Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When Heero says he wants to join Preventers two months after the Mariemaia Incident, Duo has serious reservations. It’s being run by Une, and okay, she’s working with Sally, and Sally is good people, but she’s also still working with Zechs, which creeps Duo out, because there’s crazy, and then there’s crazy, and then there’s drop a supership onto Earth to avenge the colonies crazy. He doesn’t ask how the guy survived, and at least he seems more sane than he had? Duo thinks the jury is still out, but then, some world security whatsits thought putting Une in charge of a global paramilitary antiterrorist organization was a good idea, so Duo’s definition of sanity doesn’t seem to line up with the world at large.

He’s about to make that very argument—after all, Duo’s pretty sure that his standard for sanity is pretty far left of normal—when he notices that abject misery in Heero’s eyes. They’ve only known each other for two years, and while they fucked for the last six months of the war, they’d only started actually dating after it. Heero is still figuring out how to be a real boy, and Duo forgets sometimes that Heero is actually more soft-hearted than Duo is.

Duo didn’t do anything during the Eve Wars—either of them—that he doesn’t stand behind 100%. Even his mistakes—and he’s not perfect by a longshot—he stands by. It was war. Collateral is an unfortunate reality. He did his best to minimize it, but it doesn’t keep him awake at night. It’s never been the people he killed that keep him up at night—it’s the ones he didn’t kill soon enough; the ones he couldn’t save.

Just another way he and Heero are opposites, because the blood on his hands definitely keeps Heero up at night. He still wakes up shaking, thinking about that little girl. He keeps in touch with Sylvia Noventa, which Duo thinks is downright unhealthy, but Duo put the last shrinks he interacted with into psych wards, so he’s probably not a reliable judge.

Heero still wakes up saying he killed Mariemaia Khushrenada.

So Duo says, “Okay. Let’s talk to Une.”

It isn’t a surprise that Une is delighted to bring them onboard. She helps them fast track their paperwork to establish the official identities required to be eligible for the Old Souls Statute, and therefore, Preventers. They have to pick birthdays. Duo picks Halloween because it amuses him. Heero would have selected January 1^st just because it’s literally the first day he can pick and Heero might be sensitive, but he’s not really sentimental. Duo suggests March 21^st instead. He tells Heero that it’s because having a birthday on New Year’s Day would basically obligate his friends to make a big deal of it, and also closely associate his birthday with the ends of the Eve Wars.

Both those reasons are true, but they aren’t the real reason. The real reason Duo suggested it was because it’s the beginning of spring. It’s the equinox—a day of balance and rebirth. It’s sacred in religions the world over as a day of new beginnings. He thinks it’s appropriate for Heero, and he thinks Heero knows why Duo really suggested it, because he agrees to it, but only after giving Duo a very long look.

In what must be a fucking record, their paperwork is through in a month, and they are moving into their apartment in Brussels. It’s the first lease either of them have ever signed, and it takes a call from Une herself to the new landlord to confirm that Duo and Heero really are Preventers and they really are adults under the Old Souls Statute. It’s an older home, but aside from some pretty ugly tiles in the bathroom and some laughably awful striped wallpaper in the entry, it’s almost unnecessarily big for the two of them at a little over 800 square feet. It’s on the second floor with no balcony, so the risks of anyone unknown coming in are minimal. It’s five minutes from pretty much anywhere they’d possibly want to walk to and the metro, so a car is unnecessary. It’s far from the most expensive place on the market, and they have more than adequate funds to cover it just from what they stole from OZ over the War, but it’ll also be well within their means based on their Preventer salaries, but it’s still the biggest real-world purchase either have ever made, and they’re both nervous and giddy about the commitment.

They clear the so-called basic training with scores that will stand for years, but only because Duo makes a bet with Heero to see how exactly they can match the scores without going over. If Heero loses, he’s not allowed to touch work or a work laptop outside of business hours for a month. If Duo loses, he has to rewire the apartment, because the wiring is probably decades out of date if it isn’t an outright fire hazard, but the plaster walls in the apartment are original, and Duo really doesn’t want to tear into them all over the place to replace the wiring, if for no other reason than refinishing them to match will be a nightmare. Heero pretends he wouldn’t care, but Duo knows how OCD he is, and the rewiring project would probably lead to replastering the whole damn apartment, so he is very careful not to beat his initial score.

They submit their suggestions for call signs separately, and Duo deliberately shuffled the stack of forms to make sure his and Heero’s were well separated. He’s delighted when Une approves Duo as Darkside, and Heero as Force. He’s not really sure if he slips that one past her on the grounds of seeing the dark side of the moon from L2, or if she let it through because she has no intention of allowing them to partner.

Hearing that is a rude awakening. Heero read the employee handbook and regulations cover-to-cover, so had Duo, but neither of them had thought that the non-fraternization policy would apply to them. They were Gundam pilots. Not just Gundam pilots—they were the Gundam pilots, pilots 01 and 02. Between them, they had been responsible for two thirds of the Gundam-related casualties, and close to half of those had been joint efforts, which wasn’t including the sheer amount of destruction they had otherwise wreaked. 

Une, to their surprise, holds her ground. She doesn’t want accusations of favoritism, and they had asked to keep their identities anonymous. Duo is ready to just call this whole experiment failed, but Heero has that mission look in his eyes, and he knows that Heero’s doing this, even if Duo’s not.

No way in any hell is Duo letting Heero do this alone, so he sucks it up instead of telling Une what he thinks of her to her face.

He thinks he’s entitled to holding a grudge and reserving judgment. She did have him tortured and tried to have him executed after all.

Wufei has decided to go through this with them, but he goes through faster than they did because he officially existed. Trowa’s poking at it, but is undecided. Quatre is in talks with Une, but neither of them are sure it’s a good idea.

Heero lucks out—or Une just likes him better than Duo—and gets partnered with Wufei. They aren’t what Duo and Heero are, but if you didn’t have that bar set, you’d be hardpressed to believe that there might be a more effective pair. Une is certainly happy with having them paired.

Duo’s first partner is an ex-OZ Special and one of Noin’s former students. Margeaux Ellingshire has all of Noin’s haughtiness and none of her pragmatism to balance it. She is a decent pilot—she was Noin’s student after all—but that’s about all she is, and she doesn’t respect Duo’s skills as a pilot. Not that he has much call to use them in the new job and put her in her privileged place, but the old classism is alive and well in Ms. Ellingshire.

Excuse him—Lady Ellingshire. He’s been corrected. A lot. 

Her call sign is Nightingale. Duo mostly tries to call her just that because forget trying to be friends with his partner, and call signs are not just acceptable but encouraged forms of address. She also decides that Une’s clearly not entirely sane if she made Duo the senior partner in their team, because an uneducated sixteen-year-old brat should not be making life-and-death decisions.

They have a month of what’s basically team bonding where they’re paired up with local law enforcement to get some basics under their belts. Because Preventers is so new and their roles are still being figured out, Une had the bright idea to ingratiate her new troops with law enforcement, since once thing was clear—military background did not equate civilian experience. Sarcasm aside, it was a good idea, but Duo thought that their pair might shoot both Duo and Nightingale to put them out of their collective misery by the time their month-long crash course was done.

Duo gives Clijsters and Niskanen credit because they spent most of their time putting Nightingale in her place, explaining how real-life situations worked, and seem to realize that Duo got it, because within a week they treat him like he knows what he is doing. Duo would take being permanently paired with them any day, but he didn’t join the Belgian police, he joined the Preventers.

Their apparent favoritism is a thorn in Nightingale’s side though. Of course she is being persecuted. It is because she was ex-Oz, and a woman, and Duo starts tuning her out about then.

It would be easier if she was just stupid or lazy to be honest. She’s neither of those things. She’s smart, supereducated, and driven. Sidelined during the war with a freak blown out knee during training, she has something to prove. Considering the fatality rate of mobile suit pilots—and OZ Specials in particular—Duo doesn’t get it. She should feel like she dodged a bullet, ’cause, statistically, if she’d run into a Gundam, her chances of surviving the encounter were around 20% if you go with the optimistic estimate.

Une seems to think she has real promise though because even he doesn’t believe Une partnered Nightingale with him just irritate him. Heero is sympathetic when Duo complains, but he doesn’t really understand. He hasn’t been forced to work with someone who he clearly outclasses before, and he doesn’t have the social awareness to notice or be offended by her snobbery.

The first solo assignment they have together is also the last solo assignment they have together. It isn’t exactly that the assignment should have been simple—it would have been a waste of resources to send someone like him into something truly simple—but it should have been straightforward. They were supposed to scope out a location where a major weapons deal was supposed to go down later that week.

Either someone had spooked and moved up the timeline or someone set them up because they landed in the middle of said deal. Okay, irritating, but hardly the end of the world, at least in Duo’s mind. It’s only when bullets start flying that he realizes Nightingale doesn’t just dislike him—she actively distrusts him. That is a problem when people are shooting at you.

Nightingale goes down with a shot in the vest because she outright ignores Duo when he tries to get her to adequate cover because she’s panicking. From what he can see, she’s not bleeding, so it hurts like a bitch, but she’ll probably live. He’s going to laugh very hard at how utterly unprepared Nightingale is for real violence.

You know, assuming he gets out of this alive, that is. He knows he’s a Preventer, and “kill everyone in your path” isn’t really the MO, but at this point, he thinks it’s time to take the kid gloves off. Shinigami fills him like an old friend, the world graying and going silent, and when he pops up this time, he takes down two traffickers with headshots.

When color and sound bleeds back into the world some time later, he can hear Nightingale crying softly and sirens coming—this kind of shoot-out is loud, and he kind of assumes Nightingale called for backup, but he can’t be sure. He moves carefully through the warehouse, keeping Shini close to the surface, but he doesn’t sense anyone other than himself and Nightingale. If anyone survived, they’re long gone.

Satisfied they’re secure for the moment, he goes back to check on Nightingale.

He isn’t terribly surprised when the first thing she says is “Don’t touch me.”

“Did it get through the vest?” he asks instead, Shini slipping away.

“I… I don’t know,” she admits, tears in her voice, though she’s trying hard to put on a brave face. “I can’t move my arm.”

Since she’s in Preventer navy and the lighting isn’t great, Duo can’t tell if she’s bleeding or not. The jacket isn’t obviously wet, but the scent of gunpowder and blood are thick in the air, and he can’t be sure some isn’t hers.

Resigned, he flips the safety and tucks his gun into the back of his pants, ignoring the shoulder holster for now, and crouches down beside her. She hisses as she tries to move out of his reach, and he sighs.

“We’re about as safe as we can be without backup,” Duo tells her. “I know you don’t trust me, but I have been shot before. You obviously haven’t. I may not be a doctor, but you can at least trust me to tell whether it’s life-threatening or not.”

Duo doesn’t know how he’s the one who ends up feeling like the adult when she has six years on him, but she suddenly looks very young and very scared, and Duo just feels old. Jerkily, she nods, and he reaches forward again. She whimpers as he moves aside the jacket, and gets a good look at where the bullet hit. When he does, he’s impressed she’s not screaming or wailing, because, yeah, that spot in the breastbone—there isn’t a lot of protection there, even with the vest. He can tell just by the way she reacts when he shifts her that the clavicle is broken. Still, he persists, peeling the jacket and her shirt under it aside far enough to see that the vest did its job. The skin around the impact is already terribly discolored, and that’s going to get worse before it gets better, but she should live.

“Okay,” he says, tucking the shirt back in place. “Looks like a bad break, I’m not going to lie. And that shoulder is going to feel like you got kicked by a mule with a grudge probably for a few weeks. I don’t have anything good to stabilize it right now, but it sounds like help is about here, so just rely on the mags.” He turns his attention back out to the rest of the warehouse, letting Shinigami rise again, trying to sense any other life.

In spite of her obvious distress, she asks, “Rely on the mags?”

Duo looks back at her. “Oh,” he realizes. “It’s a Spacer thing. If you get hurt while you’re working on an exterior—or even interior, if you’re in zero-G—you try to stay as still as possible and rely on your magnets. It means…”

“It means let someone else do the heavy lifting?” she guesses, and even though she’s in terrible pain, Duo suddenly understands why Une paired her with him. She has potential.

“Yeah, pretty much that.”

He’s still a bit surprised when he visits Nightingale in the hospital the next day that she welcomes him in. He didn’t really think she’d want to see him, but whether she trusts or likes him or not, it seems the right thing to do.

“You’ve really done this before, haven’t you?” she asks.

Duo scratches the back of his head a little uncomfortable. “Not from this side of the law, no,” he admits. “But more or less?”

“I heard there weren’t any survivors,” she comments, watching him carefully.

He winces because he’d apparently let Shini go a little too far. He has a meeting with Une after this about precisely that. Apparently it’s bad form for the good guys to gun the bad guys down to a man. They had recovered several hundred thousand creds worth of illegal weapons, so Duo still kind of counts it as a win, but he’s not looking forward to his one-on-one with the boss lady.

“I, uh, got a look at your chart,” he throws a thumb over his shoulder toward the door. “Gonna be a rough recovery.”

She goes to shrug and stops with a hiss. “Yeah,” she admits. “But I can handle the recovery.”

“Didn’t doubt it,” Duo says, and it’s even true.

“But I don’t think I can handle being your partner.”

It’s a good thing Duo is leaning against the wall because he might have tripped if he hadn’t been. “Oh?” he asks, not sure if he’s relieved or insulted.

“There’s a reason Une made you the lead agent in our partnership, and I didn’t trust her. I didn’t trust you. I’ve had some time to think, and…” she pauses, taking a breath. “You were… so calm. You didn’t panic. You knew how to handle the situation.”

Duo shrugs this time. “You never know how you’re going to react in a situation like that until you’re in one,” he tells her, because while it’s a cliché, it’s also true. There were people with all the training in the world who still lost their heads in actual combat. “But now you know, and you can adjust it for next time.”

She gives him a look that borders on pitying, and it gets his hackles up. “I don’t want there to be a next time, Duo.”

He thinks it’s the first time she’s actually called him by his name, and if she wanted to throw him, that is a great way to do it. “O…kay…?” he says, not sure if it’s a question or not. He doesn’t know how to feel because he is finally starting to think this might be okay, and she clearly doesn’t.

“You… you were so…” She huffs, as if her inability to articulate herself is his fault. “You live in a world like that.” He nods slowly, acknowledging it, because it’s true, but he’s not sure where he’s going yet. “I was sitting there, wondering if I might permanently lose my arm because I didn’t listen to you, and I realized…” She meets his eyes, fearless, and there’s the haughtiness he’d become so familiar with. “I don’t want to be there again. I didn’t get to fight in the war, and… maybe I got lucky when I tore my ACL. I buried a lot of friends, and I still didn’t get it, didn’t get that if I hadn’t been hurt, it could have been me in one of those coffins.” She seems a little disgusted, but this time, it isn’t with Duo.

Duo pulls his braid around to play with the ends because he gets it now. She is twenty-two, but she still had that kid’s belief in their own invincibility. That belief was stripped from Duo before he had a name. He knows better than most that anyone can die at any time, but he’s also learned how to live with that reality. She’s not there yet.

“If I’d been with someone less skilled than you, would I have even survived? Or would I have been gunned down?” she asks.

“You were with me,” he replies with another shrug, You would be with me next time too, he wants to say, but he knows she doesn’t want to hear it.

“Yeah,” she agrees, looking down at her hands, and the silence grows heavy. “It’s not that I don’t want to be there with you,” she blurts, as if she has to get it out right now. “It’s that I don’t want to be there at all.”

“Okay,” he says, and this time he means it. It is okay, because he knows not everyone is cut out to live this kind of life, willing to step into rooms where bullets will be flying.

“I can serve Preventers in other capacities than as a field agent,” she continues, and he knows that she hasn’t heard him. “I just…”

Duo pushes off the wall and goes to the bed, putting a hand on her ankle. “Margeaux,” he says, stealing her trick to get her attention. She looks up at him, and her eyes are tear-rimmed, but not red. There’s no wavering in them, no confusion. “It’s okay,” he says again, making sure she hears him this time. “It is. I get it—it’s not personal. To be honest, I’d rather be out there on my own than out there with someone who doesn’t want to be there. You gotta do what’s right for you, kid,” he says, and reaches out to wipe away a tear that escaped her best efforts to contain it. He’s horrified when it makes her start crying in earnest. She grabs his wrist, so he can’t leave. At a loss, he just pets her hair, helpless, and lets her cry.

Une reads him the riot act for killing all of the suspects. He realizes after about a minute that she’s not actually upset with him, and pretty much tunes her out after that. It’s the first time he’s getting this lecture, but he’s sure it won’t be the last. When she realizes he’s not listening, she cuts herself off and says, “I understand Agent Nightingale intends to pursue other opportunities within the organization.”

He assumes that’s fancy-speak for “she wants a desk job,” but just says, “Yes, ma’am.”

“I only spoke with her briefly, but she had nothing but praise for your cool head under pressure.” She’s looking at him like she can’t figure him out, and he has no idea why, since he’s the one who called her a psycho bitch to her face when she literally held his life in her hands. Did she really think a little shoot-out with some gun runners would upset him?

“That’s good?” he says, not sure if it’s a question or not, because he’s not sure if she is complimenting him or not. 

She sighs, visibly annoyed. Duo mentally gives himself a point, because he hadn’t even really done anything, and she’s still exasperated.

“I want your report—detailed—on my desk by end of day tomorrow. Otherwise, go home, Darkside. You’re on desk duty until your gun clears and I find another partner for you.”

“Whatever you say, lady,” he says, agreeable, and another point for him, because her mouth totally just twitched. He turns to go before she steals some points back and reminds him she’s only a facsimile of a human being.

Just before he reaches the door, she says, “Maxwell.”

He turns back, head tilted in curiosity because she doesn’t sound angry.

“Keep up the good work.”

He grins, and gives her a mock salute, deciding maybe she is actually a human being as he dashes out before she can change her mind.

When Heero gets home late that evening, Duo is curled up on the couch, a towel wrapped around his hair in a puddle on the arm. His report—or part of it, anyway—is on the coffee table, given up as the news about Tony Stark stepping down as CEO of Stark Industries, appointing his previous secretary as CEO in his place, plays.

“Welcome home,” he says, turning his attention to Heero. He looks tired, but there’s also a satisfaction about him that Duo recognizes as mission accomplished.

“Tadaima,” Heero returns, setting his bag next to the kitchen counter before making a beeline to Duo. Duo budges over automatically as Heero picks up the towel and hair, and settles in behind him, squeezing the last bits of water from it. Without a word, Duo hands him the wet brush off the coffee table. Heero tosses the towel on the back of the couch, and takes the wet mess in his hands, starting at the bottom.

“Mission go well?” Duo asks because Heero still isn’t great at small talk.

“Ah,” he confirms. “I’ll let you read the report when I’m done with it.”

Duo smiles because it had been a requirement of doing this crazy thing—no matter Preventer regulations, they wouldn’t keep things from one another. They had to keep each other in check, and keep Une in check by extension.

He opens his mouth to ask another question, when Heero surprises him. “How’d it go with Une?”

“Surprisingly well,” he admits. “Still feel like the other shoe’s gotta drop, but for now, what is it Tro says? No looking gift horses in mouths?”

“And Nightingale?”

“She’ll be fine, except for wanting a desk job. Between my gun getting cleared and Une assigning another partner, I’m probably going to be out of the field for a few weeks,” he admits.

Heero grabs the towel to wring a bit of the excess water out of the ends before he continues working his way up. “Good,” he says, because he’s heard enough about Margeaux’s temperament to distrust her outright. He hadn’t been excited to hear about them going in the field together. Duo didn’t enlighten him as to how much Margeaux had distrusted him. There was no point now—it would just piss Heero off and give him no outlet.

