08-Feb-2005
Fic Title: Trinity
Author: Tabs
Date submitted: January 1, 2005
Genre: Alternate Universe, Action and Adventure, Romance
Rating: R
Disclaimer: Gundam Wing, its concepts, and its characters, are property of Bandai, Sunrise, Emotion, TV Ashai, and all related parties therein. I make no claims to anything but the intellectual concepts of this story. This fic is written strictly for entertainment purposes. No payment has exchanged hands for this fic. No money will exchange hands in the future for this fic.
Author notes: This fic is loosely based on "Precious Little Angel," which I started a while back with my co-author Sephiroth. While I have recently received permission from Sephy to continue PLA, I chose instead to go ahead and do this rewrite because I am going to take some serious liberties with the story, and I don't feel justified in doing so with Sephy's work, even if she says it's okay.
This is set in an alternate universe where the timeline is very different from the timeline in the series and Endless Waltz. In this story, the war has been in progress for a little over eighteen months. The pilots have been engaged in the war from the beginning, have been working together all that time and all are eighteen.
Hard surface underneath. Cold. He lay very still and took stock of himself. The place was pitch black. Duo rubbed his head and tried to figure out what was going on. There was a sharp pain behind his eyes. The air was surprisingly chilly. Intelligence came back to him slowly, and as it did so he recalled that he and the others had been camped out in a relatively sunny area, in the high part of spring. Summer was around the corner; the air shouldn't be this cold, not even late at night. There were no stars out, but this wasn't the tent; he could tell that just because it lacked the smell of mould. A building, then, and not the great outdoors. No blanket, no mattress, no - eep! No clothes! Nudity meant his stuff was gone, meaning his gun was gone, meaning he was without a weapon. There goes my Kimber, he thought, already missing his favorite pistol. Odds are shitty I'd ever get it back. The place was so quiet that the soft hum of an air conditioning unit kicking on startled him. Cold air filled the room, giving him chills.
Duo started to sit up and banged his head solidly on something low overhead. He fell back to the slab, whatever it was, he found himself stretched out on, seeing stars. That was about all he could see; the beating his head took didn't help him adjust to the darkness.
He lay still for a long moment, eyes shut, trying to gather his wits. He felt groggy. His limbs felt like lead, and he couldn't seem to get his brain functioning. There was a sour taste in his mouth. Memory just wouldn't come to him, no matter how he tried to recall where he was or how he got there, and his stomach hurt terribly besides. General shitty feelings combined with typical symptoms hinted at drugging, and that made him angry. Anger helped clear the sparkles in his vision. He opened his eyes and lay still to let his night vision kick in.
There wasn't much to work with. A dim light off to the right was too weak to see properly by, though after a moment Duo saw the shadowed outlines of what could only be bars between him and the glow. His heart sank. Bars meant capture.
He couldn't quite piece together exactly what happened. Every time he tried to remember how he got in this position his brain started protesting very painfully. But he couldn't work without information, and right now he was dreadfully short of that. Since he couldn't remember clearly, he decided to inspect his cell and see what he could learn. Carefully he raised a hand above him and encountered wood slats. He ran his hands over them until he came to an edge, then, using that edge for support, got himself more or less on his feet. Duo was still feeling unsteady, and the bump on his head wasn't helping that feeling, but at least he had a starting point.
The ground was hard stone, the wooden slats turned out to be the supports for a bunk bolted into the wall above the bed he woke up on. One hand on the wall, one hand outstretched in front of him, and with seeking feet, Duo followed the wall to the corner, not running into anything. He turned at the corner, walked until he came to bars, then peered out into the darkness.
His eyes finally caught up enough to make out dim shapes in the hallway. It glinted dully off of metal across the way; Duo assumed that meant another cell. He frowned. Prison, then? But I've never heard of a prison that didn't have continual light at all times, even at night. How else can the guards keep everybody in check? It made no sense, and things that didn't make sense worried him.
He followed the bars now, found the next wall, followed it to the corner, and started back toward his bunk. About halfway there he stubbed his toe royally into something metal and bit down a curse, hopping on his good foot and trying not to yell. He couldn't see the offending object very well, but he had a good idea of what it was. A few second's investigation with his hands confirmed it was a standard issue prison commode, complete with a sink installed in the tank, and a water fountain.
Standard issue means standard prison, he thought, returning to his bunk and sitting down gingerly, but I don't hear any guards out there on patrol, and I don't hear any of the usual after-hours noises you'd get in a jail house. This isn't a thrown-together facility, but it's not being run very professionally. What in hell does that mean?
