Lovely 8
Lovely 8
Series: Gundam Wing
Characters/Pairings: Duo, Heero, Wufei, Quatre, Trowa, Duo/Heero
Rating/Warnings: T for various things, not really pushing the rating. Slash.
Summary: A retelling of Beauty and the Beast. When someone stumbles into an enchantment hidden deep within a forest, he trades his life for the lives of one of his slaves... 1x2 shounen-ai.
Author's Notes: My eternal thanks to my incredible beta, Lady_Friselle. She is fantastic beyond words!
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
FFnet link
Lovely 8
oOoOoOo
Duo was dreaming.
It was back before the Plague, or at the beginning of it. He was playing with an illusion, spinning the little colored sparks of magic into a dog, a knight, the king’s castle. There was a cluster of kids gathered around him, watching-he knew most of them, but not all.
But no, it had to be the beginning of the Plague, because a lot of them were coughing, and the littlest one, the one who had called himself Darry, was coughing hard and every few minutes, and you could see the dark bruising in his arms where his veins were swelling.
The Plague didn’t kill painlessly or nicely.
But this was wrong. It hadn’t happened like this.
And then the little warm sparks of magic, their colors strobing around the rainbow as he needed them, all changed to the sickly yellow-green of a fading bruise, or a faint one-the same as the colors twining themselves around little Darry’s arms. Duo wasn’t in control, now, the dream-self was.
Then the magic scattered, splitting into smaller and smaller splinters until they were only visible as a faint, constantly moving glitter, moving in and out of the mouths and noses and then eyes and then skin of the kids as they talked and laughed and breathed and then died. The poison never got further than his own mouth, though it coated his skin, uselessly. The faint purple-black glow of his magic prevented it.
And now he was walking the streets, but that faint almost-golden glitter of magic was everywhere, expelling itself from the dead bodies that littered the street, their bodies twisted by the disease that had killed them, skin more blue-black than flesh-colored. The rats that had feasted on the bodies lay dying as well, naked tails resembling knotted rope from the swelling.
Nobody moved but him, the glow that surrounded him the same color as the bruises on the dead bodies. Behind a few of the doorways-too few of them-lone figures lurked: healers still strong enough to keep holding on, though they would still fall to the illness soon, and the few lucky individuals who had fought it off.
The dead stood up in the streets and followed him, and he felt the magic seeping into his skin, turning him the same color as the dead. The sky glittered an unnatural yellow-blue as the little dots of magic that had come from him swirled and twisted and wove strange, branching patterns in the air that almost looked like veins.
Power swirled over and around him, and
Quatre was shaking him, waking him up. He looked at his friend with wide eyes for a few brief seconds, until he realized what had happened-a dream, of course-and relaxed.
“Whoah! Thanks for waking me up, Quatre-was I really being that loud?”
“I felt it,” Quatre said bluntly, laying a hand flat against his chest, over his heart. “Duo, what’s wrong? That wasn’t just a dream.”
Duo sighed. “It was nothing,” he said. “Just memories from the Plague.”
“I can feel you avoiding me. Please, will you trust me? I know its cliché, but talking can help.”
“It’d take a whole lot of talking to help this,” said Duo bleakly.
“Tell me,” Quatre said.
“It was the Plague,” Duo said again. “I was in the streets of the capital when it happened. There was a bunch of us; we were a gang, I suppose you’d say, but street kids just need to stick together for survival. My mother had died maybe a year ago, but we’d never been well-off, so I was already pretty much used to getting along rough. It wasn’t bad. I was a good pick-pocket, and I had found a good ‘family.’ That’s what we called it-none of us had ever had much in terms of family.
“And then the sickness came. We were some of the first to get sick. It always happens that way-you want to watch out for illness, you look at the poor.”
oOo
Outside Duo’s window, Heero paused, sensitive ears catching the flow of words.
oOo
“It was bad enough when it was just the illness. But then the magic got mixed up in it.” Duo had turned his face towards his knees, hiding his face; his voice was low and tense, struggling to speak calmly. “I-
“I tried to heal them, but it j-just seemed to make it worse. Then they all started dying, and we didn’t have anything to do with the bodies. We were too poor for graves, even at the beginning, and it was still before they started giving mass cremations.”
