Disclaimer: I don't own a thing (as sad as that realization is), except for the words I've written.

Warnings: Rated for adult language (Duo's got quite a surly mouth and mind), some violence, and mild adult themes.

A/N: There is probably no reasonable excuse for my falling off the face of the planet. So instead of excuses I will just provide you with a Duo-centric chapter that may or may not make up for my absence. We'll see by the time you reach the cliffy at the bottom there. Read? Review?

Maxwell

Chapter 17: Woke Up To That Familiar Feeling

Glass House - Atmosphere

It was dark wherever he was, that much he could tell. Or maybe couldn't tell, considering it was pitch black and maybe his eyes weren't actually open and he was still unconscious, dead to the fucking world, as if it would be any great loss.

Duo shook his head trying to knock some of those derogatory thoughts from their precarious place at the precipice of his subconscious. He blinked a few times, the movement causing a splitting pain to form between his eyes like someone was pounding a nail into his skull.

What the fuck had happened? The last thing he remembered was beating through a crowd of overly dressed fat-cats clinging to their meaningless chips and then-

"Shit." His mouth felt like it had been packed with cotton. Whatever kind of knock-out drug he'd been inundated with had not been a kind one.

"Shit," he muttered again, this time more powerful, this time directly inward. What kind of an impulsive idiot goes chasing after the bad guy barely armed without backup?

Right. This impulsive idiot. Duo shook his head again, but the motion proved to be too much for his splitting head to endure and so he resorted to assessing for anymore damage, while laying as still as possible.

He was on a bed, more of a cot than anything, but nicer than some of the contraptions he'd slept on during the war. Hell, definitely much nicer than trying to curl up in the cockpit of 'Scythe. So he presumed the bed was more that of convenience than a prison, but the fact that there seemed to be no source of light did not discount the idea that he was most likely being held here- wherever here was- against his will.

Next Duo attempted to flex his muscles, checking for any immediate injury or restraint. He flicked his fingers and brought his right arm up, there was nothing attached to his wrists and though his muscles were rather sore, he could not sense anything keeping him from removing himself from the oddly comfortable bed.

So very slowly, very slowly, as his skull screamed at him to stop the jarring movement, Duo sat up, bracing his weight with the heels of his hands and slid his legs over the edge, his feet connecting with a cold, vinal floor.

His brows furrowed, this lent more to the assumption that he was being held in some kind of cell, but somehow his subconscious couldn't quite agree to the notion. Something was definitely off.

His feet, he realized after a heartbeat of thought, were bare and it appeared, by what he could feel hanging against his skin, that he was not dressed in the clothing Quatre had previously bestowed upon him on L2. No, these garments were stiff and oddly paper-like, perhaps scrubs of some sort, he couldn't be sure without something to illuminate them with.

Fuck, this was not good. Was he in a hospital facility? The image of mad scientists and surgeons bludgeoning a near unrecognizable corpse with bloody scalpels and meat cleavers flew across his mind for a brief moment.

But he was still alive, mostly in tact from what he could tell, maybe a little light-headed, but not restrained, not drugged- anymore at least- and not being monitored. That last part he wasn't one hundred percent on, but unless his captors were watching him through foggy green night-vision he figured there probably weren't cameras vid-feeding black nothingness.

Duo took a breath and pushed upwards to stand. He wobbled once, getting his bearings, and then quickly realized how disorienting the darkness around him actually was. Without the contact of his body to the bed the only thing grounding him was the coldness seeping into the pads of his feet and even then it seemed as if he couldn't quite distinguish up from down. The sensation of floating through space assaulted his skin. Yes, this was damn disorienting.

In order to make his head stop spinning, though the painful throbbing had decided to die down a bit to his relief, Duo stepped forward, hands loosely held in front of him, waiting for impact. When he'd taken three short steps his fingers came into contact with a wall textured with peeling wallpaper. He used the surface to guide his movements to the right, stopping when he hit the adjoining wall; that had taken him a total of four steps. Along that wall his knee finally came back into contact with the bed, a bit harder than he would have liked.

"Dammit," Duo cursed under his breath, before feeling along the bed's frame. It was pushed up against the opposite wall, leading him to believe the width of the room could be no more than five or six feet.

He scuffled along then back towards the middle of the bed where he'd earlier began his investigation. From there he measured his steps until his hands once again found a wall, the fourth and final wall of his new home.

So he was in a box. Maybe six by eight feet, maybe less for all he knew. That was just fucking great. A box that appeared to have no windows or doors-

A smile graced his lips. "Bingo," he purred as his fingers played at a small, metallic notch in the wall he'd been recently inspecting. He pulled back and then pushed forward, trying to identify its function, and then finally pulled to his right and received the outcome he was looking for.

It was a pocket door, one that appeared to be constructed into the wall hidden beneath the decrepit wallpaper. He wriggled it open wider, pushing it into its hiding place, to allow a sliver of glowing light to knife into the room.

