A/N: It's finally done! I bet you readers had given up hope, huh? Well, I may write slow, but I don't surrender! So, I present to you...a new chapter! (Don't hope for much through November, however; I'll be participating in NaNoWriMo. Clueless? Try this; go to and check it out!)

Disclaimer: Don't own the G-boys, don't own Zechsy, don't own Trieze. I do, however, reserve the right to their respective nicknames

Chapter Four: In which recovery commences, laser tag is played, and trouble comes home

Zechs, in fact, was even more tired than he'd thought, once the adrenaline and the relief at finding Treize alive and well wore off. He managed to get through a bowl of chicken-flavored ramen, although Wufei had to rouse him twice to keep him from nodding off and dunking his face in it. After the meal, the black-haired pilot shepherded his half-asleep blonde boyfriend into the bedroom where Treize had been; as soon as his head touched the pillow, Zechs was out. Wufei attempted to use the same technique with Treize, only to meet considerable resistance.

"I slept for practically all of yesterday, and most of last night as well. At this rate, my muscles will atrophy even more than they already have."

"Well, you are injured," Duo pointed out from the kitchen table, still devouring his second bowl of ramen.

"Exactly," Wufei agreed, meeting Treize's level blue stare with a black one. "So you should be recuperating."

"I can recuperate just as well in the living room as I can in the bedroom, and the surroundings are considerably more intellectually stimulating."

Duo snorted into his ramen, then choked. After turning an interesting shade of red while both arguers watched him with slight concern, he managed to swallow and gasped, "Translation- Stripy wants to be in the living room 'cause that's where the TV is. I had no idea you were so shallow, T-man!"

"Shallow?" The tone of injured innocence in Treize's voice was just slightly overdone. "I simply said the environment would be more stimulating. Also, I wouldn't want to disturb Zechs, since he's obviously missed a few nights of rest and he's quite a light sleeper."

Wufei frowned, sighed, rolled his eyes...and acquiesced. As he supported Treize out of the kitchen, Duo caught the ginger-haired man's eyes and made a whip-cracking motion with one hand. Blue eyes widened innocently- but the mouth below them curved in a smug little grin. The braided boy chuckled silently as Treize turned away and settled himself on the couch; only a small half-height partition wall separated the kitchen from the living room, so the area between the two was fairly open.

The morning passed quietly; only one small pillow fight broke out, which was an all-time low for a house containing Duo on an afternoon with nothing to do but snark at daytime television. Treize, despite his earlier protestations that he'd gotten enough sleep yesterday, quietly dozed off on Wufei after about forty-five minutes of this. Soon after, Duo gave up on the stubbornly dull television and slipped outside, ostensibly to go 'visit' Deathscythe. However, driven by his insatiable curiosity about all things mecha, he quickly ended up in front of Tallgeese, parked blatantly in the clearing that Heero had vacated earlier that morning. Duo sighed.

'He didn't even bother to camouflage it. Zechs has got it bad. Guess I'll have to take care of it myself.' The braided boy wasn't really displeased; at least it gave him something to do besides hang out in a safe-house where everyone (including Wufei; Duo had seen the other pilot nod off just before he'd left the house) was asleep. As he was rounding Tallgeese to get the extra camo net he had stashed in Deathscythe, however, he noticed something else.

'That's...another mobile suit. Well, duh, but...whose mobile suit? Looks kinda like Tallgeese...' Duo circled the blue and white, gold-crested suit, inspecting it. 'Huh. Maybe Zechs brought it for...Treize? I guess that would make sense. I wonder how good Treize is, anyway? I've never seen him pilot anything...'

Shrugging, Duo put off his speculation and struck out for his own mobile suit. 'Right, camouflage. This is supposed to be a safe house, and we don't need any big honking obvious mobile suits parked on our lawn.'

Zechs had been very tired- but he was also incapable of sleeping for more than a few hours during the day. When he woke up at around four o'clock, the sun streaming in the window of the bedroom made it impossible for him to get back to sleep, no matter how hard he tried. With a sigh, the former 'Lightning Count' gave into the inevitable and rolled out of bed, rubbing his eyes and wondering how much he'd have to wander around before his capricious sleeping habits let him doze off again.

'I should go check on Tallgeese,' he decided; then his eyes widened as his brain made a connection and fired. 'Crud, I forgot to camouflage it. I was too worried about Treize...oh well, what's done is done, all I can do now is go fix it and hope no one noticed.'

With this thought in mind, Zechs moved silently out of the bedroom and towards the front door, pausing to smile at Wufei and Treize, who were both soundly asleep on top of each other. 'Lazy men...God, I'm glad they're all right.'

