Disclaimer: I, The Mad Poet (A.K. LaBelle), do NOT own Gundam Wing or any associated characters or images. Please don't sue me, as I'm poor and you'll spend more on lawyers and the court process than you could ever hope to get. However, all original concepts and characters herein are completely ORIGINAL, and therefore if you are for some reason inclined to steal them and are caught, I will hunt your bitch ass down and beat you silly.
Author Note: This fic may contain violence, language, strong imagery, and/or material which some individuals may find offensive. Read at your own risk. Feedback is welcome.
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Chapter
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00
On a fundamental level something surged, snapped, jarred against the flesh. Synapses fired, blue heat against the frayed nerves and eyes tore open, rolled into white darkness seeking the ceiling, seeking the presence the truth the sky the human contact; finding only light, only blurs, only hazy impressions of shadow and flashes of blinding cold light. Muscles twitched involuntarily, long spasmodic shivers wracking the nerves, the shattered systems. Something was wrong, on a fundamental level something was wrong--the machinery locked, frosted, killed with the cold. Byways and wiring backfired, the taste of static, of copper and salt and terror caught in the icing air, swallowed breath, burned the airways. Cold so intense it burned; it melted in liquid fire along the muscles and tendons, along the chattering nerves and burnt receptors.
Control.
Individual perception ducked close, danced away--hid in the frostbit machine, huddled in the gears and connectors. Man, machine, weapon reached out--fingers clenched and closed, numb and unnoticed against the thick air; the living, the malefic throttling air. Unalive, unindividual it nonetheless panicked: terror flooded, overrode function and logic. Hard muscle locked by heated cold tensed, lurched forward--consciously this time, an effort to recontrol the structure, the body--only to find itself bound, whipped back and restrained. The action was registered, but the limb could not be felt--too cold too hot too numb for feeling. The taste of static too intense on the heavy tongue, in the struggling throat. No feeling existed outside of it--the heat and chill dulled to memories, inconveniences; shock crept, crawled across the surface into the structure, consumed the structure. Individual perception screamed, restrained, bit through its tongue to the shock-copper-salt of blood for silence.
"Mahdrai!--" Silence shattered around a foreign sound, something outside the structure. Silence regressing, muffling and cutting and killing the sound with pain before a resurgence. "--till alive!"
(No.)
Speech. Voices. Individual perception bit harder, hid harder; scrabbled against the cold steel with human claws. The smell of blood, of burning in electric heat.
"Hold him!"
(You know the consequences, now.)
The current of electricity did not numb now but impelled, forced the structure to movement, mimicked and mocked the Individual perception in its terror--some outside forced touched, pulled, restrained once again; held it back and arrested the movement. Struggle harder, thrash harder. . .it could not be held, would not be held. The very concept of logic or escape vanished before a swelling tide of animal fear, of foreign adrenaline. How could the man, machine, the weapon not break away? Individual perception crumbled, consumed by the thickening taste of electricity, the stronger the harder the burning taste of electricity which clung and touched and pulled--the motivation, the restraint itself. Blood and metal, sweat and fear--each sensation familiar, accounted for in memory. The structure, the body, lurched again; fought for the painful air through swallowed blood, around the heavy and severed tongue.
"Dossaide mahgei. . ."
"--ke an animal--"
(I am very disappointed.)
Something jarred, snapped, surged on the inside--some last wire or tendon of sanity giving way under the punishing electric current. The creak, the unoiled grind of gear or bone as the numb jaw fought to open, and the thrashing arms tightened, muscle lined and rigid against skin but motionless. It--he, it; man-machine and weapon--choked on the blood, on the air; on the liquid spilling past previously clenched teeth to slick downward and fall somewhere, at some point, unheeded to the ground. It wanted to. . .speak. Beg. Prove. . .Nothing wrong. No fault in functions. Doctor. . .Doctor there was no mistake, please. Not the patches, Doctor. Not the patches, or the shock. Please Doctor, I'll do it right next time. This time. Please. Please. Oh god oh god, oh please--
(You know the consequences, now.)
A spasm wracked the structure again; muscles tearing, bones cracking. Eyes jerked, rolled in their dark, their blinding hiding. Cold, but it didn't matter. Pressure on the temples, the firm touch, the brief terror before--
(Very, very disappointed.)
