CHAPTER 6


CHAPTER 6


"What do you mean we're only going to eat rice? When you said we were in Hong Kong, I was expecting at least some noodles, perhaps spring rolls, not boiled rice! And to only have vegetables with it? That has to be against the Preventer's Code of Conduct somewhere, there are people in cardboard boxes living more comfortably than this..."

As much as he'd been looking forward to Dorothy's introduction to the real world, Wufei hadn't counted on her reaction to it being quite so...irritating.

"After my shower last night, I take it there's no hot water?"

"There's no running water at all."

She turned sharply, fixing him with a stare that plainly said, Take that back or I'll make you wish you had.

Wufei didn't care. Anything Dorothy Catalonia could throw at him, he was ready for. She was proving herself to be a pampered aristocrat through and through, aside from the brief moments when she'd been saving his life or cutting his throat. He just prayed that this assignment wasn't going to last much longer.

"The shower comes from a filter system through the river, the same as the pump outside," he reported, enjoying the _expression of deepening horror on her face.

Dorothy was speechless - but only for a moment.

"I'm washing in river water?"

"Cold river water," he added with relish. Not that he liked it any more than she did, but he had expected her to be at least grateful.

Looking back at his blind optimism, Wufei wanted to kick himself. Since being shaken awake that morning, Dorothy had been complaining mercilessly about everything she could see, hear and smell. Wufei conceded that there was quite a bit to find fault with under normal circumstances, but thought that his charge would do well to remember a certain phrase involving beggars and choosers.

Finally, he couldn't stand it anymore and snapped at her. "Dorothy, think what you like about this place, but keep quiet about it. Your constant whining is cutting into our work time."

She laughed at this; not the rich laugh he'd been treated to after telling her he could smell her a mile away, but the bell-like titter he'd learned to loathe.

"Work?" she said, with considerable amusement. "Preventer Chang, you're protecting me! You should know that I can't get a job, that's much too visible!"

He stared at her in disbelief. "Dorothy, I'm not talking about a job! We need to work to live, collecting and preparing food."

She smiled uneasily. "Well, how much time can it take?" she said lightly. "You get something from the fridge, put it in the oven-"

"Neither of which we have," he pointed out, a slight smile creeping over the corners of his mouth. "Dorothy, we're going to be spending our days pulling up vegetables, cleaning them and cooking them. If you don't do it, you won't eat."

Her smile faded. "But...you're my bodyguard! Surely that involves making sure I don't starve to death?"

He shook his head. "You won't starve," was all he said, before turning and walking away.

He was right, although Dorothy hated that as much as she hated everything else about this situation. She spent the morning trying to block out the hunger that came from several days of no food, then hunting through the kitchen cupboards for a snack.

There was nothing. Dorothy had been so certain Wufei was trying to intimidate her into helping him that she'd brushed off his words without a second thought. However, it seemed that he was simply being accurate when he said that if she didn't help, she wouldn't eat.

Presently, Wufei returned to find Dorothy sitting in one of the hard chairs in the living room space, staring stubbornly straight ahead. He smiled to himself and began to wash the few vegetables he had for a quick lunch.

Dorothy heard him peeling and chopping, and miserably refused to say a word to him. She wondered time and time again how she'd gotten into this mess, and began to make mental blueprints for her escape plans.

She couldn't concentrate, her every train of thought leading back to food in some way or other. Eventually, she decided to postpone her escape plans until she had more information, and wondered instead how she could get hold of some food without admitting to Wufei that he had been right. She was just trying to figure out how to contact the preventers and beg for asylum, when a plate appeared in front of her.

Dorothy swallowed.

It was piled high with raw vegetables in an irresistible, colourful salad.

Almost irresistible. Even though it was all she'd dreamed of in the past two hours, she still found herself saying haughtily, "What happened to 'You don't work, you don't eat'?" She tossed her black hair out of her face. "A real man would stick to the rules he makes up, however ridiculous."

