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Beyond the Looking Glass	By : shinigamiinochi Category: Gundam Wing/AC > Yaoi - Male/Male Views: 1983 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Wing/AC, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 8
- 9
Beyond the Looking Glass

Chapter 3: Dolls

Part 5
　

June 8th, 2066
　

Ever since he had been very small, Quatre had seen things that no one, not even his other siblings, had been able to see. He remembered, as a child, loving his gift. He always knew what his sisters and father were thinking, always knew what cards his playmates had been holding when they played goldfish, and sometimes when he touched things, a book, a picture, he would see the whole world of it laid out before him. When he had told his family these things, they had always written it off as a child's imagination.

If he told them he was going out to play with a friend who lived down the street, at the dilapidated house that would later be bulldozed for the sake of a convenience store when he was a teenager, they had just called him his imaginary friend. If they had listened to him describe his friend, they would have realized his 'imaginary companion' matched the description of the boy that used to live there until his mother had poisoned him and his father had moved far away.

One day in the late winter, when he had just been seven years old, a group of boys had asked him to come out sledding with them and he had refused. The son of one of the richest men in that small village he had grown up in, a foreigner and a shy child, Quatre seldom got asked out by other children to play unless his father arranged it with their parents. It wouldn't be until he met Trowa that he had any real friends. His father had demanded to know why he had turned them down and Quatre told him he didn't want to go swimming. His father had stalked off in disgust, having lost all patience for his son's games, but had returned hours later. He told Quatre that the two of the children that had gone sledding had hit a patch of thin ice by the lake and had drowned.

Quatre had told him that he knew, that he told him he didn't want to swim. When his father had asked him, a nervous look in his eye, where he had heard that from, Quatre had told him the truth. His mother had told him not to go with those boys, that they would fall through the ice and try to swim, but couldn't. His mother, who had died when Quatre had been a baby and had never gotten to meet, except for in photographs. Except for the many times during his childhood that she had visited him. One of his sisters had overheard what he had said and called him a horrible child, saying such a thing about their mother. His father hadn't been angry. He had been frightened.

They moved shortly after that. His father had claimed it was because of corporate espionage, but at eight years old, he had wondered if it wasn't because of what he had told him. They never spoke of it again, he and his father, and Quatre never mentioned how, even though they had moved all the way to Japan, he still saw his mother once in awhile. As he had grown older, the times he saw her grew less frequent, but he would glimpse her once in awhile, watching them with a sad smile on her face.

As Quatre had gotten older, his 'gift' had stopped being a delight. He could still sense how his family and friends felt, but feeling one of his sisters fall in love with one of the boys in her class or feeling Relena's excitement when she got an A in Calculus, her hardest subject, didn't make up for the fear he felt whenever his father looked at him. It certainly didn't make up for the way he felt every time he had looked up at the Matsuei Mansion.

He had been ten when he had learned the true horror of his gift, when he had learned that not every ghost was like the boy he used to play with or like his mother. Nasue, even in this period of growth and emulation of western civilization, was a small town. There were only two grocery stores, one hospital, one college, and two public schools, an elementary school and a high school. Dragonfly Pond Lake and the woods surrounding the Matsuei Mansion took up most of the town. Quatre had never really understood why the woods and the mansion had never been bulldozed in the name of progress beyond a small history lesson he had been taught his first year of school here about the importance of maintaining historical places and the religious vitality of the mansion, which had, according to town lore, been a spiritual place once.

The lesson had been incredibly vague about the mansion, what purpose it had served, who had lived there, and what exactly was so vital about it beyond stressing the fact that it was. All of the children who had grown up in Nasue and came from old families had simply nodded to the teacher's words, the same as they would have if he had been talking to them about how the seasons changed and Quatre had wondered if there was some kind of oral history that got passed down among the residents of this town or if it was just not viewed as important. All he knew was that his father had ordered him to stay away from that wooded path and the house on the very first day they had arrived and he had obeyed.

For a small town, Nasue had a large cemetery. The area of land that had been set aside for it was larger than any public space that Quatre had ever seen in the town, something that had always struck him as strange and morbid. It was not simply that the town had set aside a large amount of space for the graveyard, but that all of it had been used to some extent. Quatre had only been there a handful of times and each time, it had made him feel like his insides were trying to crawl out of his throat, but were being weighed down by a spiked, iron ball.

Half of the graveyard was like any other graveyard Quatre had been to, a place where residents of the town buried the ashes of their family members and loved ones, but the other half was separate and forbidden to the residents of Nasue. This, like the reason why Matsuei Mansion still stood, and the tiny mirrors that littered the graveyard, seemed to be something everyone in the town accepted easily and simply stayed far away from that side of the cemetery. Quatre had asked one of his teachers about it once, if it was the Matsuei burial plot was located, and they had only remarked that the Matsuei's had never mourned their dead in the village and something bad had happened in Nasue's history that had resulted in many, many deaths, and the victims of this tragedy were buried there, but it was considered taboo for anyone to tread on that land beyond those that tended to those graves.

Thinking about that had always given Quatre a chill. Graves, in this case, at least according to the few Nasue natives he had spoken to about it, meant actual graves, holding human remains instead of ashes, something that was rare in Japan. He assumed that the tragedy had been some sort of plague, but if that was the case, it had to be because of some superstition that had caused the villagers back then not to burn the victims, which had probably made the plague worse.

