12:

The first thing Duo did once the Reincarnation was past the point of the Cathedral's tracking monitors was search the Cathedral thoroughly. And really, who could blame him when Heero had been using modified tracking monitors to track the Reincarnation. As if Duo might make a mistake and screw up his mission, or some other ridiculous hair brained idea that only Heero Yuy would have. No, Duo felt entirely justified snooping, when apparently Heero felt the need to do unwarranted snooping of his own.

Besides, Marie was off 'working', if you could call it that, so it wasn't like he needed to be 'babysitting'.

It was a nice ship, even Duo could admit that. He wondered who owned it, if Heero had simply taken it from Relena or Quatre or wherever he had been at the time or if it was actually his. The longer he spent snooping, the more he suspected the latter. Little, subtle clues that screamed there was something akin to love in the way it all worked.

"I still don't want to know why he called it the damned Cathedral," Duo muttered under his breath.

It was a little bigger than the Reincarnation; bridge, galley, three cabins, cargo bay and not really surprising when it was Heero but an escape pod that seemed deceptively over-laden with weaponry. Duo spent a little longer than he felt like admitting even to himself just sitting in the pod and stroking the panel of controls, closed in, surrounded on all sides. Safe. Warm in the cold.

Marie's room was obvious and not just because Duo had seen her come in and out of it numerous times. There weren't huge piles of clothes and makeup all over like so many teenage girls to give her away either. It was, to his embarrassment, the underwear drawer. Which he felt entirely justified raiding just in case it was where she hid her diary or some such. She didn't, but that wasn't the point. He wasn't sure Mariemaia even kept a diary, and seriously doubted it. She wasn't stupid enough to write down anything. Not anything of importance anyway.

Which made him wonder about the diary that had been submitted in evidence to Preventers in the case to keep Wufei suspended. It had irked Duo when he heard about it, and now he understood a little better why. It screamed set up; screamed Mariemaia was in on keeping Wufei in the Valley. Or putting him there to begin with, really.

One room was set up as more of an office, a bed nailed down in the corner but the majority of the room looked like a boardroom and there were several computers against the far wall. Duo took his time trying to hack them but came up with nothing. Whatever Heero had created to block access was good. A little too good. Duo suspected he himself might have made the software but couldn't be sure without getting in the back end. It still nagged at him that he couldn't break his own damn software to get in and take a squiz.

Heero's room was the last thing he dared to go in. It was neat; obnoxiously so. The bed had even been made, as if someone might point out he had climbed out of it and just left it in a mess. As if such things even mattered when you were on a kidnapping run out the Valley. Duo didn't even bother trying to hack into the personal computer in the room, and a check of the drawers revealed the simple jeans and t-shirt combinations he'd come to expect from Heero. No suits, no uniforms. Not even a damn piece of kevlar, because if the bullet didn't bounce off you could just dig it out yourself, right? And Kevlar was expensive, so of course denim was a better idea.

He did have a nice weapons collection in a hidden wall panel that had Duo whistling low and stroking the cool metal in appreciation, but knowing Heero the whole cabinet was booby trapped to hell and back so he didn't even try to take one off the wall for a closer look. What if he'd coated them in poison or something? Duo found himself staring at his fingers in consternation, counting his heart beats...

Fucking ridiculous.

There were no secrets to be found on the Cathedral. Not unlocked ones, anyway. Ultimately his small search was so unfruitful Duo found himself sitting bored on the bridge contemplating shooting up Manfred's ship just to see what would happen. Would anyone in the Valley even care if you just started firing at other vessels docked? Were there rules about who you could fire at, and who you couldn't? Was there Mettle etiquette? Valley Pride? Was there a parade?

Was he so bored he was losing his mind?

He needed to get out, but he sat for a while longer going through his own mental notes about the Valley, what they had learned, what they suspected and what he was supposed to be doing, which seemed far more complicated than it had when Howard had first handed him the Gig. For starters, he wasn't looking for Heero any more...and he wondered if maybe he should have been. That had him frowning, because he'd just given Heero and Marie his ship and said c'est la vie, without so much as shadowing them to make sure they were going where they said they were and this was Heerothey were talking about, not Quatre. The chances of his actually doing what he said he was going to do, especially to Duo Maxwell, were, well...

He was feeling like a right dick already, without suspecting Hilde and Wufei of being in on Heero's crazy kidnapping mission. Marie just wasn't that big of a target even if she had threatened to destroy everything Heero had ever stood for... Okay, so maybe if you were Heero she was that big of a deal, but Duo thought Heero had more sense than that.

