Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Crimson Nights and Scarlet Dawns ❯ Chapter 5

Oh yes, and I've decided to go with *this* for emphasis, and /this/ for thoughts, since my italics don't always show up where I want them to. I plan to go back and fix the preceding chapters at some point, too.)

FIVE:

Duo rolled onto his side, took a deep breath and let it out again-- and then with a muttered curse, he flipped over onto his back again. Opening his eyes, he stared up through the near-impenetrable darkness of his room to where he knew the ceiling was, glaring for all he was worth.

The clock on the bedside table told him it was 3:00. The clock in Duo's head told him it was far too bloody early. And he couldn't sleep.

In some ways, it was to be expected. He'd been warned by Sally that as things started to settle out in his body, he would start to require less food and sleep-- and indeed, in the week he'd been there, he'd started to see those changes occurring. He was down to one carton of synth every day or so, and as a rule he was sleeping less.

/But right now, I am *supposed* to be sleeping, god damn it. Right now, I am pretty damned tired, and would very much appreciate just passing out for a few hours./

Giving the sheets a vicious yank, Duo tried rolling onto his other side after thoroughly punching his pillow into shape.

In just under five hours, he had an appointment with Sally and whatever of her henchmen were necessary, to determine just what traits might be manifesting in him-- it had been a full week, after all, and according to the good doctor that was how long it normally took for said traits to start to show. In just under five hours, he would find out if it would be possible for him to become a Hunter, if he would ever see the sun again. If, if, if.

He reflexively glanced up at the clock. /Four hours, forty two minutes. God./

Tension crept through all his muscles, making him practically quiver under his protective layer of blanket, but he took another deep breath and began to force it away. Slowly, he unwound himself, muscle by muscle, always making sure to keep his breathing even and deep-- very carefully *not* looking at the clock, *not* thinking about--

Nothing.

After an interminably long time, Duo passed from buzzing wakefulness into fitful sleep. And he dreamed.

In his dream he was running, chasing something through the dark, something that always managed to stay just out of sight ahead of him. It was a familiar enough dream, of late-- no doubt brought on by circling thoughts of hunts and Hunters and the suddenly wide world of the night-- and so some part of him recognized it as a dream even as most of his consciousness just accepted the challenge and stepped up the pursuit. He ran, and ran-- faster than he ever thought he could move, with the pavement blurring by beneath him and the rush of wind screaming in his ears.

But it was not enough. The shape ahead-- just a shadow, a sense of a presence-- always stayed that slight, perfect distance ahead.

Duo growled savagely, deep in his throat, and reached down inside of himself for just a little more speed. He stretched out, feet hitting the ground and pushing off, the snarl still reverberating in his ears-- and for a split second, something teetered in a precarious balance, and tipped--

Muscles coiled and leaped, eyes snapped into a sharp, deadly focus. Duo dug into the ground, pushed off, hurled himself forward--

And there in full sight, just about to round a corner, was his prey.

"Duo!"

The darkness split, and reformed into the shadows of his room, lit in stark relief by light spilling in the open door from the hallway. Still half-lost in his dream, Duo had tumbled from his bed and taken a few steps towards the light before he realized what he was doing. Stopping, he shook his head to clear it, still feeling-- *off*.

The figure framed in the doorway, when he finally looked up at it, resolved into Sally. The doctor was dressed in her usual white coat, but her expression was not the calm, good-naturedly jaded one Duo had become accustomed to. In fact, the face framed between its twin braids actually looked mildly *shocked*.

And, he realized a moment later with some confusion, it was also an *awfully* long way up.

He opened his mouth to question her, and all that came out was a rough, growling whine.

The surprised expression cleared from the doctor's face, replaced by something more like her usual-- but mixed in with a touch of amusement. "Well," she said matter-of-factly. "Right on schedule."

Now thoroughly confused, and some little bit concerned-- he still felt like something was not quite right, even though he couldn't tell what-- Duo again tried to speak and again only managed a plaintive whine. He happened to glance down-- and yelped when the sight that greeted him was not his own bare feet against the floor, but *paws*.

