘0284738’

The foolish demigod had not lied. Heero Yuy’s soul had already been Tied, indeed, not to the Angel of Death, but to this anonymous mortal. Perhaps he had been mistaken—perhaps, in his old age, his vision had slipped along with his judgement and decision-making, which had landed him in Atrox, and he had simply made a mistake about the Shinigami. There was no reason he couldn’t undo a Tie and create a new one—it wasn’t out of his jurisdiction, by any means. He could have simply forgotten about the new Tie, after dealing with thousands upon thousands upon thousands of souls throughout the ages. But to re-Tie him to a god? And what of the mortal soul he supposedly belonged to?

Something about this did not bode with her suddenly. More questions were being spawned than quieted by this strange mortal and his attachment to Death, and Loki hated more than anything than not to be completely aware of her task at hand.

She hooked the folder beneath her arm and turned back to the cabinet, determined to find the corresponding file she needed, No. 0284738, if only to finally rid herself of this malingering curiosity planted in her. Brushing her fingertips, she began to scroll through the numbers, drawing smaller as the souls to which they corresponded became progressively older. She leaned forward, nearing the very end of the drawer, and snatched up the folder she desired, only to see that it was completely empty, save for the number imprinted on the front.

"Loki?"

She didn’t move for a moment. She gave a true display of surprise, and her lips curled back in astonishment for a split second. But she quickly iced over and threw the drawer close with a frightening slam!

"Loki! Jesus!" Dabriel shrieked, flapping his wings in fright. "You want the whole damn complex to hear us?"

"Someone took it," she growled, throwing the empty and therefore useless folder to the folder.

"What the hell are you talking about?" the rooster asked her, staring at her through his peach-colored goggles as if she were insane. It was an expression he used quite often, actually.

Loki remained there, rigid, for a moment. Then she turned her head and landed a blistering stare on her companion and avian lookout, not pleased in the least. "Someone’s been here before us, Dabriel," she droned flatly, her icy eyes distant as her mind calculated. "There must be something frightfully interesting about this mortal and his rather complicated love life, I’m afraid. I only wish I knew what that something was."

Dabriel hesitated, never hearing so human a word as ‘wish’ uttered from the Angel of Death’s lips. But his shock was quickly cut short, as fear took its place only a moment later. He twisted his head, looking out the tiny square of window, freezing up like a taxidermist’s latest accomplishment. "Do you hear that?" He slowly lifted his head to gaze up at the ceiling. "Loki? Is that—?"

"Come on," she growled at him, cutting him short. "We’re leaving." The Angel of Death stormed back over to the door, all the while ignoring Dabriel’s growing cries of distress as the eerie, sliding sound growing louder, kicking piles of paper out of her way as she went. Without a movement of remorse, she snatched up the rooster, who went squawking and clawing under her arm and brought up the other with a snap of her fingers. An identical white rooster suddenly appeared, looking quite shocked to be there, floating weightlessly in the air. The quick lowering of Loki’s arm sent him plummeting to the floor only a few feet away.

She snatched up Orrin, scooping him underneath the opposite arm, carrying one rooster with each. Dabriel was still thrashing and squawking loudly when a loud, angry noise came barreling through the ceiling, thundering against the metallic walls of the airshafts. She glanced momentarily up at the ceiling, where thousands of thrown pencils and spit wads hung, untouched, and into the air-conditioning grate. She knelt down, clutching the flapping birds tightly to her side, as a massive snake’s head barreled through the grate, sending it flying across the room and clattering around the floor. Its hellish red eyes settled on an odd, chicken-clutching thief, but it wasted no time in letting out a hiss of fury and lunging downwards. A sudden wind threw thousands of loose papers into the air, and the basilisk sunk his fangs into nothing but forms and dossiers as the alarm system began to wail throughout the High Council Building.

[1] The basilisk, a giant serpent capable of killing with just eye contact, can only be killed by the sound of a rooster crowing. Just another testament to how much Harry Potter influences this story.

A/N: Sorry about the delay; hit a rather large patch of writer's block for MSMH, but I think it's well behind me now, and I've got a clear direction to head into, so hopefully chapters should be coming out sooner. This arc will be shorter than I planned on it being, instead of longer and more episodic. Also, regarding the other arcs soon to come, I've decided to condense them. I'll still be covering the same material I planned on, since all of this is just so I can get to the scenes I want at the very end, but it'll be along the lines of four to five arcs, instead of seven or more. Hope you all enjoyed your St. Patty's Day weekend, and for all of you about to go on spring break or already there, have fun! And thanks to all those who read and review, or just enjoy!