Chapter Text
The official invitation was a stiff parchment affair, signed by the new curator, and stamped with the seal of the Royal House of Sank. The unofficial one was a personal call that I would have sent directly to voicemail, had I not remembered that we had all agreed not to antagonize each other on this one matter. I’d never gotten along with Milliardo Peacecraft—or was he Zechs Merquise again now? I could never tell. For someone who had an actual given name when he was born, he seemed awfully cavalier about changing it whenever it suited him.
It had been a year since they disappeared, and that was what we were back here to deal with now. Though I’ve always thought a year to declare them dead was too… stupid, hasty, something I’d always expected of that blond nitwit, and however was he even related to Relena, she wasn’t that stupid, not the way I remembered her? No, that’s unfair. Out of everyone after the war, she and I had never really talked or bonded. Didn’t help that she was the one he chose, and not me.
Well, that’s still not really fair, was it? For me to keep harping on about how the great and vaunted Heero Yuy, the hero of the last Eve War, had chosen to go with the pretty, blond princess and not with the street rat who’d once shot him.
Anyway, yes, they’d disappeared a year after the war. Here, at Peacecraft Castle itself, if rumors were to be believed. I hadn’t thought enough about it to get involved.
All right, that’s not true either. I’d forced myself not to get involved. Not like there was very much I could do. Even if given half the chance, I’d have chased Heero down to the very ends of the known universe. I hadn’t had half the chance. I was a broke idiot with no job prospects. That had been a year ago, when they disappeared.
I mean, I don’t have job prospects now, but at least I had enough money this time to fly myself out of L2 to come to their memorial. To this farce of a ceremony where Milliardo would declare them dead, where the castle they’d disappeared in without a trace would finally, officially be donated to the cause Heero and Relena had been working towards when they’d vanished off the face of the Earth.
I should be a little more hysterical about it, but I’d had some sense knocked into my head in the year since. Wufei had been here in the immediate aftermath. So had Quatre, and yes, Milliardo. They’d all searched. There’d been no trace of them, and nothing to indicate they’d ever left. All the exits had been monitored, as with everything about Relena herself. Heero had been with her as part of that monitoring. Just another part of the circus of security that went with being queen of the world—I mean, Vice Foreign Minister at seventeen years old.
They’d traipsed into the burnt out shell of Peacecraft Castle, intending to survey the grounds for what could be restored. I remember reading it on news feeds back while I was working salvage on Howard’s ship: Princess of Sank returns to ruined palace . I remembered the fanfare. She’d intended to restore the castle and turn it over to the war charities to convert it into a museum. No one could ever forget the devastating effects of the Eve Wars, and since L5 no longer existed, Peacecraft Castle was the second best memorial.
I even remembered the chaos of the search that followed. Vice Foreign Minister disappears with bodyguard in haunted castle . It’d only been a year, but there’d already been two made-for-TV movies produced about it. Wufei had bitched a good deal on our private emails about the interview hounds.
A year later, the surrounding grounds of Peacecraft Castle were uncannily peaceful. Quiet. I’d have expected now that it was fully restored to its former glory and ready to be unveiled as the war memorial museum Relena had intended, there’d be press hounding the visitors. But no, it seemed the Prince of Peroxide did know how to do one thing well. We’d all agreed to come, if only we wouldn’t be harassed, and that’s what he had given us. After all, the ceremony was supposed to be private.
Only that Wufei, Trowa and Quatre weren’t here yet. Come to think of it, the museum worker who’d let me in hadn’t confirmed if Milliardo was here either. It seemed my being a jobless bum worked against me again, this time sending me to the meeting place too early for the people I’m supposed to meet.
At least it’s not a year too late.
Yes, I know I should stop harping about that. It had been a year, and there couldn’t have been anything I could have done that Wufei or Quatre or Milliardo hadn’t. They’d been the ones with the resources, with Wufei’s little army of Preventer agents, and Quatre subcontracting every detective agency within a hundred mile radius. And Milliardo was the country’s prince. They’d have done all they could, and still Heero and Relena remained gone.
Nothing remained now but to let life go on, I suppose.
That’s what we all did after the war, after all. The disappearance of two people shouldn’t have stopped the world from turning. It hadn’t for Milliardo, and he was the one directly related to one of them.
