Garou + Part 8 (cont)
Kidnapping

"And why the fuck didn't he think about putting them on before?" they heard Trowa snarl.

He was sitting on the other side of the attic, knees under his chin, arms wound tight around his legs, and he was glaring coldly at them. Wufei stared coldly at him, appalled at his sudden lack of professionalism.

"Because they're connected to explosives, that's why. I suppose he was bored when he had to stay in here for two weeks. All the house is booby-trapped, I saw that when I was visiting. If we had had to get out of here fast for whatever reason, we'd have been blasted to the moon. The doors are ridden with explosives. The attic's the only place sure enough."

"And if Heero comes back with Quatre and they don't know that we did that?!" exclaimed Duo.

"Heero knows that I am aware of this arrangement, he'll pay attention. And we can see them arrive with the motion detector and cameras," answered the Chinese teen. "Nothing bigger than a rabbit can enter this clearing without us knowing."

"And I repeat, why the fuck didn't he think to put them on before?" hissed Trowa.

"The batteries weren't full enough yet for it to last" Wufei answered in a neutral tone, shrugging. "I am not even sure that this will last."

Trowa grumbled behind his bangs and lowered his head till they couldn't see his face anymore. Duo and Wufei glanced at each other then chose a place to sleep the rest of the night away.

"Maxwell...?"

"Mmm?"

"If you dare to eat all of the crackers while I'm sleeping, I'll kick you out of this place."

* * *

Meanwhile, Heero was still running as fast as he could after Quatre's kidnapper. He was slowly gaining ground on his enemy, the other being more massive and slowed down by the young pilot's weight. But then, he knew these woods better than Heero...

Often, the track was interrupted and Heero had to use every ounce of human intelligence he could summon in this body to understand the way the Were had blurred his path. But he always found him again. Then the track ran in a straight line, in a path easy to follow. And the scent of his enemy had never been stronger...

He nearly missed the scent of another Were on a branch of some tree bent over the path. The brown wolf blinked, trying to analyze what he was smelling... then, he understood. The enemy wolf had entirely transformed to run faster. But if he could it was that he didn't have Quatre with him anymore... And, bingo, two minutes later, when he found the second Werewolf's scent, it was mixed with Sandrock's pilot's own.

/kill the other later, the pack's more important than revenge/

'anyway, revenge is best served when it's already frozen'

He silently ran after the other Were for a few kilometers. His internal sense of direction told him that they had slowly been traveling a half-circle and weren't so far from the house anymore... Maybe a half hour of running for a human, no more. Shenlong's hideout was fairly near to here. If he succeeded in getting Quatre back... WHEN he succeeded in getting Quatre back, he would run either to the house or to the Gundam. He hoped that the Chinese boy had installed the program permitting for any of them to open the cockpit of any Gundam, not just the designated pilot.

Personally, he had done it only because it had been a direct order; he didn't know if Wufei had decided to abide by the decision.

The smell on the track and the spacing between the rare imprints indicated that his prey was slowing down... he slowed down too to think about what he would do... and only dodged the attack by pure dumb luck. Two seconds later he was feeling a hundred and thirty pounds of muscles and black fur land on his back. He rolled on the ground, making his assailant lose its equilibrium, reared like a horse, squashing it between his own body and a tree trunk, and before the other Were could get back up, jumped for its throat.

/NO!!!!/

Confused, he stepped back, growling low. The other wolf was an enemy, he had to... eliminate it.

'anyone who opposes me is my enemy. all my enemies have to die'

He jumped forward, his fangs ready to plunge in his adversary...

And stepped back, shaking his head. His instincts were screaming at him to let the other alone, not to attack. He didn't understand why. The black Were used it to jump on him, and he reacted instantaneously, flattening on the ground out of its trajectory, and, hustling it with his shoulder, sent it once again to roll in the dust. This time, he leaped on the other and put his paws on its belly, blocking it on the ground. His adversary tried to free itself, but he was heavier and had a better position. Heero snarled, his canines at a few centimeters from the other wolf's throat, and it went immobile, understanding that it was totally at his mercy.

