Author's Note: Hello there, and welcome to Serenity's Wing. This is a rewrite of my former Firefly/Gundam Wing crossover called Of Amethyst and Gray. Hopefully, this is a better version. I attempted to create a better back-story, which means this starts out a tad bit slower than my first take. There's a better, hopefully stronger, plot this time around—although the first one never really got to that level anyway—and I've started re-watching the Firefly series, so the characters should be as close to in-character as I can possibly make them. If they're still wrong, then please let me know and hopefully I can fix it. I'm a stickler for IC-ness. And to top this new version off, Duo will meet up with Mal and co. much faster this time around.
Just in case anyone cares about this sort of thing, I'm ignoring the Oort Cloud theory. If you don't know what it is, then it doesn't matter anyway. :D
Please note that this is un-beta'd and therefore there are probably typos that I've missed on the read-through. Thanks!
Also, to make things a little clearer, this takes place after the last episode of Firefly and between the GW series and Endless Waltz. The Mariemaia thing will probably still happen, though I'm still not entirely sure when it will happen.
Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Wing. I don't own Firefly, either. This is purely for fun. No profit made. No copyright infringement intended. Thank you.
Chapter One
Duo Maxwell—much to the vexation of certain individuals acquainted with him—was the type of person that channeled his frustrations through 'positive' outlets. People, for example, were great mediums in which to improve his sometimes downtrodden disposition.
Crash! Stomp, stomp, stomp—Slam!
Silence, then—
"Damn it, Maxwell!"
Wufei just happened to be his favorite target.
Duo hid his roguish smile behind the lip of his coffee mug, pointedly ignoring the exasperated, albeit resigned look Quatre was giving him.
"Must you antagonize him this early in the morning?" the sandy-haired teen asked. "It's been three months since you last saw each other. I would have thought it might be nice not to have his homicidal impulses directed at you while we're here."
Duo set the cup down and grinned cheekily at him, leaning backwards in the chair far enough to lift the front legs off the ground. "It's because I haven't seen Wuffers in so long that I couldn't resist, Quat. I've got a lot of catching up to do and not a whole lot of time to do it."
Quatre shook his head with a quiet sigh and a smile, sitting down opposite his friend with his own cup instead of continuing to berate him. Trowa chose this moment to enter the small kitchen area of their hotel suite with a small amused smirk on his otherwise calm face.
"Wufei has feathers stuck in his hair," he stated, matter-of-factly.
Duo made a 'snirk' noise and quickly hid his face in his cup again, downing the rest of the beverage in two quick gulps before getting up and walking over to the sink. "Anyone heard anything on Heero yet?"
"Ms. Une called this morning and said she still can't find him," Quatre replied. "There's been no trace of him since he left Relena's guard detail last month."
Duo rolled his eyes. Rinsing out the cup, he grabbed a towel and turned around, leaning against the edge of the counter as he dried his hands. "That figures. That guy won't be found if he doesn't want to be."
"Which is making Une's job next to impossible," Trowa agreed from Duo's recently vacated seat.
"Yes, well, Ms. Une wants us to go ahead and head over today, "Quatre said. "She said she'd rather have our help now than wait until we can track Heero down on our own, so not finding Heero isn't so much a priority than concern for his well being."
Duo snorted, but there was no bite in his response. "That guy can take care of himself."
"She knows that, but it doesn't stop her from worrying."
"Che, women."
Duo grinned. "Mornin', 'Fei!"
Wufei, hair now washed and feather-free, opened his mouth and took a breath, before giving up and sighing instead of yelling at the braided teen. "Good morning, Maxwell." He looked over the table before focusing on Quatre. "She still hasn't found Yuy."
It wasn't a question, but Quatre answered nonetheless. "No."
"Wonder what's so important," Duo said. "Une doesn't seem the type to call all of us in unless she absolutely had to." He looked at Wufei. "You're part of the Preventers. Heard anything about this?"
"Not much," Wufei replied truthfully. "I've been out on assignment, but I've heard there's been a lot more activity lately. Apparently, the Vice President has made two appearances just in the last week."
"Do you think it could be another war?" Trowa asked.
Quatre shook his head. "No, Ms. Une seems worried, but not overly so."
"Besides," Duo agreed with a chuckle, "She wouldn't have lent us this awesome hotel room to sleep in if there'd been threat of another war. She would've demanded our asses in her office the moment we landed planet-side."
"Well, there's only one way to find out."
XxXxXxX
When the four arrived at Preventer's Headquarters, none of them were prepared for the flurry of activity nor the heavy tension in the air. Duo looked at Wufei accusingly.
"You—"
"I haven't seen any of this for myself, Maxwell," Wufei interrupted. "My information was secondhand. I never claimed to actually know."