The curator, a Mr. Bentley, met me when I arrived. He’d been pleasant and conciliatory and had even offered condolences. Was I related to Heero? Was Relena my friend? Oh, it’s ever so heartwarming to see young people come together to celebrate the lives snuffed out so young.
As if they were already dead.
They may as well be, I suppose. That’s what the ceremony this evening is going to be about. To declare Heero Yuy and Relena Darlian-Peacecraft officially dead.
Something about that made my stomach want to rebel, and Mr. Bentley assured me there were restrooms at the end of every corridor if I needed to “pull myself together.” Spoiler: I didn’t. I was perfectly capable of holding the bile in.
What I was not capable of, it seemed, was keeping myself to the wing of the castle that was meant for public consumption.
Mr. Bentley had said something about the restoration, how they’d managed to rebuild Peacecraft Castle to what it had been before the war. But there’d been areas that pre-dated the Eve Wars. Pre-dated even the colonies and the race into space. Those areas had been cordoned off, not yet fit for public viewing. The fire damage had been too great.
I’d smiled, shook his hand, and agreed to keep myself to the pretty exhibits, showing off the history of the Sank Kingdom, from centuries before space travel was even a glimmer in H.G. Wells’ eye. And I had , for the most part. Sank had a long and rich history, and Mr. Bentley’s exhibit didn’t just cover the Eve Wars, but a full tribute to the fallen kingdom, from when it had been a territory of England during the War of the Roses, to when the duchy promoted its first monarch.
When I got to the exhibit on the kingdom’s history during the Nine Years Wars though, I’d felt a tug. I say tug , but it was probably more a dire need to piss because I hadn’t gone to the toilet the entire trip from Lunar Base. It’s surprisingly difficult to do for someone used to flying their own ship. The pee stains on the rim just made something in me want to rebel.
Anyway, that was what I’d been thinking. Or what I was convinced I’d been thinking when I wandered down the cordoned off hallway in search of a bathroom. Could’ve been anything else really, because I’d forgotten everything I was on about when I heard his voice.
“This way, hurry!”
In hindsight, I’d say I was probably just hallucinating. I did that sometimes. Heard voices of my dead. A lot of the time, especially during the war, it had been Solo’s. My best friend. My truest friend. The one who hadn’t abandoned me for another on pain of death. (Well, he did die, but that’s not the point.) Other times, I thought I heard the screams of the dying, except that’s impossible to hear when you’re in space and your comm channels weren’t hooked to the frequency of the enemy Leos you’re destroying.
Yes, I know it’s all in my head. Yes, I know this was probably a sign of PTSD—all of us pilots, hell everyone who fought in the wars, had some form of it. But unlike Trowa’s memory loss, and Quatre’s rather extended break from reality in the midst of the war, mine was… a bit more permanent. I mean that in the sense of, I’ve been hearing this shit even before the war, when, you know, the PTSD would have started.
I imagined Quatre would have had things to say about this How I should have told him and he would have given me a reference to some psychologist from Winner Heath Services who could diagnose and treat me, all signed and paid for and I’d just have to attend. But I didn’t.
So here’s the other thing about me, besides the hearing of voices: I did not like charity.
And a lot of what I got from… everyone, really… smacks too much of charity. Which was why I’d fucked back off to L2 and my old hand-to-mouth existence until Howard offered me an actual job. And why I’d kept up with everyone but hadn’t shown my face on Earth, where everyone else lived. Until now.
Anyway, yes, I do hear voices, and I’d just heard the one voice I could never have turned from had I even wanted.
It barked instructions in my ear, directions. Turn this way , no, that corridor’s fire damaged , and watch your footing! The foundations here are unstable!
I couldn’t ignore it. Followed along like a hapless rat mesmerized by a pied piper. In the back of my mind, I knew I was being stupid. It wasn’t Heero I was hearing. This was all in my head. And how did he even get into my head? He was not one of my dead—and then I heard another voice. This one feminine, laughing. Teasing even.
“This would be a lot more fun if you had Duo around, wouldn’t you agree?”
I stopped walking. Misnomer—I’d been fairly running by then, trying to keep up with the directions only I could hear, because the museum workers I’d passed certainly hadn’t heard anyone when I’d passed them.