When he gets up to the scalp, Duo hmms in contentment, the day’s tension draining away. They sit in silence for long, comfortable minutes as Heero works and Duo relishes the attention and simple intimacy.

Heero finishes and sets the brush aside before moving Duo’s damp hair over a shoulder and placing a kiss on the nape of Duo’s neck. Duo leans back into him, reaching behind him to pull his arms around his waist. He traces the kana for love you on Heero’s arm, knowing Heero will understand it. Heero’s not good with spoken endearments, but Duo watches as Heero traces the kana for mi and the kanji for two on Duo’s forearm, copying Duo’s original response from the first time Heero traced the suki on Duo’s skin. He smiles and spins in Heero’s arms, meeting ocean-deep eyes.

“Missed you,” he says, moving forward, shifting himself into Heero’s lap.

Amusement dances in Heero’s eyes, even though only a small grin twists at his lips. His fingers are warm and firm on Duo’s waist, one hand slipping up under his shirt to play with the waist of his shorts. “Did you?” he asks, and only the last year of living together allows Duo to hear the teasing in it.

Duo presses closer, letting their chests collide, enjoying having the temporary height advantage a he raises his hands to tangle in Heero’s thick, unruly hair.

“Yeah,” he confirms. “Sure did.”

“How much?” Heero asks.

Duo leans his forehead down to Heero’s and he watches as Heero’s pupils grow. “So much,” he admits because it’s true. It’s only been four days, but it’s the first time they’ve been apart for so long since the war, and he didn’t realize how much he missed him until he had Heero in his arms again. Suddenly, the clothing separating them is too much—anything separating them is too much. He kisses Heero, hard and deep, pouring everything he is, everything he feels into it. Heero returns it, his body articulating his feelings better than he can with words. When they break, Duo asks, “Here?”

Heero actually growls, and, fuck it is hot when he does that. Then he surges, standing with Duo as if he weighs no more than a pillow. “Bed,” he says firmly, walking toward the bedroom, and Duo wraps his legs around him to make it easier, even though Heero could carry his dead weight just as easily.

“Yes, sir,” he replies cheekily, just to get that look from Heero that says he’s going to wipe that grin off Duo’s face.

Duo laughs and looks forward to it.

Chapter Text

Duo’s second partner is Thuy Truong, call sign Amaranth. Considering the color of her hair, he thinks it’s a little on the nose, but Une clears the call signs, not him. She’s tiny, generously listed as 5’1” on her file, but she’s ex-Alliance and an acquaintance of Sally’s, so Duo is cautiously optimistic.

Thuy has a at least a decade in age on him, but she’s somehow both easygoing and exacting. She doesn’t let Duo be lazy, but she also is about a thousand times more willing to listen to Duo’s experience and opinions than Margeaux was. They seem to work well together, but there’s something about her that makes Shini stir under his skin. She smiles a lot, but they never reach her eyes, and despite how well they seem to work together, Duo keeps his guard up.

At least, it’s great at the office. Because between Duo’s wait time to get his gun back—and to be cleared by the office shrinks, hadn’t that been a blast?—and their “bonding” time, it takes a month before they’re finally let into the field on their own. They had been given half a dozen different files to look into, and Duo’s instincts say the mobile suit parts finding their way into the States is the priority. Thuy accepts the gut feeling at face value, and they decide to check it out.

Thuy may be small, but she lifts weights like beast, and her shoulders are bulked out in such a way that is borderline comical on such a tiny frame. The problem is that Duo is sixteen and looks it. Thuy might be the opposite side of thirty, but she looks like she could be sixteen. Duo finds that getting anyone to take them seriously as a pair is a challenge, regardless of the validity of their credentials. The Old Souls Statute is still new, and people aren’t that familiar with it or what it means, or how teenagers emancipated under it fit into society.

Duo is used to being underestimated, but having legitimate authority for the first time in his life and still getting treated like some uppity brat grates. Thuy helps because she’s got a decade more experience dealing with people who think she’s a kid under her belt. Duo suffers through it for a week, venting to Heero every chance he gets before he decides that going about this one the official way just isn’t going to work. He and Heero reread guidelines and make sure that there’s nothing that doesn’t allow them to go incognito. It’s fine as long as they’re not actively trespassing or breaking any laws, and declare themselves if challenged, which is exactly what Duo needs.

If they’re going to be treated like uppity kids anyway, Duo figures they may as well play the part. Thuy seems unsure, but ultimately shrugs and goes along with it, so Duo takes Thuy with him to get information from the fringes.

Thuy, to Duo’s surprise, is seriously uncomfortable around working girls and boys, both of whom find her adorable. So, maybe Duo shouldn’t be that surprised, if this is the typical reaction Thuy gets. It only takes Duo about half an hour to realize it’s deeper than discomfort. He still has more he wants to ask, more corners he wants to check out, but no way is it going to be productive with Thuy so painfully uncomfortable and out of place. He suggests going back to the office and calling it an evening. Wufei and Heero are out of town—yet again—so Duo can go back out later. Thuy will probably give him her disapproving face, but Duo’s instincts are telling him that this is important, and he remembers well how much crooks like to brag to their lays, even if they’re paying for their time.

“I’m sorry,” Thuy blurts when they’re probably about two blocks from headquarters.

“About what?” Duo asks, playing dumb.

“I just… I’m not…”

“Thuy, you don’t have to explain,” Duo assures. He’s pretty sure he already knows why Thuy’s so uncomfortable, and if Thuy doesn’t talk about it, Duo doesn’t want to push. He’s not ashamed of turning tricks himself. After all, he stopped when he was twelve-ish, so on the rare occasion anyone tries to give him grief about it, they usually end up looking like a monster. But he doesn’t share the information freely either, for obvious reasons. Even so, he is an L2 orphan; plenty of people assume based on that fact alone, and he’s very familiar with common responses to sexual trauma.

“No, you needed to get information, and you had a way to do it, and my presence fucked it up,” Thuy says, and her voice is only gravelly because of a three-pack-a-day habit. “And we’re partners.”

“We’ve been partners for a month. You don’t have to spill all your secrets to me based on that.”

“It’s just… I’m ace,” Thuy says, unwilling to be put off. “Overt sexuality… makes me very uncomfortable.”

Duo blinks. “That’s it?” He doesn’t mean to say that, but it’s really what he’s thinking. Thuy bends her head like she’s embarrassed, but Duo gets the distinct feeling he’s being lied to. “That’s really it?”

“Yes,” Thuy confirms.

Duo blows his bangs up in irritation, both because he doesn’t believe her and because he hates being lied to. It’s not even a good lie, which is extra irritating. He knows Thuy is a better liar than this because he’s seen her do it. He’s not even sure her problem is a past trauma anymore. Before she blurted out that ace thing, she read as a trauma victim, but she’s not now, as if now that she’s got an excuse, the ruse isn’t necessary. 

Annoyed enough to let it creep into his voice, he says, “Okay. Then here’s what we’re doing. You’re going back to the office, and if you can get some warrants drawn up so when I have more information, we can move on it right away, that’d be great. I’m going to go back and talk to some more people.”

Thuy frowns. “You shouldn’t be out there on your own.”

Duo refrains from pulling his braid, but only just. Things had been going, well not well, but okay. Something about the prostitutes threw Thuy, and whatever mask or part she’d been playing, she’s lost track of it. It’s the first time in a month of working together she’s showing what could be called matronly concern, and it rings hollow. He doesn’t want to tell her that, though, because he doesn’t know how she’ll react to being called out. Psychopaths or sociopaths, or whatever the technical term is—they’re all dangerous and unpredictable when they feel exposed.

“Yeah, well, you’re not going to be any help. I can take care of myself,” he tells her instead.

“I didn’t mean to—”

He puts up a hand to stop her. “I don’t mean to trivialize, but you’re an adult. Figure out how to deal with it, or figure out how to be okay with me dealing with it.” Thuy looks like she’s going to be stubborn, and Duo’s patience is officially out. Heero’s going to be out of town liaising with at a training thing run by SHIELD for international law enforcement, for at least a week, and already the thought of going home to the empty apartment is making Duo’s skin crawl almost as much as Thuy’s patently false concern is. “Either you trust me to be an adult enough to be your partner, or you don’t. You can’t cherry-pick when it’s okay for me to be an adult and when it’s not.”

It’s dangerously close to calling her out, but it also gives her an out. He doesn’t wait for an answer, instead turning on his heel and going back the way they came.

Thuy, to her credit, lets him go, but Shini doesn’t settle until there are at least four blocks between them.

Duo gets the lead they need, and they make a round of successful arrests three days later, though not without Duo chasing down a fleeing suspect and managing to bring them down next to an overflowing trash bin. Because that’s how Duo’s luck is going, he is covered in filth and doesn’t even have any friends around to commiserate with. Headquarters is closer, so Duo uses the showers there, not thinking much of it.

At least, he doesn’t think anything of it until Thuy finds him as he’s getting dressed in a spare uniform. He’s got his pants on, but he’s still trying to get the worst of the water out of his hair before bothering to put a shirt on.

He doesn’t turn around because Thuy has a particular energy that’s unique, and she’s easy for Duo to pick out in a crowd, which would actually be really useful during missions because Duo usually can’t pick out individuals like that, except it’s also really creepy. “I know there’s fuckton of paperwork to do, but do you mind if I wait until tomorrow?” he asks.

When Thuy doesn’t answer, he sighs, turns around, and pulls up short at the look on Thuy’s face. “What? Is something wrong? Did someone get hurt?” he asks, because he can’t quite put a name to that look, he just knows that there’s no reason for her to look that… shocked? Horrified? Is that even a little bit of pleasure in that mix? Whatever it is, Duo isn’t interested in being its focus.  

“Your back,” she says, and Duo blinks dumbly for a minute before he remembers, feeling really fucking stupid.

Because now he feels really uncomfortable, he grabs his shirt out of the locker and pulls it on, foregoing an undershirt, instead buttoning up the gray dress shirt. “Better?” he asks, temper on edge.

“I—” Thuy begins. “I didn’t mean you needed to put a shirt on. I just… your back…”

“Yeah, it’s pretty ugly,” he concedes. He’s really not that vain, but he knows what he looks like and there is a tiny place in his mind that remembers when being pretty literally saved his life, literally paid to feed kids littler than him. While his face is still plenty pretty, the rest of the package didn’t survive the war so well, and there is a small place inside of him that is always going to be afraid that he doesn’t have that to fall back on anymore. He knows it’s irrational—he has more money skimmed from OZ accounts than he could spend in a lifetime. Even if something happened to that, he has friends who would never let him go back to the streets, much less to turning tricks. He has skills that could get him by in a thousand other ways than on his back.

Still, the reminder is like poking a bruise.

“How did…”

“Look,” Duo interrupts, then stops and takes a breath, realizing he’s not reacting normally. Heero’s been gone for four days and he’s not due back for at least another three, and even Duo is noticing that his temper gets shorter the longer Heero is gone. “Look,” he starts again, a little more patient. “It’s old news. Did you need something?” he asks, hoping to calm her as well.

Thuy is staring at him like she’s never seen him before, and Duo just… doesn’t get it. “Tomorrow is fine,” Thuy finally says, and pats his shoulder awkwardly, like she doesn’t know how to normally touch people. It occurs to Duo that’s it the first time she has touched him since they shook hands when they were introduced. “Good work today.”

Duo is sure that his confusion is plain on his face but he just says, “Yeah, sure. See ya tomorrow.”

Two weeks later, after another two successful assignments, Thuy asks for a transfer. Duo would like to say he’s surprised, but it’d be a lie. Things have been awkward in the field ever since that first mission, and it’s carried over into the office. The early easy camaraderie is gone, and Thuy’s ability to play a part seems to have gone with it. They’re still effective together, but the personality swings mean that Duo is relieved when Thuy asks for the transfer.  

“What happened this time, Darkside?” Une asks when he flops into a chair across from her to discuss the transfer.

“You’d have to ask Amaranth,” he says, because Thuy cleared the shrinks, so saying my partner is a psychopath probably isn’t going to fly with Une.

Une flips through a few pages in what looks like their most recent file—an extension of the original mobile parts smuggler case. “This was good work. You work well together. Why is Amaranth requesting a transfer to the colonies?” she asks again. She’s giving him her sternest glare, but it’s a pale ghost of the one she’d given him when having him tortured and gleefully telling him about his scheduled execution, so Duo just can’t be bothered to be impressed.

“I told you to ask Amaranth,” he tells her.

“I did. She said that she wasn’t comfortable with your methods of information collection. How did you come across this information, anyway?” she asks. “You just list anonymous sources. Tell me you weren’t hacking—”

“Black fucking—no,” he assures, angry because he’s damn sure that has nothing to do with her transfer request. “I just did some rounds with the local working girls and boys. These guys aren’t masterminds, and stupid crooks talk to their whores ’cause they don’t have anyone else to talk to.”

“And you would know this, because?” she asks, leaving it open-ended, continuing to flip through the file. When he doesn’t answer, she glances up and actually looks taken aback by his flat look. “Oh,” she says, closing the file.

“Yeah,” Duo says dryly. “Oh.”

She sighs and reaches to push up glasses she doesn’t wear anymore.

“There’s nothing in any guidelines I could find that say there’s anything wrong with drumming up information from whores as long as I’m not actually fucking them for it,” he points out.

“There’s nothing wrong with it at all,” she agrees. “It’s a little unconventional, perhaps, but obviously it worked, and aside from the anonymous sources—which you can obviously provide if you needed to—everything is above board. I have no complaints. So I don’t understand why I need to end such an effective partnership.”

“You are asking the wrong part of the equation,” Duo tells her. “If you don’t need anything else?”

She goes to push up glasses and changes the motion at the last minute to rub her nose instead. “Dismissed, Darkside.”

Duo pops out of the chair and doesn’t waste time beating a retreat, only to be brought up just short of the door again. “One other thing, Darkside.”

He doesn’t sigh or roll his eyes, and considers it a win. “Ma’am?”

“Desk duty until I can find a new partner for you.”

A half dozen quippy responses jump to mind, but he’s still not sure Crazy Une isn’t in there somewhere, and he’s not willing to push just yet. “Yes, ma’am.”

He doesn’t wait for another dismissal to leave.

“So what exactly did you do this time, Maxwell?” Wufei is having dinner with them tonight in what is becoming a regular thing. Wufei enjoys good food, but he can’t be bothered to cook for himself. Duo enjoys cooking, but Heero will eat things even Duo would think twice about, so he takes a bit of the fun out of it. Having Wufei over at least once a week—when they’re in town—to let Duo destress and cook for someone who actually appreciates it is a mutually beneficial arrangement.

Most days.

When Wufei’s not being a prick.

“This is not my fault,” he snaps, pointing the cooking chopsticks in Wufei’s direction. It’s just stir fry tonight, nothing fancy.

“Of course not,” Wufei says in that arrogant tone that is perfectly calibrated to make someone want to punch his lights out.

“You know, you can leave. You have your own apartment.”

“It would be a waste of food,” Wufei sniffs.

“Leftovers are a thing, Wuffles,” Duo retorts drolly, and definitely enjoys the mental impression Wufei gives of a cat with its hair on end. He uses that one sparingly because the reaction is sure thing.

“Amaranth saw your scars and is uncomfortable working with you,” Heero says, and Duo’s mouth about hits the floor, because Heero never knows gossip better than he does.

“What the fuck makes you say that?” he demands.

“I dug in Amaranth’s files—her Alliance files. Apparently the torture technique that gave you your scars is distinctive, and Amaranth recognized it.”

For a moment, the scent of the stir fry reminds him of the smell of his own skin frying as it was peeled from his back in strips. He shoves that memory back into its mental box, slamming the door firmly before he loses his appetite. It was just pain. A lot of pain, true, but just pain. It had only the power he gave it, and he tries to never let mere physical pain control him. Emotional pain is another thing entirely.

“Why would she recognize a torture technique?” Duo asks, confused once he’s got the memories locked back down.

“Never mind that—Yuy, why would you hack another agent’s pre-Preventers files?” Wufei interrupts.

“Because she helped develop it,” Heero answers Duo first, and Duo flinches, ’cause, yeah, that explains a lot actually. It makes his stomach twist to know he’d been working—and working well—with the person who had thought up that particular nastiness. If Thuy tested that horror on prostitutes, it would explain her discomfort around them too. “And of course I look into anyone who is partnering Duo,” he adds to Wufei as if it should be obvious. The indignation of the response makes Duo smile, and keeps his head in the now.

Wufei snorts. “Has anyone told you two that you’re paranoid?” he asks, and something about his tone makes Duo think it’s an observation he’s made before, but he meets Duo’s eyes with a silent question—are you okay?

Duo beats Heero to the punch and quips, “It’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you.” Just because, he pitches a piece of zucchini at Wufei, who catches it and promptly munches it—the bastard—but he also gives Wufei a small nod.

“I doubt she knows you’re a pilot though,” Heero continues. “I think she just doesn’t want to risk you finding out.”

“Yeah, well, she’s a psycho anyway, so probably for the best,” Duo says, tossing the chicken back into the wok, followed by the sauce to finish it off.

Duo listens to the strong, steady whooshing of Heero’s heart, already back to its normal rhythm, as the sweat cools on his skin. He can barely feel Heero tracing the scars on his back with his fingertips, not because Heero is being gentle, but because the scar tissue is thick and the burns left a lot of permanent nerve damage.

He can hear the wheels turning in Heero’s head, so he laces his fingers together on Heero’s chest and props his chin on them so he can see Heero’s face better. Heero tilts his head in a silent question, fingers stilling.

“Not a mind reader,” Duo reminds, since Heero often seems to doubt the honesty of that statement. “I can just tell when you’ve got something on your mind,” he says.

Heero snorts, disbelieving, but his fingers continue on their lazy trails again. “It’s nothing.”

Duo raises an eyebrow. “You really should be a much better liar than you are,” he points out, and gets a tiny quirk of a smile before his eyes grow serious.

“I should have told you about Amaranth,” he says.

“Do I seem upset to you?” Duo asks.

“No, but—”

“No buts. We’ve got a deal, remember? I’m not going to hide if I’m upset, especially if it’s with you. Should you have told me?” He shrugs a shoulder. “Maybe. I don’t know that it makes a lot of difference. I’m sure Sally doesn’t know, or she wouldn’t have recommended her. And as awful as it is that she… did whatever she did to design that damn thing, or came up with the idea for it, or whatever, she’s not the one who hurt me.” Heero doesn’t look placated. “Do they bother you?” Duo asks. It’s a minor miracle he only spent a few weeks recovering from that torture and not months—yay for being G’s experimental guinea pig—but there are a lot of places where the scar tissue is so dense, it wouldn’t even look like skin if it weren’t for the coloring, and Heero sees those scars more than anyone else by a wide margin.

“No,” Heero says simply, his hands still moving as if mapping each one.

“They’re pretty ugly,” Duo admits, trying to get more of Heero’s thoughts, because Heero will kiss them sometimes during sex, and on extremely rare occasions, he traces them like this, but he’s never said anything about them one way or another.

He feels Heero shrug more than sees it. “They’re part of you,” he says, as if it’s that simple. It eases the little bit of tension from around Duo’s heart. “Besides…”

He trails off, and Duo waits patiently for at least a minute before he realizes Heero isn’t going to continue without prodding. “Besides?”

Duo can’t tell in the dark, but Heero usually only averts his eyes like that when he’s embarrassed, so Duo thinks he might be blushing. If he was curious before, he’s practically dying now. He raises his head off his hands, and the shift makes it awkward for Heero to keep tracing his back. His hands settle on Duo’s waist instead. “Besides?” he asks again.