Quatre had cut off the connection to Duo that had alerted him to his friend’s distress entirely. His emotional wounds were-excruciatingly painful. It was also a deeply personal matter; the sensation of intrusion was too obvious, too cold, for him to be comfortable with it, now that Duo had started speaking.
“Darry was first, then Maius and July-they were brother and sister. Then Tob, then Sarali, then Jam. I didn’t get sick, no matter that I spent all my time with the dying ones, and that I was in the streets, where even the rats were dying.
“I wasn’t a healer-not that it did most people any good-but I had learned to force it. To fake it. Some good it did me. Like I said, I only seemed to make it worse. I stopped trying, after Jerry died. Emily had asked me what I had done to him, and didn’t let me touch her until two days later, after her fever had gotten so high that she was hallucinating, and by then it was too late, she didn’t even know who I was. She died six hours later.
“And then they kept on dying, until I was the only one left. Jilli died just two weeks before the end of the Plague. Afterwards, I got picked up by Ellyaugh. You know the rest.” Duo shrugged, partly to hide the tears in his eyes.
“The gods above have mercy,” Quatre whispered. “En take your pain.”
Duo looked askance at him, feelings firmly hidden behind his mask. “En?” he said.
“One of the gods of death and of life, and the god of emotion,” Quatre said automatically, startled by Duo’s sudden turn-around; his masks ran deep, worryingly so, and came much too easily to him.
“I always forget you’re not from here…” Duo said with a smile, shaking his head playfully, long braid flopping around his face.
“Really, though,” Quatre said. “Thank you for sharing that with me.”
Duo was serious again, all of a sudden. “Thank you for listening. You’re the first person I’ve ever been able to tell.”
oOo
Outside of the window, Heero moved on as Duo and Quatre said their goodnights, and Quatre left for his own room.
oOo
“So, what’s the game?” asked Trowa questioningly.
“I dunno if it has a name,” Duo said with a manic grin, “But we used to play it in the street. It’s better with a few more people, but this’ll work. So, the rules are, there’s a Home-Keeper, and their goal is to keep the ball out of the ‘Home.’ The goal of the rest of us is to get it in, but we’re each working independently of each other, so we’re also trying to keep the others from getting it in. At the same time, we’re all trying to keep it from touching the ground-that means that the Home-Keeper wins a point. You can play two ways past that-the person with the most points at the end of however long you decide the game’s going to be, or the first person to a set number of points.”
The other three players looked at him doubtfully. Wufei sneered. “I can’t believe I agreed to do this,” he muttered.
“It’s because Duo asked if you were getting old and frail,” Trowa said sensibly. Wufei shot him a smoldering glare. Duo snickered, and Quatre tried to cover his own laugh. Trowa himself, of course, was perfectly deadpan.
This was exactly what Duo needed: pointless fun, something that wasn’t emotionally charged, just the chance to run around and stretch himself to his physical limits-not that that was anything impressive, after his confinement by Ellyaugh-and spend some time with Quatre, Trowa and even Wufei.
He shook his head, his heavy brown braid flailing with the motion. He needed something to get last night’s dream out of his head, anyways.
oOo
Duo was starting to actually feel pretty good as he thumped into his seat at the dinner table. Heero had already been there, waiting; Duo had been a few minutes late. He’d realized he’d needed to wash, after the game had finished (Trowa had won, to Wufei’s disgust) and he’d cut things a bit close.
“Hey, Heero,” he said in greeting, looking under the cover of a dish near him. He was starving. Nightmares could really take it out of you, apparently. Especially when they meant that you couldn’t eat anything for a few meals, because the memories were making you nauseous.
There was silence, but that wasn’t unusual. Duo let it be, and started eating.
Heero spoke up suddenly after a few long, quiet, minutes. “Duo,” he said, sounding almost hesitant.
“Yeh?”
“Tell me more about the plague.”