Why can't you just say thank you, Dorothy?

She was more miserable than ever, her sharp tongue forming words out of reflex that her heart just wasn't in. She cursed herself, and cursed Wufei, wishing - as she had all day - that this was some sort of bizarre nightmare.

He knelt in front of her and pushed the plate even closer. She reluctantly looked up at him, but didn't see any evidence of the expected taunting. Instead, his _expression was neutral.

"I'm not about to let you go hungry."

It felt to Dorothy as if he could see right through her, could see how grateful she really was. "Thank you," she said in a low voice, her throat almost balking at providing sound for these particular words. He placed the plate on her lap, before going back to his own dinner at the table.

He finished his meal well before she did; unhindered by the social timewasters she'd been taught, he was able to eat quickly and neatly without appearing rude. He stood by the open door and addressed her.

"Dorothy, will you join me in the garden this afternoon?"

She had been so sure that he'd rub it in, that he'd try and force her to come outside with a sharp word or severe sarcasm. Instead, he'd phrased it like an invitation, making it sound like she had a pleasant afternoon tea to look forward to, or a game of croquet.

Dorothy was certain that if she spoke she would only be ungracious, possibly the least appropriate response she could think of in the face of such...kindness. Instead, she nodded wordlessly. He smiled, seeming amused, then left her to her own mixed-up thoughts.

That afternoon was an interesting one, for Wufei at any rate. Frustrating, long and hot, but interesting. Dorothy learned a lot of things about uprooting, cleaning and preparing vegetables, as well as the very important fact that she hated it all.

"Wufei, where did you learn all this?" she asked him as they peeled carrots together.

He eyed her suspiciously. "Why do you need to know?"

"I don't need to know at all," she said, rattled. "I'm just surprised that anyone has these types of skills nowadays."

There was silence for a moment as they both scraped roughly at the rapidly diminishing carrots.

"This is how I lived after the Eve Wars."

She appraised him subtly. "Were you a soldier?"

He glanced sideways at her, meeting her gaze. "Yes, I was."

Dorothy tried to reconcile her knowledge of him with this fact, unsure what to make of it. "How old are you?" she asked, sounding almost as suspicious as he had a moment before.

"I'm seventeen."

She was obviously startled. "You were fifteen and a soldier during the war?"

"You weren't at the front line much, were you Dorothy?"

She bristled. "I think you'll find-"

"I think you'll find you were in the Sanc Kingdom for most of the war, only joining Milliardo Peacecraft at the very end. Even then, you fought with dolls."

Dorothy eyed him sharply. "You've done your homework."

He shrugged. "I make it my business to know exactly who I'm going to be around. But if you'd been anywhere near the frontline through the war, you would have noticed that many of the soldiers in both OZ and the colonies were my age, and sometimes even younger."

Wufei continued peeling, staring intently at the scalped carrot. "Desperation finds a way to blind people to the necessity of childhood."

She began peeling again as well, more cautiously than before. "Where did you fight?"

There was a pause.

"I fought everywhere I went," Wufei said quietly. "Don't ask me to recall place names, I couldn't tell you."

Dorothy was silent for a moment, digesting all this new information. "If you were fighting at fifteen," she said slowly, "You must have been training for years before."

He grunted assent and began to slice his carrot.

"Is that why you know your judo or karate or whatever it is? As part of your training?"

His eyes flashed. "Don't taint something as pure as martial artistry with the stain of war!"

Dorothy made a note of his reaction and listened carefully, but he noticed her interest and calmed his ire.

"I learned how to fight with my body and my blade because it is a part of my ancestry to know such things, because it focuses the mind and heightens the discipline."

He looked away and began to peel another carrot. "It's obvious that you've never learned how to fight at all."

"So teach me."

He raised his eyebrows. "Excuse me?"

"I said: teach me."

Wufei looked at her in bewilderment, then shook his head and returned to the carrot, now about half the size it was before his butchering.

