Title: Never Turn Your Back on the Sea (2?)
Section Title: Sea
Author: Alleyprowler
Rating/Warnings: M for language, violence, and adult subject matter.
Pairings: 3x4x3, 1xR and 2xH.

The afternoon sun did nothing to warm Quatre's chilled body as he labored his way out of his temporary tomb by the sea. Working with one arm, he pushed aside the rocks, soil, grass and sand that had all but buried him in his fall. He couldn't use his left arm. He had hyperextended his elbow when he'd put a hand out to try to halt his tumble down the cliffside and now it was too painful to move. That was one injury he was certain of. There might have been more, but he was too numb from shock and the chill to feel much of anything. He paused in his labor to catch his breath.

False information, his mind kept telling him. Duo gave me false information. He tried to stop thinking that, but his mind kept going to it in the same obsessive manner that your tongue keeps going to prod a loose tooth. The shipment, the message, it had all seemed so routine, so average...just another business transaction between a salvage yard owner and an electrical engineer in need of neo-titanium. It was something they had done hundreds of times over the past few years. What the hell had just happened?

That's very interesting, Quatre, he told himself, but that's not the main issue right now. For some reason, his inner voice sounded a bit like Rashid. He had to smile a bit at that. Right now, you have to dig yourself out of this mess and get to higher ground. Look, the tide is coming in.

Startled by this thought, Quatre scanned the rocky beach he was lying on. When he had first seen the beach from the top of the cliff, there had been at least forty meters of dry land between the foot of the cliff and the water, and now there were less than ten. He swore. Did I get knocked unconscious? How long was I out? More importantly, how long do I have before it comes in to me?

Panic flooded his muscles with adrenaline and gave him strength that he swore he couldn't possibly possess under the circumstances. This time he used not only his right arm, but both legs to try to free himself. His left leg didn't want to cooperate, but he forced it to kick anyway against the restraining hold of the debris that covered him. It seemed to take hours, although that was clearly an exaggeration brought on by his overstressed mind. Cold sweat streamed down his body. His breathing came in shallow, painful little gasps as injuries major and minor made themselves painfully known. None of that mattered, because the sea was coming to eat him alive and he had to get free before its icy grey grip enveloped him; he had to get to higher ground.

He wasn't aware of his thin, shaky, but triumphant laugh when he had finally worked himself loose, but the sound was enough to spook a couple of gulls who had been standing nearby, watching his progress with reptilian yellow eyes. They took off into the grey sky, screeching out their piercing cries, and began to wheel over his head. Still laughing, Quatre climbed slowly to his feet. He nearly fell again as his left knee buckled under his weight. Although it wasn't terribly painful, the joint felt weak and sickeningly loose. Sprained, he thought. No big deal. Walk it off. He carefully distributed his weight on the injured leg once more and let out a tremulous sigh of relief when it held him.

He gasped and his body jerked as he was suddenly soaked in icy water from mid-shin down. The sea has come to eat me, he thought, and the panic that had finally begun to subside surged through him afresh. He looked down and saw that the wave had soaked his heavy steel-toed boots and the bottoms of his industrial-grey work pants. The tide had either come in much faster than he had thought or he had spent more time than was prudent testing his knee out; whichever it was, he knew he had to find a way up the cliff now.

The light was dimming now. Quatre didn't know whether it was from the approach of evening or from the thickening cloud cover and frankly, he didn't care. He turned his back on the sea and scanned the cliff in front of him with sharp eyes, searching for a place where he might be able to scramble up.

To the right, south, the cliff face seemed to get steeper and higher, and he could see the tall, slender white column of the lighthouse standing at the end of the long, narrow spit of land. He shuddered at the sight. What had at first seemed so quaint and charming now looked sinister in the fading light. He turned his gaze to the north and saw the trail of raw, exposed earth that he had slid down in his fall after the explosion. He hadn't thought it was possible to feel any colder than he already did, but the visual evidence of exactly how close he had come to death chilled him to the marrow. If the slope had been any higher or steeper, or if he had been just a little less lucky, he would have been dashed to pieces. He shut his eyes tightly and reminded himself that he was indeed alive, and if he wished to remain that way, he was going to have to calm down and force his overloaded brain to work.

