Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Slayers of the Dawn ❯ Part Five: First Flight ( Chapter 5 )

Part Five: First Flight

 

Although interesting in its own right, the farming and harvesting methods Bei Rahn had constructed were very similar to just about any other farming community that had managed to survive more than ten years in service. There were a few notable differences, nothing overly note-worthy, though, and by mid-day Quatre was trying as hard as he could not to look as bored as he felt. With each new section of the harvesting process they visited, the two hunters would be shown all the vital components and how they worked and how many there were … basic things like that. Then Relena, in perfect example of her person, would undoubtedly become involved in helping out the people working that section and Quatre and Wufei were forgotten for a time, left by the wayside as she bustled here and there, helping to carry things or cut things or bind them - whichever needed to be done at the time. She was a very self-possessed woman, he quickly realized, and had a strong personality that was both kindly and firmly reserved when speaking with the hunters. With her people, though, she would set aside her own comfort, time, and even life should it come to such extremes. His admiration for her grew. As for her distractions, there was nothing to be done save wait until she remembered they were still there or completed whatever had needed to be done.

 

The only real sense of reprieve from the near-boredom was Duo. The boy was a constant beacon of surprise and always created a flurry of excitement wherever they stopped, beginning with the first station out in the fields, when he very calmly and matter-of-factly told them he had locked Hilde in the library.

 

The fields were surprisingly close to the city, as most farming communities chose to keep distance between the two in case a dragon attacked the crops. Again it became obvious that Bei Rahn - although quite wary of dragons, just as much as anyone else - did not feel as if there was a looming threat so close nearby. They all rode in an old-style rover, ground-bound and rickety, the iron body groaning with each bump in the road while the engine whined in protest. Relena tried to shout explanations to them over the sound, but all Quatre could do was wince and nod as if he understood what she was saying, having not heard a single word of it. Wufei was stoic at his side, constantly scouting the skies and terrain in search of either dragons or possible places they would hide or reside, while Duo - having happily leapt into the back of the rover with the field workers - joked around with the men and flirted with the girls. This flirting didn't seem to bother Relena, who had noticed and obviously not been offended by it. In fact, the two were acting more like somewhat gregarious friends, as opposed to future-betrothed.

 

When they arrived they were directly introduced to Trowa - a tall young man, willowy with a dark emerald green gaze and brown hair falling over one eye. He stayed in a small hut with bunks during the harvesting season, Quatre was told as Relena showed him around, he and a few of the more vital workers. This was so they could keep a close eye on the crops and - if necessary - defend them from wandering animals in search of food.

 

“Oh, and dragons, too,” she added as an afterthought, mustering a tiny smile for his benefit, her gaze once again apologizing for what she had claimed to be a misunderstanding at that morning's meal. Duo is not the type to dislike something he has never seen or been witness to, she had said then, entreating them all, especially Heero, to understand. He would stand up and defend anything he thinks to be threatened - whether it be human, animal, or beast. You simply must forgive him, he is still an innocent and doesn't understand certain things very well.

 

He certainly seemed to understand other things very well, Quatre then mused some time later as he watched the boy shimmy up a pole to rewire and repair a spot-light that no one else had seemed to have been able to. When he came back down the spot-light shown brightly in his wake, illuminating a large garden of vegetation.

 

“Yosh!” He chirped, quite pleased with himself as he tossed the set of tools he had used to a grinning boy of about twelve who had been assigned as a helper just this season. “All done!” He glanced around at them, grinning as he gave Quatre a cheeky wink. He then sobered, putting on an appropriate, if unconcerned front up instead. “Oh, yeah. I almost forgot. T-man, you might want to send a messenger back to the castle. Hilde's stuck in the library.”

 

Relena started. “Stuck? Why - how?”

 

Duo shrugged. “I locked her in.”

 

“You - what?!”

 

Things got excited then for a while as the field-helper was instantly dispatched to release Hilde back at the compound, while Relena grabbed Duo's ear and dragged him behind the barracks. Trowa maintained stoic control of the situation, fending off interested field-workers that wandered closer when Relena's voice raised in its berating tones, and inviting the two hunters to some tea, which they had apparently just managed to succeed in growing.

 

Faintly bemused, Quatre and Wufei allowed themselves to be led into a meal-room of sorts and each shared a cup of tea until Relena and Duo returned - the former looking harried and stressed, the latter seeming none-the-worse for wear as he bounced in and leapt into the chair next to Quatre. He instantly helped himself to Quatre's cup, plucking it right out of his hands as he made a blithe comment about the weather.

