JailBreak
Installment Two
"You know, you oughtta feel pretty special. I made it all the way in here and there isn't a single female prisoner besides you! There isn't even an opportunity for a nice communal shower cat-fight!" Hilde stared at him and his cocky, if not slightly lewd, grin in shock. Part of her wanted to break down crying, another wanted to run into the embrace he was hinting that he wouldn't object to, and yet another wanted to smash him into tiny little pieces of testosterone. "None of my Gundam training prepared me for infiltrating a women's prison. But based on my cinematic observations, this is kinda disappointing. I mean c'mon, your shirt's not even torn!" That settled the three-way argument in her head.
"Duo, I'm gonna kill you!" Hilde seethed. Duo pouted dejectedly, crossing his arms like a three-year-old, and looking threateningly close to stamping his foot.
"Fine. I can see when I'm not wanted! Fortunately for you, I never look. So, Hot-stuff, whaddya say you and me go out and grab a bite to eat?"
"What the heck are you doing here? What if you get caught? How did you get in here? What about the guards?"
"Getting you out, don't worry about it, I walked in the front door, and they can't do a thing to stop me." And with the word "thing," Duo swiped a key card over the lock and the door creaked open.
"Is this where I fling myself into your arms and cry 'my hero!' Will you sweep me off my feet, and then later on expect me to show my eternal gratitude behind closed doors?" she posed.
"Well, if you're offering. . ." Duo smirked and his eyes held a glimmer of mischief.
"Definitely not, at least until I know how you plan on getting me out of here." She crossed her arms over her chest.
"You're already out."
"Oh really?" Hilde quirked a brow, in confusion and disbelief.
"Here is all the documentation you need to waltz right out of this joint." Duo pulled from a fold in his shirt a few papers and handed them with a great flourish to Hilde who stood to read them. She quickly leafed through the documents, her eyes widening with each sentence.
". . .how. . ?" was all she managed to get out. The papers had all of her information, the charges brought against her and the dates of her trial, and the official turnover of her verdict as prescribed by one Inspector General. . .Maxwell!?
"Duo, there's no Inspector General Maxwell!"
"That's not what the computers say. . .and the computers have even more authority than Treize."
"When they catch this error in the system, I'll be in worse trouble than I am now!"
"Nah, you have far too much faith in your former superiors. Assuming they do catch it, It won't be for at least a couple of months, and it's a helluvalot better for their image to keep it covered up. Besides, by that time, you can be safely settled somewhere far off their radar. I haven't been able to hook up with the others, so I'll be sure to see you off right." Hilde didn't know whether to be elated or insulted. With a wry grin he waggled his eyebrows at her suggestively. Once again, the argument in her head was settled. Without the obstacle of the cell door to impair her motions, Duo found himself intimately aquatinted with Hilde. With her fist, anyway. . ..
"That's gratitude for ya. . ." he wheezed, "I guess now I'd call us even for that stunt I pulled with the duffle bag. . .. C'mon, dinner's on me. I'm gonna treat you to the most lavish meal of your life. No expense will be spared. Now, which way to the nearest burger joint?" Hilde blinked a couple of times, then found herself being dragged haphazardly down the corridor. She pulled herself up and trotted to catch up to him. Watching the guy in front of her intently, she wondered about what had transpired.
What was so strange about him? If any other man had said half the things he'd said to her, he'd be in intensive care. But with Duo, everything seemed so natural. Like they'd been going back and forth like this for years. What was it about him?
Hilde was so lost in thought, she didn't notice the guards that they passed giving them sidelong glances, or even the male prisoners catcalling. The only thing that broke her out of her reverie was the artificial sun glaring into her eyes once they were outside the prison complex. Duo paused outside the gates, either to get his bearings or lookout for anyone who might recognize him, leaving Hilde to revel in her freedom for a few precious moments. After taking a few refreshing breaths of recycled air, she smiled at Duo, forgetting to be mad at him for forcing her into the damsel in distress role and easily slipping himself into shining- er. . .black armor. Hilde glanced down and realized that he hadn't released her hand. She decided not to mention it.
"You wouldn't happen to know of someplace safe we can go until your unit leaves again, wouldjya?" Duo asked rubbing the back of his head with a silly smile.