Heero sighs, only audible because the room is so silent. “They remind me of wings,” he finally says. He lifts a hand to trace it from the stripe up the center of Duo’s back, to follow it up and around his trapezius muscles, then back down the ribs. Mentally following the motion, Duo can picture it, and huh. He’d never noticed that the stripes seemed to make a pattern, but he can see why Heero thinks they look like wings.

He shifts, moving to straddle Heero more fully and sit up, so he can look down at Heero without straining. “Heero Yuy,” he begins, “Are you saying you think my scars are beautiful?” His voice is laced with teasing, but he’s not sure Heero will hear it. He’s still not always great at catching tonal nuances.

Heero’s hands resettle on his hips, but he looks away again, and this time Duo is sure he’s blushing. “They’re part of you, aren’t they?” he says, a little grumpy.

Duo takes his chin and leans down, kissing him, sweet but claiming, and he can feel Heero’s interest stir as they kiss. The kisses grow deeper and dirtier. Duo shifts and rubs up against Heero, quickly catching up. Supersoldier refractory periods could give a less secure guy a complex, but Duo’s pretty good at making the most of it, and he breaks their kiss to move down Heero’s cheek to his ear.

He breathes, “Need you,” into Heero’s ear, enjoying the way he feels Heero respond to that. His fingers flex on Duo’s waist when Duo fastens his mouth to that sensitive spot right at the join of the jaw. He makes sure Heero’s going to have a mark there in the morning, even if it’ll probably be gone by dinner, and Heero lifts him enough to get himself positioned better. Duo’s still relaxed from the previous round, so Heero slips in without much resistance, though Duo has to brace himself on Heero’s chest and catch his breath as he’s filled. There’s something about that first stretch that’s always a little more intense than he expects, as if his memory can’t retain the real feeling.

“Okay?” Heero asks when he’s fully seated. He almost always checks on Duo, compulsively making sure Duo is okay, and it warms Duo’s heart.

He pushes himself back up, sitting up straighter, driving Heero a little deeper, and sighs into the feeling. When he can think again, he meets Heero’s eyes and grins, eyes lidded, and gathers his hair up before letting it fall, cascading around them both. Heero’s hips give an unconscious jerk, and his eyes are all but black, the pupils are blown so wide. Duo is the only one who can do this to him—the only one who gets to see Heero Yuy like this, and it’s a rush all of its own.

“Wings, huh?” he asks, and his voice is low with his own arousal. He puts his hands on Heero’s abdomen and can feel his skin pimple under his touch. “Let’s see if I can make us fly, then.”

Chapter Text

Partner number 3 is Kairo Inthavong—call sign Quasar. He’s a rebel colonist, originally from L1, and as full of energy as his call sign suggests. He makes Duo tired, and that’s saying something, especially since Quasar is twenty-five. Duo doesn’t want to imagine what he was like when he was younger.

The two-week bonding period goes by in a flash, if only because Duo is looped into half a dozen seemingly random things, mostly because of the breadth of his experience. Heero and Wufei are only home three days in seven, and it’s draining them all.

Une has already figured out that Duo has a decided knack for unearthing smugglers. The type doesn’t really matter—between his L2 background and time with the Sweepers, he’s pretty intimately familiar with how smugglers work across the board. He admits to deprioritizing the “harmless” ones out of existence to focus on the dangerous ones—the people and arms and drugs smugglers. They aren’t usually terrorists per se, but their clientele usually are—especially when talking about arms smugglers. People just looking to protect themselves aren’t usually doing it through illegal means or in bulk.

Which is why Quasar and Duo are in Afghan deserts in fucking June, trying to make contact with a smuggling ring, posing as buyers. Quasar is some mix of African and Asian descent—colonists don’t tend to treasure their Earth ancestry as much as dirtside immigrants, and he’s third gen, so the specifics are a little foggy—and while his features aren’t quite right for the area, his coloring is close enough to pass casual muster. Duo’s language is good enough to clear as a translator. He’s never been so grateful for those weeks in the desert with Quat and the Magnuacs, because he’s got enough high-brow and low-brow dialects that he’s pretty much covered unless someone starts getting super technical.

Quasar may be a human perpetual motion machine—Duo kind of can’t wait to introduce him to Wufei just so he appreciates how much Duo has calmed down in the last couple of years—but he’s also street-savvy, which is nice. He’s nowhere near Duo’s level, but he’s capable enough that Duo doesn’t feel like he needs to micromanage him.

That said, he’s really terrible at undercover work. He isn’t very believable as Duo’s employer, and Duo’s gut says that’s going to be a problem. Regardless of the rest of the Earth Sphere cooperating, there are a still a few countries that haven’t gotten the “we’re all in this together” notice, and continue waging their own personal wars on themselves and their near neighbors. Afghanistan is definitely one of them, and where they are, there’s a decent amount of distrust, even outright hostility to outsiders. Even if Quasar’s face passes muster, his exuberance is entirely out of sync with the local population.

Which just means that when they get grabbed and towed out to the desert to be interrogated, Duo isn’t honestly surprised. If it had just been Duo, he could have gotten away, but Quasar takes some sort of taser and goes down like a log and there’s no way Duo’s abandoning the kid.

A different taser gets Duo. It hurts, but it doesn’t knock him out, and they obviously think it should. He plays dead because it gives him an advantage and he hopes they’ll talk while they think he’s out.

They do, but very little. The leader is disciplined, and Duo is known to be a translator, so they’re not taking risks, which is irritating. They’ve stripped him of some of his favorite knives and his gun, but he’s never unarmed. That said, the gundamium blades and needles under his skin are a last resort.

They tie them both up, and they’re not bad at it, but they’re not really good at it either. Duo doesn’t need anything more than dislocating a thumb to get out of them. That trick hasn’t even hurt in years. They also make the mistake of starting in on Quasar, which gives Duo more room to work. They’re not being gentle, but they aren’t anywhere near harming him yet, so Duo evaluates…

And it’s going to suck. He probably should have made a move before they got into the caves, but Quasar had still been out cold, and Duo’s strong, but even he can’t fight his way out of this many armed people with a dead weight that has a solid seventy pounds on him. He also isn’t sure how together Quasar will be once he gets them free. He’s, well, he’s normal. He might be even badass normal by most standards, but he’s not a Gundam pilot, and the very best Duo is hoping for is “not a liability.” That’s what he’s hoping for, not what he’s counting on.

Taking in their odds, he’s wondering if he should have put their safety first before the mission and kept them from being taken all together. It would have probably tanked the mission, let the group know that they were exposed, and forced them to move on, but Duo isn’t loving the way the table is laying right now.

The big thing going in their favor is that these guys—aside from one or two who seem to be in charge—are really common desert thugs. They have big guns, and part of why Duo doesn’t like guns is because any fucking idiot can kill with them, no actual skill and minimal training required, but they aren’t likely well-trained with them, and if they manage to hurt or kill either Duo or Quasar, it’s as likely to be on accident as on purpose.

Won’t make them less dead, which is actually a little bit of insult to injury, but at least he’s not dealing with pros. Pros could deal with surprises. Amateurs, not so much. And he’s seen enough explosives in this cave to make a hell of a surprise.

Quasar is being beat pretty soundly, but so far, he’s not giving anything up, which is somewhat impressive until Duo remembers he was Rebellion. There hadn’t been a lot of them, and their primary functions had often been keeping the Gundams and their pilots supplied and moving, but every one that Duo met had iron resolve. You had to, to be willing to stand up to the Alliance and OZ. Seeing it in Quasar under these circumstances is a nice surprise.

“Go get something a little more persuasive,” the guy in charge tells the lackey, pulling out a knife. He lifts Duo’s head by his bangs. Annoying, but he’s made a fatal error in leaving himself alone with Duo and Quasar.

He’s playing with a knife at Duo’s throat, as if it’s supposed to be a threat, but Shinigami has been waiting, barely contained, as Duo assessed. He doesn’t sink into Shini as much as let it take him over, and between one blink and the next, the world has gone gray and silent.

Duo doesn’t remember taking the knife from the man, but it’s in his hand and shoved up between the ribs. A twist of the handle shreds his heart, and he smiles as the man falls, silent. He is one of the only competent ones Duo had seen, so that’s one major threat down. He went through a lung too, when getting to the heart, and the man can’t even scream or gasp. He’s probably dead within 30 seconds of hitting the floor. Duo examines the knife—an oversized and overly elaborate piece of work, but it’s got a really nice edge on it, and it will do for now.

He goes to free the other one—the name escapes him at the moment since Shini could barely be bothered to recognize Heero and the other pilots; random partner number three is lucky it recognizes him as “friendly”—and watches as he recoils from Duo.

There’s just enough of Duo present to realize that’s not a good reaction, and he forces Shini down, enough for sound to come back, enough to speak. He needs to calm down his partner, needs to plan, and he needs to speak to do that. And Shinigami does not speak.

“Can you walk?” he asks. Quasar—the name is back, for now at least— is beat up, but nothing severe to the head and nothing done to his legs yet, so he should be mobile.

“Yeah,” Quasar says, rubbing his wrists. Duo’s are a little raw just because the rope had been rough, but it barely registered before letting Shinigami out, and he’s not feeling it at all at the moment.

Duo leaves him to feel out how badly he’s injured and checks the body, pulling off both a handgun and the AK-47. “You know how to use this?” he asks, holding up the AK.

Quasar stands and nods, so Duo hands it to him, tucking the handgun into the back of his own pants. This guy doesn’t have his knives, which is annoying, but he thinks he saw where they were put down, and it’s on their way out, so hopefully he can recover them. His gun is standard Preventers issue, so if he loses it, no big deal, but the knives are custom, edged in gundanium. They can cut through even most metals like a laser, and though they’re not as irreplaceable as the ones in his arms, losing them would suck, a lot. He also finds a phone and a tablet, and he can imagine both of those could be gold mines. He uses the dead man’s fingerprint to unlock the phone, quickly going into the menu and setting his own fingerprint as an alternate so he’ll be able to get in at will later, then tucks it into his pocket. He repeats the process with the tablet, then it goes into his shirt, and it’s going to be awkward, but he doesn’t want to leave it behind and doesn’t have a pocket big enough for it.

“I need you to stay as close to me as possible, watch my back, and we’ll get out of here,” Duo tells Quasar, trying to both ride some of Shini’s power to sense the people outside while still talking. It’s difficult. Shinigami, whatever it is, isn’t human, and it doesn’t think like a human, and it’s hard to remember to be human when he’s using that power.

“I can do that,” Quasar says, keeping his voice down, but the thread of iron will runs in it, and Duo doesn’t look back before moving, embracing Shini.

Duo made a mental map as they were brought in, and being able to sense where people are helps keep them on course. There’s shooting and probably yelling—not that Duo can hear it—and people trying to kill them, but Shini is brutal in its efficiency, and as it always does with these things, the more lives he takes, the stronger Shini seems, the further its power reaches. Duo finds some grenades in the same place his blades were put, and picks them up. He starts throwing them almost at random down side caves, and it causes even more panic and chaos as he feels lives snuff out.

The partner is struggling to keep up, struggling to keep Duo’s back covered. He’s bloody and limping, and Duo doesn’t know when that happened, is only irritated because it slows him down even more, and they should be out of here already.

A man comes up out of a hidden offshoot, and Duo just steps to the side before stabbing him up under the chin and into his brain. Duo drops the blade with the man because it will be a mess to pull it out of his face and they’re almost out and he doesn’t need the knife anymore. He’s got far better.

He barely remembers he needs to make sure the partner is behind him. He can sense him, but his flicker is indistinguishable from every other flicker of life in this cave.

The entrance is just ahead, but Duo grabs the other’s arm and pulls him back. There’s a lot of life just outside of view, and the cave goes from dark to the blinding desert outside. Even Shini’s eyes will take time to adjust to that.

The other is speaking to him, even as Duo is trying to get a count outside. Probably fifteen? That could be a problem. He starts to check out the boxes that are stacked just inside the cave—either it’s new product or it was getting prepped for sale, because there’s a lot here, but just shooting blindly into the people outside isn’t going to do anything.

His arm is grabbed, and there’s no thought, just reaction. He’s got his hand on the other’s throat, ready to tear it out when he realizes that he should know this one. He forces Shini down enough to put Quasar’s name to his face and drops him like he’s on fire. Color bleeds back into the world, though it’s still muted, and he can hear yelling outside the cave, even though he can’t make out the words.

“You can’t grab me like that during a mission,” he tells Quasar, because Shini’s still too close for him to actually be sorry. Later he will be, but getting out of this alive is the primary directive, and being apologetic isn’t going to get them out.

Quasar is coughing and holding his throat, and he looks at Duo with genuine fear.

“Sorry,” Quasar says after a cough, and Duo is back in his own head enough to hear the trembling in it. 

He turns back to find some fun explosives, and grins. That’s definitely one way to deal with the number of people out there. Stark really did make some of the best stuff out there, he thinks as he starts pulling a missile apart.

“What are you doing?” Quasar asks, and there’s something timid in his voice that irritates Duo vaguely, but it’s not important at the moment.

“Making a bomb,” he says shortly, pulling out the payload. He reaches up to the nape of his neck and concentrates for a moment to get a couple of the tools he keeps under the skin there out. It looks remarkably like he keeps them in his hair. “Keep your guard up in case anyone decides to try to come in and start shooting,” Duo tells him. They’re fairly sheltered where they are, but Duo doesn’t want to take chances.

“Wait, a bomb? What are you going to do with it?” Quasar asks.

Duo flicks a glance up, seeing how nervous the kid looks, and manages not to sigh. “There’s at least a dozen guys out there. To get out of here, we have to go through them. Since I don’t have any superhero armor handy, we need to either deplete their number or sneak out. Since this appears to be the only way out, sneaking is pretty much out,” he explains, even as his hands continue working. “So we have to deplete their numbers. I think a bomb will do that nicely.” He looks up. “Are there any nails or other small sharp things over there?” he asks, even as he shifts boxes around and comes up with a bunch of caltrops. Random, but they’ll definitely get the job done. “Never mind,” he adds absently.

“Are you making a frag bomb?”

“There’s a lot of crap around the entrance—plenty of places to hide behind, and the concussive forces from a bomb alone can actually be minimized, even at a relatively close distance, if you have something between you and the concussion. If we want to take them out, a frag grenade is more ideal.”

“Aren’t you worried about sealing us in?” he asks.

“Not really,” Duo admits. “The entrance should be one of the most stable parts of the cave, and we should be able to get out in the chaos.” He pauses to look up at the kid and adds, “If you can keep up.”

It’s hard to tell because the world is still muted, but he thinks Quasar is a little green from more than just the beating. Quasar nods, but it looks like he’s barely aware he does it.

Someone yells into the cave, but Duo can’t be bothered to make it out and Quasar probably can’t understand it anyway. He’s not interested in negotiating. He loads the caltrops and puts the missile back together.

“I think they want to talk,” Quasar says.

“I’m sure they do. They’ve got all the leverage right now,” Duo says, annoyed because it should be obvious.

“But—”

“I’m going to need you to clear me some space,” Duo tells him.

“How do you want me to do that?”

“You’ve got the machine gun—use it to get everyone’s heads down so I can get this off without risking it going off inside the cave.”

“Just…”

“Just spray some fire out there from a covered place so I can get this shot off,” Duo says, and if it sounds like he thinks Quasar is slow, it might be because he does.

“Are you sure we can’t wait for backup?” Quasar asks, and Duo only barely refrains from banging his head on a wall.

“We were kidnapped, you know. No one knows where we are. Finding someone in these deserts is a nightmare. No one is going to be looking for us for at least a day, and it will probably take them a lot longer than that to find us, making the very big assumption that they ever find us. If we want out, it’s up to us. If the body count is an issue for you, it’s literally us or them right now, and they’ll probably torture you to death.”

If Quasar looked kind of ill before, he definitely looks like he’s going to be sick now. Duo doesn’t have time to coddle him. The longer they’re here, the worse their odds are getting, so it’s past time to move. “Are you going to clear a path for me, or not?” he asks.

Quasar visibly swallows, then nods, some of that steel he’d seen before back in place. “I’ve got your back, Darkside.”

It’s the first time when it’s just the two of them that Quasar has called him “Darkside,” and he knows it probably means something, but he can’t be bothered to spare the energy for it. He files it in away for later and gets into position.

The frag bomb works as horrifying well as he meant it to. They still get shot at while they’re running out the moment the last of the shrapnel falls, Shinigami is in full flight, and Duo doesn’t even notice when he takes a gunshot to the calf. They make it to a shitty desert jeep that takes all of five seconds for Duo to hotwire, and then they’re off. Duo tosses a couple remaining grenades at the other vehicles he can see before he puts the pedal to the metal. There’s only the vaguest impression of a road, but Duo can set directions by the sun, and the only direction he has is west, so they chase the sun down.

No one follows them, but that’s not a surprise. In addition to the grenaded vehicles, his bomb had also destroyed or set off other explosives and devices when the caltrops penetrated protected cases, so there probably aren’t a lot of people able to give chase, and even fewer willing. Duo would think twice about chasing after the guy who threw the bomb equivalent of a frag grenade at them.

When they’ve been driving for over an hour and he doesn’t sense anyone in Shini’s now generous range, Duo finally lets Shinigami settle, and that’s when he feels the gunshot.

“Fuck,” he hisses with feeling, and takes his foot off the gas.

“What?” Quasar asks, looking shaken but holding together.

“Shot,” he says shortly, because it’s annoying. “I need you to drive,” he adds, putting the Jeep into park. He moves to get out of the driver’s seat, and his foot slips on blood, which is not great, honestly.

“You’re shot?” Quasar gapes.

“Apparently,” Duo says, irritated, getting his other foot under him. Quasar grabs his shoulders and shifts him out so he can see. Duo’s entire pant leg is drenched in blood. It’s slick with it, and Quasar looks like he might go into shock, so Duo snaps his fingers in front of his face. “C’mon, Quasar. I need you to drive. I really can’t clean this until we get back to civilization, so I need you to keep with it, okay? You’ve been doing good till now, but I need you to stay with me a little longer.”

He was trying to calm the kid, but he realizes as he says it that it’s true—Quasar has been doing well, doing everything Duo asked, staying out of his way. He may have slowed Duo down, but that really isn’t his fault.

“But—”

“I don’t have any water? Do you?” Quasar shook his head. “Then we need to get back to civilization.” He pulls the stolen phone out of his pocket, just now remembering he has it, and checks it. Wherever they are, there’s no reception, so no calling for help until they’re closer, but at least getting reception should be a good indicator that they’re getting close to people again. “Waiting on an engraved invitation?” Duo asks, and he makes sure to keep his voice teasing. Shini has settled, and there’s no imminent threat, so he’s mostly back to himself.

Quasar scrambles into the driver’s seat. Duo has to reach over to hotwire the jeep again because it had turned off when he parked it. That done, he uses one of his knives—and it doesn’t look like even one is missing—to cut off one of his sleeves and cut it into a makeshift bandage that he wraps around his calf. The pain of the shot is starting to hurt like a bitch, but there’s nothing to be done for it now. He wraps it as securely as he can be under the circumstances, props the leg up on the dashboard to get it elevated, and leans back.

“You were really something else out there,” Quasar says into the silence.

“Hmm?”

“I know you got into Preventers under the Old Souls Statute, but I thought you were an OZ Special or something.”

Duo opens an eye, the adrenaline crash and blood loss not a great combination under the best of circumstances. “You thought I was OZ?” he asks, and he can’t decide if he’s amused or horrified. “What part of me struck you as military?”

