Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ My Shinigami, My Hamburger ❯ Cupido ( Chapter 36 )

Chapter 36

"Cupido"

Shini did his best not to act abnormally, but it was becoming harder than he expected. He feigned a tired sigh, smacking his lips and readjusting his head on his makeshift pillow. It was harder than he thought to avoid his husband’s wary eyes and made him feel anxious and deceitful. It was no something that came naturally to him—after all, he had raised hell just a few days ago, raging against all odds just so he could be with his beloved mortal, threatening his mother, losing his mind, and now he was curled up on top of the ceiling fan, trying to fake a believable snore as he passed by below.

Shini squinted one eye open and glanced downward. Heero had his nose in a book as he strolled through the hallway, seeming to barely notice anything around him. Nothing about him suggested he suspected anything at all. He made little more fuss than a surprised face when they had collided in the kitchen. He hadn’t seen or noticed a thing as far as Shini knew, and if he did, he was not showing it.

He lifted his head, opening both eyes, and peered further downward, trying to glance at the words his husband was reading. It was that movement that stirred up a lick of dust into the air. The God of Death, who was currently in a half-solid state to avoid simply breaking the fan and tumbling to the floor, felt something twitch inside of his nose, scrunched it up and let out a silent snort as he choked back a sneeze. It revolted inside his throat and sinus, burning, and filled him with an odd, plugged feeling.

He held his breath as Heero lifted his head the slightest amount at the sound. He tore his eyes away from the book an instant later with a cautious silence. Walls were eyed, hallway checked, and silence carefully observed for a moment before he shrugged to himself and reinvested himself in the book. Without another thought, he had wandered back into the living room and managed to flop down on the couch with nose thoroughly lodged in the book.

And then the sneeze ripped through the block, the Shinigami solidified, and crashed to the floor.

Heero started at the sound, and quickly shut the book. "Shini?"

The Angel of Death sat up, spitting out dust and flapping his miniature-sized wings in distress, with his husband quickly at his side, helping him up. His expression was torn halfway between concern and laughter as he reached up and picked out a fragment of the broken fan out of his hair. "What the hell were you doing up there, might I ask?" Heero said. "And what are you doing down here now?"

"Accident," he mumbled, flushing purple from embarrassment and the blue blood that ran in his veins.

He purposely avoided giving an explanation of why he’d been up there in the first place, hoping that it would slip past his husband. Of course, it didn’t, but Heero only looked at him with a cocked eyebrow, and proceeded to dust off his hair. He’d been doing that more often than usual, for Shinigami had plenty of odd, Hell-born habits, since his mother had frozen Time without his knowledge. Shini’s instinct told him that Heero possessed abilities beyond average mortals, and that included sensing changes in the fabric around him and holding Darkness—if he didn’t, he would see Shini as no more than a thick, dark shadow, if at all.

So he probably knew something had happened, but not what, and gave Shini the benefit of the doubt. "Well, be more careful next time, huh?" he said, still smiling gently. He was far more relieved he hadn’t hurt himself than concerned about his broken fan and brushed a stray bang from his eyes. "If you want to take a nap, we have a bed, you know."

Shini leaned into the touch and smiled back. "I’m sorry about breaking your—uh, thing-a-ma-jig."

"Don’t worry about it. I never use it, anyway." Heero paused, making a funny expression. "Where did you learn a word like that?"

"I’ve had other caretakers who spoke English, Teishu," he purred, now melting into the mortal’s hand as it cradled the side of his face. Especially fascinated by the electric-blue tone of immortal blood, Heero brushed his thumb across his cheekbones where he flushed slightly violet. "But that was so long ago. Let’s talk about something else, ne?"

"What about?" Heero asked, purposely lowering his voice and moving to unite more of their bodies so that Shinigami would whimper and lean further into him.