The shock of the sight was enough to scatter away the last dregs of his dream, jerking his mind fully awake in the space of a heartbeat. There was an instant in which his vision whited out, and the universe gave an odd, nauseating lurch. Duo found himself sprawled on his backside on the floor, thankfully *human* limbs scrabbling for purchase as he tried to keep his balance.

The tableau held for a drawn-out moment of silence. Then, with all the dignity he could manage while still clad only in boxers, Duo pushed himself to his feet. "Was I--" He left the question hanging and gestured vaguely in the air.

"Yes," Sally answered mildly. "I think it's safe to say you're a shapechanger."

Duo couldn't suppress a flat glare. "Really, you think?" he shot back sarcastically.

Infuriatingly calm, the doctor just hummed an affirmative and turned back towards the brightly lit hallway. "You're also half an hour late, which is why I'm here," she tossed over her shoulder. "Put some clothes on, hmm?"

She shut the door behind her, leaving Duo in the darkness of his room, which seemed even deeper after the light that had been there a moment before. Cursing under his breath, he fumbled towards the wall and the light switch, finding it eventually and flipping it on. He paused a moment to glare towards the closed door. "Sadist," he muttered.

Turning, he hurriedly scooped up the nearest clothes he could find and pulled them on.

In the hallway, Sally was leaning against the wall, waiting for him, though she pushed off and began walking the moment Duo's door cracked open.

"Hey!" Taking a few long strides, Duo fell in beside her. "Was that," he gestured back in the general direction of his room, "normal?"

"Oh yes," the doctor replied easily. "The first change is usually done unconsciously, and very frequently while asleep. You were dreaming, weren't you? Chasing something?" She nodded encouragingly, not waiting for nor needing an answer. "Now that you've done it once, you should be able to work your way through it consciously. It's mostly a matter of instinct."

"Did it occur to you, at any point," Duo growled, "to *warn* me about this?"

Sally's face remained set in that same quiet smile, though there was a wicked twinkle of amusement in her eyes. "That would have been counterproductive. Like I said, it's instinct. If you knew it was coming, you would have thought about it too much and made it a lot more difficult for yourself." She gave a slight shrug. "This once, at least, you just had to let it happen."

They came upon the double doors that led from the infirmary's living quarters into the actual treatment hallway. Trying to bite back another growl of annoyance, Duo kicked out at the nearest door in a fit of pique.

Wood splintered, glass cracked; the panel screeched on its hinges as it slammed back into the wall behind it before rebounding violently back to its original position.

Duo stared. Tentatively, he reached out with a finger and prodded the quivering surface of the door. A small piece of glass fell down and clinked on the floor. Wide-eyed, Duo turned imploringly to Sally, who was watching with a tight expression that might have been suppressed laughter.

"It seems as though you've developed the strength as well," was all she said, before pushing through her own door and through.

Still a bit wild-eyed, Duo followed.

They entered into a room that might have been the very same one Duo had awakened in a week before, though it was hard to tell. Duo perched on the edge of the bed while Sally rummaged through her supplies. "So, uh--" He fidgeted in place, glancing around rather uncomfortably at all the stainless steel and white. "I thought this stuff was-- y'know, supposed to happen gradually."

"No, actually. The changes always manifest very quickly and completely."

Sighing, Duo thought back through the conversations he'd had with the good doctor, and realized that she'd never actually *said* it would be gradual, though he was convinced she'd led him to believe it. "Something else that you couldn't warn me about, I suppose?" he asked dryly.

Sally actually smirked at him. "Something like that."

Duo sighed again, slumping. "You can be completely infuriating, you know that, don't you?"

That comment won a throaty chuckle from her. "My dear Duo," she said, approaching him. "I can be whatever my patients need me to be at a given time. In the beginning, they need to be angry enough to push the limits of their thirst, so I provoke. When they're learning about things, I can be the patient teacher." She reached out and took hold of one of his wrists, feeling for the pulse there in time-honoured doctor tradition. "Right now, you need to be off-balance so that you can't think too hard about what's going on. Hence--" She shrugged, and reached forward with her other hand. "This will hurt."

