---------------- Kyuuketsuki Duo Sanguis Draconis Part V ---------------- Things sped up rather quickly soon enough. Wufei would say not quickly enough; he chafed at the bit, ready to be off on his quest and his family's justice as soon as possible. Quatre would say that things were escalating far too quickly: the action had yet to begin, but still he wished for more time to prepare. Meiran had thoughts similar to the spiritualist, although her sentiments lay more with her longtime friend than with their state of preparedness. And Trowa, of course, was merely Trowa. Duo was rather indifferent to the passage of time. He saw no reason to delay, but nor did he feel any particular need to rush. Things would happen as they happened. The one concern he did have, however, was not to be shared with his mortal companions. As the humans performed one final check of their supplies while they waited for the arrival of their guide, Duo pulled his succubus friend aside for a moment. "Hilde," he said in full seriousness. His expression stayed light, betraying nothing to the others, but the demon read something in his aura that made her suppress her usual flippant response. "Duo, what is it?" "Can you do something for me?" Again, she put aside her typical saucy thoughts. "Anything, Duo. You know that." Indeed, she owed him several big favors, had since first they had met and the guardian had deigned to help a poor, cornered succubus in her time of need. Duo and his partner did not hold payment over her head, but if she had not been a nice succubus, with a sense of decency, they would never have ended up befriending her. She did not believe that helping Duo's initial investigation into this matter anywhere near made it up to him, although now she followed as a friend watching another friend's back. She felt the threat of the black dragon even more keenly than Duo did. After all, succubi over the ages had grown quite skilled at marking danger, although usually to stay clear of it, not run headlong into it. Duo put his hand to her bare forearm, and through the skin-on-skin contact, he transmitted a focused burst of emotion. It was an intense pulse of a deep and profound love laced with a spark of lust for flavor and substance, and it quite nearly made Hilde squeal in delight involuntarily at its reception. As a succubus, lust was the staple ingredient in her diet, but a love so divine was like a fine wine, an elegant dessert, a confection beyond compare -- not very filling or nutritious, but oh so delicious. "Hil," Duo said rather gravely, as soon as the initial rush of flavor wore off into a pleasantly warm afterglow. "Can you keep that for me?" She blinked the sated haze from her mind and nodded numbly. "Why?" she asked. She could have her cake and eat it, too, sucking enjoyment from the gift while still retaining its essence. The power of Duo's love, especially having tasted it more than once, could easily be recalled to mind for later use. Further and continued sustenance was not really an option, but she could use the memory. "You might have to give it back," Duo warned. "I might need it." Her brow knit in confusion as she pondered his request. Duo was its source -- why would he need her to supply to him what he had in overwhelming abundance? "But Duo..." He stopped her with a shake of his head. "Please, Hilde, I just... If I need it, if you think I need to be reminded of it, just please... hold this for me in case I forget or something, okay?" She agreed, but with some sense of foreboding. She could tell from the way Duo had walked, talked, even breathed this morning that he must have seen his lover some time in the night. He seemed a little more himself, but it hadn't dispelled the barely perceptible air of sorrow that clung to him in a faintly parasitic embrace. Her gaze flickered to the side at the muffled exclamation of Quatre as he hefted Wufei's weighty pack, and when her eyes had returned to the guardian's, they had cleared themselves of the look so solemn it had hovered on the border of anxiety. "You don't have to come, you know," Duo said lightly, his head cocking to one side curiously. "You don't even have your usual excuse this time around." Her usual excuse being that she enjoyed basking in the light Duo and his partner cast together. She shrugged. "I've got a better reason this time. Heero would skin me alive if he thought I'd abandoned you now." She'd hesitated to say that, thinking that perhaps he could do without the mentioning of his absent lover's name, but she was sure it had to come up some time. Better that it come from someone that understood. Her fears proved unfounded as Duo chuckled softly. "He would, wouldn't he?" he mused, oddly delighted by the fact. He chuckled again and left her to wander back to his human friends, although perhaps the term 'friend' wasn't entirely accurate. He was friendly enough towards them, but nothing would ever change the fact that he was the guardian. It was written into the very fiber of his being. His life was not truly his own. He had a purpose, and not the leisure to spare on such unnecessary things. A few more blinks of his lifetime, and these humans would be memories, if that, although he did hold some fondness for them merely for the paths they walked, parallel