Hi there! Queen Vixen here yet again with another thrilling installment of "Two Lives"! Cheers and applause I'm not going to say much more because I'm saving comments for the end of the chapter. Go on and enjoy!
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Dinner was a subdued affair. Idle small talk quickly gave way to uncomfortable silence as Duo and Wufei went through the motions of eating, shuffling the food around their plates. Neither of them had much of an appetite, despite Duo's earlier comment about being so hungry. Duo especially couldn't get the image out of his mind of three bloody scalps hanging over the bed that he had shared with Heero for so long.
Duo let out a sigh of relief when Wufei suggested cleaning up the dishes and getting to work. Taking their untouched food into the kitchen, Wufei washed off the plates while Duo loaded them into the dish washer. They both were silent during the task, preferring the clinking of the glasses to the stilted conversations they had had over dinner.
The two of them finished off the dishes in record time, wanting to get to the case files as soon as possible. They brought in all of the information they had on the case and laid it all out on the kitchen table. They shuffled through the files for a while before Duo finally broke the silence.
"I just know that there has to be something we missed," Duo said as he shuffled through the papers, desperately looking for anything that would give him a clue as to the killer's identity.
"What exactly are you hoping to find?" Wufei set down the folder he was leafing through, giving Duo a guarded look.
Duo sighed dejectedly. He put his papers down on the kitchen table and leaned back into his chair. He ran his fingers through his bangs, massaging his scalp in the process. What he really needed was a good night sleep. In his own bed. With his Heero.
Looking back up at Wufei, Duo just shook his head. "I'm not sure man. Right now, I feel like I'm doing a puzzle with half of the pieces missing. I know that all of this is connected, I just can't fill in the missing parts."
"Well," Wufei said, rising from his chair, "maybe you just need to take a step back for a while. Let all of the information sink in. Look, it's getting late anyway, and we have to be at the office early in the morning. Why don't we try to get some sleep?" He started gathering up the files they scattered all over the table.
"Yeah. Sleep. That sounds like a good idea. Why don't you go on back to your room and I'll finish getting this stuff in order." Duo grabbed the pile of papers he had been sifting through.
"Okay. I've got the futon in the living room all made up for you. Don't stay up too much later. You're a pain in the ass to wake up if you haven't had enough sleep." Wufei dodged the crumpled napkin that was thrown at his head as he made his way back to his bedroom.
Duo took his time reorganizing the files, glancing over all of the little notes he'd scribbled onto the margins of the documents. He knew Wufei was right. He needed time to get his head in order. Glancing at his watch, he realized that it would be right about noon in the L2 colonies. 'Maybe I'll give Heero a call,' he thought. He knew that nothing calmed his nerves quite like hearing his lover's voice.
Putting the files into his brief case, he grabbed his cell phone and headed for the living room. He plopped down on the futon, squirming a bit so he could draw the blanket up over his lap. Duo flipped open his phone and hit the speed dial button for Heero. Sitting in the darkened room, he listened to the ringing from the other end, waiting for someone to pick up. He waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, when the answering machine picked up, Duo hung up the phone. Maybe Heero just hadn't gotten to it in time. So he repeated the process, listening to the ringing with his heart in his throat. When the machine picked it up a second time, Duo listened to the recorded voice while a cold lump formed in his gut. He left a message for Heero to call him whenever he could no matter what time it was and hung up. Sprawling out on the futon, he put the phone on the pillow next to him so he would hear it if Heero got a chance to call him later on.
Duo closed his eyes and laid in the dark for what seemed like hours. Sleep was not something that would come easily to him tonight.
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"Miss your lover, do you?" Laughter spilled out into the dark, sounding like broken glass falling on cement. "Oh just wait. Just wait until you see what I have in store for you."
The phone rang, breaking into the laughter that was still bubbling up.
"Yes? Good. Proceed as planned. Make sure that he is where he is supposed to be tonight. There can be no mistakes." The other line clicked off and the man put the receiver back into its cradle.
"Sleep well tonight, little Maxwell, for tomorrow is another day, and the fun is about to begin."
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"What do you mean I'm off the case?" Duo's enraged voice filtered out of Colonel Une's office. He had been called in to meet with her as soon as he and Wufei had arrived at work. Now Duo was seething at the news she had told him.