For a moment Duo hesitated, unsure of what he might find once he stepped out of his room. Was he a prisoner or what? Why had he been dressed in such a way that made him feel like a mental patient? And what was the deal with this puzzle of a room?

Duo resigned himself to the thought that his questions would remain unanswered if he did not venture out into the unknown. The door hadn't been locked, he hadn't been restrained, it appeared for all intents and purposes that he had free range of whatever kind of place he'd been dropped into since his, for lack of a better word, abduction.

When he poked his head out of the thin doorway Duo found his pupils fighting to constrict in the new source of light. He looked left and right down the long, silent corridors of a hallway illuminated by weak florescent bulbs overhead. It reminded him remotely of the Alliance hospital he'd found Heero in how many years before. Damn, that seemed like an infinitely long time ago now.

His feet padded along the tile floor as he crept down the hall in search of- well he wasn't sure what he was searching for exactly, but when he found whatever it was it would probably be beneficial to the escape plan he was mentally scrambling to formulate. Duo felt unusually vulnerable with his feet unprotected and his clothing, now undoubtably a pair of aqua-green scrubs, affording him absolutely no protection or camouflage.

He walked for what he assumed was several long, quiet minutes, twisting and turning and getting himself completely lost within the maze of what he could only assume was, in fact, a hospital. Or at least it used to be a hospital.

As he rounded another corner a patter of noise pricked at his ears and alerted him to an abandoned nurse's station. There were no fingers clicking along the dusty keyboard like he'd expected to see, instead his eyes caught a flash of black as a healthy looking rat scurried across the floor and underneath a bench, its slick upholstery shredded and mildewed.

Duo found himself wrinkling his nose at the sight. Hadn't been up close with one of those since his days on the streets of L2. It did not bring back any pleasant memories.

Deciding to forgo his venture, this floor proving to be desolate and useless to him, Duo found the nearest exit into a stairwell that was only lit by a few flickering bulbs every other landing or so. In the dimness as he made his way down to the next level below his own- he'd discovered to have been sneaking about the building's fifth floor- he again had the feeling of insecurity as his bare feet touched the cement with each step, careful to watch for more unwanted vermin or an ill-placed scalpel from his earlier gruesome reverie.

When he arrived at the fourth floor, Duo realized that a scalpel or some form of weaponry might not be a bad thing to come across in the end after all. Shinigami could fight, maim, even fucking kill without being the least bit armed, but hell he was kind of out of practice in the kill category, though Duo would rather die than admit that deficiency to his fellow comrades.

Damn. Why'd his mind have to jump to that particular thought? Duo wondered forward, closing the heavy stairwell door silently behind him, realizing that he wasn't even sure how long he'd been unconscious for. How many hours or days had he been missing in action? What steps would Heero take to find him? And what steps would Wufei take in order to stop the Perfect Soldier from simply killing every innocent being standing in his way?

A brief and oddly amusing image of Heero Yuy cuffed to a chair and fighting tooth and nail against the honorable Preventer Chang while Quatre fretted and cooed and Trowa stood simply watching, eyes in a permanent roll, assaulted his subconscious.

Duo shook bangs from his face and wiped the growing smirk off his face. Now was not the time to be thinking of such things. Now was the time for action and answers. Which he might have been able to achieve if not for the fact that the whole damn bloody hospital seemed to definitely be abandoned save for his scrawny ass wondering about in total befuddlement.

"Assholes," Duo grumbled, deciding wholeheartedly that no matter who it was who had shot him, drugged him, and thrown him into this stupid abyss were going to meet their maker when he finally caught up with them. If he could fucking find them- find anyone.

He made a lap and then finally came across an embankment of windows surrounding what once was some kind of waiting room. Duo wiped against some grime on one of the panes, but was unable to make out much from his surroundings. Just as he'd awoken to, the world outside this building appeared to be pitch black, the colony clearly in the middle of its night-cycle. That was, if he was still even on L2 anymore. But there was a feeling, a hellish clawing at the back of his mind taunting him, telling him that he was very much still on his former home colony, much to his pleasure. He could fucking handle a little L2, all that mattered now was finding his way out of this damn haunted hull of a hospital.

Duo made his way back towards the stairwell, determined to get the hell out and not look back. He was careful, but not as careful as before as he made his way down each level. By the time he'd made it to the first floor he found himself out of breath. He chalked it up to fatigue and whatever fucking drug had been pumped into his system outside Vingt et Un.

There was a lobby on the first floor that boasted a tall, long since extinguished, gas fireplace smack in the middle of the entryway, surrounded by several reception desks covered in yellowing papers and a thick layer of dust. There were several candelabra chandeliers above his head, burnt out now, but still fairly elegant for that of a simple hospital. Duo wondered vaguely how such an establishment came to be abandoned in the first place.

By the time Duo reached the lobby's main entrance, his desire for freedom had reached a boiling point. Several thick chains wrapped the double door's handles, padlocked by something ancient looking that actually required a key to open. Duo chewed angrily at his thumb nail. He could pick the fucking antiquated lock- most likely. He could find something to smash through the glass doors- maybe. He could find another exit- probably.

