Pairing: Hints of 1x2 and appearances from the other pilots
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Humor, silliness, cross-dressing, X-over of the random kind (Harry Potter, Wizard of Oz), scenes stolen from Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and twisted to author’s desires…and furries! Egads!
Notes: A break from all the angst since I intend to go back into it as soon as possible! So yes, the happy bunnies decided to co-operate. Please forgive any and all errors you might encounter. This was sort of written on the fly.
Duo Maxwell, a strapping young lad of seventeen, was bored.
Let’s scratch that, since we all know that most stories beginning with lines like that tend to end up in an all too familiar pattern.
Duo Maxwell, a strapping young lad of seventeen, was about as excited as one taking a long trip across a desert with no provisions. Although it had been raining all morning and the air was thick with the smell of wet grass and wood, the skies had finally cleared well enough for Duo to spend the rest of the afternoon outdoors. Grabbing a book from the bookshelf – he did not bother checking what it was – he made his way to the patio and fell into the rocking chair with a soft grunt.
“Ah, I guess I’ll just read a chapter today,” he murmured to himself as he opened the book to begin. However, a noise from the bushes beside the house; caused him to drop it in a hurry.
“Who’s there?!” he cried out, rising to his feet to peer into the lush foliage.
For a moment, nothing was seen (except for the rustling leaves), when suddenly, OUT jumped the most amazing sight! It was a large bunny rabbit with huge floppy ears and the cutest and puffiest tail he had ever seen.
(Although, it was funny to see just how much the bunny looked like his good friend, Quatre Rebarba Winner.)
“Oh dear! Oh dear!” Quatre the Blond Bunny cried out, holding up the biggest stopwatch Duo had ever seen in his life. “I shall be late! Oh, I shall be late!”
“Late for what?!” Duo asked with great curiosity. Of course we shan’t question why he is now dressed in a pretty blue dress, white stockings and shiny black shoes since he looks quite cute in the outfit.
Quatre Bunny started as if goosed and spun around to face the young girl…boy. “Why, I shall be late for King Heero’s ball, you nincompoop! Oh, he’ll have my head for sure. He will! He will!”
“Wait!” Duo cried out as the bunny began to hop towards a rabbit hole. Duo never knew the little piece of land even had those to begin with, but he was a curious young man and wouldn’t have missed this opportunity at all. As the bunny disappeared from sight, Duo was quick to dive after it…and promptly screamed for his life as he began to fall down the longest rabbit hole ever known to man.
But this was a rather unusual fall, for just as quickly as he had slid in, he began to floating ever so slowly. Down, down, down, down, down the rabbit hole he went. Would this fall never end, he wondered?
“Darn,” he mumbled. “If I had known this hole would be this long, I would have asked for a shortcut.”
He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled into the darkness below him. “Hey, Quatre bunny! Are you down there?! Where’s the frickin’ shortcut?!”
But there was no reply and it was getting awfully boring floating around with nothing to do. And so as most boys - who tend to be bored out of their skulls ninety percent of the time - he began to think of some rather weird things.
“Hmm, I wonder if this King Heero is into furries. I wouldn’t be all that surprised. Maybe they’re all into furries! And they have furry babies and breed them and oh my god! What if the world was ruled by furries and I’m the only human left?! What am I going to…oooff!”
With no warning at all, he fell flat on his bottom, stifling a small cry as he realized that the hole had finally come to an end.
“About time too,” he muttered and promptly rose to his feet as he noticed Quatre Bunny still running ahead of him in the distance. “Damn, he’s fast! Wait for me Quatre bunny!”
“Oh my poor whiskers! I shall be oh too late!” the Bunny said as he made a turn around the corner.
Duo took off after the furry creature, now aware that he was in a long hall filled with doors on each side. He got to a dead-end and to his chagrin, the bunny was nowhere in sight.
“Perhaps he went through one of these doors,” he reckoned as he began to try each one. But to his dismay, no matter which door he tried, none of them would open. Suddenly (and believe me it seemed to appear from nowhere) he stumbled upon a three-legged table made of glass with nothing but a golden key on it.