Control.
It screamed, once.
Darkness.
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01
It was approximately two in the morning. To be pointlessly precise, it was two fifteen and twelve--now thirteen, now fourteen, now fifteen--seconds, with the second decimal steadily ticking by, too fast to be worth counting in this most mundane of situations. He did not need a clock to tell him this, and it was just as well because the red-faced digital alarm clock beside his bed had been dismantled two weeks prior, then rebuilt properly and given to charity. It had been dismantled in the brief, inexplicable desire to wire it instead as a low-medium yield explosive and blow himself to a more peaceful locale--such as a statistically young death--and end his ceaseless migraines. The urge had passed, but now--at two fifteen and not quite twenty seconds in the morning, slightly more than half an hour after he had first slipped under the cold thin sheets--he was beginning to have it again.
Who--on earth or in all the colonies--would be pounding on his front door at this hour? And who of those hypothetical idiots would think they could survive such an endeavor?
He sat for a minute, perhaps two, on the edge of his bed pondering those questions, and debating whether he would rather strangle his mysterious interloper or simply remove them with an old-fashioned bullet in the skull. It was two seventeen and his migraine was already very, very bad; the floor was cold under his bare feet and that steadily erratic pound pound pounding was beginning to mark the beat of his nerves fraying and snapping one by one. It was two eighteen and the visitor had started to howl his name between pounds--dragging out the vowels impatiently--when he stood at last with no more sound than a faint grunt of irritation and stalked to the bedroom door, throwing it open, and continued into the short hall. He would forgo the gun. Anyone that irritating--and he was sure now that he knew who exactly it was, though why continued to elude him--deserved to suffer the indignity of being asphyxiated in front of the neighbors.
It was a small apartment--he did not need or want anything else, for reasons both practical and personal--and the walk to the entrance was dark but not long, with no obstacles or loose carpeting to trip or hinder him. He had no time, therefore, to become more worked-up with irritation, but also no time to calm himself down; and so it was with expressionless eyes and slightly clenched teeth that he threw the front door open into the wall with a harsh bang and crack of metal into plaster. His other hand, by that time, was already around the intruder's neck, and tightened there silently. It would have been better if he hadn't had to see their face, or to hear their voice so close by, or to acknowledge them at all as another human being rather than a loud and grating disturbance: but that of course was the disadvantage of strangulation, that it took so damnably much longer than so many other methods, and required a much closer and somehow more personal touch.
Above the tightly clenched hand a broad smile hung, wide eyes of an improbable and vivid amethyst echoing the expression from their place half-hidden behind unevenly brown bangs. The young man laughed as if he did not notice the fingers digging into the tendons of his neck, pressuring the vital pulses and tendons, tempting the adam's apple to give; and lifted a slightly grimy hand to wave in utmost cheer. "Heya Heero! Been awhile, huh? Damn, you've still got a helluva temper I guess, and still short as ever. Seriously though, I didn't even think you were in but I figured if I yelled long enough that you'd come to the door if you were, so--"
The incessantly cheerful voice continued at a relentless, meaningless pace Heero still vaguely remembered, though he had already ceased to listen except in the most superficial of manners. That too was familiar: the sensation was almost that of deja vu, and for some reason this bothered him so much that he was compelled to tighten his grip further. His free hand lifted, coming to his face so that half of it was hidden, rubbing slightly at one pounding temple. It was only one pale eye, then, which shifted from the familiar--though slightly older, and now slightly red or blue-tinged--face, to take in the full image; to understand the full scenario. It did not make sense. How many years had it been--four, five?--since the last time he had seen this old fellow pilot? Hell, since he had last seen any of them? It did not make sense for the other man to be pounding down his door at two fifteen in the morning on a Sunday--an Off Day, for all other practical purposes--and with no appreciable reason.
The not-quite familiar face--starting to become a slightly uncomfortable shade of purple by this time--raised both brows slightly, smile quirking up a bit at one corner. The overall effect was of a slightly ironic, generally sympathetic pleading expression which most people probably would have been hard-pressed not to give in to. "Hey, Heero. . .ya wanna let me go now? I understand you're glad to see me and all, but I kinda need to breathe. . ." Gasping faintly between words, the small speech only added to the pitiful and touching picture.