Duo closed his mouth with an audible click of his teeth and looked forward stubbornly.
A man with dark brown hair and a large stack of papers in his arms stopped in front of them and stared at them with a slightly bewildered expression. "You kids the ones the Director is waiting for?"
"Yes, sir," Quatre told him.
The man shifted the stack of papers and nodded before looking over their heads and calling out over the clamor, "Hey, Wilson!"
"Yeah boss?"
"Take these kids to the Director's office. She's expecting them."
"Sure thing, boss!"
As the older man shuffled off, a younger man with dark blonde hair and a popsicle stick in his mouth jogged up to them with a smile on his face. "Well then," he said, "Follow me."
Duo smiled at Wufei as the Chinese teen murmured something that sounded very much like, "Treating us like we're useless children," in an unhappy tone.
"Look at it this way, 'Fei," Duo said cheerfully. "At least they're not treating us like terrorists."
Their guide looked at Duo strangely, but led them out of the busy work area and down a much quieter corridor towards—
"A storage closet?" Trowa inquired.
"Yep!" Wilson replied. "She's in hiding right now." Then, he knocked and opened the door.
As the doors opened and the four pilots filed in, Wilson waved at them and walked away, leaving Wufei to close the door behind them. Une stood up from her desk and held out four folders. They each took a folder. "Good morning," she said, "The President has called me twice just this morning, so I am afraid that I have no time to chat. In those folders you will find four separate missions. I do not care which of you takes which, but I hope that all of you at least choose one. I will understand, however, if you choose not to participate."
Intrigued, Duo opened his folder first.
Date: March 10, AC 197
Reported by: Mitchell Bryant – Level 2
Summary: Colony X-1999 has shown suspicious activity in regards to—
Duo looked up as Trowa said, "These seem like routine missions. Why do you need us?"
"As you may have noticed, we are rather short-handed," Une replied simply. "Many of the missions given to us have been things the regular Police should be handling, but the President has decided that the Preventers Organization need to start pulling more weight. Needless to say, we need all the help we can get. I called you in because I know you can follow through. What do you say?"
Duo looked between his comrades.
Quatre looked a little hesitant before looking down at the open folder in his hands and saying, "Are these going to be individual investigations, or will there be others involved?"
"There will be others," Une replied.
Quatre looked up at the others. "I could probably do this one, but what are those?"
Duo waved his folder. "Mines a colony doing hinky stuff. Probably gonna need undercover work."
"A probe was mysteriously destroyed while investigating a disturbance in the Kuiper Belt two weeks ago. They want someone to investigate it," said Trowa. "I wouldn't mind taking the undercover mission."
"A serial killer called Barry escaped from a transport van yesterday while being transferred between prisons. I think I'll keep this one."
Duo made a face, having been about to call the convict one. He shrugged. "Okay, then I'll do the Kuiper thing."
Une smiled. "Great."
XxXxXxX
2 Weeks Later
Boing—Thwap.
Boing—Thwap.
"I should've fought Wufei for the convict mission."
Boing—Thwap.
Boing—Thwap.
"Quit that."
Duo ignored him.
Boing—Thwap.
Boing—
"Hey!" Duo exclaimed indignantly, sitting forward in his seat. He glared at the other man, who was now holding the small bouncing ball he'd been rebounding off the ceiling. "Give it back."
The other man didn't blink in the face of Duo's annoyance. "No. You'll just do it again and I told you to stop it."
The two continued to glare at one another for a couple of moments before Duo gave up and sighed, rubbing the back of his head in agitation as he sprung himself from his chair. "Fine. I'll just go find something else to do then."
As he left the room, the other man shouted after him, "And stay away from the furnaces this time!"
"Yeah, yeah," Duo grumbled, trudging down the pathway towards the cargo area. "Not my fault it turned out to be flammable."
One left turn, a right, and a ladder down two floors brought him to his intended location and as he came to a stop, he couldn't bite back the grin spreading across his face at the sight of his buddy. He'd had to cover Deathscythe with a tarp so that it could be transported, but even covered like it was, that fact that it was a suit was easily recognizable.
He'd managed to convince Une—through hard work and a wild imagination—that the disturbance "just might be from invading aliens with technology much more advanced than theirs and that he might need his Gundam in case they were attacked." She'd let him take it, but he had a sneaking suspicion that she'd let him more to shut him up than because she actually believed him.
Truthfully, it just made him feel better to have his buddy with him. He was being cut off from everywhere and everyone he knew. Having his Gundam with him was a small price to pay for comfort.
A voice over the intercom drew him out of his musings.
"Pluto is now in sight. We'll be arriving at the last known location of the probe in roughly two hours."
Duo smiled and rapped his knuckles against the side of Deathscythe. "Hear that? We're officially the farthest any human have ever been in the solar system."
