Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Wild Wings ❯ Chapter 2

Chapter Two

 

Duo rolled in his bed, trying his best to ignore whatever it was keeping his body awake while his mind tried to sleep. The action did less to calm him than it had the first thousand or so attempts and finally, with a burst of frustration, he rolled himself right off the mattress and stalked across the room all in a single smooth motion. At the door he pivoted sharply and thus began a rapid pace in the very small cube.

 

He'd spent the entire day (step, step, step) pilfering replacement hardware (turn) for Deathscythe (step, step, step). By all rights he should be (turn) exhausted rather than feeling (step, step, step) like a cadged beast at... what time was it, anyway? The braided boy squinted at his watch—only two in the morning?! Good Lord Almighty it felt like five, at the very least (turn). His heart rate was up (step, step, step) like he'd just finished a race around Heero's superiority complex (turn) and his muscles ached (step, step, step) for yet more movement (turn). He simply couldn't stand still (step, step, step).

 

Duo wrenched the door open and stalked toward the hanger. There was nothing much he could do with Deathscythe until he fetched the last few parts but he didn't have a better idea. Maybe the fresh air would do him some good... or at least he'd find something to entertain him for the night.

 

The hanger doors were spread wide but it wasn't the chill that forced Duo into an abrupt stillness. Moonlight spilled over the cement of the hanger and `scythe's Gundanium plating like quicksilver. It held him in thrall. He really, really wanted to know why.

 

The pilot approached that liquid splash of light in a frighteningly involuntary series of steps. The first two were somewhat understandable. At five he was concerned at the lack of reaction from his limbs. By eight he was nearly panicked but couldn't seem to stop the steady approach. By sheer force of will and a good bout of self-incrimination he managed to stop his body's movements a mere foot from the pool of light. The pause lasted for half a breath. Duo's body moved into the full moon's light fully without his permission and the reaction was instantaneous.

 

The pain that stabbed through his mind was nothing like the physical tear of skin and bone that began at the base of his neck and flowed down his spine like the worst case of Hives on the planet. It felt like acid. Duo fell to his knees and tried to scream but his throat was changing, constricting. He couldn't breathe.

 

Suddenly that was the least of his problems. A wave of pain, like a troop of Leos through a city with Wing's proton blaster overwhelmed his mind. Duo passed out.

 

And woke up way too comfortable.

 

Trained habit kept his eyes closed and his breathing steady. The first thing he decided was the top for one of the gas barrels was open again and they really needed to keep an eye on that sort of thing. He was still in the Hanger, then. He couldn't hear any footsteps but the echo of crickets was rather loud.

 

Duo cracked an eye open and nearly had a heart-attack.

 

Things were entirely the wrong colors and he was completely certain that haze of purple-blue around his Gundam wasn't normal. Duo jerked and tried to stand. He didn't get farther than hands and knees before his muscles wrenched and he collapsed back onto the floor.

 

Duo turned his head to look at himself and found the range of motion entirely wrong. The smooth movement jerked to a stop when he saw his hands covered in fur… and looking less like hands than paws. The snort of disbelief he tried to make came out like a strangled growl and the pilot spent a brief moment trying again to struggle to his feet.

 

His vision was wonky, though, and his legs just wouldn't work correctly. He ended up, once again, sprawled on the cement of the Hanger bathed in moonlight.

 

Duo twisted his head around (still surprised at the range of motion available to him) to look at the rest of his body, wondering if he was in the middle of a dream. The fur was an interesting mix of auburn and dark grey that swept up his arms and over his chest. His clothes were… well he couldn't see them anywhere now that he thought about it so why wasn't he freezing his ass off?

 

Fur, apparently, was the answer to that. It covered him from head to toe. And speaking of toes, those looked remarkably like paws as well. Oh! And would you look at that? A tail! Could this get any stranger? Now familiar with his anatomy Duo realized standing on two feet just wasn't going to work out.

 

He also decided that whatever he ate for dinner was clearly bad because this was by far the strangest dream/hallucination/acid trip/whatever he had taken in his entire life. Not that he was very familiar with acid trips but… well that was beside the point.

 

Duo put himself on four feet (rather than two) and promptly toppled over. This fall was accompanied by some pain in a limb that Duo wasn't familiar with, however. It was over his shoulders, rather than on his back. He twisted his head around and crashed his nose (now several inches away from his eyes) smack into a wall of feathers.

 

He pulled his head back and blinked. Wings? This was just so far beyond weird. It was time to wake up now, really. He couldn't rightly pinch himself so he bit down on the wing half-cocked over his shoulder as hard as he could manage.

 

The pain was mind-bending.