Heero, however, was not most notably not impressed. He shifted his grip slightly, and would have lifted the other man off the ground if only he had not been so very much taller. "Maxwell." Here he paused, not bothering to clear that early-morning hoarseness or hostility from his voice, and dragged the other man's face down to his. Now glaring flat death directly into those wide purple eyes, he continued. "Do you have any idea what time it is?" It was not the only question he wanted to ask, but it somehow seemed the most appropriate. It was the easiest to say in any case, and probably would be the easiest to answer: Do you have any idea just how painfully I am going to kill you for waking me up at this ungodly hour, just when I am finally adopting normal sleep patterns without the aid of medication? Do you have any idea how jarring, how fundamentally wrong it is to open my door and find, four years, or five years later, such a sharp reminder of the way things were? Do you have any idea how it feels to find you so. . .so the same, so recognizably you, that--
Duo's brows were still arched faintly, but in a wholly different manner now, so that he looked faintly wry and painedly humorous: as if Heero had made a joke which was not quite as funny as he had meant it to be, and the other man understood the intention but not enough to be wholly amused. He had such a damned expressive face, such wretchedly expressive eyes--he always had--and Heero, once again, felt that inexplicable urge to wipe himself, or someone, or everyone, off this miserable mortal coil. It was twice in the space of notably less than ten minutes, and he was certain that meant he was slipping. His hand twitched, but he restrained himself from breaking the other man's neck. The fact that he had to restrain himself, he was certain, meant he was slipping. Faced once more with Duo Maxwell--somehow everything he never wanted to be, and at the same time everything he should have been--how could he not slip? To maintain sanity under such circumstances would have been almost as jarring, almost as wrong, as opening his door to find those gemtone eyes and that horribly expressive caucasian face with its catalogue of smiles for every occasion.
The circular train of thought was abruptly derailed. Duo was speaking but that was not what had done it--or was not all that had done it. Heero jerked his head, grip unmoving, at some faint glimmer down the apartment hallway which he had finally noticed. For a moment he did not register the image, the fact, the full reality of the matter; and when he did he did not know what to do and so simply stared, unsure and unbelieving. He did not blink, and vaguely noticed that his mouth was hanging open now, teeth no longer clenched or even near each other. It was impossible. It was a mistake. It was a gross, unacceptable error; and Heero was chilled by it in a physical and primal manner which he could not, dare not examine.
It was impossible. For one mad moment his panicked, scrabbling mind blamed Duo; but that was impossible as well. He held on to it anyway. It was better than the alternative. He was slipping.
"Sure I do--it's noon, a'right? Now could ya put me down? Your neighbors are staring."
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Heero's face was fixed into a deep scowl, his eyes narrowed to a hard squint as he glared down at his black coffee mug. In a defiant attempt to deny the time he had thrown open all of the heavy dark drapes in his small apartment, flooding it with more light than the meager collection of rooms had seen in his entire tennance combined. The action had not changed the fact that it was indeed noon and not two fifteen in the morning, and now Heero was, as Duo had so eloquently--and with such unwitting accuracy--stated, sulking for no damned good reason except that the sun was out. He also could not see, for the light hurt his eyes--he sincerely hoped that his migraine medicine would start working soon before he broke something.
Like Duo's face.
"Look. . .I don't know what's bothering you Heero, but would it help to talk it out?" The young man sat on the sink with his hands firmly planted on the counter's rim by his side, head cocked at an angle. "I'm not a head-shrinker or anything fancy like that, but it might help."
Heero said nothing, only shifted slightly in his chair by the small table so that his back turned partially toward Duo; and continued to glare downward. How could anyone--himself especially--explain 'what was wrong'? How could anyone explain their world being so abruptly upended in so many ways at once, after spending so long trying to cement it? How could he explain how four years, maybe five, of brutal and punishing self-training to turn himself into a normal, functioning human being was thrown out the window by a familiar face and the jarring discovery that his once-flawless sense of time had been hopelessly in error; by being forced to wonder, suddenly, just how far he had slipped, and just what else might be irrevocably lost or broken?
"Heero?"
How could he explain it, talk it out, with anyone? Especially Duo?
"Hey!" Duo picked a spoon out of the mostly immaculate sink, and threw it at the other man. He missed, the utensil bouncing off of a cabinet to clatter noisily against the tiled floor.