To the left, he at first saw only the dark cliff face, the roiling grey sky and the rising sea, but then he caught sight of something bobbing up and down slightly in the waves. It was long and thin and lay parallel to the water, and after squinting at it a bit, he realized it was a fishing pier. His heart lightened. If there was a fishing pier, then there had to be some kind of access to the road above, and hadn't he passed a sign saying something about a public fishing area when he drove in? He was quite sure he had.

Clutching his injured arm to his chest and dragging his bad leg a little, Quatre moved as fast as he could toward the pier. It was difficult to walk on the rolling, shifting rocks, especially since the soles of his boots were so thick and inflexible, and the incoming waves seemed to suck at his feet. At least the exercise is warming me up, he thought. It was true that some sensation was coming back to his numbed fingers and toes, but the increase in circulation was also making all of the bumps and bruises he had sustained in his fall to throb painfully. His heavy winter work clothes had protected him to some extent, for which he was grateful, but he still ached and throbbed all over.

The tide was up to his thighs before he got even halfway to the pier, and it was coming in fast. He tried to move faster. The treacherous footing wasn't so much an issue now that he had reached a sandier area of the beach, but the undertow was threatening to sweep his numbed and weakened legs out from under him. Each surge of the waves made him fight harder to remain upright, and he was already exhausted. Calm, Quatre, stay calm, he reminded himself. He took a few precious seconds to stop and try to catch his breath. It's just walking. You've been doing it since you were a baby, so you ought to be pretty good at it by now, right?

His feeble joke didn't take into account his present physical condition, however. He was injured, in shock, rapidly becoming hypothermic, and the sea seemed to be intent on devouring him. He knew all these things, of course, but his stubborn will would not let him dwell on them. Instead, he started moving forward again, concentrated on keeping his footing and searching the cliff face near the pier for signs of access to the road. He thought he could make out something unnaturally white against the dark granite, something painted. Although his eyesight was acute, the lighting was very bad and the weather was beginning to turn misty with the coming of evening. The white might have been a random streak of limestone in the cliff face, or perhaps even bird droppings from a gull's nest. It was best not to get his hopes up.

A particularly violent wave came in as he was trying to decide what the white streak was, soaking him from the ribs down and knocking him off balance. His right foot, which had been resting on a slippery kelp-covered rock, slid out from under him and he fell to his hands and knees with a shout. A bolt of pain from his injured left knee paralyzed him in that position, and before he could recover from it, another wave crashed over his head.

For a moment, the entire world was dirty grey water. It flooded into his ears and eyes, into his open mouth, into his nose. His senses were full of the cold stink of it. He tasted salt as old as the Earth itself on his tongue. It burned in his sinuses. Salt and decay. The ocean was a giant graveyard, and now it was trying to claim him. He couldn't see, couldn't breathe, and couldn't hear anything but the mindless roar of dead water, which was stealing the life heat from his body.

This is how it ends, said some timid, cowardly little voice in his mind. Give up now, Quatre. You've fought too many battles in your life, and you were never really a warrior to begin with. You don't have it in you.

It was so tempting to listen to that voice! Quatre was so cold that he burned, his lungs were bursting, and his muscles had turned to lead. It would be easy to let himself go limp and ride the next surge out, to let his body be carried along by the undertow, to ride whatever strange currents there were until he was nothing but bones and a memory.

He might have done it; that's what frightened him so much later on. He almost gave up when the wave crested and broke, pulling him seaward and rolling him over onto his left side, but then his body moved of its own accord and pushed him upward out of the water, where he took in a great, whooping gasp of air and let it out in a series of short, barking coughs. The next wave didn't take him so much by surprise, and he was able to use its momentum to bring him close to rough surface of the granite cliff. He clung to it with nerveless fingers while he coughed and spat and sneezed the corrosive seawater out. Two grey and white gulls, perhaps the same pair he had seen earlier, dipped and glided in front of him as if mocking him with their gift of flight; their squealing cries sounded like scornful laughter.

