Kyuuketsuki Duo: The TV Series Episode 7
Bad Religion -- Part 1
"Oops, sorry guys, gotta go," Duo said, glancing at his watch. He tossed a dollar on the table to cover his coffee, then nudged Wufei to get out of the way so he could slide out of the inside booth seat. Once out, he smoothed out his shirt, said his casual goodbyes, and strode smoothly out of the Corner Cafe. He looked as if he had all the time in the world, yet he covered the distance swiftly.
"Wow, third time in as many days," Quatre observed, as Wufei took his seat once more.
"You know Duo," Trowa commented. From his seat by the window, his eyes followed the boy with the braid as he moved down the street.
"Yeah, always coming and going as he pleases," Quatre finished the thought. "Never know quite when he'll show up."
"He is not reliable?" Wufei inquired, frowning slightly. Duo always did strike him as flighty.
"Oh, he's reliable," the blonde explained. "Never breaks a promise or anything. But he avoids making long term commitments so that he never has promises to break. I don't know what he does, that he has such an irregular schedule, but he seems to be comfortable with it. Maybe he has to help out at the store or something."
"What sort of store does he work at?"
Quatre blinked. "You know, I have no idea. Actually, now that you mention it, I don't even know that he works at a store. I've just always assumed, since he lives in the northern quarter. He doesn't like talking about himself."
"It makes sense," Trowa volunteered.
"I've always imagined it to be an antique store or something," Quatre continued speculatively. "He's shown quite some esoteric knowledge about old things, old stories, places, that sort. And there are a number of those little random-thing stores up there."
"Perhaps," Wufei responded. Conversation afterwards faded out, after a few more valiant efforts on the part of Quatre. Duo was a good conversationalist, as was Meiran, but the boy had just left, and Meiran was still at school, involved in after-school activities. Trowa made a great listener, but rarely spoke much. Wufei tended to speak only when spoken to, and rarely volunteered information of his own. Besides, he only really came to these little get-togethers because Meiran had insisted that he socialize with his peers. Just because his life was in shambles, she had reprimanded him angrily, soon after he had arrived at their home, didn't mean that he had the right to be rude to everyone. So he tried.
There didn't seem to be much reason to stay after that, and so they all drifted their own ways.
*****
Wufei drifted through the moderate crowds of the market district, weaving a smooth path through the distracted people and meticulously avoiding bodily contact with any of them. He scowled slightly as a woman with three children stopped suddenly in front of him and reversed direction hurriedly to collect her young errant son. Not only as a mother should she have been keeping a better eye on her children, but the child, too, should have known better than to begin wandering off.
A detour around an utterly domesticated and completely oblivious flock of pigeons brought him near the small, unostentatious fountain in the middle of the concrete clearing. Easily heard over the uninspired tinkle of the water, voices pleaded to the passersby to pay heed to the weeping of their souls and seek the light. At the base of the fountain, a man and a woman stood, pushing small pamphlets into the hands of strangers. Wufei decided to take the slip of paper shoved at him, rather than to shove his way rudely past the evangelists, and was about to throw it away in the nearest trash can when he heard the woman speak something about a demon.
He calmly extracted himself from the main flow of traffic and retraced a few of his steps to listen a bit more closely, but snorted in disappointment when she continued on about the dark demon who would devour a man's soul if he was not pure and devoted to their god. Although fairly convinced that it was just another cultist's liberal interpretation of the same religious morality that stood upon every street corner, he took a cursory look at the pamphlet.
His eyes narrowed as he scanned the propaganda. Buried within the religious rhetoric and glories to the maker was the tale of a sinister force that led men to corruption. It claimed that this incarnation of evil walked among men, deceiving and destroying, insidious and manipulative. It went on to describe hyperbolically some of the demon's alleged methods and crimes, but when stripped of their flagrant abuse of man's desire to exonerate himself of guilt, the claims seemed as if they could actually contain perhaps a grain of reality.
Was this unknown cult in fact privy to some truth about the demons that walked among humankind? The advertising held enough of what Wufei believed to be true about actual demons that he was willing to entertain the possibility that the cult could indeed hold evidence of one of the demons hiding in plain sight, and if so, perhaps they could tell him where he might find it, and confront it.
The pamphlet announced a meeting that night, not too far. He decided that he might as well pass by, and see whether or not there was any legitimacy to their claims.
*****
Quatre's father looked up as his son passed him by, bearing his backpack. He had been in the downstairs study doing some homework, and was now on his way back up to his room.
"What's that noise?" The deep voice intercepted Quatre before he made it all the way up the stairs.
He turned back. "What noise?" he inquired, trying to imbue respect even into so simple a phrase.
"That jangling noise. Is it coming from your bag?"
Quatre blinked in surprise when he gave his bag a little shake, and heard a light tinkle accompany the action. He hadn't even noticed the sound that his steps had been making. Suddenly, he realized its source, and his mistake. It was too late to hide it; his father had already noticed it. He thought fleetingly of fibbing, but knew that it would never work. "Oh, that," he began casually. "It was just a gift from a friend, today." He began to climb the stairs once more.
Apparently his father had noticed the slight hesitation before his answer. "May I see?" It was a command sheathed in a polite request.
Determined not to give anything away in his demeanour, Quatre took a few steps back down the stairs and held out the strap of his bag to his father, close enough for him to see, but far enough so that he would have to reach out and take it. "It's just a little charm from Meiran...."
The moment the words came out of his mouth, he knew he had chosen the wrong ones. It was true, it was just a little silver charm his friend had given him today. A charm could have referred to any little piece of decorative silver. It could also have more mystical overtones, and if there was one thing his father couldn't stand, it was mysticism.
