I’m sorry, I was unclear. This wasn’t meant to be a single story, but rather a bunch of oneshots centered around a common idea – namely, Duo as a necromancer and the awesomeness thereof. I apologize for being misleading.

Death as a Picture
Hades’ Phoenix

Once upon a time there lived a boy at the edge of the universe.

xxx

When he’d first met the others, Duo hadn’t exactly been in his right mind. He was better now that the war was over, now that he had a family of four to come home to each night that would keep him grounded in the mortal world.

Sometimes it was easy to forget that Death was more than just his name. It took a foolish, daring, passionate, wise soul to love Death, to look Him in the face and see your own mortality, the mortality of your species, and not have fear.

Or four souls.

xxx

Duo twined around his lovers with a purr of satiation. Heero and Trowa were prone to cuddling after sex, though they’d never admit it, as primal instinct demanded reassurance of their packmates’ presence. Wufei would lay boneless and watch them all with liquid reptilian eyes. It was well known, on the other hand, that Quatre would remain a senseless puddle of puppyish happiness for some time as his empathy wrapped around the others and their emotions like a creeper vine on solid old stone.

Duo would whisper into the pillows, into the curve of someone’s throat. The affirmation of life and sex made the others’ shadows stronger for a time, turning the necromancer rather tipsy as their mortalities murmured to him. It was usually one of the lycanthropes that would hold him and provide a grounding reality for him to cling to.

xxx

Life wasn’t made from things like blood and bone, genetics and physics and chemical combustion. It was made from stories.

xxx

“I don’t understand!” the five-year-old boy cried, tears and snot streaking his face.

Seeing Sister Helen put a hand to her mouth with sick horror, Father Maxwell knelt on the floor just outside the circle drawn with salt and cinnabar. “I’m so sorry, child,” he said softly, “but this is necessary, not just to protect other people but also to protect you.”

“But I’m scared!” He trembled in the center of the circle, rattling the chains that held him down. Father Maxwell felt his heart breaking at the sight of the sobbing boy terrified by all the occultism without understanding why, unable to comprehend the consequences of the darkness that had taken hold of his own young soul.

“It will be all right,” the Father murmured, unable to hide in his words the sorrow that was cold in his chest. “It’s just a nightmare. Close your eyes and you’ll wake up soon.”

The nameless boy squeezed his eyes shut desperately. He could hear the Father saying something in that funny old language of his, underscored by the softer tones of the Sister. He wanted to trust them because they hadn’t thought he smelled bad, and let him use a bed that didn’t leave him lice-bitten in the morning, and gave him cookies that weren’t even moldy –

But then he would see Solo’s glazed dead eyes and the flies crawling over the corpse’s open sores, blood spattering the asphalt as ragged children coughed up their lungs, adults refusing to come near the dead and dying orphans for fear of their own health, and the boy would be filled with such fury he thought it might spill out of him and kill everything it touched. The flies and the sores had never touched the boy’s skin; instead they crawled inside and brought all the shadows with them.

(Every Romefeller soldier in the northern quarter of the colony died within a week. It was blamed on the rebels’ guerilla tactics.)

The boy had his eyes closed so tightly he was beginning to develop a headache, but he could still see the shadows standing tall and dark behind the Father and Sister. The shadows spoke of fire from the sky and broken glass and pain; such pain as the kind that could only come from betrayal, from war, from bitter knowledge that suffering in life didn’t make anyone noble and just made death seem a little more like a vengeful ‘fuck you’ to enemies that never got the chance to strike the killing blow themselves.

(It hadn’t mattered that the adults let the little thieving brats die, in the end the tiny rotting bodies full of plague spread flies and sores as though the fear had served as lines of gunpowder for sulfurous matches. Disease had caught the scent of the grown-ups’ fear-sweat and nipped at their heels until their bodies gave up and collapsed. Ashes to ashes.)

And as the Father’s and the Sister’s voices droned on the boy couldn’t help his screaming.

“E nomine padre, et filii, et spiritus sancti – tuo vocam Duo Maxwell!”

When the last echoes of their combined voices died away, Sister Helen unceremoniously smudged the circle of salt as she dashed for the fallen boy. Father Maxwell was just behind her, heart breaking anew as the nun carefully lifted the boy (no, his name was Duo now) onto her lap.

Duo was trembling, but eerily silent, pressing his face against the curve of Sister Helen’s neck as she stroked his braid and murmured, “Oh, my poor child, my poor little boy, it’s all right…”

“The nightmare’s over, Duo,” said Father Maxwell quietly, “you can open your eyes now.”