When he was able to breathe more or less freely again, Quatre wiped the water from his eyes and scowled at them. "You can't get me that easily," he rasped out to the gulls, the water, or perhaps simply to himself to prove that he was still alive. Spitting the foul taste out of his mouth once again, he made his way carefully along the base of the cliff. The white streak was much closer now; apparently the waves that had knocked him down had also carried him upshore a bit. He could now see that the whiteness was much too regular and straight to be anything but man made, and there were some horizontal shapes running alongside the white streak.

It was a staircase.

"Oh...thank you," he whispered. A surge of hope ran through his body like a balm.

"Trowa, do you ever pray?" He had asked that question about six months ago, on a warm night in late summer when the air was sweet with the scent of life and growth. Even on the Colonies, that time of year held a special, languorous magic.

Trowa had taken a long time to answer, which indicated that he was actually thinking about the question rather than answering off the top of his head like most people tended to do. "I rarely ever really pray," he had said at last. "And I never pray when I want something."

"Oh? Why is that?"

They had been in bed, Quatre remembered, with their naked limbs tangled lazily around one another's, tired out but not ready for sleep. It was in that state that Trowa was most receptive to questions about things he normally didn't talk about, and Quatre had taken advantage of it. "I don't think it works that way, to tell the truth." Trowa had said. "When I was growing up, most of the men I lived and worked with were from religious backgrounds, and they prayed whenever they wanted anything...you know, like a safe end to the current battle, the health and welfare of their families, or even just a good, solid paycheck that month. They kept telling me, 'Pray to God, kid, and He will take care of you.'"

"Did you?" He knew, from previous conversations, that Trowa believed in the Judeo-Christian God to some extent, but that extent was rather fuzzy and mysterious to Quatre. He himself had never had much religious education. His curiosity on the subject had been discouraged at an early age, but it still lurked in the background of his mind.

"No." Trowa had given a snort of contempt at the notion. "They seemed to treat God like He was some sort of karmic bank account where X amount of praying equaled Y amount of good fortune. That seemed pretty dumb to me."

"Not to mention disrespectful," Quatre had added after a pause to consider it. If God was some sort of father figure (which was his understanding), then begging and flattery could only earn contempt rather than favor. That, and it seemed like it debased the petitioner in a way. He had read that man was created in God's image, so shouldn't an image of God be able to cope with the vagaries of life without resorting to that kind of groveling?

"Yes, exactly. That's the way it seemed to me, too." Trowa had given him a warm, open smile at that pronouncement. "It was extremely disrespectful, the way they were going about it."

"So that's why you never pray?"

"I didn't say I never prayed, Quatre..." Trowa had purred out the name, rolling the R in a deep-throated rumble, then he'd bumped his forehead playfully against Quatre's and rubbed noses with him, catlike. "I still pray on occasion."

The nose-rubbing had tickled, and Quatre had laughed. "So what do you say to your god when you pray, then?"

"I say..." he'd breathed a heavy, warm puff of air against Quatre's neck, "I say, 'thank You. Thank You, God, for making me so fortunate. Thank You.'"

Quatre's heart had begun to pound at the sound of his name, but by then it was positively thundering. "I also thank your god," he had whispered as Trowa kissed his neck and shoulders. "I thank him...unh!...thank him for delivering you to me...oh!...I must have done something really good in a past life...ah!...to deserve this...AH! Thank you!"

The staircase was constructed of real wood, which wasn't something that you saw very much of on the Colonies. It was too expensive to import. Quatre was not very familiar with wood as a construction material and was therefore a little wary of it, especially as it looked like the staircase hadn't been repaired lately. Several of the steps looked crooked to him and the handrail canted outward at an alarming angle. He looked down at the first step and saw that the wood had split where nails had been driven into it, and although it looked sturdy enough, the engineer in him was appalled by the use of fragile organic materials for building weight-bearing structures.

