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Between Night and Day	By : kracken Category: Gundam Wing/AC > AU - Alternate Universe Views: 1261 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing and I don't make any money off of this

Chapter List
- 1-Between Night and Day
- 2-2
- 3-3
- 4-4
- 5-5
- 6-6
- 7-5
- 8-8
- 9-9
- 10-10
- 11-11
- 12-12
- 13-13
- 1
- 2
- 3
If Duo had been in in his wolf form, his ears would have been down and his tail tucked between his legs. He fought the change, though, as the switch came down on every choice part of his body, in a frenzy of blows delivered by his guardian and master Chang Wu Fei. Duo recognized it for cowardice, knew that the urge was only rooted in the mistaken belief that Wu Fei might go easier on a dumb beast, than a man who had made bad decisions.

The switch was thin and the blows delivered with a firm intention to make it sting, not wound. Duo had only to endure a full minute, before his master was tossing it away and confronting a cringing Duo with hands on hips.

"Get dressed!" Wu Fei ordered. "I can't seriously have a conversation with a naked man."

Duo was shivering in reaction to the warm room. He was freezing, after having pelted through cold forest for nearly a mile. His hair was a tangle, full of burs and leaves, and his skin had been marked by bramble thorns. The tall, stone house, tucked between older, wooden buildings that seemed to lean on it for support, and its warm light, coming from the narrow window of its top floor study, had been a welcome beacon and a reassurance that his guardian was still awake. The big fireplace, that walls lined with wondrous tomes of knowledge, and the round table, strewn with his master's work, and the plates of dripping candles that had illuminated it, were familiar and calming. Duo was home and safe, he felt, and Wu Fei, he was certain, would make sure that he stayed that way, despite the intentions of a night creature.

Dressed in a thick, red robe, embroidered slippers on his feet, the oriental features of his guardian and master, were scowling in his anger, black eyes snapping temper and hands on hips. Those seemingly fragile hands, Duo knew, could handle the delicate seeds of a puff flower, with ease, or deliver a killing blow. The man, somewhere in his long life, had mastered a myriad of fighting skills along with his knowledge of the natural, and unnatural world. Though he didn't appear to be a day of the first blush of manhood, Duo knew the great span of years that the man actually owned. Those with the blood of the dragon clan were long lived.

Duo scrambled to his 'room', an alcove that might once have been a closet, but now held his narrow bed and clothes chest. The thin, red leather curtain, his only privacy, was a scrap of something larger,cut awry and with the merchant's mark still burned into a corner; a bull with a crown. Duo had insisted on the curtain when he had reached a certain age for privacy to be important to a young man, but it had been one of the few things that he had demanded of his guardian. Being a child off the streets, he didn't dare complain to the man who's charity had taken him in.

Slipping on a soft tan tunic, and belting it over a darker brown pair of pants that ended at the knee, Duo didn't presume to take time to put on hose and shoes on his chilled feet. he was back in front of Master Wu Fei as soon as he could manage, head bowed and shoulders hunched down submissively. Neither his promptness nor his posture mollified his guardian in the slightest.

"Bark berry on your breath and evening primrose on your person," Wu Fei said as he reached and plucked a leaf out of Duo's hair. "You look as if you rolled in the debris of a forest."

"I-" Duo began but Wu Fei's flared, angry nostrils, and hand raised to command his silence, made him bite his lip and not finish.

"An explanation isn't necessary," his master told him. "You cannot explain willful disobedience, you can only receive punishment for having committed the offense. Recite to me, Duo, the reasons that I gave for not running in the forest at night? Perhaps, together, we can find where your error in thinking occurred?"

Duo blushed, hands clenched inside his long sleeves. It would have been far better to receive a worse beating than the humiliation of recounting, in painful detail, his errors, and allowing his master to show him his mistakes in a way designed to verbally wound him enough not to commit his mistakes again. "Master Wu Fei," Duo said with trepidation, imagining that there was a far better reason, than his wish to avoid his 'lesson', to postpone his punishment. "I=I ran into a... He was... I think... no, I know that he was a night creature. He tried to use his allure on me. I resisted and ran. He may be pursuing me."

Wu Fei didn't change expression. "I've already deduced that, my young, and foolish boy. His scent is on you, stronger than primrose. The scent of old roses."

