Author's Note: Compilation work... but still totally fun ... and i still don't own Gundam.
The Finest Line by Onions Make Me Cry
first chapter... The Call
The cool night wind sang a low hollow song as it whistled past Duo's cracked window. All was dark and quiet outside, except for the distant sounds of the city--a dull emanation from a few miles north.
Crouched in the corner of his room where his mattress
sprawled plainly on the floor, the ex pilot could hear Hilde dreaming
in the next room over. She was tossing in her bed again, Duo could
tell. The springs were loud enough to hear through the walls. He
himself had never been so wide awake, and as he listened to his
friend's nightmare, he
briefly envied her ability to go under at
all. Since the end of the war, the young pilot hadn't been able to
sleep.
/They'd laugh at me./ Duo thought dryly of his friends as he worried on his fist with his other hand. When he'd been with the Gundam pilots, he'd been infamous for being able to sleep through anything-- including the occasional battle. It had been a divine escape. Sleep was the ultimate coping mechanism. If he didn't dream, how could sleep be differentiated from death? Time had no meaning in that place, nor did temperature or distance. It was a blissful fall out of all reality, for however many hours Duo could snatch. And sometimes, when he would wake up, Heero would be there to soothe away the ache of coming back. It was in those moments that a little peace would come to the boy, if not for a few fleeting minutes.
Duo
thumped his head back against the wall, and the hollow thud roused
Hilde enough to stop her flopping, though she continued to sleep on.
He sighed, and ran a hand over his forehead. How had the change come?
How many nights had passed in this fashion? Just like this one?
Dozens by now, no doubt about it. The boy wasn't entirely sleepless,
but insomnia had caught hold of his body, and seemed to be wreaking a
kind of cruel revenge for being ignored for the previous years of his
life. Now at 17, Duo was witnessing the first tastes of what his
post-war life had done to him, and what it would continue to
do
until he died.
Sitting on the floor at the far end of his
room, Duo's laptop flashed awake, spilling it's eerie milk white
light across the walls. The boy flinched at the invasion of the dark,
shoulders stiffening a little, and he spent a few seconds blinking
back the glare. The red tab of an
incoming message stood plainly
out against the background of the screen. Grumpily, Duo pulled
himself out of his blankets and clambered, animal-like, across the
floor until he sat crouching in front of his target.
"What the fuck do you want?" He grumbled at the machine, fingers working at the keys. Blearily he scratched his scalp with one hand, and hit ENTER with his right.
/INCOMING: Trace H. Yuy identified in E.S. sector 15-C Continue/
Duo stared at the flashing prompt, and a cold sweat broke over his body.
-----
Heero Yuy stared at the small screen illuminating his current quarters. Fingers danced over the keys as he tracked and traced. The tripped flags had been inner layer ones, so the one tracking him was good, but not good enough. Yuy had noticed and gone about tracing the tracks, then had gone out of his way to be seen. Yet no further move had been made by his opponent, had he been bluffing?
As he sat in the near darkness, the Japanese weighed his options:
Go back into total hiding, (so they had found this location, he had other places, other names.)
Eliminate the opposition.
Confront his target; the clues added up to Masters touch.
Call in a favor… no, not an option after all.
It took only a moment before Wings pilot closed the laptop, stood, and headed for the door. Time to raise the stakes.
------
"Maybe he's done it unwittingly, but the final result is the same, regardless of the process."
Zechs leaned back on his bar stool, shaking his hair away from his face, and letting a tendril of cigarette smoke waft quietly up into the air from his fingers still clutching the bar. (Wufei sat opposite of him, with an expression of mild disgust as he eyed the smoke.)
"Now the lines of devotion will be blurred, and a decision towards our purposes will be more easily induced, if Maxwell decides to aide our cause…" the count continued. "If a decision can be attained at all."
Wufei shook his head, taking a sip of his soda and
grimacing at the leftover aroma of smoke. "You… are making an
assumption based on insubstantial evidence. Maxwell and Yuy
were friends, first and foremost. As far as I know, their feelings
for each other, be they
existent or not, only went as far as a
quiet infatuation. I know Maxwell still harbors feelings for Yuy, but
I just don't know if he intends to do anything about it."
Saying that hurt a little, that small part of him that always harbored emotion towards the self proclaimed deity. But it was no matter, such things as love were not meant for mortals as he. He mentally swatted at the melancholy poet in his head, and continued his train of thought.
Deftly Wufei reached over and took his mini comp from his bag, looking up a phone number with one hand, while at once snagging the lit cigarette from Zech. "These things will kill you." He murmured as he pulled out his cell and dialed an ill used number, while at once smashing the offending drug into the surface of the bar. "Wonder what time it is on L2?"
