Frozen
Saint Seiya
by Tenshi
Hyoga's closed bedroom door was freezing cold to the touch, and Shun's fears were confirmed. When he was woken out of a sound sleep by a burst of Hyoga's Cosmo from next door, he had hoped it was only a mistake--but the thin rime of frost covering the doorknob was enough to convince him. Shun wrapped the hem of his t-shirt around his hand to touch the handle, but the door still refused to budge. Delicate feathers of ice blossomed around the hinges, and Shun's heart stuttered, as it did before every battle. Some enemy had come for Hyoga in the night, and only Shun was there to help.
He was alone in the great, echoing depths of the mansion; no one else would have heard Hyoga's call. Saori was in Greece with Seiya. Shiryu was away in China. And Ikki...
Shun put his shoulder to the door, the thickening ice shattering at the impact, and tried to tamp down on his feelings of powerless frustration. Who knew where Ikki was?
At the least, Shun thought, with a certain grim satisfaction, I can break down one door by myself. It took him three slams, while Seiya would have taken maybe two and Ikki one, but the door and the ice wall beyond finally crumpled. Shun charged through the splinters and shards, expecting evil gods at the least. Instead he found nothing. Only everything in Hyoga's room-- furniture, curtains, walls-- glistening with thick frost, while Hyoga himself lay under his glittering coverlet, sound asleep.
Or perhaps not so sound, Shun reconsidered. The battle aura still came from him, and the icy sheets cracked and refroze as he shivered in them, his clenching fists sending out more waves of cold even as he slept, wrapped up in some nightmare of combat. Shun lowered his hands, his adrenaline draining away into sympathy. His bare feet crunched on the carpet as he went to Hyoga's side.
"Hyoga." Shun did not think it wise to touch him. He'd had enough nightmares of his own to suspect he might only get punched in the eye for his pains. "Hyoga! It's a dream, wake up."
The blond saint made a vague noise in throat, his pale lashes flickered. But he did not wake up, and the cold did not abate. There was nothing for Shun to do but try and shake him out of it, which he did, with fingers that were starting to go numb. Whatever gold saint or fallen master Hyoga battled in his dreams, it was a fierce opponent.
"Hyoga!"
Cygnus Hyoga started, grasping Shun's hand and sending a wave of ice up to his elbow before his eyes even focused. "...Shun?"
"You were dreaming," Shun said, gritting his teeth against the stinging pain. Hyoga glanced down at what he'd done, and whatever he said was both profane and heartfelt. It was also in Russian.
"Sorry," he said, shoving back the brittle coverlet. "Here, I can't shatter this, I'll break your arm--" He tried to stand, as though intending to lead Shun somewhere warmer, but he had spent too much of his Cosmo in his sleep, and his legs were sluggish with cold. Halfway out of the bed he buckled. But even winged, Shun was there to catch him. He brought his good arm around Hyoga's waist and lifted the other saint out of his frozen bed.
"I think you'd better let me help you."
Slowly, they made their way together through the broken door, back across the hall, to Shun's room. Hyoga's would be frozen solid for hours, and wet and cold for long after. But the covers Shun had thrown off mere moments ago were still warm, and his stern serenity quelled all of Hyoga's protests. One-handed, he divested Cygnus Hyoga of his sleeping pants; with one arm still ice-sheathed, he pulled the blankets back over Hyoga's pale, shivering body. Cosmo and spirit utterly spent by his nightmare, Hyoga did as he was told. But though his pride was defeated, his honor would not be quelled so easily.
"Your arm--I know it must hurt. Shun, let me--"
"Do you really think," Shun said, with a lightness that cost him dearly, "I can't manage this much?" In truth, the pain of the ice was nearly overwhelming, but Shun would not waver. There was no one else here, Hyoga needed him, and that was simply that.
Wordlessly, Shun coaxed out a little of his Cosmo, sent it spiraling down his arm like the bright coil of his chain. He didn't have his brother's black destructive flames, but a gentle warmth that was entirely his own. It spread through his frozen flesh, and in seconds the fragments of Hyoga's ice cracked, and fell away to the floor.
"See?" Shun held up his arm, forced his wince into a smile as the feeling needled its way back into his arm. "As if I'd let you get the better of me in your sleep, of all things."
"I'm fine," Hyoga said, and gave the world's poorest example of sitting up. "I can't take your bed. I'll--oof!"
"You'll budge up," Shun said, putting Hyoga back into the pillows with little more than a finger, and wriggling into the narrow space behind him in the bed. "There's room for us both, and I'd sooner let you sleep on the porch than in that deep freeze of a room of yours."
"Let me?" Hyoga wondered aloud, but that was his last protest. Shun had just curled up along his back, warm and soft and yet utterly intractable, his presence a gentle strength that Hyoga had not known since his childhood.
"Go to sleep, little Cygnet," Shun breathed, and his hair fell over Hyoga's shoulder like a queen's mantle, his hands folded around Hyoga's arms like fetters.
Hyoga would protest such things. Pet endearments and soft caresses were for boys without a Goddess' command. He would protest. Later. When his eyes were not so heavy, and the bed not so comfortable, and when Shun was not humming something quiet and pleasant against his ear. He slept, and dreamed of the time when Shun's warmth had pulled him back from the edge of death, through ice and darkness and into the light.
And Shun slept alongside him, contented to know that the mansion and his companion were both safe in his keeping.
~o~