The idea for this chapter came from a favorite commenter on AO3. I hope this is a little bit closer to what they were hoping to see. :)
Une just wants one day of peace and quiet.
"Une. Why did you insist on you and I having a meeting?" Relena questioned, steepling her fingers at her chin as she eyed the woman standing on the other side of the diplomat's desk. In all honesty, she was considering telling her secretary...no...telling her personal administrative assistant that unless the people trying to enter her office were Hilde or any one of the boys, that she should say that Relena was unavailable even if all that Relena was doing was scrolling through wedding-related websites and/or planning a new quest for game night.
After all, you could never be too careful even now...Zechs could try to walk in to talk to her about something, damnit!
"One day." Was all Une said and Relena could only raise a brow in question. "Is that a reference to something or...?"
"One. Day." The woman said before her hands came to rest on the desk as she leaned forward to be as close to eye-level as possible with the unphased and unintimidated diplomat. "I request that you make those five behave themselves for one. Goddamn. Day."
"You knew who hired when you hired them." Was all that Relena said, giving a dismissive shrug of her shoulders as she contemplated whether or not a nice cup of tea would help her cool her temper after this or if she should just go with some form of coffee.
"Miss Relena...please." Une's shoulders were a tense line and, if she looked, Relena would swear that the woman had a few gray hairs already coming in. "Please...just one day. It is not just for the sake of my sanity-"
Relena raised a brow, but refrained from voicing her thought of 'ship sailed on that a long time ago, lady' as Une continued. "-but for the sanity of all of the Preventers. Hell, just one day of peace and quiet would do wonders to keep Zechs from having a nervous breakdown."
"I really don't care if my brother has a nervous breakdown or not." Relena said as she settled on just ordering in a large frozen mocha with whipped cream and a dark chocolate drizzle.
"Well, I do." Une grumbled as she stood up straight once more and pinched the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger as if to ease the tension headache threatening to begin. "That man is constantly one nervous breakdown away from becoming a comic book-style supervillain."
As much as she didn't want to agree, Relena knew that she kind of had to because, yes, Zechs gave the word "unstable" an entirely new meaning. If anything, she fully believed that some extended time in one of those nice "I love me" jackets and a room of padded walls, padded floor, and full of pillows and magical happy pills would do the blond a world of good...or at least make her days a bit brighter...though she knew that no one would allow that scenario to happen as they didn't want to deal with Noin breaking the man out Harley Quinn-style because, yes...the woman absolutely would.
"Do you remember what that man did the last time he got too close to a breakdown?" Une said firmly, her arms crossed over her chest as she stared down at the younger who merely nodded at that question because yes, who could forget that Zechs had tried to go full genocidal? Honestly...only an idiot would forget something like that.
"And if that happens, who do you think is going to have to deal with him?"
Obviously, her boys of course because Noin would most likely side with Zechs and it wasn't like there was anyone else whom Une would try to send, now was there? Though, in all fairness, while Relena was certain that her brother would lose against the boys should all five get their heads out of their respective behinds long enough to work together to take her brother down, she knew that the collateral damage would obviously be extremely high and (even if it wasn't by some miracle) even minimal damages was a hit to the personal bank accounts that she knew that neither Quatre nor herself wanted to deal with.
She loved all of her boys, but leave them bored, angry, and/or un-responsibly supervised for long enough and chaos unfolded.
"Okay, Une. I will see what I can do...but barring making the guys take a vacation day, I cannot make any guarantees." Relena said as she let her hands down to rest on the top of her desk because, in all honesty, she really just wanted her coffee now and for Une to get out of her office. Thankfully, her answer seemed to satisfy the former-OZ operative as Une turned and walked out the door without even a goodbye. Relena rolled her eyes and leaned back in her chair because now she needed to at least try to figure out a way to distract the boys at work...wait.
An almost-Grinch-like grin spread on Relena's face before she used the call button on her intercom to request that her assistant put in the order for her frozen mocha...then pulled out her cellphone and shot off a quick text message.
= title card reading three days later =
Duo woke up and promptly fell out of his chair with a loud shout when the door to their office opened and shut suddenly, breaking the boredom-induced lull that had been weighing so heavily on the room. Quatre let out a yelp at Trowa suddenly grabbing him and pulling him under the desk just as Heero was on his feet with his partially-disassembled gun in hand...only to glance at the weapon and realize that maybe five minutes ago had not been the best time to start disassembling his gun for cleaning and maintenance. Wufei glared up then... "Yuy! Sit down!"
