[4xD] "The most noble of weaknesses" Prologue 1/7

[Darkwing]

Standard disclaimers: Unfortunately I don't have any rights on Gundam Wing and its characters. I can only take full responsibility of the plot that follows.

Author introduction: Greetings to you all. I'm glad to show you this new ficlet of mine. Please, don't ask me why I chose Quatre and Dorothy as main characters, because I actually don't know either. Maybe, because I'm always the black sheep wherever I go and because I'm a hopeless lover of all the secondary characters. Anyway this is the result.
I can assure you that this story is complete and that, after this prologue, five chapters and an epilogue will follow. You'll find them here on regular maturity. This is just because I'm a good person and I don't want to push you to read all at once...*Sharpens her modified scythe*...Jokes apart, I'll be more than happy to know your opinion about this story that, after all, is my true second fiction.
I wish you all a good reading! ^_^

Dedication: At the beginning I liked to dedicate this story just to Ivana, Tonka, Tomislav, Dinko and Angela, nice guests and involuntary characters of this virtual adventure. But then I decided to entrust you all with this daydream of mine.
This is because I wish you every possible good, my dear friends, and I want to dedicate this story to those that searched for love but still have to find it, and to those that found it, without searching.

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The most noble of weaknesses
By Darkwing

Prologue

"A parcel has just arrived for you, Mr. Winner." The kind voice of the personal secretary of the Chief Executive Officer of the Winner Corporation came out from the intercom.
"A parcel? Could you tell me who the sender is, Mrs. Bates?" Quatre frowned and lifted his eyes from the small mountain of paperwork heaped on his long lost father's desk. Even if he received a huge amount of mail on daily basis, he wasn't used to get parcels.
The old woman mumbled, a bit uneasy. "I don't know, sir. It's a totally anonymous parcel, but it's quite heavy...Judging by the package, it seems to have directly come from Earth. Would you like me to bring it to you?"
"Please, don't. If it's heavy, I'll come to get it in person."
"But, sir..."
Quatre shut down the line without letting the woman reply. Apart from her usual stream of 'mister Winner here and mister Winner there' she treated him no less than a favorite nephew, but Quatre didn't like it at all when people tried to spoil him.
He got up and opened the heavy mahogany doors of his office, heading towards his loyal secretary, that was still talking to him through the intercom.
"I'm here, Mrs. Bates. And...No, before you start to apologize, you didn't disturb me at all. I needed a short pause indeed. I should thank you." He said, his eyes smiling. He raised his hands to sooth the well known series of excuses of the woman.
"But..."
"No buts! You work too much, Mrs. Bates, and besides you're not on my payroll as a porter."
The woman sighed and lowered her gaze. "I know, but what I was tying to say is that, this is my work, I'm not used to draw back for a mere hitch." Suddenly her voice crackled. "I remember that I passed nights here at work together with mister Winner...When he still was here...He always needed me. He could call for my help at any moment...But I was glad that I could help...I am glad I can help." She corrected herself.
Quatre swallowed the lump in his throat. There was so much pain in the woman's voice that he had to recall all his self-control to avoid of being overwhelmed as well. He stepped closer to her and put a soft hand on her shoulder, smiling with sadness.
"Your devotion for my father reminds me how much I still have to learn, before I can think to match him. I'm lucky that you are here by my side in this moment, Mrs. Bates. I believe that I can learn so much from you. This is why you must know that I didn't mean to steal your work. Actually...I was just curios to death!" He ended with an embarrassed smile that showed his young age.
"Oh! But mister Winner!" Behind the half-moon shaped eyeglasses, the woman's eyes lost the glossy shade of the unshed tears as she opened them wide, completely shocked. "Breaking off important work for a childish curiosity!"
Quatre shrugged . "Well, this could be an important question too and...Talking about that work...It's true that the Iron Trans proposal is tricky, but I fear that I haven't the best qualification to take care of that contract. I'd need a trustworthy attorney that could give me some good advice. I'm more of a technicist and I'm sure that they'll take me for a ride soon."
Mrs. Bates assumed her professional stand again and grabbed the vid-com receiver. "I'm going to call mister Teodorakis..."
"Please don't. It would be pointless. I already talked to him this morning, but he's right. We're full of work and he's already following that proposal that we have with the Mars Mining Enterprise. He can't work on another case."
The woman bit her bottom lip and let her grip on the vid-com slacken, as she started to think of a possible solution. "This is a bad problem, then."
Quatre answered with a confident smile and the sentence that every Winner had impressed in his genetic code. "Don't worry. We'll just have to tuck up our sleeves to find a way. But now....That parcel?"
"Oh, yes! The parcel! Here it is."
A carton case, as big as a toolbox, was waiting for him on the edge of the large horseshoe shaped desk. Quatre studied it for an instant, then picked it up, searching for a clue of its content, but weight apart, he couldn't deduce anything.
"Well, We just have to open it, then." He took a paper knife and began to get rid of the sticky tape, as a heavy hand dropped on his shoulder and pulled him back with violence.
"Rashid? Have you gone crazy?" Quatre blinked, gaining his balance as he recognized his attacker at the same time. "What are you doing here?"
The imposing Security Chief didn't think him worthy of a single glance and remained focused on the box, as if it was carrying a label: 'time bomb'. "What is this? Why didn't it pass from my office before?" He roared to Mrs. Bates.
The woman babbled something uneasy. "It's...It arrived a few minutes ago. With a forwarding agent and..."
"And you should have informed me!"
Quatre intervened, trying to soothe the tension that Rashid brought in his grim look. "Come on, Rashid. Nothing happened. See?"
Quatre picked up the box again and shook it lightly, but was suddenly obliged to let it fall again on the table, as Rashid rushed onto him, throwing him on the floor and shielding him from an imaginary explosion.
When, after minutes of icy terror, Mrs. Bates emerged from under the table. She saw Quatre that struggled under the considerable mass of the Security Chief, in a vain attempt to free himself. If she hadn't been scared to death she could have laughed!
Quatre was yelling at his overprotective bodyguard. "Rashid! That's enough! Don't go too far!"
"If you keep to underestimate everything, you'll run into a real danger, kid! Stay down!?
"But which danger? It's just a parcel! Maybe they just forgot to add the sender's address, that's all!"
"Or they did it on purpose. Those eco-terrorists never stop in front of anything!"
Quatre sighed resigned. "All right, they blew up one of our fertilizer warehouse because they mistook it for a chemical weapons facility, but it happened months ago! And it was pretty evident that they were just a bunch of drunk hotheads." But as he noticed the stubborn glance of his interlocutor and the terrified gaze of his secretary, he sighed and threw his hands up exasperated. "All, right. You'll open it."
Finally free, Quatre could stand on his feet again. Mrs. Bates hurried quickly to him and hid behind his back. "Do you really think it's coming from a terrorist?" She asked whispering, as if by speaking normally she could awake the terrible monster hidden inside the box. Quatre remained silent and simply stared at Rashid's cautious movements.
Despite his big, calloused hands, he opened the packaging with an uncommon care. At last, after a brief look at the content, he extracted the note that he found inside and started to read in silence. Suddenly he frowned.
"Well?" Quatre and Mrs. Bates asked at the same very moment; a slight apprehension in their voices.
Rashid was as serious as a piece of lead when he turned his glance towards them. "He's definitely a terrorist." He said.
"What?" Quatre widened his eyes, speechless, but he couldn't think about the menace that he had to face since Mrs. Bates suddenly half-fainted into his arms. He carried her to a nearby chair while, as pale as a ghost, she begun to repeat a nonstop sequence of: "Oh, Poor us. Oh, poor us."
Kneeled by her side, Quatre started to fan her with a piece of paper and, without stopping his "rescue operations" turned to Rashid. "What does that note say? What do they want from us? What do they want from me?" He added.
Rashid took an apple that was inside the box and stared at it, as if it had been the first fruit that he'd ever seen.
"An apple? What does this mean? Do they want to poison me?"
Quatre left Mrs. Bates and jumped by Rashid's side in no time, grabbing the note from his hands. He started to read out loud the first lines.