 

Quite abruptly, Quatre realized just exactly who the servant girl had been speaking of when she'd said `that dratted boy,' in such an exasperated tone.

 

“So, it's really nice outside, isn't it?” Duo looked peculiarly eager as he turned to Wufei and then - when he received a vague grunt of a response - to Quatre. “All bright and clear and not a sign of rain at all. Nice weather to ride in, you know? Or maybe, I don't know. Fly in.” He buried his face in Quatre's cup at that point, his large violet eyes still remaining glued on the paler boy as if he could entreat him silently to agree. Quatre himself was trying hard not laugh.

 

“Yes, it is very nice outside.” He replied companionably, deliberately not answering the Duo's unspoken question and plea.

 

They moved on, from the fields to the delivery, from delivery to the refining, from the refining to the storage, and so on until they at last made it back to the castle. Wufei disappeared instantly, mumbling some excuse beneath his breath. Relena then excused herself as well to attend to something happening in the kitchens, which effectively left Quatre and Duo together in the square. Duo chatted on amiably of just about anything and everything before, with his hands clasped behind his head in a deceptively casual way, he glanced at the sky and murmured, “Wow, such a great day. Say, Quatre … do you think you could show me that ship you came in?”

 

And there it was; the excitement practically radiating from Duo came to a head and focused completely on Quatre, who could barely contain his humor. “Yes, I can show it to you. Come on.”

 

He half-expected Heero to be there working on it, or at the very least had expected Hilde to have heard of Duo's return and come to beat him to a bloody pulp. When neither one showed up, Quatre shrugged to himself and showed Duo what he could of the outside of the ship, explaining things as he went. “… and these are the boosters Heero added last year. There is a separate control system for them as well that he installed pretty far away from the others on deck, so there's no chance of them accidentally getting gunned together. If they did, the fuel would burn too hot too quickly and risk a chance of explosion. Heero would never let that happen.”

 

“He really likes this ship, doesn't he?” Duo asked quietly, his exuberance toned down a bit as he became engrossed in what Quatre had been explaining. Violet eye flickered down to his before dancing away; he had noticed early on that Duo never met anyone's gaze directly for very long. “I mean, he seems to take great pride in it.” For some reason he then blushed, a faint pink coming to his cheeks as his gaze - which had been lifted to inspect the engines - fell to the floor as if abruptly discomfited.

 

“He does,” Quatre agreed, watching the young man curiously and wondering at the feelings he sensed from him. “He's very defensive and protective when it comes to this ship -”

 

Duo snorted, “Tell me about it.”

 

“Because it's all he has.” When Duo turned to him, he murmured, “Duo, when Heero was very, very young a dragon attacked his village and destroyed it. He was the only survivor. Since then he has never stayed in one place very long, and seeks revenge for all that he lost as a child.

This ship was once his father's. It has come to mean everything to him.”

 

Never in a thousand years would Quatre have told anyone else that, not even under threat of pain and death. Living so long with both Heero and Wufei - two of the most stoic and private humans alive - had made him realize how precious certain knowledge was, though, and there was a sense within him telling him that Duo needed to know this. As talkative as he was, he didn't seem very big on divulging secrets of any sort, and having spent at least half the day with him Quatre was beginning to have suspicions regarding all the convoluted emotions he had been picking up from both of them. Heero would never understand what they meant unless slapped in the face, but Duo - might be different in that aspect.

 

“So he's an orphan.” Duo whispered, still looking on the ship with a faint sense of sadness in his gaze. “Funny. I am too, in a way.”

 

“Duo,” Moved by the boy's overwhelming emotions, Quatre reflexively stepped forward and set a hand on his arm. “Do you … want to go in?”

 

That changed everything; all melancholy feeling was lost as he lit up bright as a torch. “Oh, man, really? You really mean it? Hey - can we fly in it, too?”

 

Chuckling ruefully, Quatre shook his head. “Well, not really the main ship. We can take my pod, though. I don't see what the harm would be in that.”

 

“Pod? You mean you actually have personal pods on this ship?! WAY COOL!!” Duo actually started jumping up and down before darting for the ship and then running back to grab Quatre and drag him along behind. He didn't dare enter the ship unauthorized, but waited outside, happily bouncing on the balls of his feet while Quatre made his way up and into the Golgathan and pulled the levers and adjustments to open the hatch to his pod. When he came back out Duo had run to the back of the hover-craft to crow over the much smaller, three-person flight craft revealed beneath a large panel of the main ship. It was attached by locks and wires and cables as thick as Quatre's arm, keeping it perpetually primed and ready. He unhooked these deftly and climbed in, Duo hopping up next to him before he even had a chance to properly sit down.

