23 Aug 2000
DISCLAIMER: All Gundam Wing characters are property of Sunrise, Bandai Visuals, Sotsu Agency, and Asahi TV. This work is not written for profit, but for entertainment purposes only.
WARNINGS: Shonen-ai
PAIRING: 13+6
Author's notes: This part of the fic draws heavy inspiration from Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' and from the doujinshi 'Treista' by Toreno Akai.
Andrea del Castagno of Florence really existed, but The Gemini is a fictional work of art.
He was seated next to the panel that separated the seats from the door, looking down to make sure he wasn't putting his feet on anyone else's. The long sweep of platinum hair made a breathtaking contrast against the dark blue of his calf-length coat and I burned to be able to reach across the car and grasp it in my fingers, remembering its softness from my dream.
There was no doubt about it - today I would get him to look at me. Perhaps even speak to him. How could I not after that dream, where we seemed to be two halves of the same soul.
He'd settled in and assumed the serene, detached look I'd seen him wear the previous two days. I wondered if it was some kind of mask he wore so that he could retreat to a more interesting inner world during the tedious train ride. Smiling to myself, I realized that everything he did suddenly seemed to have great importance and I was the eager interpreter, imposing my own meaning on it all.
I concentrated on his face, his eyes especially, wanting so badly for him to look at me, wanting him to know I was there. We were almost at the station for the Museum and he rose, holding onto one of the poles again, swaying gently to the rhythm of the train. /Please!/ I thought, /don't leave without seeing me... just a glance is all I ask.. surely that's all it would take.../
To my utter amazement, he turned his head at that moment and his eyes met mine.
Do you know what it is to pour every ounce of yourself into your gaze? To try to say with your eyes what would take years to say in words, and to convey the purest forms of interest, affection, even longing, in a simple look? I did all of that, nearly coming out of my seat, so utterly captivated was I with his glance. Surely those clear, azure eyes would be the perfect place in which to give myself up and drown. And surely he would see all that as he looked at me.
His reaction, however, was not what I'd expected. He stared back at me for several moments as the train slowed to approach the station, and then a tiny crease formed in between the stunning eyes, as if I were a puzzle he couldn't quite work out. He searched my face, probably wondering where, if at all, he had seen me before. They was nothing there of longing or affection or any of the other emotions raging through me. The connection I had thought to be inevitable didn't materialize - not on his part anyway.
The doors of the train opened and a stream of people went by him, preventing him from leaving the car immediately. I saw him look down a bit, the puzzlement still on his face, and then there was a break in the tide of people and he moved to the doors. He stepped onto the platform and seemed to hesitate a moment before turning around suddenly, looking exactly as he had in my dream, long hair flying out to one side of him, his eyes meeting mine.
Then the doors hissed shut, and I was moving away from him. Lurching up from my seat I leaned over the passengers in the row opposite me, both hands on the window, staring back at the station platform. He was there, head turned towards the car I rode in, watching the train pull out of the station. He looked so tall, lean and beautiful in the long sweep of his coat. The movement of the train made his hair swirl around him, and the sight of it broke my heart.
I endured many strange looks for the rest of the journey to my stop, but they were nothing compared to the inner thrashing I was giving myself. /Why didn't you get off the train when he did? Why didn't you talk to him, or at least follow him to see where he went? Why did you let him get away like that? What if you never see him again?/
The morning seemed endless. I had absolutely no interest in any of the cases I was supposed to be handling and the everyday chatter of my colleagues only made the time drag more. I'd berated myself over and over again since leaving the blond man at the station and when I looked up and noticed it was eleven-thirty, I decided enough was enough.
"I'm taking an early lunch, Hayley," I called and was on the elevator seconds later, no doubt leaving a very confused secretary in my wake.
My decision was firm. I would go to the museum and find him. If he wasn't there, I would look into every building in the neighborhood. I simply had to meet him.
The walk was a long one, and by the time I'd reached the block that the art museum inhabited my cheeks were scarlet with cold. I was debating whether to stop at one of the street vendors' carts to buy some coffee when I saw him, walking up the steps into the museum. I decided to follow him, discretely, to see where he went, and headed off after him, up the steps and into the old stone building.