"I thought you plan was idiot-proof," Hilde countered with a smug look.
"A'course it is. . .. I just think it would be smarter to try to lie low for a few days. . ." he answered sheepishly.
"Well, I guess that's as close as I'm gonna get to you to admitting imperfection," Hilde smirked.
This time she was the one doing the dragging. She pulled him down street after street, wide avenues retrogressing into narrow roads, roads retrogressing into cluttered alleys. Soon she was in familiar territory. She followed the maze of alleyways and parking lots, past poverty stricken homes and low-grade restaurants. While running past a group of kids playing soccer with a worn ball in an empty lot, littered with rubbish and the scrap metal, she yelled out when the destitute youths scored a point in the makeshift goal box crafted out of pipes and a discarded MS camouflage net.
This was her home turf, and she didn't care if Duo knew it. She felt no inhibitions at all to let him in on one of her most guarded secrets. And even she had to admit, she hid it well. She was sure none of her fellow officers knew her background. From they way she talked and carried herself, they probably thought she was just a kid like themselves, maybe home schooled or even a rich girl who went to a boarding school. Meanwhile, everyone on the outside thought she was just another colony kid who had signed up with the other students. Neither side knew that she hadn't attended school since she was ten and had lived on the streets for the past five years.
Duo looked this girl he was following up and down. She was so. . .alive. How was it that she had been so willing to throw that life away just for OZ only a month ago? She intrigued him. She could meet him blow for blow in a battle of wits, and from what he'd seen, she wasn't half bad in a Suit, either.
Duo looked at his surroundings, trying to get his bearings. Where was she taking him? The streets kept getting narrower, and the buildings in more disrepair. Soon they were traveling through alleys and behind stores. Is this haven of hers in a ghetto? he asked himself. Duo never had her picked as the type to affiliate with. . .those of lesser income. Duo was trying to remember how they had gotten to their current location, (Now was it around the parking lot, down the alley with the Chinese restaurant, and then behind the deli, or was it behind the deli, down the alley, and then around the parking lot? Or was it across the parking lot? Dammit!) when he heard Hilde yell. He glanced in the direction she was looking and saw some street kids in a game of soccer. They shouldn't be playing with all that MS debris, Duo thought, old habits sneaking up on him. But what really surprised him was that Hilde seemed so friendly to them. . .not snobby at all. She almost fit right in. But that couldn't be, could it? She came off like she was with the school program sending students into OZ, and Duo guessed that only half of these kids went to school. They finally stopped at the back of an old deteriorating apartment building that teemed with life. Looking the building up and down, he saw that it was probably over a century old. The cement walls were webbed with cracks and whatever windows that weren't boarded up were too dirty to see through to the inside. The stoop on which they were standing was littered with trash and broken glass, and weeds were slowly breaking it apart with their roots. Hilde was banging on the door and calling out in German.
"Bridget! It's Hilde! I'm back!" Hilde shouted in her parents' ancient language. This brought a number of faces out their respective windows and people onto the fire escapes. Hilde waved to them all and they shouted back in a number of languages. The door in front of them flew open and Hilde turned back to the frame in the doorjamb. An elderly women of about seventy came out in a worn flower print dress and house slippers, leaning on a trite wooden cane. Her white hair was pulled tightly back, but a few strands strayed and fell to frame her face. Her eyes, once a bright crystal blue, were dulled by cataracts. Her withered face brightened warmly into a wide smile when she saw Hilde at the door. Hilde released Duo's hand for the first time since he had taken it back at the penitentiary and hugged the old woman like she would've her real grandmother.
"Hilde! Child!" Bridget said in standard with a heavy Irish accent, "When the letters stopped coming we were all so worried our dark little angel had gone and gotten herself killed for wicked old OZ!"
"I'm sorry to have worried you, Bridget, and I'm also sorry about not being able to send the money. . ."
"Oh, hush child! I don't need you throwing away your hard earned credits on a useless old fool like me!" Bridget pulled away and held her at arms length, looking her over in her dirty OZ uniform. All emblems and stripes had been removed, but it was still obvious to anyone that she was or had been a soldier.