But the Wolf in him didn't want to let him finish his enemy...

The wolf was black on the back and dark gray on the belly, and rather slim compared to the others. Svelte, but definitely adult. So it wasn't because it was a pup that he couldn't...

A she-wolf.

With a litter, if he judged by the scent of milk. Shit.

He snapped his teeth just in front of her muzzle, and finally she submitted. After having deeply bitten her ear as a warning, Heero jumped back on the path. He couldn't kill a female like that, but if ever again she got between him and his packmate, he would get rid of her, litter or not.

Finally, he arrived in a clearing against a cliff, probably the same cliff against which the safehouse was propped up. A dozen wolves and hybrids were slowly circling him... most of them females, and looking aggressive and afraid at the same time. There were a few males, but older than the ones who had attacked the house. He wanted to laugh when he realized they were far from having expected such a reaction. But he wasn't going to feel sorry for this pack. They had not been forced to bite him, and they sure hadn't been forced to take one of his... although now that he saw the size of their pack, and smelled the small number of pups they had, he could understand why they had felt the need to take Quatre. This pack was slowly dying out, from consanguinity probably. Heero hadn't been bitten to be changed, because the wolf that had attacked him had been out to kill, nor had he been expected to survive. And he was a dominant male, the alpha of this pack probably wouldn't tolerate him there, even if he had wanted to stay. But Quatre...

The blond teen was sprawled out in the middle of the clearing, still unconscious. Two Weres in hybrid form were standing before him. Heero forced himself to return to human state , if only to be able to warn them that he wanted his friend and would stop at nothing to get him back.

"Step away from him " he growled when his throat became functional enough to articulate.

But the males didn't listen to him and jumped, attacking.

He nearly sighed. He had tried to give them an exit door, not to destroy even more of this little pack, but it seemed that they would never learn.

He broke the paw of the fastest to attack him with a snap of fangs, but didn't have the time to finish him before he was assailed by two other wolves. He violently shook them off, throwing them to the ground. He was still in hybrid form, he used his hands to slap them hard on their sensitive nose.

From there, the mêlée was too confusing for him to remember all the details. But one moment he was fighting, then the next, the wolves crawled back before him, whining and showing their bellies to him. Apparently they had had enough.

He didn't know what the hell he was supposed to do, now. The Wolf sent him too many contradictory influxes, too much information that he wasn't sensitive enough to understand.

Quatre was regaining consciousness, slowly. He sat up, blinking owlishly, and looked around. There were beasts all around him, dark and furry forms, and the littlest one at least twice as big as him. He gasped, the fog on his mind lifting slightly.

"Katoru, get up," growled a brown one at him while placing itself between him and the others, in a distinctively protecting way.

The blond boy felt in his space-heart more than recognized by the voice and appearance the identity of the being.

"... Heero?"

"Get up and get moving."

He pushed him with his nose and caught one of his wrists with his clawed hand/paw, keeping him close to his body while he left the clearing, growling menacingly toward the other Weres.

"The next one who attacks myself or my comrades is dead. Male or female" he snarled ferociously when one of them made as if going to jump on them.

The Weres only answered with whines, flattening their ears back on their skulls and lowering their heads.

Heero became more of a human on the path, and put Quatre on his back when the boy, still half-awake only, tripped once too many, proving that he was still in bad shape from his hit on the head, and began running right to the house.

They passed not too far from Shenlong en route for there, and preferring not to risk a surprise attack when he had Quatre to protect, Wing's pilot escalated it to lower Quatre on the seat. The boy looked at him, his blue eyes still fuzzy-looking, then closed his eyes and seemed to fall into a light trance.

"Quatre?"

"Just need to rest a little bit more..." whispered the boy.

After having calculated a trajectory that would guide the Gundam to the little shack and having engaged the autopilot system, Heero let Quatre in the cockpit and ran to his own Gundam.

