My ramblings-
Back to Wufei's perspective!
The timeline jumps back and forth a little, so be prepared for that. So far in Duo's world, he escaped from the palace on the night of the party, made it to L2 the next day, and was there for 3 days before his unexpected capture.
The rest of the team stayed at the palace for two weeks after the party before they were captured, and this chapter takes place two weeks into them being (practically) imprisoned.
There is a reason for this, and obviously both plotlines will meet in the future.
I also realized that in chapter 1, Wufei was acting a little out of character as he was referring to the pilots with their first names, which is quite unlike him! I won't go back and change it - I'm happy living with a minor mistake - but in this chapter, and until his character develops, he will be referring to the other pilots by their surnames.
Same warnings as before - *gasp* Some boys like other boys! Apart from that, there's no swearing or blood in this chapter, though there is some gore-less violence.
So sit back and enjoy chapter 3!
Some Things Don't Need To Be Said
Chapter 3 - A Shocking Turn of Events
"How are they treating you?"
I looked up from the book I had been reading, lowering my reading glasses down and looking at Winner. He was going around asking everyone that, and I couldn't work out if it was a fear that he would end up being treated poorly, or genuine concern for us. After all, didn't he have that empathy thing he had displayed during the war - he could tell how we were, at least on an emotional level.
I realized I had kept him waiting a little longer than I should have done, and I awkwardly cleared my throat. "Fine. They're treating me fine."
What else could be said? We were two weeks into being kept in a cramped house that was reminiscent of one of the safe houses during the war. We shared two bedrooms between the four of us - myself with Yuy, Burton and Winner together, of course. I wasn't sure who did the intel on us, but it seemed that they wouldn't put Burton and Winner together if they knew of their relationship. Not that it was my business, but I doubted they were able to do anything. Between 7pm and 8am we were locked in the bedrooms, and there were guards on the doors - they only let us out to use the bathroom.
During the day we had free roam of the house - a small living room, an equally small kitchen, a bathroom with a shower and a toilet, and nothing else. We weren't allowed outside, not even with the guards. It was the closest thing to prison that wasn't prison. We were allowed books, the living room had a TV that had select channels (no news, nothing political, nothing that gave us any idea what was happening outside those four walls) and there were a few board games, including chess.
No-one was telling us anything, that was what was annoying me the most. The guards rarely spoke apart from to snap our surnames at us if we were defiant in any way, which we were, at first. Winner had reverted back into his timid self and hung back, but me, Burton and Yuy took a stand at first. We had survived a war - no-one was telling us when to go to bed and when we could use the bathroom.
The guards had guns, but so far they hadn't reached for them - I had a feeling that their orders, wherever they came from, were to keep us alive at all costs. I'm sure the guns were there for if we somehow escaped, and even then I believed they would target our legs. So when we made our stand, they didn't reach for their guns. The four of them - effectively, we had one guard each, on a rolling three person shift as far as I could tell; they wore helmets all the time, so we couldn't see their faces, and - I assume - so if we suddenly launched some attack they wouldn't be knocked out.
Instead of reaching for their guns, they reached to the other side of the belt. We tensed. We were prepared for pepper spray - various training had built up some immunity to the chemicals in the spray, so it would hurt, but it wouldn't be as effective as on a civilian. But it wasn't pepper spray - it was a taser, trained on each of us, even Winner. Winner had no wish to be involved in our planned attack, but he also couldn't bare to leave Burton, so, as far as the guards were concerned, he was a threat too.
When the tasers hit us, it was immense and crippling pain. We had training against tasers too but they must have turned up the power, because even Yuy, the perfect soldier, the one who had been trained since he was 6 years old, seized up with the pain. Winner was the first to fall and then, to my shame, it was me. All my muscles tensed at once and I couldn't move, my heart was racing. Burton fell and tried to crawl to Winner, despite the visibly spasming muscles, and this caused another taser shot at him. Burton's head bowed and I'm pretty sure he passed out, though he never admitted it. All Winner could do was watch, and I saw the tears in his eyes. I managed to turn my face away, to give him some sense of privacy, and I was lucky not to get another shot just for moving. Yuy, of course, was the last to fall, and even then he seemed less affected than the rest of us.
Like infants, we had to be carried to our bedrooms, though we were dumped on our beds rather than given any respect. I felt all my dignity go down the drain that night. I vowed to myself to not take part in any more attempts to fight against the guards - not unless we had a secure escape plan and we could leave for sure. I watched Yuy be dropped onto the bed too, and then heard the door lock. I was still in pain, but I could finally move, and I could finally move into a more comfortable position that allowed me to relax against the pain.