It had been in that cemetery where Quatre had seen his very first malevolent spirit. He had only been living in Nasue for two years and was still finding it hard to adjust at ten years old, the only blond child in a class of Japanese students since Trowa had been in the class above his. Three months into his new school year, his teacher had suffered a stroke and died. He and the rest of his classmates had been escorted to the cemetery to pay their respects by their new teacher, his very first trip to the place.

He had seen her from a distance at first, a woman wearing a western style black dress, complete with a black veil and lacy, black gloves. Her hair had also been black, cropped around her face. It had been raining out, the entire class huddled under umbrellas, but the woman hadn't looked wet at all.

At a glance, at an age before he recognized how those sort of things felt, he had thought she was just another mourner, but she had just stood there, staring at him through her veil and he had felt something deep in his stomach, a sickness just from looking at her. Quatre had stayed glued to his teacher's side for the rest of that trip, always keeping an eye on the strange woman, but she never moved and never changed her attention from him.

She had followed him back to the school. As he had left the cemetery, he had looked back, and had felt relieved when he hadn't seen her. But when they had returned to the classroom and he had looked out the window, she had been standing there in the playground. Staring at him. And when school had ended and he had gone outside to where his father was supposed to pick him up, she had been standing there across the street, still staring, always staring.

He had waited and waited and waited, staring back at the specter, but his father hadn't showed up. One by one, his classmates had gone home and he had suddenly found himself alone. His teacher, who was supposed to stay with all of the students until their parents came for them, had disappeared. Some part of him had realized that his father not picking him up, his teacher leaving him alone, had been the woman's doing and had felt an incredible sense of terror before he had really understood why.

Right when Quatre had realized that he was all alone, the woman's bloodless lips had curved upwards. He had imagined it would be what a wooden doll would look like if it tried to smile. If he had been older, the word that would have immediately come into his head looking at that smile would have been 'sinister.' Staring at her, suddenly a thousand horrible images had exploded into his head. Blood. Death. Pain. Insanity. Rage. Five boys, all around his age, some with purple faces, one bloated with water, another covered in black contusions, but all dead and laying with their limbs askew, like broken dolls.

Across the street, the woman took a step forward, the only movement she had made this entire time, and Quatre had ran, terror making his heart burst. He had ran all the way home, up to his room, and spent the rest of the night hiding under the covers of his bed, shaking and sobbing with fear and nothing his sisters or father had done or said had gotten him to come out. When he eventually did sleep, his nightmares had been filled with things no ten year old should ever dream about.

That morning, the body of one of his classmates had been found floating in the lake, his small body bloated and his head twisted around. They never found the killer and never would. Quatre's father had tried to keep that from him, but Quatre had known. He had known the minute he had seen that woman across the street from him.

After that, Quatre had quickly learned to be scared of his gift. He had never figured out if that woman had followed him from the cemetery simply because he... he had been the kind of victim she had been looking for, or if it had been because of his gift, but he would never forget that smile, those eyes that he couldn't quite make out past the veil staring at him. Every time he went to the cemetery after that, no matter what he felt, he was sure to keep his head down, even though some deep instinct almost had him looking up where he had seen the woman last.

He managed to live in Nasue for two more years before catching a glimpse of the Matsuei Mansion. His father's warning, and the vital lesson he had gotten two years previous had instilled in him a healthy respect and a healthy fear for the place. Older, more superstitious people around town loved filling Quatre and his friends' heads with stories about the place, about all the people who died there, how it was cursed and haunted, a shadow cast over the entire town, and while up until now, he had had no real proof that any of those stories were true, he would never risk it.

His experience with the mansion, up until this recent venture of course, had been tame compared to the incident at the cemetery, but in some ways it had been a lot worse. It had been during Nasue's Summer festival that he had forgotten himself and wandered too close to the mansion. He had been drunk on sweets, okonomiyaki, and Trowa. His best friend, as he did every year since they had met, had accompanied him to the festival and Quatre had been happy to walk through the town with him that night, just the two of them, as fireworks lit up the sky. He might have only been twelve years old, but even back then, he had been enamored with Trowa, even if he had been too young to realize that his looking up to his friend was something else entirely.

He would remember it for the rest of his life, however long that was, the two of them walking, him looking up at Trowa's green eyes as his friend talked about the fireworks. Then, he felt something in his head. It had been gradual, a tickling at first. Then it had felt like there glass shards in his skull, digging into his brain. Some magnetic force had him look up, above the tree line of the forest, to that dark shape that was the mansion and he had realized how long they had been walking, how close they were to that... thing.

It was impossible to find the right words to describe exactly what he saw and felt as he looked up at the old, abandoned house on the steep hill beyond the woods. He felt a pain he had never felt before, he felt... darkness, a thing he never would have thought capable of feeling. He heard screaming and could taste blood. But beyond that, his mind was touched by insanity. For a moment in his brief life, he forgot all about his love for the boy standing next to him, he forgot about his mother and his father, his sisters, his hopes and dreams. He was consumed by madness and rage and fear and horror.

Quatre then threw up, practically explosively, on the ground, his body doubling over as though someone had just punched him in the stomach. Trowa watched him, frightened, as the younger boy puked up everything he had just eaten. Quatre heard Trowa say something about him having eaten too much sugar and began to lead him back to the festival to get some water. He had felt equal parts joy at putting that horrible place at his back, and equal parts terror at having it at his back, like he was turning his back on a rabid dog that might very well lunge and rip the back of his neck out. He had almost screamed in fear that Trowa never turn his back on it, that shadow over the town. He had looked at the mansion for just twelve seconds.