"I do fucking not," Duo ground out, furious because he was arguing with himself, out loud, and that had to be a sign of insanity only in the Valley being insane was somewhat normal, so he wasn't sure if that meant he was really insane or just...normal?

"Focus, moron."

If it all turned out to be a giant hoax, it wouldn't be that hard to take the Cathedral, find the Reincarnation and shoot Heero, snap his dead happy photograph and hand it over to Howard with a shit eating grin on his face. Move on. That was doable, if it needed to be done. For now there was another issue, which still felt more important.

How to find Barton, when either he didn't want to be found, or he was playing a really stupid game of hide and seek. That was the only question he should have been wasting time on, because regardless of whether Heero was really on his team or he'd just been played for the biggest fool in history, again, Barton was still missing and that was a mystery Duo was actually starting to give a damn about.

In the end, sitting on his ass waiting for a solution to come to him just wasn't Duo's style. He dirtied up his clothes, which were already filthy, made sure his skin was liberally coated in grime and strapped a few extra knives where no one would notice and headed out, making sure he locked the Cathedral when he left. It probably had automatic locking or something, but he really didn't care. No, really. Not a care.

The gunrunners had to be avoided, which also meant avoiding being seen and recognised. It took effort to hide his hair, but outside of that it wasn't hard to avoid the places he knew were frequented by that crowd. Not hard at all, when he was focussed on a whole different kind of trafficking.

It was all about breadcrumbs, in the end. The pile of clues and receipts that formed a trail of sorts through the Valley, each place telling him a new piece of the puzzle. And it was a puzzle, designed to confuse, each piece scattering the rest to the wind as if they were not linked at all unless you knew they were and were just looking for the glue to piece it all back together into a viewable image.

Like the cafe he found where Bloom had started out in the Valley and the dealer there who was almost too high on his most recent trip to recall his own name but his eyes sharpened right up when Duo dropped Trowa's name and there was wariness there that made Duo not push it.

Then there was the Dominatrix whore down at the seedy club who as far as Duo could tell considered Trowa her pimp and was annoyed he had taken such a lengthy leave of absence as she had a great wad of money she was supposed to give him. Duo tried to convince her he was there to collect, but she wasn't that stupid which left Duo wondering if she was stupid at all or a plant of some kind. And whose. And to what end? What if he tried to take the money? What if he hadn't tried to take it?

A vendor in what could be considered the marketplace at the southern end of the Valley, or what Duo had come to think of as the southern end. He sold beautiful, intricate pieces of jewellery, which had seemed weird to Duo until the guy pointed out even criminals liked to buy their lady friends with bribes and the like. Especially if the trinket was worth more than the friend was asking for in cash. Trinkets like the one Trowa had bought from the man. A stunning string of gold and pearl engraved with a letter on each shiny surface, spelling out 'dream'.

The very same piece of jewellery Duo found adorning the golden, strangely clean hair of an expensive whore on a privately owned ship docked in the far east of the Valley, owned by someone who seemed to have nothing to do with anything besides making a quick buck from more than a fast fuck. Duo studied the jewels for clues but the word was what stuck as he stared at her golden hair and wondered if it was really the same shade as Quatre's or if his mind was playing tricks on him. She was a lovely girl, but she seemed to know nothing of any importance.

Much like the mask maker down in the east market district, besides the fact that Trowa placed an order for a new mask every month, each elaborate and enough on it's own to keep the man in business. Duo ran his finger along the metallic edge of an eye piece and watched blood well on his skin. Razor sharp, the metal had been coloured so each triangular panel gleamed with orange and blue in the light. The mouth was frozen in a half grin that struck a chord in Duo's gut, some cruelty hidden in the expression he couldn't place. He put the mask down and continued on his way.

The apothecary had similar stories to the waitresses, hookers and muscle Duo spoke to through the day, well into the evening until even he would safely call it night. Not that you could tell, what with there not actually being a sun or anything to go by, but his internal clock was telling him time was passing and faster than he might have liked considering his results. The apothecary made a potion up for Bloom once a week, something to do with a cough that set a knot forming in Duo's gut as he agreed he was there to pick up the latest sample, which was overdue for collection and he hurried it back to the Cathedral to analyse, along with his findings. Or whatever the hell he was supposed to call his breadcrumbs.

