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"Planet of the Vamps "Written By: Asymphototropic
Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam wing. Author: Asymphototropic (attracted toward the
light, but never quite arrives there) Email: asymphototropic@aol.com Rating: NC 17 Warnings: AU, yaoi, bondage, little smidgens of
het Summary: Stranded on a strange planet, Duo Maxwell studies Biology 101 Pairings: Read and see! Written for GW Safehouse's Vampire month
"Planet of the Vamps " Part 7.
It wasn't exactly the safest thing he could have said just at that moment. But Duo was pretty desperate. "No," Treize retorted. "The blood helped with the moon madness last night. Helped us to think straight," Duo pleaded. "This isn't about moon madness." "Sally Po thinks it is." "She's wrong. I've made a terrible error in judgment. And now there is no way out of the situation." "That doesn't mean ya need to kill me," the boy reasoned, writhing ineffectually in the viselike clasp of the towering Lamian. "Us. It does. Mean I need to kill us," Treize corrected him sternly. "Oh, uh. Well, now that's even worse, yer know? Look at Zechs there. You're just gonna leave him alone, huh? Who's gonna be weapons mate to him when yer dead?" Treize stared into the eternal crystalline blue of his loyal clan mate's eyes. He thought there were red-tinged tears stinging there, unshed. "Let us talk over the matter," Zechs urged. Meanwhile, Duo leaned his head against the front of his captor's shoulder, and felt the burning hot pain of the new piercing. It would take hardly a brush of flesh against cloth to start his ear bleeding again. He rasped the bite wound against the fabric of Treize' jacket. It caught upon the cloth with an agonizing tearing sensation. Duo felt his inflamed blood trickle down. "Slake your thirst. Taste me." "Duo. So sweet," Treize murmured. His head lolled forward, his tongue snaked out between his lips. The aroma was irresistible. The Lamian lapped at the blood. Duo noticed both Zechs' and Sally's reactions. Their pupils dilated, too, and their irises swirled red. It sure was one hell of a painful negotiation tactic, Duo reflected, twitching in Treize' iron grasp. "Look, you told me earlier I should pawn the earring. If it'll get you out of some kind of nasty suicide clause here, I'll do it. Would it do us any good if I did that? Sell the thing like you said? I could, like, give the money to charity or something. So maybe it wouldn't offend the moon goddesses so much." "Maxwell!" Treize paused in his suckling. "I cannot purchase my personal honor, redeem it at the cost of your own. That would be despicable." "Yeah, well, uh." Duo felt the sharp edge of the dagger, still resting against his throat. "And slashing my carotid would be less despicable, ya think?" "No," Treize groaned. "Okay, then. So how about I just keep the earring, like ya meant me to. Would that be the best thing for all concerned?" Zechs shook his head impatiently. "Duo. Wearing the crest signifies your acceptance into the clan by us. Yes. But it also indicates your acknowledgment of membership in our clan. Your joining with us. Your commitment to us." Duo Maxwell wanted to live. Desperately. After all, he was just a kid. He thought about his ship, the poor mangled thing, patiently awaiting his return. He dwelt upon the freedom of flight, the thrill of a million billion unknown stars, all his for the journeying. And he thought about Traeskavelon, cold and wild, mysterious, cruel. And beautiful, so beautiful, his home. The fierce longing for that place ran through his heart, like a sharply driven stake. Then he thought about Lamian clan affiliation. Obligations, commitments, the strangeness of having a family. People depending on him, trusting him for his righteous actions. He wanted to live. "Um. Okay. I accept." "What are you saying?" "Right here and right now. I'm agreeing. I accept. I'm willing to join your clan." He knew instantly it was a wrong move. He had seriously miscalculated, and now he would pay the price. Because Duo Maxwell didn't lie. He couldn't lie. He was a purple eyed demon of Traeskavelon. And he was incapable of lying. His physiology now informed him in bold block letters of his heritage. 'Duo Maxwell CANNOT lie.' It had been a calculated lie, too. Planned in thought, anticipated, and then spoken aloud. 'I'm willing.' A thorough falsehood. He had braced for it. Now he would pay the price. His body's reaction was swift and awful. There was a jolt of agony to his chest. His head pounded the chant, "liar, liar, liar." Nausea roiled in his guts. His muscles contorted in painful spasms. He twitched, then shuddered violently, convulsing from head to toe. His heart throbbed, then fluttered. He gasped for air. He couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. Couldn't exist. The universe spun around him, velvet black with distant pinpoints of diamond light. Even darkness was beyond his comprehension at last. He folded and faded and then knew no more. xXxXXx "Duo, can you hear me? Wake up now." Sally Po, in strangely fragmented bits, like a broken mirror image. Images in mirrors. No need for garlic clove pendants or holy water charms. Not really vampires. Not really. "What was that all about? One minute you were here with us, and the next, you were totally gone." A woman and a doctor. The combination resulted in the most perpetually curious individual in the galaxy. "Um," he began. Then perceived he was talking into an oxygen mask. He fumbled it away from his face. When Sally deemed he wasn't about to faint again, she clicked off the oxygen flow. "Just another one of my weird feral Traesky traits. My body hates it when I try to lie. I do, and it just shuts down. With any luck, not permanently." "An extreme physiologic response to falsehood? How extraordinary. I believe that must be nearly unique in the galaxy. At least I've neither read nor heard of such a thing. No wonder your reaction to our little subterfuge was so overboard. I imagine the society of Traeskavelon must have a whole psychosocial system to deal with liars. The population would need it, in order to prevent those who didn't have the purple-eyed inheritance from taking advantage of your vulnerabilities." "Hmm. Now that you