FicWad

Author's note: It's been ages since I updated this here. But I got a review tonight (one full of questions too!) and it reminded me that I should be a better author and, you know, post chapters. So here's the third one. Hope you enjoy it.
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Chapter 3: Wolfram

Unfortunately, Yuuri’s wish didn’t come true. Just as the current Maou had requested, Ahren led Yuuri to the bath and made sure he had soap, shampoo, towels, and some clean clothes to change into after bathing, then left the still rather confused former Maou to his own devices. Yuuri didn’t dawdle in the bath -- Ilaria and Idonea were making him dinner, and he didn’t want to let his food get cold. He stepped out of the bathing pool, dried, and dressed himself in the black pants and green tunic Ahren had left for him before realizing that he had no idea where he was supposed to go when he was done here. Sure, he knew his way around the castle (assuming no major renovations had happened in the last half-century), but he didn’t know if he was supposed to go to the dinning room or whatever room was being prepared for him. Yuuri stood there on the edge of the pool-like bathtub for a moment, pondering all of his options, before finally deciding to just head back to the throne room to see if anyone would be there and willing to tell him where to go.

Fortunately for Yuuri, he didn’t have to go all the way back to the throne room to find a guide. There was one already waiting for him outside the bath. Unfortunately for Yuuri, his guide was the last person he wanted to see.

“Finished with your bath?” Odelia asked brusquely. Yuuri had to admit that he was surprised that such a proper-looking young woman could and would speak so roughly. Between his last look at her in the throne room and the moment he left the bath, it seemed that Odelia had had a chance to change into a simple, elegant lavender dress and to tame her hair into a smooth, dark ponytail that hung most of the way down her back. But the hardness hadn’t left her eyes, and though she was shorter than Yuuri and appeared to be unarmed, he felt certain that a single misstep around her could spell doom.

“Umm…yes…” Yuuri replied hesitantly.

She nodded, then turned on her heel and headed off into the castle. “Come with me, then. I’ll show you to your room.”

They walked in silence until they arrived at Yuuri’s room, just in time to see the women called Ilaria and Idonea leaving. The blond (Ilaria, Yuuri thought) gave them a brief nod and said, “Your dinner is ready,” before they swept past Yuuri and his current guide. Odelia stepped aside long enough to let Yuuri pass, then followed him into the room and took up a spot by the window, leaning against the wall and crossing her arms over her chest in a distinctly challenging manner. At first, Yuuri did his best to ignore her while he ate, but he quickly discovered that it was almost impossible to do so. Her presence seemed to fill the room.

“So…you seemed very protective of that young man down in the throne room,” he finally ventured, hoping to get some information out of her.

“Elric is my brother, and the closest to me in age. Ahren was injured in battle not too long ago, and Ilaria and Idonea are useless with swords. They’re both too vain to have ever bothered learning to fight properly.”

“Wait, so all of them are your siblings?” Yuuri asked. Odelia nodded. “Can’t Elric fight?”

“Sure. But I, unlike my mother and Uncle Gwendal, don’t believe you to be who you say you are. I’m not about to let you anywhere near my siblings if I can help it.”

Yuuri blinked. This sounded very familiar…had it really been so long ago that Gwendal and Wolfram had not believe Conrad and Gunter when they claimed that Yuuri was the Maou? Apparently so, at least in this world. And then Odelia’s words really registered. “Wait a minute. Uncle Gwendal? So your parents are --”

“My mother is the Maou. My father is Wolfram von Bielefeld. And if this country survives the next few years, everyone believes I will be the next Maou.” She glared down at him with her emerald eyes, as though challenging him to dispute her claims.

“Why wouldn’t the country survive the next few years?” Yuuri asked. His head was spinning, and he thought that only one thing could help -- more information, as much as Odelia and the others were able to give him.

She shrugged. “At the moment, the war and the disease are the main contenders for the title of ‘disaster that causes Shin Makoku to fall.’ Personally, I would put my money on the disease. Shin Makoku has been through wars before, and survived. But this disease is like nothing we have ever seen before. The war started because of it, too.”