* * *

<BIIIIIIIP>

Duo swore while turning around to face the laptop. He had just closed an eye ...

"Crap, it's not possible this piece of sh... uh-ho.... Wu-man? Fei-fei? Yohooo, Wu-chan!"

"Mmm, can't you call me by my name, Maxwell..."

"Wu, tell me that you closed Shenlong's cockpit."

If it was not the case, then that meant that a stranger was playing with the Gundam...

"What about Nataku?"

"Your Nataku's moving..."

"WHAT?!?" shouted the Chinese pilot, jumping on the laptop.

At the edge of the forest, a great white and green shape was slowing to a halt.

"What the ..."

One of the comm. units suddenly crackled to life.

<err, Wufei... I'm sincerely sorry to have borrowed your Gundam, but Heero more or less forced me inside ...>

Two seconds later, pilots 02 and 05 found themselves on their backs on each side of the attic, pilot 03 having shoved them off his path without much gentleness.

"Quatre!! Are you ok?" the usually unexpressive European demanded.

<Yes, yes, a little tired, but ... What happened? I don't understand too well ... I woke up in a clearing with a dozen werewolves all around me, brr... And Heero who was growling as if he was possessed, I nearly didn't recognize him...I don't even remember what happened apart from some fuzzy nightmarish things that I'm not even sure were real...>

"Oh, you were just abducted by Weres, that's all..." Maxwell revealed nonchalantly.

<Oh, that's all ... what?!?>

Duo would have given nearly anything to have the visuals too.

* * * * * *

Once they grabbed their belongings, the pilots went to Shenlong. Wufei took his place and accompanied each of the others to his own Gundam, waiting for each of them to be sheltered in their own metal armor before going to the next one. Heero had rejoined with Wing by himself. He truly wouldn't have minded at all to having met by chance the Were who had kidnapped Quatre. Sadly, he didn't get to cross his path.

"You know, Heero," said Trowa on a private channel, "If it hadn't truly been the only place we could go to, I'd be really pissed at you now."

Heero grunted and lowered his head, ashamed. He had endangered his packmates...

* * *

For all of the time they were en route to their next hideout, Heero was the only one not to click on the visuals with the others Gundams. Finally, Duo asked him why. As Yuy refused to answer, he began to think that his comrade may have been hurt.

Heero sighed. Truly, he didn't want to start a panic over him but he really didn't want to open up a visual channel just now.

"And why the fuck can't you? Give me a good reason you're just not trying to hide some wound?"

Finally, the Japanese teen had enough and bent to the torture.

"I didn't get my backpack," admitted pilot 01 in a nearly embarrassed tone... well as much as he could anyway.

"I have it. What's the connection?" insisted Duo.

"I transformed," Heero tried again.

"And?"

Argh, it was not possible, he was too slow!!! Annoyed, Heero sighed and decided to stop alluding and explain it to him in terms he was more familiar with, for once he wasn't visibly in a frame of mind to understand.

"I am buck naked."

"Eeeh?!"

The three other pilots began to laugh.

+

* "foutredieu de bordel de merde" is French, and the first one ain't really translatable... It's an oldish swear word composed of "God" and an old way of saying "Fuck" ^^; "Bordel" means "brothel" but is used as a common swear word, and "merde" is "shit" ^^;;; Tro sure ain't polite ^^;;

* "Vaffan'culo" is Italian (not sure if I spelled it right) and means "go get fucked," I think ^^;

Me like to identify Trowa as a true Latin European... not only a French or a Spanish... In my mind the mercenaries acted especially in this zone, plus they were mostly from there. He's gonna speak Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian... Prolly Greek too, a little. Wu's gonna speak Chinese if I can find someone to help me, Quatre, same thing, Heero's gonna speak Japanese... (duh) and in the original version of the fic, Duo was speaking American sometimes, although you can understand why you won't see it when it happens ^.^;

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