mention it, I guess we are pretty damned violently hostile towards liars." "I think we will just have to get used to each other's personal and cultural idiosyncrasies." "Unless Treize kills me first. That'd pretty much make the whole 'get along together' effort irrelevant, huh?" "I've had a chance to talk to him. Now that he has calmed somewhat. When you dropped down like the living dead, and he got a chance to experience a small sampling of your demise, it was a major shock to his system. He was pretty frantic for me to revive you. So now we've been talking to him, persuading him. Une and Noin, and of course Zechs. Suggesting alternatives. The way I see it, just because you have joined us as a family member, it doesn't mean we have to demand so many traditional things from you. After all, look at me. I have an unusual profession, a physician specialist in foreign medicine. I live here at the Visitors' Center. I interact mostly with off-worlders on a daily basis. So far, I haven't taken a clan mate. And there's Noin, who runs her own business. She deals with more members of other clans than our own. Welcomes them into her social club. That's hardly traditional. And Une is a clan enforcer. That had always been considered man's work. But she serves as an enforcer, and people respect her abilities." "I bet they're damned afraid of her," Duo laughed. "I imagine you're right," Sally smiled at him affectionately. "I want us to be friends again." "Course we are. Always have been." The boy took her hand in both of his. "Never anything but." When Treize got Sally's permission to come back in to the infirmary, he looked extremely solemn. Duo wasn't at all certain things had changed, even though the doctor had assured him it was so. Duo sat up in bed. Sally wasn't letting him go until she had started him on her prescribed medicines and gotten his fever down. And in the meantime, he felt perfectly happy to rest quietly. It seemed the turmoil of the last twenty-four hours had lasted closer to a lifetime. Treize sat in the bedside chair. "Maxwell. Sally Po says you are fairly recovered now." "Yurp. None the worse for a little wear and tear." "I have sworn upon my honor to repair your star ship for you. I have every intention of doing so. In a timely manner," he added firmly. "I will help as much as I am able, as much as you will allow." "If you wanna," Duo shrugged sheepishly. "Will you think of us as your kin? Une, Noin and Sally. Zechs and myself?" "Well, I can't but say the notion will take some getting used to, you know?" Treize nodded silently. "But, yeah, if you want it that way, I'll work on it." "That suffices. I would appreciate your occasional visits here, as your itineraries permit." "Sure thing. Be glad to drop in on you." "Good, good. Zechs has had an excellent thought. The man is quite brilliant, as I think I've told you before. It is not unheard of to have weapons mate-threesomes. It is generally more a practice amongst the elders. So that, when one of us dies, the other is not left defenseless in his old age. So the gray beards form threesomes, when no one appropriate is available for a new couples pairing. But I see no reason why it cannot also occur for younger men. In this case, because you would be frequently off-world, and not always available to accompany a partner. So, for now, Zechs and I would like you to join us, whenever you visit Lamia in the future." "Gee. That kind of knocks me right over. You two being such elegant gentlemen. And me being pretty much the Traesky forest rat brat." To Duo's surprise, Treize laughed aloud, showing a full set of glittering white teeth. "Bah. Its perfectly plain to me, you are Andromedan royalty. You have merely inherited your regal clan's genetic tendency to crash land into strange foreign planets." "Now there's a tale worth hearing, certain sure," Duo chuckled. "Perhaps, sometime in the future. After you become more accustomed to thinking in Lamian cultural terms, you may wish to join a younger threesome. To support our clan by forming a useful alliance for us. In that case, we might talk about what sort of traits you would desire in your new weapons-mates." "Those guys you were talking about before. Yuy and Chang, fer instance? Are those guys into strangeness or something? Cause they'd have to be, to want to pair up with a purple-eyed Traesky demon pilot, eh?" "Ye Gods, what a thought! Yuy, Chang and Maxwell as a weapons-mate threesome? If you didn't kill each other on first sight, I'd say you'd be nearly unconquerable." Duo leaned back against the pillow, wondering why Treize thought the whole suggestion so hilarious. The Lamian man was still shaking his head and chuckling to himself, when the boy drifted off into a comfortable doze. xXxXx "This is all your fault, you realize that?" Sally Po huffed. "Hmm?" Duo asked vaguely over his shoulder. He was composing a trans-stellar mail message at the doctor's communication station, and laboring mightily to get his wandering grammar to toe the mental line. "Treize is once more teasing me about marriage proposals," Sally sighed. "He hadn't mentioned that baneful subject in months, and now here he is, at it again, full force." "What's the matter with that?" Duo asked absently. "I'm too old to relish romantic liaisons. And too nontraditional to contemplate taking a sworn clan mate." "Hey. Ya can't be all that much older than me. Plus yer smart, funny, and pretty as a new Spring dawning. There must be a thousand guys out there, just breaking their poor hearts for the lack of you," he told her, without looking away from the screen. "Duo Maxwell! What a sweet thing to say." She leaned over to kiss him on the top of his head, nuzzling the aroma of his silky amber hair. "Nah. Just the plain truth." It was as well for his peace of mind, he couldn't see the fleetingly wistful look come over the physician's face. "What are you writing so assiduously, anyway?" she finally asked. "Letter. To the editors of 'The Dirtsider's Guide to the Planets'," Duo explained. Sally studied the screen a moment, then read the text out loud. "Dear Sirs: How exactly do YOU define 'vampires'? Sincerely yours, Duo Maxwell, purple-eyed, truth-teller demon. Of Traeskavelon." ~ * ~
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