Quatre had adamantly promised himself that he would never go anywhere near that horrible place, not even so close that he could see the top of the mansion. Then Relena had decided to do their stupid school project here. If he hadn't been so scared, he would have laughed bitterly when Trowa had told him that. Five years staying away from this place, and his friends had dragged him inside the cursed place. He had known, the whole drive up to this place, that something horrible was destined to happen. He had felt it as he had looked upon the house for the second time, and he had known it when he had stepped inside. But still, he had come here. He had let Trowa's presence give him hope that he could stave off his visions, that he might use his gift to protect his friends. Seventeen years old and he was still such a naive child.

They never should have come here. He should have listened to his father... he should have listened to himself. More than anything else, he should have listened to his gift and the single warning it had given him on the drive up here. As they had traversed up the wooden hill to the mansion, he had seen something. Not a demon or a ghost or some kind of vision of their future, but the one thing that he had relied on as a child. Through the thick trees, he had seen his mother. Seeing her there, wearing the same white dress she had died in, and he had felt a chill go through him, something that never happened when he saw her. All of her usual warmth and comfort had been absent. As she had watched him pass her, she had been crying.

Would he have been able to save his friends if he had heeded his mother's warning and demanded they turn around? He doubted it. Relena and Wufei had never believed in his psychic gift. Zechs seemed doubtful, but still respectful. Heero had always been ambivalent about his visions, not disbelieving him but also not seeming to care about them either until now. Trowa was the only one of them that had always listened to him, had always treated his visions as fact. He might not have been able to save the others, but he could have saved Trowa. He would go to his grave hating himself for following his friends blindly, like he always did.

He had felt terrified the second he had walked into this place, but the most scared he had felt wasn't when the main door had locked them in, or seeing Duo's ghostly form, or even watching his friends' flashlights going out one by one in the maze of guest rooms. He had felt the most scared when his own flashlight had gone out and, in his terror, had reached out for Trowa, Trowa the only man he had ever loved, Trowa who had always been by his side, Trowa who had been standing no more than two feet away from him, and had only grasped at empty air.

"Trowa?" Quatre called out in a hushed whisper, afraid of the kind of response he would get, but the silence he received was much worse.

"Trowa!" he screamed.

His voice echoed and somehow sounded like it was mocking him. There was, impossibly, no answer. No, he thought, not impossibly. Hadn't he said it himself? In this place, anything and everything was possible. Seconds had passed since his flashlight had gone out, but he was alone. The worst thing in his imagining had happened. His friends, his boyfriend, all of them were gone and he was alone in a house full of the dead. That knowledge settled painfully in his racing heart. He hadn't realize just how much he had been relying on the group to keep sane.

He had told himself that he accepted his fate, that there was nothing he or any of his friends could do in this place to stay alive. All of his visions of the dead in this place, all of his feelings of horror and the feelings his friends had been feeding him told him that. But now, he felt an incredible terror. It was easy to think he could succumb to the inevitable when Trowa and the others were with him, but by himself... his fear wouldn't let him feel numb about any of it. Like a hyena with a wounded gazelle, Duo had singled him out and separated him from his herd. Had he been picked to be the first one of the group to die? Because he was the weakest, or perhaps because Duo had sensed some sort of threat from his abilities?

His gift gave him no clues. All he could feel was the dark, this black, ominous thing around him. His abilities gleefully informed him of some of the things that were living in there, thriving in there. Twisted things full of pain and hate, things that were all too happy for his fear. It was the things that he couldn't quite feel that frightened him the most.

The walls of this room had eyes. A thousand eyes, all directed at him, at his heart. And Duo was there, all around him. He was the walls. He was the floor that Quatre stood on. He was the air that he was breathing. That foul air with the smell of decay and age and staleness. Thinking about it for more than a second would drive him completely mad. If he wasn't already. Trowa... where was Trowa? Was he even still alive? He tried to reach out with his mind to feel him, but he only felt emptiness. Emptiness and something evil in the dark, meeting his mind like a rapist in the shadows, making him almost throw up like he had five years ago. He didn't dare reach out into this darkness again.

Crying softly, Quatre hit his flashlight in desperation and anger. It was no good. It wanted him here, in the dark, and it had no use for Quatre's only source of light. He dropped it to the ground, the metal flashlight making an unwelcoming thumping sound as it hit the ancient wood floor. Quatre sat on the ground and pushed back until his back hit a wall. He wrapped his arms around his knees and stayed there, his tears feeling heavy and somehow disgusting to him on his face. If Trowa could see him now, he would find him pathetic, just sitting here, crying in the dark. He should be trying to find his friends, should be feeling around the room for the door. He didn't want to spend a single second in this dark place, but he couldn't find the will to stand up or do anything of the things the logical part of his brain was telling him to do.

What was the point? They were all going to die. Whether it happened now or later, it was the only inevitability. He could stumble around in the dark, and maybe he would find the door. Maybe there was no door to find. Even if he did get out of this room, it was just more darkness. It was endless, as endless as this night. If he was truly lucky, he would fall down some steps and break his neck, but Duo would not allow that. Quatre had no idea what the malicious ghost would do, how he would kill them, but it wouldn't be from something so painless, he knew that much. No matter how far he traveled in this place, if it didn't want him to, he would never find his friends. He would never find Trowa.

