Hi! Sorry it's been a while, but my mom bleached our basement recently (don't ask) and I just managed to get to the computer today for the first time in a while. Enjoy! –Lady PhoenixDagger
*****
The bed was huge. Fully fifteen feet by seventeen, its quilts and blankets required at least eight women to wash them at a time. The canopy was rich, red velvet; metres and metres of it controlled by a long, brocaded cord as thick as a man's wrist, much like the pull-cord of a curtain.
Walker Broman sat in the precise centre of the stuffed monstrosity, studying an ancient book, with the double doors leading directly to the balcony flung wide open to let in some of the fresh morning air. Though Alaryan's Keep was a place he loved and frequently called home, it still got stuffy. Walker was a solid, muscular man. The way he carried himself, even at rest proclaimed him to be a warrior, though his face gave the impression of someone trying to suppress a perpetual grin. With flaming red hair and eyes the colour of newly-sprung daffodils, he would have been handsome -some even went as far as to say absolutely gorgeous- had it not been for the scars lacing his face. One crossed vertically through his right eye, another diagonally across the cheek of the same side and two more formed a crooked 'X' on the other. Very few others had seen the forest of other scars that lined his body, still a bit tender even now after all these years. But these thoughts did not cross Walker's mind at the moment. At the moment, he was just a semi-normal twenty-three-year-old man sitting cross-legged on his bed, studying.
Or, at least, he was supposed to be studying…
"Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars," he sang along and slapped his thighs to the beat of the music being fed to him via his Discman. Walker's well-muscled frame was clad in a nightshirt which just barely cleared his knees and the light breeze meandering in from the balcony felt good on his bare skin.
"Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter or Mar-"
A soft knock at the door caused Walker to look up and quickly shove his Discman between the bed sheet and the rich, leather-bound covers of "Dragons and their Habits; an Objective Study".
Nice try, dearest.
Awww, Aunt Belle! Walker chided her. I'm a big boy for pity's sake! Couldn't I slack off just a little?
No, Walker, as a matter of fact, you can't. As the Lord of Alaryan's Keep, you are still learning and therefore cannot defer in your studies. A pause. Don't roll your eyes at me like that, young man. Now put that CD player away or I shall be forced to staple that book to your forehead.
"I love you too, Auntie!!" Walker shouted at the door. Laughing softly, Belle let herself in, herding the girls and the ex-pilots ahead of her.
"Hi!" Walker said brightly, still sitting cross-legged on the bed.
Mumblemumblehimumblemumble.
Tough crowd. Walker crawled off the bed -which took him awhile- and stood facing the group. He thoughtfully stroked his chin. "Huh," he said. "You know, for all the fight you guys put up, you're all a lot smaller than I thought you'd be."
"You must be the fake lord I keep hearing about." Wufei's tone held a definite "screw with me, I dare you" note to it. He stepped up to Walker, his onyx eyes snapping. "What do you know about ruling? You don't even seem to be able to get out of bed."
I had a long night last night, kid." Walker's lemon drop eyes were hard. "But as I understand it, you were too bust shitting yourself to really take notice."
Wufei snapped. "Bastard!" Highly trained leg muscles snapped taut, launching Wufei at the other man.
No one even saw what happened next, Wufei included. Walker's arms became a confused blur as he exploded into action, catching Wufei and throwing him at his feet and kicking him back up in one smooth, sinuous motion before slamming the Chinese ex-pilot back up against the wall with his feet dangling a full foot above the floor.
"That wasn't a very good idea, friend." Walker's voice was as calm as if he was chatting about the weather. "Still, you did manage to get a hit in there, somewhere." Walker grinned suddenly. "I think one of my teeth are loose." The young man let go, allowing Wufei to drop lightly to his feet. "I don't think I've ever had anyone do that to me before without my noticing. You're fast, friend. Perhaps we could trade techniques sometime." Giving Wufei a clipped bow, Walker turned back to Belle. "Sorry 'bout that."
With the grace of a queen, she waved the incident away.
"Well!" Walker sat on the edge of his gigantic bed. "Sit down, sit down, take a load off. I don't bite."
The group sat down in a row, fitting easily on the bed's edge. Catherine and Relena were blushing slightly, sitting as far away as they could from the briefly clad young lord.
"Walker, dear?" Belle sighed.
"Hmmm?"
"Your pants, dear."
Looking down, Walker's ears turned bright flaming red. "Ah, yes. Pants. Uhm, please excuse me, won't you?" With that, he bolted away into an adjoining room, Belle's silver laughter chasing after him.
"Daaaamn." Duo flopped onto his back on the bed. "Didn't that guy have, like, a giant zombie arm sticking out of his chest last night?"
Belle nodded cheerfully at him.
"Just checking."
Presently, Walker came back wearing a simple pair of black pants topped with a brown sash like the one's the lizard people were wearing in the dining room. He also wore a white shirt that closed with the same complicated laces Relena had had trouble with earlier. She noted sourly to herself that he had them tied almost all the way up to his throat.
"Sorry about that." Walker sat back down on the bed, further into the centre this time. "Anyway, let's get to business. Welcome to Alaryan's Keep. I trust you've met the Bhaarliads?"
"Huh?" There were blank looks all around.
"The lizard people," Walker prompted.