"Dunno," he answered, curling the corner of his mouth back as he sought to finish the embrace properly. But as soon as their lips touched, the phone shouted. A cold wind blew across Heero’s face and he found himself standing alone in the middle of the hallway, blinking dumbly at the red light illuminated on the phone. It rang once more before Shini reappeared, falling into reality a few startled feet away, heart throbbing and eyes wide. Heero immediately went to help him up, but the Angel of Death determinedly got to his feet, looking rather embarrassed to have startled so. On the third ring, the mortal turned, crossed the kitchen, and picked up, interrupting the fourth, shrill cry.

"Hello?"

Taking a moment to meticulously comb down his hair and pick out another crumbly piece of the ceiling, Shini did not notice Heero’s face shift into confusion until he called out again, seeming to receive no answer.

"Hello?" he asked again, looking only mildly displeased, and hung up with a shrug. "Huh." Then, without so much as another moment’s consideration, turned around and looked at Shini, already smiling as he prepared to neatly continue their tangent. This would have posed no trouble to his husband under normal circumstances, but suddenly trouble manifested itself. Images of moments spent outside Time blinked in front of the Angel of Death, knotting a ball of guilt and worry that felt as heavy as sin in the bottom of his stomach. The tiny box sitting unobtrusively in his pocket now more closely resembled a burning hot colter against his thigh.

"Who was that?" Shini asked. Even as Heero approached him, he began to feel more and more the sting of guilt, knowing full well that his mother made no empty threats. Knowing full well that everything would not continue to go as it so wonderfully had as his intuition told him. And his intuition was also very sure that there had been someone on the other end of the line.

"Nobody, I guess," Heero answered him, quickly brushing the idea aside and closing the gap. Shini melted forward to his touch and smiled into his mouth at it, but soon that nagging guilt had even traveled upward into his mouth, turning the sensation of his husband’s lips into a hot punch of crime. He pulled away at the thought and brought out a strange expression on Heero’s face.

"What’s wrong?" he asked, this time lessening the benefit of the doubt and giving Shini a sincerely worried look. There was a touch of prodding curiosity behind it, which frightened him more. He knew something was happening.

Or perhaps that was a touch of paranoia. The Shinigami couldn’t tell.

So he smiled sheepishly and shook his head, taking Heero by the elbows and nudging him close again. "Sorry—had a little hiccup, is all," he said, hoping dearly he would accept the explanation. At the same time, the guilt swelled again at the thought of deceiving Heero, no matter how mildly.

Heero’s worried look didn’t evaporate. "Are you feeling well?" The back of his hand went to Shini’s forehead, pushing his bangs out of the way.

Shini whined and shied his head away. "Yes, yes, I feel fine. I’m not sick." However, Heero was not buying into this excuse.

"Why don’t you take a nap in a real bed, instead of snoozing on the ceiling fan? You look like you could use it," he suggested.

Shini scrunched up his nose, as if in offense. "I do not," he shot back.

Heero smiled gently, as if to ease the motherhen-ness of what he was about to say next—which it didn’t. "You should. You might still be affected by the Shrinks. It wasn’t that long ago, you know, and you might be vulnerable to other things—"

"But I can’t get it again, and I don’t wanna." It was only after he’d stomped his foot that he realized he was probably well on his way to losing the argument and grimaced.

Heero tilted his head thoughtfully at him and reached in and gave him another kiss. "I’m not going to force you, Shin. I’d never treat you like that," he muttered against the corner of his mouth. "That disease scared the hell out of me, that’s all." He stepped away, still holding his book in one hand, still smiling. He started drifting back towards the living room and a couch in the sunlight with his name on it, lifting the book in invitation. "I’m reading this book about Death Gods I checked out three years ago and never returned. I think you’d like it. It says in here the Shinigami has black skin like a snake." He laughed.

Shini hesitated, but followed him, without noticing the guilty poison waiting for him at the pit of his stomach at some later point in time. At this point, he was more than content to follow his mortal husband into the living room. "They do," he said, walking after. "Just not me."