“Awesome! It must be a key to one of the doors!” Glad at his discovery, he tried to open all the doors again, but the keyholes were all too big for the tiny key.
“Ah man! This blows!” he wailed in misery. “Oh wait…I didn’t see that one before.”
He pushed aside a curtain and sure enough, there was the tiniest door he had ever seen. He fell to his knees and slid the golden key through, grinning in delight as it opened to show the most beautiful garden he had ever seen.
“Oh, how I wish I could go in there, but I’m much, much too big to fit through the door.” Feeling very, very unhappy, Duo rose to his feet and went back to the table to see if there was perhaps another key he might have missed the first time around. But to his surprise, sitting on the table was a bottle with the words ‘DRINK ME!’ written on it.
“Drink me?!” He held up the bottle and eyed it warily, wondering when and why someone would put – what looked like root beer – for him to drink. “Hmm…and what if it’s poisoned, huh? I don’t think I want to die just yet. But…but maybe if I drink it, it will make me get smaller and I could go through that door.”
He opened it, sniffed it (had a nice fruity smell) and deciding that things couldn’t possibly get any worse, he held it up for a toast, “Bottoms up!”, and took a gulp.
Perhaps it was too big of a gulp because Duo felt himself shrinking rather rapidly. “Holy *bleep*! Stop before I disappear all together!”
Thankfully, the drink seemed to ‘hear’ his desperate cry and stopped him at a whopping ten inches.
“Yes! Now, I can get through that door!”
But alas! For poor Duo had forgotten the key on the table and there was no way he could open the door, neither could he climb the table – which now looked enormous to him – to get the key.
“Ah, damn it!” Of course he let loose a string of other colorful words, but we shall not go into them for this is a family story.
After a few more moments of angst, he gazed upon a small piece of cake underneath the table with the words ‘EAT ME!” written on it.
“Eat you, huh? Hopefully, you’re going to make me bigger so I can get the key and then make me smaller so I can go through the door.” And placing a hand upon his head, he took a bite (it tasted quite delicious) and waited for something to happen.
“Hmm…I don’t feel any different,” he remarked and feeling quite frustrated, he gobbled it all. “Oh, no…oh, no…I think I’m growing a wee bit too big now.”
And oh what a monstrous sight it was, for Duo was becoming so large that his feet now seemed so very far away and tiny to him!
“Goodbye, dear feet!” he said as he began to feel more moments of intense angst approaching. “And now, I wonder who’s going to dress you up since I can no longer reach you. I reckon I’ll start sending mail to my own feet so they can dress themselves since I can’t do it anymore. Let’s see, perhaps the address would go a little something like this…”
Duo’s Left Feet Esq
Hearthrug
Near the heater
(with much love, Duo)
But oh, what nonsense he was talking and as his head struck the ceiling, he had to slide to his knees to make himself much more comfortable.
“Oh damn,” he wailed. “Now, I’m never going to get through that door because I’m such a gigantic freak show. Kids, let this be a lesson to you. Never eat or drink anything that asks you to do so.”
And so he began to cry. Large, fat, tears of sorrow and suffering. He tried to make himself stop, but he couldn’t. Never had he been subjected to such rapid changes of puberty all in the space of an hour. But out of the darkness, a tiny and familiar voice was heard, causing our poor damsel in distress to cease his tears immediately.
“Oh, my whiskers! Oh my, whiskers! King Heero will have my head for sure!”
Why it was Quatre Bunny! And Duo, ever so glad to have company again, called out happily. “Quatre bunny! You’re back!”
The blond creature gave a violent start at the thunderous sound and dropped his kid gloves and fan in his haste before bolting off like the hounds of hell were on his fluffy white tail.
“Oh, come back, Quatre bunny! I didn’t mean to scare you!” Duo begged but knew it was hopeless, for the furry creature was out of sight again. Grumbling beneath his breath, he picked up the fan and began to cool himself as best he could. Being big and stuck in a tight hallway was no fun.