I looked around. I was far from where I’d passed the last museum worker, and the corridor I was in wasn’t the neat, spiffy carpeted hallway that led into space colonization exhibits. This one was empty. What little I could see of the furnishings were in tattered splinters scattered on fire-blackened stone. Shards of glass, half-melted from mobile suit cannon fire, were strewn about on the floor, some still sharp enough to cut through the worn soles of my boots. On the far end, a part of the stone wall had actually caved in, blocking my exploration with piles of rubble I’d have to monkey through to get past.
I couldn’t see where I’d gone, and the adjoining hall from which I’d come yielded only more black stone, cold and empty and bereft of any signs of rehabilitation. I’d wandered into one of those wings that had been too damaged to restore. And while I had a superb sense of direction out in space, that actually didn’t translate to knowing one’s way around an ancient castle with endlessly winding halls. It’d take me forever to find my way back to the main visitors’ foyer, where I really should have stayed put and waited for the others.
So, yes, it was now time to call in the reinforcements. Someone to reel poor lost little Duo in and put him back on track and tell him it’s going to be okay, you’re not lost, you haven’t been abandoned, we’re here Duo, we really are…
“Where’s your sense of adventure?”
I heard Relena’s voice, tinkling and laughing as if she’d giggled directly in my ear.
I whirled around, but the dark corridor was still empty, and I was still the only one here. Fuck this, now even Relena’s messing with my head. I knew it had been a poor idea to come here. Should’ve stayed with the Sweepers and kept my head down. At least then, I’d had some means of income to get off this bloody rock—
I heard the squeak of a door turning on rusted hinges, and I headed down that direction to investigate. Must be a museum worker.
“Hello?” I venture out. “Uh, I’m uh, one of Mr. Peacecraft’s visitors, and I’ve kinda gotten lost…”
My voice trailed into nothing. The room beyond the door was empty.
Another misnomer. It wasn’t a room so much as some kind of… hidden passageway? The door that opened wasn’t strictly a door but something cleverly disguised to look as if it were part of the wall. I remembered the exhibits, how the servants had once made use of these hidden passageways to travel around the castle faster, and unseen to the royalty and their court. That was the way of castle servants everywhere, apparently. Something the Sankians learned from the English.
And, okay, I really should not have gone off exploring; I could see the sunlight streaming in from one of the arrow slit windows, and the length of it told me it was a lot later than I thought. I should have been back at the foyer. The others would be here by now; Milliardo’s ceremony was at six, and if I dawdled any longer, exploring hidden passageways, I’d miss it.
“Duo?”
The sound wafted from inside the darkened room, and I couldn’t ignore it.
I poked my head in. The room wasn’t a room at all as I’d said, but a hallway with a winding wooden staircase skimming the narrow space. It went in both directions, and I imagined what this looked like from outside to get my bearings. A round passageway with stairs, so probably a turret. It was too dark to determine whether there were other doors above and below, but I imagined if this one was here, then there had to be more, right? I needed to get downstairs anyway. The pre-colony exhibits had been on the seventh floor, and this stairwell looked like it went all the way down to the ground floor, where, I hoped, I’d burst out of the hidden passageway, straight into the foyer.
Imagine how Wufei would look if I managed that.
I peered back at the two ends of my corridor. Nope, definitely no direct way to get to the main part of the museum from here. And somehow, Relena’s teasing voice in my head had thrown a gauntlet. I had a sense of adventure. I wasn’t just drifting out in space chasing after pieces of scrap metal. And I wasn’t going to be late to their fucking memorial, even if both of them wanted to be assholes, goading me into shit I shouldn’t do, in my head.
“What the hell are you waiting for?”
My imagination was a bitch and somehow, the Heero in my head was an even pissier jerk than how I remembered him in the flesh.
I growled under my breath and took a step through the threshold, screwing my mouth into a devil of a smile as I tipped a salute to the Relena that was only in my imagination.
“Well, here goes nothing.”
And it did.
It really did.
I don’t know what exactly happened. One moment I was walking into that darkened stairwell, and the next I was waking on cold stone. My body was unbelievably sore, like I’d fallen and hit myself on about a dozen rotted wooden steps and—I glanced up.
