Yami No Matsuei Fan Fiction / Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Living Shinigami ❯ Shinigami ( Chapter 25 )

A/N: As some of you were guessing with the last chapter, this is the final chapter of “Living Shinigami.” You’ve been wonderful readers throughout the story, even when there were problems or I threw tantrums. Thank you. So, for the final time, I hope you enjoy the chapter, which is extra long to celebrate the occasion. Read and review!

“Living Shinigami”

Chapter Twenty-five

Shinigami

With Quatre monitoring them from behind the one-way mirror, Duo and Wufei entered the interrogation room where the man named Jamison was trying to get Daniel out of the corner. He heard them approaching and promptly started to yell. “Haven’t you had enough, you bastards? We’ve told you everything we know, and look what you’ve done to Daniel!”

“He shouldn’t have attacked the chosen son of Enma,” Wufei said coldly.

The cowering man stared at them in horror and awe as his gaze passed from Wufei to Duo, who stared calmly back. Seeing his friend’s face, Jamison turned around and saw them. More specifically, he saw that Duo was walking without so much as a limp. “Holy shit.”

“Kami-sama, I beg your forgiveness,” Daniel said, shifting into a low bow. “We were in mourning and did not realize.”

“Where did your sister die, Daniel?” Duo asked.

“Kyushu, my lord,” the man said, not lifting his eyes from where they were fixated on the shadows below the shinigami’s feet. He did look up, however, when Duo stepped closer, ignoring the sputtering Jamison.

“Then she was delivered to the afterlife with gentle hands,” Duo said. “My mother and father watch over that city.”

“So that’s it?” Jamison asked. “No ‘you’ll be together someday’ or ‘she’s in a better place’?”

“I’m a pre-shinigami, not a grief counselor,” Duo said, returning to his usual joking self. “And I’m not going to say because I don’t know. The records are sealed and I’m not my Otou-sama. I refuse to tell even sweet lies.”

“Nor is all forgiven,” Wufei said, stepping up par with his friend. “You’ll be tried and sentenced just like anyone else who attacks a Preventor agent with intent to kill. And I wouldn’t suggest trying to ‘out’ my lord as inhuman, because it’d only result in people thinking you mad. Duo, are we finished?”

Nodding, Duo led the way from the room, Quatre joining them silently from the monitoring room as they passed the door. “That was quite the show you put on for them. Oh, and you’re still floating.”

Quickly checking that no one else had noticed, Duo grinned. “Seems like Danny there needed it and Jamie needed knocked down a beg. Now, if Wufei here had been the one shot, I wouldn’t have been so nice.”

“And you say I’m overprotective.”

“You’d still be hobbling around with a cast on your leg.”

“So Duo, if your parents work in Kyushu, what were they doing on L2?”

-

Three years, eleven months, and thirty days later:

Duo’s friends found it horribly fitting and ironic that his funeral would be on the same day he and Wufei had mysteriously returned after their still yet unexplained three week absence. Then again, Wufei might have done that on purpose, being the one to plan the event.

For reasons that not even their own Doctor Sally Po could explain, Duo’s heart had stopped at midnight on his twenty-fifth birthday as he and Wufei, his four-year housemate, shared a bottle of hot sake. Tests hadn’t revealed anything wrong with the drink, so foul play was quickly ruled out. The way Duo looked when the other pilots got there on Wufei’s call, he might have been just holding his breath with his eyes shut and would jump up at them any moment. But it had never happened.

Three days after his death, the remaining pilots had been approached by a lawyer representing the Kurosaki family. The estate, he’d told them, had been left vacant for generations, the line having thought to have died out. The local village, however, had demanded the land preserved for an heir they swore would be born. A comparative test matched Duo’s DNA with that of one of the long-dead Kurosaki, naming him said heir. Unfortunately for Duo, the results came too late to be of much good to him. But despite the fact that he shouldn’t even have known of its existence, the land was already listed in their comrade’s will.

Duo’d left it to Wufei on the condition that his ashes be buried there. He’d already had a place picked out, beside a small, almost hidden grave marker with the name Kurosaki Hisoka etched into it hundreds of years before. Only Quatre, Wufei and Relena knew that the marker stood for the same Hisoka that Duo called his mother, and not just a like-named ancestor as the others supposed.

The main service at the funeral was open to the public, but even so, the number of strangers that came surprised even Lady Une.

“Just think, how many people he’s touched,” Sally murmured to her as people drifted in past Wufei, who stood at the door. Many of them greeted him with familiarity, including a Chinese teenage girl who stood on her toes to kiss him on the cheek and what looked like her grandfather, who bowed to him. The two sat with the blond ‘siblings’ that had been in attendance at all of Duo’s birthday bashes.

And they were some of the more normal ones. A blue-haired family of three lead in seven others, only one having hair above his waist, the black clipped at the base of his neck. One of the women wore a dark veil that completely shrouded her face. Keeping a noticeable distance from them, a boyish man with incredibly long hair entered, and they definitely recognized him from the photos scattered around his and Wufei’s shared house. Some of the others were rather familiar as well.