Duo couldn't afford to make assumptions, especially going on as little information as he was. He lay back down on the bunk and curled up to conserve body heat. There were no blankets or pillows, not even a mattress, and the wood bunk was stealing what little warmth there was.
Since he'd done about as much as he could think to about his cell, he turned his mind to figuring out how he got here in the first place. Most of whatever drug was in him had burned out during his stumble around the room. That gave him an advantage. With a small sigh of regret, Duo stretched out on his back and shut his eyes, willing his entire body to relax. Wufei had taught them all basic yoga and meditation principles. It was kind of funny for Duo to find himself relying on them now of all times.
Eyes closed, body relaxed, he let go of all emotion for the moment, keeping only a small part of his awareness on his surroundings, and instead thought back to the last thing he could remember clearly. That was this morning. Or, well, whenever. He couldn't be sure how long he'd been captured. He forced himself to calm further, copying the breathing exercises Wufei taught him, as the scene unfolded in his mind.
The sunlight was just coming up over the eastern horizon, he remembered, and a sparkle of it gleamed off the side of Trowa's binoculars. Wufei and Heero flanked them, while Quatre, perched in a tree limb above, was scouting the area around them with his own binoculars, looking for anyone who might be coming their way. In the southern distance, beyond the wall of trees and two large buildings they were using as blast cover, there was a very old manor house that lay like a graceful giant, sprawled out for nightly repose. Duo remembered making a face at himself for letting that kind of flowery language run through his head again.
"Eighty-five military personnel, all accounted for and still on property," Duo had been saying. "Fifteen Rommefeller civvies, all targets and in the hot spots. One hundred twenty-seven non-Romm civilians, all but three accounted for." He gave Trowa a long look, enjoying the way his friend's eyebrow had ticked at those words. They'd spent the night in that very building, hiding from masked party-goers and Alliance military officials wandering the hallway. A costume ball was a wonderful excuse for getting a bunch of military officers together with some of the more influential members of Rommefeller, without arousing undue suspicion.
Naturally, that made somebody suspicious.
Naturally, that meant they got to blow things up.
"What about the three that aren't accounted for?" Quatre asked, glancing down at Duo from his perch. Trowa lowered the glasses and gave Duo a dirty look, one which said quite clearly, "keep quiet, you," despite the fact that Trowa never uttered a word. Duo enjoyed their conversations; he was the only one of the pilots who had catalogued all of Trowa's non-verbal communications. Duo gave him a sweet smile and looked up at Quatre, ignoring Trowa's death-glare. "All three are targets and should be in the marked areas," he said sweetly.
Quatre frowned. "There weren't any non-Romms on the hit list." He looked at Heero and Wufei, frowning. "Were there?"
"There are now," Heero muttered. He and Wufei exchanged glances and then shrugged at Trowa. "It's not my fault," Heero said, the closest thing to an apology he could come.
Trowa sighed, and then craned his neck to look at Quatre. "Lord and Lady Kirk were there tonight," he said. He lifted the binoculars again and peered through. "With their daughter."
Quatre rolled his eyes. "Haven't you gotten over that yet?"
"No."
"Didn't think so," Quatre muttered. He shot Heero and Wufei a look. Heero shrugged. Wufei just smiled a little.
The epic struggle between the young Dame Kirk and "Tab Bennett" had become legendary among the Gundam pilots. Trowa's clandestine personae had all but been thrust into the lap of the young vixen on his last infiltration mission, and he'd played along with it to keep his cover, right up until she slipped him a not-so-discreet note saying he'd better be in her bed that night if he didn't want to face the wrath of her parents. The polite but firm "no" that he offered her had sent her into a rage that surpassed anything any of them had witnessed before. Duo chalked it up to "fury of a woman scorned," but Trowa insisted (on the rare occasion when he felt like talking about it) that she was just mad she'd lost her play toy.
Duo had happened upon Trowa sending out invitations to the Lord and Lady, and their daughter, only the day before. He recalled draping himself over Trowa's chair and watching as the invitations went out electronically. "So, you're gonna blow her up because she -"
"Promised to chain me to her bed and make me beg for buttermilk," Trowa finished. His eyebrow twitched in that strange way it had taken to the moment he had the misfortune of meeting young Dame Kirk.
"But we're not supposed to blow them up," Duo pointed out.