“Gwendal said Wolfram is sick. Does he have the disease you’re talking about?”

Odelia turned away from Yuuri and stared out the window at the castle’s moonlit courtyard. “Yes,” she said softly.

Yuuri hesitated, then pushed his dinner tray aside, stood, and went to stand beside Odelia. “Can I see him? Please?”

“Why would you want to?” she whispered roughly. “If you are who you say you are, then you already abandoned him once.”

“I didn’t abandon him. I had no choice but to leave. It was the last portal out of here…Murata and Shouri and I had to leave, or we would never be able to go back to Earth, and that’s where our families are.”

Odelia looked back up at him, and Yuuri could see in her eyes that something had changed. “Murata? Shouri?”

“Yes. Ken Murata, the Great Sage. And my older brother Shouri, the current Maou of Earth.”

She gave him a quizzical look, then closed her eyes and gave him a small smile. “Nobody has spoken of those two in your presence since you arrived here. I think I can let you see my father. But I will warn you, the disease has changed him. He doesn’t look much like you would remember him.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Yuuri said firmly. “I want to see him. He deserves at least that much from me.”

“He probably will not be conscious,” she added. “He hasn’t been fully conscious in weeks.”

Yuuri gulped a bit, but still nodded. “That’s okay. I’ll sit with him for a while anyway.”

Odelia studied him for a second, then pushed herself away from the wall and headed out of the room in silence. Yuuri followed after her, and soon found himself in front of a pair of heavy, ornate double doors. Stealing himself for what he would see within, Yuuri pushed the right door open and slipped inside, glancing back at his guide as though seeking reassurance that he was doing the right thing. But she just watched him quietly. For once, she didn’t look ready to pounce on him at a moment’s notice. Somehow, that was comforting to Yuuri, who carefully closed the heavy door behind him so as not to wake Wolfram. Not that he really needed to worry about that. But he didn’t realize it until he got a good look at the man lying on the bed.

Where Elric was the spitting image of Wolfram as Yuuri remembered him, the man on the bed had barely any resemblance to the Wolfram Yuuri had known. As a Mazoku, Wolfram shouldn’t have aged all that much in fifty years. And yet, right now, he looked like he had aged so much…the first thing Yuuri noticed was the amount of weight he had lost. Wolfram’s cheeks were sunken, his arms looked like they would snap under even the gentlest of touches. His skin, always pale before, now had a sickly grey cast to it, and had the appearance of thin paper stretched over the underlying bones and muscles. The once golden hair completely lacked any luster. Each breath the other man took wheezed and rattled and sounded to Yuuri as though it could very well be Wolfram’s last. He had to admit, he was quite glad the other man was asleep. Yuuri didn’t want to know what Wolfram’s eyes would look like because of this disease, whatever it was. The basin on the bedside table revealed that the disease wasn’t just ravaging Wolfram’s appearance -- Yuuri couldn’t quite tell in this light, but he was sure that the cloth sitting in the basin was stained with blood, which indicated to him that Wolfram was coughing up blood or having some nasty nosebleeds. Either way, something definitely wasn’t right with that. He carefully pressed the backs of his fingers to Wolfram’s cheek and winced at the high fever he felt there.

“Well, Wolfram,” he murmured. “This doesn’t look good at all, does it? What in the world is going on here? How am I supposed to fix this when I don’t even know what’s happening?”