There was a blinking light on the computer on Heero's bedroom desk. Duo stared at it for quite some time before deciding he could possibly do something about it. Then he stared at it some more because if Heero wasn't the good guy there was every chance if he touched it he was going to blow himself and possibly the entire Valley to kingdom come. Not that he minded blowing up the Valley, he wasn't attached to it at all, but his own life was a very different matter. He'd prefer to watch the Valley blow from a better vantage point. With a beer in hand from the comfort of his own damn bridge.

But his lips buzzed as he sat there staring at it and he found his hand rising, coming to brush fingertips against the warm memory of other lips pressed warmly against his own and at some point he supposed you just had to take a leap of faith and trust. Because it was that easy. Right. He was going to be blown to hell.

Sighing, Duo tapped the keypad and was rather proud of himself for not wincing as he did so. The screen came to life and his heart thudded into it's next beat, but that was all. On the desktop an icon was blinking and Duo glared. Was this just building a false sense of security, or what? Was he going to get used to clicking buttons until finally, at the end of a long stream of button pressing something finally exploded? Right when he least expected it?

He clicked again.

Duo. Stop imagining me blowing you and the Valley to Hell. Right now.

A dark blush crept up Duo's neck and he glared at the screen but there was more so he took a deep breath and forced himself to read the rest. Though, really, if Heero had a problem with him being untrusting he only had himself to blame.

We're here. Won't take more than two days. Wu said check the apothecary and the jeweler. I love you.

Duo became aware of the soft hum of the Cathedral all around him. The only evidence of life besides his own in the ship. The ship itself, humming like the buzz between his ears as he stared at the screen. He reached out and slammed the laptop shut, got up and went to sit on the bridge. The seat smelt like Heero, and moulded to Heero's shape. Definitely not commandeered for the mission. Personal, loved...

Dream. He traced the image of the jewellery Trowa had gifted the whore with in his mind. The gentle balls of pearl, luminous in the otherwise garish light. The dulled gold stringing each along to the next, weaving an intricate web. Like the breadcrumbs, like wires in a system, connecting hubs of information. Like synapses in the brain. And the spaces in between...

Duo sat bolt upright in his seat and stared at his clues again, took out pen and paper and drew each from memory as best he could, each on plain white card so as not to distract him. He flicked through them, backward and forward, rearranged them in different patterns creating hubs of his own, threading smaller less important pieces off into smaller clouds of their own like a crazed mind map until Heero's bedroom walls were smothered in it and Duo sat in the middle of Heero's bed and stared.

"You're a fucking prick, Barton." But Duo was starting to comprehend the intricacy of Trowa's process, so very different from his own. Where Duo liked to have a plan, it was always straight to the point. Do this, get this result. Immediate and efficient. Trowa's plan was long lived, in depth and maddeningly convoluted, to get basically the same result. Only it would be permanent. Duo's might have killed the head of the snake, but smaller Hydra heads would survive and in time the problem would be worse. Trowa wanted to wipe Haze from existence. Duo hated that he was probably going to succeed.

It was because Wufei had given him the clue that Duo realised it and he sat staring at his drawing of the jewels for a long time, then he spent longer just laughing at it. He was still sitting there staring at it when Marie huffed in the doorway and he forced himself to sober up.

"Oh, so you're done now?"

"Where have you been?" He knew. She'd been at work, he'd checked. Numerous times. But that had been an awfully long shift, and he hadn't checked on her since he'd returned to the Cathedral and he really had no idea how long that had taken. He felt justified in trusting her not at all. She was Trowa's, and nothing that man did could be trusted.

"Working. Are you going to tie me to a chair and shout at me too?" Snarky snark.

"No," Duo shrugged and his nonchalance made her pause, staring at him as if he'd grown a second head. He barely resisted the urge to check in a mirror, almost certain that wasn't possible.

"No."

"Nope," Duo confirmed. "What do I care if you want to dance topless in the Valley?"

This was clearly not the response she had expected. Her mouth was deceptively small when it was closed. Hanging open it was a giant hole in her face that was actually pretty unattractive. Duo reached over and tapped on her chin to get her to shut it.

"I'm not Heero Yuy," he pointed out coldly.

"Well no shit, I didn't think I was hallucinating," she grumbled, but she was watching him like someone with a great fear of snakes watches a cobra, as if uncertain which way he was going to swing and where he would chose to sink his teeth. Duo grinned at her, making sure all his pearly whites were on display.

"You set Wufei up," he said calmly. Much calmer than he felt. He knew from the shock on her face that he had it right, that he'd always been right about her. That niggling something that hadn't sat quite right when he'd watched the tape of her declaring her undying love on her front steps. Wufei's shock. You couldn't fake the horror on that face before it had closed down, something shutting off while the reserves kicked in. Fight mode taking over from flight, like the good soldier he was.