I paid my admission fee and asked the woman at the desk if the tall blond who'd just come in was an employee of the museum.
"No, he's not," she said, "but he's come here every day for the past three days. Before that I'd never seen him, and he's not one you'd likely forget, now is he?"
"No," I murmured, "No he's not... thanks anyway."
He was disappearing up the stairs, so I followed, making sure he didn't see me. I'm not sure why I suddenly felt so shy, but I wanted to get an idea of why he came to the museum before approaching him. In fact, I said to myself in a wonderful rationalization, it just might be that whatever he did would give me a clue as to *how* to approach him.
At the top of the stairs he turned right and walked slowly down the long main corridor, towards the back of the museum. I was transfixed by the sight of him as he passed the different galleries. It was as if art walked through art, his beauty matching any of the pieces display on the walls.
One more turn, to the left this time, brought him to a gallery that appeared to be closed off to the public. At least, there were ropes fencing off the delicate archway that led into the room, and a sign on the wall next to the archway read, "This exhibition has not yet been completed." It didn't seem to matter to him, however, for as I watched he simply stepped over the low ropes and passed under the archway into the gallery. "Well," I murmured to myself, "perhaps the rules don't apply to him..."
I stood there, contemplating what to do and then realized two things: 1) I had to find out what he came to see everyday, and 2) he might just be a crafty international art thief - who also happened to be tall, blond, and gorgeous - and wouldn't it be better if I kept an eye on these rather furtive activities of his? (When I need to rationalize, my intelligence knows no bounds.) In a heartbeat, I was over the ropes and peering into the room.
I have to admit, what I saw there gave me significant pause.
He was on the floor, kneeling in front of a large picture that I couldn't quite make out. The expression on his face as he looked up at it was so intent, so serious, that I held back, unsure of whether I should interrupt such a rapt meditation. He stayed there on the floor, motionless, for nearly half an hour and all during that time as he stared at the painting, I stared at him - a work of art come to life.
I was beginning to lose my nerve, afraid now of approaching someone so completely focused. It felt to me that if I called to him, or walked into the room, it would be as if I'd disturbed a religious service. I tried several times to step forward and each time fell back again, unable to make myself go through with it. I had come this far, been this much of a fool, and still he was unreachable.
Feeling more than a little sick about the whole thing, I turned to go, but just then he stood. His eyes were still locked onto the painting as he took one step towards the wall on which it hung. Then, in the hushed stillness of that room, I heard his whisper, low and resonant. "Come back to me."
Before I knew what was happening, he turned and began walking down the length of the room to the door. It was idiotic, after I'd gone to all that trouble, but I didn't want him to see me, lurking at the door and spying on his private moments. I turned and stumbled behind the large dry walled area that fronted the exhibit and saw him walk past me, his long coat sweeping out behind him. As I watched him walk away, I thought for the barest moment that I could see a cape swirling in place of the coat, setting off the heavy mass of pale gold hair. I stood there until he turned the corner at the end of the corridor and then turned myself, to look through the archway at the gallery beyond.
/Hell,/ I thought to myself, /I've already walked in this far, surely nothing could happen if I just took a stroll down and had a glance at that picture.../ I'm always one for famous last words.
Moving through the archway, I saw the room was being decorated for an exhibit of early Renaissance paintings. Some of the smaller pieces were already in place, fitted into tiny alcoves that gave the room the appearance of being from a completely different century. It felt comfortable, even half-complete as it was. There was something about the lighting, or perhaps it was the color of the walls, but I could feel myself relaxing after the rather tense experience I'd just had.
When I came to the painting, I got the shock of my life.
It was him. It was the blond man. Certainly he was dressed differently, but the face, the hair, the tall, lean form, were all exactly the same. He was standing in a wooded clearing, turned a bit towards his left. The robes he wore were of rich, saturated red velvet, caught around the waist with a wide leather belt shot through with golden thread. A long cape, midnight blue with a pale yellow lining, fell from his shoulders to his feet, the latter encased in leather boots that clung to well-shaped calves and hid his slim, brown breeches below the knee.
