29-Jan-2004
Last Resort Ch.1 (2/??)
Authors: CleverYoungThief and Arithion
Rating: NC-17, for later chapters
Warnings: Language, violence, yaoi, angst, death, gore
Archive: GWA
Pairing: Eventual 1x2x5, 3x4
Genre: AU/Angst/Action
Timeline: TWT
Spoilers: None
Disclaimer: Don't own 'em. Don't sue. College kids are like L2 kids; we got nothin'.
Feedback: Please? ^_^
Notes: This is our first co-authored fic. *heh* Arith is pretty much on Quatre, Duo, and Treize duty, while I'm taking Heero, Trowa, and Wufei.
"'Cause it makes me that much stronger
Makes me work a little bit harder
It makes me that much wiser
So thanks for making me a fighter
Made me learn a little bit faster
Made my skin a little bit thicker
Makes me that much smarter
So thanks for making me a fighter."
--- Christina Aguilera, Fighter
"Welcome, welcome to the human circus
Let me show you the reality of these
last few wild and dangerous men."
--- Black Bomb A, Human Circus
Quatre had never been a heavy sleeper. There was a noise somewhere in his room and it woke him instantly. He sat up, ears focusing on the sound, eyes focusing on its source; the door handle.
Drawing on the training pounded into him since he could walk, Quatre began to creep from the bed. He didn't make a sound. The silence in the room was thick, cloying. yet strangely comforting.
Quatre flinched as the quiet was broken, instinctively ducking as the shards of the now broken window flew into the room. At the same time the door had burst open, and figures were pouring through both openings.
He rolled to the floor, mindless of the glass biting into his skin causing red rivulets of blood to lend his appearance a somewhat macabre air. In a swift movement he was back on his feet, trying to judge his opponents and dropping himself into fighting stance.
Suddenly his neck stung. It burned. He clapped a hand up to it, trying to ignore the solid shadows closing in on him, and felt the shaft of a dart. His eyes fogged over and his last thought tried to place just what type of tranquilliser they had just shot him with.
~~Boom boom boom. Boom boom boom boom.~~
Trowa laid on his bunk, humming softly, feeling the minutes tick away like hours as he stared up blindly into the darkness. In the wing across the building, he could still hear that terrible thudding sound, and knew exactly what it was.
/ ...Heero. /
Although he had been unsure what to think of the seemingly vicious boy he met his first day in stir, he knew better than to listen to the rumors. Rumors had a way of turning into total bullshit, in his humble opinion, and he thought it was better to see for himself.
He liked what he saw.
///" ...What's your name?"
"Barton. Trowa Barton. Yours?"
"They call me Yuy."
"I've heard things. What are you really doing time for?"
"Nobody ever told me when your foster parents beat you, you aren't supposed to hit them back."
"Ah."///
And that was that.
Then there was the escape attempts. If there was ever an award for most attempts to break out of Last Resort, Heero Yuy would have won it a thousand times over. In the six months that Trowa had been staying at the Resort, he had seen a couple of other people make attempts. But no one had gotten closer than Heero.
And every time he tried, someone got hurt.
But after living in the Resort for over half a year, Trowa was starting to think that anyone who didn't try to get out was a little unbalanced. In the reformatory, they had to deal with rats, roaches, and lice, but the real danger came from deviants themselves.
Of course, Trowa thought, smiling a little in the dark ...that's not so much a problem, when the dangerous ones are you.
There was constant fighting. The guards were ignorant, brutal, and corrupt. But some of the kids in the Resort weren't dangerous at all. They had been sent by strict parents for petty theft or some other silly disobedience.
And so they languished in cages for months alongside other young men who really were dangerous.
He had seen a few suicides since he came. Not a day went by when someone didn't get shanked, or that he didn't have to cover his ears to shut out the screams of a deviant being beaten or raped.
Trowa sighed. The place assaulted all of his senses. At least maximum security is more quiet, he thought.