Trowa's silence on the matter was eloquent. It wasn't so eloquent now, sitting in the forest waiting for them to be blown to hell. It was tense and unhappy. Having to deal with the looks Heero and Wufei had given him when Duo blabbed earlier had been bad enough. Sitting still under Quatre's scrutiny was hell.
Quatre waited. The silence grew. Finally, Trowa lowered his binoculars. "Fine," he snapped, "I sent Lady Astonia a note saying they were all there. They're probably out in her pavilion."
"Good." Lady Astonia was the sweet old biddy who was running this costume party. She was also one of those women who absolutely had to know everyone and everything about everyone. Since she'd been dying to meet the famed Lord and Lady Kirk for some time, there was little doubt that she had probably cornered them the moment she learned about them being at the party. And Lady Astonia was one of those lovely people who were never on anyone's hit list. She was too important to kill at random, and too stupid to be a threat.
Quatre went back to scouting the area. He'd been totally relaxed, even while waiting for Trowa to admit he hadn't actually set up a (relatively) innocent idiot to be killed. None of them had ever been good at killing people who really didn't deserve it, and Trowa seemed to have a weird soft spot for young girls.
The night air was warm and breezy. Too bad, really, that they were all dressed in dark green camouflage. Shorts and T-shirts would have been a lot more comfortable. Each had his binoculars, a backpack with the basic equipment they needed, and Wufei, Trowa, and Duo each wore a utility belt, since they were the ones who had planted the explosives inside while the others kept look out. They were well out of the line of sight of the main building. Just past the edge of the forest they had taken up in were two buildings, not quite side-by-side. One was a guest house, currently empty, and the other was a smaller building, most likely the caretaker's quarters and the servants' home. The two buildings were small, compared to the manor, but well-built brick. They took up hiding behind the buildings to cut back on possible debris and shock caused by the explosion.
Duo dug through his rucksack for a canteen and took a swallow of cold water, then checked his watch. "One minute to kaboom." He leaned against the tree Quatre was perched in, shuffling everything back into his bag and then slinging it over his shoulders. "Hey, Cat, would it be so horrible if Trowa did kill that girl?"
"Yes, Duo, it would."
"But she's annoying! And she's dangerous. What if she figures out who he is?"
"Relena's just as bad. She follows us around like a puppy."
"But Relena's cute," Duo pointed out. "She kinda reminds me of this little girl from back home who used to barge into the boys' clubhouse all the time and tried to tag along whenever we went anywhere. That Kirk chick just is looking for a piece of tail."
Trowa glared through the binoculars. "Why mine, I have no idea."
Heero glanced at Trowa's backside, then turned back to the manor house. "Considering you don't have a tail... "
Trowa shot him a dirty look.
"Ten seconds," Duo said.
"You don't," Wufei agreed.
Trowa glared at him.
"Nine... eight... "
"Don't look at me like that. I can't help it you don't have an ass worth speaking of."
"Six... five... "
Trowa's eyes narrowed. "Considering you're the heterosexual one, I'm surprised you're even looking."
"Believe me, there's not much to look at."
"Two... one... "
Nothing.
More nothing.
Still more nothing. All eyes turned to the manor house again, argument forgotten. At plus-thirty seconds they began to fidget. At plus-one minute, Wufei turned, slowly; he folded his arms across his chest, and gave Duo a look fit to curdle milk. Duo, mouth gaping, just stared at the intact manor house. "It's not my fault," he finally managed. "It's not my fault, honest!"
"I'm not going back in there," Wufei said.
"It's not my fault!"
Heero looked up at Quatre, but his eyes were unfocused. "What would have caused the charges not to go off?"
Quatre looked down at him with the patience one must have to talk to a small child. "Um, them being discovered, faulty charges, the explosives being duds... " Quatre gave up as Heero dropped his gaze and continued muttering to himself. "Discovery?" Quatre hear him say. "Misplacement?" Cat sighed and rolled his eyes. There was no use in talking to Heero some days.
"I bought good quality stuff!" Duo yelled suddenly. He jabbed a finger at Wufei's chest. "With *your* money, I might add."
"I'm not going back in there," the Chinese boy repeated.
"We have to do something," Trowa pointed out. "If the charges didn't go off because they're duds, it's as bad as if someone already found them."
"They have to be duds," Heero mused. "Even if someone found some of them, there's no way they all could have been found."
"Meaning they might still go off. I'm not going back in -"
"We heard you the first time!" Duo tugged nervously at his braid. "We really can't go back in there. That means the Gundams, right? Aw, hell, this was supposed to be a simple job, too... "
"Can they all be duds?" Heero started pacing the clearing restlessly, glancing back to the intact manor from time to time. "They couldn't all be faulty, could they?"