"But-"
"Not another word of it!" Bridget saw past Hilde for the first time and looked Duo up and down. Duo fidgeted. He wasn't sure he'd been quiet for so long in his life, but he hadn't wanted to interrupt them. Besides, he was getting so much useful background information this way! Maybe he should shut up more often. . .nah, the shock would probably drive Heero to self detonate again.
"So, we are all crawling the walls with worry, and you've gone and run off with some cute face? Tsk, tsk. . .. I thought I taught you better than that?" She gave Hilde a teasing glance. Before the shock of that statement had worn off enough for her to defend herself, Duo graciously stepped in on her behalf. Literally.
Duo tactfully shoved her aside with a florid bow and a manic grin. Encouraged by the old woman's delighted laughter at his display, he went so far as to tip his hat back cockily with a flick of his forefingers before crossing his arms blithely over his chest looking for all the world like the cat who had found the cream. And opened it. And finished it off without anyone the wiser.
"This pretty face belongs to the one and only Duo Maxwell, I run, I hide, but I never tell a lie." With that, his arm snaked unannounced around Hilde's waist to drag her up against his side with an audible 'umph' on her, still stunned (and increasingly annoyed), part. "Yep, me and Sweet-cheeks here have up and run off together, sorry about the worry and all, but we've just been so busy running around, what with her discharge from OZ on my behalf. Now is that romance or is that romance? Hey! Y'know I just thought of something! Since we've already got our lives on hold for each other and everything, why don't we just take the whole shebang and find us some friendly old neighborhood priest and make everything all nice and legal, then we won't have any pesky worries about 'living in sin' or getting her in trouble and-oof!"
His jubilant spiel was rudely interrupted by her elbow to his stomach, and she shot him a glare that promised a lower blow if he kept going. However, Duo had already perfected his immunity to the Heero Yuy death glare, and Hilde's vague shadow of it barely kept him from going into possible flower arrangements.
Bridget noted calmly that while Hilde had blatantly expressed her displeasure at Duo's line of conversation, she had not gone so far as to pry herself out of his possessive embrace. . ..
"Well, I guess it couldn't hurt to wait a couple of years. . ." He screwed up his face thoughtfully, tipping his gaze toward the holographic projection of a sky. "After all, I'm not sure I want to commit myself to having her snoring in my ear every night. . .. And you know she can be kind of lax in her attention to wardrobe," Meanwhile, Duo's hand had taken up a thoughtful stroke along the curve of her hip that might have seemed intimate, if not for the careless manner in which it was executed -- rather as though he might as well have been chewing on the end of a pen. Hilde's face was turning a variety of colors under his ministration as her emotions flared between equal parts of embarrassment, fury, and something she couldn't quite place. . ..
"Where did you pick up this Blarney-tongued blackguard? I suppose you culled him out of a litter of new recruits?"
"Hey now!" Hilde found herself suddenly thrust from his grasp as his hands slammed defiantly to his hips and he bent forward to add a somewhat silly air of importance to his current tongue lashing, "Just because Baby-cakes here tried to sign me up and maybe I let my hormones unbalance my judgment long enough to try on the uniform does not make! Me! A! Bad! Guy!" On that note he actually did stamp his foot, canceling out whatever severity his speech had entailed. "In fact, you oughtta be thanking me lady; if not for me she'd probably still be out there with gundanium stars in her eyes trying like hell to get herself killed for the wrong side! And for that matter, where do you get off calling me a 'Blarney-tongued blackguard'? What in the seven hells is a blackguard?! Y'know, I'm probably one of the best guys around this sink hole these days, I'll have you know I was raised in a church, might even turn minister one of these days, and who'll be laughing then? Huh? Whatchya gotta say to that? A God-fearing family man is a helluvalot better than some street punk even if he did get himself into a messy situation or two. And while we're on the subject, I wanna know what-"
He was cut off by a quick jab from Bridget's cane to his already tender stomach. "That is quite enough out of you, young man. Come inside and fill your mouth with something other than your tongue." Duo rubbed his abused abdomen and pouted. Hilde tugged on his braid, enticing a sulk from Duo. Bridget turned with a smug look and walked back through the doorway, the pair following, and Hilde closed the rotting door behind them.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
