Disclaimer: I don't own the GW characters – am just borrowing to torment for my amusement
Warnings: Swearing, yaoi, violence, general angst, possible OOCness (ages since I've written fanfiction so may be a little bit rusty) m/m sexual relations
Pairings: 1x2 , 3x4, 5+2
A/N: Just wanted to say a Merry Christmas to all those peeps who have read, followed, favorited and reviewed Domino. It's been awesome to have this much response to a fic and I hope people are still enjoying it! This is the last of what I'm calling my setting up chapters as the actions really going to start to ramp up and Heero will be back in the next chapter with the other's to follow soonish!
Song for this chapter is Deep Down by Saosin.
Chapter Twelve
It's Getting Hard to Breathe
The ceiling of the room that had become my temporary home had cracks that ran all the way along it. I wondered how well the hospital was built as I looked up and frowned, lying back on the gurney and getting out my flick knife to give me something to do. It was night and my guard, the ever chatty Lance was sat outside my room, his back against the door.
The twins had escorted me back to the hospital in the Jeep neither of them saying anything. I'd tried to get them to speak to me but it was like talking to a brick wall. Or Trowa. And they said nothing. I kinda wondered if Dallas had told them not to talk to me and they took the order very literally. They didn't seem the sharpest pencils in the box, if you know what I mean, and I think Dallas kept them around for a purely aesthetic reason – they looked tough. They must've decided without Dallas in the hospital, that they didn't know what to do with me and they locked me in what had become my room and stationed Lance outside it. I'd been here for like four hours and I was fucking bored. But I was waiting. I was antsy, I was bored but I was waiting.
I put one hand behind my head and flicked my knife in and out with the other hand and listened. The gurney was not comfortable as it was a shitty one on wheels - probably for stiffs rather than a bed and the sheets were scratchy and musty smelling. Hell, I didn't expect five star luxury and all but, come on, there were nicer rooms. I knew that as I'd scoped the place out on my first night. A part of me wondered if Dallas knew or whether he just thought I wasn't that much of a risk taker but the first night I just waited like I did now. Flicked the knife out. Stared at the ceiling until Lance took a break.
I scoped the place and gave Heero a running commentary as I did. I didn't know how well the communication chip worked but I was going with the fact that it worked awesome. It kinda amused me that he was sat on a laptop listening to the ramblings of Duo Maxwell as I'd tried to make it entertaining. Put a few jokes in. Hell, I was sure I could feel him scowling despite the distance between us. Maybe we had a weird psychic connection. Or maybe I just had a vivid imagination and I was so goddamn used to that scowl. Huh, whatever.
I searched the top floors on the first night. They were in better shape than the downstairs areas of the hospital being that the gang had left them alone but still all the signs of medication and medical equipment had been stripped. I wondered if the L2 government had stripped the hospital or the inhabitants of the District had done it the moment the doors closed on the place. It made me kinda sad to see the hand sanitizer things taken from the wall, you know, those gels with alcohol in. They'd all been ripped off the walls and the laminated posters saying to think about germs were still there.
People on L2 got desperate for highs. They'd take whatever the hell they could get. I wandered the halls of the hospital, walking passed a children's ward on the seventh floor. I stopped in the doorway of the ward. The walls were painted yellow, a bright sunny colour rather than that kinda awful sickly type and on those walls were paintings of bears and rabbits and other cute characters. The beds all looked small. A lump had developed in my throat and I shook my head, walking away.
There was nothing on the seventh floor that was useful to me so I left quickly forgetting how small those beds looked. Tonight I wanted to take a looksie at the basement, see if Dallas stored anything exciting down there. I could hear Lance coughing outside and looked back at the ceiling. He'd go soon but damnit, I wanted to go now. Finally, after another half an hour, Lance's heavy footsteps were audible. Shit yeah. I carefully moved to the door, being as quiet as I possibly could and listened to him walk down the corridor. He halted for a second and then his steps started to get quiet.
I assumed he went for a piss and it gave me, like, five minutes but that was all I ever needed. I thought I'd give up keeping lock picks in my hair when I became an adult – when I became a Preventer and didn't need to steal shit to live anymore but I think it's an ingrained habit. Lock picks? Check. Flick knife? Check. Handgun? Check. And my lock picking skills became useful far, far, too often to give up keeping them in there. Heero once made a comment that could almost be called a joke – almost , you know, about me keeping a machete in my braid if I could hide it. I'd laughed at him as it was true. I so would.