For some irritating reason that Duo could not identify there was a nudging feeling at the nape of his neck as if this was not destined to be where he ended his stay in this damn cage. His eyes flicked to his left to be met with another door, metallic like those of the stairwell. He sighed as his feet began to automatically move toward the new, unexplored section of the hospital.

The door led to another set of stairs, though these only went down towards what he could only assume was the basement. His feet grew exponentially colder and more vulnerable as he ventured downwards taking each step one at a time. There were lights, but it was dim and gray and musty.

"If I were an individual taunting and stalking ex-Gundam pilots," Duo mumbled to himself, eyes keen on his new surroundings. "Where would I set up shop?"

He grinned to himself, realizing the appropriate answer might very well be closer than he was comfortable with. His vision scanned the wall next to him where a large black painted arrow pointed forward down the shadowy hall. Beneath the arrow in capital print read: Morgue.

Great. Shinigami visiting a morgue. No problem there. Duo shrugged his shoulders and pushed down on his thumbs until the joints popped. There probably weren't any dead bodies left, why would there be if the place had long since been forgotten?

Duo walked on and swallowed once when he got to the door. It opened easily, the hinges squeaking only slightly, showing their age and wear and tear. His nose was violated by a faint smell of formaldehyde and his skin was accosted by the now even colder temperature the room's thermostat was apparently set to. It was growing abundantly clear that this portion of the hospital had been in use fairly recently.

Duo's eyes swept across the morgue, its back wall lined with metallic doors, all sealed shut, the floor beneath his feet was an ominous red, and in the middle of the room were two stainless steel examination tables. Dead bodies and all.

Brows furrowed, Duo made his way cautiously towards the bodies, which were wrapped in white sheets, but held no identification tag around their toes. Rook and Richardson's bodies are currently missing. The memory of Heero's voice burned through his thoughts. Fucking hell.

It took a mere lift of the sheet on the first body and the recognition of a clean bullet hole through the man's skull for Duo to realize where those bodies had ended up.

His eyes scanned the tables. Tucked between them in the space between each body's stiff arms was a small stack of papers. Duo snatched them up, skimming over the documents. They were some form of admittance papers or data charts that labeled the bodies both as 'John Doe: AB' and 'John Doe: O' respectively. Someone had signed for them as the primary care physician simply with the initials M.P.

M.P.? Not M.R.? Duo was about to pocket the documents, his interest and confusion both peaking, when the scraping sound of the door being pused further open caused his muscles to tense and his fingers to search for a weapon that wasn't there.

"Mr. Maxwell, you should be in bed." It was a woman speaking to him, petite and blonde and dressed in pink scrubs similar to his own. She smiled sweetly, but the action only caused his frown to deepen. This was certainly a new and mind-fucking development.

"I'm sorry," he drawled, voice deep and uncertain. "But just where the hell am I exactly?"

She ignored his question with clinical sharpness. "The doctor will see you soon. But for now you should be resting."

Duo pursed his lips. His mind felt fuzzy; this was getting fucking old already. Where had this woman even come from in the first place?

"Listen lady, I don't know who you are, but I'm pretty fucking sure you can't keep me here against my will. This place is probably condemned-"

"You're our guest here, Mr. Maxwell," she countered, the interruption curt and accompanied by another smile.

Duo squinted. "Yeah, I feel like a regular high roller over here."

"I don't want to sedate you, but I will if necessary."

"Sedate?" Duo quirked an eyebrow, mentally calculating his next move. The woman was small, the door was roughly three yards from his current position and there was a jar of fermenting old tools he could incorporate into a distraction. "Is that what's in those fun little green knock-out darts? A sedative?"

She studied him with a neutral expression. Duo managed to angle his feet towards the door, his hands forming fists, steadying himself to pounce. But he hadn't accounted for the second body entering the room behind the doll-like nurse.

Duo had already flung forward, grabbing ahold of the glass jar and hurling it towards the nurse's pristine tennis-shoes, skirting around her astonished expression, and bulldozing straight into the waiting arms of a second nurse, a male nurse, a fucking behemoth of a male nurse.

His reflexes still indistinctly off since awakening from his forced slumber, Duo found himself wrapped up and then pushed forward and finally unbalanced to the point of floundering before meaty arms were slipping under his own lean limbs to pull him up into what he could only equate as a weakened version of a full nelson.

"Get the fuck off!"

He flexed his muscles only to find the sensation of a pin prick in his arm much more palpable against his tense tendons. Duo didn't black out like he had upon receiving the green dart in his leg, but his body went slowly limp and his vision blurred momentarily as he felt himself propelled upward and over the nurse's shoulder like nothing more than a disobedient child.

Maybe I'm dreaming, he thought wryly to himself as his eyelids shut and he listened to the man's shoes echoing loudly down the basement hallway the image of Richardson's deadened eyes staring up at him from the morgue table without sympathy.

Duo could feel the rustle of folded documents against the skin of his hip with the man's every movement.