“Geez, at this rate, I’m never going to get out of here,” he said with a sulk, hardly aware that the fan seemed to either be growing bigger or he was rapidly shrinking again. “I swear when I get back home I’m going to have a good talking to….aaaaaarmmmgfffhhggrhhgg!!”
I’m drowning!
He flailed his arms and legs like a dying man before settling down and forcing himself to concentrate. After several minutes of deep thought, it finally dawned on him.
“I’m swimming in my own tears! Wouldn’t you know it!” For you see, Duo’s tears of angst, when he was huge, had been nothing but tiny puddles to him and now that he was little, he was literally neck high in them. Needless to say, he was glad he was no longer so gigantic. It would have been a pain trying to make his way out of this place. Now, if he could only find that key…
But to his chagrin, he could no longer find the table, the key or the door leading to the beautiful garden!
“Oh, I say this is all terribly trying! I’m getting quite impatient and…argh!”
He slapped his hands over his ears as a deafening sound echoed through the dark hallway. The floor seemed to shake beneath his feet (oddly enough he had reached solid ground without realizing it) and something seemed to be rushing towards him at an alarmingly fast rate.
“What in the world…?!”
“Out of the way!” came a loud booming voice as Duo felt a hand upon his arm, pulling him away from the path of the longest and reddest train he had ever seen. Just as suddenly as it had sped by, it came to a screeching halt beside him…or rather them. Duo could just make out the words,
‘Hogwarts Express’
…written in gold upon it.
“Hog…warts?”
“Do you have your ticket please?” the man who had rescued him asked and Duo spun around to finally take a good look at him. What he saw almost had him choking back a loud laugh. Why, it was none other than a boy who looked like his other good friend, Trowa Barton! He was dressed in a long dark robe of shimmering gold and silver with a matching pointy hat on his head. And in his right hand, he held a wooden staff with its head curled in the shape of a snake, while the other one was outstretched towards Duo.
All that’s left is a beard and you could pass for Merlin!
“My ticket?” Duo asked in confusion. “What ticket?”
“Did you not pass Platform Nine and Three-quarters?” Merlin Trowa asked in bemusement.
“Nope. I came down the rabbit hole and boy was it some trip…”
“Well, this is a quandary,” Merlin Trowa interrupted with a wave of his hand. “You cannot get into Hogwarts if you do not have your ticket.”
“But I don’t want to go to Hogwarts, whatever that is,” Duo explained patiently, while wondering why no one was coming out of the train or going into it. It was rather creepy with the way it just stood silently beside them. “I want to go to the beautiful garden to see King Heero…who’s into furries.”
Merlin Trowa blinked. “King Heero? Why would you want to see King Heero?” He leaned closer to whisper as if afraid of someone else hearing them. “Do you not know of King Heero’s legendary Sentence of Doom?”
“Legendary…whatwhich?”
“OFF WITH HIS HEAD!” Merlin Trowa suddenly bellowed causing poor Duo to cover his ears again at the tremendous sound.
“What the *bleep!*” Duo yelled. (Please remember that this is a family story and no swear words will be allowed. Thank you.)
Merlin Trowa nodded solemnly. “Indeed. But since you are not going to Hogwarts, I guess I have no choice but to leave you here. The Cheshire Cat should be around here somewhere. I’m sure he will be able to lead you to the castle, if you’re that desperate to see the King.”
“Hey, wait a minute!” Duo cried out as he noticed Merlin Trowa about to board the train. “Can’t this train just take me there?”
“No, I’m afraid it can’t, Duo,” Merlin Trowa replied with a slow nod. “I shall see you later! Now follow the yellow brick road and it shall take you to the castle or the Cheshire Cat…whichever comes first.”
“Ah, but what does it look like…!”
But the train was already speeding out of sight and soon enough, our poor Duo is left all alone in the middle of the woods (do not ask me how he got there), staring at his shoes and wondering whatever to do next.
“Aww man, what a stingy guy. He could have least let me ride for a while. Or he could have at least performed some magic to take me to the castle. Oh!” His eyes grew wide with delight as a long stretch of road, made of bright yellow bricks, came in view. “The Yellow Brick Road! King Heero, here I come!”