His left hand was extended towards the direction in which he looked, and in the long, slender fingers a chain was twined, with a luminous, golden cross hanging at the end of it. The look on his face was one of vague sadness.
Had he really been staring at this picture for all that time? A picture of a young man who looked just like him? It seemed so mundane -fascination with something that looked like oneself - and I found myself, rather stupidly, disappointed.
I was staring at the floor, trying to make some sense of it when I noticed that there was a fine overlay of white dust on the polished wood, no doubt from the construction that was involved in preparing the gallery for the exhibit. The dust was gone from the area in which the blond man had knelt and looking at it made me sad - missing him somehow, though we'd shared only one glance. I went over to the cleared spot on the floor and knelt down, as he had done, and when I raised my eyes to the wall, I got another surprise. He had been kneeling for a good half hour, not in front of the portrait, but to the right of it. Given the direction he was looking, then, my beautiful blond has stared for 30 minutes at a blank stretch of wall.
Getting up slowly, I picked my way out of the exhibit, my spirits sinking as I thought about him. There must have been something profoundly wrong with a man who haunted a partially complete museum exhibit and stared at the empty walls there. I came to the conclusion that I was obsessed not only with the most beautiful man on the face of the earth, but with a madman as well.
Because of a last-minute breakfast meeting the next morning, I ended up having to take a cab in to work, but I made plans to be at the museum at 11:30 again. Hayley was beginning to wonder at my sudden absences from the office, and began generating possible explanations for my behavior, the wilder of which she shared with me. But the truth was even wilder still, and I just couldn't bring myself to tell anyone that I'd begun following a possibly unstable man into the art museum.
Part of my mind told me to drop the entire thing and forget about him, but, in the middle of the night, when I'd woke from another dream about him, I'd made a decision to finally speak to him. I didn't want to believe he was insane. I told myself that there was probably a perfectly good explanation for what he did, and I needed to hear from him what it was.
Arriving at the museum early, I took a seat behind one of the large pillars in the main lobby and waited. Ten minutes later I saw him walk in and once again I followed him up the stairs to the half-completed exhibit. He knelt on the floor, in the same spot he'd been the day before and began his vigil, staring at the wall beside the portrait. His gaze was as intense as before, but now tinged with a sad longing that hadn't been there yesterday. As I watched, he leaned forward and a solitary tear fell from between his golden lashes and made it's way onto the floor in front of him.
I had just screwed up my courage to speak with him when he rose suddenly. Holding up a long, graceful arm, his fingertips traced something in the air and I heard him again murmur, "Come back to me." My heart pounded at the sound of those words. Who was it he pleaded with? Whose face did he imagine there, on the blank wall? I put out a hand to steady myself against the temporary wall that was my cover, and before I knew what had happened he'd swept past me, down the corridor to the stairs.
"Oh, no - I'm not letting you go *this* time," I muttered to myself, and I hurried after him down the stairs and out again to the street.
His legs were longer than mine, and his long strides difficult to keep up with, but I trailed behind him for seven blocks until he reached the edge of the bay that glittered at the foot of the city. Panting heavily, I followed his figure as it climbed the steps to the bridge that spanned the blue-green water and then stood, motionless. His hair streamed around him in the wind, making him look that much more fairy-tale like. The hazily beautiful image dissolved rather suddenly though, when I saw him lean over the railing and look down to the water some 50 feet below.
There was something in the way he held himself, the carelessness of his movements, that made my heart jump, and I ran the rest of the way onto the bridge, praying that I could stop him in time if he decided to let himself fall. "Wait!" I shouted, my very first word to him, now hanging in the air between us. "Please don't!"
He looked up suddenly, startled by my sudden appearance, and stared at me - that stunning blue gaze stopping me in my tracks about 10 feet from him. "Please don't do anything stupid!" I said, leaning over and putting my hands on my knees. (I wasn't used to running up steep bridges, nor getting shots of adrenalin to the heart from mysterious blonds who look as though they're planning on taking the short way back down.)
