Disclaimer: Vision of Escaflowne isn't mine. Shocking, I know.
Notes: Hello! This fic has been at the back of my head for close to ten years now, sitting there like a stubborn cat that refuses to come out until they are damn well and ready. I imagine that there must already be dozens of versions of Dragon Slayers' origin stories out there, so please bear with me as I add one more to the stack. Hopefully it's at least different enough to make it worth the read. Please enjoy and, if you like, leave some feedback at the end. Comments and constructive critiques are always welcome! ;)
1.
Guimel sat on the edge of his cot and took a deep breath.
He had been waiting for the letter in his hands to arrive for some time. Somewhere among the block printed message inside was Guimel's name, written next to a handful of words that would determine his future, for better or worse. This letter would tell him whether or not he had been accepted into Zaibach's newest military specialist unit, under the command of the Copper Army's latest up and coming genius captain.
Guimel had dreamt about being admitted to the elite team. The days since he had submitted his application and taken part in the public demonstration where his skills had been put to the test had been full of anxiety.
Sometimes, he imagined the worst outcome. That he had been rejected and found so lacking that he was forever doomed to remain in his current post – just another failed pilot on loan to the civilian guymelef industry. He would never get the chance to see any real action or contribute to his country's future, never get the chance to prove his worth, to leave his mark in the world.
But there were other days when the answer that his mind pictured inside that envelope was an affirmative, with Guimel's name typed right next to the selected few. If he was feeling particularly optimistic, he even dared envision his name placed at the very top of the list.
Now the letter was here, finally, with an answer as definitive as a guymelef's punch. Black on white, imprinted with the full force of Zaibach's technological might. Unchangeable and irreversible.
Closing his eyes, he clenched his fist around the envelope and tossed it at the wall.
Rita had pulled her best outfit out of the wardrobe that morning. The standard military uniform did not offer many options, but Guimel could tell that she had picked the skirt with the least faded oil stains on it and the blue earrings that his roommate Hans had gotten her the last time that they had gone to the nearby town of Bellotze on leave. They brought out the colour in her eyes.
She was the kind of girl who knew everything about everyone else's business and she had a special liking for Guimel – much to Hans's dismay. So Guimel was not particularly surprised when she leaned forward across her desk as soon as she spotted him, breasts pressed close together between her arms. Of course that she would already know that the results that Guimel had been waiting for had arrived.
"Well? What did it say?"
Guimel stopped next to her desk to pick up the clipboard containing his worklist for the day. The thought crossed his mind to criticise Rita for going against regulations and leaving the top couple of buttons on her blouse undone, just to get off the topic, but he barely ever walked around in full uniform himself. On an average day, the temperatures inside the steel hangar of the guymelef production factory that they were stationed on rose up to ambient egg-frying levels. Even now, less than an hour after sunrise, the halls felt stuffy and uncomfortably warm.
"They politely thanked me for my efforts and told me better luck next time – which we all know won't ever come around. This was a once in a lifetime opportunity."
Rita's mouth dropped open.
"No way! Guimel, you're the best pilot I've ever seen! You can do moves that others only dream of and you know your way around a guymelef's innards as well as its control panel. How could they–"
Rita was pretty. Hans would hate him for it, but for a second Guimel imagined himself asking her out. Buying a house in Bellotze. Making a life there, starting a family.
"I guess it just wasn't meant to be."
2.
Guimel hung suspended from wires on a harness, inspecting the inside of an Alseides prototype's guts with a portable torch between his teeth aimed at the checklist on his clipboard. It was tricky keeping the wires balanced enough to hold a steady position, making it possibly one of the worst times to be caught by surprise.
Hans never got the memo, apparently.
"Guimel, get over here quick! You gotta see this!"
Guimel flipped head over heels, banging his head on the wall of the solid structure and losing hold of the small torch in the process. It clattered down the steel giant's body to lodge itself somewhere between the Alseides's knee joint and the flight control mechanism. Everyone in the building had probably heard his friend shouting.
He cursed his job for the millionth time that day – it was far from what he had imagined himself doing when he had joined the army – and hoisted himself up to the guymelef's chest opening. Hans was standing at the giant machine's feet, waving a notice of some kind above his head.
"General Adelphos is assembling a new elite unit for the Copper Army! All soldiers with any form of piloting experience are welcome to apply for consideration by the unit's commander," Hans read, his eyes shining as brightly as his grin – and Guimel's. All of Hans's flaws were forgiven. "This is it, buddy! This is our shot to get out there and really make a difference!"
Over the next five miets, their cheers echoed equally loud across the hangar. Then Guimel remembered that, before they could head out to Bellotze and celebrate, he had a missing torch to find.
Guimel beat Hans to the room where the preliminary results of the examination were posted.
The new unit's commander had not been present for the evaluation, so a group of stand-in officers had assessed each recruit's skills. They would be compiling their scores to be sent to the commander for the final decision.
