Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Wild Wings ❯ Chapter 6

Chapter Six

 

It was late afternoon when Duo rejoined the world of the living. His sleeping schedule was now completely shot to shit, but he felt better and at the moment, that was all that mattered. He made himself some soup from a can and raided the pantry of the kitchen. He found a new jar of peanut butter, a few packets of jerky, and an entire shelf full of waterbottles. He tossed what would fit into his duffle and kept searching. Dishware, silverware, spices of every kind (did G expect him to be a chef?), a whole box of ration bars under the sink, a large med kit. He had the essentials at hand… he also had a lot of non-essentials and more than a few perishables. He eyed a small pyramid of tomatos on the counter and grabbed a banana to tie him over until the next real meal.

 

With his bag packed Duo took himself northeast. He couldn't reasonably walk all the way back to Deathscythe but he planned on refueling eventually and the local Navel base was probably the place he was going to do it. Fortunately Palm Avanue cut right through the base and was open to public transportation, a side-effect of the expanding military.

 

He spent nearly two hours walking down any street that was available to him until he was fairly certain of the base's layout. The buildings were big, but that simply cut down on the number of places he needed to look. He had his fuel narrowed down to three possible spots when he decided to catch a cab back up to Florida proper. Since the den was so close Deathscythe might have a map in the database. Or at least a suggestion on where to look.

 

Duo sighed. Safehouse. It's a safehouse, not a den.

 

The sooner he went through `Scythe's programming the better. These questions were only getting bigger the more he let them fester and his solutions were not expanding to match.

 

The cabbie tried to make small talk for the first few blocks but Duo simply wasn't in the mood. Silence quickly fell over the small yellow car, and silence led to thinking.

 

Duo was quickly beginning to realize he knew very little about what Operation Meteor truly entailed. He hoped an overhaul of his Gundam's code would provide a few clues in that regard. He was certain this wasn't what G meant about having a few weeks off.

 

And on the subject of G, how much of this did the man actually know? `Scythe's programming was a given which meant the Professor was aware of the other three (possibly four) pilots. In addition, whoever they were working for was being just as secretive. If one of the other boys was in danger, would he get a similar download of information?

 

Certainly not from Heero. Now that they were all aware of the possibility they'd be checking their Gundams for the same contingency and removing it if they had any skill to do so. He did have to wonder what kind of expertise they all had. Duo himself was nothing more than an expert survivalist. He could sneak around without being detected, a literal lab rat. What about child-like Four? Or soldier-man Three? Did Four have the gonads to kill another human being? Could Three stop himself if it was a part of the mission? For that matter, could Heero?

 

Throwing the four of them together before they had a chance to feel each other out a bit more was probably asking for too much trouble all at once. Even running into Heero had been a complete accident. How long was G planning to keep him in the dark about this mission? What else was out there, already in process, that he didn't know about; wouldn't know about until it came to bite him on the nose?

 

“You can drop me off on the next block, thanks.” Duo said with a vague gesture to the right. He paid the man and began his hike west. Getting into a national park undetected is not a difficult task if you're willing to climb a few trees. It's getting out again that proves to be more challenging of the two. So while the hike to `Scythe was rather long, it wasn't overly stressful.

 

Duo could feel himself relaxing with every step further away from humanity and made a mental note to look up anything on the `net that he could find on wolves. It might not be exact, but it had to be better than swimming around in the dark waiting for the next cottonmouth to strike.

 

He moved through the trees easily enough. When he found himself suppressing the urge to skip he finally gave into the pressure and tightened the strap on his duffle. Duo broke into a ground-eating jog and let the smile he'd been fighting break over his face. The trip suddenly became more enjoyable, and on top of it all, he was still human. The unstoppable force that was his transformation didn't even breach the edges of his conscience.

 

So it was with time to spare that he reached Deathscythe, carefully hidden under a camo net and crouched in semi-mud between the trees. As soon as he stopped moving, Duo was hungry but he packed the duffle with that expectation and only delayed long enough to sit himself down in the mecha.

 

The pilot broke out his jerky and water, queued his very limited music selection, and brought up the first of many `net searches about wolves.

 

--//--

 

When Duo surfaced his music was making it's fourth pass around the playlist and he was feeling rather crowded. He chomped on a ration bar to quiet his stomach for a while and killed some time among the trees. Running about, or even just walking to investigate whatever came to mind, seemed to quiet what he was beginning to recognize as the instincts of the beast within him.

 

He didn't just transform into a creature under the moon, that creature was still with him as a human and influenced his thoughts and feelings throughout the day. It followed, then, that he could control the beast when it came out to play under the moon. Duo didn't have the faintest idea how to go about that, but it gave him some hope. Trying to schedule attacks around the full moon might not work out very well in the long run. Especially if the other pilots ever decided to work together. What would he say? `Sorry guys I need to be a werewolf tonight? Pencil me in for late tomorrow?'

 

Right. That would go over well.

 

When the feeling of confinement finally dissipated, Duo hauled himself back into Deathscythe. He made a meal of another ration bar and was about to knuckle down for some serious code work when his com unit beeped. A question mark displayed next to the frequency signature.

 

“Zero-Four to Zero-Two, do you copy?”

 

The kid didn't sound very stressed but Duo didn't know him. Maybe calm was the new stressed.

 

“Copy Zero-Four, this is Two. What's your status?”