She flipped his hand palm-upward and dug the point of a scalpel into the pad of his thumb.

"*Ow*!" Duo jerked his hand back, and Sally wisely let go-- the backwards motion of his elbow struck a rolling table sitting at the foot of the bed and sent it hurtling with incredible force into the far wall. He ignored it, though, in favour of his injured thumb which was rapidly welling up with blood. "What the hell did you do that for?" Instinctively, he brought the offending digit to his mouth.

He realized his mistake the moment the blood hit his tongue. He jerked his hand down, but not before the taste of the liquid spread through his mouth-- and there was indeed *taste*, a strong and heady flavour that put even the most pungent of Hilde's recent concoctions to shame. Where everything else had gone bland, there was this to make up for it. It was intoxicating, it was breathtaking; it shot a dose of quivering energy right to his brain, and set all his nerves afire.

/If this is the way a vampire feels-- maybe I can understand why they can't get enough./

"I-- probably shouldn't have done that, right?" he managed to say through a suddenly dry mouth. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Sally stepping up and reaching for his hand, but he couldn't spare the effort to get his eyes turned and focussed in her direction.

His hand was lifted in a gentle grip, and something soft and damp was pressed against his faintly throbbing thumb. "It's not forbidden, amongst ourselves," she said quietly. "Under certain circumstances-- well, if you end up with the Hunters, as it looks you might, you'll figure it out quick enough." He sensed more than saw her shrug. "Think of it like an exceptionally rich dessert. You can eat it sometimes, in small portions, but too much can be very bad for your health."

She moved around in front of him, not releasing her hold on his hand, and he managed to blink and focus his eyes on her. "Do *not*," she warned, "let it control you. And do not *ever* bite a human. Either of those acts will put you on the same side as the vamps, and you'll be treated as such."

/Meaning I'd be cut down before I could say 'AB positive'./ Duo nodded slowly, acknowledging the warning.

Sally watched him in silence for a moment, staring into his eyes as if searching, then nodded herself and turned her attention to the hand she still held. With a brisk doctor's efficiency, she pulled back the gauze she'd pressed to the wound and wiped at the blood beneath it. She gave a satisfied little smile as the flesh was revealed. "Well. Looks like you're a healer, too."

Blinking, Duo turned a blank gaze downwards, to see the clear, unbroken skin of his thumb.

/I didn't even notice it stop hurting--/

"So that's four out of six-- open your mouth, please." She held out what looked like a wooden coffee stir-stick as Duo automatically obeyed her, and she used it to gently scrape the inside of his cheeks. Moving away before Duo could question, she went to a workstation along the counter and worked for a moment at something he couldn't see.

Finally, she turned back to him, holding up a single glass slide. "What we have here is a cell sample," she said conversationally. She stepped across the room and pulled back a sliding panel in the wall. Behind that panel was a massive metal box, open at the front, with a hinged door currently locked tight. Wires extended from all sides of the device, and various gauges on the front displayed a multitude of readings that Duo didn't even try to understand.

Sally turned the wheel that opened the door, releasing the lock with a faint hissing sound. "And this is a sunlight simulator," she continued, placing the slide in the newly revealed compartment inside the machine. Relocking the door, the doctor set some dials and pressed a button, bringing the lights on the front display to life. "We'll leave it on longer than we need to," she said, turning to walk back towards him. "Just to be safe. Reactions to sunlight range anywhere from mild irritation at low doses to instant spontaneous combustion. At the level I've got the simulator set, though, two or three minutes will be more than enough."

She stopped directly in front of him and once again met his eyes with a sharp glance. "In the meantime, I have a few questions for you."

Duo tried his best to shrug nonchalantly. "Shoot, then."

"What city was I born in?"

Blinking, Duo stared at her with one eyebrow raised. "Say what?"

Sally met his incredulous gaze with a challenging look of her own. "Where was I born?"

"How the hell should I know?"

Incredibly, the doctor nodded as if that was a perfectly acceptable answer. "I had a cat when I was seven," she said next, and Duo barely kept himself from gaping. "What colour was it?"

