[AO3 Crosspost] Justice, and other lies

[terresdebrume]

✗ TECHNICAL DETAILS

FANDOM: Saint Seiya
SERIES: Times Between Us
RATING: General Audience
WORDCOUNT: 1 573
PAIRING(S): -
CHARACTER(S): Capricorn Shura, Deathmask
GENRE: Long-overdue conversation
TRIGGER WARNING(S): None
SUMMARY: The thing is, even with their jarring personalities -and problems- they might have ended up tolerating with each other if they’d been encouraged to it.
Too bad they weren’t because now they’re all stuck fighting to know who’s got the most blood on their hands.

TIMES BETWEEN US ON LJ: [Series Masterpost]


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The Pisces Saint was the last one to pick an apprentice.

Anchise –who had half a mind to drop his name at this point- liked to make his entourage of not-quite-fearful boys laugh by mocking the old fish, because what other source of fun did they have? They could, of course, fight, but being expected to took all the fun out of it.

Anyway, all the other Saints had at least one apprentice, even the Pope who trained a boy for the Aries Cloth. Most of the others had a group of five or six boys living in their temples, plus the grand total of three girls, because none of the adults thought girls could really make proper Gold material –Anchise, who lived and competed with a dozen other boys ranging from ten, his age, to thirteen, remembered enough about his time in the streets of Rome to know the adults were morons, but it’s not like it really mattered to him.

By the time all the apprentices in the Sanctuary had reached the age of ten –and several of them had died from various wounds, illnesses or, in one case, a constitution too frail to endure the numerous days of fasting their monk of a master imposed- the Pisces Temple still had three unused apprentice cells, the bunk beds probably sitting empty while Anchise had to fight for his mattress every evening.

(Generally speaking, the Cancer Saint wasn’t regarded as a very good master, and Anchise knew from a lot of nagging and attempted teasing that the other boys tended to look down on the Cancer apprentices and their situation, but Anchise’s Master seemed to believe fighting for their comfort would forge his boys’ characters, and Anchise was used to dealing with worse than angry, half-alseep ten-years-old orphans. Like the older ones, for example.)

On the day the Pisces Saint brought his single Apprentice to the Sanctuary, Anchise was on dry toilets duties for his insubordination, something he strongly disagreed with: all he’d done was saying the Aries apprentice was a mommy’s boy and had an insect-like face what with the dots he sported instead of eyebrows. Obviously, the Pope didn’t take that too kindly, hence the punishment, which Anchise didn’t even bat an eyelid about, knowing what he’d get from his master come nightfall would be much worse.

All this to say that Anchise wasn’t in the dinner hall when the old fish brought his apprentice in, and only had the rumors and dubious reports of his cellmates to tell him what the newcomer was like. So far, all he’d learned was that the kid in question was twelve, apparently a girl, and the kind who cried in front of people.

Anchise decided it was exactly the kind of kid that was funny to play with, because after all, what’s the point in taunting someone who isn’t going to react?

Come nightfall and Anchise snuck into one of the cells built into the Pisces Temple for the apprentices to live-in… the good part about all the Temples being built on the same model was that finding the newcomer wasn’t very complicated, and in less than five minutes Anchise found himself in a cell with rough stone walls, bunk beds pushed on the left wall, a basin and pitcher of water against the opposite side.

And there, huddled in the tiny crack of space between the bunk beds and the wall, a mess of very curly blonde hair, of a color Anchise has only ever seen on the women selling their bodies back in Rome… well, them, and also a few tourists. No black roots to show here, though, and Anchise walked toward the kid, grabbed a fistful of hair in his palm, and yanked.

“OW!” Screamed the kid, with a voice that could never have belonged to a girl, “That hurt!”

The boy had very blue eyes, pale and freckled with grey like a winter sky, rimmed with the tell tale red of tears. Anchise scowled.

“You’re a crybaby,” he said.

“Miss home,” the other boy replied in wobbly Greek, “I cry if want.”

“Crybaby,” Anchise repeated.

“Idiot,” the other declared, little blonde eyebrows drawing together as the tears gradually stopped.

“You’re the idiot,” Anchise replied haughtily, “You’ll die if you cry like that!”

There was a moment of silence while the boy made sense of Anchise’s words, and Anchise dutifully picked his left nostril clean, right hand tugging on the hem of the scratchy tunic apprentices had to wear in the Sanctuary. Then, after a while, the boy’s nose wrinkled, his teeth bared themselves, and he said:

“Vita non est viverer sed valera vita est.”

Anchise, who had a very strict policy about languages he couldn’t understand, punched him in the nose.

{ooo}

Deathmask snorts as he remembers the surprise he felt when Aphrodite pushed him back on that first night, hard enough to send him reeling back and bruising his backside. The whole thing ended with two broken nose and a bite on his shoulder that never truly healed… even now, the scar is still clearly visible whenever Deathmask takes his clothes off.

The Temple, obviously, changed hands… Deathmask doesn’t know what the previous Pisces’ decoration was like, but looking at Aphrodite’s makeshift ‘apartment’ with its tiny cooking space, medicinal herbs and wind chimes hanging from the ceiling, he’s fairly certain all of it is one hundred percent Aphrodite.

It looks like a slightly off-kilter, mystical woman is living there and it suits the would-be rose oddly well, in that it hides exactly how deadly he can be when he wants to.

That is, of course, when he doesn’t disappear off the surface of the planet during training.

Deathmask is only just coming out of Aphrodite’s living quarters when he spots Shura stepping off the stairs that lead to the Temple.

