Archive: http://www.fanworkrecs.com
Disclaimers: I don't own the characters from Gundam Wing, I just play with them for non-profit fun until they run screaming back to their creators.
Warnings: AU - AAAAAAAAAAAU. Some yaoi, lemon, violence, language. You should be a legal adult to read this. Open-mindedness helps, too.
Pairings: all over the map; Duo-centric. yaoi and het.
Author's Notes: A huge helping of "suspension of disbelief" would be appropriate before you read this. I'm sure J or G could explain the science behind it, but they're kinda dead right now...
Part 6 ~ Mess (cont'd)
While they were waiting for the muscle relaxant to take effect, Duo hunted down a set of bolt cutters and severed the manacles around Tro's wrists. That was one less worry - he didn't think it would have been possible to put the joint back in by moving both arms together.
Now he held Trowa's weak arm straight and a little out to the side. Slowly but forcefully, he pulled the elbow across the acrobat's chest, keeping the wrist out. It looked awkward as hell, and he could tell by the set look on Tro's face that he was hard pressed not to cry out.
"Don't... stop..." Tro whispered harshly.
Duo gritted his teeth. His hands were still shaking, getting worse again, jiggling Tro's arm no matter how he tried to still the tremors. He wanted to hurry, but Trowa had told him not to wrench on the arm.
He pulled steadily against the increasing pressure, and was finally rewarded with a disgusting wet crunch. The arm jerked in his hands, and he folded the wrist up and over Tro's shoulder, as he had been coached. Two more sickening crunches, and Trowa was actually smiling with relief.
"That's it. Thanks, Duo." Tro flexed his hand, testing for problems.
"That's it?? The pain's all gone?"
Trowa started to shrug, but apparently thought better of it. "Mostly. It aches a bit, but that's to be expected after everything's been stretched like that."
Duo shook his head, carefully getting out a sterile pressure bandage and antiseptic solution with wavering hands while Trowa made the hole in his trousers larger. Cutting the med-capsule out of Tro's leg was next on the schedule.
They didn't have much time. Wheat must be right outside the door now. The entry code might take him a while, but there was no doubt he would eventually get inside. Duo wanted to be long gone by then.
As if to emphasize his thoughts, there was the unmistakable sound of an electrical short from the doorway.
"He's blown out the keypad," Duo said, possibilities and consequences whirling through his mind. "The only way in now is to blast down the door." He sloshed some of the antiseptic over the wound in Trowa's thigh, the astringent liquid going only roughly where he aimed it. His hands were getting worse again.
"From what I saw he has enough weaponry to do just that. Is there any failsafe on the lab itself?" Trowa plucked a scalpel from the med-kit, frowning thoughtfully at the length of the blade.
"G wasn't fond of self-detonation, but he was too paranoid to go without it. I can trigger it with enough of a delay that we can get suited up and out an airlock before it blows." Probably, he added to himself.
"Fine." With no further hesitation, Trowa cut into his leg, making a slow, deep incision. It was a little gross, but to Duo's mind not nearly as bad as that awful sound his shoulder had made. Go figure.
Luck was with them, for when Tro prised apart the edges of the freely-bleeding wound, the med-capsule literally popped up, the pressure of the surrounding flesh pushing it out the path of least resistance. Trowa nudged it onto the floor, and flicked it out of the way.
Duo was oddly reassured to see that Tro's hands were trembling. It had always creeped him out a little when Heero had done something awful to himself and remained rock-solid steady throughout.
They drenched the wound with more antiseptic, and wrapped a pressure bandage tightly around Tro's thigh. Duo helped as best he could, but his control was degenerating again, and he finally had to just get his hands out of Trowa's way.
Trowa was tucking in the ends of the bandage when a loud barrage started at the door.
"Th' dor won' hol' fer long," Duo began, dismayed to hear how slurred his voice sounded.
He glanced at Trowa, alarmed but not terribly surprised to see how pale the taller man was. Gundam pilot or not, he didn't look like he could take much more.