The stairwell was dark and empty, but there was enough weak light leaking through two tiny windows above to show me that yes, I had fallen, and I had broken through the rotted stairs. Seven flights. I fell seven flights and now I was on the cold stone floor of the ground floor, and I was, somehow, miraculously still alive. Granted, I’d taken way more damage getting my gundam treated like a cosmic chew toy during the war. Let’s not forget that time I’d been captured and beaten and held on Lunar Base. That hadn’t been a walk in the park either.
But falling down seven flights of stairs, even with each flight hampering the fall with yet more wood splintering on impact, had a tendency to, you know, kill you. I hadn’t been on Earth much, not during the wars, and certainly not after it. But I know Earth gravity is a bitch and a half, and if you fall, from what—fifty, sixty feet?—and land on hard stone, you kinda have a tendency to get your brains splattered on said stone.
Also you kinda feel it. You remember it.
I didn’t. Not when it happened, and certainly not now.
My brains were not splattered, and even though my head hurt like a fucking mother, I appeared to be none the worse for wear. Bruised as hell, probably, but—I groaned as I lifted myself to my elbows. Yep, muscles still working even though I ached . Everywhere. Fuck. Should be a goddamn miracle I was even still alive. And yes, no broken bones. I could still wiggle my toes in my boots, could still feel the worn out fake wool of my socks.
Fucking hell.
And that’s when awareness of my surroundings returned. There were voices all around, not in my immediate vicinity but behind the stone walls. And no, I was pretty sure it wasn’t all in my head. I really was hearing people. Only the voices were speaking in a language that… yes, it was English, but it wasn’t the English I was familiar with.
The curator and other Sankian museum workers spoke with an accent. What I was hearing was similar but not exactly the same.
And then all of a sudden, there were people around me. A great many people. So many, I was a little shocked that this tiny stairwell could hold so many without all of us crushing each other. Without all of them crushing me. I was still on the floor, on my back, and every inch of me demanded medical attention, or at least some morphine to kill the pain. Goddamn, falling seven flights ain’t a walk in the park.
I think I may have actually said something to that extent, but these people ignored me. Yammered on about French spies and English contacts. And then about heretics. Don’t look at me like that; I knew I wasn’t the one losing my mind!
One of them may have asked for my name. She was a small woman with curly blond hair peeking out of—was that a mobcap? Did Sankians wear mobcaps? Fuck if I know.
She ignored me when I gave her my name and asked her if she could very kindly ask the curator to maybe fetch a doctor. Like some help here, lady?
Nope. She got back up, yammered back at one of the funnily dressed men. And if I had all my marbles in a row just then and not still busy trying to ascertain that I hadn’t, in fact, splattered my brains on the stone floor, I might have noticed that all of them were funnily dressed, even the woman in the mobcap.
A man was sneering down at me. “Yes, he’s one o’ them papists alrigh’!”
And then he pulled a fist back and the next thing I knew, I’d blacked out again.
When I woke a second time, I wasn’t in the stairwell anymore. It took me a minute to place the smell, because it was fucking dark, and for a moment, I thought that blow to the side of my head had rendered me blind.
No, I wasn’t blind. It was just pitch black everywhere, but for a tiny sliver of gray light filtering from a tiny grate in the far wall, across grimy wooden bars that separated my tiny four-by-four square space, from the rest of the room populated with other empty four-by-four enclosed spaces.
Cage. Or cages. I was in a cage, in a room that smelled dank, ripe with the smell of human bodies and—yeesh. Was that me? I hoped, for what little remained of my pride, that it was not, and a quick slap of hand on my dry jeans crotch confirmed I hadn’t actually pissed myself while I’d been unconscious. But someone else had pissed in here, and I wanted to know where the puddle was so I could avoid it.
I wasn’t as achey all over as when I first woke, but it was still an effort to pull dead limbs back into a semblance of functionality before I could finally sit up and take stock.
I was not in the stairwell, but I might have been a damn sight happier if I was, because where I actually sat was in the dungeons.
Oh yes, I may have forgotten to mention that. Mr. Bentley had apparently thought I’d looked… judgey… when I arrived, and had given me a museum tour while we waited for the others. We’d started in the basements, what had once been wine cellars, servants’ quarters, store rooms, and yes, dungeons. The wine cellars retained their purpose, holding refrigeration units instead of aging oak kegs. I didn’t know about the servants’ quarters and store rooms, but the dungeons had been completely torn out, interior walls knocked down, repaved and converted into a basement parking lot for the employees.