The lock took all of two seconds and I slipped outside and walked quickly but quietly down the corridor. An important stealth lesson – don't run. You make more noise. Just walk quickly and try not to make too much noise. I arrived at the doors that led to the stairwell, the elevators next to them completely useless due to the lack of power and went through the door. I thought for a second about jumping over the railings as the landing wasn't too far but realised I was being an idiot and instead walked down the stairs. I wasn't being reckless or stupid.
I noticed the sign on the wall once I arrived at the basement level and saw a word that chilled me. MORGUE in large capital letters with an arrow pointing. Ah, that was in the basement. I shrugged off the sudden cold feeling and pushed through the metallic doors to a corridor made of steel and darkness. I thought about being an ass. There was pretty much no light down here. The floors that the gang used were lit by a generator and a series of large lamps – the basement, not so much. I felt in my pockets and remembered I usually had a matchbook somewhere on me for my occasional smoking habit. I'd lost my Deathscythe lighter years ago and as the war was slowly getting forgotten, never got one to replace it. Probably stopped making them.
In my back pocket, I had a matchbook and I lit one of them. It made the corridor all reflective and I was able to see in front of my eyes which was helpful. I decided to take it slow being that the metallic flooring and walls seemed to make every movement echo and my biker boots seemed to make too much noise.
"Not so smart, Duo, not so smart," I was saying to myself and then realised I was talking to myself when I should be talking to the chip in my wrist. Heero must think I'm fucking whacked.
"Okay, Heero, I'm in the basement doing some recon," I said into my wrist. Talking to my wrist seemed one of the more crazy things I'd done in my life. I must look crazy doing it. "I'm guessing that it's just a morgue down here but ya never know, the whole plan could be revealed."
I was trying to be dramatic as I held the match as I went through another pair of double doors. I'd passed an office which said Medical Examiner and a room opposite that said Office. Not being very descriptive or exciting looking, I didn't bother with either room as I had a morbid curiosity thing about the morgue. I was thinking zombie movie – a room of corpses left and decaying and ready to come back to life when I opened the door. Okay, I am fully aware that it was purely my imagination but I was ever so slightly curious if they'd left the corpses in the morgue draws. It seemed the sort of shitty thing that could've happened when the hospital got shut down – the District was a place where the orphaned, lost and lonely went and I bet a lot of bodies never got claimed. I never knew what happened to Solo's body or any of the other kids I'd known after they died. They had no grave, no marker and no place to mourn them. Least the church had the grounds it had stood on. Idly, I wondered if there was anything there now. Whether Quatre had done the tiny amount of research and guess work that it would take to figure out where the Maxwell part of my name came from. He sure as hell was smart enough and curious enough to find out.
The flicker of flame was getting hot in my fingers and I dropped the first one to the ground and lit another as I got to a final set of doors. They were heavy metal doors with small windows at the top that I couldn't see anything through. There was a sign on this door.
RESTRICTED ACCESS. MEDICAL EXAMINER AND TECHNICIANS ONLY.
NO UNAUTHORISED ACCESS.
I pushed the door. Of course, fucking locked. My eyes were getting accustomed to the lack of proper light but I was now gonna have to juggle my lock picking with seeing. Then I thought the hell with it and dropped the match to the ground and just felt and guessed where the lock was. This is proof of how good I am – lock picking in pitch black. I listened carefully for the soft click and then pushed.
"I am awesome."
Hell, Heero could wonder why I was awesome. I wasn't going to explain. Plus, he should just kinda think I was anyway.
I lit another match and entered the morgue to see the grey slabs that bodies went on, the draining equipment, the pumps, the hoses, the equipment stored on walls and then the draws. There must have been fifty plus draws. They took up an entire wall, the shining surfaces reflecting the light of my match. My fingers were getting hotter again so I dropped it and lit another one as I approached the draws. It was one of those moments where I really wasn't sure what I was expecting as I pulled one out at random. Did I expect a dead body? Logically, hell no. But there's always that part of me with the whole morbid death obsession thing that kinda expected it.
