Summary: Duo has a little problem. Scratch that, a big problem. A gift, of sorts. One that is not conducive to being a Gundam pilot, keeping a low profile, having a life or enabling any sort of normal relationship. AU, begins during the war, a long 1x2 get together fic.
Warning: Swearing. Copious amounts of swearing. AU- I use the plot of the series as a loose guideline. Most of the major events in the beginning of the series happen, however some characters meet at different times, in different ways. (Eg. Duo does not meet Hilde at Barge) Also, the time line is delayed (the war takes place over two years, not one.) This chapter is not beta'd. Future chapters are, but by a 'real world' friend who hasn't not seen the series. She corrects only sentence flow, grammar and spelling.
Disclaimer: If Gundam Wing belonged to me, there'd be a lot less fighting, and a lot more fucking. The Wake series provided the inspiration for Duo's little problem.
Note: This story begins the day Duo meets Heero in the series.
Prologue
Paranoia
April 7th, 195
The more you try and plan something, the more things seem to go wrong. You know what I'm talking about- like one of those days where you're positive that someone is out to get you.
No, I'm not being paranoid, and yes, someone usually is out to get me—part of the territory that comes with being Duo Maxwell. I'm not talking about some guy with a personal vendetta or hell-bent on global domination- those can at least be caught and thrown into a jail cell to rot. I'm talking in the more metaphysical sense; a Someone. A god, deity or some other annoying type of omnipotent being. I am going to die one day- sooner being more likely than later these days- and when I arrive at those damn pearly white gates, I'm going to hunt down whoever's been messing with my life for their shits 'n' giggles and kick them in their consecrated nuts.
Case point numero uno. When you grew up on the streets like I did, life was one constant, ever-evolving plan. Food and shelter, after all, are unfortunate, chronic necessities; obtaining them was an occupation in its own right. My 'little problem' was just that back then. Little. More amusing than inconvenient.
And then the chance to be a Gundam pilot just happens to fall into my lap. I mean, what sounds more believable; a life on the streets, or a crazy old guy offering me, a street brat, the chance to pilot one of the most technologically advanced pieces of machinery known to man, all to win a war that's been going on longer than I've been alive. Not to mention hot meals three times a day. Yeah, right, that sounds plausible. No divine meddling there.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not a big believer in the All-Mighty God, but sometimes somethings just make you go 'what-the-fuck?'. I was about the furthest thing from a soldier imaginable. Back then, I thought 'caliber' referred to one of those weird types of cheeses that I filched that always made me puke. A 'thruster' was the guy on top during... well, you know.
Which leads me to my point about Someone being out to get me. See, after that my 'little problem' became a little more...problematic.
I'm a dream-walker.
I figure that's the most accurate term describing what I do. I get sucked into people's dreams, get to live them and experience them like they were my own. Joy, I know.
Back when I was younger, it wasn't a big deal. In fact, I didn't know anything different; I'd been able to do it for as long as I could remember. I'd go to sleep at night, and I got pulled into the nearest dreamer. When he was still alive, it was usually Solo's head I got pulled into. He was always the closest body sleeping near me. At the Maxwell Church, it was whoever I shared a room with that night.
The problems all started when I began my training. Suddenly, it wasn't just happening just when I went to sleep. It was happening all the time. And not just when people were asleep either. I'd knock someone out during sparring practice and I'd be down snoozing on the mat beside them. Unlike my years on the streets, when I could still wake up to outside noises, or someone shaking me, I'd now be stuck in their head until they came around, or until someone put enough distance between us that I could come out of it on my own. You wouldn't believe how often I got caught by someone sleeping on guard duty- well, at least then my body hitting the ground was usually enough to wake us both up.
I don't know why the change; whether it was some of the drugs they gave me that screwed with my system, or whether it was just age and hormones. Didn't matter really. At that time, all I cared about was keeping my ability a secret. There was no way in hell I was going to jeopardize that chance of a lifetime—being a Gundam pilot- by coming clean. I mean honestly, could you see Dr. G keeping a defective soldier around? One who passed out every time he incapacitated an opponent? Yeah, me neither. That need for secrecy made me a better pilot in the long run, or so I hoped. I'm extremely good at compensating for my problem. I'm adept at stealth- that being a throwback to my years on the streets. If nobody hears me sneaking in, there's no reason for me to attack 'em. I'm proficient in using pressure points to render an enemy harmless, without the need to knock them out. And if those techniques both fail? Well, I don't get sucked into dead bodies.
Unfortunately, killing high school students might raise some eyebrows.
Which leads me to my next point.
I think the combination of sheer stupidity and lack of sleep on my part was the reason I found myself in my current predicament.
Let me just clear one thing up here- Operation Meteor had started out great. Sneaking Deathscythe and myself past OZ ships, hiding in a field of space garbage when I came close to getting caught- now that takes some pretty snazzy piloting. From there we fled into atmosphere, crash-landed on the Earth... okay, that last part was purely accidental. Simulated re-entry and actually going through it?- two totally different things. Simulators prepared me for dealing with any potential problems that could come up, like burnt out servos, failing life support, or dead thrusters. They didn't give me a real appreciation for being able to deal with those problems while being thrown about in my cockpit and hurling to Earth at a few hundred miles an hour. Still, 'Scythe only sustained minor damage, and we miraculously hadn't been seen. I enrolled in school. Everything proceeded to follow G's carefully outlined plan.