It took nearly half an hour of meditation, lying on my bed, eyes closed, unable to sit in lotus as I normally did, before I could focus my brain and ignore the pain. I opened my eyes and looked over to Yuy. He seemed to be shaking off the worst of it too, though his choice was the opposite of mine - I had heard him get up around 15 minutes after the door locked, and he was doing stretches on the floor. I wasn't sure how much that would help, but he certainly looked a lot less uncomfortable than before.
"It's weird," I began, watching him, making sure he was able to look at me too, which he did, briefly, "that there's only four beds. I was thinking, earlier, about Maxwell. If he hadn't gone running away from the palace, he would be here with us. Don't you think they would have a bed for him? Even if they knew they had to catch him, everything seems so...prepared. It seems quite unusual that they haven't prepared for Maxwell."
There was only four of everything - guards, beds, plates, cups; everything was so meretriciously prepared that it was like Yuy himself had done it, so pedantic and organized. So word must have gotten out that Duo had disappeared - how? I had read the papers after his disappearance - none of them mentioned it. Some of them even read as if Duo was still in the palace, always mentioning five pilots and using photos of all of us from the last few weeks. As far as I knew, the information was in the palace alone, and I refused to think that there was someone inside the palace that was leaking information to this new team, whose name and role I still hadn't gotten.
Yuy shrugged, shifting position to start doing push-ups. There must have been something in his training, I thought, that allowed him to put so much stress on his muscles after they had just been under so much pressure. But if it worked for him, as meditation worked for me, who was to say what was right. "Duo disappeared," he pointed out, as if I were stupid, "so I'm sure if they did have this place set up for five people, they just took out the extra items. It seems stupid to me to waste energy on doing that - having an extra set of everything and one extra bed is hardly luxury for us - but we have no idea of this organization's intent, apart from keeping a strict guard on us."
I shook my head and closed my eyes for a moment. I didn't want to explain to him how stupid that sounded, and how the house was too small for four people, let alone five, but he could rattle off ten million reasons why it wasn't weird that they hadn't prepared for Maxwell as well.
"...How can you even do that?" I finally asked, opening my eyes and turning my head to look at him.
"Do what?" He grunted as he finished with his push ups and moved on to stretching against the wall.
"All that...movement, after the tasers," I explained, watching him.
Yuy shook his head. "I don't know how you can't. This way, I won't be in agony tomorrow. If you keep just lying around and letting your muscles relax too much, tomorrow you may be in too much pain to even walk."
Not for the first time, I wondered how tough Yuy's training had been for him to know all this; how much experience he must have had being tasered. And, not for the first time, I decided I didn't want to know.
Begrudgingly, because it hurt even to sit up, I did so and sighed.
"Well, show me what to do then. ...Please." I added, as an afterthought, even though Yuy didn't particularly care about manners. He was a solider through and through - not many people asked him politely to do things, after all.
Yuy grunted again then nodded. "Fine. Start with just stretching out every muscle, like you would in tai-chi."
We had gotten to know each other more in the house, and Yuy - also an early riser - had seen me doing tai-chi after my morning meditation, before the guards let us out. It was something I was hesitant to do outside of our room, because the movements could resemble martial arts, and the last thing I wanted to do was get the guards believing I was training for some sort of escape.
I nodded, and began in my basic poses. It hurt at first, but Yuy was right - as I concentrated on tensing and flexing each muscle, the pain slowly eased to a dull thudding. By the time he told me to do press ups, I could do them as easily as normal. Maybe Yuy had his uses.
So our first plan hadn't really gone well, but at least we now knew what the guards had at their disposal and what they were prepared to use. The guns were a threat, but not an immediate danger unless one of us made a stupid move - if Maxwell had been here, he would have already been given a warning shot for sure.
I was thinking too much on him. I've always been bothered by mysteries I can't solve, by situations I couldn't do anything about. I found it hard to concentrate on my books and even meditation, with my mind drifting to Maxwell. Did he know about this? Was that why he ran away? Was he some sort of inside man? That didn't seem like Maxwell, but in desperate situations some people act out of character - maybe he was safe somewhere, but ratting us out. The thought alone made me angry, and I decided to think he knew nothing of this plot, and that his running away was just a coincidence.
But still, where ever he was was no doubt safer than here - he did run, and he could hide, so even these goons in their uniforms couldn't find him. If they had found him, he would be here with us, I was sure of it.
As I finished stretching and prepared for my nightly meditation, prayer beads held tight in my hand, I set aside a prayer for Maxwell.
'Protect him wherever he is. Keep him safe, and keep him well. And once we're free, bring him back to us.'
To be continued