The loud, mind-deafening music played by some of the deviants in the minimum security ward was enough to drive anyone to beat the living hell out of someone. Everything was slimy, filthy, and hard, never soft and clean, not even the bed. The food was so terrible it wasn't even fit for the rats, but the smell was worst of all: a mix of shit, piss, and disinfectant.
Trowa could shut his eyes, and meals were only three times a day, but there was no escaping that stink.
/ If I was in high-school right now, I'd be deciding what college to go into, / Trowa thought, unable to keep a bitter grin off his face.
/ ...So much for that. /
It was dark when Quatre woke and he was decidedly uncomfortable, but couldn't figure out why. His head felt furry and his eyes were heavy. At first he couldn't orientate himself. He couldn't figure out why it felt like he was lying on a sheet of metal. Then his eyes snapped open as the memory resurfaced through the residue of drugs.
As the fog lifted from his mind he registered the restraints holding him down and tugged at them. His movements weren't frantic, they were angry. He didn't feel helpless, he felt furious. There wasn't time to feel sorry for himself, he was too busy planning vengeance.
Calming himself for a moment, he forced his eyes to become used to the strange darkness of the room? No. it was a cabin. A frown crossed Quatre's face as his eyes sought out the opening in the wall that should show him where he was.
His eyes narrowed as he took in the portal like window that decorated the wall to the left of him; he was in a space-shuttle.
Things had just gotten a lot more complicated.
The door to his right opened, and he resisted the urge to try and crane his neck to see who it was. He figured he would see them soon enough.
He was right.
However, he was not expecting the person to be dressed as they were. It made a cold shiver run down his back. The person was wearing a guard uniform. Quatre had to bite back the repulsion that rose in him at the mere thought of what that uniform stood for, yet the meaning ran like a litany through his mind.
Repression. To make sure that no one who came in contact with the guards bottled up anything that made them less than perfectly normal.
Domination. To make those who came in contact with the guards feel their apparent inferiority to every other living thing on the face of the earth.
Control. No person who is watched over by the guards will be allowed control of their own lives.
Tuition. Every person under the eye of the guards knows nothing and therefore must learn the lessons they are taught.
Deference. Every person under the control of the guards must realise the true low level of their rung on the respect ladder.
Possession. All people under the power of the guards must acknowledge that they own nothing, that they are owned. That they are worthless.
Punishment. Should any person under the guards' watch go against the applicable rules, they will be accordingly disciplined.
The guard was standing in front of Quatre now. His brown uniform crisp and perfect. The needle in his hand was less so. Try as he might, Quatre could not struggle and had to watch the needle sink into soft flesh.
Without a word, the guard left the room, leaving Quatre to stare at the ceiling as the fog came slowly back to claim him. His anger wasn't lessened by that fog, instead it seemed to feed off it. He knew where he was headed now.
The Last Resort.
As the pounding sound from solitary faded to silence, Trowa finally closed his eyes, one of the first things Heero told him when he came running through his head as he let sleep drag him into a more comforting kind of darkness.
/// If somebody looks at you wrong, you *have* to fight him. If he talks bad to you or disrespects you in any way, you *go after him.* And if it comes down to killing him, do it. Remember this: if you don't kill him...
...he'll kill you.///
Quatre came awake as the shuttle clip locked into the loading docks. He could feel it and a shudder at the finality of it all ran down his spine. The door opened and the same guard entered, yet another syringe in his hand.
The blond knew what they were going to do to him. Hell he had studied the place. It had been part of his training as heir.
The Resort was owned and developed by his father.
He suppressed a moan as the man injected the drug into his system. It was almost as if he could feel the coordination begin to leak from his limbs. The fast working drug fired his nerves before numbing them, making his body unreceptive to any directions given by him.
The guard glanced at his watch and nodded to himself, before unlocking the restraints on Quatre. He picked the youth up, carrying him over his shoulder in a fireman's carry.
