Disclaimer: Again, much as I wish on stars, Gundam wing is not mine. I can't even draw them properly, so there!

Thanks everybody for the reviews, I wasn't really expecting any, but we all hope, right? :-)

Koriaena - You are right, Duo didn't have a choice about whether he was gonna help or not, but Trowa didn't know that, and for all he knew Duo might have wanted to help to gain browny points... oh well. Maybe Duo was just feeling terrible about having helped to kidnap someone, and wanted to make sure that it was clear that he didn't want to do it...

Hope you guys like this chapter too.

Woodcutter

Kasi-kun

Chapter 2.

When I came back to myself I was jolting slightly, and I am rather ashamed to say I whimpered, gasping, trying not to yell, I knew that drawing enough breath to scream would simply make matters worse. It took me only a few more minutes to realize I was lying in a wagon with Duo, the grasslander, walking, no, trudging beside me on the other side of the wagon wall. He looked miserable, and his purple eyes, which I remembered sparking at me so brightly were downcast, and empty. Over the noise of the cart, and the other travelers who I couldn't see but could hear very well, the other boy must not have heard me when I woke up. I tried and failed to move may hand, I might not be good at it, but everyone wants to add some comfort if they see another human being upset. He must have seen my hand twitching, though Forever knows it was little enough of a motion, but his eyes turned to me and his face changed. I was almost unsure I'd seen him unhappy.

"Heyla! Well awake are we? Think you can drink without choking this time?"

I was indignant. If I hadn't had the water poured down my throat when I wasn't expecting it I wouldn't have reacted that way. "What's wrong?" I croaked.

"Wrong? It's sunny, there aren't any bugs, and the breeze is good. How could anything be wrong?" He grinned at me, but I just looked at him, he might be right about me being a timber-ape, but I wasn't stupid, though maybe it had just been my pre-waking hallucination. I was just beginning to second guess myself when he sighed. "Look. We're coming to an outpost soon. We should reach it in the hour. Master is gonna have you Healed, but he isn't gonna spend the extra coin to make it a proper one, it's gonna be fast. Not many survive that kind of Healing. I hope you're strong, I..." He trailed off. He must have been looking after me when I was out of it. I wondered exactly how long I had been down for. I couldn't even see a hint of my mountains anywhere at the edge of my vision. Come to think of it, I hadn't seen them when I woke up the first time.

Suddenly the sky seemed too big, too empty, and I felt mindless terror swirl in my belly. I clamped my eyes onto Duo and tried to ignore the huge open space about me. "What else?"

"What else?!? I just told you you're likely to die and you ask what else?" His voice rose, cutting through the other voices on the road.

Shrill and whiny at the same time a girl's voice piped, "Mother! That Thing interrupted me again! He should be punished! Have him beaten!" A softer voice tried to soothe the girl, and Duo hunched his shoulders slightly as if expecting them to actually do as the brat asked. It was that bit of a lean forward that let me see his back, and I realized that his fear wasn't without merit. Across his ragged, I suppose it used to be white, shirt where red lines torn into the fabric. I wondered if this happy boy had actually deserved any of the blows and how anyone could do this to him, to anyone else. It wasn't right. Forever it wasn't! It took several more minutes for my new friend to relax and realize that he wasn't going to be beaten this time, and when he finally glanced at me again, I resumed the conversation that had started this in the first place. "I'm not ignoring that I can't die, I'm just wondering what else will go wrong. You know that trouble comes in threes right?" My voice still sounded like a tree breaking, and Duo, amazingly, didn't answer until he had gotten quite a bit of water into me.

"Well, let's see. Trouble comes in threes you say? For you that would be having your Da drop a tree on you, becoming a slave and maybe gonna die soon."

"Everybody dies." I wanted to try and take the brighter look on things, I still hadn't realized the full impact of this huge change in my life, and I'm not sure I wanted to.

"Not like this." He was so encouraging today, wasn't he? All sunshine and light.

"So what are your three problems? You know mine." It is amazing how much I was talking. I wanted this boy to talk, it seemed like he should be blathering on, not watching over his shoulder to make sure that someone wasn't standing there waiting to kick him. Violet-eyes helped me drink some more water, and it was amazing how much better I felt after only those two drinks. Wonderful. Now if I could just find out what was wrong with him I'd be as happy as I could be. Maybe I had just imagined the whole depressed look. Or maybe if I just kept watching him he would crack and tell me. I had never been much good at convincing people of things. So I waited. And waited. And... Forever! I had no idea that you could say so much and yet not give any information. Duo had not stopped talking since he had last given me a sip of water. What would happen if he hadn't told me what was upsetting him before we got to where I was gonna be Healed. I considered that, and then wondered if he had anyone to talk to before like he was talking to me now. Poor kid. Mind you, he couldn't be much younger than me. Maybe it was how small he was that made him seem so young. Or maybe it was his grin.

"I'm 15, how about you?" I could have waited all day for a break in his monologue, so I simply made my own break in what he was saying.