to, though almost entirely separate from, his. "How are we doing here?" he asked the others. "When is that demon going to get here?" Wufei asked irritably. "How typical of a woman to be late." The two females in attendance were spared the trouble of having to answer as a third joined their midst, announcing her presence with a dainty snowball that landed squarely upon the top of Wufei's head. Dorothy went straight to her half-Shinma associate, sparing not a bit of attention for the sputtering Asian man behind her. "Are you prepared to march to your doom yet?" she inquired quite urbanely. "Have you no confidence in me, my dear?" Duo drawled comfortably in response, smoothing down an imaginary wrinkle in his shadowsilk shirt. "I have every confidence, my dear, that no matter what the final outcome, you shall not fail to entertain me." "Then I hope to live up to your fine expectations," he returned with a courtly bow. He turned to the four humans, standing there watching the proceedings with some interest, although it could be said that Wufei's eyes showed some hostility as he brushed the final traces of snow from his shoulders. The scowl on his face would confirm the observation. "Well then. Shall we?" There was a brief wave of disorientation, and then the humans found themselves in a vaguely familiar landscape of a blood red sky and twisted, skeletal trees. "What are we doing here?" Quatre asked. He recognized this place as something to do with Duo, and hence not demons. "Lovely and charming though Dorothy is," Duo explained to them, "it is not every demon that can simply transport seven people into parts not their own without the opening of a portal or some such. This is so much easier." He gestured at the world around them. "A place between places. A stop between here and there. This is not a demon place, but from here we can slip to their lands." "Will we then slip directly from here to the dragon lands?" He shook his head. "No. I've never been there before. Nor has Dorothy. Since I've no point of contact to use, I cannot bring us there. We will have to settle for somewhere nearby. If you please, Dorothy?" The snow demon's chilly blue eyes locked onto his for a moment, transmitting a fix on the location that he picked up with ease. A few heartbeats more, and the landscape shifted and blurred once again, until it solidified into a rather anti-climatically dreary dip in some ordinary-looking hills. The ground seemed to be dry, packed earth of a reddish-brown hue, with no vegetation to break up the monotony, and the sky was a bland, cloudless gray that cast hazy, indistinct shadows. "It looks so... normal," Meiran ventured. She had expected the unexpected, but this was unexpected because it could easily have been expected. Duo's lips curled into a rather ominous grin that implied that she hadn't seen anything yet. "This is claimed territory. Or at least in dispute, from what I understand, by some rather boring little creatures. It's bound to look boring out here. Although I'm still not quite certain why you would be familiar with this place, Dorothy." "This place amused me for a while," she sneered pleasantly. "When the original lord was overthrown, there were more than enough underlings left to fight it out amongst themselves. In the beginning, leadership would be gained and lost sometimes once, even twice a day. Those without foresight were rather quickly killed off, leaving the more intelligent predators to vie for the glorious title of king over a wasteland. But alas, soon even they went extinct, leaving only the despicable, sniveling cowards that hid in the shadows 'til the end and pretended they were biding their time there, when all they were doing was whimpering in fear and hoping no one else ever noticed them. This place is no fun at all, now. I wonder if the rest of the world will follow the same pattern." "So... are there still demons fighting for control of this territory?" Quatre asked, his eyes glancing at their surroundings with a certain degree of anxiety. Dorothy shrugged carelessly. "Probably." "Is that... safe? For us to be here, I mean." "If they're smart," Duo said, a rather mirthless smile on his face. "If they're smart enough to recognize that we're more powerful than they are, then we're safe. If they're stupid enough to actually try something against us, then... well, we'll just have the pleasure of eliminating them from the gene pool, so to speak, and finally put this region out of its misery." He gestured politely to Dorothy. "Shall we get moving?" She chose a direction that appeared to be somewhat random to the others, seeing as how there were no landmarks to reference, but they began walking anyway. She knew what she was doing. She could feel the disordered power of a neutral zone ahead of them, just as she could feel the power gathering in the guardian among them, and she allowed her lips to curl up ever so slightly in a smile of anticipation. Well did she know that patience was a virtue. This would be worth the wait. Quatre took a place beside the guardian. "So, Duo, do you come to the demon realms often?" They had been fairly careful to avoid the term 'hell' in their conversations, opting instead for something a little more secular, although the word did tend to pop up when