Chapter Five: Fortuna Difettosa Della Ragazza

There was something about waking up from a dream into a dream, Wufei found the next time he came to consciousness. The kitchen floor under him was hard and his arm hurt from falling backwards upon it. Not broken of course, just bruised.

He knew he had fainted. It wasn't that he wasn't cognizant of what had happened before. And for that moment, he felt that he could have easily remained unconscious just a little longer. He needed time and he didn't have it yet.

With a groan Wufei sat up. Duo was leaning over him. The other Duo that was. Worry on that beautiful face and Wufei felt somewhat guilty for being the cause of it.

He gave a wan smile to Duo and turned to look over the otherwise empty room. Where was... Heero?

"How ya feelin' Draggie?" she asked, kneeling and putting a hand to his brow.

He scowled in response. "Wufei."

She smiled. "Yeah.. yer okay. Dang, Wuff-babe. You had me scared there for a second. I mean, you just look..."

He sighed, reaching up and taking her wrist to push it away. "Onna, please.." his voice cold. Nothing made sense here. But if he could focus on one thing, maybe he could get out of this. Then he wouldn't think of her as Duo. Then he would know that he was in the wrong place.

She dropped her hand with a sigh and a slight frown of confusion marring her brow, "Yeah. Well, c'mon, buddy. Let's get you to the table, huh? You can have some breakfast." Her hands, just as slender, strong, but something felt different in them, slid under his arm and she helped him stand fairly effortlessly. She was a woman, but she was still surprisingly strong as he'd always found Duo to be. What else was the same here? How... how was he to know?

Pulling out a chair, half angry, half saddened eyes look him over and her lips twist into a wry grin. "Yanno? It's just my luck. Fall in love with two guys and they're both gay. Dunno why you and Heero never got together. Well, except for the fact he's got an icicle up his ass and you deserve someone better..." And true Duo fashion, she continues to ramble as she left him at the table. "I mean, shit, Wuffie. You knew I'd done my best. I'm thinkin' you knew what I was gonna say before I said it, and really, you shoulda had some idea on how to react. We've been living in the same house for what, two years now? I figure - "

"Onna... please." He wasn't up for chatter and he wasn't sure if he wanted to hear this Duo look-alike talk in that voice that was just so... much more. Or less. Well, she was a woman. It would have to be yes.

"What the hell is up with the onna shit, Wu? I give me a flippin' break. I thought we had figured that one out during the war. What're you pullin' it on me again for, huh?"

He needed to think and he couldn't think with that prattling. "Where is Heero?" he snapped. Heero wasn't always the easiest of roommates, but he did help in curtailing Duo's rampages a bit. He'd come in, grab his lover around the waist and say something, Wufei never knew what it was, but Duo would laugh and then th-

Duo and Heero. He blinked. Here, Duo hadn't gotten to Heero.

In his world, or dimension or something, Duo had gone to Heero shortly after the war and told his best friend all about his feelings. She must have done the same here. Only that admission she'd apparently told Heero had ended up disastrously, not wonderfully as it had in his side of the universe or wherever they were. Heero might have been changing over all of that time, but it wouldn't have been the immediate and amazing change he'd noticed in the first year of his relationship with Duo. He never had that chance.

Duo stared at Wufei. Had he said something wrong? She... she... he had to keep that in his mind, it was otherworldly. They were so much alike. The same heartshaped face. She was strong looking for a woman, where the Duo he knew had been sweet looking for a man. Somewhere in between the face lent itself to both sexes well. She wore no makeup. But then, Duo had no need of such things to make that face beautiful. Had he not been an ex-pilot, intent on details, he might have easily missed the change in gender. The changes were so slight, yet incredibly telling. She was small breasted, hips only teacups worth of swell compared to the far more dramatic differences in most men and women he knew, Duo managed to change sex with almost no real change.

And now she was staring at him. And he would have to be a robotic baka like Heero to miss the hurt that distanced that gaze.

"Sure..." she growled, taking a step back with a scowl. "Forget it, Chang. I know a friggin' send off when I hear one." There was a dramatic push of the chair near him and Duo-like, the onna managed to overutilize her strength so that the chair clattered to the linoleum and skittered the additional foot to bump the pots drawer under the oven with a dull clank.

Wufei stared at the chair and heard somewhere in his mind, that Duo had left, that the footsteps were heading upstairs. Upstairs to a room. He could hear the voice, voices... Heero? It was muffled and he stared at a chair and felt as if he was dreaming, as if he'd forgotten where he had made his reservations and instead, had them made for him.

