Author's Preface: The idea for this story was conceived sometime in April or May, and I actually surprised myself by getting around to writing it in the first place. I started it in June and finished it in October, and then let it sit for almost two months when I wasn't happy with the ending I had given it. I finally rewrote and edited it, but the plot remains essentially unchanged.


Since I finished the story originally, I've found Xenogears fanfiction with some of the same plot ideas or themes. All I can say is that I apologize because I'm not trying to steal ideas from anyone here. I thought it was original when I wrote it.


There is shounen-ai content. The story doesn't heavily emphasize it or revolve around it, to be sure, but it is there without attempt to disguise it.


"Whom the Gods Destroy"

Written by Azusa Kuraino
(AzusaEris@aol.com; erica.drescher@gte.net)

The house of god's exiles had been forsaken by even the wind and the storms.

Falling snow coated the spires of Shevat, a thick and viscous snow that clung to everything it touched and blanketed buildings and gardens alike under a coating of blinding white. A cold wind, laden with icy flakes to sting the flesh of any human unlucky enough to be caught in the tempest, whirled around pillars and citadels like a tiny spirit chasing after itself in endless mirth. Exotic blooms which had withered and died mere weeks ago lay beneath the snow in shallow graves, folded upon each other like the forgotten casualties of a long-ago war.

Beneath the citadel of the main palace of Shevat, Sigurd Harcourt leaned against a cold pillar of polished grey granite, winding a strand of hair around one finger. The falling snow was beginning to obscure the cold light slanting through the ornate window above him. In an hour, perhaps less, the room would be full of darkness.

He glanced towards the dark door of the medical room. As he raised his head, a sharp cry like that of a newborn infant echoed from somewhere inside the room, then died into a quiet whimper.

"Kahr...?" He inclined his head slightly. No response.

Not that he expected one, of course.

What had Hyuga told him in that dark room? He glanced off to the side with his one good eye. A potted plant, its container cracked and chipped, leaned against the railing of what had once been a balcony; devoid of the warmth and sunlight of Shevat's old home in the skies, the edges of the leaves were beginning to wither and shrivel. Bereft of nourishment, it would surely die a slow death in the cold shadows now...

How many, he wondered, would go with it in this new and broken world of peace? How many would wither not for want of nourishment but of pure despair?

He closed his blue eye and leaned back against the column, the dense stone chilled to the core by the arctic climate which was its new home. A long scratch ran down the side of his right leg, where a falling stone had cleaved his skin lightly; the sudden drop in temperature was beginning to sting the freshly closed wound. Almost without thinking, he reached out mentally, fumbled for the healing power which had been his inborn gift-- and jumped back, startled, when the touch returned an impenetrable dead wall.

I will live, of course. I will survive. But Kahr...? Cloistered away here during the killing of the biological weapon known as "Deus" and the return of its enslaved entity to the Wave Existence, the ex-commander most likely had no inkling that his own considerable powers of "Ether"-- or indeed everyone's save for the Contact and his partner-- were effectively dead. A mere nuisance to some, a calamity to others, but Sigurd himself had emerged alive from far too many situations which ought to have been the end of him. Powerless or powerful, he was determined to find a cause in the new world. If only he could have said the same of his friend...

The Contact, his arch-rival... Right now Sigurd could merely hope that the news could not possibly put Ramsus into a state any worse than his current mindset. Not since leaving to seek out the incomplete vessel known as Merkava had he seen his former ally. Had he been merely too busy, as he had convinced himself at the time? Or had it perhaps shaken him on some deep level to see the Gebler commander reduced to a quivering wreck?

As he regarded the question dubiously, Hyuga emerged from the medical chamber, his eyes half-guarded by darkness.

Sigurd paused to give the dying plant a pitying glance and got to his feet. "Hyuga." He moved to take his friend's hand, but Hyuga took a quick step backwards, his face cast over with the strange cold aura of power that possessed only the Guardian Angel of Solaris and not the man who was Sigurd's ally.

"What... happened in there?" he mumbled hastily, feeling almost taken aback by his friend's expression of coldness. There was no longer a God to pray to, but he longed to be able to call upon someone to divinely insure Kahr's well-being... what if the ex-Element got it into his head that there were no shards of his broken life that might possibly be worth saving? What tools did he have at his disposal in that cold stone room of madness?

"He lives," was the only reply. "And, given the circumstances, perhaps that is the most we can hope for at the moment."

Sigurd glanced over Hyuga's shoulder, into the doorway of the medical room with its light now fully obscured by the storm outside. "Is he alone in there...?"