“Excuse me, but you’re Commander Une, yes?”

The two women turned around to see the blond man they’d found so much in Duo’s pictures, a small owl perched on his black suit-clad shoulder.

“Dr. Watari, correct?” Une asked, shaking the man’s hand. He nodded. “Maxwell’s godfather?”

“And family doctor,” Watari said. “I helped in his creation.”

“You make him sound like a science experiment,” Sally said with a smile. Not only would Duo not mind some cheer at his funeral, he would have demanded it.

“A test-tube birth made from two men? He was somewhat,” the man said. “You must be Dr. Po.”

“Sally,” the lady doctor corrected firmly. “If patching up the same trouble maker for a collective twenty-five years doesn’t put us on a first name basis, I don’t know what else would.”

“Yutaka then,” Watari said, lifting his eyes as the hall doors opened. “They made it.”

Even as they turned to see who he was referring to, the hall fell silent. Spotting the couple, Une would see why. Even those who hadn’t been part of the investigation could easily see that the two were family to their shinigami, especially the taller.

Violet regarded the mourners with a calm gaze from under messy chestnut bangs, and he nodded to a few, Wufei included. The slight youth beside him bore a face straight out of Une’s memories of the early days of the Preventors when the five were still teenagers and she was wary of allowing them to join. The ghosts of Asato Tsuzuki and Hisoka Kurosaki had come to their son’s funeral.

People stood in respect as the two passed them, heading for the open coffin. Which Une and Sally were standing three feet away from. Wufei followed them up the aisle, leaving his post.

“How is he holding up?” the Preventor agent asked in a low voice as they approached.

“He’s pouting,” Tsuzuki said. His face was unreadable as he peered into the coffin. “He wanted to come.”

Wufei snorted. “He would.”

Kurosaki reached in to brush a stray strand of hair from his son’s face. “We’re already breaking some rules as it is with our presence. The king called for him this morning. We left at the same time as he did. Have you and he spoken?”

“I promised him at least five years,” Wufei said, glancing skyward. “After that, it’s up to me.”

“Well, don’t start counting down the days,” Tsuzuki said. “You should enjoy life while you can.”

Fitting words to hear at a funeral. Sadly, their conversation moved in another direction as Wufei showed them to some empty seats near the front, leaving Une and Sally confused about what they’d meant by five years. By the time they thought to ask Watari, as he seemed to know more than they did, he’d also vanished into the quickly filling seating area.

“I guess we’ll have to wait,” Sally said, shrugging.

“I hate waiting.”

In the weeks to come, ghost stories ran rampant around the Preventor HQ regarding the pair and many of their acquaintances that had been in attendance, especially after the few photographs that had been allowed stubbornly refused to print or vanished from their computers all together. Especially those containing the late Duo Maxwell’s parents.

-

The following named five years sped past all too quickly, most of the remaining pilots turning thirty, an age they’d have never thought to reach if asked during the war. Time had passed, clearly leaving its mark. Relena and Heero had married, with Quatre and Sally as best man and maid of honor. Said blond man had gotten his first great niece. Trowa and Quatre had also wed, choosing a civil wedding over a traditional. Of the original five, only Wufei remained mostly untouched in his life.

He still lived in the house he’d shared with Duo, though the fact that he’d kept the second pilot’s room as it had been worried his friends. The Kurosaki sword, one of the few possessions that hadn’t mysteriously vanished after Duo’s death, was displayed proudly on a rack by the bed. But it wasn’t until Heero came to Wufei’s house to check on him after a mission and found him airing out the robe’s he’d returned with Duo in that they realized that something was going to happen, whether they liked it or not. Together, his friends and comrades confronted him about it shortly after the New Year.

“Wufei, what’s going on?” Sally asked the cornered man, doctor’s eyes scanning him over. He certainly looked healthy. That was one plus, at least.

“Nothing,” he said with a laugh, meeting each pair of concerned eyes in turn. “I’m just getting ready for Hijiri’s birthday.”

Hijiri. He’s used that name to refer to Duo off and on while they’d been living together, and then dropped the assumed name completely after his death. But Duo’s birthday was also the day of his death.

“Chang, it’s been five years,” Une said, with a sigh. Something in her stomach froze at the sound of her own words. Five years. He’d promised five years to someone, and she didn’t like the idea she was getting with the upcoming date.

“Please promise us that you aren’t going to do anything rash,” Quatre, ever the caring man, pleaded. Knowing what he did, he also had an idea, and didn’t like it anymore than Une did hers.

But Wufei only smiled and slipped through the exit door that he’d been sneakily picking behind his back.

A week later, during a late-night meeting, Quatre nearly choked on his tea as, as far as he could tell, the entire city was flooded with a very familiar presence. One he’d felt nine years prior, just before his rescue from the mad doctor. “D- Duo!”

“Quatre, are you alright?” Trowa asked, looking up from the report he was examining. Everyone else in the meeting room also had turned their eyes to the blond at the sound of the gasped name.