The chair. He knew the chair. He recognized the chair. With a start borne of desperation, Wufei stood, stalking the floor of the kitchen, picking up things and opening cupboards, leaving them open to prove to himself how things were the same. The sugar in the same place, the forks separated between long tines and short, the soup spoons in a separate drawer, the color of the faucet handles was still grey with that small crack along the quarter side of it - they were recognizable.

A sudden sound, the slam of a door upstairs rattles the teacups hanging under the upper cupboard and he reaches out with a calming sense as he stops them from bumping one another. Next would be..

I woke up on the wrong side of the world,

Just walk away, from all that you might see.

I can't rely on emotions you say you feel

I can't abide by this truth you've spun in me...


This can't happen.

This just can't happen...

There. He smiled softly. Duo's music pounding through the floorboards, down into the kitchen, taking over the entire house. Now, if things were right, Heero would come down and get a cup of coffee, kicked out of his room by an irate lover.

Wufei half turned, leaning on the sink and watching the door and almost sighed in relief with the appearance of the cold faced man.

"Heero," he spoke, wondering why he felt so tentative.

"Hn.." the grunt of Heero's eased Wufei's sensitive heartbeat. He could have smiled if he was a man to do something like that. And next, the cup of coffee...

Heero glared at nothing, obviously upset by the interruption. He crossed the kitchen, opened a cupboard and pulled down a light blue mug. The one that Duo had gotten for him at the end of the war. Filling it with water, Heero heated the cup up in the mircrowave and plucked a tea bag from the canister beside the sink, dropping it into the water and then staring at the wall.

"No.." Wufei corrected him gently. "We're not out of coffee. I just bought some last week."

Heero turned his head with confusion hiding under an angry glance. "What?"

The dream was coming back.

The song Duo always listened to when he was upset at Heero resounded down the stairs, pooling at the bottom of them and curling claws around the kitchen entryway.

I'm scared of you

I'm scared of me...

I'm scared of all

That we've become...

I can't see you

I can't see me

There's nothing

under this dying sun...

The strings in the piece had a way of getting on his nerves when it was too loud. Wufei had begged Heero to break the data tape more than once. Something in the song just struck him deeply in places he had wanted to forget, or maybe hadn't wanted to ever be aware of.

"Coffee..." He felt like the way the moment was going his reprieve from his nightmare was to be altogether too brief. "You always get a cup of coffee. Duo turned you on to it, remember? Last year."

Heero's eyes narrowed. Duo was a sore point right now. "I suggest you talk to her."

"Who?" Wufei asked, baffled.

"Duo." Heero could look unflappable and righteously angry at the same time, how he managed that, Wufei would never know. "Go talk to her. It's because of you she's playing that damned music."

"... oh... "Wufei watched Heero cup his mug of tea that was not coffee and shadowlike slink out of the kitchen.

Everything was the same. The kitchen was the same. Moments after Heero was gone, Wufei spun at the kitchen, fingers grasping doors, pulling objects off of shelves, the various foods and dishes, containers and napkins, metal bins and platters spilled around him. Panting, his face pale, Wufei stifled his sobs as he dragged one after another sweeping handful from the shelves, finding nothing and moving to the next shelf, holding the screams in as another and another shape tumbled out from under his fingertips, hitting the counter, breaking open, breaking apart, shattering on the floor. It all seemed right. But it was all wrong. Everything was wrong. Nothing fit properly because nothing fit with the Duo upstairs playing music which belonged or against the Heero that was drinking tea and walking without any emotion hiding under his angry mask.

The lower cupboard opened and he reached in, pulling out pans and cookie sheets, most having been used by Duo or Heero in their forays into housekeeping. It had all been things given to them at the end of the war, things to normalize the house, their lives. It hadn't worked with him, but he'd tried hard to let it. He'd wanted to have things normal. He had.. tried... he'd tried...

Wufei wasn't aware of the shouting. He couldn't hear it over his desperate bid to find something that wasn't right, something in his world that was so amazingly off kilter that he could be sure that it wasn't just a madness. Maybe the wrong person in the wrong spot, a coffee cup that meant the world to one of them missing, the wrong color of drapes. Something!

He'd made his way to the dish shelves, reaching around the conglomeration of plates, the blues and whites of perfection that Relena had foisted on them at the end of the war.