Duo brought an arm to his nose, and took a deep breath in surprise. It was there, faint, but obvious over the mingled scent of forest loam, bark berry bushes, and primrose. "He didn't touch me, or come close to me. I ran," Duo insisted.

"It's part of the allure," Wu Fei explained patiently, "Their glamour that draws their victims, to them, so that they may feast on their blood. You were the bee to his sweet pollen. You needn't fear that he has followed you, though. They don't feast on the unwilling. It's one of their strongest laws."

"But I've heard-" Duo began, but Wu Fei cut him off impatiently.

"Old tales. Haven't I taught you enough to disregard them?"

Duo nodded, his embarrassment growing. "Yes, I'm sorry. I was surprised to meet him, alone and in the forest, and I panicked. I forgot all of your teachings in my fear. I am a miserable student, and a disobedient ward."

Wu Fei sighed and then glared pointedly as he insisted, once again, "Repeat to me the reasons that I gave for not running in the forest at night?"

Duo knotted his hands into the cloth of his tunic, twisting it unmercifully as he nervously recited, "I may forget myself, drown in instinct so deeply, that I can never recover my human self."

"That should be reason enough," Wu Fei admonished, "But, proceed."

"Hunters may mistake me for game," Duo recited, but his attention, just then, was captured by the flames of the fireplace, the deep blue at the core, that made him think of a vampire's eyes.

"I may encounter wild animals or a wild pack of wolves. As a lone wolf, or even as a human, they may kill me," Duo recited as his thoughts tried to fathom why a creature that depended on the blood of humans, would have sought a place as far from them as possible.

"There is a reoccurring theme inerrant in my teachings, Duo," Wu Fei interrupted, watching his ward's distraction. "They repeat an end result that only a madman would ignore. Loss of self and death."

"I may meet one of the night creatures," Duo ended, as Wu Fei hadn't spoken, and then he came back to himself, blinking at his guardian and mentor as if coming out of a dream. "I did."

"I hadn't been speaking of vampires," Wu Fei sighed as he paced and then sat in a comfortable, red leather chair near the fire. He didn't give Duo permission to sit and Duo didn't presume. "There are deadly creatures in the forests that you can hardly imagine the existence of, student of mine."

"I don't have to fear Vampires?" Duo said in astonishment, grasping only that one thing.

"I didn't say that," Wu Fei replied irritably. "Their glamour is not to be taken lightly. It can ignite, in a human, a powerful attraction that can destroy all reason. Some imagine that they are in love, or wish to be enthralled completely, and pursue the creatures until they ruin themselves."

"Ruin?" Duo repeated.

"Vampires are not humans," Wu Fei told him pointedly, wanting his ward to understand that fact completely."They don't love humans. They only love what runs through their veins. Once that's tasted, a human becomes like tainted meat, highly undesirable to them. They won't drink twice from the same person. A man or woman can pine after the cold creatures, to the exclusion of all else, including their health, and not get a moment's notice from them, again."

"Is their bite that... desirable?" Duo wondered, swallowing hard at the thought of that handsome man sinking teeth into his throat.

"It is said to give an euphoric feeling," Wu Fei explained. "I've heard that some liken it to the ultimate orgasm. Whatever the truth of those tales, the end result is always the same, there won't be a second experience. Attractions to such creatures are doomed from the start."

Duo shivered, even though his chill was gone.

Wu Fei bent, picked up a fire poker, and prodded at the flames of the fire. "It is useless to ask you for vows of obedience. I'm old enough to know young men's minds. I can only warn you of danger and hope for some modicum of common sense from you."

Duo rubbed ruefully where the switch had struck particularly hard. "And the beating?"

"It makes my temper less, if it does nothing to stir your mind to knowledge," Wu Fei replied sourly. He waved the heated poker at Duo. "Bathe and then go to bed. If you've managed not to have supper, perhaps hunger will be another goad to good sense."

The flames had leapt up and the walls were orange with their light. Duo could clearly see that Wu Fei's shadow was not the shadow of a man. Duo had seen it more than a few times, and had tried to guess which type of dragon the shadow represented. It was hard to believe that a creature such as that could manage to fit in the small confines of that study. This time, however, the mystery had lost its allure, and Duo didn't hesitate to take the narrow stairs downward to the pump room to bathe, thinking of dark blue eyes, a fall of chocolate colored hair, and skin as pale as down on a white goose.

TBC
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Between Night and Day