Except that part about Deathscythe sustaining minor damage. And instead of being able to do anything about it, I had an alibi to maintain. I had G's 'plan' to follow. The one that had no contingency in it about what to do if 'Scythe was damaged, because in G's mind, that simply wasn't allowed to happen. See now why I think plans are useless?
That was why I was stuck in a hoity-toity prep-school Chem. class listening to a prof who couldn't balance an ionic equation to save his life, when I should have been preparing for that evening. I had a mystery OZ suit to find and destroy, a bust up suit of my own to fix, and all I could do was try not to fall asleep on my shiny new textbook while the prof. repeatedly mispronounced 'oxidation' as 'intoxication'.
I was doodling on the back of my notebook, completely spaced out from my surroundings, when everything went fuzzy.
"Shit," I sighed quietly, dropping my pen.
It was all I could manage before my vision blacked out completely, the floor fell away, and my forehead struck the edge of the desk. I knew immediately that the situation could progress in two ways.
Very bad.
Worse.
Teenage boys weren't exactly known for their vivid imaginations after all.
14:37
I tried to pull out, but I couldn't focus. Couldn't get a grasp. I was too tired, and finally just resigned myself to the fact that I was stuck here. At least until the jackass sleeping in class woke up. The scene in front of me was beginning to solidify anyway. It was too late.
The room I was now in looked like it belonged in an old Victorian mansion. A large fireplace situated between two enormous paned windows provided the only light in the room. A small table and two elegant, high-back chairs fanned around it. The floor was made entirely of stone, though was covered in several ornate, hand-woven rugs. The red and gold theme of the rugs was continued in the wallpaper and furniture. A large canopy bed was on my left; the frame wrought entirely of oak, elaborate throwbacks, also in red and gold, hung from each corner.
It sounds strange given the apparent elegance of the room, but the entire scene just reaffirmed my believe that teenage boys had absolutely no imaginations whatsoever. I knew it was a guy dreaming. Trust me, I'd seen it all before. In my experience, a set like this indicated two possibilities for what I was going to see.
Version one meant the room was straight out of some porn movie, and this set was the guy's idea of romance. Yeah, like a girl agrees to sleep with a guy because of his choice in bed linens. I'd have to witness kinky rough sex with his fantasy girl/girls, breasts enhanced to a minimum of three times their normal size, and not a braincell to share between them. They'd pant and moan and tell him how big he was, while he did his best impression of a dog in heat. If that was the case, I should consider myself grateful that the he actually dreamed up an entire backdrop to go along with his fantasy rather than a just a beam and handcuffs, or the leather backseat of an excessively masculine sports car.
Version two, morph into a scene out of some cheesy, b-rated vampire movie, complete with capes and horrible phony Romanian accents.
And as the main characters finally made their dramatic appearance, I had the sinking feeling this was going to follow more along the lines of version one. This could present as a problem, both with my keeping a low profile at the damn school, as well as some shred of integrity intact. Waking up with a boner would be highly embarrassing.
Don't get me wrong, watching someone else's sex fantasy did not turn me on. But when you're stuck in someone else's head- or rather, when I'm stuck in someone's dream, since as far as I know I'm the only person this happens to- I have no control over how I feel. I feel what they feel; the horror, or lust, or anguish, whatever it may be.
And it was dreams like this one that completely turned me off ever being in a relationship.
"Oh Josh," one of the girls moaned, "you're so big."
Brilliant.
19:30
I'll spare you the events of what happened next. It involves sneaking out of class and passing out in a bathroom from my usual post-dream-walking headache, catching a ride on top of a semi trailer to make up for the time I wasted while unconscious in said bathroom, nearly falling off at seventy miles an hour when a damn car passed by with a sleeping kid inside and slicing my arms into ribbons while I tried to stop myself from falling off the speeding semi into the bay below. Somehow I managed to get Deathscythe mobile and into the bay without any further incident except crushing a few trees. I'd managed to stay on schedule, the tides were right, and I'd even managed to find the mystery suit of OZ's with only a minor confrontation from some enemy Pisces suits.
That little skirmish really made my day. There's something about destroying things that really brightens my day.
You know, I finally, stupidly, began to think things were beginning to go my way when I saw the mystery suit. It wasn't one of OZ's after all. It was a Gundam. There was another Gundam out there. All this time I thought I'd been the only one. Silly, now that I think about it, I mean, if Dr. G and his group were trying to stop a war, why put all their hopes and training into just me. But at that time, nothing could have surprised me more, and finding that suit couldn't have been more perfect. I now had the parts to repair my own suit, I'd saved the suit from OZ, which meant the technology wasn't going to fall into the wrong hands, and the Gundams were still kept a secret.
Perfect.
Which brings me to point the third in my reasons for why I believe someone is out to get me and make my life a complete living nightmare.
This one's easy to explain. It even has a name.
Heero Yuy.
What a dick.
A/N Three things. First, I hope you enjoyed. This chapter was actually written last, and was the hardest three pages I've ever written. Second, I'm looking for a beta reader- I've had several in the past, and most of them don't bother replying after the initial couple chapters, so serious offers only please. Finally, I'm just wondering how long you guys prefer chapters to be. I tend to write long chapters (10+ pages). This chapter, of course, is excluded from that. I can split them up and update more frequently, or have longer chapters and less frequent updates. Up to you guys, let me know.
