Wufei 1/2
A Gundam Wing / Ranma 1/2 crossover
Part Five
By Raye Johnsen

    "Kidou Senki Gundam Wing" is copyright Bandai, Sunrise, Viz Communications, Mixx Entertainment and other associated parties. "Ranma 1/2" is copyright Takahashi Rumiko, Shogakukan and Viz Communications. In other words, they're not mine.
    [holds composure]
    [holds composure]
    [loses composure]
    IT ISN'T FAAAAIIIIIRRRR!!!!!

    Please remember: this is an Alternate Universe, so the events with which you are familiar may or may not occur; and secondly, this fic's only reason for existing is to make you smile. If it succeeds, cool. If it doesn't, well, I'm sorry. Either way, do not take it seriously.

Part the Fifth: Your Spot Is Next To The Barbie Doll

I am told by others - most notably Duo - that my curse should have made me more amenable to the plight of women. That, due to the fact that I would be female on occasion, that I should start to express a sympathy with the feminine.

Normally I respond to such a statement with either "nonsense!", "rubbish!" or something unprintable, depending on who's asking and how often they have asked. I am male and male I shall remain.

I have found, however, that there are some things with which I can agree with women on. One of them is the unpleasantness of having one's body touched without permission. Another is the fact that some otherwise intelligent men can act like absolute idiots. And that is all I have to say on the subject of Trowa Barton's initial reaction to my curse.

In its way, though, Hiiro Yui's non-reaction was almost as unnerving. I would have thought that he would have reacted as badly as Duo's Professor G. Still, after Barton's... enthusiastic greeting, Yui's acceptance was a relief.

Winner's reaction was not what I had predicted. After he had pulled me from our new base's kitchen, he fell silent as he guided me to the room his servants had given me. When we arrived there (and I was not surprised to see feminine touches about the room, such as lace edging on the pillowslips, although such touches were minimal, something I would have to thank Winner for later) Winner did not leave me at the door, nor after a short tour of the room and bathing facilities.

Finally, after Winner had extended the explanation of the facilities as far as he could, I took pity on him.

"You must be curious," I began, "about what happened in Manchuria."

"Well, I am, a little," he admitted, "but I'm more interested in talking to you and getting your help."

My help? What could I possibly help Winner with? The youth was skilful in both fighting and strategy, a brilliant warrior whose leadership was effective and appropriate. I said as much to him, and he blushed.

"Thanks," he muttered, uncomfortable with my praise.

I lifted an eyebrow. "Interaction with Duo has taught me that if one feels a collegue deserves recognition, that recognition should be given," I said gently. "You are all that I have said. It should not be a cause of embarrassment."

"It's not that. It's - it's that I want you to teach me how to act like a boy!"

I blinked. "But you are a boy," I told him.

Winner rolled his eyes at me. "I have twenty-nine older sisters," he told me. "My father was too busy looking after his business to pay too much attention to me as a child, and my mother was killed in an accident just before I came out of the uterine replicator. A group of my sisters shared the burden of raising me."

"They did well," I ventured.

Winner stared at me, and his mouth twisted. "Maybe so," he said, "but they were girls and that's the way they acted. And that's the way they taught me to act." He held up a hand as I started to speak. "I'm not saying they were bad! Or that they did anything wrong. It's not like they could teach me how to act like a boy. And they tried, they made sure I had male tutors and everything...."

"I would have thought, around the Maguanacs, that you would have seen how men behave," I said quietly. This subject was making me uncomfortable. It is, after all, the role of women to raise their husband's sons, and it seemed to me only appropriate that Winner's sisters, in the absence of their mother, should raise their father's son. My own mother had raised me to the age of seven, before I entered schooling, and my father too had been a distant figure until that time. In my view, Winner's sisters had succeeded in their task. Should my sons turn out as Winner had, I would not be displeased.

I did not say so, of course. Telling someone he is a prime advertisement for his sisters' wifely skills is hardly a subject for casual conversation.

"Yeah, but -" Winner took a deep breath, "- but I'm not like them, not really. I'm small, and young, and... and I'm in charge."

Ah. "You seem quite masculine to me, Winner," I said gently. "It is simply time -"

"No, it's not!" Winner sprang up out of his chair and began to pace. "It's not age and it's not experience! It's body language and the projection of authority! You've got it, and I want it, and you're not even a boy!"

I felt as if all the breath had been knocked out of me. 'You're not even a boy... you're not even a boy...' echoed through my head. Numbly, I began to take my shirt off.

"Hey - no - wait -" I heard Winner say.

"Not a boy?" I hissed, pulling the shirt off completely and turning to face him. His face was turned away and I reached out and physically pulled his head to face mine. He kept his eyes resolutely shut.