Mr. Winner reached out and took it into his hand, pulling it in for a much closer scrutiny, and forcing Quatre to take another step closer to his father. He hoped his father would forget his poor choice of words, and just let it go, but inside he was already wincing and bracing himself for confrontation. In this case, he could be found 'guilty' in his father's eyes.
"This is a ward," his father stated flatly, almost, but not quite, accusingly. "What are you doing with a ward like this?"
Meiran had said that it was supposed to be a ward against minor evils. She had gifted him with it almost with trepidation, claiming that one never knew what might be lurking in the night. "I told you," he enunciated clearly, trying to keep the bitter edge from his voice. "A friend gave it to me."
"It's utter nonsense," Mr. Winner proclaimed derisively. "Childish fancy created by ignorant fools trying to take advantage of the gullible."
"What did you want me to do?" he responded sharply, losing his patience with his father's stubborn ways. He had heard the same thing a hundred times before. "Refuse a gift from a friend, given in good faith, just because of what some ignorant fools might say? Wouldn't that just be lending credence to their claims?"
Mr. Winner's slate gray eyes narrowed angrily. "I want you to get rid of it," he ordered, taking a step closer to his son. Even a couple steps down, he seemed to tower over his son. Mr. Winner was a big man, with a broad chest, neatly trimmed, dark brown beard, and a stare that routinely intimidated men across a business table. Quatre, unfortunately, took after his slight, blonde, blue-eyed mother, or so he was told. She had died while he was still very young.
Quatre jerked the bag back to his side defiantly. "No," he refused, mild outrage leaking into his tone. "It's just a little piece of silver, Father, and it was a gift from a friend I care about. I am not just going to throw it away because you say so!"
His father's nostrils flared in that way Quatre had identified with 'don't take that tone of voice with me, young man!' Luckily, his father spared him that one bit of inanity. "I do not want to see that trash in this household, and that's final. Is that understood?"
Quatre's own aquamarine eyes narrowed in powerful irritation and frustration. "Fine!" he nearly spat out through gritted teeth, spinning around and finishing his ascent with steps louder than necessary. When he reached his room, he wanted desperately to slam his door shut behind, but he knew it would just be another thing for his father to frown upon, so he restrained himself to a good thunk of wood against wood, and flung himself angrily down in his desk chair.
He closed his eyes and counted to ten before straightening in his seat. Slowly, he removed the trinket hanging from his bag's strap, and considered it contemplatively. His father was normally a rather rational, if strict, man, until it came to this one thing, and then all reason seemed to fly out the door.
The hand holding the little charm hovered over the trashcan next to his desk for only a fraction of a second before he snatched it up decisively. Instead, he withdrew a fresh sheet of notebook paper from one of his drawers and carefully folded the flat trinket inside. Satisfied with the innocuous look of the package, he opened his center desk drawer and placed it reverently towards the back.
Quatre wished he knew just what it was that had caused his father's aversion to anything supernatural. The nanny that had raised the Winner children had been reprimanded harshly by the Winner patriarch when he had discovered her telling fantastical stories to them. They had been harmless little things, little rhymes that warned of evils, or the tale of the mysterious house just outside of town that he was never to go near.
His father claimed that such stories would just rot his mind and corrupt his reason, and that honest people had no business spreading such tales, nor paying them any heed. Yet if such was the case, if they were such drivel, then why did his father fear them so?
Come to think of it, how had he recognized the trinket as a ward, anyway?
*****
"Well, I'm glad that's finally over!" Duo declared, falling into a physics-defying sprawl as he took up more room than should have been possible on their bed. "It only took us, what, three tries to nab it?"
"Not everything can be easy, Duo," Heero chided, seating himself on the edge of the bed. As always, his posture was straight and attentive. "Matters of time aside, it went relatively smoothly."
"Yeah, well, you weren't the one it was lobbing ice cubes at," he retorted.
"Guardian's privilege," Heero responded smartly. "I'm just the sidekick."
Duo surged up out of his sprawl and grabbed Heero around the chest in a bear hug, pulling him down back to his original reclined position. "You are not 'just a sidekick'," he whispered fiercely. "You are my partner, and my equal in all things that matter. You are my teacher and my guardian, my friend and my love. You are all that keeps me sane, everything that keeps me human, and you are the center of my universe, Heero, and don't you forget it!" He punctuated the last phrase with an almost painful tightening of his arms.
Heero mulled over that for a while. "Okay." Not seeing too much in the way of alternatives, he managed to wriggle around in his partner's grasp and settled on his side next to Duo, head resting comfortably on his shoulder.
It soon became clear to Duo that Heero had said all he was going to say to that when Heero closed his eyes and began to slow his breathing. "'Okay'? That's it?!"
Heero cracked one eye open and peered at the peeved guardian. "What? Did you expect me to disagree?"
He opened his mouth to argue, but ended up taking a long breath instead, before closing it and starting over again. "No," he said with strained patience. "But how's about a little... I dunno, something a little less flippant?"
Heero raised his eyebrow as if to say, 'You are accusing me of being flippant?' "Alright. You gave me a life I didn't even know I was missing," he stated rather blandly. "And showed me a humanity I didn't know I had. You saved me from an eternity of repetitive mediocrity and gave my life meaning. I trust you with my heart, my body, and my soul. You are my friend and my love, and you are the center of my universe, and now you are going to go to sleep."
"Heero!"
"Sleep, Duo." He had little recourse but to do so, as Heero promptly removed himself from the realm of the conscious and any further conversation.
TBC...
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