Duo's Rat:

The Trap 2

by Nix Winter

Disclaimer: I still don't own Gundam Wing, but I have a great deal of respect for the original creators.

Notes: I have a book coming out from Venus Press next Wednesday. It's het, but when Jewls grows up he'll be a yaoi boy. Www. venuspress. com And I got interviewed at Road to Romance too, http:www. roadtoromance.ca/spots/spotnixwinter.htm yes, shameless promo, but I have been on the 1x2 list for so long and I know I don't really talk here like I used to. It used to just feel like 'home', like a family here and well, I guess I kinda wanted to share where I was at with the group too. I am really glad this list is here. I guess it still is a home and grounding place for me.

And here is where I'm posting all my fan fic, if you're interested in getting them that way http:groups. /group/nixfics/ so like take out the spaces in all the links, ne?

ND

Two

Heero didn't want the feelings that came with hearing Duo. Duo's voice and words had always reached inside Heero and twisted feelings long repressed by his training. Small sounds, protests against the present, fluttery whimpers, and Heero knew that Duo didn't know he was making those sounds. Training, years of very effecting conditioning, tiled into place over Heero's emotions. First he had to know what he could find out about their environment without alerting their captors to his growing wakefulness. Then he would find a way to get Duo to safety. Emotions were so hard to control when Duo was involved and he hated that, hated the way his mind raced around in circles, recording every sound that Duo made so that revenge could be had, if he wanted to. So much confusion tumbled in on him and he felt his heart rate rise and he couldn't stop it! Which only confused and frightened him more.

Then Duo screamed and Heero's heart rate burst like a buster canon! He was on his feet, fists and body moving into fighting pose. He was unrestrained and there was only he and Duo in the room. Duo was held to the wall, arms out to the sides, leather straps holding at wrists, forearms, elbows, biceps, and then around his waist, and chest, with wires that lead back around him to disappear into a metal wall. A helmet of black metal covered half of Duo's face, hiding his eyes, but not the blood inking red from his nose down around the side of his mouth, to drop down to his bare chest. That chest panted, short and fast, displaying purple bruising that Heero didn't know the source of.

The room held only the sound of Duo's ragged breathing, the small sounds of pain and fear, not even the full out scream remained. All the walls were smooth. All the same, except for the openings for the wires that disappeared behind Duo's shivering body. There was nothing else, not even an opening for a camera.

Heero himself was not restrained in any way. "Duo?"

Duo's fingers curled, tightening in response to Heero's Voice.

"One hand only if you can hear me," Heero whispered.

Duo tightened one hand, and heero realized he'd been holding his breath. Escape was the first mission.

"Heero?"

Duo's voice was fragile, thin and it mad Heero feel old, eel as if Duo were on the edge of still being a child, so fragile and innocent. And that was when his internal diagnostics understood there was a break down coming. "I'm here," Heero said.

Distantly, he wondered why he couldn't spell Duo's blood. Blood had always bothered Heero, always connected back to the shred of his humanity that he had cherished deep within himself. That shard of humanity was his promise to himself that when the war was over, he could find the person he'd been before his training. Internal mental diagnostics decided that Duo's voice and laughter had also gotten linked to that secret cache of humanity. He needed Duo if he were ever to return to being a normal man, he needed Duo.

Then a spasm hit Duo and his body pulled away from the wall, knees bending a little, pulling at leather strap around both of his legs. Bare feet pointed stiffly towards the smooth metal floor. Another scream was building in his chest as air was sucked, fingers like claws. Heero could imagine the pain that made his friend's body move like that, strain, and when the scream tore free from Duo, Heero the soldier was planning the easiest way to break his neck, to free him from the torment their captors had planned for them. Heero the man cried, body temperature tears from a body that demanded a response for the feelings under his programming.

"Heero," Duo wheezed, his whisper still enough to get Heero's complete attention. "Touch me. I feel so lost."

Heero reached out, hand feeling so large, or maybe it was just that he felt so small. To touch for comfort was suddenly frightening. He touched for a mission, to accomplish something. He didn't take missions he couldn't accomplish, and he knew his touch would not cure the pain in Duo's body, not free him from the restraints or monitors, but he touched anyway, his palm laying flat on Duo's taunt belly. "I'll do what you need me to do, Duo."

"Talk to me," the small voice whispered. "I'm a man now, right? I'm not a little kid anymore?"

"No, Duo," Heero said, "You are a man."

"You are a man," Heero repeated, his mind moving away from the feeling that Duo was a child. Duo was heroic, brave, strong, and he had a quality of identity, of self that Heero longed to have. "You and I are prisoners. You are being tortured."