"Oi, Maxwell!"
Duo looked up. Mildred, the ship's mechanic, stood leaning against the railing of one of the catwalks with a grin on her face. Her yellow overalls were smeared with oil. She'd probably been working on her pet project again. "Why are you down here? Shouldn't you be up top gawking at Pluto like the rest of those numskulls?"
Duo grinned at her. "Why aren't you?"
Mildred snorted. "I'm much more interested in getting us back home than looking at something I've seen thousands of pictures of already. I know Hako believes that those panels can get us back, but I'm not so sure. It's old technology."
"Careful," Duo teased. "Wouldn't want the passengers to get twitchy."
Mildred eyed the cloaked Gundam as she replied, "I don't think anything I ever said to you would scare you. Not if that's what I've been thinking it is."
Duo shrugged and opened his mouth to reply, but was interrupted by the intercom again.
"Uh, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, guys, but I think we have a problem."
XxXxXxX
"Aliens."
"Well, yeah. What else could that be?" The pilot, a man probably in his late twenties, pointed emphatically at the large ship seeming to float towards them.
"He's got a point, Garrett. Nothing should be out here besides us."
"Stranger things have happened."
"What? Like a creepy-ass looking ship floating through an area in space that hasn't ever been explored by actual humans is considered normal? I've ran the classification on that ship through the system three times and nothing's coming up. It's both unregistered and unknown. I'm telling you, it's gotta be aliens."
Duo watched the ship on the screen as he listened to the crew debate what it was behind him. For all intents and purposes, it looked abandoned; dead, even. The pilot—Andrew—was right about one thing at least. He didn't recognize that type of carrier either.
"Have you tried contacting them?"
"Well, no, but if they're aliens, I don't really want to anyway."
"Do it."
Duo heard Andrew sigh resignedly behind him, followed by the sound of buttons being pressed and then, "This is Beehive. Please respond if possible."
They waited in silence for a moment before Garrett spoke up, "Did you not take Communications class in the Pilot's Academy? That was the crappiest message I think I've ever heard."
Andrew grumbled, but didn't try again.
Duo's eyes widened as the ship suddenly came to life and turned its course in a maneuver he would've normally thought impossible for such a large vessel. As it angled itself directly for their ship, an angry looking claw-like thing flickering with electricity, Duo took a step back. "That can't be good."
Garrett moved in front of him as the previously unmoving ship continued towards them and Garrett cursed. "No," he agreed. "It's not. Andrew, we're leaving."
"On it!"
"Everyone else back to their posts. I'm going to need everyone to get us out of here." As the remaining crew members exited the helm in a hurry, Garrett's eyes landed on Duo, who'd remained behind with nothing to really do. "If things turn ugly, I want you and that suit ready to go. Someone's going to have to get out of this, if things go South."
Duo nodded, understanding, and turned to leave.
"And Maxwell?"
Duo looked over his shoulder and caught the small object Garrett threw at him. He looked down. It was the bouncy ball Garrett had confiscated from him not fifteen minutes ago. He looked back at the Captain.
"Good luck."
Duo jogged all the way down to the cargo area, uncovered his buddy, ran the start up sequence, and waited near the passageway.
It wasn't a long wait.
The ship collided heavily with something—probably the other ship—and as Duo attempted to regain some semblance of balance, the main lights were suddenly replaced with the dull red glow of the back ups. Things went abruptly downhill from there. Duo retreated and stood at the open hatch of Deathscythe with a gun in hand as thirty seconds later, what looked eerily like frantic, fast-moving zombies poured out of the passageway and into the cargo area.
"What the hell is this?" Duo said to himself, dumbfounded. The whole thing was like something out of a bad horror film.
As the first one came into range, snarling at him in an acutely non-human fashion and holding what looked like a handmade spear, Duo shot him in the chest. It wasn't a wound that would immediately kill him, unfortunately, but he'd done his best with how much the zombie-guy was thrashing around. However, his sympathy was ruthlessly squashed as said zombie-guy merely got back up and re-joined his pals in trying to reach him, albeit more slowly.
With all the growling and frantic climbing the zombie-like creatures were doing, he never noticed the one coming up behind him.
As the sneaky one clamped an unyielding arm around his chest and attempted to take a chunk out of the space between his shoulder and his neck like some kind of zombie-vampire-mutant, Duo's training took over and he elbowed it in the gut hard enough to knock the breath out of it. As it reeled backwards, letting go, Duo whirled around and deposited two quick shots into the thing's head. And then he decided that now was a good time to leave.
He jumped into the cockpit of Deathscythe just as one of the zombie-things took a dive at him and it cleared over the space harmlessly to tumble down the opposite side of the Gundam. He pounded his right fist on the button to close the door as his left one came up to check the nape of his neck. Luckily, the thing hadn't broken skin. He hated to think what kind of diseases the thing had.