Quatre shuddered in the dark, feeling cold fingers wrapping around his heart and breath ghosting across his skin. It could well be his imagination. It could be his gift. It could be anything at all. The real reason why he was sitting there wasn't that he saw no point in trying to do anything. It was because he didn't want to stumble in the dark. He didn't want to reach his hand out and touch something... something that was not old wood or rotten paper.

He grasped at his head and squeezed his eyes shut. It was beginning to ache. He focused everything he had at not letting whatever was trying to get inside of him a way in. A vision or some kind of malice, he couldn't afford either. Not if he didn't want to go completely insane. Being here in the dark... every minute felt like an hour, every second pure torture. All he could do was hear his furious heart beat in his head, whispers in his ears, and feel the darkness press against him, wanting to consume him. To eat him.

'I should just kill myself,' he thought in despair, 'If this is what the rest of my life is going to be like, fighting against visions, being all alone here, I should just end it now."

He did not want to be here anymore. He didn't want to be without Trowa. Beyond everything else, he did not want to meet it. He didn't want to find out what it had planned for him, whatever painful, horrific death it had chosen for him. Better to take his own life than to open his eyes and see it leering at him from the shadows.

Yes... yes... do it... kill yourself...

It would be so easy. There were a hundred things, possibly in this very room, he could do the job with. Rope, a sharp shard of wood or glass... It wouldn't hurt too much and then he would be free of his fear. Free of his visions at last, away from this darkness and rage, away from it.

So simple... yes... no more fear, no more anger, no more betrayal...

Quatre let go of his knees and groped around him, searching for something, anything. His fingers quickly met something on the ground not all that far from where he had been sitting, a small saw. It felt sharp where it shouldn't have, having been here for hundreds of years. It was as though the tool had been laid there just for him.

Do it

He pressed the saw to his throat and shook, feeling the cold metal against his skin

Do it do it do it

He dug the serrated blade into his flesh and felt one of the points break the skin. The heat of his blood as it trailed down his neck was repulsive and shocking.

Now

"No!" Quatre screamed, throwing the saw away from him.

He sobbed and wiped at his bloody neck, frightened at the damage he had done to himself, but as his fingers found the wound on his neck, he realized he had barely cut himself at all. He shook so hard, he felt like he was having a seizure.

He had almost slit his own throat. That voice in his head... that despair he had felt... He had come so very close to listening to it. Quatre laughed insanely in the dark room. No more fear... those thoughts had been alien. Killing himself wasn't going to free him from this nightmare. If he died here, that would be it. It would be him haunting these halls, searching forever for Trowa. Maybe it would even be him who would kill his friends, possessed by it, the darkness that thrived in this rotting mansion. In this place, nothing died, not really. And hadn't that been the worst of his fears, not the fear of a painful death, but the fear of what would come after? A fate worse than any death Duo could deliver...

Quatre slammed his head into the wall behind him in shock when his flashlight flickered and for a brief moment, he saw the glimmer of eyes in front of him, each one reflecting the light from the flashlight for a mere second. He scrambled for the spot where he had dropped the flashlight, his heart slamming around in his chest like a frightened bird. He forgot all about surrendering to his fate, those watching eyes, and even how close he had just come to committing suicide, focused only on that wonderful light he had seen. Before now, he had had no idea how much he had come to rely on such a little thing.

He was so sure it would be just like before when he had reached for Trowa only to find nothing, that the flashlight wouldn't be where he had dropped it. Something had made it roll away or it had been spirited away to keep him in the dark. His fingers touched round, cold metal and Quatre almost screamed with joy. He snatched the flashlight up before anything else could grab it. He felt something grab his wrist and nearly wrenched his hand back before he realized that whatever was wrapped around his wrist wasn't the cold flesh of some specter, but just cloth, the strap of the flashlight.

Taking a deep, labored breath, Quatre flicked the switch of the flashlight. Beautiful, man made light spilled out into the blackness, illuminating a shattered, wooden bench and tools scattered everywhere. It also lit up the face of the doll that was inches from his own as it stared up at him with glimmering, black button eyes sewn into an aged, rough cloth, as well as it's hand which tightly gripped Quatre's wrist.

The blonde teenager screamed and yanked his hand back. The cloth of the doll's hand was rotten and gave way with a sickening rip, like that of wet paper. Quatre stumbled back, hitting the wall again, and the beam of the flash light went wild. The eyes that he had seen before, beady and black and lifeless, belonged to a countless number of dolls strewn about the room, all in various stages of decomposition and rot, some with shattered limbs, others with missing patches of hair and eyes. Small dolls made of cloth bodies and black and red straw hair hung from the ceiling. As he moved the flashlight across them, they swung in a breeze that didn't exist, like small children swinging higher and higher. When he had seen them before, they had looked like charms. Now they looked like victims of some madman, strung up and defenseless.

'The workshop,' Quatre realized and knew that if he dared to turn around, to put his back to the dolls, he would see that a part of the wall behind him was warped and destroyed by some terrible force.

It should have given him some kind of relief. Of all the places he might have been spirited away to, he had ended up not only on the same floor he had been taken from, but in a room he had been to previously instead of lost in one of the hundreds of other rooms he hadn't. With his flashlight working again, he could find his way back to the room he had been taken from. He might even be able to find his friends and that thought made hope blossom in his heart. A hope he had no right to feel.

