A/N: So… yeah, I know the last update for this fic was a day over two months ago but hope people are still with me *waves at followers/reviewers*. Chapter is beta-d by ELLE and the song is London Calling by the Clash.
On a brief note, I am British but I am not a Londoner and while I am using some of the geography of the city, I will be using artistic license to some extent. Plus I guess London could change slightly in the AC timeline. Or that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it!
Chapter Eight
London Calling
I'd been to plenty of cities in my years undercover, plenty of countries but I'd not been to London apart from a stopover in Heathrow which said nothing about the actual place or the country in general. Airports and spaceports were not the best damn venue to get an idea of a place – they were all bland buildings full of people waiting for something. It was kinda depressing. Yeah, you had people who were waiting for vacations but then you had the sad looking businessmen and lonely travellers. I'd been one of those, drifting through cities and the colonies until I got another undercover op. Ghost-like, I guess, not really belonging anywhere.
Seemed a long time ago now. Moved on from there.
I'd piloted the Preventer shuttle. For the first time in damn forever I'd been in the pilot's chair and it felt better than I imagined. Yeah, it didn't compare to Deathscythe – hell, nothing ever really did – but the sense of power and the knowledge of controlling a machine was still something that made my pulse race. Made me feel damn alive. Even if it only was a short flight across a continent. Even if it was damn uneventful and my only job was take-off and landing as the rest of the time I flicked over to auto-pilot. Even if I spent the rest of the journey idly playing with the ring on my finger and trying to figure out what the fuck I'd actually agreed to and feeling the ever so slight "tense" thing going on between me and Wufei.
'Fei must have damn noticed. He'd not said anything but hell, you couldn't get shit past that guy. Huh. I remembered him bitching about my tattoos in a tiny café in Berlin and they had been mostly hidden. Yet he'd noticed. Like I said, nothing gets past 'Fei. The ring still felt odd on my finger – big and clunky and just unnatural. It sure as fuck felt symbolic. Yeah, basically, I'd linked myself to Heero forever. And forever was a fucking long time. Though I guess with our lifestyles perhaps not as long as normal folks. I still didn't see either of us living to old age – especially now we were back in the field, even if Heero was just protecting the Princess. After all, someone had just attempted to kill her.
We didn't land at a major airport being that they were fucking huge and busy – instead, we landed at what once had been a British military base a coupla hundred of years ago that the Preventer organisation used. I felt kinda naïve about the organisation I'd just joined. Yeah, I knew they were a peace-keeping force. I knew they policed the whole damn earth sphere but I just hadn't quite contemplated the whole thing. Undercover I'd not existed to the organisation so it did not matter what the fuck I did. Now I heard Une's words echoing in my head about acting as though I was befitting of the uniform or whatever the hell she'd said.
Once we landed, it was a black town car and some British agents. I kinda thought about making some stereotypical jokes but refrained. Befitting the uniform and all. Guess it's a bad thing to disrespect colleagues. I kinda wanted to say something about stiff upper lips and tea and whatever but, you know, didn't. The boss lady would be so proud.
"We going straight to the Field Office?"
Wufei shook his head, his eyes glancing down at his open tablet. "We check in at the hotel and then meet with the Local Commander. He wants to discuss our investigation."
"So Une wants to make sure we play nice with the locals?"
"Something like that."
I shrugged and let Wufei be mysterious if he was not going to offer me any additional information. I leaned back in my seat and thought about trying to make conversation with our agents but then decided to just look outta the window.
I guess I'd never know if I'd go back to any one particular place – I guess I just seriously didn't know now I'd taken a job as an active agent and Heero was in Sanc for at least the near damn future. I thought briefly about the place we'd built for ourselves. I thought about us tangled up together in thin sheets in the heat of the night and being damn sweaty and sticky and not giving a shit as long as our bodies were touching as much as possible. And I guess I sure as hell missed it. I played with the ring again. Maybe Heero did. I was nostalgic for something I never really appreciated at the time. Huh. Guess you only want stuff you can't have or something.
The military base had been situated outside of London and I leaned my head against the glass of the window, creating condensation as raindrops ran down outside. I guess the old cliché of rain and British weather was damn true. Who'd a thought it.