He had to shoulder his way past a group of disappointed soldiers twice his age to get to the notice boards. The men were complaining about biased scoring standards and the evaluators' incompetence, but refused to vacate the spot to let others come close enough to look up their own names and marks. Guimel wondered acerbically if they were perhaps expecting the results to rewrite themselves if they loitered around long enough.
He saw Hans's name first. Average marks on all exercises had landed him solidly in the middle of the ranking. Guimel's own name did not appear until he managed to move further to the left.
His heart soared. He could not believe it. He was in fourth place.
The designated evaluators had not been the only ones observing the candidates' performance that day.
"Which one of you is Guimel?"
The officer who posed the question stood out among the common soldiers relaxing around the barracks' break room before lights out. His black and gold armour marked him as part of General Getin Gus's Silver Army.
Guimel immediately stood up to present himself with a salute, before following his superior to a nearby empty chamber for privacy.
"You performed well today, soldier. I haven't seen flying like that in a long time, especially coming from someone as young as you."
Guimel accepted the compliment with a nod. He knew that he was a damn good pilot but, given that most of his days were spent running the same limited set of manoeuvres on half functioning guymelefs in the backwater regions of the country, hearing an actual acknowledgement was as refreshing as a drink of cool running water from a mountain spring.
"I want you among my troops," the officer said. "This new unit of Adelphos's is a pipedream. Even if you do get in, what's in it for your long-term career? It's a dead-end. There's the General, there's the unit's Captain and then there's you. No chance whatsoever of promotion or of rising through the ranks. No chance of ever leading a team of your own one day. So what do you say? How do you feel about joining the Silver Army instead?"
It was tempting. Easily one of the most enticing offers that he had ever been made in his life. From test pilot on loan to civilian guymelef manufacture contractors, to a post that could one day lead him to take charge of a squad of his own.
The thing was: the more Guimel considered the possibilities, the more it seemed like he was being offered plain mediocrity. He would be given the same chance as everyone else, take the same path that most every other pilot took, surround himself in the same type of unbearable routinely every-day average-ness where he would never truly stand out.
In this new unit, he would get a chance to fight at the front lines of the truly important battles, to stand at the forefront of Zaibach's army and clear the way for their bright future to be realised. History would remember him forever.
In the end, it was not at all a hard decision to make.
"I appreciate the opportunity, Sir, but I must respectfully decline."
The reply caught the officer by surprise and he did an actual double take, while trying to process Guimel's words. In the end, though, the man turned on his heel and left the room without another word.
Later, Guimel would realise that he should have thought better about the consequences of his choice.
3.
The massive gates of the guymelef factory screeched open to reveal the shapes of three people in full uniform. The one in the centre wore black and red with spiked pauldrons. The two who flanked him were clad in black and blue.
Guimel was equal parts in awe and envious of how tall those two escorts stood. He knew exactly who the newcomers were – everyone at the factory did. It had been the talk of the week, how the Captain of Copper Army's new specialist unit, the Dragon Slayers, was coming in to personally collect their order for new Alseides guymelefs right off the production line.
That could have been him standing out there, Guimel thought.
He looked to the side. Even Rita had forgotten all about him in favour of the new arrivals.
The Chief Engineer's voice filtered through the open communications channel into Guimel's cockpit, as he explained the capabilities of the Alseides to Captain Dilandau Albatou. Enhanced crima control, increased flight speeds, stealth cloaks, flamethrowers – all the best and the latest that Zaibach's cutting-edge technology had to offer, extensively tested by Guimel himself to hand over to the Dragon Slayers' use.
He had tried to leave the hangar as soon as it became clear that the Captain intended to take one of the guymelefs out for a test run. Guimel had had no desire to fall into the trap of comparing his own skills – which had clearly been found lacking – against those of whoever took that Alseides out for a ride.
Fate conspired against him, though, as the Captain had requested a challenger for a practice duel, someone already familiar with the guymelef's capabilities, and Guimel had been the only one of the pilots in sight.
Ejecting a stream of crima, he let it solidify into a blade.
"Ready whenever you are, Sir," he spoke into the microphone linking him to the red Alseides in front of him.
The Chief Engineer, Hans, Rita, the two Dragon Slayers and every other person who had been on shift at the time gathered at the hangar entrance to watch the two guymelefs circle each other on the open grounds outside.
Rita was smiling his way and Hans was pumping his fists, encouraging his friend to kick ass, but Guimel had very little time to take in the view. No sooner had he finished speaking, he was on the defensive, doing everything in his power to block a flurry of attacks that seemed to come from all sides. The brutal impacts of their clashing blades caused the structure to groan all around him in a way that he had never experienced before. Dilandau was strong.