"He will not be, if I can help it." He made no move to resist when Sigurd stepped towards him this time; he could see vestiges of human compassion beginning to creep into the older man's face. No doubt, Sigurd mused, he saw that as a weakness. But if anyone had ever displayed such "weakness" in front of Ramsus, he might well have just a bit more strength to draw upon in such a fateful hour...

"Doctor... sir?" The young woman who emerged from the medical room-- not even a nurse, but a hastily trained teenager bundled into a blue nursing gown-- stared at the two men fearfully with pursed lips. "Do you want me to... sedate the patient?"

Hyuga was silent a moment. "Only if he requests it."

"Do you really trust his judgment at this time?" Sigurd inquired.

"I offered to give him an injection to help him sleep, but he refused..." fretted the girl.

"No." The refusal was a firm one. "In fact, give him no drugs at all. Anything you choose to give him may well have an unprecedented reaction."

"Eh?" queried Sigurd, but his friend took no notice.

"If you are worried about violent behavior, put your concerns to rest. I know your 'patient'... perhaps too well. He will not harm you, though his own self is another matter..." His silence was a sea of bitterness. "You need only to watch over him."

"If you say so, Doctor--" The blue-capped girl began to duck back inside the room.

"Please." The girl stopped, stilled by Hyuga's tone. "Do not call me that. I am no physician, nor do I have the right to be called one. I violated those oaths long ago."

Sigurd was unsure whether the profound chill he felt was due merely to the plummeting temperatures in the citadel or the quiet that washed over the cold room like a suffocating sea as the nurse retreated from sight.

"May I... see him?" he ventured warily.

"Kahr?" Hyuga seemed surprised.

"If you think it would be... appropriate..." The vision that assailed his mental imagery now was one of madness, a human being stripped of his humanity, screaming in rage and pain and struggling against choking restraints, left to his excruciating pain by someone smug in their certainty that they were doing the right thing, even if their hapless victim could not appreciate it.

He shook his head almost imperceptibly. Perhaps that was merely a memory dredged up to haunt him...

"It is up to you. Though I doubt you will get much of a response out of him..."

"You never know," Sigurd offered, trying to sound optimistic. Perhaps all that was needed to bring his friend back to the realm of the living was a gentle word of compassion, a warm touch, a few little drops of kindness...

Hyuga cast his gaze downwards. "If you wish to see him, you may. And if you do so, perhaps then you will understand why none of us is quite sure what will become of him..."

"Hyuga." His friend made no motion to resist when Sigurd touched his arm, this time. "I don't know what's happening to him in there. But I'm going to be assailed by visions of the worst that could possibly happen until I can see for myself..."

Tucking a fold of silver hair behind one ear, he vanished into the dark room, swallowed up by the shadows of the place where despair was incubated.

*****

He didn't know where or how he had acquired the ability to sense things this way. As a child, he had always been somehow aware, in a way that defied words, when somebody needed comfort or surcease from their troubles. Shouldering the burden of others' pain, it had seemed more often than not, was his true lot in life. But he couldn't at all recall a time when he hadn't been grateful for this blessing or curse of empathy.

He had expected the dark room to be filled with despair or incomprehensible rage. What he felt was an undercurrent of something far more subtly jarring--

--nothing.

An utter, almost parodical nonexistence of emotion. And it made him shiver in a far deeper way than the encroaching cold of the fallen snow.

The young nurse, the girl, was pacing about the peripheries of the room, rearranging supplies seemingly for the sake of looking busy and examining the Shevite medical tools one by one as she picked them up. Sigurd made no move to interrupt her; even if she didn't feel the death of will in the room in the same way that he did, he could not imagine that she felt very comfortable at this point in time.

Commander Kahran Ramsus was swaddled in heavy woolen blankets, lying on one side and facing the wall. His expression offered not the least hint of distress or discomfort, or indeed anything that might have been called emotion at all. In a way that almost brought tears to Sigurd's blue eye with bitter irony, a wayward visitor might well have judged the curled figure to be content and restful.

"Kahr." Words going cold in his throat, Sigurd tilted his head to one side and bent close to the sleeping figure, content only when he heard the unmistakable whispery sigh of a breath. "It's me, it's Sigurd... you can come out now. It's all right..." And as he spoke the words he knew it would not be all right, and he hung his head silently in remorse.

Ever so cautiously, terrified of perhaps awakening some sort of primitive startle reflex, he reached out clumsily with one hand, placed it against the side of Kahran's face.

Cold. So cold, so very cold... the colorless skin was chilled, very like white marble in its texture. As if Kahr, deeply enrapt in his hapless slumber, had absorbed into his own body the cold surging upwards and into the palace. A frozen vessel of coldness... and one abandoned with neither warning nor clue.