And with a spring in his step and joy in his heart, Duo began to skip happily down the road, humming a familiar tune while wishing he could have shiny red shoes to match the scenario.
“Oh dear god,” came the low drawl from someone or something on his left. “A flaming queer just had to show up this time.”
“Huh?” Duo came to a stop and looked high above him. At first he could make out nothing, but slowly a long bushy tail unfurled from the shadows of the leaves before he made out the thick brown paws and kitty ears. Duo gasped in surprise for it was none other than the Cheshire Cat….who did bear a striking resemblance to his other good friend, Wufei Chang.
The Cat sat upon the branch and scratched its ears lazily. “Well, are you just going to stand there looking like a doofus or are you going to say something?”
“You…you….you’re so cute!” Duo squealed in delight which was promptly followed by a loud thump as the cat fell off the tree in complete and utter surprise.
“I’m not cute!” he began, only to sputter in disbelief as Duo held him within his hands to peer closely at him. “Put me down this instant!”
“No way, kitty! You’re going to take me to King Heero’s castle. Merlin Trowa said you had to!”
“Merlin Trow…?” the cat asked in bemusement.
But Duo was having none of it. He was going to get to King Heero’s castle today or his name wasn’t Duo Maxwell.
“Let’s go! We haven’t got much time!” he cried out as he tucked the flustered cat beneath his arm and began to skip down the road. “Oh, look, it’s Quatre Bunny again!”
And sure enough, running ahead of them, was none other the blond Bunny Rabbit. The Cat made a low sound of despair as Duo took off after it.
“Wait for me, Quatre Bunny! I finally found you after all this time! Wait up, you!!”
The rabbit had, of course, heard Duo’s plaintive (insane) cries and wasn’t going to stick around to deal with the madman. So, instead of waiting, he ran even faster and before long, both (three if you counted the Cat, who wasn’t doing much running anyway) of them were speeding down the brick road as if participating in a sprint race.
Why is she chasing me?! Thought the poor rabbit. I haven’t done anything to her!
Why is he running so damn fast?! Thought the poor boy. What’s he so afraid of?!
“Ah, finally the gates!” The Cat cried out in relief. “You can put me down now, you psycho!”
“Eh? We’re at the castle already?” Duo gasped, having to put the Cat down to place his hands on his knees. His lungs felt like they were about ready to burst out of his chest and yet again, the damn bunny had escaped. He finally lifted his head to peer at King Heero’s castle and oh my! What a grand sight it was!
“It’s the beautiful garden from that doorway and everything looks like a deck of cards!” Duo cried out in pleasure. “I love playing Strip Poker!”
“Oh for the love of…” the Cat began when suddenly, loud trumpets were heard all across the land. A man, dressed as a Spade, walked to the font of the gates and opened up a very long scroll.
“Hear Ye! Hear Ye! The King seeks the presence of a girl named Duo Maxwell to the Court of Law immediately! She is to be sentenced for harassing a bunny rabbit who did nothing to her!”
“What?!!!” Duo screamed in disbelief as everyone turned to look at him in shock/horror. “This is outrageous! I want my lawyer!”
Two more soldiers (a Club and a Diamond) ran out to grasp Duo’s arms on each side. “Please come with us, miss.”
“I’m a boy!” he began, kicking and screaming as the Cat waved at him from the crowd of onlookers. “Hey! Don’t leave me to suffer this alone! You come with me too! You’re my only witness!”
“ORDER IN THE COURT!” came the loud booming voice from the speakers as Duo was unceremoniously dumped behind a stand. He glowered at the jury – who were made up of twelve girls and women with the words ‘FAN GIRLS’ written on their plain deck of cards outfits – and promptly broke into a winning smile in the hopes that it would sway their opinions of him. The smile seemed to work for several girls actually passed out on the spot. Incredible!
“ORDER IN THE COURT!” the voice boomed again. “PRESENTING THE KING AND QUEEN OF HEARTS. KING HEERO AND QUEEN RELENA!”