 

“Just wanting in company is all. How was your day?”

 

Duo chuckled as he skimmed the first layer of code. “Pretty lackluster, Four. Nothin' doin'. What about you?”

 

“About the same.” There was a sigh over the line. “The guys and I haven't moved for the past couple of days—“

 

“Wait,” Duo interrupted. “You've got `guys'?”

 

“Just friends of the family.”

 

“That is so unfair.” Duo didn't really give a hoot about fair but it was something to say while he processed this new information. How did the kid end up with `guys' and so early in the game?! Duo barely had contacts back in India if he wanted fuel, he was still grasping at straws for a fairly steady income of money and the kid had `guys'!?

 

“They're not very good company, though. They're all so much older than I am—“

 

“Yeah, I hear ya.” Duo drawled. He knew what it was to be the youngest in a crowd. It had been like that for a while with Solo. A long while. “Have you tinkered with your machine's programming yet.”

 

“No, I'm not very swift in that area. I can patch him up and keep going but any major overhauls someone else will need to handle.”

 

“One of your guys?” Duo teased.

 

Four giggled, “Yeah, most of them are pretty handy with a wrench. I imagine Zero-One already has his completely purged, right?”

 

Duo paused in his work. He could imagine (if Four was as astute as the rest of them) that the kid could have guessed at Heero's expertise. Despite being a complete mystery, the man made very little secret of what he was capable of and the subject certainly could've come up after he left the conversation this morning.

 

But why was the question posed to Duo? Heero wouldn't have said anything about meeting, but it sounded like Four knew. How did he know!? Duo was beginning to understand how the kid managed to get himself a Gundam.

 

The silence must've crackled with static for too long. Four's question jolted him out of his thoughts. “You have met Zero-One, correct?”

 

Duo blinked. “Only briefly.” He borrowed Three's words and hoped the kid would drop it.

 

“So based on that, don't you think he's already changed every bit of code?” There was a pleading note there just asking to be reaffirmed. For all his expert socioanalysis, he really was just a kid who wanted to know he'd done good. Here's a penny.

 

Duo felt an urge to pat him on the head. “Yeah, probably.” He said, returning to his own code.

 

“I don't know about Three, it's hard to tell with him.” Four continued.

 

“Even in person?” Duo prodded, then cursed himself. If he didn't want to be questioned about meeting Heero, who ever said Four would like it?

 

But to his surprise the kid answered without any hesitation at all. “Especially in person. I have never meet someone so unhappy in my entire life.”

 

Gears ground to a halt. Tires screeched. Duo nearly choked on nothing but his own spit. Unhappy?! I would have gone more with `deadly' or maybe `scares the piss out of me,' how do you get `unhappy' out of that?

 

“I mean,” Four went on, oblivious to Duo's world stopping, “I understand that we all needed to go through a level of training and conditioning to pilot but why was his so much more intense than ours? It makes me sad sometimes.”

 

Duo really couldn't speculate on the training of pilots. He'd stolen the damn Gundam for goodness sake. But Four's last sentence had him back to square one, doubting how this kid had ever made it into Project Meteor. He had too big of a heart to be a killer.

 

“Anyway,” Four was saying, “I think if I had the ability, I'd keep the programming but I'd change it a bit. Sending out that download after you returned was just bad timing and doesn't allow the rest of us to act on the information. It would be more useful to have the other pilots aware of alerts when they happen and we can judge for ourselves if you're in need of extraction.”

 

Duo tilted his head, honestly trying wrap his mind around this kid on the other end of a radio line. One minute he sounded five, the next he was throwing strategy around like a pro. It was damn confusing! The braided pilot shook his head and responded. “Useful maybe, until one of us is captured.”

 

“Well of course you'd have to factor in radio silences, space to Earth, capture and interrogation, probably remote detonation…“ He trailed off and the sound of typing slipped through the static. Was he making a list?

 

Duo didn't think his brain could take much more of this flip flop between child and expert. He changed Four's label from a question mark to the word `strategy' and tried to leave it at that. When the kid didn't talk right away, Duo let himself dip back into `Scythe's programming where time easily lost meaning.

 

--//--

 

“Have you ever heard of Illian?” Four asked some time later.

 

Duo groaned and sat back in his chair. He'd been an a good zone there, aware of nothing else for a while. He rubbed at his eyes. “Sorry, what was that, Four?”

 

“Illian. They're a traditional Arab music group. Have you heard of them?”

 

“Nope. Why?”

 

“I just noticed you don't seem to have much of a collection going.”

 

Duo glanced in confusion at the com, then belatedly realized his music was playing. He didn't remember turning it on.

 

“Can I send you a file?”

 

An alert beeped on `Scythe's console indicating a pending download. “What is it?” He ran it through his system check but it came up clean.

 

“Just a few songs. I don't know if you'll like them but the same twelve were getting a little redundant.”

 

“Eh, sorry about that.” Duo opened the folder and his jaw hit the floor. Just a few songs his ass, this had to be a small library. He scrolled for a few seconds and never made it past `A.' on the alphabetized list.

 

“Don't be. If that's what you have, that's what you work with.” Four's voice was gentle, soothing again. Confusing.

 

Duo's stomach growled and he grabbed the distraction like a lifeline. “Hey buddy, thanks for the tunes. I've got to find some grub, though.”

 

“Very well. Fly gently, Two.”

 

Er… right. “Two out.”