Anger swept down my veins. I had lost dignity, position and some of my much-hoarded integrity to this damned curse. I would not lose my masculinity to it too. It was, after all, all I had left. "You will damn well open your eyes, Winner, and look at me, and repeat those words."

He kept them shut, shaking his head.

"Damn it, Winner! Open your eyes and LOOK AT ME!" I all-but-screamed, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him.

His eyes flicked open under the unexpected shock of my actions, and he stared at my - currently male - chest.

"But - but you had breasts," he muttered, almost dazed. "Hiiro said -"

"A disguise. What the hell would Yui know, anyway?" I snapped.

"You're swearing an awful lot," Quatre said, with that calm tone that I've heard too often from people who are in shock and are just about to start screaming and throwing things. "It's not you."

"'Not me'? I'll have you know, Winner, that my mother regularly scrubbed my mouth out with soap before I was ten, and the only reason she hasn't done it lately is because nowadays I can run faster than she can."

Winner's lips quirked. I wasn't sure what I'd said to provoke the youth's puckish sense of humour, but I was relieved by its appearance.

"Besides," I added, "being a man is more than projecting the image. I have always been taught that one should judge by deeds, not words; and your deeds are those of a strong man." Winner looked at me quizzically as I continued. "We who know you know you for the man you are, Winner. Those who don't know you -" I shrugged. "Let them whisper. They will anyway. You should not change who you are for someone who'll never know you in the first place."

"You sound like my sisters."

"Were you wise, you would listen to them, Winner."

The next morning, Duo was waiting for me as I descended to the main part of the house.

"I am soo bored," he told me.

"Indeed? I believe Winner has a library," I replied, deliberately obtuse. Duo obviously wanted to persuade me into something, and who was I to deny him his amusement?

Duo's face artfully twisted into a scowl of disappointment, but his eyes were dancing. "Weeell... we're not well-known in this region. We don't have to worry about being recognised," he began.

I could see where this was going. "True..." I said, encouragingly.

"And there's a cinema at the local shopping centre...."

I grinned at him. "Do you have a copy of the movie listings?"

Before Duo could reach for the hardcopy newspaper that had been delivered that morning, a hand dangled it in front of my face.

"I believe," Yui's voice came from behind me, "that there are several pictures showing which we would enjoy."

"We? What's this 'we', white man?" Duo demanded, reaching for the paper.

"Don't call me that, you're the only Aryan in the room. And you're not the only one who's bored."

"What happened to Evercrack?"

"The server's down. And don't call it that."

"What about Gotterdammerung?"

"My server's down," Yui clarified.

"And you haven't changed servers?"

Yui shrugged. "I want to go to the cinema. If you have a problem with it, Maxwell -"

"Enough," I entered the fray. "Yui and Duo, you are both welcome to join me at the cinema. Provided we all agree on a film, of course."

After giving each other sidelong glances, they joined me in poring over the paper.

As we looked over the listings, I could not help studying them out of the corner of my eyes. The air about that minor quarrel had been... disturbing.

At the shopping centre, I watched the other teenagers, attempting to assess current fashions and behaviour patterns. The sooner I could pick up on them, the sooner I could construct a facsimile for myself. There is nothing harder than picking one teenager out of a crowd when they all speak and dress the same.

Here, it seemed that the prevailing language was English with aspirated, lengthened vowels and a flat tonality. The common fashion seemed to be T-shirts printed with images and/or mottoes and various types of jeans. Obtaining the clothes would be easy, but the accent was both subtle and difficult to grasp.

The most common images on the clothing seemed to be of two figures - a short-haired Chinese girl and a long-haired European boy, either singly or together. Girls seemed to favour wearing the image of the girl, while boys wore T-shirts printed with either the girl or the boy. I was puzzled until I saw a T-shirt with the girl leaning up against a mobile suit (though of no model I'd ever seen), and the motto on the back reading 'I have PMS and a Gundam. I'm sorry, did you say something?'

If my mother had been standing beside me in that moment, I would have been eating soap for the rest of the day.

"'Fei? What's up?" Duo asked, startled by my seemingly unprovoked stream of invective.

I pointed at a knot of teenagers across the main corridor of the shopping centre, all of them wearing T-shirts printed with various fanciful images of Duo and myself.

Duo blinked, looked, and began to swear himself.

Hiiro stepped away from us, and walked to the clothing store located two shops down the corridor. A worker was restocking a rack at the front - one, I was less than pleased to see, that featured shirts with Those Pictures on them.

"Excuse me," Hiiro said politely to the boy, "but who are these pictures of?"

The boy looked at Hiiro sidelong, as if he'd asked what colour the sky was. "It's the Gundam pilots. You know? The ones that destroyed that OZ base in China."

"I didn't think they put out T-shirts."