He didn't feel relieved at all. To find himself in a completely different room, all within the time that his flashlight had winked out, was impossible. That he was on the same floor didn't matter. It was just as impossible as ending up in some place on a different floor on the other side of the mansion. He hadn't even thought of it as being teleported some other place, but as being spirited away, taken, and that was exactly what this was. He had been taken from his group in the blink of an eye and it could happen at any moment. Knowing where he was didn't matter.

He didn't even know how much time, in reality, had passed since he had been taken. It could have been seconds, like how it felt, or it could have been days. Maybe he could find his friends. Maybe they were all still there in those rooms, looking for him. Or maybe they were someplace else entirely. Maybe they were dead. Maybe in he wouldn't even survive the short trip to those guest rooms. Maybe he wouldn't be able to find them, maybe his flashlight would go out and he would find himself someplace else again.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. In this place, none of it mattered. It wasn't even worth his fear, wondering if he dared move out of this room. He had no power here, even his choices were meaningless. Whatever Duo wanted to happen to him would happen. He had brought him here and if he didn't want him to leave, he would be trapped in this room forever. Despair filled him and he had to bite down on his lower lip hard enough to draw blood to keep his tears from spilling out, something he couldn't afford even more than hope. He just wanted to see Trowa, even just hear his voice. If he had to die, why couldn't he be with him when it happened?

If this was like any other time he had used his psychic ability to reach out to touch the dead, he would have done so. He would have reached out his mind into the dark and tried to find Duo. He would have tried to find out what it was Duo really wanted and found some way out. But this place wasn't haunted. A spirit did not roam these halls, looking for something it had once lost. This place was the palace of death itself.

Every board, every pane of glass and straw mat reeked of it. This place was just as much of a dead, lost soul as Duo was. This place was Duo. He had tried to explain that to the others, but he knew that they just couldn't understand it. He could have tried harder, but he hadn't wanted to tell them that every shadow they walked through was it, every room just another part of the thing that kept them here. And he knew that if he tried to reach out his mind to touch that thing, this part of Duo that was in the very air he breathed, his mind would become a part of it. Maybe that had already happened.

Quatre touched his throat again, feeling the slight cut there. Maybe the madness was already seeping into him. If he wasn't careful, he knew what he would see in this room. It was already there, creeping along the edges of his sight, those terrible visions. He stepped away from the wall and looked down at the doll that had grabbed him. It's beady eyes looked up at him as though it were accusing him of tearing it's arm off. The arm that had grabbed him in the dark laid next to it, the rotten stuffing that had spilled out of it in a small pile and in the low light, it looked disturbing, like off color flesh or a spider's egg sac. Quatre saw that something had ripped off the doll's legs at some point, like a child taking the limbs off a helpless insect. It didn't seem capable of moving anymore.

"What do you want, Duo?" he heard himself ask the quiet room and immediately berated himself for it. Trying to communicate with the spirit was pointless, and he really didn't want to be answered.

Something in the mirror moved. Quatre frantically swung his flashlight to it, the glare off the reflected surface making him wince and he lowered it to the floor. He was standing several feet from it and for a moment, he was sure that the figure he saw there was just his own reflection. It was definitely male and had the same blonde hair and red t-shirt that he had. It took him no more than a second to realize that it wasn't his reflection at all, that the thing in the mirror was bigger than he was, older, and while the spirit did appear to have blonde hair, a red t-shirt was not at all what he had seen.

The man appeared to have died in his late forties, but any features besides the fact that he had been taller and more muscled than Quatre could have any hope to be with his scrawny body were so mangled and mutilated, they were impossible to tell. His face looked like some large animal had gone after it, just a mess of red flesh with one dead eye peering out at Quatre. The blood vessels in that eye had hemorrhaged, making even his original eye color impossible to tell, but his gaze seemed almost miserable to the teenaged boy. His torso was a complete horror, his chest and stomach ripped open by thousands of bites. His ribs hung out at various angles, obviously broken. From the open cavity that had once been his stomach, entrails and flesh hung out, his intestines which looked to have been a wonderful feast for some creature, dragged on the floor. Just looking at him made Quatre gag and it took every ounce of his control not to vomit the little amount of food he had eaten... he didn't even know how long ago, if there even was anything in his stomach anymore.

He blinked and the apparition vanished. He didn't need his gift to tell him that it had been one of his visions and if any of his friends had been there, they wouldn't have been able to see it. Perhaps Heero would have. His friend seemed to have almost as much psychic talent as Quatre did in this place. That spirit in the mirror had been one of Duo's victims, he could feel that much. But those wounds... it had looked like the man had been attacked by a dozen ravenous animals...

As the spirit disappeared in the mirror, nothing replaced it. Quatre could not see his reflection. Fear hit him in waves and although every instinct he had screamed at him not to, he walked up to the mirror until he was standing right in front of it. He realized, that fear growing and growing, that he had assumed that the ghost had been in the mirror because he had not seen himself in it, but that from where he had been standing, the spirit would have stood directly behind him if it had been nothing more than a reflection...

He waved his hands in front of the mirror, but there was nothing. He could see the dolls behind him and the work bench, or what was left of it, reflected there, but not him. He felt like Duo was mocking him, erasing him. Rage and fear equally rolled in his guts.

