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)
Duo yanked on the lifeline, pulling them together, and clumsily grabbed onto the shoulders of Trowa's suit. If the Preventer were going into shock due to blood loss, there would be very little Duo could do except watch him die.
He looked through the visor, and was surprised and immeasurably relieved to see that Tro didn't have the slack-faced look of trauma-induced shock. Instead, he was rigid, staring straight ahead, wide-eyed. "S-so c-cold. "
Duo started, suddenly realizing that he had seen that same lost look on Tro's face a long time ago - when he had caught up with the acrobat at the circus during the war. Trowa had lost his memories, and had been recovering from a near-death experience when he had been left floating in space after his Gundam had exploded. Duo had never heard the details of how long it had been before Tro had been rescued, but it seemed clear that the slow terror of that time was now returning to haunt the normally-unflappable pilot.
"Tro, c'mon, stay with me, here." Duo manoeuvred himself so that his helmet was directly in front of Trowa's, filling the other's field of vision. "Hey, you gotta focus - you're not alone this time. I'm right here, buddy. I'm not going anywhere."
Duo kept talking as the green eyes slowly lost their fixed stare and focussed again. "D-Duo?" Trowa grabbed Duo's arms, desperately tight, as if ensuring that the braided man wouldn't wander off.
Duo forced a warm smile onto his face. "That's right, Bang Boy. You didn't think I'd let a golden opportunity to *talk* at you uninterrupted get away from me, did you?"
A shaky chuckle sounded over the radio, and Duo grinned for real. The grip on his arms eased, but didn't let go.
Duo cast about for a topic to hold Trowa's attention. As he knew from past experience, injuries, hunger, and other demands of the body could be muted or even ignored outright if the mind were concentrating sufficiently on something else.
"So, Tro... who was Wheat talking to when you went into his office? He said his buyer recognized you as a Preventer."
Trowa's gaze had been sliding irresistibly space-ward, but jerked back to Duo's face at the words. He swallowed, but answered readily enough. "Dorothy Catalonia."
"What!?!" Duo frowned. Dorothy wasn't his best friend or anything, but he had thought she'd straightened her head out about the relative value of war and peace. But maybe she had quit the Preventers since he had lost contact with the other pilots.
"Y-yeah." Trowa stared unwaveringly at Duo, obviously trying to ignore the unending vista just past his visor. "We knew she had been s-saying that another insurrection was inevitable, but we didn't figure her for the mastermind behind it." Trowa's voice calmed and steadied as he spoke. "We'd been tracking gundanium shortages and thefts for almost a year and..."
Trowa kept speaking but Duo's attention suddenly focussed inward, caught by surprise as a wave of nausea and weakness swept over his body. The butterflies in his stomach seemed to have mutated into birds. Pigeons maybe, he thought distractedly, remembering how they fluttered in flocks on Earth.
He took a slow, steadying breath, hoping he wouldn't throw up inside his suit. Concentrate on something else, he commanded himself sternly. What's working for Trowa should work for you, too.
"Why did Heero leave me?" he blurted out, interrupting a determined recitation of how the Preventers had narrowed the search to Alvek Wheat.
OK, that had definitely gotten Trowa's attention. His own, too, as a matter of fact. He took a fresh grip on Trowa's suit, shakily pulling himself back into center view when the taller man looked away, falling silent.
"C'mon Tro. I don't remember anything about it. Don't leave me hanging here, wondering."
"I don't..." Trowa's eyes wandered to the distant stars and he shuddered, pulling his gaze back to Duo's general direction. "You should be talking to Heero, not to me!"
"In case you hadn't noticed, pal, Heero's not here," Duo drawled. Trowa's face tightened slightly at the reminder, but he stayed silent.
Duo sighed with exasperation. He was disturbingly aware of feeling sweaty and weak, and he could sense another wave of sickness gathering. He closed his eyes and tried to ignore the way his skin felt two sizes too small. He shifted, trying and failing to find a comfortable position.