Closing his eyes, Heero lifted the mug to his lips, and took a long drink. The coffee was left over from the day before--bitter, and cold. It lay thick on his tongue; refusing, for a moment, to be swallowed. ". . .Hn?"
There was a moment of silence, and then Duo laughed, throwing his head back for a moment before looking back to Heero with a wide and slightly disbelieving grin. " 'Hn'? 'Hn'? Jesus Heero, I can't believe you still say that!" He laughed again, slapping his knee as if Heero's faint grunt of acknowledgment were the funniest damn thing he had heard in years. " 'Hn'!"
Heero reached up, once again, to rub at his temples. The pills were most notably not working yet. "I fail to see what you find so amusing, Maxwell." He would have been happy to leave it at that--or better yet, to have Duo leave it at that; but that, of course, would have been too much to hope for. The brunet on his kitchen counter opened his mouth to speak again, and so Heero filled the silence instead. The statement was inane, but right now that didn't really matter. Anything was better, after all, than being questioned again. ". . .You cut your hair."
"Huh? Oh, yeah." He grimaced, eyes pained; and one hand lifted to finger the short tail tied behind his neck--all that remained of his once-impressive braid. "Got caught in an engine turbine I was fixing and then the thing just popped on, if you can believe that. . .so it was my hair or my head; and I tell you what it was a hard, hard choice. Surprised you recognized me, though."
". . .Hn." Heero did not want to say that it had been the eyes, the face, the familiar feel which had made him recognize the other man; that it was the voice, the tone, the way he had stood grinning in the hall like the happy fool he both was and was not. He swirled the coffee in his mug, watching the thick and grainy grounds shift where light filtered into the black liquid.
"So, Hee--"
"What are you doing here?" The question was clipped, abrupt--thank God it did not sound as desperate, as grasping as it had felt. If he did not keep Maxwell talking, he would be asked what was wrong again. And 'hn' was probably not an answer Duo would accept for that question.
"Jeez, you're rude." Duo sniffed slightly, sounding hurt, but then forged ahead again as if nothing had happened. "Well you know, after that little bust-up with Hilde I started wanderin' around again--odd jobs and stuff, you know; damn but I love this work!--and I found myself here and figured. . ." Here he hopped down from the counter, putting his hands on his hips and cocking his head to the other side, beaming for all the world as if this were the very, very best thing, ever. "I figured, hell! While I'm in the area, I might as well look up my old buddy Heero! And so I did!"
Heero was silent for a moment as he took another sip of his coffee. He hadn't known about any 'bust-up' between Duo and Hilde, little or otherwise, but the subject held no interest for him so he did not press. He did not look up when he spoke. "You sound proud of yourself."
"Screw you. I went to all this trouble to find you, and I never even got a 'hello'. Man, you're an ass."
"Tragic. Maxwell, if I get evicted over the disturbance you caused I will kill you."
"Pft. If you get evicted, it's 'cause you tried to kill me. In the hall no less! Now that's a disturbance." Duo dropped his hands from his hips, lacing his fingers together instead as he raised his arms up and let his displaced hands settle behind his head. Turning on the heel of one battered black sneaker, he began to wander from one end of the small kitchen to the other; only a few paces each way. "Kind of a shame if you did though--get evicted, I mean. S'a nice place you got, if a little cramped. But anyway, you gonna tell me what's--"
"It is not 'cramped'. It's fine." There was no coffee left in Heero's mug. He blinked once, slowly, at the grounds stuck to the bottom, and considered getting up for more. "How exactly did you 'look me up', anyway?" He was not, after all, listed in any public directory. True enough that he did not make any secret of his identity or whereabouts, but still: after so many years without any kind of contact, Duo should have had a harder time of it than he had made out.
"Man, stop interrupting me." Duo waved a hand faintly, shrugging. "But ah. . .Well, I guess I didn't really look you up, in the technical sense or anything. I yoinked your address from somebody else."
Now Heero looked up at last, one brow raised faintly and the other drawn. No one here had his address. At least no one that Duo would know, and certainly no one who would simply give such information out. . . .Did they? "Who?"
"It was--" Duo's surety faltered a bit, and he frowned slightly for the first time since, and the only time other than, the mention of his butchered hair. The expression, to Heero, looked out of place; as if it were a mask, or something badly painted onto the skin. "Shoot. . .some girl, right? Help me out here, Heero. It was. . .was. . ."