Quasar shrugs. “The Lightning Count had that crazy hair. I thought you might be another special case—no pun intended.”

Duo snorts and closes his eyes again. The last dregs of his adrenaline are fading, which means the pain of the gunshot wound is really starting set in, accompanied by a handful of other nuisance scratches and bruises from being dragged around like a sack. He hopes that either Quasar’s injuries look worse than they are or he’s tougher than Duo thought, because it would really suck if he had to keep driving. “Rebellion,” he says simply.

“Yeah, I figured that out. I don’t think any Ozzie would have thought to use terrorist tactics under those circumstances,” Quasar says, and he shounds a little curious and a little censuring.

“If you had any better ideas, I didn’t hear them.”

He hears Quasar sigh. “I didn’t have any,” he admits. “I just… I don’t miss being considered a terrorist. I didn’t join Preventers to keep that legacy alive.”

“So ask for a transfer.” Duo means it to be a quip, but it comes out just tired and honest. He can feel Quasar’s eyes on him, and says, “Eyes on the road, kid.”

“How old are you, exactly?” Quasar asks.

“Sixteen—close as we can figure,” he says with a sigh.

“You do realize I have almost a decade on you?”

“It’s the miles, kid,” Duo says, repeating the diminutive just to get a rise out of Quasar. He can practically hear Quasar grumping and opens his eyes, looking over at him. “Seriously though. These kinds of assignments, the ones that can go sideways like this? If these aren’t the assignments you want to be on, you should ask for a transfer. Because it’s not my first one, and I guarantee you, it won’t be my last.” He waits for Quasar to turn and meet his eyes, at least for a moment before adding, “I mean it. These assignments? The really dangerous ones? They will come my way. If you’re my partner, that means they’re coming your way too.”

“I’ll think about it,” Quasar tells him, and Duo can tell he’s serious as his eyes turn back to the desert. The last of the sun is slipping over the horizon, and the stars are starting to show themselves. They’re superbright in the desert sky, so Duo does some mental calculations and points Quasar a little more northwest. Quasar looks at him like he can’t be serious, but he does as he’s told, and that’s really all Duo cares about. He is never, ever going to listen to anyone who tries to tell him that memorizing the celestial position of any given location is paranoid. Ever.

The jeep makes it to the edge of town, and Quasar and Duo have to secure a safehouse on foot. Duo reaches out to Une for extraction. By dawn, there is a Preventers military helicopter there to effectively airlift them back to a base in Kabul, and from there, they catch a plane to Brussels. Une doesn’t trust any of the locals to care for them, and as long as neither are in life-threatening danger, thinks it best to have their doctors take a look at them.

Duo can suffer the extra hours to let Sally get a look at his leg. She patched him up a few times during the war, and while he’s a long way away from Heero’s “break my femur, set it myself, then promptly start walking on it,” Duo would be lying to say that his immune system is anywhere near baseline. He also can’t say if what makes his immune system weird is the shit that G did, because of Shinigami, or some weird interaction of both. It’s also possible that his immune system was always fucking jacked. He did survive two of three plagues without any known medical interference before Shini or G got their hands on him, so who the hell knows for sure. Regardless of the why, he’s definitely more comfortable with Sally cutting into him than anyone else.

And she does have to cut into him. The bullet is actually lodged up against one the gundanium blades in his calf—sister blades to the ones in his forearms—and it may have actually made the injury worse since the bullet couldn’t pass cleanly through, but it also may have saved him a broken leg. When Sally finds the blade, she’s beyond confused. When Duo explains what it is and why it’s there, she’s pretty much horrified. She has no idea how his muscles house the hypersharp blades without being torn to shreds, and demands Duo let her remove them. He refuses on two accounts—one, it would be much less damaging for him to just remove it—his muscles are trained to move them in and out after all—and two, he doesn’t want her to remove them. It’s less to do with the rarity of the blades than the peace of mind that comes from knowing that, short of having his legs and arms removed, he will never be truly disarmed.

That said, getting shot in one is decidedly bad. That’s never happened before. He knows the placement of the blades help strengthen the bones—acting as internal braces—but getting the force of a bullet knocked into one did dislodge it from its usual home. The resulting bruising is spectacular, and he’s damned lucky it didn’t hamstring him.

Sally decides that for his leg—and possibly for his stubbornness—she won’t put him out to remove the bullet. Also, the blade needs to be removed, if for no other reason than to reseat it properly. Duo has to let her remove the bullet and any fragments before he can safely remove the blade, and to his earlier point, it’s easier for him to use his muscles to extract the blade than to have Sally cut him open to do it.

Halfway through the removal, the local starts wearing off. Duo flinches once, then manages to keep it together through the rest of the process by gritting his teeth and going through his mental obscenity dictionary to distract himself. By the time she thinks she’s got it all and the blade can be safely extracted, he has all the feeling back, it aches something fierce, and he simply tenses the appropriate muscles to get the blade moving, wanting to get it over with.  

Sally is not expecting him to be able to do that for hours and certainly hadn’t expected him to do it immediately, so she’s not prepared for small—but strong—spurt of blood when the blade shifts. She curses him out in three new Chinese dialects that he’s going to have to ask her about later as she recleans the wound, triple checks to make sure there are no fragments she missed, and then closes it. She informs him that he’s staying overnight, not allowed to get up—going so far as to put his bandaged leg in traction to ensure it—and he’s not to walk on the damn thing for a bare minimum of a week.

“I also took the liberty of calling Heero to inform him,” Sally says as she’s giving him the rundown, and he stares.

“Heero’s—”

“On assignment, I know. But he’s listed as your next-of-kin, and I know he’d want to know,” she says, utterly unapologetic.

“Fuck. He’s going to fucking worry,” he complains, because Heero can be surprisingly overprotective of Duo if he isn’t the one at his side.

“He promised he wouldn’t cut the assignment short. He said something about a backup plan to make sure you heeded doctor’s orders.”

Duo glares because he knows it goes against every ingrained instinct of Heero’s to abandon a mission. He and Wufei are also on L3. The primary reason they’re there is they’re coordinating the security for a major, multiday charity event that’ll be hosting some of the top politicians and celebrities in the Earth Sphere, including, of course, Relena. She’s quickly gaining political power of her own, and Une wants the best there to make sure nothing happens to anyone, but to her least of all. With the following she’s gathering, if something happened to Relena, riots could be the least of their problems.

Given their history, he also knows that Heero doesn’t really trust anyone else with Relena’s safety at these big events. They do legitimately have downtime, though, at least.

“That was totally unnecessary,” he tells Sally anyway, because it was.

“Not my first time with you as a patient, Duo,” she tells him. “I don’t think it’s unnecessary at all. You need to stay off that leg for at least a week. You’re lucky you didn’t make it worse, hobbling on it for miles in the desert.”

Duo sighs. It isn’t his fault the jeep ran out of gas. Quasar did his best to act as a crutch, but supporting Duo’s weight with his seriously bruised ribs had been brutal. At least his makeshift bandage had kept any additional sand from getting into the wound.

“How’s Quasar?” he asks, because he hasn’t seen the kid since he’d been checked in.

“Lots of bruises, a few cuts,” Sally says, still frowning at whatever she is looking at on his chart. “He’ll be out of the field for at least a month.” She doesn’t say as you should be, but he hears it and ignores it. Two weeks, tops, would be his bet before he’s back in the field.  He doesn’t expect he’ll be with Quasar this time, and he thinks he’s more relieved than upset about it. Quasar is a good kid—no matter what their ages are on paper, Quasar is definitely the kid in this equation—but like Margeaux, he’s not well suited to the everyday life-and-death missions. Assignments, he mentally corrects. They’re called assignments, now, not missions, but they amount to the same thing.

“Une is coming down to take your report in person,” Sally says absently, and the fact she’s still looking at his chart makes Duo nervous.

“What’s wrong, Sal?” he asks, unwilling to beat around the bush.

She looks up at him, surprised, closes the chart, and shakes her head, full doctor face on. “Nothing you need to worry about.”

“Be a better liar or don’t bother,” he tells her flatly.

She sighs, then seems to admit defeat, because she says, “I’m not happy with how quickly the anesthetic wore off. Your reactions to drugs have always been…”

“Weird?” Duo volunteers.

“I was going to say ‘atypical,’ but weird is another word for it,” she admits. “Still, the dose I gave for removing the bullet should have lasted at least a few more hours.”

She doesn’t say it makes her nervous, but it’s written all over her face. Duo is high-danger agent. His chances of getting injured—and seriously so—are a lot higher than an average agent’s. If his body is reacting unpredictably with anesthetics, she’s got reason to be a little nervous. She pulls on her best doctor face, and he assumes that he only sees how agitated she still is because they’re friends: he both knows her better than average patients and she’s more personally invested than she normally would be.

“Try not to stress about it too much, Sals,” he teases. “I’m weird. It’s part of my charm.” He gives her his winningest grin, and it succeeds in easing the furrow between her brows.

“What isn’t part of your charm is your escape artist antics,” she informs, going for Wufei’s best haughty tone and not missing it by much. “Which is why you’re in that.” She nods to the traction thingy, and he rolls his eyes.

“Yes, mom,” he says.

Sally snorts rather than risking a rejoinder, and says, “Get some sleep, Maxwell.” She even hits the light on the way out.

There’s no way in hell he’s sleeping in this place, even though the exhaustion of the last day is pulling at him. Hospitals are not safe places, war or no. He reached over to where his laptop bag had been set on the side table, and pulls it out. He hates writing these reports, but at least it’s something to do.

Duo texts with Heero—real-time colonial-Earth calls can still be hit-or-miss, so texting is much more reliable unless it’s an emergency. Honestly, it’s probably a good thing it’s not a call. Duo’s exhausted enough that he knows he looks like shit, and it’s the exact sort of thing that could make Heero a little crazy and unpredictable, though even if Heero went AWOL and decided to come back, it’d still take him three days, and Duo plans to be back on his feet, if not yet back in the field, by then.

It’s been a few hours since Sally left him, and his report is mostly done. He should look through it again in the morning before he submits it, because while he hasn’t hit the level of exhaustion that leaves him loopy or hallucinating, he can tell he’s not far from it. It makes him feel old, because it’s only really been two days, and he remembers running for longer on less during the war.

Then again, he hadn’t pulled on Shinigami for hours on end during the war either. He suspects the extra level of weariness is because of how much he relied on Shini during the last day and change. He hated having to do it, but without either free rein or having someone like another pilot at his back, he’d had to balance going all out with making sure he didn’t space his partner. Someone like Heero or Wufei at his back would have allowed him to minimize his reliance on Shini. If he’d been alone, he could have gone all out for a much shorter time. The constant push and pull wasn’t something he’d done before.

He closes his laptop and slides it into his bag, ready to check himself out if he can, or just leave if he can’t. He just finishes getting his leg out of traction when a knock sounds on his door. He blinks in surprise at finding Une there.

“Hey, boss lady,” he greets, uncertain. It’s after 8 p.m. and he has no idea what he did to earn a personal visit. Is she going to fire him on the spot? At this point, he’s not sure he’d be disappointed if she did, even though Heero might lose his shit.

“Maxwell,” she returns, and he can’t decide if the use of his name instead of his call sign is a good thing or a bad thing. “Po told me you’re supposed to be in traction tonight,” she says pointedly, looking at the contraption and Duo’s leg, now just on the bed.

“Is she supposed to be telling my boss about my medical status?” he wonders, mostly to distract her. It doesn’t work, but he doesn’t really expect it to.

“Yuy told me there was no way you would actually stay in it,” she replies, ignoring the deflection.

“You talked to ’Ro?” he asks, surprised. Well, he’s not surprised Heero talked to Une about his own stuff, but he is surprised Heero talked to Une about Duo.

“I did.” She steps in, turns on the light, and closes the door behind her, and that it puts Duo on immediate alert. “Calm down, Maxwell. I just want to talk and not be overheard.” She comes in, pulling over the chair for visitors, and sits in it like a queen.

Duo almost says sorry if I still have scars from the last time we were in a locked room alone, but decides not to go there. She is his boss. If he’s going to be a Preventer, he has to deal with her. Period. She really does seem a thousand times saner and more grounded than she did during the war, but well, he does have literal scars from her.

When she doesn’t say anything, he says, “I’ll have my report ready for you tomorrow.”

She sighs. “When was the last time you slept, Maxwell?”

Why the fuck does she care? And why does it even matter? He’s going home anyway, and he’ll sleep there. He’d sleep better with Heero, but that’s not an option, and he knows it.  

“I’m saying you look like shit, agent. When was the last time you slept?”

“I’m sorry, I’m clearly missing something,” Duo says. “If you don’t want my report, why are you here?”

She links her fingers together on her lap, and if Duo didn’t know better, he’d say she looks uncomfortable. “I took Quasar’s verbal report.”

“O…kay…?” he says, confused. “Do you want mine?”

She sighs again. “No, Maxwell. I’ll take your written version tomorrow, but I’m pretty sure I know the most important parts.”

“And those are…?” Duo prompts when she doesn’t say anything else.

She takes a short, sharp breath, as if she wants to take a deep inhale but won’t let herself. “That Yuy was correct. The partners you’ve had up until now have been well below your level, and they are putting you at risk. It’s clear from Quasar’s report that his presence not only compromised the assignment, but that accommodating him required you to take actions far more extreme than you would have had to had you been alone or operating with a more experienced agent.”

“Well, there’s not exactly an abundance of people my level running around. I gotta adjust too,” he says, because, okay, everything she said was true, but he doesn’t think he’s wrong either. He shouldn’t be this severely handicapped by an average agent.

“You do,” she agrees. “But if I’m going to give you assignments based on your skill, I can’t give you partners I wouldn’t otherwise trust on the assignments.”

That’s fair, but he feels like there’s a catch, because he’s not sure the pool of people she’d trust with some of the things she’d trust him or other pilots with is that deep. “So… new partner to come?” he guesses.

“Yes. Quasar hasn’t formally requested a transfer, but regardless of whether he does or not, I can’t have him compromise you on another assignment. There’s an agent I have in mind once you’ve recovered, and we’ll see how that goes.”

Part of him wants to tell her that he’d be fine if she’d just let him and Heero partner, but obviously she’d have the same problem with finding an adequate partner for Wufei, and, to be totally blunt, Wufei can be an absolute dick. He’d probably have gone through twice as many partners as Duo by now, and he’d bet Wufei would have made half of them quit Preventers outright. So as much as he misses working with his lover, he knows damn well that just being partnered with Heero isn’t an actual solution.

“Sounds like a plan,” he says. “Was there something else you needed?”

“You’re planning on checking yourself out against medical advice, aren’t you?” she asks.

Duo considers trying to spin off a tale, then mentally shrugs and admits, “Yup, exactly what it looks like.”

“Then you are coming home with me.”

Wait—what? “Uh, no offense, boss lady, but I’ll pass. I can manage on my own.”

“I’m certain you can, but after haranguing me for half an hour, Yuy informed me that since I assigned you an inadequate partner, I would be the one to make sure you actually recovered appropriately, since he isn’t here to do so himself.”

Duo stares because there are so many things wrong with that sentence, he doesn’t even know where to start. His hallucinations are usually visual, not auditory, but there’s a first time for everything…

“I must have sand in my ears, because I thought you just said that I was going to stay with you,” he says because he is clearly mistaken.

“You heard me correctly, Maxwell. You’re going to stay with me until Po clears you to be on your feet.”

She’s serious, and Duo blurts, “I think I might take my chances with the hospital.”

She actually smiles, not a big grin, but a twitch of genuine amusement, and huh. She might be human after all. “They’re only willing to keep you till tomorrow, and I agreed that you would stay with me until either Sally cleared you to be on your own again or until Yuy was back.”

“What did he have to do to get you to agree to that? Say he’d quit if you didn’t?” he asks, stunned. It’s weirdly nice that Heero was willing to push her around for what he thought was Duo’s best interests, but couldn’t he have stayed with Sally?

Then again, Sally was an actual doctor, would probably be worse, and also may have let Heero quit rather than have to keep a protracted eye on an injured Duo.

“That’s exactly what he threatened,” she admits, surprising him twice over. Not only that Heero would have made that threat to begin with—Duo had said it because it was the only obvious leverage he could think of that Heero had—but that she would admit it.

“And you just agreed?” He knows he’s making her basically repeat herself with different words, but he really is finding it hard to believe.

“I agreed because in this instance, he is correct. I am endeavoring to make sure we don’t end up in this situation again, but I also made it clear that I will not be backed into corners by him threatening to quit.”

Duo can’t help it, he props an elbow on a thigh and his chin on his fist and asks, “And what’d he say to that?” He has a pretty good idea, and he’s reasonably sure that Heero will tell him if he asks, but it’s more fun to make Une tell him.

Une looks like she can’t decide whether she’s annoyed by him or amused, which is a pretty common feeling he evokes. “That if I find an adequate partner for you, he won’t have to.”

Duo laughs, because, well, yes, that sounds exactly like something Heero would say. It makes him think better of Une for admitting it though.

“You know he’s not one for idle threats, right?”

“I seem to remember that, yes,” she says a little wryly, and he remembers that she was the one who backed Heero into self-destructing. He still has fucking nightmares about that, but, well, he’s not really sure the woman sitting next to him is the same woman who backed Heero into the corner in the first place.

Heero is the one who trusted her to protect Duo. Heero, who has as much reason to distrust Une as Duo—maybe more—entrusted Duo’s safety to her. It means something.

“All right then,” he says. “Gonna help me put actual clothes back on or are you going to take me outta here with my ass hanging out?”

He makes her laugh. It looks like it catches her by surprise because it’s honest and real and she even snorts, which is kinda adorable, and he thinks this might be okay.

Heero comes straight from the spaceport to Une’s townhouse to pick Duo up. He’s been all but bedridden by order of Une and Heero, and by the end of the second day, Mariemaia as well. He didn’t exactly forget that Une is Mei’s guardian, because he doesn’t really forget things as much as temporarily misplace them mentally, but he had been surprised when the small girl with some of the largest blue eyes he’d ever seen had found him his first morning in Une’s home. Duo loves kids, and Mei is a pretty decent distraction during the day, so she becomes his near-constant companion while he’s under Une’s care. She’s sweet and damaged and so afraid of making more terrible decisions, carrying weight no child her age should have to, but Duo knows how to deal with kids who have grown up too fast, and he finds a quick balance between letting her be a kid and treating her like a person and not a kid. If Une had been softening on him before, seeing Mei take to him pretty much pushes her over the edge, and he finds himself enjoying talking to her in the evenings.

Still, when Heero walks in, something undefinable loosens in his chest and he breathes a little easier. He always misses Heero when they’re apart, but being apart and injured has been worse than normal, if for no other reason than he has less to distract him from missing his lover. They had been in relatively constant contact, but it isn’t the same as seeing Heero in person.

It’s gratifying when Heero makes a beeline to the couch the instant he catches sight of Duo. He doesn’t hesitate to take Duo’s face in his hands and press their foreheads together. Duo closes his eyes, puts his hands over Heero’s, and feels the tension leave Heero’s shoulders as they just breathe one another in for a few moments.

“I’m really okay,” he assures in soft Japanese, because the language always seems to comfort Heero. “I should have been walking two days ago, but the tiny tyrant has insisted I not,” he adds with a chuckle.

Heero sits on the edge of the couch next to him and gives him a curious look. Duo’s braid had been in Duo’s lap, and Heero grabs the end without seeming to realize it, running his fingers over it.

Duo can feel Mei’s eyes on them, and when he looks over Heero’s shoulder, he can see her half hiding in a doorway. “Mei, can you come over here?” he asks. “I think you’ve met, but I think maybe you both could use a proper introduction.”

