23-Apr-2004
Title: Street Of Dreams 31/?
Author: Lasha Lee
Email: anakerie@cinci.rr.com
Warning: Climbing a tree in Central Park for naughty purposes can lead to hefty fines, high dry-cleaning bills, and possible commitment to Bellevue, especially if you're accompanied by a 17-year-old boy wearing nothing but his underwear.
Pairing: Various
Disclaimer: I STILL don't own any Gundam Wing characters. "Remittance Man" is by Jimmy Buffett.
Sinner on the mainland
He's a sinner on the sea
He looks for absolution
Not accountability
How many destinations
Oh God he's seen them all
He collects his precious pittance
Never a port of call
Rachael was going to kill her.
Rachael had never killed anyone in her life, no matter how often she'd wanted to or how much she'd dreamed about it. Murder was too final, too easy. Mentally reducing them to jelly was much more fun and rewarding.
However, there was no other option about it. As soon as she caught up with Vickie, or whatever her real name was, she was going to slowly and methodically rip out her veins one at a time and strangle her with them, then use her as a marionette.
She paced around the big hotel room, puffing on a cigarette, and glaring now and then at the smoke detector, just daring it to go off and betray her. One beep, and she would have stomped it to death with her bare foot.
The smoke detector reviewed the situation and decided that her cigarette could be their little secret.
She hadn't been all that surprised when she'd woken up and found Vickie gone. Disappointed, yes, but it wasn't unexpected. The other woman definitely had an agenda, and somehow Rachael had fit into it. No harm, no foul, and they'd both seemed to enjoy their time together. If it was meant to be nothing but a one-night-stand, then she'd accept it and smile at the memory. There'd been other women before Vickie; there would be a lot more after her.
That was before she'd reached for her computer and discovered it missing.
Someone women raised children; less maternal women raised flowers. Rachael's pride and joy, her baby, was that computer. It had followed her everywhere around the world, and now across the galaxy. When her boat had sunk off the coast of Guam, she'd swum to shore one-handed, holding the computer above her head with the other one. Each year she paid a hefty sum to have it upgraded, and she'd refused all offers to sell her a newer model.
She and Kimiko were family.
And now, for whatever reason, Vickie had abducted her little Kimiko. She'd snatched her away from her mother, and she would pay in blood for that.
Not that Vickie would get very far. Even if the other woman managed to crack her password (Yujicola), Rachael had encrypted all of the important files. Reporters weren't above stealing stories as they were being typed, and no half-wit cub was going to get credit for a single line of Rachael's hard-earned reports.
She'd been extra careful as well not to include any damaging personal information on the computer. She kept her journal on there, but the entries would reveal nothing Earth-shattering. There were some chances just not worth taking.
Vickie was obviously another reporter: that was the only thing she could come up with. She'd suspected as much, but this just proved it. Too lazy to do her own research, she'd decided to hijack Rachael's.
Which would have made a lot more sense if she'd stolen the computer AFTER Rachael had actually written her report. But even if Vickie was amazing in bed, she didn't seem to be too tightly wrapped.
Her big fear was that finding the computer useless to her, Vickie would toss poor little Kimiko into a trash can or worse into the ocean. She imagined some species of Setan fish laying eggs inside of the cracked monitor, or spawing all over the broken keys.
Over her dead body!
There was a frantic knocking on the door. "Ms. Yamamoto! Ms. Yamamoto! Are you all right? I'm smelling smoke!"
Rachael snubbed out the butt of her cigarette. Personally, she preferred the smell of blood right now.
Remittance Man
Black sheep of the family clan
Broke too many rules along the way
Remittance Man
So far away from home
No they'll never understand
The Remittance Man
"Grady David Landagren." Shan peered over Gage's shoulder at the computer screen at the grainy image. "He's cute. What kind of relative is he?"
"Some kind of uncle, I think." Gage added the man's name to a chart, below a list of others. "It's kind of hard to keep track, you know. They all were all so fruitful and... multiplyful."
Although Gage had never attempted to contact his biological mother, her comments about him being the descendant of all sorts of less-than-wholesome men had sparked his interest. He'd started collecting all the information he could about his infamous ancestors, which turned out to be more than he and Shan had expected. It seemed that at least in this case, Laura had told them the truth. There were quite a few of them; Gage had come by his wild side honestly.
"So what was Grady? Pirate? Highwayman? Purse-snatcher? Serial killer?" Shan asked.
