A/N: Maybe a follow up to The Very Thing
A/N2: For Kangofu-CB. Sending you all the love.
A/N3: Un-beta'd - just a quick thing I wrote in an effort to keep procrastinating actual work today.
Pairings: 3x2x3
Warnings: language, angst
Runaway
The weather, as far as Duo was concerned, could fuck the fuck right off.
It was a glorious day in Brussels. And while Duo was, to be fair, away on assignment more than he was actually in Brussels, he was fairly certain he could count on one hand the days it hadn't rained or threatened rain. Or snow.
But not today.
Today it was glorious, the sun out with just a few, anemic white whisps lazily floating through the blue sky and it was warm.
It was offensive.
It was as if the fucking heavens were laughing at him.
And while Duo was aware that it was perhaps too self-indulgent to think that the weather was trying to offend him, it didn't change the fact that it was annoying.
He wished he had taken a cab instead of walking in.
By the time he was within a block of Preventers HQ, he had worked up enough of a sweat that he had to remove his suit jacket and carry it looped over his shoulder bag. He was tempted to take off the damn tie, as well, but he would probably forget to put it back on. And then someone would say something and Duo, in the mood he was in, would say something back and it would just escalate.
So, tie constricting his throat, blue dress shirt sticking uncomfortably to his back, bag strap chaffing his neck and the jacket sleeves dancing against his leg, Duo stomped his way closer and closer to the dull gray office block.
It looked like a prison.
Hell, it felt like a prison.
Duo sighed.
He wasn't helping matters, thinking like this. And it wasn't like anyone else was around to help matters. Duo was on his own and he needed to get his head out of his ass and -
Duo's gaze was pulled away from the imposing gray tower. Brilliant white, close to street level - white and -
Holy fuck.
He almost tripped, almost ended up face first on the distressingly dirty cement under his feet, and as it was he had to steady himself on a passing civilian and offer up an apology.
Standing not ten yards away, leaning against a lamp post without a care in the world, was Trowa Barton.
Trowa Barton, who was supposed to be - hell, Duo didn't even know where Trowa's latest mission had taken him, but it wasn't HQ.
He looked…
Even if it hadn't been a hellish seven months since Duo had last seen him, Trowa would have stopped him in his tracks and left Duo staring at him, frozen, brain an unintelligible mush.
Trowa was wearing a white dress shirt, the top few buttons undone to show off his tanned neck and upper chest, black trousers that, as usual, fit him almost obscenely well. And his face - he'd grown a beard and mustache. Short, perfectly trimmed, framing his jaw and hiding the scar that Trowa had picked up on a South American op two years ago.
His hair was slicked back, a rare look for Trowa unless he was being forced into dress uniform or doing it for cover work.
Somehow, Duo worked out how to put one foot in front of the other and found himself standing just a few feet from the other man.
He noticed the sunglasses in Trowa's hand, the bulging travel bag at his feet, the smirk on his lips and the warmth in his green eyes.
"Hey."
The smirk grew, the left corner twitching a little and revealing, just for a second, Trowa's illusive dimple.
"Hey yourself."
"I, uh," Duo made a vague gesture, "I just got back two days ago. Spent yesterday in debrief."
Trowa nodded. The look in his eyes, the slow droop of his lips, told Duo that he knew. Of course he knew. He always seemed to know.
"You told Une you didn't want any time off," Trowa murmured, and it was as close to a censure from him that Duo had ever heard.
Duo bristled.
"Yeah, well, just because things got fucked up doesn't mean I can't still do the fucking job."
Trowa arched one eyebrow but he wisely didn't say anything.
"She put me on light duty, anyway," Duo muttered.
Trowa nodded again.
Duo sighed. He wanted -
Hell, he wanted a lot of things.
Foremost, he wanted to be able to go through a shitty fucking day - hell, a shitty fucking seven months - and not want to throw himself into Trowa's arms.
He wanted Trowa's embrace to not feel like the only thing that made sense in the world.
He wanted Trowa's heartbeat to stop reminding him of the steady thrum of a ship engine, alive and powerful and all that Duo had ever really considered home.
"You going somewhere?" Duo forced the words out of his throat, between his dry lips.
"Rome. I need to lay the groundwork for an op in a few months."
Rome. Trowa, with his classic good looks and his rangy, Terran frame, usually got assigned to Terran ops while Duo was sent out to the colonies. It made sense, and it wasn't as if Duo could complain about the chance to be closer to the stars, but once in awhile he wouldn't mind staying dirt bound.
"Sounds nice. Maybe, uh, maybe I'll see you when you get back?"
That earned him another arched eyebrow and Duo flushed.