The Capricorn stops, then frowns with something suspiciously close to distaste and Anchise doesn’t even feel surprised. They’ve never been close before, there’s no reason unexpected resurrection should change anything to that.

“What are you doing here?” Shura asks, more aggressive than he should be.

“Pretty sure it’s me who should ask that,” Deathmask shrugs, feigning nonchalance, “It’s not me who’s trying to suck up to the others in order to get back in their good books.”

So far, Shura’s effort have been markedly unsuccessful, but even though Aphrodite tends to think it’s normal the Capricorn tried, Deathmask mostly feels amusement at the knowledge that no amount of groveling will ever get Shura back on his pedestal of honor… it takes more than that to forgive someone’s murder.

Deathmask should know, after all.

“I find it surprising,” Shura says without raising to the bait, “that you’d come here when you know beyond doubt that Aphrodite isn’t here.”

“Yeah well, everybody ran to Patchouli’s. I figured I might as well do some dust-shaking of my own.”

Deathmask smirks as he remembers Aphrodite once suggested they broke into the Virgo Temple while Shaka was away, just to see if he kept his apartment as empty as his stomach, but they never quite got around to actually doing it.

It doesn’t sound as fun to do it on his own.

“I notice, however, that you are here and not there,” Deathmask continues. “That’s not going to convince them you’re on their side.”

“We are all on the same side,” Shura states, but even his mouth twists with the bitterness of the lie.

The Sanctuary stopped being a single entity long before any of them was even born, they all know this. After all, they may never have gotten along, but aside from common lunches during the first years of their trainings, they weren’t encouraged to mingle either.

Deathmask even remembers being beaten when his camaraderie with Aphrodite was discovered.

“Please,” he snorts, “Don’t hurt yourself. The only person who was ever remotely close to being ‘on my side’ vanished an hour ago.” He shrugs. “Call me a sentimental if you want, it still bothers me.”

“That wouldn’t have crossed my mind,” Shura answers with a blank kind of honesty. “Though I always did wonder what drew the two of you together… I’m assuming you didn’t discover your shared taste for murder until after the Other Pope came into the equation.”

“Power,” Deathmask corrects, sighing at the would-be ominous name for Saga’s crazy, “not murder.”

“Power serves justice,” Shura answers hotly, “not the whims of a maniac!”

“Power serves whoever has it,” Deathmask retorts, his whole body going rigid in his armor. “Why do you think everyone’s running after it?”

“Not everyone,” Shura tells him, just as tense. “And murdering people for fun is no quest for strength.”

“Well,” Deathmask shrugs, “It sure beat killing people for justice… how’s that been working for you again?”

The thing is, though, that Shura seems to really believe what he’s saying.

In Deathmask’s mind, it’s probably the biggest reason why they can’t get along –because Shura, contrary to Aphrodite, still buys this old bullshit that somehow killing someone is about doing a favor to the world, rather than just ending a life. As if it’s somehow fairer to destroy on the microscopic scale than the macroscopic one.

As if somehow, the life of an individual doesn’t matter so long as the whole is safe… but what whole, really? In Deathmask’s experience, that ‘whole’ has never been anything but people who stick to the norm.

Maybe that’s the thing about Shura: aside from a slight obsession with blades that’s only unthreatening because there are people like Deathmask living in the Sanctuary, he’s one of those who thinks most like a normal person. He’s one of those who had it the easiest.

Of course there’s such thing as justice when the best thing that happened to you in life wasn’t to be picked up by a raving, brutal maniac with a serious penchant for bloodshed among his students. Of course there’s such thing as justice when you weren’t fed poisonous berries from infancy until ingesting your blood means death for anyone who tries.

Of freaking course.

Deathmask has never been part of the norm, the ‘whole’ that deserves to be saved. Does it excuse the man he’s become? Honestly, he couldn’t care less about that bit, but it sure as Hell means he’s not the type to pull punches.

“Come on now, tell me how murdering Aioros was acting for justice, I’m curious to hear it.”

“The Pope ordered me to do it,” Shura says, face growing progressively paler, “You know that.”

“I do,” Deathmask agrees, “I also know he ordered us to kill the people we killed. What makes it all right for you and wrong for us to obey? Because we knew who he was? Because we noticed, I don’t know, the different cosmos and the different hair color and the different voice and didn’t kid ourselves about it?”

“You could at least have fought it!” Shura retorts, and this time there’s a twitch of his mouth that isn’t due to annoyance. “You could have risen against him!”

The two of them are still standing exactly where they stopped earlier, still in their fucking golden armors, in their fucking capes, in a fucking ancient Greek temple in the middle of the twentieth century. It’s all so ridiculous it would be funny, if it didn’t all feel so damn pointless to begin with.

It’s not like this conversation is going to change anything.

“Aioros did just that, look where it got him!” Deathmask points out, “You should know by now I’m all about staying alive.”

“You are despicable,” is all Shura answers before he spins on his heels and leaves the Temple in long, angry strides that mean far more than the annoyance he often displayed after he was forced to meet with Deathmask and Aphrodite for ‘mission talk’.

Not that he ever ended up doing much of the actual work, since bloody Aphrodite kept volunteering to do it for him… stupid fish must have thought he’d gain the Capricorn’s trust by taking on his workload, but he should have known better.

You don’t survive by being nice to people.

“Vita non est viverer sed valera vita est,” Aphrodite answered when Deathmask told him so.

There’s more to life than living.

Deathmask snorts again because honestly, only Aphrodite would use Latin to spit such bullshit.

(It’s possible Deathmask’s laughter at Shura’s parting words comes too late, too shrill, too loud. What does he care?

There’s no one there to hear, anyway.)