"I would never...I love Wufei!" Naive, stupid little girl.

"But you did." And they both knew it. Duo felt suddenly old. Very old and heavy and tired and he remembered the look on Howard's face, stern and determined to make him take the Gig and maybe it hadn't been because of what the Gig was. Maybe it had been because Howard had his fingers on everything and knew the score. Maybe...there were just far too many maybe's and Trowa might have been the kind to pause and contemplate them all but it just wasn't Duo's style. Immediate results, that was what Duo liked.

The slap rang out, deafening the hum of the ship and the buzz in his head. His palm stung and tears brimmed in her clear blue eyes as she stared at him, looking hurt and dumbfounded. Looking young and stupid as ever.

"Trowa..." And there it was.

"Told you to?" Duo sneered at the incredulity on her face. How had he known? How could he ever understand?

Because he'd been that young and dumb himself. Once.

"Did he tell you what they would do to Wufei?" Would she even have understood if he had?

That was what he left her with, striding past her and out the door, leaving the Cathedral altogether, wondering how they did it, and wondering why there was always someone there to fall for it. Someone idealistic enough to assume everything would be alright. Why people weren't born cold; why it had to be learned. Why they hoped and dreamed and had faith. Look where that got them.

The memory of the sun was far, far away as he slunk into the corners of the Valley and disappeared.

It took him some time to calm down enough to approach with a clear mind, and when he thought he was ready he waited another hour to be sure before slinking up the alley toward the thick red chinese pillars. He heard him long before the Diner came into view and Duo found a nice shadow to lean into while he observed.

The Valley is a Maze, the maze is in a Haze.

It came down to breadcrumbs. And a hint from Wufei. Duo watched the man and really, he was incredibly out of it. The rotten teeth in his face were not fake; the fat tongue rolled back and forth against one, shaking it looser in the cragged face. The lines were deep and the brow naturally furrowed, the skin pocked and scarred with burns and disease. The silvered eyes were too wide, straining still to see against the glamour that must have closed over decades ago and he stumbled in the dirt and grime, sometimes almost upright but more often on all fours as if more animal than man.

What had he been like, before Haze found him? Had he ever been innocent, ever been good? How far back would you have to go to find a time when sunlight had touched the greyed and thinned hair that hung limp and clumped with filth around thin shoulders? How hard did you have to look to find a glimmer of that being, in that time?

Pretty fucking hard, as it turned out. Duo watched him for hours and never saw it. The man was a shell, eaten from the inside out and lost to the emptiness. But the whore had been too. Most addicts had nothing left, long after the addiction faded.

"The haze is in the maze. The maze is in the haze! Haze amaze! Crazy amazed! A maze of crazy in the haze! Just a passing phase? No! The maze!"

"Is in the haze," Duo muttered darkly, shaking his head and approaching on soft, silent feet. He wasn't fooled, flailing around to stare at Duo, leaning in to close the gap between them, until they were nose to nose and if Duo focused just so on the old man's silvered eyes he could just make out the shadow of his pupils between aching, slow blinks.

His breath stank like rotten cheese and his skin reeked of sweat and oil. Duo forced himself to ignore it, just waiting, shadowing every movement the man made. A hand lifted and Duo's did the same. A foot shifted and Duo's shifted with it. Slowly, the man's face relaxed and he swayed, as if rocking a small child. Like a snake.

Lips stilled and the swaying came to an end. Duo found himself standing there, nose to nose with him.

"Do you dream?" Duo asked softly and at first he wondered if his words were heard at all. The mouth remained open, fetid breath escaping in near visible clouds of breath. The eyes remained empty, unseeing. But very slowly they shimmered and tears brimmed, sliding silently down the rugged panes of his face, spilling over as if a dam inside had been broken.

"The Haze..." A near physical thing that had stripped everything human from him and left him where he was. Lost, to It. To the Dream.

"Hazy days are in the maze," Duo murmured and for a moment he second guessed himself because there was no recognition there, only the frozen rictus of pain as the man struggled to comprehend.

"The dream..." But he blinked, the silver eyes drying and his gaze shifted, his shoulders hunched as he lurched away, back toward the steps and Duo stood there and sighed, because he hadn't really thought it would work. The man was simply too far gone.