Who the fuck was he kidding anyway?
He and Trowa had been dancing around this - not-dating but more-than-fucking thing for, what, a year now? More than that. It was stupid to try to sound nonchalant, to imply he didn't care one way or another what Trowa did with himself. They both knew it was as far from the truth as Duo could aim for.
Their schedules made things worse, of course, and they had spent more time apart than together over the last two years, ever since that first night they fell into bed together, but…
But that didn't change the fact that Trowa scared the piss out of Duo, when he looked at him like he was now - as if Duo was the only thing in the entire galaxy that mattered.
"It's only for a few days."
Duo nodded. He had gone seven months. A few days? That would be fine. Hell, last night he'd managed to shove enough pillows into a line in the bed beside him that it had almost felt like Trowa was sleeping at his back.
"I could use a partner."
It was Duo's turn to arch an eyebrow.
As a rule, Une didn't partner them together unless she absolutely had to - something about one former terrorist being a calculated risk, two former terrorists being enough to stage a coup. Besides that, their skill sets were similar enough that it was a bit of a waste.
"What's the op?"
Trowa shrugged one shoulder, and still leaning against the lamppost, he managed to do it while still looking like he was posing for some kind of photo shoot.
"There's a Martian Diamond smuggling ring selling rocks out of Rome."
"You're feeling out a spot in the smuggling group?"
Trowa was good for that sort of thing - he didn't have the weight and bulk of a traditional 'heavy' but he was able to more than hold his own in hand to hand and he had the ability to read a room that gave him a totally unfair advantage in almost any fight.
"No. Golitz will do the undercover for this." Trowa flashed a rare grin. "I'm just playing a rich bastard looking for a good time."
Duo had to laugh, even as he felt another thread of envy.
There weren't many ops that called for that sort of character on L2 or L3. And even if there were, Duo wasn't the agent who got tapped for them.
"A good time involving diamonds?"
Trowa nodded and shifted his sunglasses to his other hand and used his right to dig into his trousers pocket.
He straightened up and flipped something at Duo.
Something sparkly and round.
Duo caught it, felt it in his closed fist, and slowly opened his palm.
"Marry me?"
The casual tone didn't do all that much to keep Duo's heart from skipping a beat and he cursed himself.
"Wh-what?"
He looked up and found Trowa's eyes inscrutable, his smirk giving away nothing.
"I need a husband. Someone I can buy expensive gifts for on our honeymoon. Someone who likes diamonds." Trowa reached up with one hand and tugged on his own left earlobe. "Someone who might need a diamond earring, among other things."
Piercings weren't really Duo's thing. He had tattoos - too many of them according to Wufei - but a piercing… it had always seemed to Duo like a really great target. Like a light up sign that said 'rip me out!'
But, on this last op, he'd gotten a few, all on his left ear, starting at the lobe and working his way up. Not so much his choice - the gang liked to commemorate special occasions and Duo… hadn't wanted a single tattoo to commemorate the shit he had done with that gang.
The first thing he had done, when he got back to his tiny apartment in Brussels, had been to change clothes and pull out every single piercing, all seven of them, and throw them away.
"Among other things?"
Trowa shrugged again.
"Maybe a bracelet or two. A necklace. Diamond encrusted cuffs." His lips twitched. "A tie pin."
Duo had killed a guy, once, with a tie pin. It had been one of those rare ops when he and Trowa worked together. Duo had saved Trowa's life, and as thanks, Trowa had spread the legend of Duo wielding a pathetic two-inch long tie pin and saving their asses.
He stared at the ring in his hand.
"I'm on light duty," he reminded Trowa.
"I pulled a few strings. Op's yours - if you want it."
No assumptions there, at least. Trowa had learned that Duo didn't like it when choice was taken out of the equation. And Duo had learned that Trowa rather preferred it the other way.
"Cuffs? Would those be for me or for you?"
Pink crept over Trowa's cheeks, but he managed to hold onto his neutral expression and casual pose.
"I think those are the kind of things that are for both," he replied.
Duo had to laugh and he saw Trowa relax, just a little.
"I don't have anything to wear," he sighed. His personal clothes were all bland suits for work and well-worn denim and cotton for those rare moments when he could escape. His mission clothes… Duo didn't even think they could qualify as Eurotrash, let alone the kind of thing a wealthy young man on his honeymoon would wear.
"Martian smuggling is a top priority - we've got a disgustingly large budget for this op. We can go shopping."
Shopping. Not a favorite pastime of his.
"We can get drunk and then go shopping," Trowa said quickly, anticipating Duo's reluctance. "We're taking the train to Paris anyway - we can have champagne, shop in Paris, and then continue on to our villa in Rome."