"I'm still alive!" he screamed at the mirror and slammed his fists against it.

Any other mirror would have cracked at the hit, but this one was not even fazed.

'Am I though? Am I alive, or am I just...'

The thought sent tremors of cold dread through him. He felt cold. So unbearably cold.

'This is what insanity feels like,' he thought and almost laughed at himself.

Shrieking, mocking laughter filled the room, as though it had heard his own thought. Quatre swung his flashlight around, not trusting the reflection of the room in the mirror. He watched, feeling frozen in place, as things in the dark began to move all around him. Some strange and awful sound joined with the laughter and it took him several seconds to realize that it was the sound of old joints clicking into place. One by one, the dolls strewn about the room began to move. Their limbs trembled like an arthritic old man's as they, one by one, began to rise. They stood by the walls of the room like damaged soldiers, their bodies creaking and rotten and malformed.

They all turned their heads, their eyes finding Quatre, and he would have screamed if he hadn't felt so completely frightened, paralyzed by a fear that would have driven him mad if he hadn't already passed that point already. Their eyes were all different shapes and sizes and color, some made of glass, some of bead, some of buttons, but in the dark and under the faint light of Quatre's flashlight, those eyes gleamed identically, like rats'. Even in the darkness, he could see their mouths, the ones that even had mouths left, gape open. They were laughing at him.

Suddenly, with a burst of speed and fluidity that should have been impossible for the aged dolls, they stumbled towards him. In his head, he saw a doll, one of that looked eerily like Duo, bite into his neck with it's deformed, broken jaws. He felt wooden splinters dig into his throat as it was ripped out. He could even taste thick blood on his tongue, could feel a searing pain where there was no injury. A wooden hand wrapped around leg and Quatre screamed, kicking the doll away from him as more closed in on him. The doll, the wood it made of so old and fragile, practically exploded as his foot made contact, raining a cloud of dust and splinters in the air.

Quatre didn't know what was more terrible, the grotesque, animalistic lumbering of the dolls as they came after him, or that laughter that both seemed to come out of the gaping mouths of the little golems and from out of the walls. Laughter that was high pitched and insane and full of bitter mockery. Laughter, Quatre realized, that sounded like a child's.

It came to him then that in his fear of the dolls, he had turned his back to the mirror. In his mind's eye, he saw something that might have been a vision or it might have been his imagination; a monstrous, serpentine form and impossibly long, white arms reaching for him from that mirror, a mouth full of teeth like needles...

Pure, animal terror exploded in him and Quatre ran to the door. The beam of his flashlight darted all around, making the forms of the lurching dolls even more awful than they already were, and for a moment he thought he wouldn't find it. The room wasn't that big, but in the darkness it was like a gaping chasm he had no hope of escaping from. He almost cried when his fingers touched the door handle. He pulled on it with every ounce of strength he had, so sure that it wouldn't open. Duo would make sure that it wouldn't open. It would get stuck, or not even move a centimeter, held tight by some powerful force, or it wouldn't open in time. The dolls would get him and devour him.

The door slid open with impossible easiness, making a loud slamming noise with the force he had used. Quatre didn't stop to question why he would be allowed out of his tomb and he didn't check to see if the dolls were still animated. He ran the very second the door opened wide enough for him to fit through and promptly collided into something hard, something that was human and not the wall of the hallway. Something male. Something that he wasn't so sure was alive.

'Duo,' Quatre thought and a hoarse scream was wrenched from him before it registered in him that the figure was taller than the spirit was, and the chest he had run into was warm and familiar.

Kind green eyes looked down at him with shock and concern instead of dead, violet ones full of malice. Long arms, as known and loved as his own, wrapped around him tightly, practically crushing him to that familiar chest.

"Quatre," Trowa said breathlessly, his voice thick with a bastard mix of fear, relief, disbelief, and joy, all colliding with each other, "I thought..."

He didn't need to finish that sentence, Quatre was thinking the same thing, a thing that he couldn't bare to voice out loud.

'I thought I would never see you again.'

Dimly, as he hugged his lover as tightly as Trowa was holding him, Quatre realized that he was crying so hard he was breathing in more tears and dust than actual air and had to force himself to breathe normally. If he thought at all, even for a second, that the dust coating his throat and tongue were from that doll, he might start screaming and he would never be able to get that stopped. It didn't matter, he thought, Trowa was here. The man he loved was here and he wasn't alone. Those dolls didn't matter. The things he had seen didn't matter. The darkness of the hallway and his tight grip on his forgotten flashlight didn't matter. Trowa in his arms was all that mattered. Hearing his heartbeat, just as frantic as his own, through his shirt, rapid but strong and alive was all that ever mattered. Everything else was whispers in his head. The fabric of Trowa's t-shirt in his clenching fingers was the most real thing in the universe.

"Where were you?" he was finally able to gasp out when he felt Trowa's own fingers in his hair, hurting him with their eager grip if only he cared about something as unimportant as pain, "How... how did you find me?"

"The lights went out," Trowa sounded like he was choking on his words, "when I finally got my torch working again, I was someplace else, someplace on this floor, but I didn't recognize it. Everyone was gone. You were gone. I thought that the worst had happened, that our dreams had come true... I thought that all of you were gone and I..." 'I was alone,' Quatre thought and remembered those same thoughts and where they had led him, "I ran and ran and ran until I came back to this hallway. Then I heard you scream..."