All thoughts of his boyfriends, however, were temporarily driven from his head as he came through the trees and his eyes settled on his mobile suit...and Maxwell. Cold dread trickled down his spine like ice as Zechs's brain gave him an instant flashback of all the other times that Maxwell had gotten his hands on Tallgeese when Zechs wasn't around.

"Maxwell!!" The shout had a note of near-panic in it that Zechs wasn't proud of, but at least Duo looked up. "What are you doing to my SUIT??"

Undeterred by his tone, Duo pulled his torso out of Tallgeese's cockpit and cheerfully waved a wrench at Zechs. "Hi, Zechsy! What are you doing up and about?"

"Don't change the subject. The question was; What are you doing to my suit?" Zechs leveled his best 'I am your commander and you'd better obey me' glare at Maxwell, who shrugged it off without blinking.

"Just..." Maxwell's grin was evil incarnate, at least, to Zechs's suspicious eyes. "...improving a few things."

This did absolutely nothing to soothe Zechs. "Like what?"

"Well...eheh..." Duo finally seemed to register that Zechs was about to go into a killing rage if Duo didn't 'fess up, right then. "I didn't screw up the paint job, I promise! And the operating system is...still basically the same...not that the paint job couldn't use an improvement..."

"Move." His slightly rambling explanation was interrupted, and Duo scrambled hastily out of Zechs's way as the blonde dropped into Tallgeese's pilot seat and brought up the main screen. It did look...basically...the same...except for the little chibi figure of Deathscythe dancing in the lower corner, waving a sign that announced, 'New and Improved!' in comic-book font. Zechs leveled another killing glare at the braided boy.

"Why is there a chibi Deathscythe dancing on my screen?"

Duo grinned brightly at him. "Well, I was going to make it a chibi Tallgeese, but I needed something for a 'placeholder' and since I already had the Deathscythe pic all formatted...heh. By the way, Wufei was right. You're really gorgeous without your mask."

"Oh..." Zechs absently reached up for where his helmet would have been, except that he'd left it...here. In Tallgeese. 'Oh, well.' It wasn't worth putting it on now."Er, thanks?"

Duo chuckled, shaking his head. "I never would have taken you for the clueless type, Zechsy. So," Zechs had turned back to his screen by now, "What do you think?"

'Odd, he almost sounds...nervous?' Zechs shot him a glance, but Duo steadfastly refused to meet his eyes. "I haven't found anything...obviously bad yet. What did you do, Maxwell?"

Duo rolled his eyes. "Call me Duo, will you? Please. Well, for starters, have you taken a look at the anti-grav compensator settings? Once I got a good look at the specs, and realized you have to fly at three-quarters of max speed just to keep this thing from killing you, I thought I should prob'ly do something about it. So, I juiced up the power on the compensators and adjusted the settings so that they kick in a little better up in the top speed range."

Zechs raised an eyebrow, trying not to look as impressed as he felt, while rows of figures and numbers that would have been incomprehensible to anyone but an elite pilot and/or mobile suit tech scrolled by in front of him. "...Well. That's...something I've been meaning to have a look at for a while. Anything else?"

Duo shrugged modestly. "Not much. I may be a Gundam pilot, but I'm not Superman, ya know, and I've only had a few hours. I was just checking out things like stealth abilities and weapons when you got here, and the first half-hour, before I got to the anti-grav compensators, I was tweaking the O.S. Should have a better response time and things like that now."

Now Zechs was starting to wonder just why the Gundams hadn't won yet, if all of their pilots were capable of this kind of thing. "I...see. Remind me, why haven't I switched sides before this? For the tech upgrades alone, it's worth it."

The braided pilot grinned proudly. "Well, maybe it had something to do with the fact that one of your boyfriends was still on the other side?"

"But the other one wasn't," Zechs responded absently. "Six of one, half-a-dozen of the other. Can all five of you do this?"

"Well," Duo was practically strutting now, "not really. I'm the best with fiddling and recalibration stuff like this, mostly because I'm the only one who really gets into it. The other guys usually just fix whatever's broken and move on, unless they really want an upgrade on something."

"So..." Zechs looked at Duo, and, slowly, grinned. "What other 'upgrades' did you have in mind?"

Treize woke up feeling comfortably warm and slightly squashed. For a split second, he didn't remember where he was...then recollection flooded back, and the muscles that had tensed relaxed in relief. However, he didn't manage to keep them relaxed for long; shortly after recollection, pain flooded back as well. Wufei, who had somehow managed to wiggle around in his sleep so that he was sprawled on top of Treize instead of vice versa, grumbled inarticulately in protest as Treize's body flinched involuntarily. The older man was just starting to consider how he could get out of the position he was in without waking Wufei when the front door slammed open and Duo ran inside, shielding his head with his arms and breathless more from laughing than anything. In pursuit was Zechs, silver-blonde hair flying wildly behind him, wielding a large ratchet in mock (at least, Treize assumed it was mock) fury.