"We are, huh?"
Trowa shrugged.
"My husband and I are, yes."
"And when does this honeymoon of yours start?"
Trowa glanced at his watch.
"The train leaves in about an hour."
That pulled another laugh out of Duo.
He didn't know if Trowa was just that sure of himself or just that desperate.
"I've got a backup - if you don't want to, Duo. Addams is ready to go."
Addams. He was a good guy. Another Terran. Duo trusted him, and it wasn't as if this op sounded even remotely dangerous anyway.
Trowa and Addams would go off to Rome and pretend to be frivolous Terran assholes madly in love with each other and Dou could stay in Brussels and do paperwork. He could wallow in his own self-loathing and -
"I missed you."
It wasn't really fair, for Trowa to go and say that, and he knew it, judging by the cautious look in his eyes.
Duo sighed and ran a hand through his hair.
He looked up at HQ again, and then back to the brilliant white of Trowa's shirt.
"You and Une aren't just shoving this on me because I wouldn't take the leave?"
Trowa snorted derisively and closed the space between them.
"Une can shove the leave wherever she likes," he muttered and reached out, using Duo's belt to tug him close, until their bodies were flush. "I'm doing this because I want to spend the weekend with my boyfriend in a Roman villa spending as much of the Preventers money as I possibly can and getting fucked by you in as many ways as we can possibly think of."
Duo swallowed hard.
That… that was a hard argument to counter.
"I, uh…"
"Come on," Trowa leaned down and whispered in Duo's ear, "don't you want to see Une's face when we turn in receipts for two am room service orders of champagne and oysters?"
Duo did, in fact, want to see Une's face when they did that. She gave him a hard enough time whenever he requested more money for undercover work, things like a few extra hundred credits so he could bribe informants instead of using the threat of physical violence - that Duo very much wanted to spend as much of her money as they could.
"About these diamond cuffs of yours -"
"Of ours," Trowa corrected him, "we're married. What's mine is yours. I'm yours."
Duo shivered, at the words, at the way Trowa said them against the shell of his ear, at the memory of the last time Trowa had told Duo that he was his, naked and tied up in Duo's bed and his composure a distant, shattered memory as he begged to be fucked.
"Think we'd get to keep them after, or would we have to turn them in?"
Trowa stepped away, straightening up and smirking down at Duo.
"Luggage gets lost, all of the time, unfortunately. Sometimes hotel staff even steal things."
Duo tried for a shocked expression.
"No!"
Trowa, very serious, nodded.
"We might even have to go back, a second time, to investigate that."
Duo snorted.
"Don't push your luck. If we do this your way, I'm pretty sure Une's never going to let us work together again."
Trowa shrugged.
"She won't anyway, if we move in together."
Duo rocked back on his heels.
They hadn't talked about that.
Well, they had, sort of. Before Duo had left on this latest op. Trowa had bitched about the water pressure at his own apartment and Duo had yet another new, obnoxious neighbor and leaky plumbing that always seemed to break in some new and bizarre way when he was gone. We should just find a new place, Trowa had grumbled, rolling over onto his stomach and then sliding down the length of Duo's body to start lapping at his soft cock, working him back up to full erection while Duo tried to wrap his head around the idea of them living together- of Trowa wanting to live together.
"Roommates can't work together?"
Trowa gave him a look, a look that held a brief flicker of hurt and then a lot of judgement.
"Roommates."
Shit.
There wasn't a whole lot that Duo had found to be effective in pushing Trowa away. But that - trying to write off what they had as something casual, as something that wasn't the only thing keeping either of them sane - was the easiest and quickest way to have Trowa gathering up his clothes and stalking off in a silent, furious huff.
"I mean… you… you want to make this official, then?"
There was paperwork for that, which, of course, was what Trowa had meant.
Spouses and 'significant others' couldn't partner together, couldn't be each other's direct supervisors.
"I did just ask you to marry me," Trowa grumbled, and Duo couldn't tell just how pissed he was.
Duo took a risk and snorted.
"You call that a proposal? You didn't even get down on one knee. Hell, you didn't even take me out to dinner or buy me flowers or anything."
"I could take you to Rome," Trowa offered, his eyes teasing.
"Yeah," Duo agreed, relaxing. "But I'm thinking taking me to Rome is the perfect proposal for asking me to move in with you. You're going to have to think of something better when you do propose marriage."
Trowa's dimple flashed again, gone almost as soon it appeared.
"I'll keep that in mind."
He held out his hand.
"I think we have a train to catch."
Duo laced their fingers together.
"I think we do."
-o-
The End