Quatre couldn't tell if Trowa's racing heartbeat was from running, excitement from finding him, or terror. As his boyfriend talked, his grabbing fingers relaxed and stroked his hair lightly.

"You're shaking," Trowa murmured, finally realizing that.

"The same thing happened to me," Quatre confessed, "One moment I was standing right next to you, then my light died and you were just gone. And when my flashlight worked again, I wasn't in those rooms anymore."

"Where?" Trowa asked.

"T... there," Quatre whispered and pointed with a trembling finger to the door he had run through.

The door was closed again, but Quatre had no recollection of shutting it behind him and there was no way it could have shut, even a fraction, unless he had. Trowa untangled himself from his boyfriend, leaving Quatre feeling cold, like the mere absence of his touch had punched a hole in his heart and all of the heat in his body was seeping out through it. He felt utterly abandoned and, for a moment, bitter and angry at his lover for just letting go of him like that when he needed his warmth and companionship so badly. Then everything he felt turned to horror as Trowa reached out to touch the door.

"No!" he yelled, "Don't go in there!"

Trowa looked at him oddly and Quatre felt his bitterness keenly again. He thought he saw a flash of irritation in those green eyes and, if only for a second, he hated Trowa for it.

"I have to, Quatre," Trowa said tiredly and his tone, as though he were explaining something to a small child, needled the other boy, "there might be some clue about what's going on."

"There isn't," the blonde insisted, even though he knew that that was a lie. He had been far too frightened to actually look around the room before, but he really didn't think that there was anything in that cursed room that would tell them where their friends were or why they had been taken only for the two of them to be reunited, "Trowa, please, don't go in there! The dolls in that room..."

He couldn't find the right words for what he had seen. Alive was not at all correct for what those dolls were, but neither was haunted or even cursed.

"They're... they're evil . They're possessed by something! Just now they tried to..." again he struggled with his words.

What had they been trying to do? Kill him? Some part of him, the part of him that sensed these sort of things, knew that Duo had not been the one to animate those dolls, not the spirit that they had seen. It had been something different... something that felt entirely different to Quatre but no less malevolent. Even if it wasn't Duo, he had still sensed that the entity had wanted to harm him, but if it had been trying to kill him, it could have. Yet the dolls had gone after him sluggishly, actually allowing him to reach the door. Had it simply wanted to frighten him? Threaten him? Well, it had certainly succeeded.

"You don't have to go back in," Trowa assured him, smiling softly at him, and that tired, irritated tone was gone from his voice. It was as though a stranger had slipped into his lover's skin, but only for a moment before he had come back to himself, "I just want to take a quick peek. If I see anything... bad, we'll make a run for it, ok?"

Quatre wanted to tell him no, that just a peek was bad enough, and that running in this place was pointless, but he knew that thinking they were safe just because that door was now closed was just as pointless. Nothing mattered, he reminded himself, nothing they did was going to amount to anything, so what difference did it make? When he was with Trowa, he kept forgetting that they were marked for death.

"Here," Trowa wrapped his larger hand around Quatre's, the warmth of his skin driving away all of the chill he felt, "hold my hand. As long as we hold each other's hands, it will be alright. I won't loose you again and I won't let go."

Quatre looked down at their hands linked together in the soft, faint glow of their flashlights and felt a deep, brilliant love for the other boy. That love drove away everything else, his fear, his doubts. It even seemed to drive away the dark. He smiled up at his boyfriend and it felt like the most natural thing in the world to him. Everything wasn't pointless. It might be their destiny to die here, but constantly being afraid was as pointless as everything else he had deemed so. Loving Trowa, being with him... those things weren't pointless at all.

'Just now... why was I angry at him?' Quatre wondered and felt confused. He couldn't remember where that bitterness had come from. There didn't seem to be a trace of it left in him.

Trowa reached for the door with his other hand, and this time, Quatre didn't try to stop him even as he felt himself tremble with fear. He felt incredibly helpless and useless. He had these gifts, this extra perception that could tell him things that a normal person's senses couldn't. He could talk to spirits, sense if a place was haunted, and tell what the people around him were feeling, but for all of his abilities, he couldn't do a single thing to save Trowa. If anything, in this place, his gift was a hindrance. He would rather just not see or feel anything at all.

As Trowa's slender fingers touched the handle on the door, Quatre saw with what he could only call his third eye that horrible doll, the one that looked like Duo, or would if it hadn't been terribly degraded and warped. It stood there in the doorway, leering with it's glass eyes, the jagged wood that had once been its mouth stained red with blood. It seemed to look up at Trowa's throat hungrily, like a jackal that had eaten in a very, very long time, it's need for food having driven it mad. Quatre squeezed his eyes closed as he saw those wooden teeth bury themselves in his lover's leg, ripping out a huge chunk, and knowing, hoping it wasn't real.

Trowa slid the door open with some effort, the old wood stubborn to give way. It made an unsettling creaking sound as Trowa pushed on it. Quatre's chill grew as he realized that the sound was the same exact one that the dolls' joints had made as they had moved towards him. Both that sound and the door's sluggish movements were impossible. When he had opened it in this flight out of the room, the door had moved effortlessly and soundlessly. Or had it? Quatre grabbed at his head, which was starting to ache. How could he ever trust what he had seen or heard or felt? He had been terrified besides...