The otherworldly purple of the boy’s eyes had dimmed to a more natural bluish shade; the ageless awareness in his gaze was gone, bound by the limitations of a proper mortal name. Duo looked like a child in every meaning of the word now, no longer a being of anger and terror and hate, and he peered timidly over the Sister’s shoulder.

“No,” he whispered, “this is just the deeper sleep before it comes back.”

xxx

Death was both transient and absolute, making it a concept that appeared infinitely complicated to a mortal mind and yet was stunningly, cruelly, brilliantly simple. Of all the races that populated the Earth’s Sphere, necromancers were the most unique in that no one knew how they were made. They weren’t born, or bred; they couldn’t be made by technological or magical means, despite some mad attempts to do exactly that; there existed no genetic explanation, as there were for empaths and pyrokinetics. But, somehow, they lived and breathed and existed the same as werewolves or the Dragon clans. They ate, and talked, and fucked, and dreamed the same ephemeral dreams. They felt pain, and joy.

But there were times in which Duo would go silent and forget to smile, and the other pilots suddenly felt that they were standing in the presence of something they’d known all their life without ever being consciously aware of it.

xxx

A person’s death was as unique as the person himself.

xxx

Sex between Duo and Quatre could get rather…intense.

By nature empaths became either entirely withdrawn from the world, going cold in an attempt to protect themselves against the overwhelming sensations around them, or they became incredibly tactile as they instinctively reached out to soothe mental wounds. Quatre leaned towards the latter outside of battle, focusing his heart on the other pilots to maintain his sanity in a world of constantly shifting friendships and enmities, like clinging to the rocks in the midst of a storm-tossed ocean.

(Werewolves were renowned for their protectiveness of loved ones. At least until an empath was put in a bad situation, and suddenly the werewolves seemed more like overgrown puppies in comparison.)

To Quatre, Duo felt like a living contradiction, a brilliant light that cast shadows instead of illumination. He was something evanescent, hardly alive, barely even existing, and yet so undeniably there that the blond would never, ever mistake his presence for anyone (anything) else. He was the personification of a principle that might come in a hundred million different shapes but still, inevitably, implacably, always comes for everyone, Quatre’s rational side told him. And nature abhors a vacuum, so the empath couldn’t help thrusting harder and harder into the body beneath him without ever quite being able to crawl inside Duo’s skin, fingers tightening on hips until bruises formed, lips kissing until teeth drew blood.

To Duo, Quatre was a wellspring of life and emotion and being that made his skin shiver, his toes curl, his back arch upwards to try and greedily pull all that light into himself like a collapsing star. Between the two of them was a careful dance of polar extremes, an ebb and flow guided by the single commonality of what it meant to be human.

When Wufei once walked in on them, he leaned against the doorjamb with a book dangling from one hand and an eyebrow rising above his thin glasses.

“If you two don’t stop, you’re going to mentally scar every psychic within five miles of this place.”

Quatre just smiled, forehead pressed against Duo’s sternum. Duo smirked with bloodstained lips, demonstratively stretching against the mattress and tightening his thighs around the other’s hips. Both of their bodies bore welts from blunt fingernails, and shadows within the room were trembling and stretching towards the beds against all the laws of physics. One particularly ambitious shade wound around Wufei’s leg with the sensation of a graveyard’s chill. Instead of looking worn out from hours of carnal sin, the empath and the necromancer smelled to Wufei’s senses like they were drunk on a spiritual high.

He sighed in exasperation. “At least keep yourselves from projecting onto the other existential planes, I have no particular wish to begin associating Sun Tzu with Duo yelling ‘fuck me’.”

Quatre muffled his snickering in Duo’s chest.

xxx

Wufei didn’t mind allowing Duo to read his books. He didn’t bend the spine or curl the pages, and he replaced them on the shelf when he was done. That said, the dragon never could figure out why Duo had a habit of reading only two-thirds of a given book (usually some sort of fiction, he claimed Wufei’s more scholarly subjects were as dry as an old mausoleum) before putting it away and starting another.

When he asked, there was a long pause, then a quiet, “I already know all the endings. Sometimes it’s nice just to see the beginnings.”

xxx

“Once upon a time there lived an old man at the edge of the universe,” Duo began with a smile and a glint in his eye, “and every night when the galaxies set and the gods went to sleep, he stood at the edge and stared out into the void.”

The children at his feet listened with wide eyes as he spun a tale of longing and memory. He didn’t know himself where his talent for storytelling, for half-truths and verbalizing the wordless, came from. Maybe it was his life as a thief and terrorist, maybe it was because he saw a hundred different deaths every day. Personally he liked to think it was an innate creativity that didn’t have anything to do with anything except himself, especially when it let him connect with these children on a level beyond what a jaded, narrow-minded adult could understand.