"Every time I think I can predict your path, you change your step. It's a quality I haven't encountered since...for a long time."

Abruptly, he stood, and carried the sliced vegetables to the pot over the fire. He stopped. "I'll teach you, Dorothy Catalonia," he said without looking at her. "But you have to agree to learn."

She smirked. "Just make sure you can keep up."

Dorothy thought she could see him smile, but wasn't too sure; it could have just been a twitch for a mosquito.

As the light faded, Wufei told Dorothy she could take the bed. She had smiled sweetly and responded with, "Why thank you, Wufei!" a sentiment she retained only until the moment she actually lay on it.

His reasons for taking it the first night were instantly clear: it was rock solid, inifitely less comfortable than the sofa. She cried out, and was about to get annoyed until she heard a small chuckle through the thin walls. Hit by the funny side of it, she curled up under her threadbare sheets.

"Thank you Wufei!" she called, just as sweetly as before.

"You're welcome!" came the muffled reply, making her laugh.

The next morning, she awoke to discover that he was gone.

Unable to shake off the sensation of having a table embedded in her back, Dorothy had snatched the chance to get up eagerly. She had expected to find her bodyguard in the middle of his exercise routine, but there was no sign of him. On further inspection both his clothes and their boat were also gone.

At first, she refused to be concerned, but when he still wasn't back by eight, she began to worry. After all, Wufei wasn't the one that was being chased by a group of assassins, and he was in a place where he could speak the language and blend in perfectly. If she had been in his bu xie[1], she would have left as well.

She couldn't stop thinking about how she was all alone, a stranger in a strange land, with no way of escaping or communicating safely with anyone. As a result, when he walked through the door at half-eight, she was waiting for him with her hands on her hips, blissfully unaware of her resemblance to a jilted housewife.

"Where have you-" she began to demand, but was cut off by the net of fish he slapped on the counter.

Wufei grinned at her, apparently oblivious to her horrified _expression. She gazed in disgust at the pile of fresh corpses in front of her, their eyes sunken and glassy.

Slowly, Dorothy lifted her nauseous gaze to meet his enthusiastic one.

"Today, Dorothy," Wufei declared, "I'm going to teach you how to gut and skin a fish!"

She thought she might be sick.




Gradually but surely, Wufei and Dorothy settled into their distorted version of domestic bliss.

Dorothy soon found that she was just too tired to keep up her sniping comments, and Wufei had begun to respond to every one with stony silence, giving her nothing to work with. As a result, they lapsed into an unacknowledged truce of necessity.

With this new level of civility, Dorothy discovered that there was a lot to be learned from Wufei. He taught her things she wanted to know, things she didn't, things she thought she'd never need, but always in such an unassuming manner that she never felt like she was being taught.

Except in her martial arts lessons. The two-hour daily routine made her feel both powerful and weak, pushing her body beyond what she had considered its limits, but being informed of every minor flaw in her technique as she did so. Wufei was not a teacher with infinite patience; if he felt that she was capable of doing something, he would push her harder and harder, getting visibly (and audibly) more annoyed until she achieved perfection. His standard of perfection.

On the whole though, they lived a simple life, full of early mornings, many disagreements and a lot of rice...

The rice was paid for in fish to their friendly neighbours, the Lam family, and was eaten with vegetables that Dorothy spent the day collecting, peeling, chopping, and eventually cooking. Dorothy would have demanded that Wufei cook, but his days were spent doing the many small repairs necessary to survive in their humble home. Besides, he helped her whenever he had a spare moment as it was, she didn't want to feel guilty for giving him more work.

The only thing she disliked more than being forced to cook was being forced to eat the same meal twice a day, every day. It was the one thing Dorothy simply couldn't put aside, and her distaste was made very clear to Wufei, who ignored her.