Could Quatre have moved his face muscles enough to glare, he would have. Instead his face remained slack and expressionless, but his mind broiled with hatred.
All Quatre could see was the floor, and the backside of the guard carrying him. If he wasn't so angry, Quatre would have been humiliated at the way he was being carried. As it was he was too busy running through a thousand different possibilities in his mind.
He could hear voices, but refused to focus on them not wanting to chance that they could be talking about him.
Quatre wasn't sure how much time had passed. A door was opened and they passed through yet another before he was unceremoniously dumped onto what felt like a leather armchair.
His head was positioned for him, and he would have scowled at the guard if he could have. When the man moved away, Quatre's eyes fell on the ginger haired man at the desk in front of him.
"Mr. Winner." The tone of the voice was almost insulting. An arrogant inclination of his head made Quatre wish he could move enough to spit on the man. Instead he chose to put the glower he wanted on his face, into his eyes.
The man laughed and motioned to the guard, who struck Quatre across the face. His head snapped to one side and the blond couldn't even flick out his tongue to gather the drop of blood he could feel forming. He hadn't expected the blow at all.
A skulking figure sat in the shadows of the tiny, sunless room, biding his time. He was a creature honed by pain and torture, refined by rage and hatred. He crouched in the black of the cell, hands clenched into fists, tendons taut as wire, muscles as tense as rock.
Heero Yuy, Deviate 2457, was almost asleep in his isolation cell, alert even as he rested, eyelids fluttering wearily, when he heard the sound of boots in the hallway. He held his breath in the darkness, cobalt eyes gleaming in the pitch, listening with every fiber of his merciless being.
Before coming to the Resort, Heero Yuy had been a homeless ward of the state, and nothing more. Now, tempered by fury, he had been changed into an enemy of everything. He hated blindly and without the faintest spark of reason. Heero hated the guards and the thousand humiliations they forced on him. He hated the other deviants, he hated Treize... hated the very steel that made up the walls of his prison.
He stood silently in the darkness and walked over to the door in his bare feet, peering out of the screened glass window at the door that was his only view of the outside world.
/ Wonder how Trowa is doing... /
He had been in solitary for six weeks.
He watched, eyes narrowing as the guards carried a blond kid down the hall. Heero bared his teeth silently in an unconscious snarl as he realized where they were taking him.
They were taking him to Treize.
He slammed his fists against the cell door, still wearing that terrifying snarl on his face. He hit it as hard as he could, over and over, the sound echoing through the halls.
/ Welcome to hell, newbie. Welcome to hell. /
"You in there, Yuy! Shut the hell up! Don't make us drug you again, you fucking brat!"
Heero closed his eyes and pounded harder, smiling grimly, waiting for them to come in after him. He looked forward to it.
He always got a chance to hurt a few of them before they got him down.
"Now, Mr. Winner." The man behind the desk leaned forward, twining his fingers restlessly. "Your heritage gets you no quarter here. You will be dealt with the same way as the rest of these delinquents. Rebel in any way that can be seen, and you will be dealt with. We are under strict instructions to give you no special treatment whatsoever. And trust me, we plan on fulfilling that duty."
Quatre's face paled a little, and he had to dampen the fire he could feel in his eyes. Bit by bit he could feel his limbs reawakening and wondered mildly if they had taken his 'breeding' into consideration when administering the drugs. He kept himself limp, knowing that not even his father knew the full extent of his own son's abilities.
The ginger-haired man smiled coldly. You will be taken to your quarters and left to recover there. I will be watching you closely.
Quatre schooled his features, keeping them slack and forcing himself to dangle his limbs as he was once again hoisted over the guard's shoulders. His mind was working a hundred miles per hour.
He focused himself, calling on his training and concentrating on his center. Quatre knew that this was probably going to be useless, but be damned if he was going to take this lying down.