She’s timid, but she alternates between being timid and painfully mature, so he doesn’t think it’s anything worse than normal. When she comes to stand behind Duo’s shoulder, just beyond Heero’s immediate reach, Duo says, “Mei, this is Heero Yuy. Heero, this is Mariemaia Khushrenada.”

Mei pulls herself up, the picture of a proper young princess, then bows her head in a perfect Japanese greeting. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Yuy.”

Heero gives Duo a side-eye that Duo returns with a shrug. You stuck me here. It’s on you if you forgot that sticking me with Une meant I’d probably get Mei out of it, he thinks. But Heero reaches his hand out. “It’s nice to meet you as well, Ms. Khushrenada.”

She takes it and looks a little flustered, and it’s all so painfully polite, Duo can’t stand it. “Oh, grow the fuck down, people,” he blurts, putting a hand on both of their shoulders and pushing down. Heero’s already seated and is a brick shithouse anyway, so he doesn’t even do Duo the courtesy of pretending to move, but Duo catches Mei off guard, and she has to take a couple steps to catch her footing. It makes her giggle, which always makes her seem more her age, so Duo tries to make her do it as much as possible. “’Ro, Mei. Mei, ’Ro. You can call him Heero-nii if you want,” he suggests. “But neither of you are old enough for this miss and mister nonsense.”

“Would you like to stay for dinner, Heero-nii?” she asks, taking Duo at face value and testing out the name.

Heero turns to Duo. “You better not be cooking,” he says firmly.

“I’m not. I’ve been teaching Mei this week.” He sees the look Heero is giving him and sighs. “I’ve been sitting the whole time,” he assures.

“I haven’t let him be on his feet, Heero-nii!” Mei confirms, seemingly horrified that she might be in dereliction of Duo duty. “He’s been sitting at the stools, his leg propped up, just like Dr. Po said he had to. He helps me cut some things up, but I’ve been doing all the actual cooking.”

Heero gives him another look, and Duo says, “Hey, she was in charge of a whole army. I figure she’s old enough to handle herself in a kitchen, especially when she’s being supervised.”

“I don’t know that you count as supervision,” Heero says.

“You mean you don’t know if I count as an adult. I can totally supervise this one.” Because she’s unconsciously moved closer to Duo, he can reach over and ruffle her hair. She makes a noise somewhere between laughter and indignation. “So whatcha say? Dinner?” he asks.

He gets yet another look, silently asking Duo how he feels about it. He gives a little shrug and a smile. As much as he missed Heero, he’ll be off the next couple days, and he knows that there’s not going to be any sexy fun times until Sally clears him, so he doesn’t really care where he is as long as they’re together.

“Forgive my imposition,” Heero tells Mei.

She lights up. “It’s our pleasure. I’ll go let Anne know!” she says, and takes off at a pace just shy of what could be considered running.

Alone for the moment, Heero asks, “How are you, really?”

“Healing, really. Sally’s being overly cautious.” He can tell by the pleased little twist of Heero’s lip that he agrees with her, and sighs. “How are you? I know how much being around Relena can stress you out.”

“She’s…” he pauses, thoughtful. “Better. She’s taking her own security and safety more seriously.” Duo knows that’s a nice change from the crazy girl who chased them all over the fucking planet. She must have also finally moved on, because the frown lines she usually gives Heero between his eyebrows when she’s been obnoxiously coming onto him are missing as well.

“That’s good,” Duo says, leaning forward to rest his forehead against Heero’s shoulder. “Missed you,” he says softly, tracing daisuki on Heero’s forearm.

He can feel Heero turn his head and take a deep breath of his hair and murmur, “Me too.” His free hand moves up to the nape of Duo’s neck, and Duo can feel daisuki traced there too.

They break apart when they hear Mei’s quick footsteps coming back. “Anne says we can start dinner when we’re ready,” she says, practically vibrating with excitement. “Heero-nii, can you help get Duo-nii to the kitchen? I can lead the way.”

Heero scoops Duo into a bridal carry as he stands, making Duo whoop and laugh as he wraps an arm around Heero’s neck to steady himself. “Lead the way, m’lady,” he says.

Duo sinks into his arms and his strength and sighs in contentment as he’s carried to the kitchen.

Chapter Text

The agent Une had in mind for Duo is Enoch Amos—call sign Reynard. He is ex-OZ, which Duo doesn’t love, especially because he was Alliance before that. That said, he’s a stealth and reconnaissance specialist, which means he’s been in a lot of high-pressure situations and knows how to keep his fucking head down. Une even gives Duo access to some of his old files, and Duo can admit—the man is good.

Good, yes, but it only takes Duo about five minutes to figure out why he was a solo operative. Reynard isn’t used to having a partner, much less a team—and the next headache on Duo’s plate is going to require a team. Duo has no idea what Une told him about Duo, but Reynard is trying to reserve judgement, and, well, failing.

It’s a funny thing Duo has noticed about stealth operatives—a lot of them, and Duo doesn’t exclude himself from this—don’t have great poker faces. They’re used to operating in the margins and under cover, so when they’re confronted directly, they don’t always handle it well. Duo tends to cover his by being over-the-top, with obnoxious laughs and “I know something you don’t know” grins. Infuriating and distracting people from his less-than-perfect poker face works for him, especially because he has a well-developed knack for pushing people’s buttons.

Reynard’s background is too hardcore military to allow him that flexibility, and Duo’s sense of humor and open irreverence strikes him as wildly unprofessional. On paper, they should be a good match, but Duo pretty much starts dreading working with Reynard the first time he calls him “Foxy” and about gets his head bitten off. It doesn’t help that Reynard apparently has a son who is about to graduate from secondary, so Duo is literally young enough to be his kid, and it’s fucking with Reynard’s ability to view him professionally.

For the first time, Duo’s tempted just to tell Reynard that he’s a Gundam pilot, except with Reynard’s background, he’s not sure that it won’t totally backfire, so he bites his tongue and just tries to focus on work.

His current headache is a growing grass-roots terrorist organization calling themselves “Earth First.” They’re trying to get their hands on enough ordinance to blow the colonies out of orbit—all of them—which makes them the worst kind of fanatics. Duo knows damn well there is no reasoning with people like them. Those kind of zealots are like rabid animals—you just need to put them down.

Even though he doesn’t voice the opinion to Reynard, Reynard’s experienced enough to pick it up, which is why Duo doesn’t exclude himself from having a shitty poker face. He really can only hide his thoughts for short periods of time. Working with someone day-in, day-out, he just can’t keep the façade going—it starts feeling too much like lying.

They argue while planning the infiltration. The group had kidnapped a number of promising students from local engineering programs, and they are working on getting a lead on where they’re being held. They disagree vehemently on the best course to infiltrate and take down the organization. Duo was a terrorist, and he’s dealt with the worst of the crazies in that area. He knows that if they want to have any chance of recovering the kidnappees, they’re going have to have good information and a really good team. Reynard thinks that he could get the kids out on his own, and Duo has no idea why he thinks so. It’s five college kids, complete civilians, who are going to be scared and panicked, and who the hell even knows if they’re going to be able to follow simple instructions?

Duo stays late to dig deeper into Reynard’s pre-Preventers history—they really need to do something about their information security, no matter how useful it is to him at the moment—and he realizes after about two hours of reviewing Reynard’s old files what the problem is: the man’s dealt with terrorists, sure, and any terrorist group can be unpredictable and dangerous. There is, however, a fine line between terrorists and zealots. Terrorists, often, can be reasoned with. They might be willing to kill others—even civilians—in their crusades and they might be willing to accept losses of their people for the same reasons, but there still tends to be someone in touch with reality around, someone who can be talked off the ledge.

Zealots are something else entirely, and somehow, despite his decades of experience, Reynard has never dealt with true zealots. His stealth work tended to be against Alliance and OZ subgroups, dealing with internal issues, not external threats. There is no talking a zealot off the ledge; they will grab your hand and try to drag you down as they fall to their deaths. If they were dealing with normal terrorists, maybe Duo and Reynard could get in and spirit the kids out, but honestly, with five hostages to worry about, Duo is leery of that possibility under the best of circumstances. Two? Maybe even three? Reynard might have been able to convince him. Five? Nope. That’s too many variables, too many people to keep calm for just the two of them, and that’s not even accounting for the fanatics.

“You might be okay with a body count, Darkside,” Reynard says in a huff. “But I’m not. This isn’t the war anymore.”

Duo glares at him across his desk. Rumors of the body count from his last mission with Quasar had made the rounds in the last couple weeks after a team had been sent in to clean up what Duo had left. It, apparently, hadn’t been pretty, and the casualty count was high enough that, if not for the extremity of the circumstances, Une nearly had to have him suspended. Only Quasar’s account, backing up that there had really been no other options, saved him. But Reynard heard the rumors, and he’s not good about hiding the fact that he thinks Duo is simply bloodthirsty. As a stealth specialist, he thinks there should have been a way out, which, as far as Duo is concerned, is his bias as a solo operative showing. If Duo had been alone, he could have gotten out with a minimal body count. With an agent like Quasar? Duo would like to see him get that kid out of that mess in one piece better than Duo did.

“Obviously this isn’t the war,” Duo agrees. “But you try telling that to these guys—they’ll tell you that the war won’t be over till the colonies are blown out of the sky.” He’s doing his best to keep his tone level. “You and I should go in, secure the hostages, then signal a tactical team to come in to scrape out the rest.”

“Scrape out the rest,” Reynard snorts. “I understand that’s how the Rebellion may have thought of people—bugs to be crushed—but that’s not what Preventers aspire to be.”

“It’s not—” Duo has to stop and take a deep breath, throttling the urge to throttle Reynard, since holy fuck did he drink the OZ Kool-Aid if he thought OZ and Alliance didn’t view the Rebellion as stains to be scraped away. “I get where you’re coming from,” he says, starting slowly. “And I respect that. You want to save everyone, and… I get that, I do. But for me, the hostages have to be the priority, and I have serious concerns that we can get out five hostages without having to deal with the fanatics.”

“I understand you’re some kind of prodigy, but prodigy can’t make up for experience, Darkside,” Reynard says, and Duo wonders if he could have possibly been more condescending if he were trying. “You don’t have to shoot your way out of every assignment.”

Duo threw his file onto his desk and stood up. He’s in the middle of a growth spurt, but he’s still a whole 5’4”, and feels a little out of synch with his body, and it’s making him even more irritable than Reynard’s blind optimism. “If you have to shoot your way out of every assignment, then you’re a shitty stealth operative,” he says.

“We can agree on that at least,” Reynard says with a snort. “Look, why don’t we set up time with Une to talk through our options, and get a third opinion?” he suggests.

It’s the closest he’s come to compromising, but it rubs Duo wrong because he obviously thinks that Une is going to side with him, or he wouldn’t have suggested it. As much as Duo is starting to like Une after staying with her for a week, he really doesn’t want her opinion on this.

“Yeah, fine,” he agrees, tired, because, really? What choice does he have? Refusing to run this by Une would be tantamount to admitting that Reynard is right in Reynard’s mind. “I’m gonna go get a drink,” he says, needing space.

He does go to the vending machine on the floor and gets a bottle of water out before he swings by Heero and Wufei’s desks.

“Maxwell,” Wufei acknowledges, cagey. Duo thinks that’s unfair. He hasn’t done anything to warrant that reaction lately. Frankly, they’d all been too fucking busy for Duo to mess with Wufei much.

“Wu-man,” he returns, just to see if it still garners that particular little eye twitch—oh, yes, it definitely does. “’Ro,” he says, jumping up to sit on Heero’s meticulously clean desk. He maintains that the absolute cleanliness of their desks—both of them—is downright unnatural, but they both just huff at him when he does.

Heero turns away from his laptop and looks up at Duo. “Do you need something?” Heero asks. Although they discuss their respective assignments at home, they mostly keep out of each other’s way at work. Part of it is that Heero is really not into PDA, part of it is that if it gets around that they’re involved, their chances of ever being partnered go from slim to pretty much nonexistent, but some of it is just that it’s too easy to lean on old habits and lean on each other instead of other Preventers, so they try to remove the temptation.

“Just… arguing with Reynard,” he admits, fiddling with the label on his bottle.

“Again?” Heero asked.

“Don’t you mean ‘still’?” Wufei volleys back. Because Duo has matured, he only flashes Wufei the bird rather than responding to the snipe.

“He still thinks we can get in by ourselves,” he says, answering Heero.

Heero’s read over the file, so has Wufei, and they both agree that Reynard is in over his head. If the kings of “any mission is possible” both think that Reynard is smoking good shit, Duo feels vindicated. “We’re going to run the options by Une and let her be the tiebreaker.”

Heero frowns, and Wufei beats him to the punch. “Une does not have the expertise to be a tiebreaker in this case.”

“Thank you!” Duo says, turning and waving his hand at Wufei. “But I also don’t have a better option. If I ask you guys for a second opinion, he’ll just think you’re biased toward me. Same problem with anyone else he’d suggest.”

“Has Une ever run this kind of mission?” Heero asks.

“Assignment,” Wufei and Duo both correct automatically. They’re all doing it, trying to adhere to the new terminology. The struggle has been real.

“And, to answer your question, not that I’m aware of.”

Heero hmphs and crosses his arms. “Where does the timeline stand?”

Duo sighs. “They’ve had those kids for over two weeks now. Yesterday isn’t soon enough,” he admits.

Wufei’s eyes narrow. “You think they should do it?” he asks Heero.

“I think we should do it,” Heero corrects. “I don’t trust Reynard to have your back if this goes south. It’s going to be bloody, no matter what you do. It’s fanatics,” he says it as if it’s self-explanatory. It’s so nice to listen to someone reasonable, Duo’s tempted to kiss him right there. He makes a mental note to show his appreciation of Heero’s common sense in private.

Wufei looks thoughtful for a moment before nodding once, firmly. “You don’t have time to train up a tactical team, and Preventers doesn’t exactly have one yet. That said, she might consider sending the three of us in overkill.”

Duo shrugs. “It’s five hostages. The critical thing is getting them out. If that takes all three of us? I think that’s what it takes.” Though even as he says it, it feels like overkill in his head, too. “Maybe just offer you two to take it?”

“You’re the infiltration specialist,” Heero says. As nice as it is to hear him praise Duo’s skills, it’s really neither the time nor place to jump his bones.

“Yeah, but you’re both more than passable,” Duo returns. Even though it might not sound like it to others, it is a compliment. They all had to do infiltration during the war, and even though neither Heero nor Wufei specialize in it, they’re both good—though if pressed, Duo would admit Heero’s better than Wufei.

“Not for something like this,” Wufei disagrees. "You think it’s a forest base?”

“More like jungle,” Duo gripes. While he’s still the best, he definitely prefers urban targets. He’s not convinced he isn’t still getting sand out of his hair from his last trip to Afghanistan, and he’s a fucking mosquito magnet to boot.

Wufei and Heero trade glances, doing their silent communication thing. It’s relatively new to them, so it still amuses Duo to see it. “If not all three of us, it should definitely be a team,” Wufei decides. “If for no other reason than extraction.”

Duo winces. He’s been so busy arguing with Reynard over the infiltration, he hasn’t given proper thought to the headache that extraction is going to be. He rubs his eyes. “Black Death on its black fucking horse,” he complains.

“Suggest to Une that you bring Wufei and I in. We’ll be happy to help,” Heero says.

“Will do. Fuck, I need to go plan an extraction.”

“You should probably write one for Reynard’s ludicrous scenario as well,” Wufei suggests. Duo stares at him. “Better to be overprepared than under.”

“Une may not consider the threat to be great enough to warrant us all,” Heero warns.

It's a fair call out because, really, the Earth First crazies wouldn’t warrant them all if not for the hostages. Then again, if not for the hostages, Duo would be able to go in guns blazing.

“Yeah, all right,” he says, sighing. “I need to go… plan.” He says it like a dirty word, and it at least gets commiserating looks out of Wufei and Heero.

Heero pats his thigh, which is about as overt as he would be in public, even just with the three of them. “Will you be home tonight?” he asks.

“Probably. I’ll give you a heads up if for some fucking reason we head out this evening.”

Heero nods and pats his thigh one more time. He holds Duo’s gaze for just a few instants too long, and Duo wants to climb into his lap and claim that mouth, wrap himself up in Heero’s strength and scent, and forget all this fucking drama with yet another ill-fitting partner. It’s not the place or time, though, so Duo jumps down from the desk, pats Heero’s shoulder as he walks past, and hopes he’ll be home tonight to do exactly that.

“We have our orders, Darkside,” Reynard says, and it’s all Duo can do not to snarl at him. Of course he’s not going home tonight. They’re heading out tonight because an informant thinks the hostages are at risk.

“Give me five,” he says, eyes glued to Une. She looks past Duo’s shoulder and nods for Reynard to go. The moment the door is shut, Duo says, “You know this is going to be a disaster, right? At the very least, you should send Heero and Wufei with us.”

She sighs and for a moment, she looks tired before she rallies.

“I wish I could,” she admits. “But Vice Minister Peacecraft received death threats at the ESUN Conference. I wish they were run-of-the-mill, but they’re not. I’m sending Yuy and Chang out tonight.”

“These guys are crazy, Une. Like really crazy. And they have five hostages.”

“I’m well aware, Agent Darkside. But given our new information, you don’t have time to train a team.”

“Are there any local tactical teams we can coordinate with?” he asks, changing tacks. This is happening; now to minimize the collateral.

Une shakes her head. “It’s on the Wakandan border in Uganda,” she reminds him. “We’re lucky the Ugandan government is letting us in to do this at all, and they don’t have any resources to loan us.”

“And Wakanda’s a backwater that doesn’t have resources to loan us,” he finishes. He rubs his hands over his face, because there’s no good solution. “We need a mobile task force,” he tells her. “Multiple,” he adds.

“I would love that, but we don’t have the personnel to have them yet. When we do, I’ll be sure to volunteer you for training them.”

He’s actually okay with that—more than okay with it. At least if he’s training them, he can be sure they’ll be competent and he can weed out the rust, but that doesn’t help him much right now.

“Okay,” he says. “We’ll try this Reynard’s way, but I need to know that if his way doesn’t work, my head’s not going to be on the chopping block for getting us—and hopefully the hostages—out alive. If we manage to arrest some of the crazies, great, but it’s not a priority in my book. Those kids are. And if I can’t safely secure the bad guys, I’m going to put them down.”

She gives him a long look but nods. “Understood, Agent. But please, do your best.”

He snorts at that, offended. “You don’t need to tell me to do that,” he says. “But I’m not a fucking miracle worker, and Reynard’s plan? It needs everything to go exactly right.”

“I didn’t take you for a pessimist.”

“I’m a realist, not a pessimist.”

“Yes, well, I’ve seen you pull miracles off before.”

Her faith in him would be touching if he weren’t so sure it was misplaced.

Duo suits up with every fucking throwing knife he owns and at least half a dozen handguns. He must look at least half as pissed off about this as he feels because Reynard visibly recoils when he slides into the pilot’s seat of their plane. It’s a small assault jet, nothing as fancy as some of the stuff SHIELD is fielding these days, but it's maneuverable, and more importantly, it has cargo space to carry at least ten passengers. 

“Did you loot the whole damn armory?” Reynard asks.

Duo shoots him a side glance. Reynard is armed, but lightly, more focused on armor than armaments. This would be appropriate if they were trying to get in and out without anyone knowing about it. Duo doesn’t think there’s a prayer in hell of that, so he’s armed appropriately.

“Seriously, kid—”

“Don’t call me a fucking kid,” Duo snaps, and he can hear the sting of threat in his own voice. “If we get out of this without me needing any of my personal armory, then you can give me grief about it. Until then, shut up and buckle up.”