Quatre dropped from the branches and stopped Heero with both hands on the Japanese boy's shoulders. "Just... calm down, all right? All of you. No, they probably aren't all duds, unless we were intentionally sold faulty explosives."
Trowa crossed his arms and leaned against Quatre's tree, brooding. "Somebody's ass is going to be in the grinder after this."
Duo gave him a dark look. "Gee, thanks, Tro, I really needed to hear that."
"Well, Duo, if it's not your fault, as you keep saying, over and over I might add, then you shouldn't worry so much."
"Are you saying I protest too much?"
"I'm saying -"
The explosion that cut Trowa off deafened them all and nearly flattened every tree surrounding the manor house. What looked like a thousand birds took flight at once and were either thrown to the ground, thrown off course, or died in mid-air. The shockwave managed to penetrate deep enough into the wood that the trees they were using as cover bent and swayed dangerously around them. The tree Quatre had been perched in rocked back about forty degrees.
The servants' house and the guest building in front of them took the brunt of the explosion in their direction, preventing the boys from being killed in the shockwave the way the birds were, but the blast also blew out all the windows in both buildings and kicked them back from their foundations by a good distance. Wind whipping past the buildings or rushing through the broken windows knocked the boys completely off their feet, and more; they were actually thrown back into the underbrush The last thing Duo saw before he briefly blacked out was Heero shoved by a shockwave so hard that he collided with a holly bush, ripped a hole in it, and then Heero, bush, and all skidding about ten feet before the trunk of a very large oak stopped his progress. Then the lights went out for about two minutes.
When the lights came back on, the wind around them was still whipping insanely, but at least he could get a hold of himself. "Holy Christmas!" Duo bellowed over the noise of the explosion as he tried to right himself. "What in Hell's name was that?!"
"That sure as hell wasn't us!" Quatre yelled back. "We didn't have anything that powerful in stock!" He struggled to his knees and braced himself against a sapling.
Wufei grabbed a low branch from the same tree and hauled himself to his knees, rubbing his head painfully. "No," he agreed, still shouting, though the brunt of the explosion had passed and the noise level had lowered some. All around them birds were crying out in hysterical song. "That couldn't have been us. They had to have something stored there."
"In a civilian manor house?" Quatre raised an eyebrow, then looked around. "Where's Trowa?"
"Shit," Duo said, struggling upright, "where's Heero?"
"I haven't seen either of them."
"Wait a minute." Duo rattled his brain for a moment, trying to remember what happened just before he blacked out. "Heero's back that way." He waved his hand vaguely. "I didn't see your boyfriend, though -"
There was an unholy groan off to the left as Trowa pulled himself out of a pile of debris caused by the explosion. He looked like Duo did the one time he tried to give Wufei's cat a bath, and he had a knot the size of an egg crowning his head. Wufei brushed himself off and hurried over to give him a hand up; Quatre raced ahead of him, collapsing beside Trowa, oblivious of the dirt. "Are you all right?" the blond asked him, examining the bump.
"Jesus!" Trowa jumped and shoved Quatre away as probing fingers got too close for comfort. Quatre's eyes widened, his mouth opened in a silent protest. "Quatre, I love you. Believe me, I do, but please, let Wufei do this, all right?"
Wufei shoved Quatre out of the way and grabbed Trowa's chin. "You're eyes look all right. You're still professing love of Quatre, so I don't think you broke your skull." He hauled Trowa to his feet ungently. Trowa's eyes narrowed. "Maybe I should have let you handle it after all," he muttered in Quatre's direction. Quatre stood and made Trowa swing an arm over his shoulder, acting as a human crutch for him, while Wufei plowed ahead into the thicket to look for the remaining survivor. Duo paused in Wufei's wake and looked at Trowa, thoughtfully. "Hey, Tro?"
Trowa gave him a narrow look.
Duo jabbed his middle finger up in Trowa's face. "How many fingers d'you see?"
"I'm still armed, you know. I can remove that quite easily."
"Duo," Quatre scolded. Duo laughed and hurried off after Wufei.
They heard Heero before they actually saw him. Duo listened to the artistic swearing coming out of his boyfriend's mouth and wondered, not for the first time, if he ought to be taking notes. Heero knew English and Japanese fluently, and it seemed he went out of his way to learn new and exciting curse words in both. It always impressed Duo that he only ever repeated himself to add adjectives. When they finally spotted him, Duo winced in sympathy.