"Doc," Duo said slowly, an uncertain half-smile hovering around his mouth. "I think maybe you've had a bit too much of the medicinal brandy this morning."

"No, only on weekends," came the unexpected response, and Duo blinked in shock yet again. "One last question: what was my reaction to my high school prom dress?"

Eyes wide, Duo just stared.

After a moment, she gave one of those brisk *doctor* nods, smiling a bit as though satisfied with something. "Well, that's not unexpected," she said, turning back towards the sunlight simulator. Something on it beeped faintly just as she approached.

"Uh, Doc?" Duo asked hesitantly, still eyeing her a bit warily. "What just happened here?"

"You're not psychic," came the prompt reply, as the dials and knobs on the machine were turned. "Which, as I said, isn't really surprising. It's all but unheard of to have both the shapechanging and the psychic traits. Since you already demonstrated so capably that you had the one, I expected you wouldn't have the other, but of course I still had to check."

"And-- me knowing about a dress and a cat--?"

"I've been thinking very hard about the answers to those three questions since I knocked on your door earlier. If you had any hints of psychic talent, you'd have picked up on them."

"Ah," Duo answered faintly, then he snorted as a grin escaped despite himself. "Out of anything you could have asked, what possessed you to pick those questions?"

"Well, most people will receive psychic impressions in one of three forms: words, pictures or feelings. So I chose questions that would appeal to all three: a name, a colour, an emotion."

"No, why did you pick those particular questions? I mean, I'm sorry Doc," he continued with a rueful grin, "but I can't see you in a prom dress, at all. So unless you were just going for shock value--" The realization struck him suddenly. "Oh. You were, weren't you? Trying to keep me off balance, or however you put it."

Sally tossed him a grin over her shoulder as she pulled one final lever and opened the door. "There might be hope for you yet, Maxwell."

"Gee, thanks. If I may ask, how long are you going to keep that up?"

"Oh, we're done." She reached out and retrieved the slide from inside the simulator, bringing it up to her face and peering at it closely. "Well, now, this is interesting."

"What's that?"

Without answering, Sally moved across the room to where a microscope was set up on a bench. Clipping the slide into place, she looked at a while longer, while Duo waited in finger-tapping impatience across the room.

Finally she stood and stepped away. "As far as I can tell, your cells suffered no damage from the test. Now, with something like this, it's always safer to check again and be sure-- it's always harder to prove the absence of something than the presence, after all-- so we'll run another test in a few days. But in all probability, you're not light sensitive."

A rush of elation went through Duo at that statement, and it wasn't until that moment that he realized just how much the thought of never seeing sunlight again had bothered him. It was not enough, though, to keep him from noticing the odd expression that flashed on the doctor's face as she made her pronouncement. It was gone almost before Duo could note it, and so after a moment he gave a mental shrug and let it go.

"So," he eventually said. "If that's all your tests-- what happens now?"

"Now, you will stay in Med for another three or four days while you get used to your new abilities, and then-- whatever you want. With the way things have turned out, you will be strongly encouraged to join the Dayhunters--" Again that brief flicker of an expression, replaced almost instantaneously by the calm smile. "But of course it's your choice. There are any number of other options, as well. I can have some people come and talk to you--"

"No, that won't be necessary." Duo chewed absently on his lip for a second then nodded decisively. "I'll do it. Go with the Hunters, I mean-- something about them has appealed to me all along. And these Dayhunter guys-- well, if there's really only four of them, I think they could use an extra body on their team. I'll give it a try. I assume there's nothing saying I have to stay if it doesn't work out?" He glanced up at Sally and was reassured by a firm shake of her head. "Well, then." He hopped down off the table, dusting his hands off on his pants. "If that's settled, can I go back to bed?"

Sally laughed, as she had been intended to do, and Duo grinned back at her. As she shooed him out of the room, he happened to glance back and note the dull white colouring of the door's outer side. Slowly, his grin widened to wicked proportions. /I think I know what I'm going to do to improve this hallway./

/But where could I find those particular colours of paint?/

Humming a bit to himself, Duo started the walk back to his room.