Duo froze, face tilted down so it was hidden in shadow. Heero was reminded strongly by the split-second flash of… something that had flowed across Duo’s face when Heero had first asked about the plague. “I already told you most of it-it devastated everything, and went after people with power, and fucked things up nine ways from Sunday. What more do you want to know?” His voice was steely with forced casualty.
Heero’s slight frown deepened into a scowl, his features making the expression even more threatening. “That’s not all. What happened to you during the plague?” he said.
Duo stilled entirely, unnaturally so. It was even more eerie compared to his near-constant movement and fidgeting most of the time. He raised his face to meet Heero’s eyes, face immobile and cold as a carved statue. There was the glint of something dangerous in the back of his eyes, and even Heero half-wanted to listen to that threat and back down.
“What makes you say that?” said Duo, voice careful and ice-cold. His tone said clearly that he had a guess.
“I-overheard you, last night,” said Heero finally, rising to the challenge in that tone.
Duo stiffened visibly, eyes sparking violet-blue. “Do you have any concept of privacy?” he ground out, tone dark with rage.
“And does it mean nothing to you, that you are a guest in my castle?” replied Heero, hackles bristling despite himself.
“You will never understand what I have been through,” hissed Duo, “and I don’t particularly care. You will never know what I have been through, because I see no reason to tell you and now I know better than to assume I have anything resembling privacy here.” He slowly rose to his feet, fists clenched with fury. “What you’ve been through sounds like Hell, but-” Duo suddenly cut himself off, taking several deep breaths in an attempt to calm himself down, although he kept his eyes carefully open and focused on Heero.
Briskly, Duo strode off towards the door. Heero made no move to follow him.
He struggled with the door for a few minutes, but it refused to open. With a shout compounded of frustration and rage and bone-deep pain he punched hard at the door’s surface, ignoring the blood that welled from it as he pulled his hand away.
“Ask it,” he snarled, and even Heero knew that he had overstepped his boundaries.
“Will you marry me?” he asked, quietly.
“No,” spit out Duo, then ran away through the now-opened doors.
--
BetaNote: I think she’s doing a pretty good job so please show your support and review. It might encourage her to write faster. LadyFrissell
Series: Gundam Wing
Characters/Pairings: Duo, Heero, Wufei, Quatre, Trowa, Duo/Heero
Rating/Warnings: T for various things, not really pushing the rating. Slash.
Summary: A retelling of Beauty and the Beast. When someone stumbles into an enchantment hidden deep within a forest, he trades his life for the lives of one of his slaves... 1x2 shounen-ai.
Author's Notes: My eternal thanks to my incredible beta, Lady_Friselle. She is fantastic beyond words!
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
FFnet link
Lovely 8
oOoOoOo
Duo was dreaming.
It was back before the Plague, or at the beginning of it. He was playing with an illusion, spinning the little colored sparks of magic into a dog, a knight, the king’s castle. There was a cluster of kids gathered around him, watching-he knew most of them, but not all.
But no, it had to be the beginning of the Plague, because a lot of them were coughing, and the littlest one, the one who had called himself Darry, was coughing hard and every few minutes, and you could see the dark bruising in his arms where his veins were swelling.
The Plague didn’t kill painlessly or nicely.
But this was wrong. It hadn’t happened like this.
And then the little warm sparks of magic, their colors strobing around the rainbow as he needed them, all changed to the sickly yellow-green of a fading bruise, or a faint one-the same as the colors twining themselves around little Darry’s arms. Duo wasn’t in control, now, the dream-self was.
Then the magic scattered, splitting into smaller and smaller splinters until they were only visible as a faint, constantly moving glitter, moving in and out of the mouths and noses and then eyes and then skin of the kids as they talked and laughed and breathed and then died. The poison never got further than his own mouth, though it coated his skin, uselessly. The faint purple-black glow of his magic prevented it.
And now he was walking the streets, but that faint almost-golden glitter of magic was everywhere, expelling itself from the dead bodies that littered the street, their bodies twisted by the disease that had killed them, skin more blue-black than flesh-colored. The rats that had feasted on the bodies lay dying as well, naked tails resembling knotted rope from the swelling.