How Heero had managed to get himself tangled up in both a holly bush and a thorn vine Duo had no idea. If Trowa had looked like a cat's scratching post, Heero looked like he'd lost a round in the ring with a cougar. "Heero," Duo sighed, exasperated, "how the hell do you do these things to yourself?"
"Will you shut the hell up and get me out of here?" Heero couldn't even stand. His clothes were hooked so firmly into the thorns he couldn't rise straight up, and there was no place to put his hands to lever himself out, not with all those sharp stickers everywhere. He managed to break one hand out of the bushes, scratched and bloodied, and Duo could see the wrist purpling even now. He carefully took hold of Heero's arm in a fireman's hold, grabbing below the bruise to avoid further injury, and hauled. Wufei, meanwhile, cut through the vines and branches, pricking himself no few times. A moment's work and the two of them had Heero clear of the holly bush. They spent another few minutes removing debris and thorns from his clothes. Duo untangled burrs from Heero's hair, wiped blood from Heero's face with his own sleeve, and dropped a kiss on his forehead. "Better?"
"Some," Heero murmured. He raised his right hand to his cheek and pressed it there, trying to stop the scrapes from bleeding any more. "We ought to see about the manor."
Duo sighed. "All work and no play. C'mon, Wu, I think he'll live."
"Oh," Wufei said, "joy." He eyed the two and brushed past them, muttering to himself about love sick idiots. Duo laughed and wrapped an arm around Heero's shoulder, dragging him along by main force. "Ya think Wu's getting bent outta shape 'cause he hasn't gotten laid yet?"
Heero's lips thinned. "I stand to differ."
Duo puzzled that one out - fluent he may have been, but sometimes Heero's English was a little off. "So he is getting some then? With who? I didn't think there was any chick willing to put up with his ugly mug."
"Hilde."
Duo tripped and dragged Heero down with him. That set off another spark of swearing, but it was half-hearted at best. "The fuck? Hilde? MY Hilde?!"
Heero struggled out of his grip and gave Duo such a look, he didn't even need to slap the braided boy. "Your Hilde?"
"Well, um, yeah, I mean, my friend, my Hilde." He sat up and looked sheepish. "Ya know, the way Relena's your little burden, Hilde's mine. That kind of thing. Aw, hell, Cat's coming. C'mon, let's go before he sic's the gang on us." They dusted themselves off and hurried back to the clearing, Heero mollified not at all, and Duo mentally kicking himself for giving the Japanese boy an insecurity complex.
It had to be hard for Heero, having Duo around. Duo admitted, with only a modest amount of shame, that he was a horn dog and would have humped a table leg if that were the only thing around. Somehow, despite his bad behavior, he managed to win Heero's affection. To Duo's mind, that couldn't be good. Not for Heero, anyway.
Duo picked up the pace and reached Heero's side. He poked the Japanese boy between the second and third rib. Heero's eyes slid sideways; seeing he had Heero's attention, Duo put on his best puppy-dog look. The Japanese boy heaved a sigh, but his expression softened.
"Not mad?" Duo asked, making his voice very small. Those kinds of things always got to Heero, and Duo might have felt guilty manipulating his boyfriend's emotions, but it was so much fun, he never really could feel sorry about what he was doing. Besides, Heero could see right through him; if he really objected to Duo playing with him that way, he would have laid the braided boy out flat with a jab to his glass stomach.
He looked at Duo out of the corner of his eye, and then gave in to a soft laugh. "No," he sighed, "not mad."
"Oh, good, then I will get laid tonight!" Duo pressed his hands together, mimicking a gesture Relena was wont to use whenever she managed to get her way. The smile Heero wore grew; he ducked his head in embarrassment and nearly tripped over a tree root. Duo tussled the mess of Heero's hair and hurried on ahead, catching up to the others.
Someone had dragged out the sketchy map Duo had made of the manor and the area surrounding it, and the other three were studying it with great intensity. Trowa had a string and thumbtack he was using as a makeshift compass, apparently trying to determine the radius of the explosion. His expression was sour as he worked out the calculations, and he didn't bother to look up. Quatre and Wufei, on the other hand, both raised eyebrows at the returning pair. Wufei's lip twitched. "Glad to see you two have decided to rejoin us."
"No problem," Duo quipped.
Trowa let loose a rather colorful curse as he crumpled the map up and shoved it back into Quatre's backpack. All eyes were on him when he looked up. Duo could tell he was quite aware that he was turning red, and was trying very hard to fight the blush, and was losing, and knew it. "The, ah... the pavilion was outside the blast radius," he finally managed.