Less than an hour later, Shini had fallen asleep and lapsed into that nap he had so vehemently argued against. It was not in the bed, though, as Heero had suggested, but on Heero himself, lying on his chest beneath the book. Heero found himself hearing fewer and fewer remarks about the true nature of hellions and correcting the spellings of demon names as he read on and saw an evenly rising chest.

He watched Shini sleep for a moment, then absently brushed the long tail of hair that curled out from underneath the Angel of Death’s neck and up in a winding trail over his chest. He rested the book on Shini’s shoulder as he reached up to grab the tip of that tail of hair. Shini curled up around the weight of the book in his sleep. He twitched it in front of his nose, looked down, and smiled. "I think we have to find a new way to keep your hair, Shin," he murmured, then slung one arm around him and continued reading just past his husband’s ear.

Shini didn’t wake throughout the process of his husband trying to rouse him or cooking dinner and eating on the couch beside his near comatose form, watching an old subtitled black and white American movie. Nor did he wake when Heero left him momentarily, letting his head fall to the cushions and current of chestnut hair run down and pool on the floor. He returned, camera slung around his neck and a smug and playful slung across his face that Shini wouldn’t see. Even when the iridescent bulb whirred to life and snapped out a flash as bright as the break of dawn, he remained dead to the world. Even when Heero decided to take him upstairs, carrying him with no certain ease, and put him in their bed, he snored on. Even when Heero himself finally curled up with his husband, nothing stirred him and he slept on into the early hours of the morning.

But when the red numbers of the clock turned and struck the Devil’s Hour, his eyes snapped open on a darkened room.

Shini found himself immediately and completely aware of his surroundings. Heero was sleeping, loosely draped on whatever body part he could reach, facing the Shinigami’s back as he slept on the edge of the bed. The light punctuation of his breathing hung in the air, alone. Moonlight was peering in through the exposed window, forming a mystic, dreamy white square on the book which Heero had left on the beside table, the letters of ‘Death Gods’ catching the light and turning silver. He woke with the impression that he had not been asleep naturally and he was slipping out of the grasp of something. Something was not right in all the silence.

Shini was made of Darkness, created from the scale of the first Reaper, the Father Shinigami, and a given life by a feather of the Goddess of Love. He could feel it pulse and gently hum within the entire house. He always had sensed shadows, and such perception had sharpened with age so that he could feel the slightest pulses of Light created by the life within a plant within the Dark. Since coming to stay with his mortal husband, and especially since his recovery of power after the Shrinks, he knew every crevice and crack of his home that filled with shadow.

The crack beneath the bedroom door began glowing soft white. Shini felt the Light of a deathless being spark into existence in the house and sat up.

The room filled with Dark. The Angel of Death felt his influence on the shadows surge and hiss in provocation around him, forming a guard around Heero’s oblivious sleeping form. Wings silently erupted from his back, flexing their sin-black feathers in the moonlight, muscles arching and tensing for an attack and the unwavering defense of his husband. Shini felt his power form a growl low in his throat and got out of bed, setting his jaw and clenching his right hand around a staff of Darkness.

No one invaded his home. No one, Immortal or not.

Before he opened the door, Shini paused to turn and look at Heero, who slept, no wiser to the change or his absence. He stopped, took a double take, and hesitated another moment, for there was a clean, untainted white glow coming from his mortal husband, standing stark and unafraid against the Dark. Shini felt something turn over in his stomach with a confusing taste of both confusion and gladness, but the sensation of a presence lingering downstairs pulled him away, rousing his furious, protective fire again. A living wraith, he turned and walked down the stairs, shutting the door to the bedroom with a gust of shadowy wind.

Shini found it hard to believe that it would be as easy as walking down the hallway to find the intruder, but his disbelief did not slacken the territorial fury that filled him and made his knuckles white around the staff he’d materialized out of Darkness, squaring to face the stranger sitting at the kitchen table. Part of the light which had drawn him downstairs was the hints of life Shini could sense interrupting his Dark, but also the kitchen lights glowing gently over the table, illuminating the long, platinum blond hair running down the back of the chair.

