Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Angel in the Flames ❯ Chapter 1 ( Chapter 1 )

Chapter 1

There was no moon that night, any light was from the sputtering lamps that lined the nearly deserted street. A few figures ran here and there, but mostly the city was silent. A darkly dressed man stumbled from a bar, tripping over himself. The man righted himself, and began to stagger down the street, humming tunes to himself in his delirium, lost in his past. The man was far from in his prime, at 22, he was hardly more than a boy, but he was lost, broken. His time was past, and there was nothing ahead of him but an endless line of tomorrows without hope. His long braid fell to his knees, a perverse memoir of the past. He turned into a side street, still humming mindless little ditties to himself. The man was Duo Maxwell, Ex Gundam Pilot 02 and destroyed human being.

More figures joined the deserted street, moving as one, they followed Duo into the alleyway, moving like hyenas on the scent of a kill. The number of beers the prey had downed in the last few hours confused him, he couldn't remember which way to go. Duo turned around drunkenly, realizing it was a dead end. The men surrounded him, cutting off his exits. A burly bald man cut in front of him, eyeing him up and down, but backed off as another man came forward. The leader, a beautiful young man with a sleek black ponytail and dressed in leather sauntered up to the confused prey. It wasn't hard for the leather man to quickly slip a rope around Duo's wrists and press him against a nearby wall.

"So, madam, Isn't it a bit dangerous for you to be walking around this neighborhood alone at this time of night?"

The leather man's groupies snickered at the comment, behaving as any good gang should. Duo couldn't grasp his situation.

He managed to stutter blearily, "Not…a…woman…leave…me…. alone…"

The man in leather chuckled to himself and ignored Duo's drunken demands. The man snaked his hand down to Duo's crotch, and was surprised to feel a bulge. The leather man chuckled gently to himself and turned to his lackeys.

"Well boys, we've got a surprise here tonight, not a woman at all! We've got ourselves a cross-dressing fag instead! He's awfully pretty though isn't he? " With that he yanked hard on the rope and brought Duo to his knees. The bald man drew closer to circle around the leader and his catch. He cackled with a voice rough enough to grate metal on.

"Raven, this one's too pretty just to fuck, I think it would be best if we made our guest a little more…comfortable."

The leather man, Raven, looked scornfully at his inferior. "Get a damn magazine Holte, maybe it will calm you down, shit head." However on Ravens face, it was apparent that he agreed with Holte's statement.

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Heero Yuy lay on his bed staring at the ceiling, silently contemplating. Everything was different. Ever since he was young his sole purpose was to eliminate his enemies in cold blood, protect the colonies from danger. But after the war, things changed abruptly. Everyone went their separate ways. Trowa returned to the circus, Wufei joined The Preventers, but left after only one year. Duo's business with Hilde failed, miserably. Quatre took over the Winner Enterprise, and became politically active. Heero himself severed connections with everyone, and wasn't heard from again until Duo found him.

Duo had bought a small house in what used to be New York City. In a last ditch effort to bring the ex-pilots together again, he invited Heero and Wufei to live with him there, they accepted. At first it had been enjoyable, but after six months, Duo steadily became depressed. He took too nightly drinking and became more and more distant. Wufei and Heero noticed, but were at an absolute loss as to what to do. The Duo they had known was dead.

Recently Heero found himself prone to lying in bed, staring at the plain, blank ceiling, just thinking. After the war, he had tried to dispatch himself multiple times, backing out each time at the last minute. Somehow, it seemed that a spark of something living had survived the years of brutal training. He would never have hesitated to self-destruct to serve the whims of Dr. J, but now it seemed that all was changed, even himself. In the years since the war, he found himself feeling; not the vague flashes of something unrecognizable in his chest, but more often a deep seated ache, lodged below his breastbone. A sadness of which he had not known before, and it came to him often, especially when he was alone.

It occurred to him that Duo had been out longer than usual; not that anything about Duo's behavior was `usual' lately. If Duo wasn't drunk, then he was depressed. Something in Duo had died, leaving just a shell of what he had been. Heero found himself drawn to the former soldier increasingly of late, watching him in his drunken stupor, carefully placing cool cloths on his forehead during his intense slumbers, when he screamed and yelled unintelligible words, often driven to tears and pathetic babbling. He felt the ache most strongly during these fits of sleeping madness. Perhaps Duo's suffering was a result of the killing, a way of dealing with his guilt, or perhaps he had forced happiness upon himself for too long, driving himself over the edge. What had happened to make this joyful person die inside? Heero did not know, but whatever the reason, Duo was keeping his secret closely guarded, and he could not help but think that there was something he could do to help.

Heero sighed, and rolled over on his small bed, looking at his small alarm clock, 3 am. It was late, but Duo had been out late before. In the morning if Duo wasn't home he would have to look for him, not a task Heero was looking forward to with any relish, it usually took hours, sometimes even a few days to find a lost Duo. And the whole time he suffered the sadness, and the feeling of helplessness that grew with each passing day of his absence. If this was what friendship was, he wondered why Duo wanted it so bad of him.