He looked at me funny but finally said, "I must be something like that. I'm not sure though. People don't keep track of street brats' ages. Sha." The last was a bit of a snort, and a bit of a laugh, but incredibly sad, hopeless.

Ahh, that explained his clothes. Probably snitched from some rich Lord's clothes line while they had been hung out to dry. Forever smart, at least he was, I had to open my big mouth and comment, "So that's your first trouble. What are the other two?"

He glared at me, then kinda laughed and lightened up a bit, "I think that for me trouble is never ending. That trouble was matched with it's other two a long time ago."

"Sorry." I mumbled, and I wondered why I cared so much. Every time I had asked questions on the mountain the other kids would ignore me, laugh at me, or asked one back, the one they forever asked, 'Who's your papa? The one you got your weird eyes from, or your strange hair? Does your mama still know him?' Those had led to fights and to Papa finally forbidding me from going to town anymore. I hated them, those kids, but sometimes I had wished I could just have a normal conversation with one of them. Now Duo was actually talking to me, or at me as the case may be, and I had to go pry into what he obviously didn't want to discuss.

"I'm just worried about the sale. I mean, I've seen them back in my city and they weren't pretty. I always managed to keep out of the way of slavers, but this time I was careless and I got caught. I just... oh, I don't know. I kinda wish... I mean if I have to get sold, I wish it could be back in the cities I know, and could escape in. Over here, I don't know the run of things and I could get into as much trouble as good."

This was news to me. Duo came from the other side of the mountains? Everyone said that they were savages over there. Powerful and terrible, but he didn't look any different from anyone else I knew, accept for the violet eyes of course. Oh, and the hair. I haven't mentioned it yet, but it should have been the first thing to be commented on next to his eyes. Actually, I haven't told what he looks like other than his eyes have I? Well, here we go then. He has bright lavender/violet eyes. Second, he had this rope of hair that was more beautiful than most of the hair that I've seen girls have. It was the kind of brown that trees have when they're damp, except now in the sunlight it was shining with highlights of gold and a little bit of red. It reached half way down his thighs even though it was tightly braided. I'm betting it would reach his knees if he ever let it out of its plait. He was slender to the point of being skinny. I admit I have a bit of a skewed vision on that, but since he was even thinner that me, he had to be really thin. And finally he was short for a human. Probably only a bit over the 5 foot mark. Maybe 5'2" or so? Shorter than me anyway. When I first met him he wore that raggy, baggy, too big shirt that I already told you was crisscrossed with lash marks, and a pair of ratty old canvas pants. The kind that sailors wear in the tales Mama used to tell. His hair was tied with a piece of twine. By his own words, I was wrong, too. He wasn't a grasslander. That was a term used for people on this side of the mountain. I won't repeat the words used for the people on the other side of the mountain, I mean after all, there is a chance, really tiny maybe, but still a chance that a lady or a child might read this. Besides, I'm sure that you've all heard the terms before yourself. Even if you are a lady or a child.

"I thought that you would know more than me, you know, about how to survive here, so I was actually starting to hope we had a chance, until the master said he was gonna pay for a fast healing for you." Oh, right. We were talking about why he was sad.

"Will the selling come soon?" I asked. Again I wondered how long I had been out of it, and how far it would be if I made a run for home.

"Ya, they said we'd get to the market day after tomorrow. Sha! I'll kill myself first."

"Don't! If I do get better, we'll run away together. Somehow. Tomorrow night, after I'm Healed, but before the sale. We can run to the mountains and be safe."

Duo laughed quietly then, and it sounded like a steel trap closing. "That's a long run. Sha, you slept for most of it, but we left the mountains just over two weeks ago. There's no way we could get there fast enough to be safe. Not if you know nothing more that I do about 'grasslander' was it? About grasslander customs."

"Well then, somehow, some time, I vow that we will be free again." Not, I had to admit to myself, that I'd had such a bad time of it yet. Actually, I could probably be considered pampered, I hadn't even seen my captor/master's face yet. Tomorrow would tell, if I survived today. Just then the wagon hit the world's largest pothole, and my body decided it was tired and had dealt with enough pain, and didn't want to feel any more and blackness swept up and embraced me.

I'm not sure you could call it waking. I vaguely heard Duo yelling something but the darkness had too much of a hold on me and I couldn't comprehend his words. Then it happened. I don't even know how to describe it. Molten lava perhaps? Maybe the Dragon Flame, the kind talked about in the stories Mama used to tell us? Starving, suffocating, freezing and crying all in an instant. I really should ask Quatre how to describe it. He's much better with words than me, but I get ahead of myself. All I knew was that I was filled with the most horrible pain I could even imagine and beyond all limits of the human body, and beyond again, forever beyond. I'm not sure that I could have even screamed if I had been awake to do so.

The one coherent thought I did have just before I sank into an even deeper darkness was, 'forever, but Duo was so right. If this is Healing, no wonder people die of it.' I wished I could die, just to get away from that rending pain.

And then all was dark, and I was floating in a void of nothing.