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Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Wing or any of the characters or references. I do own the original characters, their mine you here me? (Insane laugh in the back round.)
Notes: Here we go, oh look the plot finally started. I don't have a preference as to what you call Heero in the reviews, it's not that important. As for Wufei, I did say why he's looking for Odin, or at least a hint of it. I will be explaining it more, but not until about chapter seventeen or so. Any critique's you guys have would be great; I always love feedback, and don't tell me it's perfect be cause it's not.
Chapter Twelve
(Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble)
There was definitely something in the air Odin decided as he collapsed backward onto a pile of cushions in the Play House. Something that hadn't made it completely out of the smoke holes and hung a bit lower in the air. He giggled and wondered if he would end up seeing pink elephants. He brought the back of his hand to his sweaty forehead and watched the ceiling start to slow down. It was still moving in the dancing rhythm he'd just been in, but it was definitely slowing down.
Once the ceiling had ground to a halt he let his head flop to the side to see where he had landed. He was lying next to the archway just inside the Play House. There were two figures on the pillows to his right that were squirming about and trying to swallow each other's faces. The light in here was very uneven. There was a fickle luminescence coming from the archway that led to the Dance House, but other than that and the glow numerous screens placed haphazardly about the room, it was completely black. He could see people moving about the floating screens and near the arched doorway. Between the glows there was only darkness with a vague sense of movement in the gloom.
He watched the glowing lights for some time and the more he watched the stranger they behaved. They would expand and contract and sometimes he could see little faces in them. The light faces were very distorted and would stretch and meld into each other. They all seemed to be laughing at him. Or was it the people next to him, or maybe lights were tittering at each other. He giggled back at them, too softly to be heard by anyone else.
Odin reluctantly turned his face away from the delightful lights when he felt someone crouch down next to him. He would have turned over if he could but it seemed that the minute he had fallen down all his strength abandoned him. His limbs felt as heavy as lead and full of water. So he flopped his head in the someone's direction and stared at their boots. Big thick boots. He blinked and stared harder, wondering why they seemed familiar and why they kept grinning and splitting into two pairs and back again.
A large hand came into view and reached for his face. Odin tried to lean back out of range but he was already on the floor, or was it the ceiling? So he couldn't go very far and the hand had a longer grasp. It slid around the back of his head and lifted his face up enough so that he could see who had him in their clutches. Oh, I know you, he thought. It took more work then usual. His mind was in a daze and refused to function properly. Preferring instead to drift about with no direction, following random whims of thought. Finally he achieved enough coherence in his brain to say
"Your boots are moving."
"I bet they are," Borg chuckled and laid the kids head down gently. "I'll be back," he said and hurried off. He returned soon with a cup of water and helped Odin to sit up. He hauled the kid into a sitting position and leaned him against the wall. Then he held the mug to his mouth, making sure that the kid didn't dribble as he gulped down the needed liquid. He could tell the kid was trying desperately to focus on something, but he just couldn't seem to do it, at least not yet.
Borg tried to ask him where he had been dancing and after a few tries he got enough of an answer to piece together what happened. He was right, Jinx's new friend wasn't the type to go and waste himself right off. He must have been dancing near those idiots who decided to do things cafeteria style. They'd been so trashed they thought it would be funny to set fire to several different drugs and see what happened. They went boom was what happened and everybody in close range got a nice heavy measure of mixed dope.
Borg nodded to himself and stayed with the kid for a bit. He must have a pretty good tolerance if he was still conscious. Who knew how the other people had turned out. It was good thing the kid had gotten into one of the other Houses, if he'd fallen in the Dance House he might never have been found. Looking around at all the entertainment's a nice idea came to Borg.
"Come on," he said and pulled the kid to his feet. He wobbled a little but managed to stay standing, a good sign. Borg pulled the kid over to one of the VRs and slid the Optical Receiver over his head. The kid brought his hand up to the shield that covered his eyes and turned his unexpectedly blind face to Borg.
"Wha…"
"I think you'll like this, and it'll keep ya busy till the high wears thin," Borg said. He took the kids hands and pulled the long gloves and armbands on him. He stuck the gloved hands into the hoof like palm controls and touched a button on the side of the Optic Receiver. A bright length of energy extended itself from the side of the Receiver, and forming itself into a resemblance of several wires, attached itself to the screen in front of the kid. The screen blinked on and an identical image could be seen beneath the visor like Receiver in front of Odin's eyes. The kid relaxed a little and Borg tightened the strap on the back of his head so the Receiver wouldn't fall off while the kid made his selection.
Odin chose where he wanted the VR to take him and waited. What happened next was an unpleasant shock. From the device around his eyes two little nodes attached themselves to his temples and started sending out little cybernetic waves. Odin sucked in a breath at the sudden jolt of electronic signals rushing into his head. They were everywhere. He could feel them, like bugs, bugs crawling through his brain. Skittering here and there with tiny legs brushing against his thoughts.