 

Duo picked himself up from the floor with a growl and managed not to fall this time. Now that he was aware of them he could feel the wings on his back shifting and twitching. The muscles were unfamiliar and just plain frightening. He focused on moving them about just to occupy his mind for a moment. Maybe he wouldn't have to puzzle out the very, very bizarre colors of his vision.

 

Anatomy had never really been Duo's strong point. He knew how things were supposed to move in a human body but in this dream…scape he wasn't sure the usual laws of earth applied. He was a canine with wings, for the love of God! There was something seriously demented going on here. Duo grunted and looked at his chest. Well his cross was still there, that was something at least. It was glowing like a floodlight but he was rapidly learning to suspend his disbelief and just go with the flow. He could analyze it all when he woke up in the morning. He was sure this whole escapade revealed volumes about his psyche.

 

Duo turned, or tried to. He wanted to move back toward his bedroom but he'd done so with the expectation of a human body and ended up, once again, on the floor. This was going to take some serious getting used to. He picked himself up and moved (awkwardly) like a dog. As soon as he found the rythem his body wrenched to a halt. It was always something!

 

The pilot found himself at the edge of the moonlight and snarled. The effect was a wonderful echo of frustration and for a moment he was distracted by the sound. He did it again, just because he could, then chuckled to himself. It came out in a series of huffs.

 

With a grunt he focused on the looming shadow of the hanger. It was only inches away from his paws and yet he found himself surprisingly reluctant to cross over. He grit his teeth and forced his body forward. A sensation of impending doom swamped his mind but Duo pushed it away and doggedly trudged forward. The moment the last of his tail crossed into the shadow Duo stumbled and fell. He thought his heart was going to burst from his chest the pain was so intense. It was as if his very soul was being torn from his body. The desire to return to the moonlight was so much more intense than anything he'd ever experienced before.

 

He dragged his body up and lunged out of the shadow. His relief was instantaneous.

 

Duo struggled to stay on his feet while he panted and tried his best to wrap his mind around what had just happened. Apparently he needed to stay in the moonlight. It was the why that was escaping him at the moment.

 

He didn't have much time to consider it when he caught the sound of footsteps. They were shuffling and not very loud but he could hear them just the same. Duo took a step toward the shadow of the hanger but stopped before the motion was entirely complete. He didn't want to do battle against that ultimate feeling of paralytic desire again… and he was beginning to doubt his dream excuse.

 

This just didn't fit with any of his normal nightmares (and it was a nightmare, don't mistake it). Duo took a deep breath to sooth his trembling nerves and abruptly snorted. The wash of information his nose absorbed was overwhelming. He knew without a doubt that it was Howard meters away down the hall, that a family of rabbits were quietly sleeping twenty steps to his left outside the hanger and that they really, really needed to close that open gas drum. This whole place would light up in an instant with the fumes it held.

 

The footsteps paused. Duo heard a door ease open and he knew that Howard was looking at his empty bed. The hanger would be the man's next stop.

 

He needed to get out of here.

 

Duo moved slowly toward the exit, fighting his vision and this weird anatomy every step of the way. The world was a wash of purpleish blue with some variations if he focused on a single object but his sense of depth was so accurate it was scary. He could pinpoint blades of grass at the far end of the clearing in front of the huge trees and knew, somehow, that he could read the darkness of those trees in a matter of seconds at a dead run.

 

He moved into a trot, then an easy lope and tried his best not to focus too hard. If he thought about it he was going to tangle his legs and eat it, he was sure. Instead he tried to fold his wings along his back, or at least put them in a spot where they wouldn't get in the way of things. He didn't make much progress in that area. He let them drop in frustration and yelped when we weighed significantly less for a fraction of an instant. Apparently they weren't just for decoration.

 

Duo plunged into the darkness of the forest without thinking about moonlight or his body's strange shape. Unlike the heart-wrenching tear of the hanger's shadow, the forest rejuvenated him, urged him to run, excited him. Duo leapt over a log and gave into the sensation. It skated over his skin and buried deep into his mind, pushing him further into instinct and the forest. His higher mind faded away and he was simply primal in the moment, reveling in the sound of wind over his ears and the steady thump-thump of his paws over the nettles.

 

His violet eyes scanned the loose forest on automatic. The purpleblue landscape was tinged a shadowy green beneath that depth sense and every slight movement was cataloged and analyzed in the span of an instant, dismissed as unimportant or a non-threat in the next moment, then passed as he ran between trees and over the light hilly terrain.

 

This was freedom, something deep within him acknowledged the thought. He embraced it and exploded from the tree line with two massive beats of his wings. He was airborn in an instant and this was a true escape. His depth sense expanded with his growing height, coloring the distant ground more blue than purple while the treetops still hinted at the reddish tone. He could see for miles and knew instantly how long it would take to reach each landmark he focused on, either by air or by land.

 

The last of his conscious thoughts faded and the pilot fell deeper into sensation and primal reaction.