"Therz a 'mergency airlock a' th' back... There'r sootz ther..."
Trowa stood, his jaw tightening as his wounded leg took his weight, even slight as it was in the low gravity. He swayed, but remained upright. It would have to be good enough.
"There's an airlock directly into the lab?" Trowa asked, his voice determinedly level. "Couldn't we have just come in that way instead of going past all the traps?"
"Th' lox one way. 'f ya force it, it'll blow th' lab."
They began to hobble to the emergency decompression airlock, Trowa limping and Duo staggering. His legs were wobbly and weak, and he hoped he'd be able to make it to the other end of the room.
Duo took one last look around the lab as they went. He'd been thinking about the contents since arriving at the tiled corridor. There were plenty of half-completed devices and interrupted experiments, but nothing that could be used without risking catastrophic failure.
Too bad, really...
"Duo!!" Trowa's alarmed tone caught his attention, and he realized with surprise that he was about to land face-first on the floor. His arms twitched, not responding to his desire to break his fall, but the memories hit before the decking could.
Heero smashed Tro's gun arm against the thresher, and the acrobat's face blanched as the bone broke with an audible snap crunch as the joint realigned and Heero began to splint his broken leg with a wrench one of the Sweepers had left on the ship gazing up at the moon and wondering where Heero was flying away laughing with Deathscythe's stolen parts now part of Wing exploding in Siberia leaving a cold deeper than space in Duo's heart and Quatre was moaning in reaction over the comm looking so pale in that hospital bed after peace had been won and Lady Une had surrendered the remnants of OZ's former officers had joined the Preventers but Duo just ignored the subtle sneers and gibes at least they weren't as mean to him as they were to Zechs asking if he had been involved in the gundanium thefts Wufei leaning back against the blond and saying seriously "If there should come a time when you need help, or someone to talk to, I would hope you would call me... someone to talk to... call me... talk to me..."
...talk to me...
"Duo. Duo! Talk to me!" Trowa's urgent whisper finally penetrated Duo's hazy thoughts.
He raised his head, blinking blearily. He was lying on the floor of the emergency airlock. Looking back the way they must have come, he could see the underside of the workbenches in the lab, and several pairs of legs moving around cautiously.
Wheat was in the lab, hunting for them.
Even as Duo watched, one of the pairs of legs rounded the end of the bench. The legs were attached to the goon who had had the run-in with the lab door. He gave an excited yell, which was cut off abruptly when the airlock door irised shut.
"Duo, I need the authorization code to seal the door. Duo, can you hear me?" Trowa was already sliding his long legs into a suit, yet his voice sounded as calm as if he were commenting on the weather - a sort of a 'nice day we're having, oh, by the way, we're about to die' kind of tone.
The door began to dilate, prompted by the goon on the other side, but Trowa slapped the emergency button again and it closed obediently. "Duo, I need that code."
"363-741-629." Duo rubbed his face in an attempt to clear his muddled mind as Trowa's lean fingers danced over the keypad. The door hummed briefly, signalling that the magnetic seal had been engaged.
"They saw us," Trowa commented, still in that purposefully unexcited tone. He pushed his arms into the suit, pulling it up to his shoulders.
Duo grinned, reaching up to snag an enviro-suit for himself. "I noticed," he said dryly.
Trowa smirked back at him, his fingers flying over the fastenings of his suit with the ease of long practice. "Glad to see you're back."
"Yeah, well, I wouldn't want you to have dragged my sorry ass all the way in here for nothing." Duo wiggled awkwardly into the suit, frowning slightly at the odd fluttery feeling in his belly. "Thanks for that, by the way."
"No problem. I'll get those." Trowa's hands batted Duo's shaking fingers away and started sealing the shorter man's suit. "Can you set the self-detonate from in here?"
"Yeah. I -" A flat buzz from the airlock door indicated that Wheat hadn't given up trying to get in at them. Duo tilted his head at the door. "Now that its locked, it would take a laser cannon to get through that door."