His breath came faster and faster as he started to hyperventilate. He tried to bring his hands up to tear the visor off his head but they were encased in metal blocks and he couldn't bring his fingers out. It was like the Zero, and yet it wasn't. It wasn't painful like Zero had been. They felt like insects swarming about inside. Instead of hooks splitting his mind open with rips that left him screaming, but that did nothing to quell the rising panic. They were looking for something, oh god, get OUT!
Then it was over. They found what they were looking for and he was plunged into a void. At first that was all there was, black and a small sense of vertigo at the sudden of the absence of things. The noise, the booming music from the Dance House, the yelling and the babble of conversation were gone. The smells of the houses were missing to, as were the constant press of bodies moving about him. All of it was gone. It seemed even his clothes were missing. Replaced by a skintight suit, and that felt like a helmet on his head. He realized the reason everything was dark was because his eyes were squeezed tightly shut. So with a great deal of caution he started to pull them open. He blinked and reminded himself to breathe.
He stood completely still, his feet magnetically clamped to the colony beneath him. The metal ring of the colony stretched away from him on all sides. Like a long gray plain spreading far into the distance. He was unable to see around or below it, but above. Above, the globe of Earth hung in all its glory, full of swirling blues and whites with little bits of brown mixed between. And above that lay the vast expanse of outer space itself, reaching far, far beyond the scope of the human mind.
Odin tilted his head back as far as it could go, staring wide eyed at the universe around him. He was submerged in a sea of stars. The only sound to be heard was his own quiet breathing filling his helmet. So quiet, a relief after the continuous chatter and jabbering of the Earth. The air being recycled inside his helmet was clean, without the faintest sent of the reeking smog he had gotten accustomed to inside the Den.
It was amazing how close they had come to recreating the beauty of space, but he could still tell the difference. He might be the only one in the whole of humanity who could, but it was there. Just little things he could notice. The absence of a slightly metallic scent to the recycled air. The feeling in your heart and guts at seeing something so much more, than you. Little things. They had come very close though.
How long he stood gazing at the stars he didn't know. Eventually he reached down, and pulling the tether from his belt he attached it to a holding ring on the colony surface. Then he disengaged the magnets in his boots and floated into space. There was a slight jerk when he came to the end of his tether. He considered for a moment, reminding himself that this was only a game. He touched his fingers to his belt and let the tether go. He did not move about or try to steer, just let himself float away. Drifting through infinity with a calm he had not felt in so long. I have missed this, he said to himself. Not even his thoughts daring to come above a whisper lest he inadvertently shatter this blessed moment of peace.
~~~~~
Borg had left as soon as the kid settled down. For a second there he had thought he was going to rip the thing out of his head. He went to get himself a drink and headed for the spot in the Spirits House were he was supposed to meet up with his brother. They didn't look anything alike of course. They weren't blood relations, but they were brothers none the less. Brothers of the underworld.
Borg found him lounging on top of one the back counters with a squirming girl in his lap. He was talking to a lady with a glazed expression that was standing by his shoulder and nervously fingering with the edge of tiny her dress. Borg waited until his brother completed the deal he was haggling with a glassy eyed woman. The lady handed over a wad of cash and stuffed the little palm-sized packet he handed her into her the front of her bra. Borg chuckled, as if sticking it in there would keep anyone from going after it.
His friend winked at him, then turned his head back to the girl in his lap and proceeded to enjoy himself, pausing every now and then to pull some smoke from a freshly rolled joint. Borg shook his head and took the joint from his hand. He leaned against the counter and took a long drag.
"Scead,"
"Borg,"
"Ya know it's fucking dumb to be smoking on the job." Borg sucked in another breath and blew the smoke out his nose. Scead gave his friend a smirk around the mouth he was kissing but otherwise ignored him. He ran his gloved hands up and down her sides. Scead always wore gloves, brown ones with the word 'pain' dyed in white onto each one. Borg snorted and shook his head at his friend, who just continued on with the girl. Eventually she disengaged saying,
"I gotta go to work Hon, but thanks for the present." She hopped off his lap and sauntered into the crowd, Scead's eyes following her swaying hips all the way. Borg rounded on the other man,
"Present? What the fucking hell on earth and space do you think you're do'in!" Scead sat up properly on the counter and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
"Don't bitch your ass off. She always pays when she's got the money." Borg breathed in the last of the joint and threw it to the ground, crushing the ash beneath his heel.
"And when she doesn't? Shit man, you're in enough trouble and this ain't going to impress the big man." His friend ignored him and reached into his pocket for another joint. Borg reached out and tapped a finger on his friend's inside arm. Scead flinched and withdrew his arm, kicking Borg in the shoulder and fixing his sleeve over his forearm. "You've been cranking up again, I can tell," Borg said and eyed his friend from beneath his hat. Scead was a tall man, lean but muscled. His eyes were set deep into his head and combined with his high cheekbones it gave his face a very sunken look. He was pale, with dirty blond hair sticking out of his scalp. Not one of the most attractive of men and even Borg, who certainly wasn't clean or sober, could see why the little hussy had been in such an intimate position with him.