someone wanted to emphasize just how thoroughly unpleasant and 'hellish' their circumstances were. Duo favored him with a tolerant smile. "More often that I'd like, sometimes, but no, not really that often. My business rarely intersects with that of the demon kind, although it obviously has of late." On his other side strode Hilde, with Dorothy gliding along before them. On Quatre's other side, slightly behind him, was Trowa, a silent sentinel guarding his back. To the rear, Meiran and Wufei walked side by side. Wufei's eyes kept an almost restless watch on the land around them, and his fingers gripped the hilt of the sword attached to his belt in loose preparation. "You know," Quatre said, never one to let a learning opportunity pass him by. "I believe I recall you saying once that your powers had no direct effects on demons." He accepted Duo's silence as agreement. "Then how is it that you can consider yourself to be more powerful than these demons, at least in the sense of them being able to recognize a creature that is a threat to them?" "There's more than one way to skin a demon," Duo intoned gravely, before returning to a more normal tone of voice. "Sure, I can't bind one and send it to the Dark -- not that I'd really want to. The powers that be would probably get pretty pissy at me if I did. But that doesn't mean that I can't slice a demon's head off." Hilde sniffed disdainfully beside him. "How crude." He smiled. "Not all of us have such an elegant tool as seduction on hand as you do, Hil." "You do, too. You have outstanding seductive potential, Duo. Tell him I'm right, Quatre." She leaned back to catch Quatre's eye behind Duo's back, and the poor spiritualist was suddenly taken by the intense desire to agree to anything she said, if only she would smile at him. He gulped, knowing full well that the succubus was playing with him and that he ought to resist, but finding it more and more difficult with each passing moment, until Trowa reached out and brushed slender fingers across his arm, and a brief surge of empty calm washed over him. It felt as if the vibes that were being sent his way were washing over him, but no longer touching him. As soon as he got his mental feet back underneath him, the contact was withdrawn, and Quatre shuffled a few cautious steps away from her. "Now, Hilde," Duo chided her gently. He had missed neither the succubus's wiles, nor the quiet man's interference. "Stop playing with them." "Duo," she pouted playfully, clinging tightly to his arm and looking up at him through batting eyelashes. She added only a touch of her appeal -- she knew who already had a well-established claim on his affections. "Well, fine," Duo conceded. "Play with them if you must, but treat them with a little respect and courtesy, please?" Wufei was well within earshot. "You have no such authority to be making such decisions, Duo," he said sharply. "I will allow no demon to play with me." Hilde glanced appraisingly at him over her shoulder. "Who would want to? You're no fun at all." Meiran wisely stifled her snicker at that. "On the other hand, that might make you the most fun of all. I do love a challenge." She might have proceeded to provoke the man further, had Duo not taken her by the arm in a gentlemanly fashion. "Now, Hilde," he said aloud, before bending down slightly to whisper softly in her ear. "Those two back there have a thing going, Hil. I'd thank you not to ruin it for them, okay?" She tossed another look over her shoulder at them, catching Wufei's distrustful glare. "Oh, fine." "But I suppose I wouldn't object if you were to give them a tiny, tiny little nudge in the right direction at some opportune time," he continued conspiratorially. "But I mean tiny. And for the gods' sake, subtle." She grinned from the corner of her mouth on the side away from the two walking behind them. "No ruining anything, Duo. I got ya." For a succubus, she did have a rather uncommonly large romantic streak running through her, but her sweet tooth hadn't gotten her into any trouble yet. "I'm standing right here, you know," Wufei broke in irritably. "It's rude to whisper about someone, especially when he's right where he can see you." "Hey, I was just asking her to leave you in peace," Duo said in his defense. "And it took that long?" "I was being eloquent about it." He may have had to put up with Wufei's distrust, but he was glad they were along. The mild bickering was keeping him in good spirits. Would have been better if Heero were there, but oh well. He couldn't expect life to be perfect, now could he? -------- sometimes i refer to the humans as boys instead of men. that's not me being confused. that's duo still thinking of them as boys, no matter their age. and do not even ask me why, but the lands they are currently strolling through were inspired by the year of four emperors. _________________________________________ This piece of fiction is the intellectual property of the little turnip that could. The basis for this fic, i.e. Gundam Wing, Kyuuketsuki Miyu, et al., is the property of someone else. The author can be con- tacted at jchew@myrealbox.com. This has been an entirely automated message. http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~jchew/misc/gw.html last modified : 1/6/2003 22:48:12 PST