Or so she thought. About two weeks into her new life in Hong Kong, Wufei was late returning from the Lams'. Dorothy spent the entire morning collecting vegetables and pretending she wasn't worried while going through her mental filing cabinet of "Things That Could Have Happened", beginning with Abduction, Bone-Breaking and Collapse.

When he returned in the afternoon, she had reached Suffocation for the third time and was frantic. She had been about to impress upon him just how angry she was, when the sight of his companions shut her up.

With a small smile, he was leading a cow and carrying a couple of chicken coops, full of occupants by the sounds of them. Dorothy stared.

"Wufei, that's a cow," she said flatly, her eyes never leaving the ugly thing.

"Well, at least I don't have to waste time on the basics."

"Those are chickens."

"Glad you noticed."

"Wufei, how did you afford a cow and chickens?"

He raised his eyebrows. "Dorothy, just because we're acting penniless doesn't mean we actually are."

The implications of this sank in slowly.

"You mean..."

"The preventers actually pay me, even if I don't use that much of it. And I was given a certain amount - a certain large amount - of cash to use on this assignment."

"This assignment, that would be...me?"

He nodded in confirmation.

"You have large amounts of money to spend on...me."

He nodded more hesitantly, seeing where she was going and not liking it one bit.

There was a pause. Dorothy drew her breath.

"Then why didn't you buy us a luxury flat above a gourmet restaurant with hot, running water and air-conditioning?! Or we could have stayed in a hotel somewhere, it didn't have to be five star, just somewhere with a mini-bar, and a bath, and room service, instead of-"

The cow mooed happily at her.

She gazed at the insipid bovine in disgust. Wufei patted it; he seemed almost seemed proud.

"No, that's far too conspicuous. Besides, a cow's more useful, and so are the chickens. Don't you even see what this means, Dorothy?"

"It means you're in serious-"

"It means we have milk and cheese and eggs, and beef and chicken if they stop being productive!" he said heatedly, raising his voice.

Dorothy felt sick at the thought of slaughtering that stupid cow. She turned on her heel and marched inside.

Wufei sighed and led the cow to his field. Dorothy had learned a lot, but she was still a long way from leaving behind her spoilt debutante persona.

It was true, she didn't say a word about housekeeping anymore, and was willingly learning Cantonese phrases and martial arts, but she made up for these leaps forward with childish steps backward.

Like the cow. He had thought she'd be thrilled at the prospect of something different to eat, some variety in her diet for the first time in a fortnight, but all she had seemed was disgusted.

He tried to put thoughts of Dorothy's attitude problem out of his head and concentrated on setting up a pen for the chickens.

He completed the job close to nightfall, and began to wonder whether Dorothy had refused to prepare dinner to make her point. It was exactly the sort of thing he expected her to do, and he tried to decide between taking the time to make his own dinner or rolling into bed and waking up early to make a good breakfast.

As it turned out, he did neither. As he stepped inside the house, he was greeted with a warm atmosphere and unusual cooking smells. Apparently she wasn't being spiteful after all - at least, not in this particular way.

As usual, when Dorothy was doing something unexpected, Wufei was on his guard. In their time together, he'd become almost permanently on his guard, making one inaccurate prediction after another, when he wasn't making gross underestimations.

She was stood behind the stove, serving up their dinner, and smiled at him as he entered warily.

"Sit down," she said carelessly, waving a spoon at the set table, with a precious candle lighting the room from the centre of it. He slid into one of the two wooden chairs, and she laid a plate in front of him.

It was fish, fried egg and rice with some sort of tomato sauce over it. He looked up at her in surprise, and she grinned shyly back.

Shyly? This was not like her at all...

It was quickly replaced with her familiar arrogance as she said easily, "I don't know why you make such a fuss about catching fish. I stuck a rod out there and had one after only four hours!" She grinned brightly at him. "Pretty good, don't you think?"

He couldn't help it. He imagined her watching the rod, checking it every two minutes and cursing at it when nothing turned up. He had to smile. She noticed, smiled herself and sat in the chair on the opposite side of the small, rickety table.