'Sincere greetings to the Winner Corporation's C.E.O., Mr. Quatre R. Winner. With this I'd like to offer you a...a...uh! What the heck! I don't know! How the hell do you call a gift in bureaucrat-ese? You know that I'm not good at writing, Q-man!'

Quatre read the last line twice...'Q-man? But I know just one person that calls me like that...' He kept on reading, under Mrs. Bates's attentive eyes and Rashid's amused ones.

'However while I'm here on Earth - so to speak, since I'm underwater 12 hours a day and the 12 left I'm over the water - I thought it would be nice for me to send you a souvenir. I was searching for peaches, but Howard was right, here where we are now there aren't peaches. [1] In this season here is colder than the slums of L2, so I couldn't find them. But I sent you these apples. I picked them in person from a native countryman...Hey, don't you want me to tell you how I convinced him to loosen his hold on them? Well, actually I was trying to steal them, but yes, okay... maybe I lost my touch because he caught me. Could it be fault of the helicopter's engine? Only Heaven knows! But can you realize this...? Man! The great Shinigami caught red-handed by a common farmer!'

Quatre started to laugh. He couldn't believe that Duo tried to steal some apples just for him! As if he now needed to steal to have them! But that was his friend's style. That mail was surely in Duo's own hand.
"But, who is he?" Mrs. Bates asked, as she held her breath, not having forgotten Rashid?s statement about the nature of the sender. Besides she couldn't understand why Quatre was so happy that he just got an apple basket from a terrorist.
"He's Duo." He said. "Do you remember him? He came here to see me, a couple of years ago, during the war."
Finally the woman's gaze lit up. "Oh, yes! He's that young man with long hair, isn?t he?? She smiled, recalling the day she met him. "I remember him. He came here asking for you, but he hadn't an appointment. I was about to drive him away but, I don't know how, he managed to convince me to let him inside." She giggled. "He also said that I was a charming woman! He thought I was younger of five years!"
Quatre rolled the eyes and shook his head. Only his friend could be so talkative to send a professional woman as Mrs. Bates out of phase. "Yes. I'd say your memory is excellent, but let's see what he has to say."