"Get out," Shini spat at the figure so venomously he wasn’t sure which language it came out in. There would be no time wasted on chitchat or negotiations. "I want you out, now."

The figure did not move. It only remained sitting, back to the Shinigami, and stared at the wall opposite. Shini’s emotions of fury calmed enough for him to consider the being that sat before him. The white-blond hair, longer than his, nearly touched the ground and was bound at the nape by a large red ribbon. The back was bare, pressed up against the chair, marked by large, square shoulders and what looked to be an empty quiver and bow. Shini could see the swathes of luminous, milk-colored robes flowing down onto the floor.

It didn’t move. Shini’s bare feet tensed, nearly ripping into the floorboards as Darkness hissed out from underneath him in a steam of anger. "Get out," he repeated. He clutched the staff at his side, which also smoked beneath his infuriated touch.

The figure laughed. Shini whipped his weapon out in front of him, both hands gripping and creating a hot black steam that evaporated with a crackle of energy. He watched the being, obviously a male by the deep, gruff tone of voice, continue to laugh to himself as he reached out and touched the vase in the center of the table. Shinigami suddenly saw that same vase, bathed in sunlight as Heero set it out and touched the flower sitting inside, and his anger swelled.

"Just who the hell do you think you are?" Shini asked, flapping his wings once and casting a menacing shadow over the kitchen floor.

The stranger casually took his hand away from touching the petals of the rose, then glanced down at the polished floor at Shini’s silhouette.

"Mother’s right. You have fallen under your mortal’s influence. You’re just as stubborn and profane as him," he said, finally turning his head to look coolly back at him. "It is too bad that I never got the chance to know you before his wicked influence."

Shini blinked at him, though his mouth was still slung in a grimace of warning and brows drawn.

The intruder laughed again. Beneath his white-blond bangs, Shini saw amusement cross his long, masculine face and light in his aqua-blue eyes. "You give your brother an awfully cold welcome. Don’t you have anything to say, Shinigami the 13th?"

"Get out," he hissed again, his voice turning to a violent slur and his wings arching, ready for attack.

The intruder stood up from the chair with the undeniable grace and speed of an Immortal. He loomed, much taller than he appeared seated, and from his back emerged a pair of wings, hawkish and robust as opposed to Shini’s broad and lissome spread, crimson red bleeding into gold bleeding into emerald green at the tips. He arched a pale brow at the Angel of Death. "You’ve already said that," he taunted. He took immense pleasure out of the furious expression Shini tried to lance him with. "Come now, give your brother a hug."

"Why are you here?"

"Mother sent me," he replied. "You know that. And watch your tone, younger brother."

"You have no place here. She has no place here." Shini, welding the staff like a katana, set his shoulders and made no ambiguous stance. His violet eyes, flecked with glowing spots of Darkness, narrowed angrily over the shaft of his weapon. "Leave, please."

His brother did no such thing. So Shini made good on his threat and, with a crack of energy sounding his fury, disappeared and reappeared mere feet from the intruder and swung violently at him. The intruder sidestepped the attack, the staff connecting with only the tip of his long tail of hair. Shini stumbled forward. He had fully anticipated connecting that blow, and whirled to face his target as quickly as he could—but not fast enough.

The being claiming to be his brother stood at the other side of the kitchen, pulling the string of his bow taut.

"See you tomorrow, brother," he said calmly, smiling over a glittering blue-white arrowhead. He let it fly and Shinigami staggered backward, staring in horror at the shaft lodged cleanly in the left of his chest. His eyes shifted back to his assailant, but his vision was divided and blurred, jumping irregularly from light to dark and his body sagging and Dark energy sputtering and whimpering. He caught one blurry glance of his sibling—a most unpleasant one at that—before he felt the floor and knew blackness.