However, it was the only way up, and Quatre gripped the railing with his left hand and put his left foot on the first step. That turned out to be a bad idea. His leg immediately buckled when he tried to pull his weight upward on it, and he had to grab the shaky railing to brace himself against a fall. He cried out in pain and surprise, and the sound from his hurt throat was eerily akin to the wail of the gulls that were still circling around his head.

He felt a stab of despair when he realized that his left knee was not going to be able to bear its usual share of his weight on the stairs. He was going to have to rely on the splintered handrail on the outside of the staircase or the granite wall on the inside for support, neither of which looked like a great option. The railing was rickety, the rock wall offered no handholds, and the steps themselves seemed to be deteriorating before his eyes.

Quatre looked away from the staircase, to the lead-grey waves. "Do I want to die by falling or by drowning?" he muttered aloud. A deep shiver worked its way up his spine. "Or do I want to die of indecision?"

He decided it was a stupid argument altogether. Staying on the beach would only offer him death in one form or another, but climbing upwards, as painful and difficult as it might be, offered a sliver of hope. Quatre took it.

I'm going to kill Duo, he thought as he settled his right foot on the bottom stair, hauled himself upright, and balanced his weight on the wet granite wall. I'm going to kill Duo painfully. He took another step. It wasn't as hard as he though it would be. In fact, the sentiment and the unusual stair climbing method seemed to be working well. Duo is SO dead. So slowly, painfully dead. I'm going to enjoy it thoroughly. Right foot, left hand, right foot.

So immersed in concentrating on his climb, Quatre didn't notice that he'd reached the top of the cliff until a gust of cold wind blew across the flat surface of the point and plowed into him with enough force to take his breath away. He instinctively dropped into a half-crouch to make a smaller target of his body, just as he used to do when he was the target of more tangible and more immediately lethal projectiles during the wars.

The wind dropped and Quatre raised his stinging eyes to scan the area for any further threats, but all he could see in the grey gloom was an empty stretch of road to his left and the shapes of the lighthouse, visitor's center, and jeep to his right. The boxy shape of the jeep looked odd somehow, and Quatre had to blink a few times before it came fully into focus.

It was tilted, which was why it looked odd. He had parked it parallel to a low guard rail, and evidently the blast from the packing crate had knocked the vehicle to one side with enough force to nearly send it over the edge. It was balanced on the two passenger-side tires with a stanchion from the guard rail embedded just behind the door. The driver-side tires were about half a meter from the ground. Quatre's heart started to thump painfully in his chest when he realized that the jeep might very easily have broken free of the guardrail and come crashing down on his head as he lay unconscious at the bottom of the cliff.

He took a few seconds to get his erratic breathing under control before he began limping toward the jeep. Everything that represented safety and sanity was in that jeep: his toolbox, the jerrycans of water and fuel, his GPS unit, his laptop, his cell phone, and the half-empty cup of coffee in the dashboard cup holder. Those were the sane, rational representations of reality he was walking toward, and when he reached them this entire brutal nightmare would begin to fade.

Right.

Getting the driver-side door open was a pain since the car was tilted at a 110-degree angle and Quatre was working against gravity and a gusty wind that kept trying to blow it closed, but desperation and anger gave him the extra strength he needed to fling it open enough to slip his upper body into the driver's seat. After that, it was simply a matter of rocking his weight back and forth before the vehicle freed itself from the stanchion and landed on all four tires.

He laughed huskilly in relief and began to search his pockets for his keyring, which he found in his right front pocket just above a keyring-shaped bruise on his upper thigh. The keys were undamaged. Quatre felt an irrational surge of jealousy toward them.

The jeep started up just fine when Quatre keyed up the ignition, much to his relief, and he slammed the door shut to cut off the biting wind. Now that he felt safe, the first thing he did was to grab the paper cup of stone-cold coffee out of its holder on the dashboard and drink down the last few swallows with an eagerness that bordered on greed. As disgusting as cold, stale coffee tasted, it was far better than the taint of sea water that lingered in his mouth, throat, and sinuses. The water tasted of corruption, but the coffee tasted of sanity.

