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Kyuuketsuki Duo
Demons -- The Seventh Chapter
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	The demon released him and backed away, suddenly unnerved by 
Duo's abrupt, bonechilling laugh.  The guardian speared the demon with 
pale lavender eyes through his chestnut bangs, a slight maniacal grin 
hovering on his lips.

	"Shinma energy, eh?  That's what your power is based on?  Tsk, 
tsk."  His voice was low and dangerous, light and teasing, all at the 
same time.  It was a cold length of very sharp steel hidden within a 
deceptively beautiful sheath.  "Didn't you know that that's what my 
specialty is?"

	Doubt sprang into the demon's posture, and it showed.  "I'm the 
Shinma guardian, you know.  The guardian of the veil between the Shinma 
realm and the human realm."  The prey-turned-predator's smile became 
oddly gentle and deadly as his power gathered silently around him, a 
dark mist that coiled lovingly around his body and pooled obediently at 
his feet.  "You see, it's my job to take Shinma energy from wherever 
it's strayed and return it to where it belongs.  The Dark.  And unless 
I'm mistaken, you have Shinma energy that really doesn't belong here.  
It really must be returned."

	A small wind stirred out of nowhere, catching the loose dust and 
swirling it in its lazy eddies.  Shadows from the guardian's power 
flicked out to join it, mixing in to kick up a strong miniature 
maelstrom, which drew out the Shinma power from the demon and funneled 
it away to be returned to the Dark.  The young guardian stood calmly in 
the center of the whirlwind born of his own power, his long braid and 
flowing clothes whipping wildly in the fey currents, but he ignored it 
all, his eyes remaining intent upon the demon before him.

	The demon overcame his hesitation at the theft of his hard-won 
power.  He tried to recall it, to keep it tightly bound to himself, but 
it responded only weakly to his commands.  Shinma power could never be 
made truly a demon's, and its binding to the creature was not nearly 
strong enough to withstand the force of the guardian's call.  Failing 
that, the demon howled its rage and attempted to charge the guardian and 
stop the inexorable leeching of its stolen power, but it was beat back 
by the force of the twister.  Dark tendrils of power reached out from 
the winds to snap at him and keep him at bay.

	The whirlwind slowly dissipated, bearing the last of its 
retrieved burden to the Dark, although the air around the guardian still 
crackled with his power.  The demon that stood before him looked much 
less intimidating, without much obvious physical change.  Approximately 
sixth circle, the guardian's mind automatically cataloged.  It had lost 
none of its height or breadth, none of its sharp pointiness, but the 
aura of power was gone from it, leaving it with only the threat of 
physical violence, ever the main tool of this hellish subtype.

	It was stunned, the totality of its work having been conjured 
away in under a minute, by the frail, foolish, terrified, or so he had 
thought, boy.  "How could you have...?!"

	The guardian smacked himself lightly on the forehead.  "How 
could I have forgotten why I'm here?  I really am quite useless, you 
know.  Useless, selfish, weak, disgusting...."  His sad, whimsical voice 
trailed off, and he chuckled coldly again.

	Suddenly he turned his head and snarled viciously at the 
surrounding demonlings, and they swiftly scattered far, far away.  
Snorting, he returned his eyes to the demon before him, and shrugged.  
"So hard to find good help these days, isn't it?" he drawled.  His head 
tilted back, exposing his slender, pale neck, his eyes never leaving the 
weakened demon, and a hand raised to sweep his bangs back languidly 
before it trailed down his neck and chest, fingers splayed briefly on 
his abdomen before returning idly to his side.  "Well, I guess it's just 
you and me now."

	The suddenly denuded demon was running swiftly out of options, 
and made a cowardly, desperate, foolish attempt to escape unharmed.  "I 
can give you what you want, boy," it growled.  "What do you want?  
Power?  Blood?"

	The guardian rolled his eyes towards the blood-red sky.  How 
droll.  As if he hadn't heard that one before.  He smiled, and in no way 
was it a friendly smile.  "You can give me exactly what I want."  The 
demon bared its teeth, the parody of an accomodating grin, in 
anticipation of paying off, then betraying, the foolish human.  "I want 
what's best for my friend," he explained softly.  "I want his freedom.  
And you're in the way of that.  So you see, your death would greatly 
benefit me."

	The demon's display of teeth became an angry one.  Bereft of any 
other possible course of action, it charged the guardian once again.  
That was predictable and typically unimaginative : the guardian 
sidestepped.  As the demon went crashing past him, he turned after it 
with a deadly calm.  A small, transparent sphere formed in his upturned 
palm, encasing an unassuming, but coldly burning flame, and with a 
thought he sent it flying into the demon's broad back.  It hadn't been 
enough to kill, merely to add momentum and send the demon sprawling into 
the dust.

	'What are you waiting for?  Stop playing with him and finish 
it!' hissed the voice in his head that Duo recognized as the power.  It 
didn't speak to him in words, per se, but in compulsions, but the 
meanings were usually clear enough.  It wanted more control, and it 
wanted to feed upon another creature's death.

	Duo didn't know what he was waiting for.  Granted, he didn't 
know if he could have blasted the demon with enough fire to kill it -- 
he vaguely recalled that this particular subtype was no stranger to 
flame.  But it went deeper than that.  He was reluctant to put an end to 
it.  He wanted Heero to be free, of course, he had come all the way to 
hell, albeit accidentally, to see that it was done.  But now that the 
moment was upon him, it was very, very difficult to let go of the only 
person in the world he had, the only one who could possibly understand 
him, the only one who had stood by his side time and time again.

