Warning: characters may appear rather…well…not themselves at time. This was mainly the result of a vast verbal flow I got a few days ago and it seemed to wander off and develop a life of its own. Plus I've ended it in a way I've never quite attempted to do before, methinks.
"You lied to me!"
She was angry again, green eyes clawing at his insides, bitter and raging. Or were they blue again? He hadn't dared to glance her way when that 'voice' entered his hearing range and so was perfectly oblivious as to whether she wearing the chameleon-like battle uniform…or something else…
"It would help if you mentioned what I lied about."
He chanced a glance at her. Gods, she was blazing. That. Was. Not. Good.
Lexi paused, chest inflating with surprised rage as her herbivore incisors chipped away at the rim of her mouth.
"You told me your birthday was during winter break! And now, now, Tech actually tells me that Zadovia's database lists your date of birth as being on the 23rd of June! I mean, that's barely two weeks away! It would have been nice if you'd given us a bit of notice so that we could've prepared for the extravagant party you're bound to demand."
Duck ground a mental fist into the taunting face of an imagery Tech who was currently running around his mind, having picked up an annoying laugh from Mastermind. Oh dear. A cackling coyote was one he never wanted to deal with (though he didn't understand why the image was so easy to conjure up- no doubt Rev could come up with an endless supply of reasons).
A coyote. A cackling coyote. Alliteration. Disturbing. And obviously his brain had engaged itself into self-preservation mode by preventing him from answering the question.
"It's just a birthday, a time where any idiot can pull a few party poppers and give unnecessary abuse to novelty piñatas shaped like us-"
Tech burst into his mind again, round, bloated, sweets dropping out of his mouth and growling to boot.
Duck blinked.
"-err, or a donkey-"
Long ears. Not good. Especially since he had always privately thought Tech had resembled a donkey, albeit a intelligent one with sharp canines designed for ripping up ducks who tried to whack them with party sticks.
"Erm. Ah."
The Tech piñata was still hovering in his mind. Duck gave up and replaced it with an Ace one.
"…"
Great, now he had completely lost his trail of thought. And, so it seemed, the plot.
Lexi was looking at him, a strange, empathetic look in her eyes that was carefully dousing the righteous anger that had burned in there before. Uh-oh. He hated it when she did that. It meant he was going to have to talk about his feelings.
He was completely and utterly doomed.
"Look Lexi, it's just a birthday, it's nothing to get worked up over."
She stood still, hands carefully encircling her hips until he started fidgeting. What was she doing, just looking at him like that as though she wanted to fix him?
"But Duck…"
Her voice was almost painfully soft now.
"…having a birthday gives you a great excuse for throwing a party about yourself. And you never miss out a chance to celebrate your 'greatness.'"
He was almost relived to hear the customary sarcasm dipped into her speech just as he was almost annoyed to hear the lack of bite that such an insult usually held.
He sighed.
"Look. My birthday is on the 23rd June…and that's national pink day."
Lexi's inquisitive look froze comically.
"That's it? That's the reason?!?"
Duck almost exploded.
"What d'ya mean 'that's it'? It's embarrassing! It's not 'famous' or anything but a lot of people dress up in pink and eat pink food and I bet even the crazies roll around in some imported pink sand and I'm sure there's an evil fashion designer who's just dying to stain our clothes in some Barbie-like dye that will take forever to wash out and…and…well…pink's not really my colour."
Lexi rolled her eyes.
"No, but it's mine…" she muttered, feeling an urge to slam her palm against her face.
Duck stared at her blankly.
"Huh…what? Oh come on Lexi! I know I can make any colour work, I look fabulous in anything but I'm telling you now, Danger Duck will not and cannot ever do pink!"
The female rabbit shock her head, letting her hands fall limply to her sides.
"Figures that your birthday would be on a day I might actually enjoy…"
It was then that Duck's eyes locked onto the battle uniform that Lexi had decided to adorn after all. The large pink triangle blazed up into his line of vision. And certain things slotted into place. A rather deadpan "oh" escaped his mouth.
"I mean it's alright for you, you're a girl and you can make pink look reasonably good, well, as good as any colour can look when it's not worn by yours truly…" he muttered, holding up a hand in an odd gesture that she could only guess was a clumsy method of pacification.
"Oh, so that makes everything alright of course…" she ground out.
The mallard peered up at her, wincing slightly at the cold savagery plastered in those same green eyes that had been encouraging him to talk mere moments before. Funny how easily he could switch off her sympathy valve.
He didn't understand girls. Or rabbits. Or cackling coyotes that had it in for him. But mostly he just didn't understand her.
She stared at him for a brief moment longer as though expecting something more. And then a brief shudder of disappointment ran thought her frame, so slight that it was a mere vibration, in fact, not even that much, just a tremor through her skeleton that was impossible to perceive, so how could have even known she was disappointed by him in the first place-
All coherent thought faded as she calmly left the room.
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It was a quiet affair. Some citizians wore pink sweatshirts and brought cute stuffed piglet-shaped comforters from the fair. Most didn't. The 23rd of June was caught upon the breath of wind blowing in from the dawning sun and snuffed out again just as quickly with the close of evening.
At least, it was after the Loonatics put a halt to the decisively not-so-innocent plans of a young artist who had taken to throwing supernaturally-charged pink paintballs at everyone from a helicopter. So Duck had almost been right. But that still made him wrong.