A tongue of flame aimed at his head blinded and disoriented him. Next thing he knew, his Alseides had been knocked to the ground and he was staring at the blue sky through his visor, with the sun glinting off of a silver blade pointed directly at his face.
Doubt overtook Guimel then. How could he ever have thought that he stood a chance of becoming a Dragon Slayer? Dilandau Albatou – his skills were on a completely different level.
4.
"You call this a top-notch guymelef? It's crap, that's what it is!" Dilandau shouted as soon as he was outside the cockpit and back on firm ground.
Guimel's eyebrows rose in direct proportion to how far the Chief Engineer's fell in outrage. The Alseides had been manufactured according to his designs and the man had been proud to see it fly at the hands of an expert who could squeeze every inch of potential from each precisely dimensioned joint and finely calibrated hydraulics. The Strategos Folken might have created the concept and preliminary design of the war machine, but it had been the Chief Engineer who laid out the detailed plans and determined the exact location where each wire, nut and bolt were placed.
The Alseides had consistently outperformed every other known model, not just Zaibach's but those developed by other countries as well. The abilities of Ispano models were a mystery, but as far as every other piece of armoured combat equipment was concerned – guymelefs, tanks, mechanical and manually-operated canons – the Chief guaranteed that they could not hold a candle to one of his Alseides.
"Excuse me?" was the Chief's offended response.
"The steering response during flight is a death trap. I could count the damn seconds go by from the moment I moved the controls to when the melef actually responded. I want it fixed."
"Are you crazy? There's nothing to fix. You won't find steering as smooth and seamless as this in any other model out there, I promise you that!"
Guimel bit his tongue, though. He had been taking the Alseides out on test flights since its early stages of development and had written about the very thing that Captain Albatou was complaining about in his reports. He had also spent enough hours rooting around the metal entrails of the giant to know both the source and the solution to the problem.
The only thing preventing the improvements from being made was the Chief Engineer's vanity. The knee articulation that he had designed was too slender and made out of materials that were too light to be able to properly counter the forces that they were subjected to during high-speed flight. A hardier and heavier articulation would decrease the guymelef's maximum speed achievable to somewhere just above the current record, but it would considerably improve manoeuvrability.
Guimel had carried out the experiment himself, switching the problematic articulation with one cannibalised from an older Galdiola model in his spare time. His theory had been proven correct, but the Engineer had dismissed his findings. He would not stand to have a merely "slightly faster" model. He wanted to beat all records and leave the competition coughing up dust for years to come, even at the cost of the Alseides's overall battle efficiency.
"I don't care what you have to do or how little time you have," Dilandau argued. "I am leaving this afternoon, with or without these guymelefs. And you can rest assured that I'm not taking them in their current state when I have a set of customised Galdiolas, fit to my specifications, already on board my ship."
He took a step forward to glare down his nose at the Chief. Guimel, Hans and Rita waited to see how the man would react. From how tightly he was clenching his fists, not very well. The two Dragon Slayers escorting Dilandau, however, took a step back from the Engineer, making sure to stay out of their Captain's path. Guimel wondered what that meant.
"It. Can't. Be. Done," the Chief ground out through gritted teeth. "Not on this decade, not five decades from now! It is physically impossible for our current level of scientific knowledge, so I recommend that you–"
Guimel could not say what madness possessed him to interrupt the Chief at that exact moment, drawing attention to himself in the process. Whatever it was, it had no relation to self-preservation whatsoever.
"Actually..."
5.
"Guimel, come down from that window and help your father thread this needle. My eyes aren't what they used to be anymore."
The boy leapt down from a stool and walked over to his father's worktable with messy blond curls falling over wide blue eyes.
"I saw a Fanelian soldier out with the Cesario troops, Father."
The old tailor patted his son's head.
"I wouldn't be surprised, my boy. It's always after a prey has been brought down that most predators choose to come out looking for their pound of flesh. Fanelia, Cesario, Egzardia, the lot of those invading bastards, they're nothing but vultures, feeding off of our people's suffering and misery."
"Isn't there something we can do, Father?"
"We wait and we survive and we prepare," he said, gesturing at the collection of miscellaneous torn uniforms that he was sowing together. "One day, our Emperor's Grand Army will break through the siege around our home and free our people. We must all be ready to step up and fight when that day comes."
Guimel nodded, a new light kindling in his eyes even as the single lamp hanging from their underground home's ceiling flickered and died. A Cesario tank was crawling past them on the street above.
"Now stay away from the window and go play with your toys, Guimel."
His toys were salvaged guymelef parts and a mostly depleted energist.
"Well, well, if it isn't Guimel... Were you expecting something, little sheep? Some kind of letter maybe?"
Guimel thanked the gods that he had been partnered with Hans rather than some of the other idiot pilots who, like him, had been stationed at the factory. One of them would have killed the other long ago, if he and pampered Zaibach City prince Lutz had been paired together in the same sleeping quarters.