There was a pause - and endless amount of time when I thought perhaps he hadn't heard me, or might not speak English - and then he frowned a bit, that same puzzled expression I'd seen when our eyes met on the train. Then he spoke.
"Whatever do you think I'm going to do - kill myself?"
The voice was a deep, rich baritone that made me shiver, but his words had the effect of causing my face to go flaming red. "Well, in a manner of speaking... yes. Weren't you?" I said, wishing I could think of a more witty rejoinder now that the danger seemed to be passed.
"In a manner of speaking," he replied, "no."
"Oh," I said, wanting the ground to come up and swallow me, "oh. Well." We stood there looking at each other for several seconds and I caved first. "Lovely weather we're having today, don't you think?"
He smiled, tentatively, and I thought the sun had come down to earth. "Yes... yes I suppose it is..." His voice trailed off and we kept staring at each other - just standing there, smiling and staring. Surely I was going to die from happiness.
"I suppose I should thank you," he said at last, "for being so concerned for me. I really wasn't going to jump, you know."
"Good," I said, stupidly. "That's... really good." Then I stood there, nodding my head and smiling, no doubt looking like the idiot I felt myself to be.
He nodded too, and his smile broadened. He looked like an angel, then, and I knew I couldn't let him get away. "Could I convince you to join me for a cup of coffee?" I said. "There's a little place on the other side of the bridge that's excellent."
His smile turned apologetic and my heart sank. "I'm afraid that's too far for me to go," he said, "I have to get back to the art museum." He brushed past me, starting to walk back down the way he had come, and I turned and grabbed hold of his hand. He turned sharply at the touch and stared at me, another unreadable look on his face and let out a small, huffed breath.
"Please," I whispered, "don't go yet."
He seemed spellbound, searching my eyes for something and, ultimately, seeming to find it. "Then it's true," he murmured and walked slowly towards me, not taking his hand from mine. "It really *is* you."
We were standing close, now, only inches apart, and something strange was happening to me. I felt like I was spinning, the world moving very fast around me, and then suddenly it turned opaque, as if everything but him was covered with gauze. He raised soft fingertips to my face, tracing my cheeks and brushing over my lips, and whispered, "It really *is* you..."
Then, for some completely unknown reason, I reached up a hand as well to cup his cheek and breathed against his mouth, "Yes... yes, it's me... and I'll never leave you again..." The next moment my mouth was on his and I was dissolving into him, falling eagerly, willingly into the touch of his hands and his lips. /This is home,/ I thought, barely coherent. /This is what I've lived my whole life for, what I've been searching for. I've been waiting for this moment since the day I was born... I've found my soul mate.../
Our kiss went on for what seemed a blissful eternity and then he gently pulled away. Staring into my eyes, he tugged on my hand softly, saying, "It's time to go back... I'll show you the way..."
I followed him as if in a dream. "I know the way to the art museum," I said, my own words sounding strange to my ears. He said nothing, just smiled again, and we walked in a deep and intimate silence back up seven blocks to the large stone building. We'd paid our admissions, the same woman behind the counter looking a bit puzzled to see us together, and were making our way up the stairs to the second floor.
As we reached the landing, my portable phone rang and I let go of his hand to get it out of my pocket. "It's my office calling," I said in irritation as he turned to look at me. "Go on ahead, I'll meet you up there - won't take a minute. Now where is that thing?"
"Don't answer it," he said, looking at me with concern.
"Really," I laughed, "it will only take a - ah hah!" I fished the troublesome gadget from the deepest recesses of my coat and held it up looking sheepish.
"Ignore it - it doesn't mean anything," he urged, looking more troubled now.
I waved him on as I heard Hayley's voice come on the line. "Really - go on up, I'll be right there. Hayley? Is that you? Look this is a devil of a time to call, this better be important."
He stared at me for several moments and then turned, looking sad, and walked slowly up the stairs. I was trying to understand Hayley's anxious voice through the static on the phone. "What was that?" I nearly shouted, "I had an appointment with whom?"