"That sucks, Heero. Just me? Or am I just getting to go first?" Duo said. His words had started out jokingly, but then it turned to fear. "Heero, you're not angry at me? Are you? I mean, I didn't mean to fall and get us caught."

Heero's breakdown came a little closer. "No! Duo, it wasn't your fault. You have to stay strong. I am going to get you down from there."

"Don't," Duo snapped. "Don't touch the wires. Trap."

And then a deeper fear set in for heero. Not the kind of fear that served as warning of guid, but something uncontrollable and toxic. The fear rose ravenous within him. "Duo. I need you."

They stood there for that moment, just feeling the connection between palm and bare belly. "I'm always gonna be hanging around you, you know that? Relena's going to think I want a threesome."

Heero blinked. "I do not want a 'threesome'."

"Yeah," Duo sighed, body sagging into the restraints again, even though there wasn't much of a difference with how tightly he was restrained. "I'm just a fucking idiot. But what if I were a girl?"

"No, I respect you more than any other I've ever known. I would respect you the same if you were a girl. Gender does not imply any useful metric." Suddenly it became very important for Duo to know how he felt, as if his very self might slip away under the coming battle. "Duo, you are the only person I open myself to. You're the only person how is more than just a statistic to me. Do you understand?"

"Hell no," Duo said, trying to turn his head so he could see out from under the helmet covering half his face. "Heero, what's wrong? Heero, you're not fucking shot and I just can't see it, are you?"

Heero heard the sound first and looked up, even as his hand glided up Duo's belly to touch his lips, a caress that came from so deep within him that it by passed his mental censor all together. From above a ten centimeter transparent barrier was decending slowly from the ceiling. "There is a barrier coming down between us. Approximately 10 cm deep it is wide enough to completely separate us. It is close enough to you that you may be able to feel it when it is in place. I will find a way to free you."

"Heero," Duo said, softly, lips moving against Heero's fingers as he spoke, slow, almost as if he were considering kissing them. "There's an orphanage on L2. I've already set up funding for them, but you could visit them for me, 'kay? And I'd like a tree planted there too. A Duo tree."

"Understood," Heero said, but he was already slipping into mission mode, more than maybe he'd ever been and feelings or human needs were far from anything he could process in that moment. Every known property of the material their cell was made up scrolled though his mind as he sorted through looking for a weakness that he could exploit. His physical strength could be unleashed to tear metal apart when he relaxed the controls built into his psyche that made him pass as a normal human. He would simply tear his way to the control center and kill them all. He would abandon all covert operations, the hopes of returning to his humanity.

The barrier sealed between them and a dark mist began filling the narrow chamber that Duo hung in. Time froze for Heero for a moment, watching the cloud like swirls of it roll over Duo's bare feet, then up over the black pants that Duo still wore. Death's pilot could feel it coming, smell it maybe and he struggled frantically at the restraints, head thrashing, and Heero just stood there, no plan formed yet, his mind racing through all possible outcomes, refusing to waste a chance with rash human desperation.

Then a door opened. To the side, a ship with its ramp down, obviously on a launch strip, just sitting there waiting and the mission oriented soldier in him told him to run, to let them miss calculate whatever mind game they were playing. And it occurred to him that their captors could be his very own programming team, punishing him for his feelings and weaknesses over Duo by forcing him to abandon that very weakness as it suffered an agonizing death.

"I will not leave him. If you wish to maintain me as a weapon, you will not kill him."

Absolutely nothing changed. Heero could not hear Duo screaming, but he could watch through the clear barrier.

"Tell me what you want," he spoke to whoever was listening, as it only made sense that the mind game was directed at him, they must want something from him.

A voice, genderless, generic, spoke from at least three different speaker sources in the room. "You will comply to protect his life and sanity?"

"I will comply." Heero said. It was the end of his control, the end of his solder state. "Please don't hurt him." And where Duo had seemed like a child earlier, now Heero became one without even knowing it, just the little child he'd been before he'd become the perfect soldier. "Please don't hurt him. He's my friend."

The smoke was vacuumed from the chamber so rapidly that Heero worried Duo would suffocate, but then the barrier lifted and the restraints released. Duo fell and Heero was on his knees, holding him, pushing the helmet off. Duo was unconscious, head tilted back, dark circles under his eyes, face pale, breath ragged, but he was breathing and Heero clutched him tight, holding the fragile life of his friend so close, rocking slowly back and forth on his knees, fingers brushing through Duo's hair. "I comply! I comply! I comply!"

In a control room, a woman ran her finger down Heero's back on the main monitoring screen. "See? I told you I could do it. The secrets in that boy's mind are going to be worth a fortune."

"War is just so very profitable," the man next to her agreed. If it weren't for people who could tear up a young man's mind like so much scrap metal, there probably wouldn't be war in the first place.