Nobody moved but him, the glow that surrounded him the same color as the bruises on the dead bodies. Behind a few of the doorways-too few of them-lone figures lurked: healers still strong enough to keep holding on, though they would still fall to the illness soon, and the few lucky individuals who had fought it off.
The dead stood up in the streets and followed him, and he felt the magic seeping into his skin, turning him the same color as the dead. The sky glittered an unnatural yellow-blue as the little dots of magic that had come from him swirled and twisted and wove strange, branching patterns in the air that almost looked like veins.
Power swirled over and around him, and
Quatre was shaking him, waking him up. He looked at his friend with wide eyes for a few brief seconds, until he realized what had happened-a dream, of course-and relaxed.
“Whoah! Thanks for waking me up, Quatre-was I really being that loud?”
“I felt it,” Quatre said bluntly, laying a hand flat against his chest, over his heart. “Duo, what’s wrong? That wasn’t just a dream.”
Duo sighed. “It was nothing,” he said. “Just memories from the Plague.”
“I can feel you avoiding me. Please, will you trust me? I know its cliché, but talking can help.”
“It’d take a whole lot of talking to help this,” said Duo bleakly.
“Tell me,” Quatre said.
“It was the Plague,” Duo said again. “I was in the streets of the capital when it happened. There was a bunch of us; we were a gang, I suppose you’d say, but street kids just need to stick together for survival. My mother had died maybe a year ago, but we’d never been well-off, so I was already pretty much used to getting along rough. It wasn’t bad. I was a good pick-pocket, and I had found a good ‘family.’ That’s what we called it-none of us had ever had much in terms of family.
“And then the sickness came. We were some of the first to get sick. It always happens that way-you want to watch out for illness, you look at the poor.”
oOo
Outside Duo’s window, Heero paused, sensitive ears catching the flow of words.
oOo
“It was bad enough when it was just the illness. But then the magic got mixed up in it.” Duo had turned his face towards his knees, hiding his face; his voice was low and tense, struggling to speak calmly. “I-
“I tried to heal them, but it j-just seemed to make it worse. Then they all started dying, and we didn’t have anything to do with the bodies. We were too poor for graves, even at the beginning, and it was still before they started giving mass cremations.”
Quatre had cut off the connection to Duo that had alerted him to his friend’s distress entirely. His emotional wounds were-excruciatingly painful. It was also a deeply personal matter; the sensation of intrusion was too obvious, too cold, for him to be comfortable with it, now that Duo had started speaking.
“Darry was first, then Maius and July-they were brother and sister. Then Tob, then Sarali, then Jam. I didn’t get sick, no matter that I spent all my time with the dying ones, and that I was in the streets, where even the rats were dying.
“I wasn’t a healer-not that it did most people any good-but I had learned to force it. To fake it. Some good it did me. Like I said, I only seemed to make it worse. I stopped trying, after Jerry died. Emily had asked me what I had done to him, and didn’t let me touch her until two days later, after her fever had gotten so high that she was hallucinating, and by then it was too late, she didn’t even know who I was. She died six hours later.
“And then they kept on dying, until I was the only one left. Jilli died just two weeks before the end of the Plague. Afterwards, I got picked up by Ellyaugh. You know the rest.” Duo shrugged, partly to hide the tears in his eyes.
“The gods above have mercy,” Quatre whispered. “En take your pain.”
Duo looked askance at him, feelings firmly hidden behind his mask. “En?” he said.
“One of the gods of death and of life, and the god of emotion,” Quatre said automatically, startled by Duo’s sudden turn-around; his masks ran deep, worryingly so, and came much too easily to him.
“I always forget you’re not from here…” Duo said with a smile, shaking his head playfully, long braid flopping around his face.
“Really, though,” Quatre said. “Thank you for sharing that with me.”
Duo was serious again, all of a sudden. “Thank you for listening. You’re the first person I’ve ever been able to tell.”
oOo
Outside of the window, Heero moved on as Duo and Quatre said their goodnights, and Quatre left for his own room.
oOo
“So, what’s the game?” asked Trowa questioningly.