He was acutely aware of a growing, gnawing need - for what, he couldn't describe. He knew quite well that he must be going through Bliss withdrawal, but the odd thing was that he couldn't remember how the relief of a dose would feel. That's what he got for indulging in a memory-suppressing drug, he supposed.
The craving grew, and he was desperately aware of that packet of blue powder nestled in his left pants pocket. With the enviro-suit on, it may as well have been on the moon. Maybe he should just switch off his oxygen intake right now and spare himself the-
"You and Heero had a fight - a bad one." Trowa's quiet voice over the radio came as a welcome, if unexpected, distraction. Duo glanced at him, but Tro seemed fascinated by the dials on the front of Duo's suit.
"Heero left, and... You followed after him, but by the time you caught up, he was..."
"With you," Duo finished flatly.
"Yeah," Trowa whispered. "We didn't plan it..."
"No, don't tell me," Duo interrupted. "It 'just happened,' right? So I have one fight with my lover and you move in on him?" The righteous anger he wanted to feel wisped away, dissipated by the sick empty feeling in his belly.
Trowa shook his head with apparent frustration and finally met Duo's eyes. "You know it wasn't like that. Your relationship with Heero wasn't like some idyllic scene from a romantic novel. The last year you were together, you argued constantly. You said yourself that he was driving you crazy, that he was too cold, too precise, too... too Heero." Trowa sighed, sounding discouraged.
Duo grasped at a random detail, hoping Tro wouldn't notice the sweat beginning to bead on his face. "The last year - and you said before that I was missing for two... What year is it??" The last thing he could clearly remember was going on some mission with Heero, and a gunfight with a security team in a lab...
Trowa looked at him a bit oddly, but answered readily enough, "206. August 14th - well, 15th by now."
Duo slowly closed his mouth, literally struck dumb by the disconcerting realization that he was missing just over five years of his life. Except for that one amazing memory of the being deliciously and thoroughly screwed on the office desk at Preventer HQ, he could recall nothing of what it was like to be Heero's lover. It was as if it had all happened to another person.
Another shivery wave of nausea crested and broke, leaving Duo shaking and desperate for distraction. "S-so... how did you two get together then?"
Tro frowned at him, apparently relieved but no doubt suspicious of his docility. "That night, after your fight, Heero went over to Quatre's to talk... He was... depressed, sure that the whole mess was his fault, that he was too much the Perfect Soldier to ever have a successful relationship. Quatre was trying to correct that impression, and he just... he said more than he meant to."
"What? Quatre? What did Quatre say?" Duo strove to sound normal, while his stomach was trying to crawl up his throat. He had to stop himself from trying to feel for the packet of Bliss through the leg of his enviro-suit.
"You have to understand, Duo... Quat and I had just split up a few months before, because he couldn't ignore my feelings for Heero anymore. I hadn't said anything, but... Quatre could sense them empathically, and he knew that I wasn't being honest with him, or myself. Quatre was hurting, too, and it just... came out."
"WHAT!?!?! My dear friend Quatre told my lover that his lover had the hots for him? Fuck! He practically shoved the two of you together!"
Trowa threw his hands up, exasperated. "You reacted this way the first time you found out about it, too!"
Duo yelled, "Because it's a good reaction!! I can't believe Quatre would betray me that way!"
"Quatre felt horribly guilty about it - he still does. Some days he thinks he should throw the resources of Winner Enterprises into finding you, so he can apologize, and other days he thinks he should just leave you in peace, since he's a awful person who deserves to have his one and only lover fall for someone else, and have one of his closest friends detest him."
Duo looked away, silenced for a moment. Of course Quatre would blame himself. Even if Q-ball hadn't been involved at all, he would have blamed himself for not seeing it coming.
"And Quatre" Trowa's voice broke slightly on the name, "didn't see it as betraying you, or breaking you and Heero up. He could already feel that the two of you had grown apart. He was trying to show Heero that he still had something to live for."
"Something to li... Heero was suicidal?"
"That's what Quatre felt."