"You little punk! How dare you insult Tallgeese so? PINK??"

This last exclamation, seemingly a non-sequitur, informed Treize of what was going on. He leaned back luxuriously, enjoying the show as Duo bounded around the room and Zechs bounded after him. Wufei growled in protest, unwilling to wake up and get off of his nice warm cushion even with all the commotion going on around him.

"Duo, didn't Zechs warn you the last time this came up what would happen if you ever tried to paint his suit again?" the ginger-haired man called out lazily to the leader of the pair.

"I was joking!" Duo protested, putting on an extra burst of speed as Zechs threatened to overtake him. "Can't he take a joke??" Suddenly, amethyst eyes lit up with a sudden idea. Treize barely had time to start to yell before Duo vaulted over the couch complete with inhabitants and began cowering behind it.

"Save me, O mighty Stripy One! I throw myself on your mercy!"

Zechs screeched to a halt in front of the couch, still glowering in playful ferocity at what he could see of Duo as the braided boy peered out from around the threadbare obstacle. Pointing the ratchet as if it were a sword, he announced solemnly, "Sentence him! He insulted my mobile suit! He actually suggested painting it..." he paused for dramatic effect, then crashed back in at full volume. "PINK!"

"What? Pink?" Wufei, still in the process of waking up, blinked at Zechs, who was the only occupant of the room he could see from his current position. "Where? I thought Relena was stalking Heero, not us."

Duo burst into a fit of giggles from behind the couch, Treize began to smirk, and Zechs rolled his eyes and lowered the ratchet with a long-suffering sigh. Wufei took in the situation more fully and sat up, carefully, with a sigh, rolling off of Treize as he did so.

"Obviously, I missed something. Why do you have a ratchet?" The question was addressed to Zechs, who blinked at the hardware in question with sudden recognition and sheepishly tried to conceal it behind his back.

"I...erm...I was looking for a murder weapon, and it was handy?" Only Zechs could have delivered this line while maintaining his poise and making it all seem, somehow, elegant. Well, only Zechs and Treize, anyway.

"I'm being falsely accused!" Duo protested, still behind the couch, but crouched so that the upper half of his face, complete with large, innocent amethyst eyes, was visible. "I didn't exactly suggest painting Tallgeese pink...I just asked what Zechsy thought of pink as a color scheme."

"It was implied," Zechs stated, managing to cross his arms while still holding on the ratchet, and looking unmollified.

"No, it wasn't!" Duo argued. "If you'd let me finish, I was going to suggest painting that other Tallgeese-looking mobile suit pink. You know, to differentiate it from the actual Tallgeese."

Treize, without speaking or noticeably changing expression, held out his good hand towards Zechs. His boyfriend matter-of-factly plonked the ratchet into Treize's palm, and the ginger haired man reached over, somewhat awkwardly since bits of the couch were in the way, and lightly smacked Duo's head with it.

"Ow!" The braided boy rubbed the affronted spot and pouted at Treize much more dramatically than was really, in Wufei's opinion, called for. "What was that for?"

"It should be obvious," Treize informed him haughtily. "That is my mobile suit you threatened with pink. I'd be the first to admit that it could use a new paint job- the current one really is far too much like Tallgeese –but not pink."

"You know," Wufei remarked from the floor, where he had ended up sitting after his roll off of Treize, "I've never actually seen you pilot anything."

"Me neither," Duo agreed. They both looked somewhat expectantly at Treize, who only blinked at them in blank uncooperation. After a moment, Zechs sighed and broke the silence.

"Since he's obviously not going to tell you, I will. Treize is at least as good as, if not better than, me. Which is saying something."

Duo looked incredulous. "Better that Zechsy? The Zechsy who gives Heero a run for his money? I've got to see this."

"I am rather spectacularly out of practice, you know," Treize stated, surreptitiously glaring at Zechs, who only looked impassively back at him. "I haven't done any piloting in...about a year."

"Aw, you'll remember," Duo stated airily, with a dismissive gesture. "It's like learning to ride a bike- once you learn it, it sticks forever. Anyway, though, you can't go out it your suit the way it is now."

"And why not?" Treize sounded interestedly amused. Zechs had settled himself comfortably on the love seat when it became apparent that the conversation was going to take awhile, and was watching everything from behind his long, silvery bangs while trying to hide a yawn. After all the excitement, he was starting to get sleepy again.

"Because it's tacky, that's why!" Duo exclaimed, as if the whole thing should be very obvious. "It's way too much like Tallgeese. What's it called, anyway?"

"Um..." Treize blinked as he did some rapid thinking. "...Loki."

One of Duo's eyebrows crept up suspiciously. "As of when? Something tells me that's not the name it came with."