The stack curled outward at the top as he pulled it forward, leaning at the edge of the shelf and slowly falling in toward his chest. He watched it, the blue and white coming together to make a strange purple, like a distant bruise, and as it came in, he braced himself for the crash, distantly, as if he were watching it all on a television screen.

A grip on his arm and then a wrench turned him around. Fingers laced into his shirt front and he lashed back, slamming the heel of his palm into a chin, knowing that it could only be a friendly, but unable to completely disengage himself from the training. He knew he held back if only a small amount and the flash of gold gave him a start. Still, it did nothing, knowing that he'd struck not only Duo, but a woman, to stop his reaction as her hold on his arm twisted it and her knee fitted behind his. It was a simple turn on Duo's part, meant to do what, he wasn't sure, but his defense left her on the ground, her arm around her stomach, and her mouth bleeding.

He'd been looking for something different, something wrong in this world, hadn't he? A woman, striking a woman. His face burned from embarrasment at the act and he turned away.

"Oh-ho no.." came the soft sound of disgust and while it was a voice he knew and didn't know, he still could not understand the import until a weight hit him from behind.

Flung against the counter, Wufei turned and lashed out with a side kick. The kick swiping across where the body of his attacker should have been. But his attacker stepped back, catching his foot so that he was forced to round about with his other. The momentum to free him.

Letting him go, she came at him again, before his feet were on the ground a hit to his solar plexus left him gasping and he silently danced back, catching his breath and fighting against the stars in his eyes. Why? What was it that would have ever caused Duo to attack him?

But this wasn't Duo. This was a woman, and if he thought of that, he might remember to subdue her only?

Subduing her was not an easy task and before long, the kitchen showed signs of his inability to do just that. He'd held himself back, going to the point of saying, "Onna, onna, onna," under his breath (when he had it) as the pair of them moved the fight from the kitchen into the living room, trying to remind himself of exactly what sort of creature it was he was against.

At some point, a moment when he could not quite pinpoint, everything changed and the word was no longer an issue. His adversary was someone he could not subdue. Duo, this Duo, was as skilled in fighting, more so, actually, than the other. This Duo did more than street fighting. She met him on his own level and while he was the better of the pair, she was not far behind him. To simply try to subdue her without harming her would mean to acknowledge defeat. And at that very moment when he passed that line, Duo knew it. And horribly, he knew that this was what she had been pushing him toward. She was forcing him to recognize her as a threat.

Panting, Wufei backed somewhat, taking stock of the fighter he faced. She was breathing as hard as he, her face showed signs of a few hits and she held her arm close to her body. It did not stop her from using it but he knew her elbow had almost been broken, the tendons had to ache. Yet he was not afar himself from true pain. His ribs creaked strangely and his body felt keenly more than a few bruises yet to show.

And stranger than anything was the silence. Violet eyes stared into his and he felt his spirit retract. Those eyes said more within the silence than he'd ever heard in the flood of words that seemed to fill the air whenever he'd seen them before. But he fought that second breaking, fought it with all he had until with a half scream, he swung wildly at the braided madness who sidestepped.

The heel was at his throat, a leg held with steel quickness and eyes giving accusation along the long line of limb. Wufei bit back the continuance of the cry and licked his lips, tasting blood.

"Why?" He hated the desperation in his voice.

A fine brow shot up on her face and his heart twisted along with falling into his gut. Those eyes... damn them if he didn't see the jester deep in them, and deeper still, the pain of being a child of L2 and the pilot of Deathscythe.

Her lips twisted and the fine voice slid along the extent of the leg, foot poised to show how close he'd been to being killed, how easily he could have been, and how he'd been defeated, by a woman. "Because, obviously you've thought that my saying I love you means that I'll go back on my words during the war." Her body shook but it wasn't from exhaustion, he knew that. "You forget, Chang. I may run and I may hide as well. But I never lie. I didn't lie then, when I told you I'd not have you treat me as anything but an equal, and I don't lie now. I don't give an colony's rat's ass about your damned manhood when it comes to my being able to do my job. And if you ever call me 'onna' again, I'll make sure you remember the day."

Looking deeply into his eyes, how could he look away? Her eyes captivated him just as her counterpart's always had. There, in those eyes, he saw the harbinger of death. Deathscythe's pilot was not gone, not by a simple change of sex. And it was all the more obvious when he saw the wry grin part her lips and anger flash out in violet streams. "And I don't think you ever will forget this day, will you?"