"You're too close. The killer obviously has some sort of fixation on you. You need to stay low until he has been apprehended." The colonel shifted in her seat, fixing Duo with a glared that dared him to challenge her authority. Duo, however, was not going to give up so easily.
"How can you do this?" Duo realized that he was practically screaming at her and knew that getting this outwardly upset with her would solve nothing. He took a deep breath and tried to quell the rage building up inside. "I've been working on this case for a month. I know this guy. I'm getting into his head. We are so close to catching this guy. That stunt he pulled in my apartment was the biggest mistake of his life. And that's if it was even him. We have no proof it was until the forensic reports come in."
Col. Une stood up from her chair. She kept her eyes down as she sighed. Looking up, she looked right into Duo's eyes. "You have no right to challenge my judgment in this matter. I am your superior, and as such, you will do what I say, when I say it. If I say you are off the case, you are off the case. There are no questions."
"This is not a regular police department, and I am no regular officer! It won't look bad to your superior if you keep me on! I am the best man for the job and I can take care of myself. I was a Gundam pilot, in case you forgot." Duo hated bringing up the past to try and get his way, but it was his trump card, and he needed it. He had to stay on this case.
"This is not a discussion Mr. Maxwell. You will give your files over to Mr. Chang as soon as you leave this office. And you will report to Sally Po to be reassigned to another case. You are dismissed." With that, the colonel sat back down and swiveled around so her back was to him.
Duo turned around and stormed out of the office, slamming the door on his way out. Everyone in the hall started bustling around, as if moments earlier they had been listening to the commotion coming from the room.
"Don't you people have anything better to do?" Duo barked out to anyone within hearing range. He glared at all the people he passed on the way to Wufei's office. Once there, he practically ripped the door off its hinges as he entered.
"I take it things did not go well?" Wufei asked.
Duo just glared at him. "No, Wu. Things did not go well. According to Une, I'm officially off the case." He plopped down in the chair in front of Wufei's desk and slouched down.
Wufei just sighed, knowing this was not the end of things. "Am I to understand that you have other plans for this matter?"
"You're damn straight I do. I'm going to bag this guy whether Une likes it or not. He picked the wrong damn officer to fuck with."
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Later that night, Duo and Wufei were back at Wufei's apartment reviewing the latest evidence. The forensics department had put a rush on the results from Duo's apartment at the order of Wufei, and they had gotten the preliminary information just as they were heading home for the day.
When it came to the hair, DNA had confirmed that all three scalps were indeed taken from three of the victims, specifically Aino Yukiko, Higurashi Noriko, and Mimura Mitsuko. However, another hair had been found on the bed that belonged to neither Duo nor Heero, nor any of the three scalps. They were currently running a DNA match to see if it belonged to any known criminals in the database.
The apartment itself had been in perfect order, with the exception of the scene in the bedroom. Duo could find nothing amongst his or Heero's possessions that appeared to be missing. Apparently, whoever had broken in wasn't interested in adding theft onto the already escalating list of crimes.
While Duo had been stuck in his office all day doing paperwork on other cases, Wufei had gone back to Duo's apartment building to question his neighbors. To his annoyance, everyone he talked to said that nothing had seemed out of the ordinary. They didn't even know anything was wrong until the Preventers showed up. One woman had mentioned seeing an electrician entering the building, but she wasn't sure if it had even been that day and she had no idea what he had looked like.
Wufei sighed and leaned back in his chair. They were getting nowhere with this. What they needed was for those lab reports to turn up something useful. If they could just get a match on that hair they found, they'd at least have something to go off of. As of now, they were at a dead end.
"We're getting nowhere with this." Duo said, as if reading Wufei's very thoughts. "Why don't you chill out while I go into the kitchen and make dinner. Since you did it last night, I figure it's my turn."
"Sounds like a great idea." Wufei got up from his chair and made his way to the front door. "I'm just going to run down and get the mail. I forgot about it when we first got in. I really wanted a look at those forensic results."
"All right." Duo left the table and walked into the kitchen, heading for the refrigerator. "How does pasta sound tonight? I don't know if I could do anything more complicated."
"That's fine. I'll be right back."