"Remittance Man."
"A what?"
"A Remittance Man."
"And that is..."
"He was such an embarrassment to his family that they actually paid him a monthly sum to stay away." Gage explained cheerfully, making a few notes. "He was a raging alcoholic, and a womanizer. The rumors are a bit vague after all this time, but apparently the final straw was him plying his charms on the girls of a local finishing academy. They were most receptive."
"Of course they would be; he's your ancestor." Shan laughed, kissing the top of his head. "How many did he seduce?"
"Over a hundred. At least, that's all they could prove. It could have been twice that. He seduced their headmistress as well. Apparently part of the reason his family shipped him off was to save him from the wrath of her husband, and a hundred and something very angry Papas."
He closed the page and stood up. "He died before he was 35. No one is sure how, but somehow someone ended up setting him on fire. Poor Uncle Grady; he drank so much he probably went up like a Roman candle."
"Well." Shan wrapped his arms around his mate's waist. "I'm glad you didn't end up like him. You broke the cycle."
"Barely. If I hadn't met you, I might have ended up exactly like him."
"Not exactly." Shan shook his head firmly. "You wouldn't have accepted their money."
The blond man glanced around the room. "Sometimes, I wonder..."
"What?"
A man of empty pockets
From jingling his change
The idleness and grieving
For all that he retains
By the harbor lights of Sydney
Or the Bora Bora moon
He recites his sad confession
To the seagulls and the loons
"Nothing. Just thinking about how different things might have been without you, Dearest One." He leaned forward and kissed Shan deeply.
"You almost burned to death because of me anyway." Shan reminded him with a grin, when he could breath again.
Gage glanced down at the scars on the back of his hand, which had never faded with time. "Burning to death for you, my love, would have been acceptable. Burning to death because you've managed to impregnate your captain's wife, mother, daughter, and probably dog isn't."
"It just took Mother Nature a few generations to get it right, that's all."
"Meg would say Mother Nature still has her work count out for her." Gage tried, and failed, to hide a the flash of pain in his eyes.
"Are you sure you're going to be up to this tonight? Dealing with your family?"
"My family..." Gage moved toward the closet and began searching through the clothing hanging there. "Sometimes I think the Landagrens might be easier to handle. I think I could easily hold my own with a bunch of swindlers and boozehounds. At the very least, the party would be livelier."
"They're not so bad." Shan sat down on the bed. "Well, Meg is, but I like Amy. I think your parents really love you."
"Well, at least they're not trying to pay me to stay on Dera." Gage's head vanished into a soft green sweater and appeared out the other end. "What about Lucrezia? What do you think of her?"
"I'm not sure. Sometimes she acts like she wants to make peace with you, and then other times... I just don't know what to think. I think she likes you, and she's trying hard not to like you."
"We have a truce while Dad is sick. As soon as he's gone we'll go back to hating each other." Gage sat next to him and trailed his fingers up Shan's right arm. "Won't we?"
"I don't know. I know that it doesn't have to be that way. But if she gets close to you, Meg will hate her for it. So she's got a fine line to walk here. The solution is to somehow get Meg to like you."
"That solution is 2 parts futility, and 3 parts sulfuric acid."
"I didn't say it was going to be easy, but you love a challenge."
"Can't I just take your sister instead?"
"If you can pry her away from Joey Mercer, be my guest. I think he's got dibs now."
Shan grabbed his shoes from under the bed and slid them on. "And we better get a move on if we're going, Sweet Prince."
"You're right, you know." Gage laughed out loud. "If I can make your father like me, I can make anyone. I'm going to make peace with my sister if it kills both of us! Dad would want it that way. Maybe... maybe we can really be a family. Meg is the key to all of it. She's cost me my last Christmas card!"
"That's my boy." Shan took his hand. "She won't know what hit her."
Well you can claim that you were born a prince
But you're the only one you can convince
Survivor with no livelihood
That you could ever make it good
But still you dream of what you can pretend
He was terrified.
He hadn't meant to be bad, but it had been such a pretty day. Too nice to stay inside his room and take a nap like his daddy had told him to. Jazz didn't have to take a nap; Jazz was a big boy and no one ever made him take naps. No one made Linra ever take a nap, and he chose to ignore the fact that they still made Rosie sometimes.
So he'd pushed open the window and climbed outside, dropping to the ground below. He was three, after all. Not some baby.