"As of now," Treize retorted firmly. "You'd shoot me if I told you what it was originally called, and I've got enough holes in me at present."

This was the last thing Zechs remembered of the conversation, along with a blurry impression of Wufei sitting cross-legged on the floor, with a few strands of obsidian hair escaping from his normally severe ponytail. When Treize and Duo wrapped up their discussion, approximately an hour later, Zechs was still sound asleep.

A week later, none of the other pilots had returned from their missions, and Duo was bored out of his mind. So bored, in fact, that he was starting to consider laying a few booby traps somewhere just to relieve the tedium. At this point, even being murdered by Zechs for 'damaging' his precious Tallgeese would be better than being So. Damned. Bored.

He had been announcing this, loudly and at regular intervals, for the past few days, so Wufei wasn't too surprised at the sudden crashing noise which came from the braided boy's room at around two o'clock in the afternoon. If anything, the fifteen or so minutes of silence preceding it had been more shocking, not to mention alarming. Still, Wufei decided, crashing noises from Duo tended to be precursors of disaster; he headed up the stairs to see what was going on.

A cautious glance through the half-opened door of the room Duo normally shared with Heero revealed the braided boy seated ungracefully on the floor in front of the closet, rubbing the back of his head and muttering imprecations. A cardboard box was lying open beside him, looking somewhat battered. Wufei only had to read the title emblazoned on it in excited-looking letters to know that he wasn't going to like Duo's latest plan. The box read: Super-accurate LASER TAG! Have a shootout with your friends! Ages 8, batteries not included.

Duo looked up at him and grinned, only somewhat maniacally. "Hi, Fei! Guess what I found in the back of the closet!"

Wufei examined the box again, dubiously. "Do I want to know?"

"It's laser tag!" When Wufei still looked blankly suspicious, Duo rolled his eyes. "C'mon, don't you know what laser tag is? Look," still seated on the floor, he began to rummage through the box, and pulled out a harness and plastic gun, "you wear this, and shoot with this. If your laser hits the other person's harness, it bingles." To demonstrate, Duo shot the harness he was holding at point-blank range. A high-pitched alarm went off, making Wufei wince, and continued for several seconds until Duo thumbed a button. "Easy as pie."

Wufei eyed it, again, dubiously. "Let me guess...you want us to play this?"

Duo nodded enthusiastically. "C'mon, 'Fei, it's fun! And I'm booored! Please?"

The Chinese boy sighed, then grinned somewhat evilly as an idea struck him. "All right, I'll play this...laser tag..." Duo started to beam, but Wufei cut him off quickly. "If, and only if, you convince Zechs to play too."

"Sure."

Duo beamed at Wufei; Wufei glared at Zechs.

"Sure? You're not supposed to say 'sure'! You're supposed to say no so I won't have to play!"

Zechs smirked at his boyfriend unrepentantly. "Oops. Besides, it does sound as though it could be enjoyable. At least, more so than sitting inside all day trying to find something good on daytime television."

Treize's voice drifted over the back of the couch to join the conversation. "I completely concur. I'm playing too."

Wufei groaned. "Not you, too! You're both spoiling my image of you as mature, sophisticated officers! Besides," here, his tone took a serious turn, "you can't play, you're injured."

"Sniping doesn't require a lot of motion," Treize pointed out reasonably. "I intend to spend the entire game firmly planted behind some wonderful bit of cover, picking all of you off one by one."

"I...gehr..." Wufei stopped, took a deep breath, sighed, and continued. "I'm not going to win this argument, am I?" The other three occupants of the safe house shook their heads. "So I should probably just give up now and try to enjoy this...laser tag...shouldn't I?" Three heads went up and down. Wufei sighed again. "Very well. Let's go."

"AUGH!" Duo staggered to a halt in the middle of his run for cover as his harness bingled loudly, announcing that Trieze had just taken him out. "Oh, woe, woe is me! I hath fallen in the heat of battle, with none to mourn my demise!" He wobbled dramatically in a circle, hand to his forehead, and prepared to continue his speech. Zechs cut him off, amused.

"This isn't an opera, you know, Duo. You don't get a three minute death aria." The silver-haired pilot was reclining lazily in the grass, harness and gun spread out beside him; Wufei had mown him down within the first five minutes of the game. Duo flopped down facing him and grinned.

"Aw, c'mon, Zechsy, doncha want to hear me sing?"

Zechs raised an elegant eyebrow. "No. I've heard you sing."

Duo pouted at him. "Are you implying that...I..." He trailed off in mid-sentence, staring up at something behind Zechs, expression slowly shading towards 'oh, crap.' Zechs swiveled in the grass to see what the braided boy was looking at. His expression changed not a single iota as he spoke.

"Oh, hello, Yui. How was the mission?"