Trowa took a step into the pitch black room and Quatre grasped his hand tightly. Even with both of their flashlights, when Trowa went inside, the darkness seemed to swallow him up and Quatre felt a weak scream catch in his throat at the sudden thought that the hand attached to his didn't belong to his boyfriend at all, but to some formless specter. He almost let go in his fear, but his other fear, his terror of being separated from Trowa, had him clinging to that hand desperately.

The Italian teenager took a step back out into the hallway. He had been in the room for no more than a minute, but to his lover, it had seemed like hours. It was as though his lover had vanished into a different world. He expected Trowa to look frightened like he had, or at least unsettled, but the other boy was almost expressionless.

"Come here," he said softly, tugging on Quatre's hand gently and the blonde felt like he had at four years old when his father had forced him to look under the bed to prove to him that there were no monsters under there.

"No!" Quatre protested, realizing that Trowa intended to lead him back into that horrible room, "Please, Trowa, I don't want to go back in there! Can't we just go and look for our friends, please?" he tugged back on his hand until Trowa released him.

Trowa's non-expression quickly turned impatient, a look Quatre had never seen on his usually calm and handsome face before. Again, Quatre felt like a child in the presence of his father instead of his boyfriend and he loathed it.

"Quatre," Trowa said sternly, a tone he had never taken with his lover in the past, "There is nothing in there to be frightened of!" he snapped in exasperation.

Horror filled Quatre as Trowa grabbed his wrist and forcefully pulled him into the room. He almost screamed in terror, feeling like he was being dragged to his death.

"See?" Trowa said with that impatience and shone his flashlight across the room.

The dolls were where they had been the first time the six of them had come here as a group, some strewn, some lined up against the walls of the room, their beady eyes calmly watching them. They hadn't moved at all. The straw dolls hung from the ceiling motionlessly and the saw was where it had been, like he hadn't thrown it at all.

With a shaking hand, he touched his neck. Feeling the shallow cut there, burning, was the only thing that kept him sane. At least until he tried to remember if that cut hadn't been there before, if it wasn't one of the serial cuts that had mysteriously shown up on all of them. No matter how many memories he perused through, he just couldn't remember.

Trowa's stare was accusatory, searing into him, but what he was accusing him of, Quatre didn't know. Did he think he was lying about the dolls? Drop by drop, his terror was replaced with anger. How could Trowa possibly not believe him?! Trowa always believed him! He knew that he had this accursed sight. So why, why was he looking at him like he was crazy?! The one person in his life that he wanted, needed to believe in him?!

'Don't look at me like that!'

All he had was Trowa, all he had was his believing in him, trusting him, so how could he take that away? How could he not believe that he was telling the truth? How could Trowa leave him behind, leave him in this cold and dark place instead of believing in him?

Quatre's hand curled into a fist as an incredible, alien rage burned in him. His wrist throbbed from Trowa dragging him into the room by it. Trowa had done that. He had just pulled him in when he had told him he hadn't wanted to.

'How dare you make decisions for me... Don't I have any say in my life, my fate?!'

'I'm not a doll!' Quatre almost screamed and for that second that those words rang out in his head, he almost struck his boyfriend.

Then all of that doubt, all of Trowa's accusatory stare vanished. It just melted away to nothing, like a mask of vapor, and then it was his lover's usual kind smile. With a gentleness that was startling amidst the anger Quatre had just felt, an anger that he wasn't even sure was his own, Trowa touched his hand.

"I'm so sorry, Quatre," the taller boy rubbed at his face with exhaustion, "It's just this place... I'm so tired. I feel like it's still this morning at the same time that I feel like we have been trapped here for days. It's hard to think clearly sometimes..."

Quatre's anger dissipated and he wrapped his arms around his lover.

"It's ok, I know," he murmured against him, but inside, he was shaking.

He had almost struck Trowa just for daring to look at him like that... what was happening to him? What was happening to the both of them? He loved Trowa with all of his heart, he never wanted to hurt him, and he certainly didn't hate him. He felt Trowa bury his face in his golden hair and shuddered. It felt so good, and in the wake of everything he had just felt, unwanted. It was a pure feeling he didn't want to get mixed up in his tainted heart, like planting flower seeds in a parasite infested garden.

"Come on," Trowa urged, letting go of Quatre, "let's go find our friends."

Quatre nodded, taking Trowa's hand as the Italian led him out of the doll room. Despite every feeling telling him not to, his relief had him looking back.

In the mirror a chestnut haired child stood, silently laughing at him.
　

End Part 5

Author's Note: Just a general reminder, since I hardly update this story like I should, there are indicators when something else than what you might think is going on. If this were movie, video game, or television show, this would be easy to notice because of audio clues like differentiated speech or eerie tones, but since this is literature, all speech and thoughts that are meant to be Duo, The Darkness, or The Child are typically italicized, unless I forget ^_^
So, if you see a character thinking something in italics *hinthint*, there's probably more to it than you think. Even if it isn't in italics, if someone is doing something or feeling or thinking something about someone that seems out of character, there is probably a supernatural reason for it, I'm just not going to be obvious about it because I hope people are paying enough attention to notice it.
Originally this part was going to be longer, but since Halloween is now one day away, I decided to cut it a bit short to get this out in time. And now I will focus all of my energy back on A Stagnation of Love for National Novel Writing Month :3
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Beyond the Looking Glass