He'd reached the top of the stairs now, and turned to look down at me. "It will be meaningless," he said softly. "Just another trap..."
"Go on," I told him good-naturedly, "I'll be right up. Hayley, I don't know a Mr. Jeffries, and what do you mean, 'I'm late.' I didn't have an appointment with anyone this afternoon!" When I looked up again, my blond man had gone. "No, I'm not joking around with you - you must be joking with me - who's this Mr. Jeffries I'm supposed to know?"
I began climbing the stairs, arguing with my obstinate secretary, who was insisting that the person waiting in my office for fifteen minutes now was someone I'd worked with for the last year. I'd never heard of the man before, and didn't waste time telling her so. When I reached the top of the stairs, I could see the blond disappearing through the archway at the far end of the museum. "Look, Hayley, I don't appreciate the joke - you can tell Haynes that for me, all right? I'm in the middle of something here. I'll talk to you later."
There was a loud protest from her as I pressed the button and cut off the call.
Hurrying down the corridor, I noticed that the temporary wall had been taken away while I'd been out of the museum. A few workers were putting up the signs that announced the new exhibit that would open officially the next day. They grudgingly allowed me to take a peek inside and I walked under the archway... to find the room empty.
I felt a race of fear pass through me. Quickly I searched the other rooms on the second floor, but he wasn't in any of them. It was as if he'd just... disappeared.
Telling myself to be calm, I sat down on a bench that overlooked the entire floor and started thinking. Surely I'd seen him step into the new exhibit room. It had been when I was on the phone with Hayley and she'd been talking nonsense...
Something about that thought sounded familiar. What was it? Where had I heard that same thing, only just recently?
Then I heard his voice in my head. "Ignore it -" he'd said, "it doesn't mean anything." He'd been talking about my phone ringing, the call, perhaps, that I was about to take. And then he'd said, "It will be meaningless. Just another trap..." What had he meant? What was meaningless...?
"What she said to me," I murmured to myself, feeling suddenly strange. "It's true... what she said didn't make any sense... I was missing an appointment with a long-time client whom I'd never met. It *was* meaningless... /What the devil is happening?/ I thought to myself. /Where's he gone? Why had he said those things about the phone call, and what did he mean by a "trap?"/
The room was beginning to empty, the lunch break now past, and there were very few people on the floor aside from myself. Even the workers had taken a break and were nowhere near the soon-to-be-opened exhibit. I felt a shiver, look down at the archway at the end of the corridor, a sense of finality. Something was down there, and I had to know what it was. It didn't matter if it seemed frightening or dangerous, I had to go there because that's where *he* last was. So I walked, very slowly, to the edge of the exhibit, passing under the archway and on in to the room.
The exhibit was nearly finished now. The white dust was gone from the floor and here and there glossy wooden benches were placed in front of key paintings. There was one in front of the portrait that looked so much like my beautiful blond, so I crossed to it and sat down heavily. My eyes strayed to the painting and I nearly broke down to see him there, so unreal, so far away from me.
I'm not sure how long I stared, but gradually, the room grew dimmer and dimmer, and I remember thinking to myself that it must be getting near nightfall and that's why the place was so dark. But I couldn't move my eyes from him - the soul mate I'd lost somehow - with his stunning eyes and his lovely fair hair streaming down his back.
I thought about going back to work tomorrow, meeting with clients, making jokes with the partners, battling traffic to go to endless lunches with people I didn't care about or even particularly like. And I would do that over and over, each day, and know that I'd met the other half of me and somehow let him slip from my grasp. *That's* what the trap was, I thought to myself, and then paused, holding my breath.
The trap... what was it he'd said, "...meaningless. Just another trap..." I stared again at the portrait. "I'm almost there, love," I heard myself whisper. "Is this the trap?"
A hand fell on my shoulder and I jumped up. Turning around, I found myself in a clearing in the middle of a dense wood, and *he* was there, right there in front of me, with his hand on my shoulder. "Did you finally see the trap, my love?" he said, his voice low and silky.