". . .Meryl? Yuri?" Heero supplied the names of a few female coworkers, vaguely remembered only from the tags on their shirts. They did not, in fact, have any clue where he lived outside of--possibly--the general neighborhood, but perhaps Duo's memory could be jogged. "Sandra?"
"No, no, and no. It was--damn!" Hooking the only other chair out from beneath the table, Duo dropped into it, one palm flat against his forehead as he looked to the ceiling in thought. "I just can't remember. Uh. . .sweet girl though, a little excitable but cute as a button, right? We go way back--"
"'We', Maxwell?"
"Yeah, 'we'. Nothing wrong with that, us both knowing her. She always liked you best, definitely. . .damn! What the hell was her name?"
For another moment, Heero was silent before his next offering. Could it have been. . . "Was it. . .Re--"
He had intended to say 'Renee'.
He had intended to say Renee--a strange and social girl on evening security who somehow seemed to have prior acquaintance to everyone she met; whose vibrant eyes and passionate smiles had reminded him enough of Duo for Heero to both loathe and love her, enough that he had clumsily attempted to return her affectionate friendship for about a month before disgustedly giving up on the entire ordeal. She seemed a reasonable enough possibility, now that he thought of it. She seemed a perfectly reasonable person for Duo to know, to adore, to describe as 'cute as a button', sweet but excitable and odd. He relaxed before he spoke, certain the mystery was solved, that the coldly familiar electric tingle in his spine was nothing, was only a figment of an edgy imagination.
Duo, however, interrupted him. For one clear moment he seemed to have been sent by some higher power with no purpose other than to destroy Heero's meticulously mundane world, and at that he was performing admirably. For one clear, crystalline moment Heero was certain that if he reached across the table and broke Duo's neck right then, in that perfect instant, that everything would be all right; that he would wake up at precisely two fifteen and twelve--thirteen, fourteen, fifteen--seconds in the morning, thinking he had heard a knocking on his door that would only be his headache starting up because he had somehow inexplicably forgotten his migraine pills. For one moment, when that first syllable escaped his lips and Duo pounded a hand down on the table with an enthusiastic 'Yeah!' and finished the name--the wrong name--Heero thought that the world might just be ever so much better off without Death around to fuck it up any further.
After that, the small electric tingle exploded up his spine; wiped away all reason, all moments. Before thought had quite returned to his blank uncomprehending mind his fist had shot out and caught Duo's face with a thick wet crunch, sending the other man's chair over backwards and spilling Duo to the floor. Heero drew in a deep, trembling breath colored with the familiar taste of his own blood--he had bitten, for the first time in years, deeply into his tongue again--and stood slowly, hands flat on the table for support. He was slipping, and he was going to fall. He had looked like a fool, or some strange automaton punching Duo while his eyes went glassy and his jaw hung in disbelief, but had not been aware of it. He looked dangerous, now, in a purely animal way as he looked down at his old fellow with clenched fists; with tremulous breath hissing between his bared teeth and eyes a strange storm of passionate rage and empty, uncomprehending shock.
He was aware only because he saw himself in Duo's eyes, but only passingly aware at that. Perhaps later he would remember, and notice, and try to understand. There was. . .a look on Duo's face, beneath the blood from his nose and lip; a look in his eyes beneath the reflection of a savagely protective Heero. It disturbed him to see that expression, of all the range he knew Duo possessed. It did not belong on that face, in those eyes--not something he himself was so familiar with, so intimate with, that he woke up to its black reality almost every morning. He shivered, the faint convulsion rocking his body and sending him back to his seat. He gripped his empty coffee mug out of reflex--the desire to hold something cold and solid as if it were an anchor. He neither felt nor heard the ceramic crack in the pressure of his hold.
He was aware of nothing, and thought of nothing, but Duo's shocked and strangely frightened eyes staring up at him from where he could not, at this angle, see. He was aware of nothing, and thought of nothing, but Duo's words, and the slight tremor in his voice.
"H-Heero. . .I. . ." A faint breath, more of a gasp, and then sound resumed in the silent room. "Oh God. I just. . .forgot who Relena was. . ."
Perhaps Duo was slipping, too.