"I'm..." She cleared her throat, sounding uncomfortable. "I apologise."

He looked at her with even more surprise than before. She was gazing intently at the food she toyed with on her plate. "I..." she began, then stopped and regrouped. "I'm afraid I haven't been...making an effort. At all."

He considered this. "I think you've coped quite well for-"

"For a spoilt debutante?" She glanced at him, then returned to scrutinizing her meal. "Not to sound cliché, but that's not all I am." She smiled ruefully and stabbed her fish with a fork. "I'm also a spoilt schoolgirl, a spoilt soldier and a spoilt commander."

This confession took him by surprise, and he waited to see where she was going with it. His mind ran through the list of ways she could benefit from telling him this, how she could possibly be manipulating him.

"I admit it," she said, sounding resigned. "Even as a soldier, I was never anywhere less than at Mr Milliardo's side, and the lower rank officers fought to wait on me. I've never been in conditions as poor as these."

Wufei felt his defences rise and opened his mouth to speak, only to be interrupted by Dorothy.

"But it's more than I deserve."

He shut his mouth again and listened to her.

"I know there are many people who wouldn't have treated me as well as you have. I mean..." She sat up and stretched out her hands, eyes wide and enthusiastic. "You bought me a cow Wufei!"

He laughed involuntarily, and it was a moment before he caught himself. She seemed pleased by his reaction, however short it was.

"I took a couple of eggs from those cackling idiots, and skinned the one fish I was able to catch. I can't believe I never thought of making sauce before," she remarked, mixing the food on her plate. "We've got enough tomatoes."

He tasted it and wrinkled his nose slightly. She didn't miss it and grew angry. "Why don't you tell me what you think, Wufei?" she asked with a threatening tone.

"It's a little bland. Tomorrow, I'll get some herbs from the Lams to give it some flavour."

Dorothy was annoyed at his lukewarm reaction, until she realised he was still spooning it hungrily into his mouth. On sampling it herself, she had to admit that it was pretty tasteless. However, it seemed like the finest, most carefully prepared sauce she had ever tried, a break as it was from the monotony of plain rice and vegetables.

When Dorothy woke up the next day, Wufei hadn't caught a single fish. She found him at the back of the house, putting a roof on the chicken pen.

"What are you doing?"

"Good morning to you too," he said without looking up. "It's going to rain. I don't want the animals to be cold."

It occurred to Dorothy that this meant he hadn't been to the Lams' house to get any herbs for her tomato sauce. Without disturbing Wufei, she decided to go on her own.

That idea was firmly put to rest when she remembered that Wufei had caught no fish that morning, giving her nothing to trade.

She searched instead for Wufei's wallet. After all, he had said that there was money designated for her use alone, and she figured that if using it was a problem, she could easily pay him back when they were in Europe again. She positively glowed as she imagined rejoining civilisation, if only for long enough to buy some herbs.

His wallet was slim line, made of plain black leather, as simple as everything else he owned. As Dorothy opened it, she was stunned to see a photograph, a picture of a young Chinese girl.

She couldn't be more than thirteen or fourteen. Dorothy guessed that maybe she was his niece or some such relation that he was apparently quite fond of. She smiled at the thought of Wufei as the doting uncle she imagined he would be, and wondered if the girl was the daughter of his brother or sister, however many of those he had.

It suddenly occurred to her that she hadn't heard Wufei mention his family at all.

Dorothy sat on the bed, absorbed in what she was seeing, a slice of Wufei's life she'd never even thought about. Once more, she felt like a spoilt, selfish little princess.

Behind that photo was another, of the same girl in what Dorothy knew to be a Chinese wedding dress. She blinked and stared.

The boy beside her was Wufei.




[1] bu xie, or Mao shoes, are the black, slip-on Chinese shoes, still used today. Wufei wears them in the series, Meiran in Episode Zero, and so on.