Trowa handed Duo a helmet, then settled his own in place. "Take a guess what Wheat used to blast open the lab door."
"Oh. One more reason to hurry, then..." Duo concentrated on making sure his suit was space-ready.
He felt a bit distracted. His stomach didn't hurt, exactly, and despite not having eaten at all today, it didn't feel like hunger - more like butterflies. He shook his head sharply, dismissing the vague sense of unease. He didn't have time for nebulous anxieties.
He turned to the security console and entered his passcode, relieved to see that it was still accepted by the system. He activated the self-detonate procedure and then paused, thinking out loud. "We'll need time to get far enough away... but I don't want to leave Wheat enough time to hack in and interrupt the countdown."
"Unlikely. If he had a good hacker, he would have just shut down the whole security system on this asteroid to begin with."
"Good point. Three minutes, then." Duo entered the time carefully, double-checking that his fingers were pressing the buttons he was aiming for. He hit Enter, and the impersonal voice of the auto-destruct began the countdown.
"You think Wheat will take the hint and get back to his ship right away, or will he try to blast us with the cannon first?" Duo asked, sealing his helmet.
"Let's not wait around to find out, ne?" Trowa snapped a lifeline between their suits, and hit the outer lock release.
With a bang and a hiss, they were jettisoned into space.
The force of the air expelling from the lock, aided by the small rocket packs on the backs of their suits, allowed them to manoeuvre into the shadow of one of the larger asteroids nearby. They made no attempt to land - asteroids were notorious for twisted outcroppings with razor-sharp edges, a well-known hazard for enviro-suits. They just needed to be sheltered from the blast when the lab blew.
Curious to know what their enemy was doing, Duo flipped his radio receiver to the frequency Wheat had been using, needing only three tries to get his shaky limbs to cooperate
"...back here right now!! I'll gut you, you worthless..." Wheat was screaming obscenities and threats at the top of his voice. Duo winced and dialled the volume down.
Trowa put a hand on his arm, pointing with the other to a shape rising from behind their sheltering asteroid. Duo stared. G's runabout was lifting off, and from the sounds of it, Wheat wasn't aboard. The pilots must have sealed the ship and decoupled as soon as they'd heard the auto-destruct sequence start up.
Duo smirked. They were smarter than he'd originally given them credit for.
The little shuttle turned, manoeuvring jets firing, and then sped away, blurring into invisibility as it went.
The three minutes were almost up. Duo shut off the radio altogether, not wanting to be deafened. A bright flash lit up his field of vision, outlining the asteroid they were sheltering behind with edges of purest white. A moment later he could see wreckage sailing past - dust, chunks of rock, and the remnants of the lab, twisted, broken, and utterly silent.
Duo watched the debris flash by, sobered and a little worried. While the explosion solved the immediate problem of Wheat hunting them, the resulting cloud of metal-rich dust would scatter and obscure the signal from their distress beacons. If the Preventer ship could even pick up the weakened broadcast, he doubted it would be able to pinpoint the source.
He and Tro might be able to get clear of the asteroid field by judicious use of the little jet packs on their suits, but if the Preventers came in to investigate the explosion, they might miss each other. Dying of either cold or suffocation in the unending deep of outer space was not a pleasant prospect.
He flipped on his distress beacon anyway, and then dialled his radio back to the suit's original frequency. He actually had his mouth open to speak to Trowa when he heard a faint sound over the suit's receiver - the soft susurration of unsteady breathing, barely controlled.
Duo pulled slightly on the lifeline connecting their suits, turning himself around in order to see his companion's face. Trowa was in profile, but Duo felt a spike of dread as he took in the other's posture - slightly curled in on himself, his arms crossed across his chest, fists tightly clenched.
"Tro?" Duo's voice was sharp with worry. "Are you all right?" If the pressure bandage on Trowa's leg had slipped, he could be losing blood fast.
For a long moment there was no reply, just the sound of that quiet, desperate breathing. Then, softly, as if to himself, Trowa whispered, "I'm... so cold..."
End Page 25
(:./wingnut/alter25)
