[FanFic] - DP/UF - On A Winter's Day

[Lord of Anvils]

Eyrie Productions, Uninc.

presents

ON A WINTER'S DAY
An Exile Story

Benjamin D. Hutchins

(c) 1993 Eyrie Productions, Uninc.

20 JUNE 2245
CHELTOPOLIS, SALUSIA

A shop-front exploded, sending glass and bits of masonry
flying twenty meters across the crowded street. The onlookers
clustered behind the police barricades gasped, then scattered, and
within seconds, the street was empty save for the Salusian police
crouched behind their riot shields and aircruisers.
From inside the shop, a slightly charred 99-series combat
Buma, the product, like all its kind, of GENOM Corporation, stomped
out into the semicircle of police barricades that surrounded the
ruined shopfront. It looked around, scanning, its sensor wands waving
in the air around its optics. Then it snarled, causing several of the
police to draw back a step.
Inside the ruined building, some rubble stirred, then threw
itself off a scorched and dirtied young woman, who got to her feet and
shook dust out of her raven hair. She wore a 3WA winter uniform
(Cheltopolis being in Salusia's southern hemisphere).
"Well," said Yuri Daniels to her fire-haired partner (who was
extracting herself from a similar predicament), "you certainly put the
fear of us into _him_."
"I did't hear you piping up with any better ideas," Kei Morgan
replied sourly. She surveyed the back of the Buma, who was still
snarling at the police. "Damn, they're building those things tougher.
Time was, that grenade would have at _least_ taken off a limb."
"Reminisce later," Yuri said. "Right now, shall we think of
some way to take that thing out before it kills a few dozen Salusian
cops?"
"Give me a second, I just had a jewelry store fall on my--"
The Buma made a decision, turned to its left, and, popping its
thrusters, streaked through the barricade, scattering cops,
overturning an aircruiser, and zooming down the street.
Kei and Yuri darted out into the street after it, looking down
the direction it came in. "Oh, this is a wonderful turn of events,"
Kei observed, even as Yuri was dragging her into one of the
aircruisers (one of the smaller ones, which had no roof and was thus
not meant for transporting prisoners).
With a cursory glance at the controls, Yuri powered up the
Cheltopolis Metro Police aircruiser, lifted it, and slammed open its
horizontal thrusters, sending them down the boulevard after the Buma
at several times a reasonable rate of speed. Newton's Third Law of
Motion catapulted a not-quite-prepared Kei over the seat and into the
back.
Climbing back into the front and strapping in, she observed
through gritted teeth, "I hate you."
"Good," Yuri replied cheerily. "See if you can figure out how
this navicomputer works. Maybe you can even tell me where the stupid
thing's going?"
"I'm going into a coma," Kei muttered, poking a few of the
buttons on the computer. "Oops, too late," she continued, crossing
her eyes, "I'm in a coma."
Yuri punched her shoulder.
"Ow! All right, all right," Kei grumbled, rubbing her
shoulder and looking sulky. "Looks like it's headed for...oh,
_wonderful_. It's heading for Salusia Tech."
"ST?" Yuri risked a glance at her watch, taking out a string
of mailboxes as she did so and causing Kei to duck under the
dashboard. "It's 1630. Does ST have an on-hour or half-hour
afternoon schedule?"
"We'll find out if there are twelve thousand innocent
bystanders hanging around for the Buma to use as cover, now won't we?"
"There's a happy thought."