Duo was about to flee back to the shadows when the wild footfalls came back to his side and the man grabbed him, hard and fast around the shoulders, pinning his arms to his sides. It took everything in Duo not to throw the man hard enough to smash his head all over the damned ground.

"The dream...the place where we remember!" There was something in the depth of his silvered eyes, something haunted but determined. That sliver of self that remained, even after all the years and all the horrors he had endured. A speck that still heard, still listened, and most importantly still remembered.

"What do you remember?" Because that was the point, wasn't it? Trowa had left a map of clues who knew the way through the maze that was Haze. Just in case they'd been too stupid to realise they had the most important piece of the puzzle. Because they had Wufei, and Wufei still knew everything. Still remembered everything, even if he didn't realise he did. That was likely important, too, but Duo had neither time nor inclination to give it more thought than a lingering massive swear bubble he intended to burst over Trowa's head when he found him. Was it so hard to leave a note saying 'Wufei knows'? Seriously.

The hands around his shoulders tightened, slid higher until they wrapped around his neck instead and again it took everything he had not to snap the old addict's neck and leave his corpse there for others to puzzle over. Not that they would, not in the Valley.

He was struggling so hard to recall, to drag the memory forward through endless scorched synapses that Duo felt sympathy well up within. He let his air move slowly, felt his pulse hard against the filthy, calloused hands clinging to him and he felt his own face crack into a smile. Calm, soothing, friendly.

The addict smiled back and his grip loosened enough that Duo could drag air in, the whole world suddenly small and drawn in against his skin, evaporating into the moment.

"Air. It's in the air."

The light in his gaze went out, and something else in him was lost. Effort bled away and was replaced with compliance and Duo doubted the man would ever find even that small shred of himself again. The effort it had taken received no reward and was lost.

Duo shoved him away, hard in case anyone was watching, swore loudly and with annoyance and fled into the shadows. He went back to the Cathedral first, logging on to the computer on the bridge and searching for a map of the original L5 blueprints. He drew a new image over the original of what he knew of the Valley, slowly figuring out what part of the colony had been revived and locating possible sources for the rebuilt ventilation. There were limited possibilities considering the scavenged nature of Mettle Valley.

Of the three possible entry points he located, only one appeared heavily guarded. Thugs or mercenaries, it didn't really matter. It was clearly not what Duo was looking for and he left them alone, entering instead through the small office front. A front it was, though it was hard to tell. It was the clock that gave it away, frozen as it was. Duo stood there staring at it for a long time before he just shook his head and decided he wasn't that surprised.

1:21. How fucking quaint.

The office was abandoned and Duo stalked through the halls, aware of cameras and more importantly which were actually functioning and which were for show. He wove through the complex until he found a way into the ceiling, very aware that the inside of the vent he found himself in was clean. Squeaky, disgustingly horribly clean. If you were from the Valley. Relena would probably give it the thumbs up.

A maze was an understatement. Even with a torch and the map in his mind, Duo struggled to match where he was overhead with what he thought was below, sometimes having to push a vent open to check where he was, not an appealing situation to find himself in when you stared down out of the 'sky'.

The longer he spent in the vents, the slimier his hands began to feel and when he shone a torch on them he realised they had a silvery sheen to them and felt like laughing. It was in the air indeed. Hell, the whole Valley was on it. He resisted the urge to flee back to the Cathedral immediately, with it's clean filtered air. Just.

And regretted it when the panel above his head opened and from the corner of his eye something large and dark came down and collided hard and fast with his head. The dark of the ventilation shaft was nothing to the pitch that took him out.

He woke to a dark room and something flicking his nose but when he swung an arm to swat the annoyance away it slithered out of reach. He rolled and held his moan back but couldn't keep a hand from rising to cradle his head and the large bump there. Pain, but no blood. A good sign, in Duo's experience. Head wounds were a pain the ass at the best of times, let alone when you added some blood to the mix, and if it needed stitches they always wanted to shave his head and that was just not happening. Ever. He had a weird shaped head, and he liked his hair.

"What are you doing here?"

That voice! Duo turned and glared, taking in the ridiculous height, the broad shoulders, and bulging muscles that had to be drug induced. The clear, bright green eye staring out from behind the long, filth matted brown hair and rage rose in him, pushing out the pain. Pushing out everything and leaving him raw. His companion didn't have time to consider dodging a second time, because Duo didn't give his actions any thought.

Of all the violence and victories in Duo's life, nothing, not even seeing Heero Yuy's face alive and well after the Incident, had felt as good as his fist colliding with Trowa Barton's face.