“You know none of that is in the plan. Wait... where’s our pilot?”

“I’m our pilot, so you better hope I don’t get killed or you better be able to fly this toy,” Duo says.

“I’m licensed to fly it,” Reynard says, defensive. Duo notes that “licensed to fly” does not mean “comfortable flying” so, that’s just… awesome. One more thing to worry about.

Not that he intends to die on this little suicide run Reynard is planning. The more Duo thinks about it, the more it’s feeling exactly like that. He’s survived plenty of "suicide" missions before, so this one isn’t special in that sense, but he’s not usually worried about keeping other people alive through them.

Duo ignores Reynard as he runs through the startup sequences on autopilot, and gets through all of the back-and-forth required with the tower to take off. It’s a little weird to still be clearing his takeoff with someone, but it’s also kind of nice to be on the right side of the law.

He’s well aware of how carefully Reynard is watching him go through everything, so once he gets clearance, he starts narrating what he’s doing as if he’s talking to himself. Once they hit their cruising altitude, he sets the autopilot and turns to Reynard. He loves flying. On this short of a ride, he’d usually pilot it manually till they get to their destination, but he needs every minute he can get to go over details and backups with Reynard.

Reynard is professional and thorough as they go over everything they have in the few hours they do. Duo is crystal clear about his backup plan. While Reynard doesn’t like it, he doesn’t shoot it down, even if he clearly considers it a last resort.

They set down in a field about three miles from where their target is. After powering down, Duo covers the jet with a camouflage net.

“You still think this is an appropriate mission for just… the two of us?” Duo asks, staring at where the tree line starts. He’s got forty pounds worth of emergency supplies and survival gear on his back. It doesn’t make him feel any better about how this is shaping up. Seeing surveillance photos and seeing how dense the vegetation is in person are two very different things. There are a lot of natural environments that Duo likes—beaches, in particular—but he seems to spend a disproportionate amount of his outdoor time in rather hostile places. He’s getting a little tired of it.

Reynard has a similar pack on, and Duo hopes the old man can keep up. It might only be three miles as the crow flies, but in this terrain, it’s going to feel more like ten. Getting the hostages out is going to be a fucking nightmare. They need a fucking team that was more than two.

He hears Reynard sigh. “You were right,” he says, and Duo startles.

“I’m sorry?”

“We should have had a whole team. Getting the hostages out through this…” Reynard shakes his head. “It’s going to be a nightmare.”

At least we’re finally on the same page, Duo thinks, but manages not to say. Instead, because they’re in this clusterfuck together, he says, “There wasn’t a team to give us anyway.” The admission hurts. Maybe if they had another couple of weeks to pull something together, they would have. Maybe if they had time to negotiate with a neighboring military, they could have found the team they needed. Though that assumes that the Ugandan government would allow a non-Preventer tactical team into their country. Some governments are being very protective of their re-established borders, and Uganda definitely falls into that category.

“You don’t have to be so magnanimous.”

“I’m not,” he says. “We needed a team, but we don’t have one yet. I’d feel a lot better if we had Force and Dragon with us, but Relena’s safety is more important than a bunch of college kids.” Reynard makes a face at that, but he doesn’t argue. “So, we’re pretty much all they’ve got now.” He looks over the tree line again, thinking about the poorly defined road he’s seen on surveillance images. Putting the jet down anywhere close to that main road would be a terrible idea. The chances of it getting spotted would go up astronomically, and that road had to be watched, which was why they landed where they had. At the same time, he went over the kids’ profiles in his head and realized this is going to be hard terrain for experienced and in-shape Preventers.

“What are you thinking?” Reynard asks.

“Wishing we could put the jet closer to the road. Getting the kids through this… it’s going to be bad.”

“It’ll slow us down, but it’ll slow down anyone chasing us too,” Reynard points out.

“If I…” Duo starts, thinking, wondering if he really wants to warn Reynard about this, but then he remembers the feeling of Quasar’s throat in his hands. “If I go… silent. Or, worse, if I start laughing…” He turns and looks Reynard in the eyes. “If I do either of those things, you take the kids, and you run, and you do not look back. If you get to the jet and you can wait, wait fifteen minutes. No more. If you can’t wait—don’t.”

“I am not going to leave you—”

“I’ll be fine. You can send someone back for me later if I don’t contact you by the time the kids are safe. They are the priority. Am I clear?” he demands.

“I won’t leave you,” Reynard insists stubbornly.

“It’s not me you should be worrying about if that happens,” he says, tired already. “Come on. We’re burning daylight. This is going to be bad now—it’s going to be even worse at night.”  

It’s pretty much as bad going as Duo thought it would be, but Reynard keeps up with him well. He might be an older guy, but at least he’s in shape. Duo could go much faster on his own, but while speed is important, it’s not the critical piece here.

They lose what little daylight was coming through the canopy before they make it a mile. Reynard pulls on night vision goggles, but Shini is a low hum under Duo’s skin, and his night vision has always been good. Darkness on Earth, even the deepest nights, is nothing like the black in space. Between his sight and the life sense he’s got from Shini, Duo picks his way through faster than he thinks Reynard likes.

They don’t speak. It’s too important to listen to their surroundings to talk to each other. This is a back way, completely undeveloped, so it’s unlikely to be guarded. Even so, about two miles in, Duo finds a path that seems like it’s used for guard sweeps. That’s… not great news. These Earth First crazies are showing more organization than Duo likes to see from fanatics. If they’ve got some ex-military, that’s also not great.

He merely points the path out to Reynard, then carefully steps over it, avoiding disrupting it more out of habit than intention. It takes them more than another hour to make the last mile. The building is overgrown, but it was industrial. It’s old—possibly dating back to World War II, even, given how overgrown the area is. On the plus side, it’s not that big, so there aren’t a lot of places they could be holding the kids.

On the negative side, it’s not that big. There’s not a lot of room to hide, and something about the shape is pulling on his memory. He’s seen something… not the same—the same would have pulled up the association more quickly—but similar. He lets it percolate in the back of his mind and keeps taking in the area.

There are several off-road vehicles parked out front, camouflaged, but none of them are going to get through the terrain they just came through. He should still disable them. For all he knows, there’s a trail that can get them around to where they put the jet down more quickly than they can get through the jungle on foot.

He looks back to the bit of the bunker that he can make out. If it dates to WWII days, it could be a lot bigger than it looks aboveground. Nazis and Hydra both built some crazy shit in weird places.

They find the main entrance and it’s, well, it’s less sophisticated than Duo thought it would be, and that’s a relief. The camera on the door is moving, and timing it should be easy. The bigger problem is the guard. They can’t afford to take him out because he’ll be missed far too quickly. They need to distract him, but in the middle of the jungle, there’s not a lot to distract him. Duo’s also curious as to why there’s only one. Usually you have at least two.

He catches the flicker of life from the expected second guard just in time to pull Reynard behind a tree. Reynard signs something at him, but between the dark and the fact that Duo’s not really looking at him, he can’t be bothered to make it out.

Where was Trowa to lure a wild animal when you needed him?

The shape of the bunker thing is still nagging at him, so he decides he needs to get a raised view. He takes off the backpack and motions to the tree they’re hiding behind. Reynard shakes his head, but he can’t risk physically stopping Duo, so Duo ignores him. He pulls out three of his smaller throwing knives. Their blades aren’t much wider than a butter knife, but they’re ideal for stuff like he has in mind. He sticks one into the tree sideways at about waist height, and the gundanium-edged blade goes in soundlessly. He takes a big step up onto the hilt, slides another one in as high as he can comfortably reach, then plunges the third into a middle ground between them.

It’s an awkward-looking way to climb, having to reach down and retrieve the lowest blade before he can progress up, but it is quiet and it’s sneaky, which is what he needs. He’s sure he’ll get an earful from Reynard about doing this in the dark with no safety gear, but those blades won’t move. They’re more than strong enough to hold his weight.

He comes to a large overhanging branch probably fifty feet up and moseys out onto it. When he’s about halfway out, he can feel the branch give a tiny bit, and he squats down, pulling the goggles on to get a good look overhead. When he does, he nearly falls off the branch.

It’s a missile silo. That’s why it seemed familiar, and that was why so little of it was visible aboveground.

Okay, this mission was a problem before—now it’s a really big problem. If not for the hostages, Duo would be planning how to blow the thing to kingdom come, but there are hostages. He’s pretty sure that Une isn’t going to accept “they have a missile silo and maybe missiles, and I thought it was more important to blow the silo than save the innocents” as sound reasoning. It’s wartime reasoning. Had they still been at war, five college kids would have been acceptable collateral.

It’s not war, though, even if the Earth First psychos want to make it one. Getting the kids out has to be the priority. He sits and looks over the silo. It’s not a big one, at least, and it’s in kind of a weird place for a missile silo—not just the jungle, but where it is in Africa in general. Then again, it’s probably close enough to Europe to do some damage, not to mention all the havoc it could have wreaked on the Arabian Peninsula.

He mentally goes through all the silo layouts he knows. They’re, in his experience, pretty form-pressed no matter who builds them, so at least it limits where they could be keeping the kids. But it does make the whole infiltration piece about ten times harder. There isn’t usually a lot of wasted space in these places so there’s not a lot of places to sneak and hide.

The engineering students keep bugging him. Why engineering students? They’re all promising kids, but their specialties don’t make sense. They were taken from good, somewhat local universities, but nothing in these kids’ files strikes him as the type of brilliance that would warrant kidnapping. Then again, that level of brilliance is usually harder to get to, and those kinds of brilliant usually find their way to the big tech schools. These kids all have good futures in front of them, but none of them are going to reinvent the airlock. Only one of them was even studying anything related to—

Wait. Florence Nabirye—she was working on alternative energy sources. She had a paltry offer from MIT, but she chose to stay local because they didn’t make the offer good enough to make her leave her home. AE tech is mostly being pushed for conversation and pollution reduction, but it has serious military applications too. The other four are straight-up mechanical engineers.

He thinks about where this missile silo is located, and his stomach sinks. He scrambles to his feet and descends the tree as quickly as possible while remaining silent. When he hits the ground, he grabs his pack and yanks on Reynard’s arm to get him to follow. Reynard is both pissed and worried. It’s all but radiating off of him, but he follows Duo back into the jungle.

When they’re far enough away, he pulls his arm free of Duo and demands, “What?” He keeps his voice low to avoid it carrying, even though the normal night noises of the jungle should cover them.

“We have a way bigger problem than we thought,” Duo says, matching his volume.

“How?”

“One, this is a missile silo,” he said. “That’s a problem, but not the big problem.”

“What’s the big problem?”

“I think Earth First is trying to build a buster rifle in that silo,” he says. It’s hard to see but, Reynard looks like he might just be gaping at Duo, so he goes on. “This silo? L1 passes over this point every few days.”

“Could a buster rifle actually hit a colony from the ground?” Reynard asks, getting his head back on.

Heero and Quatre know the buster rifle specs better than Duo does. When he gets home, the first thing he’s going to do—after jumping his lover’s bones—is make him give Duo the full rundown on the rifle specs. This might be the first group to think this way, but Duo doubts they’ll be the last, and he honestly isn’t sure how hard it is to do what he thinks they’re trying to do. Duo’s pretty sure he could do it—if he ever lost his fucking mind—but he is at least familiar with the tech, and, well, he’s him, and he knows that he can make machines most people can’t.

“I don’t know,” Duo admits. “I just don’t know how firing a buster rifle through full atmosphere would affect its power. I also have no idea what firing a buster rifle in full atmosphere would do to the atmosphere. I can tell you that they’re only gonna get one shot at it. This whole area will be slagged once they fire it.”

Reynard cursed vehemently, and Duo was right there with him. “How big of an area will be—what did you call it? Slagged?”

It’s kind of nice that Reynard is taking Duo’s evaluation at face value and that he’s trusting his expertise, but he wishes it wasn’t because they were now in an area that is way out of Reynard’s own experience. “I don’t know,” he admits, thinking about how big of a crater Wing left when Heero self-destructed. He’s not sure if this would be equivalent or worse. He’s leaning toward worse—Wing’s self-destruction was relatively contained; Heero did survive it, after all. And he doesn’t believe for a second the crazies building this thing have any real understanding of its power. He’s certain that the silo wasn’t built to take it. “Miles,” he says. “If I had to bet, I’d say miles—in every direction.”

Reynard runs a hand through his hair. “We can’t leave this.”

“Nope,” Duo agrees, leaning against a tree, crossing his arms.

“None of our intel suggested they were doing anything like this, did it?”

Duo shrugs. “I mean, we know they want to blow the colonies out of the sky, I just don’t think anyone realized they might actually be close to achieving that.”

Reynard sighs, but he isn’t panicking. It’s nice to see he is holding up to the level his records say he has. “All right, I’m a stealth and infiltration expert. This… this is out of my wheelhouse, so if you’ve got any ideas, I’m listening.”

Duo taps a finger on his arm for a moment, mentally testing things and discarding them. “We still want to get the kids out if we can, but I… don’t know that it’s the first priority anymore. It kind of depends on how close they actually are.”

“We gotta get the kids out. That is the first priority still,” Reynard says, firm.

“Well, then one of us is gonna have to focus on the kids, and one of us is going to have to focus on sabotage. If we’re going to get the kids out, we can’t be worried about trying to arrest anyone. We don’t have the manpower. Shoot to kill. Don’t hesitate. You don’t want to risk one of these psychos getting up after you think you’ve put them down.”

Reynard’s lips are pressed in a hard line, but he gives a single sharp nod. “I’ll take lead on the kids. It sounds like you know a lot more about these machines than I do.”

 “I was thinking the same.”

“What else are you thinking?” Reynard asks, correctly reading Duo’s silence and the fact that Duo hasn’t moved.

Taking a deep breath and letting it out, he says, “You aren’t going to like it.”

“I don’t like any of this. Just spit it out, Darkside.”

“I think I should clear the way.”

Reynard isn’t a dummy, but he spells it out anyway. “By which you mean… kill everyone in sight.”

“Yeah, pretty much that.”

To his credit, he doesn’t start cursing at Duo, but he looks flustered. “Can we at least notify Une before we start this little detour?”

“We’d have to go back to jet to do it securely,” Duo says, even though he knows Reynard knows. The man needs to hear it from someone other than himself. “It’d probably be morning by the time we got there and made our way back…”

“And we can’t lose that much time,” Reynard concludes.

For Duo, it’s less the time loss that’s a problem, than the loss of cover. Doing this in the day will be a lot harder than it’s already going to be, and there’s a good chance this place will be more active. Plus, they’re already a good six hours past their tip that the kids were in danger, so, yeah, Reynard’s time concern is a problem.

Reynard is technically the lead agent in this partnership, so it should be his decision, but at least he knows he’s in over his head on this one.

“I don’t like sending you in as the vanguard,” Reynard says.

Duo scratches at the nape of his neck. “Let’s just say you’d like it a lot less if you were running from me rather than following me. But it’s your call,” he reminds.

He’s glad it’s so dark and Reynard really can’t make him out in detail in the goggles. He doesn’t want Reynard to remember that these “kids” they keep talking about have anywhere from two to six years on Duo.

“Okay,” Reynard agrees, even though he doesn’t sound happy about it. Duo’s not happy about it either, he just doesn’t see a better option short of blowing the whole place and saying “to hell” with the hostages.

Reynard turns to head back to the silo, but Duo makes him pause when he says, “Uh…” He turns and even though Duo can’t quite see his eyebrows lift, he’s sure they have. “One last thing… I want to go in quiet, which means knives, not guns, for as long as I can.”

“Men die quieter when you stab them?” Reynard sneers.

“When you stab them in the lungs and they can’t scream, uh, yeah, they do. Way quieter than guns anyway.”

It’s probably for the best that Duo can’t see his expression.

By the time they get back to the entrance, one of the guards has gone for rounds again and the other looks very bored.

“Can you disable the cars?” Duo asks.

“I can handle that,” Reynard says.

“Good. Go start on that. I’m gonna track down our wayward guard and get rid of him. Try to be quiet. I shouldn’t be long.” He doesn’t wait for a response, instead taking off on the route he’s pretty sure the guard took. He hasn’t been gone long because it only takes Duo about five minutes to track him down. He’s got night vision goggles, but they’re an old model, only heat-sensitive, and Duo lets Shini ride. He found out by accident that it lowers his body temperature, but that’s very, very handy at the moment. When the man hears him, he turns and looks straight past Duo as though he’s invisible, and it allows Duo to close the distance in a couple large steps. A couple quick stabs, and the man is down, and he won’t be getting up again.

He retraces his steps and finds Reynard with his hands up behind a jeep. He’d made enough noise to lure the other guard away, which is precisely what Duo was hoping for. The guard has the same kind of night vision on, and Duo slips right past him. The man doesn’t realize he’s there until it’s too late.

That eliminates both guards, and Duo nods at Reynard, turning back for the entrance. He watches the sweeping camera and dodges in as it makes its arc, and disappears into the silo. They probably don’t have long before someone notices the guards are gone, so he sinks deeper into Shinigami.

They feel safe inside. Only individuals are wandering around, keeping guard, and they’re lax. Duo lets his eyes adjust to the light inside for a minute, then he moves, soundless as a shadow in a gray-washed world. The first guard he approaches, he gets lucky with because his back is to Duo. Duo’s hand closes over his mouth as he stabs him in the lung, stealing his air for a moment before he finishes the job with a broken neck. He eases the body down, not wanting all the weapons to clatter and sound the alarm when he’s been so careful to keep him silent. Then he moves on.

The fifth guard is the one who finally sounds the alarm, and the time to be quiet is gone. Now it’s time to be fast. He leaps up onto the railing, pulling out the guns and aiming at every person he can see, then drops and swings down to the next floor.

Duo loses himself in the fight and the kill, dancing as much as fighting. He laughs as he works his way through person after person, feeling their lives extinguish under his hand. He prefers the up-close kill, the feel of a blade sinking into flesh, the moment the life leaves them at his fingertips, but there are enough enemies that guns are necessary—especially when they start running from him.

It’s cute, that they think they can get away.

Finally he’s at the bottom, and Shinigami is strong drenched in so much death. Duo knows exactly how many people are left here—only ten. One behind him is the partner, and he’s catching up. Two are threatening the remaining four in this room, which only leaves three others he has to possibly worry about, but they’re running away, not toward.

He blinks, assessing, the men screaming at him, but he can’t hear them. He realizes the math isn’t adding up—he should have five flickers being threatened, not four. And two of those flames are weak and dying,

He sighs, because he needs to be Duo for this, not Death. Humans are so tiresome.

“Put your fucking guns down!” is the first thing that filters back into his understanding. The man is screaming, but his fear makes the demand shrill and panicked. “Put them down, or I’ll blow a hole in her fucking head!”

“That would be stupid,” Duo tells him, calm, but he holsters the gun and resheathes the knife. “Because if you kill her, there’s nothing stopping me from killing you.”

“You’re hurt—and outnumbered,” the man tells him.

Duo smiles, and he knows it’s not a nice smile. He lifts a hand, then flicks his fingers, flinging blood in the man’s direction. “This?” he asks, and flicks his fingers again. “None of this is mine. No one’s coming to save you. If you have any hope of keeping your life, you’re going to hand over your hostages,” he informs.

“Darkside!” Reynard calls from outside the door.

In the moment of distraction, one of the hostages being held at gunpoint tries to wrestle the gun out of his assailant’s hand. The one Duo had been talking to automatically shifts his gun to aim at the new voice, new threat, and Duo closes the space with two steps, crushing the man’s windpipe in one hand, redirecting his gun to his cohort with the other, so when he shoots on reflex, he shoots his partner.