They air-skidded around a corner, almost going into a spin
before Yuri applied far too bone-jarring a burst of corrective side
thruster, and crashed through what remained of the Salusia Institute
of Technology (Cheltopolis Central Campus) main gate. Before them was
a parking lot.
A very large parking lot, full of aircars, groundcars, and
students going to their cars. ST, apparently, had a half-hour
afternoon schedule.
Kei would have said, in all likelihood, "Somebody shoot me,"
but she didn't get the chance, because somebody did. Or rather,
somebody (something?) shot their car.
With the emission of what could be be described as an
indignant cry of exceptional annoyance with the gods, the Lovely Angels
dove for safety approximately 0.02 seconds before a focused particle
beam punched into and annihilated the power core of their borrowed
aircruiser, causing it to explode prettily and making a lot of college
students hide behind random cars.
"Did you see where it was?" Kei called to Yuri, who was hiding
behind a car across the access road, gun out.
"No!" Yuri replied. "Not exactly--I think it's on your side
of the road, though."
"Okay...you look for it on your side, and I'll look for it on
mine." Before Yuri could ask after any details of this plan, Kei had
drawn her own weapon and ducked around the back of the car, heading
down the row.
"And what am I supposed to do if I find it?" Yuri muttered,
moving warily around the back of the car she was hiding behind and
working her way down the row, every sense alert.
Thirty-four rows of cars later, she was getting just the
tiniest bit sick of this. By now, the separation between herself and
Kei was becoming so large that, if one of them found the Buma, she
probably couldn't get help from the other in any reasonable amount of
time. Yuri tightened her grip on her pistol. One more row, and that
was all she was doing.
She turned the corner around the end of an airvan, keeping
low, and pulled up short. She'd found the Buma, but someone else had
already done the same. A young man in a long grey overcoat and a
floppy hat had discovered, or been discovered by, the Buma. He stood
with his back to Yuri, a brown ponytail of hair hanging to the middle
of his back. His feet, clad in mosh boots, were spread and planted,
and his hands were extended from his sides and flexing slowly in their
fingerless leather gloves. Were those swords on his back?
The Buma snarled and lunged. The young man dodged aside, and
they turned in a quick circle before winding up exactly where they
were before. In the instant she could see him, Yuri had the
impression of glasses and a scarf on the face of the young man--the
impression of familiarity. She crouched by the end of the car with
her Bajoran disruptor in hand and didn't even breathe.
The Buma growled and extended a pair of long spurs from its
arm, slicing them through the air toward the young man. He ducked
backward, turning it into a backward roll, and came up with the swords
somehow magically drawn from his back, in a half-crouch. He parried
the spurs aside with the shorter of the two swords, which Yuri noticed
was in his right hand, and drove the Buma back with the longer, making
threatening cuts at its optics and sensor wands.
This went on until the Buma remembered it had a beam weapon,
but the fact that it had to seal its optics and lock its mouth before
it could fire was a dead giveaway. Rather than dodge to either side,
though, the young man gathered himself and leaped _straight up_!
Well, not quite straight up, since he also flew forward, tucking into
a neat somersault over the Buma to land on the hood of a car behind
it. Yuri's surprise increased. It was the kind of thing neither she
nor Kei would think twice about, but your average college student--
[Doesn't face down combat Buma with samurai swords. Who IS
this guy?] she wondered.
The Buma turned to find the young man crouched on the hood of
the aircar, his longer sword replaced on his back. Yuri could see his
face now, and he did in fact have a scarf covering most of it. Still,
he looked familiar, sneakingly familiar. If only she could get
closer...
The Buma roared in outrage and set itself to fire again. In
that moment, something glittering silver dropped from the young man's
sleeve into the palm of his left hand. For an instant, Yuri thought
it was a Card, but then it flipped open, and she could see that it was
a semicircular object, a flat half-disk of silver metal about five
inches in diameter, which had been folded symmetrically.
[What is that?]
The young man wound up and cast the object as if it _were_ a
Card, in a style Yuri found very familiar, mostly because it was hers.
It struck the chest of the Buma with a sharp <tac> and stuck there;
the Buma aborted its firing sequence to look down and reach to claw it
free from its chest panel. The young man, meanwhile, took refuge
under the car.
Yuri realized what the object was and ducked under the van she
was crouched behind.
BLAM!
Yuri felt the suspension of the van rock above her as the hot
wind and blast wave swept over her right side; she hoped it was
checked out. When it passed, she crawled out from under the van and
got to her feet, regarding the burnt spot where the Buma had been and
the large amount of broken car windows in the area.
The young man in the coat got out from under the car he had
been hiding under, looked at the spot, pulled his scarf down under his
chin and dusted off his hands.
"Ayep, yep, yep," he said in a self-satisfied tone. "They
don't make 'em like they used--"
He realized he was being watched, and looked up, startled.
Yuri, seeing his face, hearing his voice, and now meeting his
eyes, had her sneaking suspicion confirmed. It felt like a hammer had
struck her in the gut, and she knew that this young man was not
particularly young.
Ben Hutchins pulled his scarf back up over his nose, turned
around, and ran away, disappearing in the cars.
Seconds later, Kei ran up.
"Yuri! Yuri, are you--oh, Goddess, you're okay. I
thought--whoa! Did you do that?"
"Um..." Yuri blinked, snapping herself out of the slight
trance the shock had put her in. "Oh! Yeah, I forgot I had a limpet
mine."
"Hm. It's not like you to forget your gear..." Kei shrugged.
"But hell, we all have off days, right? C'mon, let's go file the
paperwork and get on that next lead."
As they walked away, Kei continued, "Hope it pans out better
than _this_ one."
"Yeah...right..."
"Are you okay? I think that explosion rattled your brain."