That was not the dungeons I was in now, even though I remembered the stained black stone of the perimeter walls, and the grate that opened out into a ditch on the western side of the castle. This was definitely the dungeons, only it didn’t look like it had when I’d been shown here mere hours ago.
Had it really just been hours? I didn’t know how long I’d been out, but I didn’t care. One of the museum workers—it had to be, I didn’t think there’d been anyone else in the castle besides them, at least not that I’d seen from Milliardo’s brief—had cold-cocked me when I asked for medical assistance. For all I knew, this was a bloody setup from that goddamn platinum prince. We’d hated each other since forever. And now I’d fallen for his ploy, hook, line and sinker. Probably waiting in the wings now to have the vaunted gundam pilots brought to heel.
Well, fuck that. I wasn’t staying here; yes, damn it, not even for Heero’s goddamn funeral. No hot guy is ever worth that . I may be a hopeless simp, but I’m a simp with a modicum of self-preservation. I was blowing this place the first chance I got. I just needed to make sure none of the other guys had arrived while I was out and been captured as well.
I got up and looked at the wooden grilled door. There was a massive rusted lock, old-fashioned and probably older than my nonexistent grandparents, blocking my way to freedom. I shook the lock and the metal clinked ominously. Locked tight.
Something stirred in the blackness beyond the light from the grate.
“Ye ain’t gettin’ outta here, boy.”
I whipped around, blinking and peering about. My eyes had adjusted to the gloom enough that I could make out a lump in one of the far cages. A lump covered in what looked like a rough-hewn sheet or tarp. It twitched and moved and sat up. A face emerged from between a mass of tangled, dirty, gray hair. A glint in the darkness. Was it the man’s eyes or was that a gold tooth…?
“Watch me,” I muttered.
He cackled. “No, ye ain’t. Ye be gettin’ out of here and there be guards outside the dungeons. The grand duke ain’t sufferin’ no papists on this vaunted land. Pah! Horseshit!”
He spat. No really, he actually spat. Indoors .
Milliardo must be deeply off his rocker. Not only did he hire funnily dressed goons to pose as museum workers, he even had actors down here, pretending they were prisoners. What the hell? And that word he’d uttered. The worker goon in the stairwell had said that too.
Was I supposed to be insulted because the grand duke of trashy blond bombshells thought I was Catholic ? Showed what he knew about me if he thought my priest’s collar and crucifix were meant to be signs of religiosity.
I was already moving. I didn’t have my backpack with me—the stairwell goons must’ve taken it when they found me half-dead—but see, I didn’t need it to get myself out of hairy situations. I’d learned from being taken captive by Oz multiple times during the war.
Don’t ever let yourself get taken without something handy to pick the lock that restrains you.
Sounded a lot like something Solo would say when we were a gang of street urchins breaking into abandoned buildings for shelter. And hair as long and massive as mine? Yep, you got it. Hair pins.
Had to count myself lucky the dozen I’d stuck in my braid hadn’t stabbed my brain when I fell, but I found one that was still in reasonably serviceable shape, and made quick work of the lock. It was stupidly easy.
I smirked at the other prisoner— actor— sitting and stewing in his cell, watching me. “He ain’t holding a gundam pilot down, I don’t think. Not when it’s the God of Death.”
“Gund—what?” The old geezer’s accent thickened as he tripped over the word just about every soul in the ESUN knew.
I let myself out of my cage and looked around to get my bearings. This had to still be the basement parking lot, this dungeon. I just didn’t know how they managed to convert it back into a dungeon. But I remembered my way. The ramp had been on the south wall, next to the grate and… yep, there’s no ramp there now, but there was another wooden staircase leading up to the store rooms, if memory served. And if this host of actor-goons hadn’t remodeled the whole damn place while I’d been sleeping. Beyond that would be the servant rooms, and a servants’ exit, just above the ditch on the west wall.
I took one last, sneering look at the place, hoping but not really expecting my things to be somewhere around. They weren’t, so I grinned and shot the actor in the cage with a jaunty salute.
“You can tell the Prince of Peroxide that there ain’t no chains—not even gundanium—that can hold a gundam pilot down. He should know that.”
I smirked. I seemed to be doing that a lot after figuring out Milliardo’s nefarious plans.
“Oh, and that the God of Death sends his regards.”