When we arrived into London, heavily congested traffic, black cabs and imposing tall buildings around us, I kinda thought even though the weather sucked there was something kinda impressive about the place. Yeah, it was grey and dull at first. But then this was an old city. You could see the modern clashing with buildings that had stood for centuries, the large skyscrapers of glass and steel next to the old and the unmoveable. It was kinda heartening that even though they built those fucking huge and tall skyscrapers, the most interesting things on the skyline were the old. The buildings that had existed long before someone had the idea of the damn colonies. I felt so unused to this – the sense of history. The sense of place.
I was at times a total colony boy and despite having drifted through a fuck ton of countries and cities, I rarely went and looked at the damn culture or the architecture. I'd either been undercover which meant my perspective on a place was coloured almost entirely by the lowlifes and fucking scumbags I was having to deal with on a daily basis or I was passing through in some haze. Those years where I'd drink to forget the last undercover and fuck around with the first decent looking guy who'd show some interest and forget about the kids being trafficked or the drugs that were being sold cut with killer chemicals and forget that I'd been a complete fucking screw up and pushed away the only person that damn mattered. Those years had not been my finest. Yeah, I done some decent work – brought down some criminal gangs and shit but it had taken that L2 op for me to stop screwing around. Grow up a little. Let Heero in. Move on. Get engaged.
Shit. Still sounded fucking weird.
The hotel was in the heart of London, perhaps not as fancy as the place we'd been staying in Sanc but that had been paid for by a certain blond billionaire. This was being paid for by a peace-keeping task force. I kinda thought their priority shouldn't be if the place comes with fluffy robes or a decent mini-bar, more that we actually you know, catch the motherfucker who planned the whole hit on Relena shit.
It was as Wufei did all the checking in thing and I did the whole wandering around the lobby checking out the security camera thing, that I realised we'd only be getting one room. Okay, yeah, not a big deal. I am not the most modest person anyway, hell, it's a curse and I have no problem with my body even if I am a bit on the skinny side. Hey, Heero has never damn complained, in fact, he knows every part kinda intimately. But this was 'Fei. The guy who'd kissed me, well on the forehead, and had saved my ass from some fucked up life of drowning my sorrows or something. And yeah, me and Heero were now all committed and all but I still figured there was the whole shadow of three years where Wufei had been the one guy I could rely on, who'd kept my head from spinning outta control after so many shitty undercovers, who had stopped me from losing my damn self in all those sex trafficking rings and drug cartels and weapons smuggling ops. Really, there was so much unresolved shit here that being in the same room as him suddenly seemed like a damn stupid idea.
Yet, we had no choice as we dropped off bags and we tried to take as little time as possible as we had our goons waiting, parked outside the lobby.
I automatically picked the double bed by the door, kinda thinking as I always did about escape routes as the window was too high up for a jump out of. Unless, I wanted to do it in spectacular Heero style and I had jumped from a hospital window myself not too damn long ago on L2 and that had been a lot less height and was still not the best idea I'd ever had. Combine that with the pacemaker that's keeping my heart beating and damn, I'm so not gonna use that escape route. Maybe the self-preservation instinct that I've never had finally came into play. Maybe I was listening to Heero for a damn change – after all, I had promised not to be too damn stupid.
Wufei was looking at me, I realised, and I figured that maybe I needed to deal with the weird feeling that had been between us since we took off from Sanc. That he hadn't bitched at me taking over the controls of our plane, he'd only sat there for the journey, arms folded across his chest and seemed to be meditating. I kinda knew that was his thing, after all, he'd used that technique all that damn time ago on Lunar Base when I'd been so impressed with him. Those techniques he'd tried to teach me in a Preventer safe house after a fucked undercover.
I knew it was my place to say something, that I should say that, "yeah, 'Fei, me and Heero are getting married at some undetermined time" and maybe say he could be my best man or something but fuck, might as well be a complete dick and knife him in the stomach at the same time or something. I wasn't sure what his feelings were, never really knew but I don't think they were purely platonic. There had been too many times we'd nearly done something and maybe… yeah. I shouldn't have said the shit I did in the hospital.
"In a different time and place…" I remembered saying.
Fuck, I really was the asshole in this situation.
"We should get to the Field Office," I said, "don't wanna give Une an excuse to fire my ass already."
I went for deflection and we secured our room, keeping our registered weapons and ID's on us and making our way back to our car for the short trip to the Preventer Field Office, both spending our time looking outside at the shifting cityscape. I briefly brought out my cell, deciding that really, Heero should know I've arrived, and sent a quick message before securing it back in my pocket. I knew dark eyes observed that.