"Kei, I'm going out for a little while, okay?"
"What's with you, Yuri? You've been acting weird ever since
that explosion. Been jacked in all afternoon. What's going on?"
"I just want to take a little walk and get some air, is that
all right with you?"
"Sure, okay, fine! Geez. You'd think you saw a ghost or
something. Have a nice time. Should I wait up?"
Yuri paused at the door, pulling on her coat, and thought.
"No...no, don't bother," she decided at last. "I might be out all
night."
"Okay...just be careful. Think you'll end up at Mascon and
Karin's?" Mascon and Karin were a couple of Salusian friends of
theirs, whom they had met when a previous mission brought them to
Cheltopolis, a year or so previous.
"Maybe." Yuri went out into the hallways of the Cheltopolis
Heights Marriott, paused, and made for the elevator.
Back in their room, Kei looked at the door for a while, then
shrugged and went back to cleaning her gun. "That girl needs to get
laid," she muttered, scrubbing out the barrel of her E-Mag a bit more
vehemently than was strictly necessary.

Yuri stopped in front of the brownstone and looked up and down
the street, checking the numbers on either side. Yes, this was it;
#401 Gamnor Avenue North. This was the place. She went up and tried
the door; it was unlocked. She climbed the stairs to the fourth floor
and then paused to gather her thoughts before knocking on the door to
#4.
It opened to reveal Gryphon, just as she'd always known him
(well, perhaps a little younger than he had been when they'd parted),
barefoot, in jeans and a threadbare flannel shirt, his hair unbound.
He smiled. "Uh...hi, Yuri. C'mon in." He ran a hand through
his hair, a nervous gesture she recognized immediately, and stood
aside. Not really knowing what she was doing here, Yuri stepped in.
The apartment was smallish, but comfortable; a single room
about twenty feet square, with hardwood floors and old-fashioned
wainscoting. Yuri knew the building was newer than that style--in
fact, that style had never existed naturally on Salusia. The building
had been built in anticipation of a large number of ST students from
Earth living in the neighborhood. It was meant to look like any one of
a thousand thousand such buildings on Earth and the Terran colonies.
This particular one was even vaguely neat, although there was
the usual jumbling of books and the like, and of course, Gryphon's
ever-present, antiquated-looking tower computer. Was that a Cyclone
in box mode in the corner?
"What brings you by?" asked Gryphon, looking up and down the
corridor before shutting and bolting the door behind her. "Harbinger
of the Angel of Death?"
"Kei doesn't know where I am."
"I appreciate that." Gryphon opened his refrigerator. "Dew?"
"Um...sure." He extracted two Dews and handed one to Yuri.
"Come in, sit down." Yuri walked into the apartment itself,
taking off her coat--it was heated by old-fashioned steam radiators,
and quite warm. She sat down in one of the two large chairs that
faced the holoset, and Gryphon sat in the other, turning it to face
hers.
"Sloppy of me to show myself like that," Gryphon observed.
"If you'd been Kei, I'd be dead now."
"I doubt it. You'll always have those two seconds or so of
leeway as she's paralyzed by shock, under conditions like that...like
I was. What the hell are you DOING here?"
"Going to college," Gryphon replied.
"I KNOW that."
"How'd you find me, then?"
"I looked in plain sight. How many people would have thought
to look for Benjamin D. Hutchins by looking to see if there were any
students registered at ST named 'Benjamin D. Hutchins', from Earth?"
"Kei wouldn't. She'd turn the damned database upside DOWN
looking for aliases, but she'd discard an occurrence of my real name
as nothing but a coincidence."
"Exactly." She half-smiled. "You're a clever bastard,
Ben."
"I'll have you know I'm of perfectly legitimate birth..."