Zechs faltered as Wufei snatched his cigarette away, eyes following the motion. Slightly incredulous, he stared at the younger man for a few seconds, before allowing a baffled grin to slip past him. Nobody had ever had the bravery to do such a thing… Nobody, that is, but Treize. However, Treize had been a very special exception, and the count was forced into a difficult position of consideration. How could he react to such a thing? Their grounds of relationship were still freshly claimed, after all. Friendship, and so on.
"You are. You are exactly like Treize." The prince at last concluded. "You've got iron balls, is what it must be." The smile which capped off the comment was one of half-amused compliance, and the count leaned back again, entertained by watching. Shortly after, though, he lit another cigarette, but this time held it away from where his Chinese subordinate could snatch it.
"It must be late on L-2. You'll probably be waking Duo up."
-----
On the distant colony, a ring shot through the silence.
Jerking eyes away from the white screen which was threatening to blind him, Duo stared into the blackness of his surrounding room. One ring passed, and then two, and then three, before the sweating pilot at last found the strength in his limbs to lift his fingers from the keys of his laptop.
Heero had been found. Heero was found. He was discovered. His location, all the information needed, was contained here. If he acted quickly, he could apply a manual follow-up trace and cut Heero off at his next turn. Duo had the skills, he knew Heero's style, his patterns, his attention to specific details. He knew Heero as a person, knew his habits. Personally Heero. His Heero, who was now found. Heero who was lost. Heero.
"uggh… Duo!" Hilde shouted groggily through the wall, and a thud moments later signaled his friend's shoe colliding with the opposite wall. "Get the phone!"
Acting as if a mechanical doll, Duo at last rose from his crouch, and walked stiffly across the room to the loose telephone. A trembling had taken hold of him now, and it was with dinosaurs lumbering circles through his intestines did the braided boy finally manage to pick up the receiver.
Heero was found. He could find Heero. Did Heero want to be discovered? Did he want to discover Heero? What would he do? What would either of them do? Would they really have anything to say to each other at all? To say all the things he'd been thinking…
"Hello?"
"Good morning Duo. It's Wufei." The Chinese boy said as pleasantly as possible across the line, yet still sounding like himself. "I apologize for the late call, but I'd like to ask you… if you would like to meet me in San Francisco in say…12 or so hours? Sooner, if possible. Maybe meet up with Heero too."
Never
let it be said that Chang Wufei was not to the point when he needed
to be. As he spoke he played with the cigarette he stole from Zechs,
twirling it between his fingers, fumbling at first with the short
object but soon finding a rhythm. He waited patiently for
Duo's
reply, which by the sound of the bit of fear in his voice with a
simple hello, might be a bit.
Falling onto the floor was an easy reaction for Duo, though returning to the sitting position was a motion that did jar his teeth a little. He'd been crouching after all, and a simple totter in the backwards direction was all that was needed to find him on his bottom again. With Wufei's words ringing in his ears, he tried to calm himself into being able to process the information he'd been presented with.
Swallowing, Duo licked his lips and opened his mouth.
"Uhh.."
-----
Zechs watched with satisfaction as Wufei lowered his telephone from his ear.
"He'll do it, then?" The prince asked, though
from the sedated look on his counterpart's face, the answer was
plain. "Somehow, I'm not surprised. Yuy tends to wreak that kind
of effect on people. He breeds a kind of… mmm…" pausing,
Zechs contemplated Heero,
and sucked on the end of his cigarette.
"A kind of irrationality. Humorously ironic, really. Considering
the kind of strictness 01 conducts himself with."
"Yuy inspires different things in different people. Just as you and I are different, so then is the impact Yuy has on Maxwell verses myself." Wufei shot the smiling prince a dry look. "It isn't irrationality… it seems to be just more…respect…awe…admiration? In an odd sense. For some maybe more than just that. But that isn't me." Wufei said, getting up from his seat and tossing the approximate amount of credits to cover both his meal and Zechs' drink on the counter.
Watching Wufei, the count took a moment to quirk an eyebrow. "Something about Maxwell bothers you? You're… quite stiff."
But Wufei's back was already casting a shadow across the Count as the boy headed for the door, and the reply way brief. "Nothing of your concern."
Hesitating for only a moment, Zechs stood at last, and followed the pilot out of the bar with a contemplative look.
Author's note: wow, are there really 16 people on my author's alert list? I had no idea sixteen people even knew i wrote this shit...