'However you won't believe me, but the lively old man...recognized me! Do you remember about that price they sat on my head, right after Heero dragged me out the cage? Well...This guy hasn?t a single tooth in his mouth and he's more wrinkled than a tortoise, but he obviously still has all his neurons working, because he simply called me by my name! You can picture my face...At that point I thought that he was going to beat the shit out of me with that stick of his! But he just asked me for an autograph for his nephews and gifted me with the apples. Well...it's a good thing to earn a basket of apples as a reward for saving the world, right? However give them a try, they're delicious. I bet you won't find anything so good over there!'

Quatre lifted the eyes from the paper and looked at Rashid. He was biting the apple that he still held in his hand and his blissful expression was enough to tell that Duo was right. In those apple there was all the taste given by mother earth.
"I must say that our rascal had good taste. He scared us, but he had good taste." Rashid acknowledged. Quatre smiled and kept on reading.

'Ah....And if you are wondering why I didn't sign the sender on the parcel, you must know that it wasn't a mistake.'

Out of the corner of his eye Quatre saw Rashid as he rose a perplexed eyebrow, as he bit his apple. He went on reading.

'I did that for grumpy man Rashid, of course. I know that the Old Owl becomes nervous if he hasn't any concrete menace to take care of. So I figure that with an anonymous parcel, sent to your holy person, he has alerted the whole Maguanacs corps by now. Some training never hurts!'

By pure chance Rashid didn't choked on the apple juice as Quatre interrupted the reading to laugh out loud. Things didn't go exactly like Duo said, but after all he wasn't really wrong. Even Mrs. Bates had to hide her giggling in front of the reaction of the stoic warrior. Obviously she couldn't tell it to anybody, but she also thought that Mr. Rashid had the look of a huge owl, with that stern expression and those untamed eyebrows.
"How did he call me? Old Owl? I hope for him that he doesn't meet me, because if he lost his touch, I didn't lose mine at all!"
Quatre slapped his long time friend on the back "Come on, you know that this is just Duo's way to say hello. Look at what he says after."

'Naturally there's no need to ask you to say hello to everyone for me. One of these days we should come back to that place...What's the name of that cute village in the desert, full of those fantastic chicks dancing covered just with that so-small-it-should-be-illegal veil? Well...I don't remember the name, but we surely need more places like that in the world.
Now I'll say goodbye. Howard is here, grumbling like a potful of beans because we lost a day because of a storm, so I must go. Don't tell me that you're up to your neck in work, because I'd like you to drop by here on Earth for a trip.
When you're free, blow me a whistle, okay? You know that I'm always ready for a good run away!
Waves!
Duo'

Before going on with the reading, Quatre quickly glanced across the note. A long post scriptum was to follow and a word, written in capitals, stood out between the lines, written in the irregular handwriting of his friend. Quatre carefully folded the mail and put it inside the box full of apples.
"Well, it looks like Duo could throw the house into confusion even from so far away." He cheerfully stated. Then he picked up the box and hurried back to his office.
Rashid and Mrs. Bates remained still, staring at the closed doors, speechless for the incomprehensible Quatre's hurry.
They couldn't know that the friendly mail contained the magic word that could make anyone loose calmness and reflection, also a quiet person like Quatre.
It was the name of a woman, of course.

TBC...

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[1] ref. "Peaches in winter", by the same author.
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AN: Here we are at the end of this episode, or better, at the beginning of this romantic adventure. I truly hope you liked it, despite its levity and my obvious mistakes. I'm really curios to know what you think of this. I'll wait for you with open arms, just let me have a way to contact you. ^_^
Thank you in advance,
Darkwing

[takisha16]

I loved it!!!!
I was doubled over in laughter over Duo's note!!!
It was so great, it's exactly how I could picture Duo acting!
jajajja.....stealing apples...hmmm...I want some apples now
I loved Quatre here! It's so true that most people don't go for the secondary
couples! I loveeeee this one!
Rashid was so funny! I loved how he acted and how Duo predicted he would
act!
Yay for a new Q*D fic!
update sooon!!!

[Darkwing]

WOW! Thank you!
I thought that nobody would read this fiction, not to mention to leave a review! And what a nice and kind one! Thank you so much, Takisha! *Tight hugs*

I'm so happy that you could find some enjoyment in it, even if - I'm sure - I made grammar and spelling mistakes. I hope that you won't find boring the next parts, which I promise I'll post soon.

I'm also glad that you found Duo in character even if his appearance happens only through his written message (I confess that I've a partiality for him). And I also hope that the other characters might show their true personalities too.

I'm so grateful for your answer. You truly made my day, dear!

[GundamVixen]

This AWESOME!!

I love it!

you're characterizations are right on target! and I was laughing SO hard with the letter!