What I saw I didn't expect.
A tray of vials. Small vials. Hundreds. I blinked and picked one up. The vial itself looked innocuous in the dim light – it was full of clear liquid that looked as harmless as water. However, the label had a code and a company name. It said Core Technologies L2-187VSMRK2. I figured I didn't need to be a genius to work out the code – these were no vaccinations and the name Core Technologies was as fake as my own Domino identity. Or so I figured. It just sounded so lame. This job was all about instincts and, yeah, sometimes my instincts were wrong and I was unbelievably reckless but my instincts told me all I needed to know. Plus the code was easy to decipher - L2 187 Virus Strain Mark 2. So this was the virus. Or a version of it. So my little trip to Monument Park suddenly made sense – this was about more than explosives, more than the L2 Project, more than killing Quat – I sure as hell didn't know what I'd got into. Last job before retirement and it had to be this complicated. I pocketed one and slid the draw back in carefully as I suddenly heard footsteps. Busted.
I turned to see torch light approaching the door and thought about ducking and hiding but damn it, the light from my itty bitty matches would have been seen through the glass of the double doors and I was fucked. I thought whether it would be one of the twins. Or both and made a plan of how to attack, reaching for my flick knife and dropping the match.
The door opened and the torch light was on me.
"What are you doing here? You're restricted to your room."
It was Zee, a gun in one hand and a torch in the other. The gun she was still holding wrong. I wondered if she'd ever shot anyone being that she didn't know how to hold the weapon at all but I felt a little relieved it was her. I returned my knife to my back pocket and was gonna play the innocent card.
"I'm just looking around," I said casually, going for a charming smile on my face.
Her eyes looked at my suspiciously, her gaze looking towards the metallic morgue draws. "No one's allowed down here."
"I can see why. It's kinda creepy – ya think there's still bodies?"
That made her shudder and confirmed a few things. She had no idea about the vials and she was easily creeped out. I thought about the amount of bodies I'd seen, I'd seen too much death – bleeding, puking, rotting, dying. Bodies really didn't bother me.
"No one's allowed here," she repeated.
"Fine, I'll go back up – no harm, ya know."
She shakily held her gun and I walked slowly towards her then lunged. She didn't expect the movement, I easily got the gun off her and disarmed it, taking out the clip and then handed it back to her.
"You need to learn how to hold a gun, darlin'. Don't use real bullets 'til ya know how to shoot it."
It was as though she now realised the vulnerable situation she was in. Zee didn't even protest "darlin'" and instead tried to look unfazed.
"And you could teach me?"
"Yeah, it don't make sense to me why Dallas doesn't teach you."
"I'm not here to fight."
"Sweetheart, when the shit hits the fan, everybody's gotta fight – learn how to hold the thing before you end up shooting the wrong person."
She glanced at me and trained the torch on my face. "I don't get you."
"Darlin… nobody does."
I looked back as I followed her, the vial feeling heavy in my pocket despite its small size. I had no time to check but I'd picked a random draw and if each one contained a few hundred vials then in the fifty or so draws… there was a hell of a lot of vials. Math ain't my strong point – sue me, piloting means you have a system that tells you what to do and does most of the calculations. The rest is all feel and institution. Undercover work does not generally require math. I am not stupid, I'm just not formally educated but I didn't need math to know that there was a ton.
I felt the vial in my pocket as I walked, the small size making it seem kinda harmless but I knew the consequences of it. And I wondered now if I was immune and why the hell I'd been immune first time. I'd thought about Solo's death at the goddamn monument but the reality of the vials brought an image I really didn't want in my head – Heero coughing up his own blood. It made me shiver and I hoped that Zee didn't see. Thinking about Heero made me realise I needed him.
There were two reasons. I needed to get the vial to him so he could get it tested, hand it over to the Preventers and work out the exact composition for a vaccination. We needed to know if it had to be injected, if it was airborne – we needed to set up a motherfucking quarantine.