He sighed gently and allowed his fingers to linger a while longer on Ramsus's frigid skin. Something-- a memory?-- dug at the edges of his consciousness, and he had a faint image of bodies huddled together in what amounted to a prison cell for all intents and purposes, their days divided between neglect and torturous experiments. And a vision of the blankness that would creep into their eyes, every so often, when they found a place to hide far away from the torment of their physical existence... their bodies were there, but they were not; they lived as empty shells void of mind or spirit.

"My God..." His silver hair spilled onto Ramsus's cheek as he murmured the words. "What did they do to you?"

He did not know, in full, what had transpired in the depths of Merkava when the commander had returned to his place of "birth," as it were... he was not certain he wanted to. He knew only that the man who had once tagged alongside him, shy among others but full of such astonishing energy, had been replaced by a crazed demon of tears and fire who knew only the lust to kill; and, when that lust had been stymied, a venomous self-hatred that seemed to have eaten away at his very physical flesh.

Nor did he know yet whether to mourn for that younger man in sunnier times, though the chances that he still existed somewhere inside this bitter cold vessel seemed distressingly small to Sigurd. Somehow, he could not bring himself to weep over it, and this embittered him all the more.

After a while he got to his feet, letting his hand fall from the stony flesh. Perhaps, he reflected, it would almost be better if Ramsus was to sleep forever here, eternally young and beautiful, never again having to bear the burdens of the sorrow that had driven him so far away in the first place...

"Sigurd..." Hyuga's faint whisper from the doorway caused him to start. He shook hair out of his eyes and glanced at his wristwatch, utterly unsure of how much time had elapsed. Shaking his head imperceptibly, he bent down and dusted his fingers lightly across Kahr's closed eyelids.

Some say sleep heals all sorrows and cures all heartbreaks. I cannot see it cleansing you thoroughly, my friend, but do not hesitate to try...

"Watch him," Sigurd called to the nurse, once he was safely ensconced just outside the room. "If you fall asleep, make sure someone else is there in your stead. And if he awakens, call me, regardless of what state I am in."

The citadel outside felt so warm now it was utterly disconcerting.

Somewhere along the long walk through the shadowed corridor with its ruined decor, Hyuga breached the silence. "He is... merely sleeping, of course. I imagine he must certainly be physically exhausted."

It made perfect logical sense, but... something about that deep, cold slumber had simply felt wrong. There was a vague sense of something not right, like a forgotten word on the tip of one's tongue, trying unsuccessfully to breach Sigurd's consciousness. In no way he could put a name to, it had simply not been an ordinary sleep...

"Moreover, sleep would constitute an advisable course of action for you as well, at this point," Hyuga went on; his fingertips stroked a soft crescent of Sigurd's amber skin. "However... well... cadaverous he may seem to you at the moment--" and Sigurd saw him wince in muted distaste as he fished unsuccessfully for a better suited word-- "he is, nonetheless, alive and in capable hands. Sleep now. As for what comes tomorrow, we shall worry about it then..."

Sigurd gave only the briefest shrug of concurrence.

Kahr... where is your mind now? What are you seeing? Is there beauty beyond reckoning in your distant little garden, or nothing but eternal night?

However, he could not deny that night, too, had overtaken the crippled shell of the royal palace; fallen snow had fully obscured the view from the citadel. In the velvet-dark little corners, the poor forgotten plants seemed almost to be trembling, their new clime beyond anything they could hope to adjust themselves to.

"...Yes, let's sleep," he agreed in a mumble. Blue eyes met ebony, and for a flash of existence there was a gentle warming heat, a remembrance of long-dead affection buried now in the muddy wallows of history.

...No. Sigurd severed that thin line of affection with a quick glance towards the floor. There would be no pleasure for him of any sorts, not with this subtle wrongness jabbing its blunt blade gently into the back of his thoughts. If only he could have identified what it was...

Their gazes met, and tore away, and parted as the two men trod their seperate ways.

If only I could have a little glimpse inside his mind. If only...

*****

Cold dark night curled its little velvet fingers around Shevat as surely and swiftly as the plummeting snow.

Floating through a dreamless reverie, Kahran Ramsus clutched himself into a bitter cold ball of infant helplessness.

Beauty like the snow, they had said. Such pale skin, that ivory hair. Oh, their silver tongues, those purveyors of flattery, most base and loathesome of lies. No, there would never be any beauty for him, not in this life.

"We do not need this. We have my son..."

And he had clung to this sad, aimless, rambling parody of a life-- why? Those words had echoed through his head always, long past the age where he ought to have dismissed them as a silly child's dream. Why had he lived? To prove wrong that voice prying at the back of his thoughts, cold and polished as sharpened steel. To show her, nay, to show the world that he was superior to that son, that ill-begotten child whose mere existence had torn him away from that liquid warm dreamworld...

