27-Jun-2002
Title: No Joy in Mudville
Author: Sparcck
Rating: R
Genre: Yaoi [1x2], Angst
Warnings: Some violence, some language, some sex
Archive: As always, the wonderful GW Addiction (http://www.gwaddiction.com) houses all of my GW work.
Disclaimer: No money made, no harm done.
Feedback: All comments, criticisms, flames, marriage proposals, and
death threats should be sent, with love, to sparcck
Notes: Something I've been working on in spurts for quite some time, but I
think I finally have a breakthrough, and I thought, again, the posting would
help.
Thanks to Sharon (again and again) for all her inspiration. The cracks
in my wall came by way of the challenge on her site
(http://www.zerotwofan.com/rapture) and I'm so grateful.
Last night I dreamt that I was you.
I was dressed all in black with dark glasses and attitude.
Such a pose I could simply not hold
through days in a northern town that I had once called a home.
And your studies of fringe New York Streets:
I was reading the pavement in every word you would speak.
To a "brownstone up three flights of stairs"
and it's on...-Death cab for Cutie, "No Joy in Mudville"
There are a series of numbers connected to facts that stay with me.
Two years after the Mariemeia uprising, I joined the Preventers at Wufei's urging. I was surprisingly restless and it made sense.
One year after that, Trowa followed suit, bringing Quatre with him. We rarely spoke of our missing fifth, each for our own reasons that we kept very close to us.
Four months later, Wufei and I were assigned a homicide investigation on L2, the victims former members of OZ and red flagged in our databases. They were brutally killed, found with crosses carved into their chests. The first logical assumption that found its way into my head was of him and I hated myself for it.
We returned to earth and I made a phone call while fireworks from the Preventers' Independence celebration exploded outside my office window.
Two more phone calls confirmed it.
It was only three years after the end of conflict, and Duo Maxwell had disappeared.
AC 5 Jul 199
I hung up the phone gently, resting it very deliberately in its cradle. If I didn't, I would have slammed it down, possibly thrown the whole damn thing across the room for good measure. I sighed and scrubbed my hands over my face.
I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see Wufei standing behind me, a grave expression on his face. A burst of red from outside illuminated the room for a moment and my mind skipped back to the last body they had found.
Wufei and I didn't discuss Duo, but I knew he thought the same thing I had.
"He's gone," I finally said.
Wufei took a moment to school his features into a neutral expression. "Who was that?"
"Hilde Schbeiker. Duo lived with her for a little while."
"I remember her." He dropped the report from L2 on my desk. "I'm not putting Maxwell's name on that."
I grunted my agreement and scanned the notes he had written up, then signed my name.
'FURTHER INVESTIGATION PENDING' he had stamped on the bottom.
"I'll do it," I heard myself say.
"We'll do it together."
"I'll do it," I said again, more firmly and Wufei put both hands flat on my desk, leaning over towards me.
"You're very close to this. Screw up and it's Duo that will suffer."
I glared at him, then back down at the report. I shuffled the papers aside, sliding out the glossy color photos of the crime scene, of the bodies.
The first one was the most meticulous, body arranged in a crucifixion, throat slashed, side gouged open, ribs showing. The victim's chest had been carved open in the shape of a cross, but nothing had been removed.
"I should be the one to go," I said after a moment.
"Just be careful." He frowned hard, his brow creasing. "Duo--"
My hand jerked closed and crushed the photo. "Don't say his name again."
"I'll speak of him when I want," he bit out in Chinese. "He's my best friend."
"Then where is he?" I spoke deliberately in English, swiveling my chair around to face him.
For a minute, I thought he would hit me. He chest was heaving in anger and his hands were clenched at his side, one gripping his belt in place of the sword that no longer hung there.
"I'm having the last body shipped here for further examination," he said at last, his eyes shuttering. "I'll update you if I find anything." He turned and left my office quietly.
I was alone again.
Wufei and Duo had always been close. Duo was the only one who didn't question it when we learned of the Chinese pilot's involvement with Marimeia. And he was the first one to accept him again afterwards.
So it made sense that Wufei considered Duo his best friend, but it made me feel an odd way, one that I refused to analyze although that really should have been my first clue.
And then one day Wufei stopped calling him, and stopped getting calls from him. I never asked what happened. I didn't think I wanted to know.
More dishonesty with myself. Had it been two years earlier, I never would have accepted such behavior.
After Duo, I was the one that Wufei had kept in close contact with more than the others, calling me once every few weeks to let me know what was going on. We always spoke Chinese to each other and I originally thought his constant communication with me was just a yearning for familiarity and an opportunity to keep something from his past alive.
Difficult to grasp that he actually wanted to be my friend.
Without a war and a fight for justice, Wufei was quiet and scholarly; he was almost mild-mannered. He realized he had more than his share of fieldwork after only a year and began studying for a division transfer.
It was almost exactly two years after he joined the Preventers that he called me with news of his recent Forensics exam.
"Yuy," Wufei said as soon as I answered the phone. "My division transfer went through. I start in Forensics on Monday."
"Shouldn't you be out celebrating?" I said, pushing my steamed broccoli around on my plate. I hadn't been very hungry lately, hadn't wanted to do much of any of the "normal" things I thought I wanted to do.
He pursed his lips. "I'm trying to avoid Dorothy."
"Catalonia?"
A fine blush tinted his cheekbones, although he struggled to hide it. "She keeps... asking me out."
I had no idea what to say to that.
I saw laughing violet eyes in my head, felt the memory of thin wrists trapped in my fist and the clumsy mash of lips and teeth.
Wufei was looking at me strangely. He couldn't possibly know what I had been thinking, but he was perceptive and he knew something was wrong. And when he knows something that he thinks he can fix, he has a hard time keeping his mouth shut.
"That means there's another field agent slot open."
"Yes."
"Join."
I was silent. He had asked me routinely every month since he joined. But now he had a real excuse for needing me. I felt the tug of the mission in my gut.
"We need another good agent," he persisted.
I stared down at my chicken and broccoli, the taste suddenly like sand in my mouth. I'm not good at this, I realized suddenly, looking around my spare apartment. I couldn't be "normal." It wasn't coded into me.
"Heero," he said, a thread of impatience in his tone. He knew he had me.
So I joined.
I didn't go home after Wufei left for the night. I couldn't. The thought of facing that little apartment alone was finally too much for me.
I missed Duo. It was time I admitted it.
I looked again at the photos, wondering if it was the closest I'd been to Duo in over two years. Feeling slightly ill, I tucked them back into the folder. I refused to believe this was Duo's work.
The Duo I remembered was brash and stubborn. He was artless and graceful at the same time. He was smart and sharp and intense.
And he makes you feel something you've never felt before, a little voice inside me said. He makes you feel warm and a little out of control.
I rested my hands on the chair arms and started out the window until the sun started to come up. My eyelids drooped and I saw Duo framed against a sea of people; I snapped my eyes open before the memory could go any further.
Something else the person I used to be never would have allowed.
People change.
Checking my watch, I saw that the desk clerk would just be coming in, and I smoothed my shirt out and adjusted my tie as I went to get a missing persons report.
End Part 1
(:./sparcck/mud)