Heero raised a single eyebrow, his only commentary. Wufei, nobly, fought back a smile, but Quatre couldn't keep it in. "Trowa, my love, you have issues. Big issues."
Trowa looked at his feet.
Quatre sighed and stood on tip-toe to plant a kiss on Trowa's forehead. Wufei rolled his eyes and decided to change the subject. "Despite our best efforts," he drawled, "it looks like we all made it through the explosion unscathed."
Quatre suppressed a smile and looked back toward the manor house. "That wasn't us," he repeated slowly, after a moment of thoughtful silence. "Whatever they were doing there was a lot bigger than any of us anticipated. I don't think our survey team knew about the place being a storehouse." He looked back at the others. "I think we better get back to base as fast as possible. They're going to need this reported."
"I'd suggest splitting up," Wufei put in. "There are bound to be patrols, guards, something after an explosion like that." He looked at the manor thoughtfully, and then added, "If someone survived."
The others murmured in agreement. As the last of the smoke cleared away, they could finally see the house clearly, along with the goodly portion of surrounding land that was flattened by the blast. What remained were smoking and charred chunks of flotsam, smoldering forest, and stripped earth. There was glass everywhere surrounding them, shards left from the buffer houses. A new wave of smoke was blowing in, caused by the fires that were spreading out from the radius of the remains. The smell of burning ash and pine mingled with the scent of scorched rock from the houses' foundations, and the torn earth under them. All around the grounds just beyond the now-thin barrier of trees were dead things, mostly people and birds, and a few other creatures that were harder to identify. Duo tore his eyes from the scene for a moment and looked down. A dead squirrel lay at his feet, its eyes open and glassy. He looked back up at the sea of death out beyond the tree line.
Duo felt a lump forming in the back of his throat. Without a word or a single glance around him, he dropped to one knee and bowed his head. The words came back to him as if her were sitting at Father's knee again. "Per istam sanctam unctionem, indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid deliquisti, Amen."
The other four stood silently, Wufei's face drawn into a scowl, but otherwise they were respectful. Duo professed not to believe in any god but the god of Death, and yet, there were times when he felt something opening up inside, a memory of a hand on his shoulder, or something akin to it, and he couldn't not say a prayer, bow his head, bless the land, whatever it took. He had no idea what the others really thought of his actions, and as he stood the only hint was in Wufei's narrowed eyes. But as he stood, they all whispered Amen.
Quatre cleared his throat, breaking the moment. "Duo, I think you and Trowa had better leave the back way and get to our camp. Take what you need, bury anything that's useful that you can't carry - we'll come back for it later - and destroy the rest." His voice was unusually quiet at first, but it grew to normal as he spoke. "Wufei, you and I will head out east and circle back around. Heero, you make straight for city. We'll rendezvous outside the city in two days, and make for the base from there."
Duo blinked up into the darkness and sighed. The headache beginning just behind his eyes told him that he wasn't going to get anything else useful out of this situation. He couldn't remember anything else after that. Whatever happened must have been shortly after they split up. It was driving him crazy to have lost such a large chunk of time.
Forcing himself to relax further, he rolled over on his side to try to conserve body heat and willed himself to sleep. His head ache was starting to fade, finally, after half an hour of struggling with it and his memories. Whatever else was going to happen, he had a bad feeling that if he didn't get some rest, he might not get another chance.
Sleep was slow in coming. Trowa wasn't there, he realized. Whatever crappy jail cell he was in, there wasn't any sign of any other inhabitant in the other cells. There was one vague memory that popped up, too little information to do anything with, but it was there anyway: he could hear a gunshot, see Trowa going down, but whether Trowa had been hit or was ducking was beyond Duo's knowledge. Duo didn't have any emotional overtones to the memory. Either he didn't remember enough to feel anything significant, or else Trowa hadn't been killed. Not enough to stake his paycheck on either way. He was going to play it safe and assume his friend was dead.
Just going that far gave him a sharp pain in his chest. He shut his eyes and neatly boxed up the emotions, putting them away until he had the time and leisure to deal with them. If that ever happened.
He wondered what Heero was doing, and if his lover was safe. He hoped so. He hoped Heero wasn't worrying unnecessarily about him. Duo sighed, missing his boyfriend.
His last thought before finally drifting off was what he wouldn't do for a nice warm blanket and a nice warm Heero to share it with him.
End Part 1
(:./tabs/trinity)