"Relax bro," Scead said, blowing smoke into the air. "It's an advertisement, lets the fuckers who are interested know we got the stuff to sell." Borg snorted and took a large gulp from his drink. Which had lain forgotten on the counter while he had a smoke in his hand. It was an advertisement all right…
He was about to try and raise the subject again when a greasy rat of a person plunged through the crowd and started jabbering at them at high speed with out stopping for breath. Scead squinted, trying to make out what the rodent like man was saying. After a few seconds he gave up and motioned to Borg. Borg reached out and clamped a heavy hand around the skinny throat, pressing inward gently and raising the babbling man out of his slouch. He quieted immediately.
"Say again, G," Borg ordered, smiling a menacing smile to show all his teeth. His captive gulped and nodded, then began to repeat himself much slower.
"Here," he squeaked out, " he, he's here, the guy, I mean the kid guy, I mean the kid who's here, I, I mean,"
"What," Scead interrupted, using his most contemptuous tone of voice, "the fucking, hell are you babbling about?" the little man gulped again and Borg squeezed a little harder.
"The, the k, kid. The one ya wanted me to find a, at Christmas, the one who killed Abe and the others…" Scead's amused face went very still. His eyes narrowed and his lip curled into a sneer. He brought the joint he had been smoking down onto the counter and ground it into the metal tabletop.
Then he lunged forward. Borg released the small fellow so Scead could grab him by the collar of his shirt. He brought him up till they were nose to nose and purposefully breathed his reeking breath into the rat mans face.
"You're sure about this?" he asked. The man nodded vigorously.
"Oh, yeah, yeah, ah I saw him good, I'd recognize tha, that guy anywhere!" He insisted, trying to turn his head away from the stench of Scead's breath.
"Show me," Scead hissed. The man nodded and pointed in the direction he'd come. Scead leaped off the counter and hauled the man after him, with Borg following in his wake.
"Don't do anything fucking stupid, there's to many people here," Borg said to the back of his friends head. Scead nodded
"Nothing stupid," he assured. They left the Spirits House and wormed their way through the dancers to the Play House archway. They stopped just inside and their captive pointed ahead to a chocolate haired youth immersed in a VR. Borg's shoulders slumped
"Ah, shit," he said to himself. Scead glanced over at him, then back at the kid.
"Ah shit is right," he said. "Dead shit."
~~~~~
The evening was a wild affair. The VR lasted long enough for Odin to regain enough of his senses that he wouldn't accidentally injure himself. Neon and Jinx met up with him later, both slightly tipsy from drink and sweaty from dancing. The threesome roved through the crowds, taking part in what ever struck there fancy. Neon commented that he thought Odin was more fun with his brain loose. Jinx conned a man out of fifty with one of his card tricks and they disappeared into the throng before he could realize he had been tricked. They had to pick their way past a small orgy in one of the back corners; none of them really interested in falling into that pit. Odin found that the houses were in fact much bigger then they appeared and Jinx assured him that this was only a lesser Den. Some of the larger ones could be five times as big as this.
At one point they found a pair of decorators in the back of the Play House. There was a woman lying on her stomach almost completely naked getting a tattoo of rose vines up her entire side. They all agreed to pool their small stash of money to get some decoration. The fifty Jinx had conned out of the passing man wasn't quite enough. Jinx and Neon both wanted to do something. Odin was hesitant, but Neon insisted that if he was going to help pay he had to get something done. Jinx agreed and the two of them, aided by drink and whatever he had unintentionally inhaled got Odin into a chair with a single earring stud picked out. The stud was small and flat, and looked like several thorns pointing outwards in a circle.
Jinx chose a witch's pentagram tattoo to go between his shoulder blades. Odin watched Jinx take a long swig from the bottle in his hand and his face screw up in pain as the woman with the ink stabber started on his back. Neon had his head in a bubbling vat, with just an inch or two of his of his bright orange hair touching the liquid. Odin barely felt the earring stab through his left ear, his attention riveted on the other two and the eyes he could feel boring into his back.
The feeling continued all night, through dancing, drinks and food. Every time he would turn around to catch whoever was following him all he could see was the mob. Not a face would stand out. In the Dance House they followed him, in the Spirits House and the Play House. Where ever he went, they never lost track of him. Even through the fight that broke out later on.
He kept himself and the others out of the shadows, keeping his eyes and ears open, but a Den is an impossible place to ignore from the interior. It's how they are designed. Nearly invisible from the outside, often mind blowing on the inside. So all he really felt capable of at this point was to go along with the flow. Just as if he had fallen into a river, you can resist for awhile but inevitably your strength will give out and the current will carry you along to your final resting-place. It is said that people have been lost in Dens and no bodies ever found. It is not a place for the weak-minded.
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