"...completely useless..."

Gently, like a blind helpless kitten only minutes removed from its mother's womb, Ramsus began to uncurl slowly in the darkness. Pushing away that burden of scrub-rough blankets, he felt the chilly snow air on his skin at last, so bitingly cold and yet nothing in the face of the icy maelstrom that filled his body, sucking away all the sweetness and the little seeds that might have blossomed into joy-- and leaving behind only the dregs, the despair and the hate, hate, hate that blundered aimlessly and found no target at last other than its wielder.

He sat up, and curls of hair fell about his face, that pretty colorless hair that someone long ago had reckoned to an angel's.

"Trash is of more worth to us than you."

His eyes darted across the breadth of the room, this place they had dragged him to when he had wanted only to die in Merkava-- for he knew, he had known all along, the vessel of ascension would fall before the power of the Contact. Knew even when they had steadfastly believed in its invincibility. How dearly he had clung to those words from long ago: the superior life, created to be above all others!

The irony was such bitter poison in his blood and yet he nearly laughed aloud. The silly belief had fired him with inhuman determination and will to achieve-- if he was superior to the Contact, surely even the precious son could not stand in his way!-- and yet, in the end, it had all been a lie. The Contact most of all, but even the other Animus, were far superior to him: he, silly, worthless trash, the dregs of the world, fit only to be spat upon.

Upon a little chair flanking the door, the girl in the blue nurse dress sat with her hands falling languidly in her lap, head bowed in deep slumber. Had he not long ago relinquished the right to feel joy or gratification, Ramsus would surely have smirked. Nudging aside the remaining covers, he swung his feet to the floor; the marble was chill and unyielding as ice. He bore it with tight-lipped satisfaction: this meager cold was inconsequential to him, now. If that girl had touched him, he mused idly, she would surely have frozen solid, arms and legs stilled in a rictus of eternal beauty.

He was not certain where he was going, but nonetheless, he went.

There was neither door to the dark cold chamber nor guards to stand vigil over its former occupant; only the sleeping girl remained, giddily ignorant of the beauty that had blessed every other human being with its gilded fingers and spared Ramsus alone among men. He stole out into the citadel, mentally tracing backwards through the corridors he had chanced to observe on his way in.

"This thing... is worthless to us..."

And for the first time, Kahran Ramsus nodded in silent and full agreement with that dark chorus that surged eternally at the back of his head.

Who in this broken empty world had use for such a thing as him? The only gift he could bestow, now, upon this ravaged land, was death.

Death... his own.

The entranceway to the palace proper was unguarded as well. Indeed, and rightly so, they had not seen fit to confine him here. In the snowfields the spiraling gusts of snow cried out a low, mournful death dirge as they snaked between the spires of the palace.

"No..." Ramsus's voice was low, quiet, inaudible to any ears but his own. "Do not mourn for me. If you knew who you were crying for, you would be silent..."

He stepped outside, and the folds of chill air embraced him at last.

How determinedly those winds battered against his skin, as if trying to drive him away, and yet their efforts amounted to nothing; nothing, nothing at all compared to the cold inside. Fingers caught in a spell of trembling, he reached for the clasp at the front of his uniform coat.

The bulky layers of fabric peeled away, and he threw the discarded clothing in the direction of a snowdrift. That uniform, that insignia, was now as useless as he: Solaris was gone, and he would not die bearing a symbol of allegiance to a fallen empire. In quick succession he tugged away his shirt and then his pants, the exposed flesh oddly devoid of sensations either cold or hot.

"Ha, ha... chase after it, 'boy'..."

No. He had spent that worthless life caught up in foolish, futile chase, and he could run no more. They had won; he had lost; he laid his surrender at the feet of the world now, with nothing at all to hide.

"A love that'll never be yours... no matter how hard you try to pursue it."

His lover, his tormentor... how true, how very true her words had been. If only he had listened.

Bare as a newborn infant now, he fell to his knees in the snow, and the powdery drifts embraced him as if lusting to claim this piece of useless flesh as their own. "Take me..." His lips formed the words, but no audible sound rose from his throat to interrupt the cry of the winds. "You've won... ...I am... nothing..."

Sheeting snow blanketed his eyes, the pretty angel hair, and a warm velvet embrace began to curl around the edges of his consciousness.

"Let... me..." His lips, half-numb, trembled in hesitant jerks. "Let me... die."

And the storm, in a cold swirl of mercy, came down and embraced Kahran Ramsus in the heart of its torrent, and the soft veil of oblivion was cast over his eyes at long last.