 

“Close it right there, and press that button.” Duo did as he said and the hatch of the pod sealed itself with a strange, rubber sucking sound. “Now, see this button here?” He pointed to a small red button beneath a glass casing, waiting until Duo had given a solemn nod before he continued, “Don't ever try and press that. It will kill the power and we'll drop like a stone.”

 

“Oh, right. Why would you want to do that?”

 

“To drop from range. It's not a technique used very often, because it's hard to get the starters to fire back up in a hurry. If you can manage it, you can drop abruptly from a higher height to a lower one abruptly and switch directions mid-flight. It's used for evasion, when a dragon is after you.”

 

Duo have a hmm of understanding and nodded. “So what happens if you can't start it back?”

 

“If you know you can't start it back - it's not the kind of maneuver you try out of the blue, so I mean you should have at least attempted it before and would know - then it can be done over an area of deep water. The pod reverts from air to aquatic mode in the span of about two minutes. Enough time to escape and lie low for a while.”

 

“Right. So can I drive?” He gave Quatre another eager look, followed quickly with a puppy-dog pleading when the paler boy hesitated. “Aw, pretty pretty please, Quat? I promise I won't hurt it at all and I want put a single dent on it. Please - please??”

 

“Duo, do you even know how to fly one of these?”

 

“I know how to drive a hover-craft, does that count?”

 

“Drive,” Quatre asked suspiciously, having come to know Duo rather well at this point, “… or crash?”

 

Duo blinked innocently. “There's a difference?”

 

~(…)~

 

Despite his great reluctance, Quatre did eventually let Duo take the controls. After they'd been out for nearly an hour already, with the braided boy paying rapt attention to everything he said and did, he determined that Duo's interest was genuine and that he would really do his best. Although he seemed both unreliable and completely hopeless on first impression, Quatre was beginning to see why Relena and Hilde turned to him so much and had given him such high - albeit aggravated - regard. His attention, once captured, was absolute. So was his dedication, it seemed, and when he had asked some of the castle's inhabitants about the boy in passing the first thing that always come up was he never lies. Complete honesty was practically non-existent; it prompted Quatre to comment by way of a test,

 

“You're doing pretty good, Duo. Were you lying? I mean, have you really flown a ship like this before? You can tell me, I won't get mad.”

 

Duo grinned and shook his head, his gaze riveted on the outer windows, which dominated the fore-walls and tended to make it seem like they were in actuality flying without aid, surrounded by nothing but sky above and land below. “I may run and hide,” he laughed, “but I never lie. This is the first time I've ever flown. I wonder, though, if …” he turned the controls sharply, causing Quatre to jump and reflexively grab the dashboard to keep from falling out of his chair.

 

He watched with a pounding heart as the ground zipped by the cockpit windows. “D-don't you think you should pull up a little -”

 

“Nah, it's cool.” Duo murmured back in a distracted manner, now obviously looking for something as he leaned forward and glanced out the window, turning first one way and then the other. Quatre squeaked as a cliff edge went rushing by, barely a foot away; for his part, Duo handled the craft as if he had been born to it, whipping and weaving in and out of a pair of canyon walls. “Now where is …”

 

Suddenly Quatre's heart stopped completely as a low, trumpeting roar seemed to erupt right beneath the ship and rise beneath them, louder and louder as it came. Oh, no … don't let it be …

 

It was. Faster than lightning the dragon came at them, clipping the ship's wing with her own and sending it spinning end over end in the air. Duo let out a holler and snatched at the controls, raising the nose and speed and sending them shooting out of the canyon. The dragon followed, the sound of her roar made so deep and so dense by her proximity that the iron panels literally trembled with it. Quatre tried to think fast - his weapons on the pod had been disabled for months now due to a systems glitch that made them back-fire and he hadn't been able to obtain the correct supplies with which to repair them. He had a spear and a laser gun in the back but those worked best on ground and -

 

He cried out, thrown against the side of the ship as Duo cut a sharp right, dodging a line of flame the dragon shot at them. “Duo, maybe I should -”

 

The rest of his words were drowned in another roar from the dragon, and a bout of wild laughter from Duo himself. He was handling the controls like a veteran pilot, shifting the gear-marks and picking up speed or falling back as appropriate. Still, it made Quatre nervous and he cried out again, covering his eyes as a stretch of rock appeared right in front of them. They missed the outcropping by a matter of inches; Duo hollered something and burst into laughter again, Quatre far too disjointed at the moment to make sense of either action.