But not before the other gun goes off.

“Francis!” one of the girls screams as the boy drops. Duo drops the man in his hand, and goes to the boy. He’s hit in the stomach, and Duo can tell by the way the blood is gushing as much as by the way his life is flickering away that there’s no saving this kid. Maybe if they were in a hospital, but even then, it’s a big maybe. He presses his bloody hand to the gushing wound; the kid coughs up blood, and nope—this one is not gonna make it.

“Darkside?” Reynard calls again, his gun peaking around the doorway.

“Secure,” he calls back. “We’ve got one down though.” He turns his attention to the remaining three kids. “There’s supposed to be five of you,” he says.

“What are you doing—save him!” the same girl who had screamed his name demands.

“Fl… Flo…” the dying kid coughs up. He’s got a minute tops before he goes under. If Duo had to guess, the bullet hit his abdominal aorta, and there… really isn’t much chance of surviving that. He’d have been better off with the femoral artery, cause that at least Duo would have been able to tourniquet, even if it would have cost the kid the leg.

“Baby, stay with me,” she tells him, and her face is filthy, tears leaving streaks in the dirt as she pets his face.

“He’s not gonna make it, is he?” an accented voice asks Duo, and he turns to another boy who looks… pretty shitty. He looks sick, to be honest. He’s dripping in sweat even though it’s pretty cool this deep underground.

Reynard kneels next to him and meets Duo’s eyes. “That’s a lot of blood.”

“Artery,” he says.

“Lo… love… you…” he gasps out to the girl who is at his head. Duo’s finally back in his own head enough to recognize her as Florence Nabirye. The boy stills. Duo feels him go, like a whisper he can’t quite hear, and he takes his hand off the wound.

“No, Francis. Dammit, you can’t leave me!” Florence yells, shaking his head. Duo reaches up and closes his eyes, and she wails. Duo knows that sound—that scream that comes from the depth of your soul. A scream that rages at Death itself for taking what was yours.

Duo sits back, letting her mourn. They have some time for now, but he can’t imagine that the Earth First crazies will abandon this place willingly. There’ll be backup coming. From what he’s seen, they’re too close to making the buster rifle work to abandon it now—no matter the losses.

He can’t do anything for the dead, only the living. He turns his attention to the remaining two. They’re both sick, and they look it. They’re dehydrated. Florence is still crying, and it’s loud, but it’s not the kind of screaming that feels sacrilegious to talk over. “Joel?” he asks. The guy nods. “Patience?” She nods. “I’m Agent Darkside, Preventers. This is my partner, Reynard.”

“You’re here to save us?” Patience asks, sniffling.

“Here to try. I’m sorry we didn’t get here sooner,” he says, and he even means it.

“Where is Wamala Okello?” Reynard asks gently.

“Wamala, he refused to do anything for them,” Joel says. “They killed him… I don’t know how long ago. I’ve… lost track.”

“Easy to do down here,” Duo assures. “You’ve been down here two weeks.”

Joel murmurs something in what’s probably an African language, but Duo will admit that the linguistic fragments he’s acquired over his life don’t include much in the way of African languages.

“So it’s just you three, then?” Duo asks. Joel and Patience nod, and he turns to Florence. Her wailing has quieted to soft sobs, but they don’t have time for her to mourn. “Florence?” he asks.

“Can… can we take Francis… can we take his body with us?” Florence asks. Her voice is rough with pain and sorrow, and she hasn’t looked up, but she’s pulling together much quicker than he expected.  

“I’m sorry,” Duo says because there is no way he is dragging that body with them through three miles of rough jungle.

Her lower lips trembles, but she takes a deep breath. “Then I’ll stay with him.”

“Miss Nabirye,” Reynard starts.

“I tried to run, the first few days—before they killed Wamala. They broke my leg,” she says. She shifts her leg to the side, and even Duo hisses at how bad that looks. They had done their best to try to set and bandage it, but it had broken the skin, and that’s always really bad. It’s swollen and twisted, and he’s surprised she isn’t incoherent from the pain. “This machine… what they’ve had us working on, it needs to be destroyed,” she informs, and she’s still staring at her dead fiancé, but her voice is oddly steady even as she continues to stroke Francis’s face.

“We’re not leaving you,” Duo says.

She laughs, and he knows she has to laugh or she’ll start crying again. “Patience and Joel are sick, yes, but at least they are able bodied. Do you know how many stairs we have to climb to get out of here? They disabled the elevator.” She meets his eyes, and she’s… at peace with the decision. She’s tired and she’s hurt and she’s in more pain than she thinks she can recover from.

He can remember being in that place. Remember forcing himself to sit up on a cell floor to meet his death despite the breath-stealing pain of having most of his back burned off. He remembers Heero coming through that door, before they were friends, before they were even partners, certainly before they were lovers. He remembers his filter going missing, and saying exactly what he was thinking.

"If I'm going to be killed anyway, it seems like fate to be killed by you instead."

Heero would have made it fast, painless, and he could finally, finally rest. He remembers opening his eyes when the shot didn’t come, asking Heero, “You’re seriously going to shoot me, right?”

“If that’s what you want.”

He remembers the gun lowering, Heero asking if his right hand still works—as if he couldn’t shoot just as well with his left hand—and then supporting him the whole way out of the base. If he had to say there was any single moment he fell in love with Heero Yuy, it’s that moment—the moment that even horribly injured, in monumental pain, willing, even eager to finally let go, let it end, that Heero still saw value in him—that’s the moment he fell in love with Heero.

“This isn’t a war, and we don’t leave innocent people behind,” he tells her. “You don’t have to make the sacrifice play.”

She laughs again, and this time there are tears in it. “Do you even have any idea what you look like? You look like a nightmare come to life!”

Duo blinks at her, looks down at his feet, and he can see he’s in a puddle of blood that has dripped off of him. Okay, he can see her point on why he looks like a walking horror movie.

“Sorry I don’t come in a pretty package,” he grumps. “We were already here by the time we realized they were trying to make a buster rifle out of this old silo.”

She stares at him. “You… know?”

“Four general engineering students plus an unusually gifted one who is working on alternative power sources? What could they possibly have you working on in abandoned missile silo?” he asks. “We didn’t know it was a silo till we got here, so we weren’t able to put together exactly what was going on until then. Before we realized that, the plan was to sneak in and get you out, hopefully with minimal losses. Now, we need to blow this place, and it’s just the two of us. We prioritized getting to you over arresting guys we don’t have the manpower to haul out of here. I’m sorry about Francis.”

It’s not really his fault the kid—young man—young man died. It was Francis’s decision to try and take the gun from his captor that got him killed, but Duo can be sorry for her loss and he can be sorry Francis wasn’t able to trust that Duo was there to help, able to trust that Duo could get him out.

Florence sniffles and wipes the snot away from her nose. “I, uh, I put in a failsafe in it,” she says. “I can make it take this whole silo out, but I need to trigger it.”

Duo sighs. He’s not going to change her mind, which is fine. He turns to Reynard. “Take Joel and Patience,” he says. “Head for the jet. Florence and I can work together to rig this place. I’ll catch up. You’re going to need a hell of a head start, because even if we can keep this relatively contained, it’s gonna be a hell of an explosion.”

Reynard opens his mouth to object, but Duo cuts him off. “Trust me to handle this,” he says.

Reynard’s lips flatten into that same hard line, but he nods once, curtly. He goes to Patience and Joel and helps them to their feet. “Come on. We’ve got a lot of stairs ahead of us, and about three miles of jungle hiking,” he says. They both groan a little.

“Take my pack and my supplies when you get up there—anything you can possibly give them to carry without falling over,” Duo tells him.

Reynard gives him a hard look. “I’m not leaving without you either, Darkside,” he says.

Duo gives him a shit-eating grin because he can. “I wouldn’t do that to you. If you came home without me, my partner might literally murder you.”

“See that you don’t,” he says, but he seems relieved and he turns his attention back to the two sick hostages.

Duo waits until they’re out of earshot before going over to crouch in front of Florence. “I know you’re like six inches taller than I am, but you’re a stick, and as you kindly pointed out, you can’t walk on that leg. So up you go. I need you to guide me so we can blow this place up. Sorry the ride’s a little, er, bloody.”

For a long moment, she doesn’t move. Duo opens his mouth to encourage her again when he feels her hands land on his shoulders. When she’s draped over him like she’s hugging him, he stands, relieved he doesn’t need his hands as he carries her piggyback to where she indicates.

Florence is good—better than Duo thought. MIT made a mistake lowballing her, because she could probably make a real difference. She knows exactly where the weak spots are in the machinery, and Duo knows enough to make sure that things will blow up nicely even if he doesn’t have actual explosives. The big trick is damaging everything irretrievably without leveling the surrounding area for miles or setting off an earthquake. The reason he didn’t even consider that this was a missile silo before seeing it is because it’s in a fairly seismically active area. In his experience, places with seismic activity don’t usually build down. It’s sort of a minor miracle this place is still standing after some seventy-plus years. It does mean they need to be especially careful with blowing it, because explosions in areas that are already unstable are doubly bad.

“How did you learn all this?” she asks him after he rewires the power source of the buster rifle—which is going to be the biggest boom and yet needs to be way less boom than it’s actually expected to power.

She’s sitting on the ledge for the moment because Duo needed to move more freely to get to the power source.

“Taught some, picked some up,” he answers absently. “I have a knack for it.” She’s holding up admirably considering, well everything. He doesn’t like how hot her whole leg is though. It’s definitely infected—badly enough he’s half tempted to try removing it before evacuating her, but he’s not sure that an open wound might not be worse. Also, he’s not really a doctor, for all of the random medical knowledge he’s haphazardly accumulated. He’s not confident he can remove the leg without killing her, especially if she has to be awake for it. Still, it’s made him try to rush through this more than he normally would. The problem is—because, really, this mission doesn’t have anything but problems—he kind of can’t rush this. The work is delicate, and it’s a damn good thing that Heero and Wufei didn’t come alone, because even though they’re both capable with explosives, Duo’s the true expert with them. They could rig this place to blow, but Duo would put even odds on either leveling the surrounding jungle or setting off an earthquake.

Not that Duo doesn’t think part of the jungle is going with this place. Avoiding that is probably impossible, but hopefully he can keep it to a hundred meters or so around. The Ugandan government is probably going to throw a fit; the Wakandan too, but Duo is happy to ask for forgiveness on this one. It’s too risky to leave an almost-functional buster rifle intact, and he’s unwilling to call on the still very sketchy Ugandan government to take control of it or dismantle it. If they have to, he’s pretty sure they can spin it that it was damaged and went off because of that. It’s not really even a lie, considering the damage he’s doing to it to make it blow way less badly than it’s designed to. He’s pretty sure that they can get the surviving hostages to buy into if they have to, as well. They understand as well as anyone what this thing is supposed to be capable of, and he doubts they want it in any government’s hands.

It’s not like any Earth First crazies are going to be around to contradict them. Most of their bodies are going to be destroyed when this goes—which reminds Duo. If he has time, he should see if he can throw the guards from outside down the silo.

He slides a glance over to Florence and thinks maybe not. They’re both close to the bunker—they should get blown up anyway.

“I think that about does it,” he says, pulling out his phone. It doesn’t get reception for shit out here, but he should be able to use it to remotely trigger the bombs.

“You’re actually very young,” Florence says, and it sounds idle, but when he glances up, he’s pretty sure it’s not.

He finishes programming the thing, setting it to self-detonate in an hour regardless of him hitting the button. They’ve been down here for over two hours, so he hopes that Reynard and the other two have made some decent progress. He’s really not all that sure of how far the impact area on this is going to be. He knows how big he intends it to be, but he’s not a master of what Florence was building, and she’s not a demolitions expert, so there’s more guesswork than he likes to have in his booms.

“Okay, we’re ready to go,” he tells her, climbing out of the array. 

“I need to stay here to set this off,” she says.

He snorts. “You didn’t really think I was going to let you stay here, did you?”

“What are you going to do? Put me on your back and carry me up, what, thirty flights of stairs?”

“That works,” he says.

She stares at him. “I’m not going to be the reason you don’t get home to your partner,” she says.

“It’s only twenty-five flights, and it will go much faster if you don’t argue with me,” he tells her, crouching with his back to her.

“I honestly don’t know if I can hold onto you for that long,” she says.

He sighs and is about to argue, when Shini stirs under his skin. Even though it’s been a while since he pushed Shini down, it’s still… energized from all the killing, and he’s still tapped into its power. People are coming, and he doubts they’re friendly.

“We’re out of time,” he tells her.

“Then go and let me stay! I have nothing to go back to!”

“I doubt very much that Francis would agree with that.” Shini is rising, so they really are out of time. He can’t argue with her, and he’s not leaving her, so he reaches over and puts her in a sleeper hold. She fights him for a few moments, but she’s exhausted and injured and weak, and it doesn’t take long to knock her out. That done, he lets Shini rise again, and picking her up is easy. The world grays and goes silent, but he can sense those flickers.

He shifts her in his arms so he can pull out a gun. He checks the clip automatically, makes sure it’s full, then shifts her back into a bridal carry. He feels a Shinigami smile stretch his lips because it’s time to go. He stalks to the base of the stairs, then leaps the entire flight. The flickers at the top are too startled to react, and he puts them down with a shot each. He can sense the other flickers scrambling, and he begins to run. He has twenty-four more flights to get up after all—and at least a dozen more lives to take.

By the time Duo catches up with the partner and the other two, they only have about a mile to get to the jet. The smaller one isn’t doing well, and the partner is all but carrying her, but he doesn’t have Shini’s strength bolstering him, and it’s draining him. They have too far to go to fail here.

He shifts the one in his arms and stops in front of the other small one, tapping a shoulder to indicate she should get on. He’s got strength in spades right now, even after all those stairs and the rough terrain. She looks at him and says something, but he can’t hear her. He grabs her hand and puts it on his shoulder, pulling it forward so it would rest on his collar. He gets the sense that the partner and dying flicker are arguing, but he pulls insistently, and she finally gets on. She’s much smaller than the one he’s carrying, and her weight is barely a thought.

He says nothing, merely moving forward through the dark with intention. He can sense false dawn on the horizon, sense the larger animals in the jungle beginning to wake, can sense them flee from him. He moves through the jungle as though he was born to it, as if he’s weighed down by nothing more than his own skin, and he can sense the other two trying to follow the path he’s laying before them. He’d like to take giant jumps and strides, but some place inside of him knows he shouldn’t do that where people can see. It was one thing to do it with an unconscious body in his arms, but it is something else to do it with someone clinging to his back. Still, it’s irritating to have to pause and wait for the other flickers to catch up, picking their way through so carefully where the jungle all but gives way before him, as if the very vegetation knows what he is.

When they break free from the tree line, he can see the first brightness of dawn rising. He doesn’t slow his pace, throwing aside part of the camo net and opening the cargo hatch. He goes straight in, turns, to let the one on his back sit, then settles the one in his arms in a seat and buckles her in. That done, he goes back out and pulls off the rest of the net. He wraps it up in a ball and goes back in, strapping it down absently. He’s vaguely aware that the conscious one is afraid and has woken up the unconscious one, but he’s more focused on the fact that he can feel more coming—and not just the slow flickers of the partner and the other.

He chuckles softly and goes back out. There’s one—a vanguard perhaps?—who had gotten close to the jet. Duo reaches around the corner where he’s waiting and wraps his hand around the man’s throat. Shini is so strong, Duo doesn’t know if he’s ever ridden it like this before. He almost isn’t surprised when he feels the life leave the man in his grip, as if its soul didn’t dare remain where Death roamed. He drops the man, pulls out two guns, and goes to meet the jeep that is coming toward him. They’ve got machine guns, but Duo doesn’t flinch—as if mere mortal weapons could harm him?

He puts all of the riders in the jeep down methodically, and the jeep veers off and into the tree line, where it crashes.

Finally his two flickers make their way out of the jungle. He holsters the guns and runs to meet them, wrapping an arm around the tallest flicker’s waist and almost dragging him back to the jet. The partner has to run to keep up with him, but more are coming, so they need to be going. Duo could play this game all day if it were just him, but it isn’t.

Once the third one—Joel, his name is Joel—is in a seat, he pushes Shinigami down. It’s not going to be helpful for piloting. “Buckle up. Now. We need to go,” he tells him. He goes straight to the cockpit, ignoring whatever they’re saying, and begins the startup sequences. As soon as Reynard is on, he closes the cargo door.

“We’ve got incoming,” Reynard gasps, throwing himself into the copilot chair.

“I noticed,” he says dryly. It’s a good thing this little jet is designed to take off quickly. “Hope everyone’s buckled up. We might be in for a bumpy ride,” he calls back. One of the jeeps that just came into the clearing has anti-air firepower on it. That’s annoying. “That goes for you too,” he adds to Reynard, who is not buckling up as quickly as he’d like. “Everyone good?” he yells.

“I think so,” Joel responds.

“Then hold on.” He hits the clutch and the little jet zooms like it’s on a launcher, taking off in the limited space like a champ. The instrument panel starts lighting up warning signs about the missiles on their tail. “So fucking annoying,” he sighs.

“This jet isn’t armed,” Reynard sounds a little panicky.

“Yeah. Note to self—don’t take out unarmed jets out again,” he complains, then banks the jet.

“Jesus Christ!”

“I told you to hold on,” he says, making them do a loop that causes a couple of the missiles to hit each other instead of them, but he still has a couple stubborn ones on their tail. He does another tight bank—at least this little baby handles like a dream—and then does a deep dive. Everyone in the jet is screaming. It’s kind of distracting, but he doesn’t have the attention to yell at them to shut up, so he just ignores it, waiting till the last possible second to pull the jet out of the dive.

The missiles aren’t so agile, and they hit the jeep that fired them, which he thinks is only fitting. He whoops in glee as the jet evens out. “Everyone still with us?” he calls back, remembering to check on their guests.

“I think I pissed myself, and Patience threw up,” Joel informs. “But I think we’re all here.”

“What the hell were you thinking!” Reynard snaps at him. Duo looks at him in surprise.

“I was thinking we had missiles on our tail and we don’t have an armed jet. I had to get rid of them somehow. It’s not like I could just fly around until they ran out of gas. They’d hit us before then.”

Reynard is still staring at him and is a disturbing shade of white now that Duo is really paying attention.

“What the hell are you?” he asks faintly, as if he didn’t mean to.

Duo blinks at him, all innocence. “A Preventer,” he tells him as if it’s the most obvious answer. “Kampala is less than half an hour out at these speeds. As much as I’d like to get them somewhere more secure, I think we’re going to have to go with the biggest, closest hospital. None of them are in good shape,” he points out.

“That was before you tried to kill them with those stunts!”

He refuses to apologize for saving their collective lives. “That reminds me,” he says, and shifts to pull out his phone. He unlocks the screen and hits the button to detonate the silo. The explosion goes up—which is what Duo was kind of hoping it would do—and the concussion hits the jet, but he keeps control of it.

“What was that?”

Duo waves his phone. “The silo? Going boom? You remember me and Florence staying behind to make that happen, right?”

Reynard sits back and clutches his heart. “I’m too fucking old for this shit.”

Duo doesn’t think he means it to be funny, but Duo can’t help it, and he laughs, still riding the high of the jet antics. “You should get checked out when we get the kids to the hospital,” he says.

He takes Reynard’s groan as agreement.

He has Reynard put in the necessary call to Entebbe International to get them clearance and two ambulances to meet them when they land. He gives Une a call as a heads up to let her know—in two minutes or less—that they completely underestimated the threat that the Earth First crazies posed and that Duo may have had to blow up their base, so she has fair warning if she gets any angry calls from Ugandan presidents or Wakandan kings. The full debrief will have to wait.