The blond drew a deep, steadying breath and moved as fast as he possibly could right then. It wasn't as fast as he would have liked, but it took the guard by surprise. His hands moved to the man's neck, dropping him to the floor with a precise pinch. As the man fell, Quatre rolled, coming up to dance on the balls of his feet.
He felt groggy and weak, but adrenaline was the greatest drug he knew of, and he was feeding off it. His eyes flashed up and down the corridor as he registered guards moving in his direction.
He'd known it was futile but he held his head proudly as they approached him. He was backed awkwardly against a locked door of some sort. Quatre wasn't going to go easily. The first two guards that approached him were disabled and lay unconscious on the ground. His eyes almost glowed with the energy coursing through his body.
Cobalt eyes widened as the blond, who had looked like he wouldn't last a week in this hellhole, began to fight back. Heero watched the boy fight avidly with a detached eye, a soft sound of awe coming from him as his eyes tracked carefully placed strikes and the falling bodies of the guards. The kid was no pushover, that much was certain.
Heero's chilling laughter was a hideous mix of murder, rage, and triumph. He beat on the door harder, flecks of blood beginning to dot the floor at his feet. His pounding set a vicious backbeat for the fight outside his cell.
The boy fought well. Of course, he was still fresh.
They hadn't had a chance to break him yet.
/ You get 'em, blondie. You fuck them up. /
/ I think this could be the beginnings of a beautiful friendship... /
Two more made a pass at him, again deftly deflected by the young man. None of his blows were to kill, all were to disable and render unconscious. He hated violence, but would use whatever was necessary.
But he was tired, and his muscles hurt. an after-effect of the drug.
His eyes flashed with fury as a gasp escaped his chest and he fell to his knees. Glancing down at his chest where the pain came from, he saw a tazer dart and registered what it had been.
Booted legs stopped in front of him and he raised his head to look at the ginger haired man, a scowl on his otherwise handsome face.
"Mr. Winner. That was a very unfortunate choice of action. I did warn you."
Quatre had enough control to do what he had wanted to before. He cleared his throat and spit on the man's shiny boots, a look of loathing flowing through his eyes. "You are what my father made you, Treize."
The older man laughed cruelly, motioning to the guards who delivered another shot.
Quatre's body convulsed and a sharp cry rang out in defiance from his lips. But darkness was claiming him, the drugs and electricity in his system were not mixing well.
Treize leaned down as the blonde was slipping away and spoke.
"And you will be what *I* make *you*, by the time you leave here."
Heero froze as he saw Quatre tagged with the tazer and collapse in front of the door. His eyes were narrowed in the darkness, and he swallowed hard. The rising hope that he had felt surging in him sputtered and died, like a crushed fire. He let out the breath he hadn't realized he had been holding in a rush.
/ No... no... /
/ Shit. /
He beat the door one last time with his fist, a frustrated, beaten sound, then glared daggers silently out the window at Treize, cobalt almost seeming to glow out of the darkness. His bangs fell in his face like a feral animal's mane, and his expression beneath the matted, choppy hair somehow managed to be blank and savage at the same time.
He wished there was no steel between him and the man who had put him in this place.
Pale blue eyes flashed up from where they rested on the blond collapsed on the floor. Treize let his gaze fall on the window of the door behind the unconscious youth. His eyes narrowed.
The snarl on the face of the chocolate haired... animal... in that room, made his blood run cold. He tried not to remember the multiple disciplinary actions that had been taken against that boy. And still a growl from that throat made any man fear for his life.
Treize did not show any of his feelings on his face. He simply smirked up at the blue-eyed youth and let a sneer cross his face before standing up and motioning to the guards to take the blond away.
Making a mental note to keep the two separated as much as possible, Treize headed back to his office.
Heero Yuy certainly didn't need another target, and as much as Quatre was to receive no special treatment. he also wasn't supposed to end up beaten to a pulp.
End Part 2
(:./cyt/last2)