“In the void he could see something that might’ve been a dragon, might’ve been a snake – “

“A naga!” shrieked a giggling mage child, just before he was knocked over by an actual half-grown naga with a mean right hook. Duo hid a smile as Heero patiently sorted out the tussling kids with that quiet steel confidence of his.

That’s impossible, adults would say about…anything, everything. It goes against the laws of magic. Laws! As though magic were something to be distilled, dissected, diluted. No, there were the laws of physics, and then there was magic to mess with those laws and keep them all on their philosophical toes.

When the little naga and mage were still and Heero once more standing behind Duo’s shoulder, the necromancer continued speaking, weaving his hands in the air as though directing his own words, as though he could pull out all the intricacies of the human heart without magic and lay them down in blood and sepia ink. Ashes to ashes, e nomine padre.

Wisps of shadows, unconsciously peeled from the dark side of air particles, trailed after his fingers.

xxx

When someone thinks they’re going to die, time slows down until a heartbeat lasts for a millennium.

Like a proper orgasm, Duo said.

La petite morte.

xxx

The understanding between Duo and Trowa was something of a more silent nature. Werewolves had a different relationship with death than empaths or even dragons, as they were a species that lived with wildness in their veins. Killing came as easily as fucking and hunting. The universe sang in the lycanthropic heart.

It was no coincidence that wolves and ravens had a symbiotic tradition.

So when the moon was full or simply when the tedium of daily mundane life got to be too much, Trowa would slip away to some region unpopulated for miles around. Duo would sometimes accompany him with a face as expressionless as a deathmask and eyes dark as stone.

Ready to fly?

The long, lean muscle of Trowa’s body would twist and ripple like water as his bones snapped into new shapes: longer forelimbs, shortened digits, extended jaws that turned his face lupine. Duo could never look away from these transformations. Whereas he always witnessed the change from life to death, this was like seeing the potential hidden underneath a shallow human exterior finally given breath and strength. It was the opposite of entropy; it was the creation of savage beauty and power.

The necromancer then inhaled the scent of fresh blood and a pounding heart, and laughed.

Trowa howled, long and low and surreal, before taking off through the expanse of forest with his paws ripping into the ground.

Duo had no such transformation himself, not a raven or other properly clichéd form. But everything has a death, even stones and dust particles – all he had to do was reach out for that darkness to flow like water after the werewolf. Under the odd flatness that moonlight cast onto the world, his vision would expand in a thousand different directions as a thousand different beings died or were destroyed. In these times he was no longer ‘Duo Maxwell’; instead he had names like Azazel or Shinigami or Santa Muerte, bean sídhe or simply ‘the companion behind one’s shoulder.’

Trowa howled again. Before the echoes could fade Duo called out as well, the sound (a death-rattle, a scream cut short, a last breath) rising on the wind and fading in the dark places between the stars.

xxx

Once upon a time there lived a boy at the edge of the universe.

xxx

Nowadays Heero was a bit more careful with his life, as the four other pilots – just as stubborn and tough as he was, albeit in different ways – had made it quite clear to him that they valued his life much more than his corpse. With the war over and Preventers managing to repress a few rebellions thus far, the promise to look both ways, so to speak, wasn’t too difficult to keep.

But that was now. During the war, Duo hadn’t been pleased when Heero tried to blow himself up. Again.

“Do you want to die?” Duo snarled, to which Heero had merely raised a brow.

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of death, Maxwell.”

The necromancer had seized Heero’s tank-top and yanked him close enough that the werewolf could smell the odd musty sweetness of his breath.

“I can see your death, Yuy. It follows your heels like a shadow. But if you think I’m going to sit back and watch you court it like a fucking suicide bomber, then I will be the one to show you what your death is. Sweet Baby fucking Jesus, you’re so in love with your Goddamned ideals that you can’t even live properly! So if you want to die so much, say the word and I’ll finish the job I started.”

Their first meeting had healed as two messy graze-scars on Heero’s upper arm.

Later, the werewolf mused that it was death itself that made the necromancer such a passionate fatalist. How could Duo be anything else, when he lived his life in the constant shadow of mortality? It might have destroyed a lesser soul. And perhaps that was what made necromancers; not birth or occult rituals, but a life-force so strong that it transcended the traditional boundaries between existence and annihilation.

The thought made Heero feel humbled, and from then on he lived with this philosophy: everything dies. Whether it was a creature or ideal, change, often in the form of death, was inevitable. Living that brief period as fully as he could was the best way to honor that brief period.

And the only way to love Death.

xxx

It took a foolish, daring, passionate, wise soul to love Death, to look Him in the face and see your own mortality, the mortality of your species, and not have fear.

Or four souls.

xxx

Once upon a time there lived a boy at the edge of the universe, and from the abyss he pulled out the stories for Life.