He could hear the strains of music, her music, rolling into the room. And then her foot was gone and Duo turned, running fingers deep into the tucked hair at her scalp. "Dammit, Wufie," she sighed and he wanted to cry from the pain in that voice. "Why don't you get to your room and sleep it off, whatever the hell you've got in your system. And don't come back down until you can at least be respectful to what we've been through together." She didn't look at him, just walked toward the kitchen, stepping on a broken lamp as she went, the crushing of glass under heel snapping him to reality. "I'll clean this up. You just get out of here."

Wufei stared after the retreating braid that swung lightly across an arched back and between strong shoulders, more slender but all the same strength and resolve in them he'd always cared about, and felt like a child being grounded for his bad behavior. Shame rose in him. Respect. He'd always respected Duo, at least from the end of the wars - when he'd come to realize the pilot was very much an integral part of their team and as capable as every one of the other pilots. And somehow he'd let her gender get in his way of respecting what may have been very much the same person. He'd treated her like the child and had ended finding himself in a switched role, with her having to act like the scolding mother.

A pain that had nothing to do with bruises filled him as he trudged up the stairs, stopping half way up to meet the blue, stone eyes of the first pilot. Heero took a moment before moving to the side, not saying a word, not giving a single word of advice on what to do, how to do it. Because this was a Heero who had never accepted Duo's advances. Because Duo was a woman. Here, Duo was a woman.

Wufei closed the door to his room behind him and leaned on it heavily. Then he slowly walked through his bedroom, taking notes of all those things that were the same, all those which were different, finally stopping at the desk and fingers trolling the edge of that photograph, the one from his dream. There they were, the same and yet so very different.

From there, his eyes lowered to touch on the papers, letters, and finally a small book that looked amazingly familiar. He laughed, painfully and small. What irony, to find the map to navigate this new world right under his fingertips all the time.

Taking the journal he'd begun sometime after the war, he laid himself down on the bed, tucking his hand about it, and closing his eyes, let his aching body fall into a half rest where he could hide, too.

- - - - - - - -

- - - - -

((The music here is INCREDIBLE.. : ) It's written by Monda, background music by Antony Kostic with Monda singing, called Dying Sun. Monda is one of my favorite lyricists. I LOVE her use of words. She's got real power and a true connection with the way emotions are evoked, but not dragged out, of the listener. As soon as I get a URL for it, I'll put it up so everyone can hear it. So very fitting for the girlie Duo. Here are the lyrics in their entirity, as this wasn't a song fic, I didn't want to use them all, no matter how badly I wanted to use them all! hee hee

Dying Sun

by Monda

I woke up

On the wrong side

of the world

Just walk away

from all that

you might see

I can't rely

On emotions

You say you feel

I can't abide

by this truth

you've spun in me

This can't happen

This just can't happen

I'm scared of you

I'm scared of me...

I'm scared of all

That we've become...

I can't see you

I can't see me

There's nothing

under this dying sun...

All messages

have been torn

to shreds

All signals

are dangerous

to the touch...

These whithering

promises

have turned to gray

You're killing

the inside

of me

This can't happen

This just can't happen

I'm scared of you

I'm scared of me...

I'm scared of all

That we've become...

I can't see you

I can't see me

There's nothing

under this dying sun...

Don't do this to me

I'm not ready

I'm scared of you

I'm scared of me...

I'm scared of all

That we've become...

I can't see you

I can't see me

There's nothing

under this dying sun...

All right! This chapter was longer than the other. I'm not sure, but I originally had the idea for just the girl. Things went not the way I planned, as usual. Heh. Anyway, sorry for mistakes! If there are any. I have NaNoWriMo coming up and really wanted to get things out on everything before the first of the month so I could feel less guilty for taking off time to do my mini novel thingie. ;)

Vamp Queen: Yay! There ya go. An update and all. I'm glad you like it! It's fun, a bit sloppy and fun nevertheless. Hee hee.

Magical-FlyingDragon: Okay.. did that make Heero more understandable? I hope so! If not, I'll keep working on making it plain! Tro and Quatre are there.. I suppose they'll be showing up soon. Things are going about.. half as fast - grrr... because the authoress was silly enough to be doing two fics at once. Bother that. Anyway, I think the female Duo is cool.. and I'm struggling REAL hard not to make her stereotypical. She's a girl, not girlie, as she'd tell me. Not sure how I'm doing, and I'm glad you're liking her! Hee. OH! And thank you for being so darned faithful in yer reviews! You're simply the best!))