Guimel's humble origins in the occupied territories of western Zaibach ensured that there was plenty of prejudice to go around and he was tired of trying to explain that he may have come from a town currently under Cesario's control, but he was as true a Zaibach as the rest of them, if not more. His blood held the special kind of dedicated iron tempered in the fires of oppression and a burning desire for freedom.
He snatched the letter containing the results of his application to the Dragon Slayers from Lutz's hands, belatedly realising that it had already been opened and its contents read.
"Oh yeah, about that – you should really know better than to expect the Emperor's Grand Army to award you an honour like that. Sheep don't fly, kid, and they don't stand a chance next to dragons. Now run along to your room and cry like the loser you are, little sheep."
To his shame, Guimel did just that, chased down the hall by a chorus of mocking bleats from Lutz and his friends.
6.
Guimel could feel the Chief Engineer's angry glare boring into the side of his head, but he kept his focus on the Captain of the Dragon Slayers.
Dilandau's smile was smooth and pleased.
"And this fix of yours could be implemented en route to our final destination?"
It was a bold claim, considering that Guimel had not the faintest clue of where the Dragon Slayers were headed. It could as easily be one day or one colour away.
"It's only fourteen guymelefs, Sir – uh, sorry, fifteen, counting yours," he hedged, hoping that his lapse would not be misinterpreted. Fourteen had been the number of open spots on the unit when Guimel had applied and so it was the number that featured most prominently in his memory. "There are plenty of decommissioned Galdiolas here. We used them for testing, so the parts required for the update are easy enough to procure. I know every bit of the Galdiola's and the Alseides's mechanics like the back of my hand, so each installation should take about... uhm..."
Before Guimel could get too deep into his mental estimation of a time frame for the adjustments, Dilandau held up a hand. He took Guimel's measure, from head to toe.
"So you can fly and tinker with mechanics. Interesting... Where are you from, soldier?"
Against his better judgement, Guimel allowed himself to wonder what might have been if instead of fourteen spots there had been fifteen. Would little Guimel – Guimel, the country bumpkin – Guimel, the frustrated pilot – Guimel, the sheep – would he have stood a chance then of being accepted into that prestigious unit?
"Avam, Sir. It's a minor town, close to–"
"The Cesario border to the west, yes. I'm familiar with it. My first official mission was in that region. Heavily occupied by foreign troops. Still is, if I'm not mistaken."
"You're not, Sir." Guimel's voice was subdued. Home was always home.
"Before, you fought like you knew what it's like to lose and didn't like it one bit." Dilandau paused to consider the scratched up guymelef behind him that had been splayed out, helpless, on the ground not that long ago. It gave Guimel enough time to gather his thoughts. This conversation was going nothing like he had thought it would. "No, you strike me as the kind of person who would rather die than lose one more time. Am I right, soldier? Are you that kind of person?"
Guimel averted his eyes, feeling exposed by Dilandau's query. His instinctive response was yes, but he held back. How could he make such a bold claim when he had done nothing but lose since the moment he had started making his own decisions?
He had failed to get assigned to a fighting detachment upon enlisting and he had failed to defeat Captain Albatou in their spar just moments ago. He had failed to earn a spot among the Dragon Slayers and he had failed to have enough foresight to accept that Silver Army officer's invite to join his troops instead.
So Guimel kept his silence.
"I like your attitude," Dilandau said. "Give me your name, soldier."
7.
Guimel was hurriedly shoving what few possessions he had into a worn knapsack when Hans found him.
"You bastard!" his friend called. "How could you do this to me?"
Startled by the vehemence behind the words, Guimel looked up to where Hans stood at the door to their shared quarters. His friend's face was twisted by the struggle to hold back emotion, a battle that was soon lost in favour of a delighted peal of laughter.
"You glorious, lucky bastard! Congratulations, Guimel, you did it! Somehow... I'm still not sure how... but you did it, buddy! You're a Dragon Slayer!"
Guimel approached Hans, intending to thank him, perhaps apologise for leaving him behind. Instead, he found himself being lifted off his feet in a bear hug from the slightly taller boy.
"I'm going to miss you, you know that?"
"I'll miss you too, Hans." Guimel smiled. "And Rita. And this place. Even Lutz and the Chief."
"Liar."
They shared another laugh before the mood turned solemn.
"Guimel, I know that I'm just a mediocre soldier and that what I say probably doesn't count for much, but... do your best! You show those damn foreign vultures what we Zaibach country boys are made of."
"I will, Hans. You can count on it."
The two pilots clasped hands, a binding promise between friends seeing each other for possibly the last time.
"They have dragons?" Hans said and ruffled Guimel's hair. "We have Dragon Slayers, and our bellies aren't soft. Our bodies are made of steel and our spirits tougher than a makushi goat's horn. We will not be defeated. Give them hell, Guimel!"