Yuri actually laughed at that.
"You know," said Gryphon softly, "I never got a chance to
thank you for helping me get away. I found out later what believing
in me cost you...it would have been a lot easier just to let them have
me, wouldn't it?"
Yuri nodded mutely. Her lower lip quivered, but she managed
to keep her voice from cracking when she said, "But I couldn't do
that...not when I really did believe in you." Then she fixed him with
a piercing hazel gaze (the cold had made her eyes almost green) and
said, "If I ever find out it was for nothing..."
Gryphon looked deeply wounded, but by way of protest, he said
only a single word: "Yuri."
Yuri's gaze softened. "I know, I know. Eris, Kei would know
too, if she'd just wake the fuck UP...!"
Gryphon shrugged and got up, dropping his empty can in the
recycling bin and sprawling on his bed (which was in the corner by the
windows). "She's locked in; it's almost like a fugue state. I'm
honestly not sure if she _can_ be brought around...but it doesn't stop
me from searching the universe for evidence to try with."
Yuri walked over and sat down beside him, brushing his hair
away from his forehead. "You...you'll have her back someday. I know
you will." This time, her voice did break.
"Yuri..." He reached up and touched her cheek with his
fingertips. "I'm so sorry. I've brought you far more grief than I'm
worth. If I had known what would happen, I would _never_ have asked
you to help me. I could have found another way out, maybe."
She took his hand and held it in her own. "No, I don't think
so. You couldn't have escaped without help...and no one else would
have helped you."
"Maybe not," Gryphon repied, "but I don't think my life is
worth the pain that saving it has brought to you."
"Don't say that!" she cried. Gryphon blinked up at her.
"Don't _ever_ say that. Ben, you _made_ me. I only exist because of
you. It took me a long, long time to come to terms with that, but I
did, eventually. I owe you _everything_. You know how I think, my
view of honor and obligation...I owe you anything you can ask of me.
No matter what...the cost..."
He brushed a tear from her cheek with the knuckle of the hand
she still held in hers. "No one has a right to ask for what you lost.
But I'll be damned if it ends this way! I'll be _damned_ if I'm
responsible for this. This is a promise, Yuri, on my very life: by
the end of this century, _you will have MegaZone back_."
She blinked at him, too surprised to even be upset by the
mention of the name.
"You will," Gryphon affirmed. "If I have to drag him! If I
run out of time and have to let him _kill_ me--he WILL admit his
mistake. You WILL have him back. Ever since I found out what I'd
caused, I gave righting it an even higher priority than clearing my
own name."
"You...you did?"
"I always pay my debts, Yuri," Gryphon said evenly. He pulled
their still-linked hands down and brushed her knuckles with his lips.
"I wrecked your life, and I'll do my damnedest to put it back
together."
She was speechless, staring at him, her eyes brimming, lips
trembling.
Gryphon sat up, cupped her chin in his hand, and kissed her,
once, very gently.
"You know I love you, Yuri," he said. "Didn't I tell you so,
long, long ago? I couldn't hurt you any more than I could hurt Kei."
She looked into his eyes for a long, long moment, and saw
nothing there but the blue of polar ice, and truth.
"Thank you," she said, but her voice was only a harsh whisper.
"You are," he said, "very, very welcome." He looked over her
shoulder at the clock on the wall. "You'd better get going...Kei's
going to start wondering where you are. I'll get a few hours of sleep
and then get my stuff together and blow. It's not good to stay in the
same neighborhood. You found me by accident; she might too."
Yuri stood, took a couple of steps toward the chair with her