And goddamnit, pathetic as it sounded I needed him, a steady presence, a hand, a touch. I was feeling pretty low – that little vial seemed to break down the last of my righteous anger and made me feel… hollow. Fuck it, the whole operation felt like it was tearing my insides to shreds. Zee walked me back to my designated room – obviously not wanting me to do anymore night wandering. Didn't think if I got caught again, I could use a sleepwalking excuse – think this was my one and only time of finding out more intel and I was pretty sure this was enough to get the Preventers down on the gang. Biological terrorism beats bombs, guns and assassination attempts.
Lance seemed pretty surprised to see me not in the room and looked a little apprehensive at the sight of Zee. Shit was gonna get back to Dallas and he looked kinda scared. Still wondered how harsh Dallas dealt with people.
"Make sure he doesn't move from his room, asshole," Zee said and walked off dramatically.
He looked at me. "How the hell did you get out?"
I grinned at him and slipped through the door. "I'm sneaky."
I kinda wanted to laugh at the poor guy as he just shook his head, closed the door and I heard the sound of the bolt being locked. I got the vial from my back pocket and looked at it closely, sitting down on the gurney and sat cross legged on it with my head in my hands.
"'Ro," I said quietly. "I think this shit might be biological. I've got a vial of what looks like a virus and I need to get this to you. Meet me…" I stopped, not knowing where to say to meet him. Wired was out if he was even still there. "Meet me in the alleyway beside Black Velvet – where ya tried not to punch my lights out. I'll get there in an hour. I'll wait fifteen minutes. If you can't make it… hell, I know you can no matter who the hells tailing your ass, I'll come back here and you just get the info to Wufei."
I glanced around the room to figure out my escape route. The door was no longer an option as I listened to hear someone else had been stationed outside my door as well as Lance. Sounded like one of the twins – real heavy footsteps. The window was not an option as it was barred and too damn small for my skinny ass anyway. It left one option. An option I hated. I looked up the ceiling – time to go crawling through the air conditioning system vents. Awesome.
I listened for a second and then clicked the breaks off the gurney, dragging it under the vent and put them back on. I hopped up, grabbed my knife and started to twist the bolts out without ripping my fingers to shreds. Even though I was stood on top of the gurney, it was a bit of a stretch and I wished I'd grown taller. My life would be so much easier if I had.
The metal grating covering the vent started to become loose and I pulled with enough force to free it – I may not have Heero sized super strength but I worked out when I wasn't on undercover – I was not weak. I listened, cocked my head and heard a conversation on the other side of the door. It seemed Dallas was back and Lance was feeling slightly anxious about the fact he'd let me slip past. A part of me wanted to stick around and listen. The other part knew I had to get outta the hospital so I pulled myself up and found myself in a dirty, dusty and grimy air ventilation system. I'm starting to think I get all the shittiest jobs…
The crawl space was not big – my body was just about small enough to navigate it but it meant with every movement my entire clothing, hair and skin was getting plastered in grimy shit from the sides. Fuck, my braid was gonna be beyond gross but the other option was sitting on my ass until the Preventers showed. I'm not good at the patience thing.
I calculated I just needed to get to another corridor that wasn't guarded so I shimmied, crawled and pulled my way trying not to cough as dust and dirt got stuck in my nose. I stopped for a second and listened, then wiped my hands over my face to move bits of hair from my eyes and I was actually thinking for the first time ever that my hair sometimes was a massive pain in the ass. Like right now. But like I hell was I gonna cut it again. I continued crawling 'til I got to another vent and laid my head down to listen to any sounds underneath. When I heard nothing, I jimmied the vent and watched it drop to the ground with a crash that sounded far too loud. Damn it.
For a few minutes I tried not to breathe but when no response came, I lowered myself down to the room. I was in an operating theatre and it had no windows and only a little light streaming through from the corridors. I took a few seconds to work out where the hell I was and then worked out the direction to the stairs. See, the main problem I had was that the bottom floor windows of the hospital were barred – steel that I couldn't bend. I'm not fucking Heero Yuy. The bottom floor seemed to be about keeping people out which I could get. L2 gangs probably tried to steal medication all the time when the hospital was open and working. Barring the windows would work to stop that. So the bottom floor was all out for my escape.
The other floors? No bars. So I was gonna pull a Heero Yuy stunt.
Babe, you're so not the only one who can go jumping outta hospital windows without using a parachute.