He hunted for his phone while he waited for the engine to warm up enough to make turning on the heater worth his while. There was no way he could drive in his current condition. He needed to get warm enough to bring some sensation into his extremities and to stop his convulsive shivers before he took the wheel or he'd just end up driving off the road and mashing the jeep into some unsuspecting tree. That wouldn't do, not when he had some business to take care of first.

The phone had lodged itself between the passenger seat and the door and the floor, and it took Quatre a couple of minutes to retrieve it. His thawing fingers were still numb but were beginning to tingle painfully as his circulation improved, and the awkward position of the phone wasn't helping any.

"Fucking piece of shit," he growled under his breath, "just come out of there so I can call Duo and ask him just what the fuck he was thinking. Come on, move!"

It was as if the phone felt threatened – it practically leaped into Quatre's hand. He sat up, wiping moisture from his brow, and began to dial the prefix code for off-Earth calls.

"Quatre, this wouldn't have happened if you'd actually listened to me and bought the right kind of shoes," Duo griped.

Quatre sighed, resigned. "Yeah, I know."

They were in the downstairs bathroom of Quatre and Trowa's townhouse, dressed in sweaty t-shirts and shorts. Duo's feet were encased in elaborate white, yellow and orange basketball shoes which must have set him back a weeks' pay, and Quatre was barefoot. His shoes had been stuffed into the wastebin by an irate Duo.

"This is probably going to scar."

"Well, it'll have plenty of company."

"Not funny, Winner." Duo concentrated on picking tiny pieces of gravel out of the shallow but dirty scrape on his friend's knee with a pair of stainless steel tweezers.

Quatre, perched on the counter next to the sink, turned the faucet on and off to distract himself from the sharp pains shooting up and down his leg. "I thought my climbing shoes had enough tread on them."

"Yeah, for climbing. Not for basketball." Duo closed one eye and stuck his tongue out in concentration as he picked out a stubbornly sticky little stone. "Come out, you little bugger...ah, there. Did I hurt you?" He looked up at Quatre with wide, concerned eyes.

"No, it's okay." Quatre smiled reassuringly although his knee was stinging so badly that it felt like he'd shoved it into a wasps' nest. "Is that it?"

"No, I have to clean and bandage it. Give me the alcohol and gauze. I'll need some tape, too."

Quatre opened a drawer beside his left thigh and handed Duo the necessary supplies. "This is going to hurt, isn't it?" he asked, striving for a light tone.

Duo dabbed at he blood streaming from the wound with a damp washcloth. "Quat, if there was any possible way I could make this hurt less, I would. You know that, don't you?" He looked up at Quatre again, and there was a shine in his eyes that hurt Quatre more than his scraped knee could have possibly done.

His voice was husky when he spoke: "I know it, Duo. Go on, do what you have to."

In the end, it hadn't left a scar at all.

Quatre shut off his phone before he had even finished punching in the off-Earth code.

He switched on the heater and tried to relax in the driver's seat while he wracked his brains on who he should call about this incident.

Not Duo. He had either been lied to or had been coerced by someone. He would never intentionally hurt Quatre, and there was nothing he could do right now anyway.

Not the local authorities. This was a terrorist act against a former Gundam pilot, and although Quatre wasn't overt about his pilot status, he wasn't exactly a private figure, either. Anyone with enough patience and the correct connections could have put two and two together and come up with more.

Not Trowa. Oh no, not Trowa. He had quite enough pressure on him already without the added worry of his lover being in danger. He could get the sugar-coated version of the incident later in the week when Quatre was scheduled to come home, and everything would surely be over by then.

Not Heero. Involving Heero mean involving Relena, which might end up endangering both of them. That was too big a risk.

Not Noin or Zechs. They were off on Mars, and there was no reliable way to communicate with them at the present time.

That left only one person. Quatre dialed the number from memory and tried to make himself feel calm, or at least to sound calm, while the phone rang.

His call was answered after only two rings. "Yes," he said, surprised and pleased to find that his voice was steady, "May I speak to Agent Chang, please?"

TBC