This is a year for ghosts, it seems.
What that his too, too solid flesh would melt... yet there he stands, as calm and tangible as his counterpart Marquise had stood before Lady Une in AC196. An impossibility offensive to reality and to my own conclusions. He doesn't turn to face me, though he must know I am here by the sound of my teacup striking the hardwood floor, the result of terror overriding caution and tense muscles. When he speaks there is nothing hollow or unnatural about his voice. It is just as I remembered it to be, and that is by far more frightening.
"You were expecting something more macabre, perhaps?"

The light from the fire does not dim in his presence, and as he turns to me he walks around the low coffee table, not through it. He seats himself on one of two armchairs by the mantelpiece.

"I was not expecting anyone." My voice shames me by breaking.

"Of course not. You are alone, as always." A sad smile, almost condescending. "And my arrival here has no doubt startled you. I apologize."

I choke on the most obvious words that refuse to leave my mouth, unable to voice them in their inescapable honesty- You're dead. There is nothing on earth that could have prepared me for this; I try to look away, and cannot. I try to speak, and I cannot...

"Do I frighten you?" He asks, in all politeness. "I could assume a deathly pallor instead, if you wish. Perhaps recreate my appearance as it was moments after my death? Unsightly burns, cauterized blood, skinless features, the human figure distorted into obscenity by the vacuum of space before finally being incinerated..."

The blood drains from my own face. Not because of the indignity of such a death... I am not unfamiliar with corpses. But not this- guilt. Not when I had already laid to rest that turmoil of emotion a year ago! I had killed him, yes. Hadn't I? That made my solution... acceptable, so I'd thought.

"Of course..." He continues. "I am more comfortable as I am. This... this is how I remember myself" His face remains handsome, and whole, looking exactly as it had the last time we fought. But now there is sorrow and confusion where once stood resolute determination and nobility.
"-In truth, I do not know the reason for this... my visitation, any more than you do. Unless it is merely for the occasion..."

He speaks casually, but the air is tense around him. I can feel parts of my being dying from his simplicity- from his damnable light conversation in the face of blinding irrationality. -Then, he looks at me with well-deep eyes, and the chill that seeps into me from his gaze somehow allows me to calm my shaken nerves, like a non-lethal dose of venom. It reminds me of the solitude of outer space.

I have seldom played host to the living before, let alone the dead. I attempt to imitate his aloof manner, maybe out of spite or merely incompetence. I seat myself in the chair opposite his.

"Why would you come to see me, if anyone? I said my last farewell to you a year ago. I cannot fight you forever. I have nothing to say to you anymore. What could you possibly have to say to me?"

"It is October 31." He says simply. "A day for those who could not be buried, and could not remain quietly in their graves..." His voice is calm, impersonal. "I do not wish to fight you, Wufei. There are others here that I have more obligation to see than you, I'm sure you're aware. I do have a desire to see what you have done with the peace that I helped initiate... But inexplicably I cannot remove myself from this place." He shrugged as if there was nothing 'inexplicable' about his appearance in the first place.

Why should he haunt me? I ponder, slowly beginning to feel nauseated. Why indeed... My mind strays to a vision of a steely, temperature-regulated safe kept secretly away from the prying eyes of friends and enemies alike. Secrets... relics or simply memorabilia left over from an all-consuming obsession that I thought I'd killed. That box... its contents. But they were mine by RIGHT, weren't they? My fingers are frigid, even so close to the fire, and they tighten around the armrest. I notice my companion shiver sympathetically.

"Would you... like anything? Are you cold?" These niceties sounded ridiculous even to me and most certainly would to such a socialite. And then I realize that they are wrong...wrong... In the silence I prayed that he WOULD challenge me to fight him- hiss or shriek like some unholy shadow and cover the room with black malevolence.
But his eyes leave mine, in what I mistake at first for amusement, but after moments turn his face by shades into an unfamiliar mask of vulnerability and pain.

"I am cold..." he says quietly. "...There were... many things I wanted." His frame shudders subtly, and he suddenly seems insubstantial compared to his surroundings. This weakness disturbs me more than his intense tranquility, more than his past-bravado, or his humiliating skill ever did. The wrongness is almost suffocating- it's in the air, invading my skull like smoke...

"I'm sorry." I intone, more to myself than to him. "My God, I'm so sorry..."
His eyes, unfocused, are dim and stare into the distance, his handsome visage growing darker. "I waited for you...for both of you... no one ever came." Finality is in that voice...
"There was no one waiting for me... no where to go." His voice grows stronger in its anguish, even as his form begins to dim.

"What are you talking about? Your death... I didn't mean for...I didn't think I'd win!" The calming chill is utterly gone, and can I feel fire begin to claw its way across my nerves.

"Not the deep silence of an atheist's death, nor heaven, nor hell, nor purgatory... no faces of past loves or family waiting to greet me. No eternity filled with a battle for our supremacy or friendship... Just. Nothing."

"I didn't mean for you to die!" I am on my feet, desperate, the small table overturning with a jarring clatter. "It wasn't my fault! You... You killed yourself in that battle!"

"Does it matter?" He whispered, the navy blue of his uniform charring slowly, languidly at the edges, turning to a red haze in the air. "Does it matter if there is nothing, and absolutely nothing awaiting me my martyrdom?"

"I don't know what you're talking about. Please...Please just go away." I am shaking violently now, the world turning to a nightmarish blaze around me. . In my mind, the safe springs open of its own accord, spilling its secrets to the world, the horrified and disgusted witness. My secrets...my right!

"Why won't you let me die?" One eye is blue- beseeching me while the other melts slowly in the memory of intense heat, like a parody of tears sliding down the painful red of exposed ligaments
"Why won't you bury me?...Wufei?"

His voice is an echo in my fever-saturated brain, for there is nothing left within his peeling throat with which to produce sound. His vivid, hollowed body crunches inward, methodically as if being pulled in on itself by strings. I watch his death in slow-motion.

But I can't bury the past. Not for you, not for anyone. Not after the years of waiting, of concealing from your over-inquisitive kin the last of her legacy! I can't give up what is rightfully mine! Some things do not change!

"DAMN YOU DAMN YOU DAMN YOU GO AWAY! GO AWAY!" The words sear my throat like flame- I can't breathe, as if the air around me had gone acidic with bile. Red fills the world-
"I'm so lonely..."

The fire is not in my mind anymore.
Flames lap up the sides of leather upholstery, devouring the dark wood of the overturned table, leaping towards the wood-paneled walls in excitement, filling the room with heat and poisoned smoke like a vengeful dragon. Exposing the twisted remains of over heated metal hidden behind those panels, a yawning maw into the past.

The obscene, crumpled framework of flesh that had been seated in front of me is now a pale figure standing over me. His gloved hands hold the blackened remnant of what I know for certain is bone. The remains of a human skull that had been smuggled off the battlefield three years previously. Treize holds it with an air of quiet contemplation. Satisfaction.

I choke on his name in the blinding heat. As his figure fades into the dark fire, I know that I will never see him again.

That I will never see anything again.