He looked around, wondering if he should just sit on the edge of the bed or not, until his eyes fell on a chair nearby. Yuuri decided to move the chair closer to the bed, thus giving himself a more comfortable place to sit. This turned out to be one of his worse ideas, as the chair was rather heavy and he was huffing and puffing by the time he got it next to Wolfram’s bed. But in the end, he decided that the effort was worth it. Settling himself into the chair, Yuuri turned his attention to watching over Wolfram and pondering the terrible situation his former kingdom seemed to be in. He was pretty sure he had been allowed to travel back to Shin Makoku to fulfill a particular mission. But what was that mission? He didn’t know yet, because he didn’t have enough information. All he knew was that there was a war and a disease, and that the two were connected. Unfortunately, nobody seemed willing to give him anymore information at the moment…or perhaps there was nothing else to give. Shaking his head sharply, Yuuri tried to push those thoughts from his mind and concentrate on Wolfram’s well-being, but after about half an hour of fighting with himself over that, he gave up. He needed to do something other than watch the unconscious Wolfram struggle to breathe, so he got up and began a quiet exploration of the ornate bedroom. There wasn’t a lot to explore here, really. Wolfram’s clothes had never been of much interest to Yuuri, and since the wardrobe, dressing table, and a few assorted chairs and small tables seemed to be the only furniture in the room besides the bed and bedside table, Yuuri’s exploration of the area was quickly completed.

He did, however, discover a second door in the room, which he pushed open cautiously. This door wasn’t as heavy as the main door and opened with greater ease, revealing a small but well-appointed sitting room of sorts. Two more doors led out of the sitting room, and Yuuri decided to explore those next. The door on the right led to a large office, filled to bursting with a desk, a huge table, several chars, and innumerable charts, books, papers, and scrolls. Yuuri stepped up to the desk and studied some of the papers, struggling with the unfamiliar Mazoku writing system - apparently, lacking regular exposure to it for ten years of his own life wasn’t conducive to maintaining an ability to read it. Even so, he was able to decipher several of the titles on the papers, and concluded that this must be the Maou’s private office. Feeling certain that the current Maou wouldn’t appreciate him poking into her private affairs (even if many of them were similar to the affairs Yuuri himself had once dealt with), he beat a hasty retreat back to the sitting room and decided to take a quick peek behind the other door he had seen there. That door led to a slightly smaller, much less cluttered office. Where the charts and papers in the previous office had dealt with issues important to all of Shin Makoku, the charts and papers here seemed to be specific to a particular region. A closer inspection revealed that they concerned the area controlled by the von Bielefeld family -- specifically, by Wolfram, or whoever was currently fulfilling his duties. So, this is Wolfram’s office, Yuuri thought. I wonder if anything here can help me figure out what’s going on…

Yuuri made his way slowly and carefully around the room, examining the papers and maps and charts. He focused on understanding the titles on each paper, which proved to be a good system. Though he didn’t find anything that seemed of use, it did serve as a good exercise for jogging his memory, and his ability to read mazoku writing got better and better with each title he read. Finally, he made his way to the desk, where the biggest bound book he had ever seen lay open, a feather quill balanced across the pages. He rounded the desk and stared down at the book, wondering what secrets it held, then gasped. The pages before him were empty! Yuuri pushed the quill aside and flipped to some of the later pages, but they too were blank. He was a bit bewildered and about to do something drastic, like tear a page out of the book and hold it over a candle to see if something had been written on it in invisible ink, when the rest of his brain finally caught up with him and made sense of his current observations. This probably wasn’t some big secret book written entirely in invisible ink. In fact…Yuuri flipped back a few pages from the first blank ones, and discovered pages thick with Wolfram’s elegant, almost delicate handwriting. He squinted at the page he was on, but his ability to read Mazoku writing wasn’t up to the task of reading such tiny print in such dim light as this. He needed some more light, quickly. Back in the sitting room, he found some candles and (much to his surprise) a book of matches. Deciding for the moment that the origins of the matches weren’t as important as the light they could give him, he struck one and quickly lit the candles in the candelabra he found, then carried it into Wolfram’s office, set it on the desk, and flipped to the beginning of the diary. If he had any doubt that this was indeed Wolfram’s diary, that doubt vanished when he got a look at the first entry.

Why that…that…that WIMP had the sheer GALL to propose to me! Yes, that’s right, he proposed to ME, Wolfram von Bielefeld, who most certainly deserves better than some horrid pretender to the throne! Must kill him in tomorrow’s duel, it’s the only way to repair the tattered shreds of my dignity.