Once Wufei was gone, Duo went about preparing dinner. He got a fresh jar of sauce out of the cupboards and some noodles from the pantry. He put the sauce in a pan on the stove and set it to heat up, along with a pot full of water for the noodles. . He grabbed a loaf of bread from the counter and began slicing it up for garlic bread. He was just about to add the pasta to the boiling water when Wufei came back in, holding several envelopes and a small package.
"Did you tell anyone you were going to stay here?" Wufei asked as he set the mail on the counter.
Duo thought about it for a second. "Only Quatre and Trowa. I was going to tell Heero when I talked to him, but he didn't answer when I called him last night and he hasn't returned my call yet." That thought made Duo uneasy and he stirred the noodles faster. "Why?"
Wufei looked worried. He glanced at the mail and Duo noticed what he was looking at. The small package was addressed to him, but it had Wufei's address.
A shrill note of fear started going off in the back of Duo's mind, but he quickly silenced it. He could not believe how much this was getting to him. A simple package had him on the edge of a nervous break down. How could this have happened? He was a Gundam pilot. He had looked into the very depths of hell and survived. And now some psycho with a penchant for mind games was reducing him to a shivering little kid.
Duo walked over to the counter and gingerly picked up the package. He sniffed it but there was nothing. He couldn't smell the tell tale grease or oil that would accompany a bomb, and there was none of the old rust smell of dried blood. He set it back down on the counter and went back to his pasta.
"It's probably nothing. You know Quatre. He probably decided to send over extra toothpaste or something. Even though I turned down the invitation to live at his place doesn't mean he can't take care of me here." He smiled at Wufei, but the smile didn't quite reach his eyes. He was scared, and he knew it.
"You're probably right." Wufei said as he picked up the rest of the mail and went over to the kitchen table. "We'll just wait until after dinner to open it." He sat down and began opening the stack of bills he had received. Duo went back to preparing dinner, knowing that Wufei didn't believe his explanation for one second. He was grateful though. He had to prepare himself before he could see what his newest little gift was from whoever was doing this.
They ate in silence for the second night in a row, both intent on eating their pasta. Neither one of them wanted to voice the fear they had about the contents of the box. Duo kept glancing at it from the corner of his eye. There was one thing he knew for sure. There wasn't any toothpaste in that box.
After what seemed like an eternity, both of their plates were empty and in the dishwasher. They both stood in front of the counter, staring at the box, as if afraid to touch it.
"Oh for God's sake, it's a box. What are we so afraid of? We're god damn Gundam pilots. We've faced so much in our lives and here we both are, afraid of the contents of a fucking box." Duo grabbed the box off of the counter and set it on the kitchen table. He grabbed an unused knife from the table and, in one fluid motion, slit the tape that kept it closed.
He pulled back the flaps, holding it away from his face incase he had been wrong about it being a bomb. He knew simply holding it the other way wouldn't save him, but it gave him one small ounce of courage. When it became obvious that neither him nor Wufei were going to be consumed in a fiery explosion, he looked down to examine the contents.
Duo thought he was going to be sick. He slowly slid to the floor, landing on his knees. The box fell off of the table and onto the floor, spilling out its contents.
Wufei let out a string of Chinese curse words that, if he had been in a different mood would have made Duo blush. Sitting on his kitchen floor was a cell phone and a gun. Wufei had seen both of these items before, many times. The gun had been waved in his face more times than he could remember. The gun, and the phone, both belonged to Heero Yuy.
A note glided to the floor, inches away from Duo's knees. Hand shaking, he picked up the piece of paper and read the words that had been scrawled on it.
OUR LITTLE SECRET.
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Okay, okay. I know what you're probably thinking. "Oh my god! Less than three months between updates? What's going on? Is this a sign of the apocalypse?" No promises about the apocalypse thing, but all I know is that I suddenly got this huge urge to write at like, three AM. So you can thank my insomnia for this chapter. Now if someone could just explain how this is a good thing to my room mate, I'd be in the clear. ;;
Also, I wanted to say thank you to all of the people who reviewed! I know that most people who read this don't review, and I understand why they don't. I know I don't review every single story I read. But those of you who do review definitely help me with my writing. It's so nice to know that there are people out there who appreciate this story. Keep letting me know what you think! It's great inspiration!
Queen Vixen