coat on it, then turned around.
"She's not expecting me back," Yuri said, regaining her voice.
"Ben...can I...stay _here_ tonight?" She let a significant pause drag
out before adding quietly, "With you?"
Gryphon looked sharply up, his eyebrow crooking. He wondered
if he'd understood that pause and inflection combination correctly.
[Might as well ask,] he said to himself.
"You mean," he said bluntly, "can we drown ourselves in animal
passions and temporarily sweep the sadness of our lives away in a
short flood of hormones? You mean, can we make love?"
"Yes."
Somehow, when he'd asked the blunt question, he hadn't
expected the blunt answer.
[This is a fine howdyado.]
Gryphon got up and went over to the window, pushing the
curtain aside and looking out at the snowy street. More snow was
falling as he watched, settling on the sidewalks and rooftops and
making the neighborhood (which _was_ a decent one) look pristine and
untouched. Below, a groundcar chugged along in low gear, heading
uptown. Gryphon wondered who was in it and what the story of _their_
life would look like.
He shrugged, turning around. "Sure, why not? I can't
possibly get into any _more_ trouble." He cracked a somewhat nervous
grin, then held up a hand. "But only if you're absolutely 100% sure
you really want to, and that there will be no regrets, no
recriminations, no second-guessing later."
She locked eyes with him from ten feet away and said without
hesitation, "None."
That was good enough for Gryphon. He shrugged again, a
gesture of acquiescence. Where this kind of thing was concerned, he
was generally (like 90% of the time) passive, preferring to watch and
see what happened.
Yuri reached for the first of the buttons that held her silk
shirt together in front, but before she could undo it, Gryphon had
interrupted her train of thought again, saying:
"Mind telling me why?"
Yuri paused, brow furrowing in thought. "I wouldn't, except
that I don't really know myself. All I know is that I feel like it's
something I have to do. When you look at it, it seems pretty silly we
never did...you know, before. I mean, how much sense does it make for
immortals to be mono..." She stopped; he was holding up a hand again.
"I've turned this line of thinking over in my head a thousand
times, Yuri. You don't need to explain it to me. It was just idle
curiosity on my part. Oh...and, uh, don't bother with the buttons.
If it's all the same, I'd like to take care of that myself."
Neither could help it; both of them broke down laughing.
The laughter died with the first kiss.
Outside, the snow fell with its almost imperceptible whoosh in
the silent, empty street.

The next afternoon, WDF _Lovely Angel_ (3WA-261) boosted away
from Salusia.
"Well, that was a completely pointless trip," Kei groused,
shoving her seat back from her console and standing up. "What a bust
that mission turned out to be...all those Buma to protect one lousy
small-time chiprunning operation, just because its head _used_ to work
for GENOM! Grrraaaah. I'm gonna take a bath and forget the whole
thing. Yuri? Yuri!"
"Hmm?" Yuri replied, looking away from the viewer at Kei.
"You haven't heard a word I've said! Just staring at the damn
viewer. Honestly, girl, I think something in that explosion rattled
your head." Kei sighed in exasperation and went aft.
Yuri looked back at the viewer and watched the tiny blue speck
on the far side of Salusia flare and disappear.
"Good luck, Ben," she said softly. "Good luck and godsspeed."

Gryphon checked his heading and warp coil status, and then,
satisfied that he was locked in for the long cruise to Earth, punched
up a musical selection from his onboard entertainment system.

/* Billy Joel "The River of Dreams" _River of Dreams_ */

Yuri - Yuri Daniels
Kei - Kei J. Morgan
Gryphon - Benjamin D. Hutchins

Visual effects by Industrial Light and Subspace