"Yes..." I answered him. "It wasn't the phone call, was it? It was the world..."
His smile was the softest, most comforting thing I'd ever seen. "You're back," he whispered, too happy to fully speak. "You're really back."
I took him in my arms then, wound myself so tightly around him that I know I'd never lose him. "It was a mistake," I murmured as I pressed my lips to his cheek. "One I'll never make again..." And he stared into my eyes, leaning forward and letting me tumble down into him, this time never to surface again.
EPILOGUE
"I still can't quite believe it, Mr. Jeffries. It's so incredible to see it as it was really meant to be seen." Ms. Lucy Robbins, curator of the art museum's pre-Modern European collection, was standing back and shaking her head. A soft smile on her face spoke volumes about the piece she was currently admiring and the man she addressed, Mr. Emil Jeffries, chuckled a bit to see her reaction. Well, I thought for awhile there that I wouldn't be able to get it to you in time for the opening. I had an appointment with my regular lawyer, who was to handle this particular piece, but the man never showed up at our meeting and for a few hours it was a close run thing. Luckily they had another art man on the payroll to handle the transfer."
"I had no idea that the other part was still in existence. There have been lots of rumors circulating in the art world about it, but it had been missing for so long..."
"Mmmm - several hundred years," Mr. Jeffries said, nodding.
Ms. Robbins looked back at the new acquisition and smiled again. "First the one twin last week, and now the other one." She shook her head again in happy disbelief. "Looking at them now, it's clear they were made to be together."
"Ms. Robbins? Mr. Jeffries? The television crews are here. Are you ready?"
They both turned and walked out to where several camera crews waited and Ms. Robbins gave the speech she'd prepared in the wee hours of that morning.
"Good morning. It's my pleasure to announce that the museum's new exhibition, "Love and Faith in the Early Renaissance" has had the unbelievable good fortune to receive a new painting, just this morning, that is the twin of one just acquired last week for this same exhibit.
"Together, the two paintings, both done by Andrea del Castagno of Florence, are known as `The Gemini' with each painting on its own referred to as a `Twin.' The paintings themselves do not depict twins, however. The are thought to be portraits of two youths who lived in early-15th century-Italy and may have been acquaintances of the painter.
One of the paintings, known widely as `The Searching Twin', depicts a fair-haired youth, dressed as a noble, who holds out a cross in his left hand, as though offering it to someone. The other painting, known widely as `The Wandering Twin", is of a brown-haired youth dressed as a knight. He is painted so that he faces the other Twin, and holds out, in his right hand, a deep red rose. When the paintings are place side-by-side, with the Searcher to the left of the Wanderer, it appears as if they are looking into each other's eyes.
"Over the years, several individuals have owned The Gemini and it has been displayed at no less than ten museums, and in all that time the two paintings were always displayed together. In 1919, however, the Wandering Twin, strangely true to its name, disappeared from a private art collection in France. Historians have never been able to determine if it was lost, stolen, or met some other fate.
"Our museum acquired the remaining painting, the Searching Twin, just four days ago, when it was brought to this museum from another in Munich. We had planned on making it the centerpiece of our new Early Renaissance exhibit, opening today, and so were completely shocked when, early yesterday evening, a lawyer representing Mr. Emile Jeffries, a prominent art historian and collector, with us here today, telephoned our head curator and made the offer to donate the missing Twin to the museum in time for today's opening. Our restorers worked without sleep all last night and this morning, and we've just hung the second Twin with the first. I must say, ladies and gentleman, that the two of them together are a beautiful sight to behold. It is the museum's great pleasure - and great *honor* - to provide the space for the reunion of The Gemini. Thank you."
Later that afternoon, a young woman and her elderly mother were seated on the bench that stood before The Gemini. They had been looking at it for some time in companionable silence when the younger woman looked over at her mother. "Mom?," she said a slow smile appearing on her face. "Why do you have that silly smile on your face?" The mother shrugged eloquently, eyes still on the painting, and took her daughters hand. "I don't know - it's just that... they look so perfectly happy together..."
owari
(:./kumiko/gemini2)