"'Course they didn't. That's why these're pictures, not photos. The company says they're just generic pictures, but we know who they are."

"Um, yeah," Hiiro said, but the other boy kept going.

"You have seen the clip, right? 'Cause if you haven't, I've got it on the computer behind the counter and I'll show it to you."

"Yes, of course I have, but -"

"The girl's a babe, isn't she? I don't know about the guy - long hair is so old-fashioned, you know - but that girl - WOW. If it takes long hair to get a girl like that, I'm growing mine!"

Hiiro tried to break into the conversation again, but the boy talked over the top of him. "There's just something about the fact that she's a Gundam pilot as well as a cute girl. It just makes her so much sexier, don't you think?"

"No, I don't think," I growled from behind him. "Do you? Think, that is?"

He jumped, and turned around to stare at me. Duo grabbed my arm, and began dragging me off. "So sorry, just a bad day all round, thanks a lot," he babbled, pulling me away from the idiot.

"You can let go of me, Duo," I informed him icily. "I am not going to eviscerate the fool."

"I know that," Duo told me, not relinquishing my arm.

"So?"

"But you said nothing about not going back and breaking his arm," Yui added from my other side. "Let's go. The movie is starting soon."

"Bastards," I said, with feeling.

"Quite possibly," Duo said cheerfully.

The movie was an exercise in torture.

"Why are they all wearing those shirts?" I demanded in a whisper.

"I understand that this region, when it was a separate country, was built up from a penal colony," Yui told me. "After some time, it became a cachet to be descended from someone who had been a convict. These people take pride in criminal ancestry - particularly as many of these ancestors were rebels from another province that were fighting a guerrilla war for their independence, that were transported here to keep them from being able to return to continue the fight."

"In other words, to these people, we're just like Great-Great-Grandfather?" I said, incredulous.

"More or less, yes. There's a reason why OZ has seven bases on the Australian landmass."

"Wonderful," Duo said, eyes alight. "A continent full of backup!"

"We're not here to incite political riots, Duo," I told him.

"Spoilsport."

"... cool."

"But she was a twit!"

"The guy was a dolt, they were destined for each other."

"Nothing like the girl Gundam pilot."

"You compare everyone to the girl Gundam pilot."

"Well, she's cool."

The girl Gundam pilot (who was a boy at the time, thanks to a quick backwards stumble when disaster in the form of a cold cherry soft drink in the cinema threatened) was not happy. I stared at the back of the heads of the gaggle of teenage girls ahead of us, willing one to trip and fall on her face.

It didn't happen, worse luck. We left the cinema and the town without incident.

I didn't speak until we were safely out of town. "I can't believe that we're pop icons."

"Believe it," Yui said shortly. "That clip of you two is almost as popular as the current number one song on the music charts."

"That's not something I want to think about, Yui," I told him.

When we got in, Yui went to check his laptop. In this location, it was in the conservatory. Yui, again, had not bothered to share his reasons.

He returned quickly. "The holiday is over," he told me, handing me a printout. "We have to hit Fremantle Base."

"I'll go prep ShenLong and DeathScythe," Duo said.

"The mission is for ShenLong and Wing," Yui said stiffly. Both of them stared at each other, and then Duo shrugged.

"'Kay then," he said flatly. "I'll rely on you."

I frowned at him. "You have never had a problem with my competence before, Duo."

"I wasn't talking to you, 'Fei."

I shook my head and headed out to the hangar to prep ShenLong. Had everyone taken leave of their senses today?

Author's Notes:

    1. Some issue is made in the Episode Zero manga over the fact that most children on L4 are created in test-tubes and 'born' from uterine replicators, and that Quatre was very unusual in being both the product of a passionate encounter and carried within his mother's womb. It is also specifically stated in the manga that the knowledge of this was kept from him, as his mother died in childbirth with him. As far as he knows, he is a 'normal' test-tube baby.

    2. WuFei is a pottymouth. I did not make that up! He uses the most masculine and roughest forms all through the series, and uses quite foul language all through his battles.
    Japanese has several 'forms' - different vocabularies - that have varying levels of politeness. Relena, for example, uses an exceptionally formal and polite form, Noin and Lady Une use common feminine form, and Quatre uses polite masculine form. To use a rougher form than one's company, particularly of the same gender, is a lapse in politeness, and the more rough the form the ruder the impression. The effect of WuFei's continued usage of that particular form is similar to that of someone using the F word in every sentence. And meaning it.
    This was actually fairly hard for me to reconcile with his character - because as a high-ranking son of his clan and a son-in-law of the station's ruling clan, WuFei would have been extensively trained in etiquette and correct social behaviours, and swearing is an antisocial behaviour. So I have decided that, at least in this fiction, he swears in moments of stress, and minds his manners the rest of the time.