No one had seen him take off into the fields to play, and he'd giggled to himself about that. He'd fooled them all; he was so much smarter than anyone else in his family. He'd come back when he felt like it, and they'd never find him.
He'd knelt down to watch some bugs carry leaves, and then had followed them to see if he could find their nest. The asheria was tall over his head, and he couldn't see anything but stalk after stalk all around him, but he didn't care.
He'd found the hole where the bugs had come out of, and watched for a long while as they scurried around, crawling over his hands and tickling his fingers with their tiny legs. He giggled again.
He realized after a while that the bugs had gotten a little harder to see. It was too early to get dark, but the reason became clear when the first drops of rain slashed him.
He decided finally that he should go back home; it had gotten a little colder and he was getting hungry. He wondered if Papa and Otosan would be angry with him, and tried to think of a good excuse.
It began to rain harder suddenly, the wind picking up and blowing the stalks all around him. He jumped in the air, trying to see which way his house was, but he wasn't tall enough to clear the top of the huge plants. It was so dark now that he could barely make out his hand in front of his face.
He began to run, slipping and sliding in the mud, and falling down several times. But it seemed that no matter how fast he ran, the stalks never gave way to open field. There was nothing in the entire world but dark and rain and endless asheria, and he sobbed loudly, trying to shield his eyes from the stinging water and the debris the wind was throwing into him.
Then he heard a voice over the roar:
"LUKKKKKEEE!! LUUUUUUKEEE, WHERE ARE YOUUUUU?"
"DADDDDDYYYY!" He wailed back, the wind ripping the words out of his mouth. "DADDDDDY, I'm SCARED!"
The stalks bent and shifted, and suddenly everything was okay again. His father grabbed him up and shielded him against his chest, running toward the house as fast as he could.
They reached the doorway and ducked inside the kitchen, Luke still crying against Duo's shoulder and clinging hard to him.
"It's okay, Luke. It's all over now. You're home, you're safe. Shh, Daddy's got you."
He'd been punished for sneaking out, but not severely. Now that he was an adult, Luke could appreciate the fact that Duo had been just as frightened that day as he had been himself. He'd asked him about it once.
"Of course I was terrified. My baby was lost in the middle of a monsoon!" Duo had smacked him very lightly on the arm. "When I first went in there and saw you missing I thought you'd been kidnapped!"
The next year, everything had turned upside down. The Wronith had come to Dera, and the asheria had burned to the ground, and the fields that were the Maxwell children's playground had nearly become their deathbed. Duo's leg had been mangled, and Luke became aware for the first time of the fragility and true value of his family.
That horrible time had changed him, the same as it had changed them all. He hadn't developed Shan's phobia of fire, but he had developed a desire to keep his family safe that was so strong it nearly overwhelmed him at times. Back then... back then he hadn't been able to do much. He'd only been four years old. Whether it was from the Wronith, or the terrible truth about his biological father, or from whatever demons were lurking inside of him, he'd keep them all from harm or die trying.
There were worse things than death, after all.
He found himself walking down a pretty street, something out of a storybook or a movie. Trees,flowers, animals romping around with children. It was early evening, and he could smell dinner cooking in the various houses along the way. The yards were all neatly trimmed, and the shutters on the homes were painted. It was almost too perfect, he decided. It was as if someone had designed it with a child's idea of perfection in mind, and the result was something that was nice enough on the surface and appeared phony if you looked closer. Even the children seemed pre-designed; all wearing similar clothing and all smiling at him with perfect teeth. He smiled back.
He'd been here earlier, but hadn't paid much attention to it, not the way he was doing now. Now it seemed as if he was noticing everything; from the smell of the grass to the way the wind tugged at the back of his jacket.
He was being too hard to the designer of this place, probably. He was just used to his farm, where nothing was ever cookie-cutter or conventional and they liked it that way. The Maxwells and the Chang twins had grown up free-range; even if Wufei hadn't exactly been thrilled by that. After all, he lived in a neighborhood like this. Meishel and Shan would have probably grown up exactly like these kids if they hadn't had the farm to escape to.
Luke suppressed a shiver at the thought of his Meishel growing up a docile little conformist.
No, not his Meishel... not any longer.
He swallowed the bitter thoughts and pulled his jacket tighter around him. He still had a few hours to kill before he was due at the meeting. He had wanted to get a feel for his enemy; wanted to be able to look at the homes and know instantly which ones contained the Deran Pure, but it was impossible.
He was terrified.
End Part 31
(:./lasha/street31)