	The demon had regained its feet and tackled the guardian in the 
midst of his musings.  'Tsk, tsk, guardian,' he thought to himself as he 
automatically tucked, rolled, and flipped the errant demon over his 
head, although earning himself another set of scrapes and bruises.  'The 
middle of a battle is no time for doubts.  There are no more Heeros to 
cover your back, to come to the rescue, this time.'

	Autonomic response took over, and unconscious analysis of his 
adversary began with dreadful focus.  It was obvious the creature was 
stronger than he was, and would maul him if he let it get in too close 
to him.  Fire from afar would not do.  He would need a weapon to extend 
his reach and defend himself.  Swiftly following the thought came 
action.  The long shaft of a staff sprang into existence in his waiting 
hand, crafted once more from shadows made solid, a contoured grip 
automatically forming to fit his hands perfectly.

	'All this physical fighting lately,' he chided himself.  'Why 
did Heero go through all that trouble to teach you to use your powers?'  
He readied himself to meet the next attack, glad there had been at least 
a few lessons in hand-to-hand, in case of emergency.

	'He taught me because it was his duty to teach me,' Duo mentally 
answered his own rhetorical question.

	Sidestep.  Block.  Sweep.

	'He taught me because he cares?' a small voice suggested.

	'No.  He taught me because it was his mission,' he reminded 
himself.

	Wait.  Parry.  Dodge.

	'He taught me to survive.  I can survive.  I can succeed.  
Without him.  I am proving that now.'

	Block.  Strike.  Strike.

	'There is nothing more for him to teach me.  It is time to let 
him go.'

	'But I want --!'

	Ouch.  Missed a block.

	'It doesn't matter what I want,' he cut himself off harshly.  
'This isn't about me.  This is about him.  He doesn't want to be tied 
down for an eternity to human frailty or human corruption.  He was meant 
to be so much more, and only I can give him the opportunity to be so 
much more.  I'm the one who got him punished.  I'm the one who got him 
exiled.  If I ... if I care anything at all about him, then I have to 
let him go!'

	A standstill.  His weapon had come sweeping down in an overhead 
blow intended to crack open his target's skull, only to be blocked by an 
upraised forearm of corded muscle.

	The demon was grinning, confidence regained during the long 
physical battle.  It was something it knew it was good at.  "Still think 
you can defeat me, human?"

	Doubts erased during his discussion with himself, hesitation 
overcome, Duo thought, 'Time to end this.  For Heero.'

	He grinned back.  "Yes."  Another idle flexing of his power, and 
his weapon reshaped itself.  It was something Duo recalled using once, 
when some of the older kids at the orphanage had had to help a nearby 
farm bring in the harvest before a large storm hit.  A large shadowy 
blade extended itself swiftly from the high end of the staff, slicing 
through the demon's arm.  Before the appendage had even hit the ground, 
before the demon had even had the time to howl in outrage, the guardian 
smoothly twisted his impromptu scythe's downward motion back up with a 
flick of his wrist and took off the demon's head in an effortless 
backhand horizontal sweep, the nearly weightless, terribly sharp shadows 
sliding easily through the demon's fibers.

	"And the moral of the story is: cheaters never prosper."  His 
statement fell on dead ears.

	Duo straightened himself and caught his breath.  As an 
afterthought, he again summoned the cold fire at his command and sent it 
towards the steaming body.

	'Oh, look.  It does burn.'  Shrugging mentally, he filed that 
little fact away for future reference, and turned his regard towards his 
scythe.  He waved it experimentally in the air a few times.

	"Ooh.  I like."

	He fixed the contours of the makeshift weapon in his head and 
stowed that, too, away in his memory, ready to be recalled at a moment's 
notice.

	So now the deed was done, there was nothing left to do, and 
there was no going back.  No sense in delaying his own plans any 
further.

	He sent his thoughts winging through the planescape, aimed at 
his Shinma superiors.  When he had caught their mercurial attention, he 
emphatically showed them what he had done, scenes from the old man's 
house, the destruction of the stone, himself standing over the corpse of 
the defeated demon, and he awaited acknowledgement, demanding repayment 
without giving the thought form.  Agreement came, and swift on its 
heels, he felt the Shinma conglomerate fulfil its half of the bargain.  
There was a sudden, painful wrenching sensation in his head, a 
displacement and shifting of powers, and even though he had shut his 
mentor out of his thoughts, even though he no longer needed to, he knew 
that it was over, that Heero was gone now, to do bigger and better 
things, and he told himself sternly not to cry.

	"Well, now that that's over and done with," he said around the 
lump in his throat.  "How the hell am I going to get out of here?"  He 
asked nobody in particular, for there was nobody left around.  He stood, 
solitary and alone, in his own, deserted little corner of hell.

_________________________________________
This piece of fiction is the intellectual 
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The basis for this fic, i.e. Gundam Wing, 
Kyuuketsuki Miyu, et al., is the property 
of someone else.  The author can be con-
tacted at jchew@myrealbox.com.  This has 
been an entirely automated message.
http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~jchew/misc/gw.html

last modified : 10/28/2001 18:56:32 PST