There didn't seem to be much he could say to that. Duo had seen enough of Quatre's empathy to trust the blond's instincts in that area. And Heero wasn't the type to waste time once he ha decided on a course of action - immediate intervention would have been essential.
"Duo... I'm not going to apologize for loving Heero, and I would be lying if I said I was sorry he loved me back. But I am sorry it hurt you. I'm sorry for the way you found out, and for the way it's driven a wedge between the five of us. Quatre's barely functioning, Wufei refuses to talk to any of us, and Heero, he... Aside from being lovers, you were his best friend, and he misses you. He needs to know that you're..." he trailed off.
"What, Tro? He needs to know that I'm 'all right?'" Duo laughed a bit hysterically. "I'm floating here with scars on my wrists from when I tried to commit suicide, slowly going out of my mind from withdrawal, with a dose of relief in my pocket that I can't reach because I'm tucked into an enviro-suit, waiting for my ex-lover to come looking for my replacement so he can maybe rescue me before I run out of oxygen. I'm 'bout as far from 'all right' as I c'n be." He swallowed back bile, shivering.
Trowa looked down, biting his lip. "Heero's not 'all right,' either," he admitted softly. "I'd like to say that when he realized he cared for me, his problems all faded away, but that's not the case. He needs to talk to you, to resolve what happened between the two of you. When you disappeared, he just... froze up. He can't let go of the past long enough to reach for the future."
"Oh, tha's jus' fine, Tro. I'll jus' help counsel Heero so he c'n let go of me and reach fer you. Tha's jus' peachy." Duo was panting a bit - he couldn't seem to catch his breath. If he could pull his left arm back out of its sleeve, maybe he could wiggle it down inside his suit leg and reach into his pocket?
"He doesn't want to let go of you, Duo," Tro protested, his voice sounding suspiciously tight. "You were his first and best friend, the one who wouldn't give up on him until he admitted his feelings, his human needs beyond the next mission. He was trying to follow his emotions, but first he had to realize what they were, and you helped him to do that."
"I's jus' my luck tha' when he fine'ly figured ou' wha' love was, he re'liz'd i' wuzn't fer me, huh?" Duo's voice broke. It was getting difficult to speak again, and he could feel the shudders working up and down his body. Shit, he didn't want to do this anymore. If he could just reach that packet...
Trowa was speaking again, but Duo ignored him. He tried to pull his arm inside the body of his suit, but the sleeve fit too tightly. After a couple of futile efforts, he grabbed his left glove with his right and pulled, hoping to anchor the arm of the suit enough to shift his elbow up.
Trowa grabbed him, yelling at him and pulling his hands apart. Why the hell had he ever thought Tro was quiet? The damned jerk wouldn't shut up. And Heero thought he was a motormouth...
Duo tried with single-minded intensity to pull on his sleeve again, but Tro was in the way and he just couldn't seem to make his limbs work properly and then his whole body was shaking and he was immersed in vivid images that grabbed his mind and wouldn't let go.
He shook and whimpered, helplessly caught up in the memory storm, and when he finally emerged on the other side, wrung out and trembling, it was to find himself trussed up tight.
He struggled weakly, still a bit dazed, trying to free his hands from where they were pressed against his thighs.
Trowa floated into view, holding onto the shoulders of Duo's suit. Holding on, Duo noticed abruptly, but not tethered with the safety line. With a sinking feeling, he realized that Tro must have wrapped the length of cable around his body, binding his arms down flat.
Things rapidly got worse after that. Duo swore and ranted, but Trowa would not release him no matter what he said. He wriggled and pulled, but the suit was too form-fitting, and Trowa too efficient - he couldn't free his hands.
Soon he was unable to even struggle. The shivering nausea swept over him with increasing regularity, interspersed with mind-clenching bouts of memory, leaving him floating limply, dazed and weak. And under it all was the nerve-shredding need for Bliss.
He begged Trowa to let him go, to give him the relief he needed. He tried to claw his way through the confining gloves so he could rip open the suit leg to get to his dose, but he couldn't get a purchase with his short fingernails.
And finally, he wept - with frustration, and fury, and fear.
End Page 26
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