"Ohhhh…"
"Yep, that's them. By the way, try not to call them lizard people to their faces in the future. They really loathe that. And it marks you for future 'monkey boy' jokes later on in life. Anyway, the Bond brought you here and as you know it severed itself upon your arrival. I won't sugarcoat it, ladies and gentlemen. Your world is no more and every single person you've ever met in your lifetimes is dead beyond the shadow of a doubt. But there may be a way to bring a few back, though I can promise you nothing." A cold breeze blew through the open balcony, fingering Walker's flaming hair. Before him, Catherine's face was pale as death and Relena had tears streaming down her face, but the boys merely sat, eyes intense, features set in stone. Impressed with their stoicism, Walker stood and went on, pacing now. "Normally I would not be doing this, you know."
"Lucky them," Duo muttered.
"Indeed," Walker agreed. Duo blushed deeply, not having meant for Walker to hear that remark. "Still, what you witnessed last night is something which even those who I have known since my childhood have not seen, and to have only that in your minds only gives you a tiny portion of the story. Listen to me and try to believe, because everything I'm telling you is the truth. The burden within me is a symbiotic plague bent on killing me implanted by Black Hood, a corporation which you will soon learn more about." Walker cracked his knuckles and sighed. "So now you'll learn of myself and of the other survivors of Black Hood. All of those who come here learn this story, though never so soon." He held his hands out to them, his tawny eyes wide with the thrill of intrigue. "Come with me. Come and let me show you my life."
The seven tentatively stood and touched his hands, all of them noticing the deep scars laced with black lining the tops of Walker's strong hands and wrists. First Relena, then Quatre, then Trowa and then Catherine. With narrowed eyes, Heero touched Walker's scarred hand, followed by a scowling Wufei.
This left only Duo. He sighed and watched his friends clinging gently to the scarred hands and quickly made his decision. "I don't think so, guys. You're on your own." Crossing his arms, Duo backed slowly away. "No way, uh-uh. I've had enough weird stuff happen to me for one lifetime, thank you very much."
Belle frowned at him and, very suddenly, Duo found himself walking towards Walker's outstretched hands under her power. Frantically, the braided ex-pilot did the only plausible thing he could think of: he grabbed onto the bedpost and refused to let go, even while his feet seemed to want to go on without him. "I said no!" he shouted.
Walker sighed. "We only need to make skin-to-skin contact, Duo. You do realise you're wearing shorts, right? And I'm not immobile, you know," he said and kicked out a naked foot at Duo's bare leg.
"Awww, shit."
And once again, darkness took him.
*****
Trowa opened his emerald eyes to the scene before him. He stood not in Walker Broman's bedroom, but rather in another much smaller room filled almost to capacity with loudly humming machines and people in surgical garb. Ah, we're in some sort of hospital, he surmised. Walker stood before him, hands clasped, his scars shining blackly in the gloomily lit room. Behind him the machines continued to hum and beep, but no noise came from the doctors.
"My brother Darien and I were born here into bondage in late August 1977, as a multimillion dollar project for the genetics company known as Black Hood. Our mother was created for the specific purpose of conceiving us." Walker's voice was low, silky, almost painful. "By about six months of gestation, we were, shall I say, 'forcefully removed' from our mother's womb and put into these incubation tanks to finish growing." Walker moved to reveal a pair of long glass tubes both about a foot in diameter that reached from ceiling to floor, filled with fluid. In the exact centres of the tubes, a tiny baby floated, eyes still tightly sealed, body curled up in the fetal position. Trowa noted with mute horror that thin wires and hoses protruded from all over their bodies. A small digital counter was attached to each tube. One neared the thirty second mark and the other was about a minute behind it.
"I'm the one on the left." Walker indicated the tube holding the smaller babe. "Darien is the one on the right. He's older than me by about a minute or so. Watch. He's being born."
The group stared in hushed dread as Darien was extracted from his tube, silent and staring, clinically watching his new surroundings with cold green eyes. The hoses and wires were disconnected and he was set down naked on a stark metal table. Through all this, Darien remained noiseless and staring.
"Perfect." One of the myriad of doctors picked up Darien's tiny foot by the heel and released it, letting it drop with a clunk to the metal table. Darien made no sound. "Simply perfect," the doctor purred again.
"As you can see, Darien was born without a hitch." Striding over to the other incubation tube, Walker tapped the glass with his knuckle. The babe inside revolved slowly to regard him and, in a move that for some reason made Trowa's stomach lurch, waved slowly at its older self with a tiny, open hand before being extracted from its own artificial womb and placed next to his new brother. "I, however was supposed to be born female. Some of the drugs they pumped into us in vitro reacted with each other and changed my sex almost halfway through the pregnancy. Lo and behold, I was born a boy. Cold and emotionless, but a boy nonetheless."
The disgust the doctor held for this apparent failure was etched clearly on his face as he watched the motionless baby lying on the table. "Take this one to the OR." Immediately a gaunt-faced nurse materialised, picked up baby Walker and waited for any more instructions. The doctor smiled chillingly. "I think I shall call it call it draco erectus."
Swinging doors creaked as the nurse took baby Walker from the room.
"I was given a new body that day," mused Walker sadly. "Wings, new feet, fangs, claws, a tail, all of which can be pulled into my body and hidden when needed. They even recoded my DNA. I need to take a whole handful of pills and injections every day to keep my body from rejecting these 'gifts' they gave me, you know. What's left of my health is dependant on a syringe and a handful of red and yellow pills." His voice broke. "All because those bastards took my humanity from me." Carefully he began to touch the ends of his fingers, from which short, sharp metal claws could burst, eager to rend flesh and strike deep into bone. He breathed a short, shuddering sigh. "But I digress. Come." The scene behind him began to blur. "Darien and I are now four years old.
*****
That's all for now, but stay tuned! At my current rate I'm averaging about two chapters a week, so this story'll be just shooting along. See you in Chapter Nine!
L.P.D. *//.^*