One of the fan girl’s uttered a low ‘booooo!’ and was promptly seen no more for a trap door had been opened beneath her feet. She was quickly replaced with another girl who had ‘QUEEN RELENA AND KING HEERO 4VER’ on her card outfit.
The large oak doors opened as the trumpets began to play again. And as Duo watched, a long procession of fifty cards walked into the room (complete with two Jokers playing some tricks) before the King and Queen finally made their grand appearance. Queen Relena had a rather sour countenance and disposition to match but it was King Heero that had Duo salivating all over the stand.
“Damn you’re hot in a crown and royal robes, Heero!” he cried out and to his delight, the King winked and waved his wand in Duo’s direction.
“I know,” he mouthed before sitting on his throne. “CALL THE FIRST WITNESS!” he immediately bellowed causing most of the furniture in the room to rattle to their very foundations.
“Damn, but you’re loud…wish you were this loud in bed though,” Duo mumbled beneath his breath. But the ever observant fan girls heard this and quickly scribbled on their journals.
‘Wish Heero was louder in bed – more ideas for fan fiction.’
“CALLING THE FIRST WITNESS!” one of the soldiers thundered and in came Quatre Bunny, looking quite cute in his waistcoat and shiny new fur. Walking alongside him were none other than Merlin Trowa and that traitor, The Cheshire Cat, and all three were ushered to the other side of the courtroom.
“Now, state your case,” Queen Relena began but King Heero cut in with a loud,
“THIS CASE IS GETTING US NOWHERE! OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!”
“But my Lord,” Quatre Bunny said, his whiskers twitching in fear. “She’s the one who kept chasing me when I did nothing to her!”
“Maybe if you hadn’t been running so much I wouldn’t have to chase you,” Duo countered. “And for crying out loud, can’t you all see I’m a boy?!”
“Not with that dress on!” King Heero said with a wide grin. “Now if you’d only dress like that for me more often…”
And the fan girl jury scribbled away happily.
‘Duo should dress in drag more often.’
“I would if you came home earlier,” Duo said with a pout as he noticed the Queen’s face becoming redder and redder with each passing moment. “Then I wouldn’t be having all these crazy ideas of…”
“ENOUGH!” Queen Relena yelled as she rose to her feet. “I’VE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS LOVEY DOVEY STUFF. OFF WITH ALL OF YOUR HEADS!”
“NO!” Duo yelled as he rose to his full height. He now towered over the rest of the people in the room for he had grown to his normal size again. “This is a stupid trial anyway and I have no right to be afraid of you because you’re nothing but a bunch of STUPID CARDS!”
A loud shriek arose from someone in the room and suddenly all hell broke loose. The card people seemed to rise into the air, becoming flat as they lashed out at Duo angrily. With a loud cry, he closed his eyes and waved his hands, trying to swat them away as best he could.
“Stop it!” he cried out helplessly. “Stop it! Stop it, you stupid cards! Stop it!”
“Duo?”
“Stop…!”
“Duo?! Wake up!”
A rough shake on his shoulder and his lashes flew open, wide violet eyes staring blankly at the concerned faces peering down at him.
“Hee…Heero?” he called out thickly at the familiar face of his boyfriend and partner. He turned his head a little to look at the other boys standing around him. “Quatre…Trowa…Wufei?”
“Yeah, it’s us,” Heero replied with a small smile. “We heard you screaming and came out to see what was up…didn’t know you liked reading Alice in Wonderland.”
“Huh?” Duo blinked in confusion before looking at the book on his lap. “Holy shit.” He wasn’t even aware he had finished it.
“Oh man,” he began slowly as he sat up and rubbed his eyes. “I had the weirdest dream, you guys. You wouldn’t believe it. See, I was sitting here and then…”
…we already know what happened, don’t we, dear readers? So why don’t we leave our young pilots to listen to Duo’s tale while we tiptoe away from their sanctuary.
And don’t forget to watch out for the rabbit hole, for you never know when you might fall in yourself.
~The End~
Gundam Wing Fiction
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