The hatch couldn't close quickly enough and he ended up letting off three more shots at the zombie-things before he was safely inside. He took a moment to catch his breath as the screens booted up and showed him his surroundings. He didn't like what he saw. The cargo area had roughly fifty of the weird zombie-things scattered around the room, either looting through things or climbing on his Gundam. He hit the record button to his left with more fervor than was necessary and pushed his suit to sit up and give the room a once-over. He needed something to bring back home, after all.
More zombie-things were coming through the passageway now, and the new ones were covered in what looked like new blood.
Duo didn't think twice as he swung Deathscythe's fist through the metal side of the ship, ripped a hole large enough to fit through, and escaped.
He forced himself to believe that the bright yellow splashed with crimson he'd seen out the corner of his eye had merely been a trick of the light.
XxXxXxX
He'd lost sight of the sun.
It was a disturbing thought, if not because he no longer knew where he was, then because he hadn't actually thought it was possible. The sun was roughly eight-hundred and sixty-five thousand miles wide—not exactly an easy subject to lose sight of. And yet that was exactly what Duo had done.
Though, maybe the huge-ass wall of scattered metal, ice, and rocks had something to do with that.
Duo cursed and veered sharply to the left to avoid the small ship diving towards him. The zombie-mutant-things seemed to have little to no regard for their own safety and attacked him with the single-mindedness not unlike that of the Mobile Dolls from the war. The only upside to the situation was that there weren't very many of them.
The small ship—the last of the bunch that had deployed after his escape from the Beehive—sped towards him yet again and he spun as he got out of the way, bringing the scythe around in a clean arch with him, and effectively sliced the pest-like ship straight through the middle.
Frowning sadly, he looked over at the Beehive. The weird zombie-things' ship was still attached to it and now it looked just as dead as the first one. The hole Duo had created to escape had probably dropped the zombie-things' numbers dramatically if the majority of them had been crowded around the room with him, but there was no telling just how many of them there had been to begin with. For all he knew, their ship could've been full. They definitely had room for more than he'd seen.
Well, he thought, clenching his fist, Ti— A loud beeping interrupted his thoughts and pulled his attention to his left where a moving dot had shown up on his radar. He turned Deathscythe to see what it was.
"Another one?" Duo exclaimed uneasily as the blip turned out to be another of the creepy red-painted ships. "Man. How many of these things are out here?" Pressing a few keys and pulling on the navigational stick, he started flying backwards and away. He didn't have time to stick around. Something like this needed to be reported, and fast.
Half an hour later, he was zombie-thing free, but no closer to locating the Sun.
Okay, Duo, he thought, If you were a gigantic ball of Hydrogen dictating the orbits of planets, where would you hide?
Looking at his navigation screen told him nothing, as all it showed was a glowing, blinking 'Error' message. Since Deathscythe had been on shutdown and in the cargo area during the trip, it hadn't recorded their progress, but that didn't explain why it couldn't pinpoint his location. He'd had to have gone out of the known solar system for that to happen. And Duo didn't want to think about what that could mean.
He glanced around. He had to say, it was a hell of a view, though. He'd pushed Deathscythe in the opposite direction of the zombie-things, which meant he had moved away from the wall of scattered space debris—and he was beginning to think that it had actually been the Kuiper belt—and was now floating listlessly through space. Space looked the same, generally, no matter where you were in it, but out here…
Duo relaxed into his seat and sighed. Space had a way of making someone feel exponentially small and the feeling was only magnified now that he didn't have the colonies nor the familiar planets surrounding him. He was a fish out of water—or in this case—a human out of his solar system. And he was going to eventually run out of power. Chances were he'd freeze to death before he could ever get back home.
He had no idea how to get back to the belt either, as it was impossible to tell the difference between one belt from next. And there were four, from what he'd been able to gather so far.
Futilely, Duo flipped the switch to attempt contacting someone again. It hadn't worked the last four times he'd tried it and even though he knew why, he still tried. He was just too far away; Deathscythe wasn't outfitted with the same equipment that the Beehive had had. Inputting the S.O.S. signal, he waited, listening to the droning static as he floated through space with nowhere to go.
Ten minutes went by with nothing, and then twenty, and he sighed as he reached forward to turn it off when he heard it. It wasn't much, and it was impossible to make out, but he heard it nonetheless. The sound of the static cut out long enough for maybe three or four choppy syllables to get through. Duo felt a smile spread across his face and he looked to his right at 'belt' he had been hovering next to. He flipped on the 'mic' and hoped for the best.
XxXxXxX
TBC
This chapter was only supposed to graze the 3K mark, and what do I do? Went and made it exactly 4400. :sigh: Thanks for reading!