 

He had to find a weapon of some sort - somewhere - while Duo had the dragon distracted. And he had to get in touch with Heero some how - he began rooting around in the cabinets beneath the control panel and came up with nothing, save an old-fashioned flair gun and a length of rope. He had no airbound weapons, what could he possibly use….?

 

He'd never have that question answered; the world outside their cockpit flickered into a sea of blue and green-shaded scales as the dragon drew tightly in front of them, causing Duo to snatch the controls up again and to the side to prevent collision with her. She was already rising with them, her head level with theirs as reptilian lips slid back to bare dripping white fangs in a long, ferocious roar. Quatre watched in disconnected awe, stunned by the beauty of seeing a dragon so close and amazed at how gracefully she moved, how every shimmering scale adjusted to expand her chest in preparation to breathe fire and burn them alive. His imminent death seemed vague and irrelevant at the moment; I'm going to die, he realized, and … I don't think I want to yet.

 

He closed his eyes and relaxed in preparation, determined to meet absolution on his own terms. He wouldn't be frightened. He would be calm …

 

… although nothing was happening.

 

Blinking his eyes opened once more, Quatre started as he caught sight of a large amber orb gazing in on him, the dragon having twisted her head around to peer inside the cockpit. She was still treading air right in front of them and they were -

 

He quickly glanced at Duo, who was hovering the pod right where the dragon had led them to. He wasn't even trying to evade her rather ferocious scrutiny.

 

She blinked, a long, slow affair that involved two sets of eye lids - the outer covered with scales, the inner a clear layer of skin - and peeled her lips back to bare her fangs a second time.

 

The ship bucked beneath them - it strangely felt as if they had been hit from the back or lower side - before Duo gunned the engines and flipped the controls, sending the ship in a wild, curving dive up and over the dragon, brushing right past her wings on his descent. She screeched and whirled around to come after him, a short burst of fire burning in their trail.

 

Quatre stared in shock, glancing continuously from a laughing Duo to the dragon ferociously trying to catch them beyond their windows. She gained on them and then - just before a certain catch was imminent - she fell back. Duo showed an amazing agility behind the wheel, twisting the ship in all ways and manners that Quatre had never been brave enough to try as he evaded her grasp time and again, sometimes dipping into the canyon, something doing amazing acrobatics in mid-air to narrowly fly right by the dragon in a change of direction. It was almost as if they two were …

 

Impossible! Quatre's mind raged, even as his instincts hollered the truth and his empathic abilities practically hummed with Duo's shear sense of breathless joy. They're … playing …

 

After a short time the dragon gave another roar, this one noticeably different than the last. It was quieter and several tones higher, more a sound of leave than warning, and that she did, whirling around them in a flurry of blue and green scales, the tip of her tail clipping the wing of the pod again as she passed. Duo beamed and continued flying, turning the ship back toward the city of Bei Rahn, happiness and satisfaction bleeding out of his every pore. He chanced a glance at Quatre, breaking out into a giddy grin.

 

No words were said, no explanation given, Quatre far too intent on calming his wildly beating heart and bid his quick breathing to slow down. By the time they had landed back in the bay, Quatre had managed to convince himself he was still whole, in one piece, and definitely alive. Oblivious to his still partially-paralyzed companion, Duo opened the cockpit and leapt out, jumping once and holding his arms over his head. “Wow that was cool - I've never seen the world like that, all high up and it looked so big from up there and -”

 

“QUATRE!”

 

Instantly Quatre froze, every molecule in his body turning to ice, molding him to the spot where he had landed right next to the braided boy. Wanting to do anything but, he managed to turn around and meet the hard, chipped blue gaze of Major Heero Yuy. And he was in a mighty fine rage, it seemed … “You let him fly my -”

 

“Um, well, Heero, it was -”

 

“DUO!”

 

Hilde came storming across the room, her boots clicking on the floor as she advanced; Duo took a stumbling pace back at the sheer fury within her voice. “What the fuck do you think you were -”

 

Quatre glanced at his partner in crime and winced, even as Duo gave a helpless little shrug. They were both in deep water now, and they knew it. The dragon may not have killed them, but …

 

Taking a deep breath, Quatre turned to superior and tried to form a believable excuse, while next to him Duo did the same.