Hilde just rolled her eyes as she walked to the center of the room, everyone seemingly content to ignore the exaggerated zombie-like groaning coming from Duo. "I don't know, I'm pretty sure he could still kill a man with a disassembled gun."
Heero did not answer...but the silence was answer enough. Quatre reappeared from under his desk, dusting himself off...and not even batting away Trowa's hands when the other reappeared and proceeded to 'help' in his own way. "Hello, Hilde, how are you? I thought that you said that today was your day off?"
Hilde smirked at the blond, adjusting the pageboy-style hat that she wearing, before she reached into the messenger bag hanging from her shoulder. "It is...but I bring you five a series of quests from our beloved queen."
Well that caused Duo's groaning to stop and made him pop up from behind his desk not unlike a gopher, while everyone else sported varying expressions of confusion and curiosity at what was going on right now. Hilde unfolded the paper, and promptly cleared her throat before proceeding to read. "Our queen has humbly requested that you five brave adventurers undertake a series of quests that must be completed by the end of the day. Should you succeed, your reward will be beyond measure."
All five of the former pilots glanced at one another...then nodded as they collectively put two-and-two together and realized that this might as well be a 'live-action roleplay' session for their game. Well...it was something to kill the mind-numbing boredom that they had all been suffering from, so why not? Quatre grinned at Hilde, before slipping into his in-game (and far too often real-life) role as the 'face of the party'. "And what, pray tell, are these quests?"
Hilde just handed Quatre an envelope before folding the paper in her hands back up. "Everything that you need to know's in that envelope. Have fun guys...and remember, all of it needs to be done by the end of the day."
And with that, Hilde gave each of the guys a one-armed hug, placed a peck of a kiss on Duo's lips, and vanished back out the door like she had never been there. Quatre just shrugged and opened the envelop, pulling out the note inside. "Okay...ahh...Relena wants us to make some decisions regarding options for our future wedding."
Heero and Trowa just nodded because they still agreed that getting options narrowed down prior to actually setting a date was a reasonable idea, while Wufei turned back to his computer and minimized his solitaire game. "What exactly do we need to work on?"
"Quest one is for us to come to an agreement on décor ideas such as flowers and other things or if all of us want to do a type of theme wedding." Quatre said as the entire group moved to stand around Wufei's desk with Duo clearing off a spot on said-desk and planting himself onto it. "Quest number two is for us to come to an agreement regarding the food and music for the reception, and jotting down our own décor ideas if we think of any."
"How many 'quests' are there?" Duo questioned as Wufei already had a new word document made and titled so that they could begin. Heero and Trowa glanced at one another and pulled out their cellphones, clicking on their respective browser options since they knew that the internet would be necessary for this...and their phones were the only ones that couldn't be monitored and/or hacked by anyone at Preventers HQ so why not?
"Uh...it appears to be four main quests, some broken into smaller parts." Quatre said as he read over the paper in his hands before he passed it over to Heero for further inspection just in case he had missed something in the wording. "Relena also wants us to agree on our portion of the potential guestlist beyond what Wufei noted down before, and she would like it if we can all agree on potential honeymoon locations that we would all enjoy. She appears to be quite adamant that we all need to be in agreement on things."
Five different, for the most part, males having to agree on a bunch of things that would need to be agreed with and/or willing to compromise with Relena and Hilde's own chosen options later on? Well...they had done far complexer things before, now hadn't they? Trowa nodded, eyes closed in thought and moving a fist to rest against his chin as he passed his phone to Quatre so that his boyfriend could pull up a websearch for flowers suitable for weddings. "Where should we start?"
"Flowers should be easy enough." Heero muttered as he set the paper down on the desk and picked up a pen from Wufei's desk so that they could mark off when an objective was completed...or at least when they all agreed that one was completed enough so that things didn't devolve into a fist fight...again.
"Yeah. So...for starters...we can all agree on "no roses of any kind", right?" Duo ventured and the remaining four nodded while Wufei rapidly typed in all caps, in bold and underlined, NO ROSES OF ANY KIND under the 'Flowers' header on the document on his computer.
"We might want to avoid lilies too, I think. They seem to be more associated with funerals after all." Quatre ventured as Wufei added that to the forming list.
"No carnivorous plants." Heero added in without looking up from his own cellphone...no one wanting to tell him that 'no carnivorous plants at a wedding' was kind of a common sense given.
I now want to see a picture of Zechs dressed as the Joker and Noin dressed as a version of Harley Quinn and I wish that I could do justice to trying to draw that image. lol