The car pulled up outside a building that overlooked the Thames, the river that looked grey and depressing at this damn point. The silent agent dudes didn't say anything as we exited. I wondered if these agents were just drivers and I thought that sure as fuck was a depressing role in the Preventers. Join the organisation that protects the entire earth sphere. End up driving other agents around. Must be like being a cab driver. Least cab drivers got tips sometimes and at least they damn talk.
The building was probably the oldest I'd ever been in and I self-consciously tugged at my shirtsleeves and looked to check if my boots were a damn lost cause. I guess that whoever the local commander was they'd just have to take me as I was. I looked over to 'Fei who looked all put together. He didn't wear the regulation tie but still looked more official than I did. I didn't get it. Guess you could put me in a suit and I'd feel somewhere deep down that I was the street kid gonna embarrass myself or whatever.
It was similar to Sanc – meant to be impressive, I guessed, but then this was London. Yeah, it was no longer the heart of the world or whatever it had been a coupla centuries ago – see, I had been reading my briefs and doing my research, but it was still all about being important. The building had always had some link to peace-keeping, I'd read that, and it had housed British Secret Service or whatever the fuck they were called in the past. And it now housed the Preventers so the place had a fuck ton of history. Landscapes of battles on the walls. I mean, battles with horses and old ships. Not a mobile suit in sight. Art that was probably worth more than whatever amounts of Gundamium still existed.
The building may have been damn old but the technology was ever present. I could see the cameras, I could see the metal detectors and I knew I'd have to give up my newly acquired weapon as we made our way through the building. I'd just got used to carrying a piece again since my official job acceptance and I kinda liked the feeling but I handed it over as we went through the detectors and I complied with all the rules – let them check my ID, let an agent pat me down without any smart ass comment. There's a part of my brain that just wants to say that the only one who gets to touch this piece of ass is my male fiancé for pure shock value but hey, I don't and my weapon is handed back to me.
"You know who the Local Commander is?" I asked 'Fei as that little nugget I'd either bypassed or it had not been in my briefing notes.
Wufei nodded but didn't actually answer. Which seemed kinda ominous or something. Calm before a storm.
"Someone we know?" I pressed – as damn, there were so many people we could know, even in the vaguest sense.
The thing with the whole Preventer organisation was that it was full of people we'd either fought with, which was good, or fought against, which was bad. And I'd got outta that bullshit in my tenure undercover as I was a blacklisted agent and that meant I had no real records – apart from those that were kept closed, locked tight by Wufei's old team. Or maybe not so tight. After all, Roth had kinda had access to my whole crazy twisted and fucked psyche. My medical shit. My fitness for duty evaluations. So yeah, I wondered who our local commander could be and kinda wanted to cross my fingers it wasn't someone I'd pissed off in a past life. Not White Fang. Not some pompous ass Romefeller dick. Not some ex-Ozzie with a superiority complex like all ex-OZ officers seemed to have.
And since I was meant to be playing nice, to the rules and all, I needed not to piss the Local Commander off. As really, I wanted this job. Wanted this investigation. Wanted to feel the thrill of doing something that meant something again. I couldn't lock up Shinigami as much as I couldn't lock up any part of myself and damn, I wanted this. So, all in all, warning from Une and the fact I didn't want to fuck this up meant that Duo was on his best behaviour. Shit, really should not talk about myself in the damn third person, but basically, yeah, this had to work. I didn't want to have risked everything with 'Ro for me to end up back tinkering with cars.
We were led to a Briefing Room by an agent, his uniform damn perfect in every way and it was as the door opened I realised that I knew the Local Commander but, you know, as I have the world's suckiest luck in life it was not someone who I wanted to see. Or work for. Or be remotely friendly towards.
He stood up as we entered, doing that whole elegance shit that came from good breeding and knowing how to hold yourself right. I thought Heero knew how to stand straight with all his soldier boy shit but 'Ro had nothing on him.
"Yuy let you off your leash?" he said smugly as his eyes fixed on me. Cold blue. Not Heero's deep blue and not his sister's kinda cornflowery blue. Harsh.
Yeah, our Local Commander was Zechs Merquise. The smug bastard with his whole "trouble in paradise?" comment. And now I couldn't tell him to go fuck himself. Damn. I so have the suckiest luck ever.