Quatre’s knuckles were white as he clenched his hands around his cup, barely managing to set it onto the table without spilling. “We’ve got to stop him. Wufei’s going to die.”

Heero’s eyes flew to the wall calendar. January fourteenth, and the clock was showing eleven forty. The three pilots and their commander were up and running full out to the parking lot within the moment.

“Can we make it in twenty minutes?” Wing’s former pilot asked as they loaded into Une’s car, being parked the closest to the front doors.

“This late at night, there might be a chance,” she said. Long black streaks were left on the pavement as they pealed out of the parking lot.

The Quatre the feeling only intensified as they came in sight of the house. Eleven fifty-eight. He didn’t pay attention to any of his surrounding as he ran into the house, thanking every god he could think of, whether or not he believed in them, that the door was unlocked. Eleven fifty-nine.

The sound of Duo’s old grandfather clock striking the hour had never been so horrible as at the moment that he yanked open the door to Duo’d bedroom, just in time to see a flash of etched steel. As his horrified comrade’s caught up to him, Quatre knew that his eyes alone saw the pale hand that caught Wufei’s as the Chinese man fell, the physical slipping through his grasp while one that seemed… paler separated from it.

As though sensing the stare, violet eyes lifted to his, soft and gentle in defiance of the blood pooling on the floor. Coal black eventually followed, tearing away from the floor where Wufei had been looking at his own body in morbid fascination. Somehow unnoticed by the others, Duo removed his mother’s sword from Wufei’s hand and put it away in the sheath on his belt. He still looked twenty-five, as he had when he’d died.

“My will’s over by the sword wrack in my room,” Wufei said, very matter-of-factly, as though he wasn’t a ghost who had just committed suicide, his corpse so fresh as to be still warm. “I’ve made arrangements for it to be read two days after my confirmed death.”

Quatre’s nod was tiny enough to be all but invisible, meaning that only the two ghosts could notice it, since they were looking right at him.

“Time to go,” Duo said, glancing up at his clock, still just on the last of its strikes. “Keep an eye out, Cat. You might be seeing us a few times before your time. We’ll certainly be keeping an eye on you guys. Oh, and don‘t touch anything with little scythes scribbled on it. They‘re surprises for the guys and the new recruits.”

When asked, he refused to explain why he’d started to both laugh and cry then as he threw himself toward the open window, staring at the sky.

-

In great contrast to Duo’s, Wufei’s funeral was small and private, held on the Kurosaki grounds with only two dozen or so people, each of which had been listed in his will. While his marker was going to stand there over a fistful of ash, the rest were to be scattered in the soil of the newly rebuilt L5 in a field where they were going to plant some flowers.

“Is everyone here?” Heero asked, glancing at the small ground milling about. There was to be a meal before the service, even if few were really in the mood to eat. It too had been in the will.

“All except for the three that weren’t named,” Quatre said. “Do you think they’re going to show? We weren’t able to contact them since we don’t know who they are.”

“We’ll just have to start eating without them,” the other man said.

They were halfway through the meal when Relena stood up and wandered away from the outdoor table, having seen something moving down along the dirt road leaning up to the manor. When she returned, she wrapped her arms around Heero from behind for comfort. “There’s a carriage coming up the road.”

“Someone from the village?” Heero asked, tilting his head to see her face better.

“Not unless someone from here also came to Duo’s funeral,” she said, shaking her head. “The driver was there. The short man with long hair.”

“Kurikara?” Quatre asked, remembering the name Millardo had told them. Relena nodded and his stomach fluttered. It had also been the name of the dragon that had defended Duo, so many years ago. If he was driving the carriage…

His thoughts were ground to a halt as it stopped not far from the table, the door facing them. An achingly familiar voice drifted out from within as the latch began to turn. “Sorry we’re late. The girls were messing with my hair for hours.”

More than one cup or fork was dropped as the door opened and a young kami stepped out onto the grass, his robe tied neatly around his elbows and his hair left loose over his back. Duo Maxwell, Hijiri Tsuzuki, bowed to them in greeting before his face split into a wide grin. “So, didja miss me?”

As Relena, being the only one standing and therefore having the easiest access, launched herself at him with a sob that was both happy and royally pissed off, there was an amused cough from behind Duo. When Wufei stepped out into the dappled sunlight, it was to quickly lunge forward to steady Sally as she threatened to topple over.

“Been back in the world of the living for an hour and you’re both already charming the ladies,” Kurikara snorted, swinging down from his seat.

“Is anything you pilots do even close to normal?” Une asked weakly as the three settled themselves into their seats.

Duo snorted, reaching for the potatoes. “Normal is overrated. Just be glad ol’ Trieze was busy this weekend.”

Wufei looked at him, startled. “He’s a shinigami?”

“Over in Europe, yeah,” the long-dead (as opposed to the living or newly-dead) man said. Then his brows furrowed and he looked to Kurikara. “Hey, how come Wufei got to come to his funeral? You guys didn’t let me go to mine.”

“Tough love, Kenko.”

“Mean!”