“I dunno if it has a name,” Duo said with a manic grin, “But we used to play it in the street. It’s better with a few more people, but this’ll work. So, the rules are, there’s a Home-Keeper, and their goal is to keep the ball out of the ‘Home.’ The goal of the rest of us is to get it in, but we’re each working independently of each other, so we’re also trying to keep the others from getting it in. At the same time, we’re all trying to keep it from touching the ground-that means that the Home-Keeper wins a point. You can play two ways past that-the person with the most points at the end of however long you decide the game’s going to be, or the first person to a set number of points.”
The other three players looked at him doubtfully. Wufei sneered. “I can’t believe I agreed to do this,” he muttered.
“It’s because Duo asked if you were getting old and frail,” Trowa said sensibly. Wufei shot him a smoldering glare. Duo snickered, and Quatre tried to cover his own laugh. Trowa himself, of course, was perfectly deadpan.
This was exactly what Duo needed: pointless fun, something that wasn’t emotionally charged, just the chance to run around and stretch himself to his physical limits-not that that was anything impressive, after his confinement by Ellyaugh-and spend some time with Quatre, Trowa and even Wufei.
He shook his head, his heavy brown braid flailing with the motion. He needed something to get last night’s dream out of his head, anyways.
oOo
Duo was starting to actually feel pretty good as he thumped into his seat at the dinner table. Heero had already been there, waiting; Duo had been a few minutes late. He’d realized he’d needed to wash, after the game had finished (Trowa had won, to Wufei’s disgust) and he’d cut things a bit close.
“Hey, Heero,” he said in greeting, looking under the cover of a dish near him. He was starving. Nightmares could really take it out of you, apparently. Especially when they meant that you couldn’t eat anything for a few meals, because the memories were making you nauseous.
There was silence, but that wasn’t unusual. Duo let it be, and started eating.
Heero spoke up suddenly after a few long, quiet, minutes. “Duo,” he said, sounding almost hesitant.
“Yeh?”
“Tell me more about the plague.”
Duo froze, face tilted down so it was hidden in shadow. Heero was reminded strongly by the split-second flash of… something that had flowed across Duo’s face when Heero had first asked about the plague. “I already told you most of it-it devastated everything, and went after people with power, and fucked things up nine ways from Sunday. What more do you want to know?” His voice was steely with forced casualty.
Heero’s slight frown deepened into a scowl, his features making the expression even more threatening. “That’s not all. What happened to you during the plague?” he said.
Duo stilled entirely, unnaturally so. It was even more eerie compared to his near-constant movement and fidgeting most of the time. He raised his face to meet Heero’s eyes, face immobile and cold as a carved statue. There was the glint of something dangerous in the back of his eyes, and even Heero half-wanted to listen to that threat and back down.
“What makes you say that?” said Duo, voice careful and ice-cold. His tone said clearly that he had a guess.
“I-overheard you, last night,” said Heero finally, rising to the challenge in that tone.
Duo stiffened visibly, eyes sparking violet-blue. “Do you have any concept of privacy?” he ground out, tone dark with rage.
“And does it mean nothing to you, that you are a guest in my castle?” replied Heero, hackles bristling despite himself.
“You will never understand what I have been through,” hissed Duo, “and I don’t particularly care. You will never know what I have been through, because I see no reason to tell you and now I know better than to assume I have anything resembling privacy here.” He slowly rose to his feet, fists clenched with fury. “What you’ve been through sounds like Hell, but-” Duo suddenly cut himself off, taking several deep breaths in an attempt to calm himself down, although he kept his eyes carefully open and focused on Heero.
Briskly, Duo strode off towards the door. Heero made no move to follow him.
He struggled with the door for a few minutes, but it refused to open. With a shout compounded of frustration and rage and bone-deep pain he punched hard at the door’s surface, ignoring the blood that welled from it as he pulled his hand away.
“Ask it,” he snarled, and even Heero knew that he had overstepped his boundaries.
“Will you marry me?” he asked, quietly.
“No,” spit out Duo, then ran away through the now-opened doors.
--
BetaNote: I think she’s doing a pretty good job so please show your support and review. It might encourage her to write faster. LadyFrissell