Lexi breathed a quiet snatch of sunset-driven air. She admired the warm rush of colours blending into the golden orb that was setting to her west, even felt the beginning of a bubbling giggle rise to the top of her throat at the velvety streak of pink that brushed its way unashamedly along the bottom of the sky.
There had been no party. Not even a surprise one. Duck had imposed a strict lecture on all of them a few days before, face uncharacteristically grim as he stated that he didn't want anything, not a card, not a present and defiantly no long-eared piñatas. Tech had looked surprised and perhaps a tad suspicious while Rev had let out a loud gasp and tried to engage Duck into an hour-long debate on why he should have a party with lots of noise and sugar intoxicating sweets over Slam's loud protests at the 'cake-ban'. And Ace had simply sat there, a thoughtful expression rising over his face as though he could see or perhaps empathise with something only he could assess. And then he had smiled and brought an end to the matter with a few choice words.
And she had sat there. And said nothing. After all, what more was there to utter?
She hummed a little to herself, legs swinging over the sloping edges of one of the Headquarters' many grand balconies, partly to ease her mind and mostly to drown out the timid footfalls of an indecisive waterfowl who had spent the past hour nervously tapping his feet inside the patio doorway.
He coughed.
She didn't turn around.
And then there was a faint rustle and a rose-tinted edge of something flat whizzed past her eye.
Ears perking up, she turned, a faint stab of curiosity lighting up her face.
Duck didn't acknowledge her, eyes glued to the way his fingers bent over the stem of paper rippling between his firm hands. The paper shuddered and then conformed into the rudimentary style of a paper aeroplane. It shifted into his hands before he drew it back swiftly, and then jettisoned it out beyond the marble perimeter of the balcony.
The rabbit's eyes followed its departure, noticing how the pink surface seemed to glow with a rusty orange light as it dove into the obliteration of a dying sunset. She blinked, a streak of water forcing her sight to turn away from the blinding light and lose the rest of the trail.
Another crackle of paper, then another, and it was like tiny fireworks in her ears. Lexi observed the stack of rose-coloured paper that had materialised beside Duck at some point in his journey across the wind-swept tiles and over to her right hand. In fact, she could now feel him staring down at the way her fingers were gently clutching onto the slim railing, each muscle cramped tightly round the stone material like a taunt rope. She could even assess the way he was thinking, the thoughts that were running through his head, and it scared her to realise how well she knew him after all.
Then his hands were moving again, into the familiar folds and creases, giving birth to another doomed flight projectile and she breathed in shakily, knowing that whatever had just happened, could happened, hadn't quite faded. The moment was still cloaking them, a small reminder of possibilities and questions she had often entertained herself with late at night when she didn't have to keep five boys in check.
And then the sharpness of paper wove itself into the thinning grip over the railing. She gasped, feeling him look at her again and the alight pressure of sun-baked feathers over her quiet hand as it threaded the aeroplane between the slits in her fur. Then it was gone, the incessant tugging of the wind straining at the flimsy body of his creation in her tangled fingers.
She paused. But just for a moment. And then the aeroplane was flying over the breeze, riding above it and carving a shadow of orange over her facial expression. A content one.
Duck watched her calmly before returning to the repetitive folding of paper aeroplanes. It didn't surprise him too much when a few seconds later she leapt down to join him. She was accepting his atonement with ease, just as she often did. Honestly, he didn't mind this pink stuff so much when she was around to bear the brute of it. After all, she was a girl and pink was her trademark colour.
And if it helped beat out those annoying images of cackling coyotes and smug Aces by replacing them with a vivid picture of a pret-ahem, okay-looking girl, then so much the better.
-----------------------------------
Meanwhile Tech was posing in his chair, looking incredibly pleased with himself as he deleted the temporary database he had Lexi 'accidentally' glance over a few weeks back and brought the real one back online. The real one with all the customary settings that enabled personal information to be withheld from anyone…apart from someone who knew how to handle computers like he knew his own heartbeat. It was then, to Rev's insurmountable horror, that his muzzle began to shake in a creepy chortle which eventually rose into a high-pitched squeal of laughter.
The next day Rev posted an online list of all Tech's personality quirks he found to be annoying as well as a sound clip of the supposed cackling. He was rather overwhelmed by the response he received, as well as the vast amount of bad grammar many of the comments contained.
And so everyone lived in a reasonably happy state of mind for a considerable length of time. That is, until Tech discovered the website Rev had created and realised that one of the responses was from Mastermind. And then the world never knew peace again.
Ahem. So yes. I wanted to make Duck secretive for a trivial reason rather than a miserable one. Admit it, how many times have you come across a fanfic where someone doesn't want to celebrate something because theirs parents died in a car crash on that day or they couldn't save their best friend etc. I figured it would be so much like Duck to blow something out of proportion due to his pride. And yes, I still think he is an angsty little Duck who was scarred for life at the orphanage and that's why he's a little messed up in terms of sensitivity. Mind you, Lexi is one of the few people who does attempt to get the bottom of the matter with Duck so…why not?
Yeah, I figure Duck has the capability for that quiet atonement scene with the aeroplanes. I'm not so sure Ace would have been up for it.
And Tech? I love him, really I do, but there was this strange part of me that wanted him to mess with people's lives and make a brief cameo into Duck's head.
It wasn't all in in vain though. Rev learnt to be so naïve about the internet and Duck didn't get beaten up.