His next call is to Quatre, because the blood is still tacky on him and he feels pretty gross, and he can only imagine what he looks like, but he’s liable to make people very, very nervous with this much blood on him, so it’s not like he can easily find somewhere to clean up.

“Hey, Quat—sorry for the random call, but do you happen to have a place in or around Kampala, Uganda I can borrow?”

“There’s a small WEI hotel near the airport, but I believe that one of my sisters has a private residence outside the city. Which would be better?” he asks.

“Hotel near the airport sounds perfect. I really, really hate to ask, but mind putting in the word for me. I’m, uh, kind of a sight, so I don’t want to terrify anyone when I check in.”

“Are you okay?” Quatre asks, nothing but genuine concern.

“I’m fine. None of it’s mine, just… this was messy, and I don’t think walking through the airport to find a shower to clean up in is a great idea.”

“I’ll have them send a shuttle to pick you up.”

“That’s not—”

“If you’re worried about walking around in public, then I’m assuming you will have a hard time getting a cab.”

Duo searches for another argument, but sighs and says, “Go and be reasonable.”

Quatre chuckles. “I’m always reasonable,” he says, and Duo doesn’t even pretend to know how he can say something like that with a straight face. “Do you know what runway you’re coming in on? I can have a car meet you there.”

He gives Quatre the runway and hangs up.

“Who was that?” Reynard asks.

“A friend.”

“You really shouldn’t be talking to anyone extraneous to the assignment yet.”

“You heard everything I told him. We probably should have made arrangements before we got here,” he admits, making a mental note for future assignments. “Chances were good they’d need a hospital. Besides, I’m going to run to the hotel, take a shower so I don’t send locals running from me screaming, then meet you at the hospital. Give me an hour—tops.”

Reynard looks like he wants to argue, but well, Duo must really be a sight because he doesn’t.

“If you’re gone longer than that, I’m sending the Ugandan police to find you.”

Duo gives him a flippant salute as their radio sparks to life with approval to put the jet down.

He helps the medics get the students loaded into ambulances and lets Reynard deal with the security until he’s shuffled off into an ambulance with Florence. They luckily leave about the same time that a discreet town car drives onto the tarmac. The hood ornament is the WEI logo, and apparently in Uganda, that warrants respect, because security doesn’t berate the driver. He digs a card out of his go bag to give to the security head, then closes up the jet and locks it down. It’s going to be there for a couple days in all likelihood.  Duo has to laugh when he recognizes the Maganac that gets out of the car.

“Zuhair? What are you doing here?” he asks, because even for Quatre, randomly flying a Magnanac out to a Ugandan city just because Duo needed a ride is too much to seriously consider.

“Master Duo!” he greets, then really looks at Duo and begins right in on admonishing him. Duo has not figured out how Quatre found the most mother-henning group of men on the planet to make up his personal army, but he can’t help but be amused by it.

“I’m totally fine,” he assures. “Just need a ride so I can get cleaned up, then I need a lift to the hospital. And you didn’t answer my question,” he says. He brought his go bag off the jet with him, so he even has a spare Preventers uniform once he gets out of the mission gear.

Zuhair frowns. “I am helping Miss Tahani move her latest… paramour out, currently.” He holds the door open for Duo to get in. There’re black towels on the seats to prevent him from getting whatever is still wet on the car, which is thoughtful. Zuhair gets in the front after he closes the door behind Duo.

“Tahani is… she’s one of the youngest of his sisters, right? She’s what, twenty-four?”

“Twenty-three,” Zuhair corrects, though he sounds irritated as he starts the car. “And this is the third boyfriend I have personally helped remove from a premises.”

“Ouch, really?”

“Others would characterize Miss Tahani as… overly exuberant.”

“So she falls in love at the drop of a hat, doesn’t she?”

“I did not say that.”

But he was still sitting very stiff and proper, more proper than most of the Maganac Corp were with the pilots. “You’re having trouble getting rid of this one?”

Zuhair hesitates, but says, “He’s a cousin to the president of Uganda, and he is not used to anyone telling him ‘no,’ much less a woman.”

“How far out of the way is the place that Tahani is staying at?” he asks.

“Oh, Master Duo, I could not—”

“Cut the crap, Zuhair. If I look like a horror film reject, I may as well use it. I’m just going to have to take a much faster shower than I wanted to.”

“Of course, Master Duo. Let me make a call so everything will be ready for your arrival.”

Duo chuckles and sits back. Quat owes him for this one.

Duo would never consider the Maganacs to be anything less than efficient, but how Zuhair manages to time pulling up with a young woman who must be Tahani—there’s no mistaking that hair—and a very tall and imposing looking gentleman walking down the front steps, he’s not sure. They’re in the roundabout of a relatively small mansion (by Quatre’s standards, anyway), and are having what looks like the civilized version of a screaming match.

A servant, who must be in on it, gets Duo’s door. Duo hands off his bag like it’s his right, and the servant bows, taking it without missing a beat and with a murmured, “Master Duo,” as if he’s a familiar guest.

Duo starts up to the yelling couple with a purposeful stride. Zuhair chases after him, yelling, “Master Duo! Master Duo! I am so sincerely sorry!” with the sort of tone that implies he’s been apologizing at length already.

Duo doesn’t stop until he’s right in front of Tahani, and he discounts the man she’s not-arguing with like he’s invisible. “Tahani,” he greets her, putting his most arrogant, better-than-you tone, complete with Quatre’s upper class L4 accent. “Darling.” He says it like a reprimand. He’s taller than her, but only just, but it works for the ruse.

She stares at him like she’s just seen a ghost. “Duo?” she asks faintly. He’s reasonably sure most of Quatre’s sisters are at least familiar with the other pilots’ names, if not them individually, but this is a hell of a way to be introduced to one.

The man grabs his shoulder, then pulls it back quickly. Duo turns to face him as he stares at the ick on his hand—wow, Duo was even more saturated than he thought if even his shoulders are gross—and gives a pointed look at the now slightly bloody hand. Duo runs his gaze over the man and leaves no question that he finds him lacking. “I’m sorry. You are?” he asks.

Timing it perfectly, Zuhair catches up with them. “Lawrence,” he commands the servant. “Please take Master Duo’s bag to his room!” He gives the direction as if he’s slightly panicked.

Lawrence bows again, and mutters a rushed, “Of course, Master Zuhair,” and takes off at a clip that, for a servant, is as good as running.

“Mr. Mbabazi, may I introduce you to Master Duo Maxwell—Miss Tahani’s intended.” Zuhair bows to them both.

“Your intended?” Mbabazi snarls at Tahani.

Tahani, of course, has no idea what they’re talking about, so she starts backpedaling. “No! It’s not like that! He’s just a friend of my brother—”

“He is all but blood to Master Quatre,” Zuhair informs helpfully, though his tone is grave and serious. “He would be greatly pleased to call Master Duo brother by law as well as by heart.”

“Really, Kizito,” she appeals to the man. “I don’t know—”

“You have forgotten your brother’s wishes?” Zuhair interrupts, aghast, and Duo really wishes he could cackle at how perfectly he’s playing the offended party.

“You are intended?” Mbabazi demands, infuriated. “I had heard you were a loose woman, but I had no idea you were spoken for.” He turns to Duo and inclines his head.

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t shake your hand,” Duo says. “I’m afraid I’ve just arrived and have not had a chance to clean up.” He reaches up to where there’s an itchy patch on his face, and sure enough—that’s dried blood. “Please don’t concern yourself. I am not injured.”

If Mbabazi doubted Duo was covered in blood, he doesn’t now. He visibly swallows as Duo gives him a grin that’s all teeth and no kindness.

“You are a… friend of Mr. Winner?” Mbabazi asks, aiming for what’s probably his normal arrogance and missing it by a mile.

“As close as kin, I assure you.” He turns his attention to Tahani. “Really, Tahani. Must we continue these games?”

Her sincere affront is all he needs to sell it.

“I apologize if you have been misinformed.” Duo reaches into a pocket and finds a handkerchief. He started carrying them when Quatre convinced him that they were useful to have on hand. He pulls it out, shaking it out, but it’s soaked through too. “Damn,” he says as if inconvenienced. “I don’t suppose you have a spare handkerchief?” he asks. Before Mbabazi has to decide whether or not to sacrifice any such thing to him, he waves it off, pulling a bloodied knife out of a sheath. He is going to have to clean some of those thoroughly, but even a bloodied handkerchief can get some of the worst off. “Never mind. I really just need a thorough shower. Again, I apologize if there has been any misunderstanding. Do you need any assistance on returning home?”

“N… no, Mr., uh, Maxwell, was it?”

“Yes—I’d give you a card, but I’m afraid they’re in my bag at the moment.”

“No, sir, that’s quite all right,” he says, holding up his hands. “The error is mine. I did not mean to trespass. Please, accept my sincere apologies. I assure you, no insult was intended.”

“Yes, well, an easy mistake to make,” Duo concedes in a way that implies he’s being very generous. “I’m certain it will not happen again, will it, Tahani?” he asks, turning toward her.

She fumes at him, turns on her heel, and somehow manages to stomp back into the house without actually stomping. He’ll have to ask her how she does that after this.

He rolls his eyes for Mbabazi’s sake. “Women,” he says in that particular tone Wufei has that always makes Sally’s blood pressure rise. “If you’ll excuse me, Mr. Mbabazi?” he says.

“Of course. I’m sorry we did not meet under better circumstances.”

Duo has already turned away from him to go up the steps, dismissing him.

Lawrence reappears to open the door. “Your things have been put away in your usual room, Master Duo,” he informs. He glances down, notices the bloody footprints Duo has left on the marble steps. Like the consummate professional he is, he doesn’t miss a beat. “I’ll have Annette take care of that immediately, sir.”

“Thank you, Lawrence,” he says. “Please pass on my apologies for making such a mess of her floors.”

“As ever, Master Duo, it’s no problem.” He steps back to let Duo in and shuts the door behind him. Apparently someone had gone through his bag because his favorite pair of all rubber flip flops are just inside the door. “If you would like to remove your shoes so as not to leave more tracks?” Lawrence suggests in that imperious way that Duo has learned the best servants have, the pandering gone now that Mbabazi isn’t around to witness it.

“Absolutely,” he agrees, bending over to unlace the heavy combat boots. “I’m afraid these are a total loss. Would you mind burning them?”

Zuhair ducks in and closes the door behind him with something just shy of a slam.

“How’d it go?” Duo asks, prying one foot out of a boot. Ugh, until that moment he hadn’t realized how gross his feet felt. The socks will be a loss too, but he doesn’t dare sit on the floor. Instead he rolls one off with care to make sure he doesn’t fling blood anywhere.

If Zuhair were any more pleased with himself, he’d be vibrating out of his skin. “He was quite apologetic and eager to leave, Master Duo. Thank you so much for your assistance!”

“Is that what that was?” Tahani demands, coming over with a large trash bag. He’s mildly impressed that she even knows where those are kept, much less could come back with one so quickly.

“Zuhair said you were having trouble getting rid of this one. I have it on good authority that I look pretty terrifying right now. Thought I’d help,” he admits.

Her arms are folded and she seems irritated. “So you really are Quatre’s Duo?” she asks.

“I am. Zuhair can confirm. I’ve got some credentials on me, too, but uh, they’re probably as bloody as the rest of me.”

“What were you doing?”

“Rescuing some kidnapped college kids and killing a lot of fanatics,” he admits.

“The kidnapped engineering students?” she asks, handing the bag to Lawrence who promptly turns it partly inside out to pick up Duo’s bloody boot and put it in the bag.

“Yes, those.”

“Oh,” she says. “Are they… are they all okay?”

“Two of them didn’t make it. The other three.” He finished rolling the second sock down, stuffed it into the shoe, then dropped them both into the bag, putting his second foot into the sandal. “I may need to borrow that. I don’t know that most of this is going to be salvageable,” he warns Lawrence, then goes back to his original train of thought. “Uh, the other three, we’ll have to see. They should be at the hospital by now, which is where I will be going as soon as I’m, uh, more presentable.”

“Lawrence had your things put in the guest suite this way,” she says, taking the bag with the bloodied shoes from Lawrence. “I’ll show you.”

Duo gets his first good look at her. She doesn’t just have Quatre’s hair, she has his eyes, though her skin tone is much richer than Quatre’s colony-pale complexion. She’s dainty but she’s stop-and-stare gorgeous, so he can understand why she’s had three people to kick out in a year. Even apart from the Winner name and money, this is a girl who would never have difficulty attracting attention.

“Thanks. I’m sorry to impose.”

“No, it’s quite all right. I wish Lawrence could have warned me—it would have been much more fun,” she admits. “At least, I’m assuming all of that posturing was an act.” There’s a hint of uncertainty in her voice, so he smiles.

“I’m not sure who my boyfriend would kill first if it weren’t—me or Quat.”

She giggles, and it’s a surprisingly girly sound out of her. “I’m relieved. And it’s probably for the best I didn’t know. I’m not a great actress, so a genuine reaction was, I’m sure, much more believable.” She opens a door. “This way,” she says. “The bathroom is straight ahead.”

“Thanks,” he says, aware that the slap of his flip flops is incongruous with what a disaster he looks like. Naturally, the first thing he walks into in the bathroom is a mirror, and yikes. He’s honestly lucky Tahani hadn’t run screaming from him. His hair is caked in blood—it’s splattered all over his face, down his neck, and all over his hands. It’s hard to see how much blood is on the black clothing, but he can see some lighter patches drying. He shakes his head, goes to the sink to rinse his hands first. It at least gets the first bit off. He’s probably going to require a long soak to get all the blood from under his nails, but it’s going to have to wait. Once his hands are barely clean, he plugs the sink and begins to fill it, then goes over to start the shower. He’s aware of Tahani hovering in the doorway as he pulls of the gun holsters first. The guns go onto the vanity counter after a check that the safeties are on. The holsters go into the empty tub. They’re leather and probably have to be replaced, but he’ll take a better look later. Next are the knife sheathes. The blades themselves go into the now-full sink, the sheathes go into the tub with the holsters. He custom built the sheathes, and the straps are vinyl, so they should be salvageable.

“Mind bringing that bag over?” he asks after pulling his phone and credentials out of his pockets, setting them on the vanity next to the guns.

“Here,” she says, holding it out open. He pulls the flack jacket off first and drops it into the bag because he knows that sucker is toast. He follows it with his shirt, because, yeah, there’s no hope for that either. He hears her suck in a gasp when he gets it off, which is a pain because a lot of it was stuck to him. He looks over his chest and feels his sides, but no, he doesn’t have any—oh. Right.

He turns to face her so she’s not staring at his back.

“If you leave that there, I can probably throw my pants in it before I get into the shower,” he says gently.

“Does… did… Quatre, ever do… ever have…”

“These kinds of things weren’t the kinds of missions Quat ran,” he assures. “He was too valuable to be in the field unprotected most of the time. And he, uh, never was captured, so none of the”—He waves a hand vaguely over his shoulder to indicate his back.—“He doesn’t have anything like that.”

Her eyes fasten on his cross. “You’re Christian?” She sounds surprised.

Duo laughs, a little bitter even in his own ears. “Not really, no. Don’t think God and I got much to say to each other, except maybe curse words. Just… a memory,” he explains.

“I should… I should let you, uh, get your shower,” she says, suddenly looking uncomfortable.

“Yeah, probably. I promised my partner I’d be at the hospital within an hour, so I think I’ve got maybe ten minutes.”

“Can you… in ten minutes?” she asks, surprised.

“Probably not, but I can probably pass muster. So, if you don’t mind?” he says.

“Yes, of course.” She sets the bag down next to the tub. “I’ll… I’ll just. If there’s something you need laid out?”

“There should be a full Preventers uniform in my bag. If you don’t mind pulling and laying that out, that’d be great.”

She nods and turns on her heel, dashing out the door, but she does close it behind her. He scratches his scalp but shakes his head. He’ll have to figure it out later.

He ends up cutting his pants off. They’re so stiff and stuck to him, it’s easier than trying to peel them off. They and his underwear go straight into the trash bag. He waits to pull his braid out until he’s in the shower. He wishes he could skip it, because it really is going to take forever, but there’s far too much blood to do that. Fortunately, the shower is decadent, has multiple shower heads, and excellent water pressure. He unravels his braid as quickly as he can, finds the most powerful setting on the hand held, and soaks his scalp thoroughly. That done, he pours a large glob of the stock shampoo into his hands and starts scrubbing it in. He has a mental clock ticking away, and what he’d love is an hour to get every speck of blood off him, but he doesn’t have it.

The best he can hope for is not seeing any more diluted red or pink in the bubbles as he rinses off. He scrubs shampoo down into his ends, because they need it. He’s pretty sure he didn’t get it all in the first pass, but he doesn’t have time for a second one. He takes a generous amount of the conditioner, and rubs it briskly through his length, twists it up in a knot at the back of his head, then grabs a washcloth to give his body a quick, but hard, scrub, including his face. He tries to get in his ears, but all the little nooks and crannies probably need some time with Q-tips to clean out.

Later, he tells himself. He pulls the knot from his hair to rinse the conditioner as his internal ten-minute time goes off. The water from his hair is still rinsing a little pink, but it’ll have to do for now. He turns off the shower heads before his hair is fully rinsed and resorts to wringing out as much water as he can. It’s only then that he realizes he forgot towels. He steps out onto the bath mat and notices a towel warmer on the wall. It’s in perfect reach from the shower door, because of course it is. He shouldn’t complain, though, because drying off with a warm towel is something he could definitely get used to.

He dries his body off first, getting the worst of the water off, then takes the towel to wrap his hair in. He grabs the second towel to finish a more thorough drying, then wraps it around his waist and steps into the room.

Somehow, he isn’t surprised Tahani is still there. She did lay out his uniform on the bed though, complete with his boxers and socks, he notes.

“You looked much bigger before,” she comments.

Duo grabs his underwear and pulls it on under the towel before taking it off so he can pull on the navy uniform pants.

“It’s all in the attitude. Being covered in blood and weapons also tends to make an impression,” he points out, taking down his hair and roughly toweling it. He doesn’t usually do this, but he’s on a clock, and he needs it not to be dripping wet. He pulls on a black tank, tucking his cross into it automatically before reaching for the gray button-down.

“Do you need help with your hair?” she asks.

“I do not,” he tells her, buttoning up the shirt quickly. He glances at the Preventers tie and considers it, wishing he could pass it up, but he’s already going to look like a kid dressed up in dad’s uniform. It’s better to be as professional as possible. He does the tie by touch. He’ll check it in the mirror when he goes to get his phone out of the bathroom. He sits on the bed to pull on his socks, noticing that he still has blood around his toenails. He blinks and tries to remember the last time he was quite this saturated, because it has been a while.

He pulls his socks on before reaching into his bag for his brush, before giving it up.

Tahani is still watching him, and he knows what that weighty a gaze means.

“Look,” he says. “I’m not sure what you’re thinking, but I’m seventeen, and I do have a boyfriend who really will put you in the ground, Quat’s sister or no, if you make a move on me.”

She blushes prettily at being called out.

“I wasn’t…”

“Zuhair told me this is the third partner he’s had to throw out. Since the Maganacs have only been helping out Quat’s extended family for the last year and change, that’s three semiserious partners in probably less than a year. You wanna experiment, that’s cool. I’m just not interested in being a conquest,” he says, pulling out his spare combat boots. Heero always tells him that carrying a spare pair is overkill because they’re bulky and take up so much space, but Duo has had these bloody mishaps with enough pairs that having a spare just makes sense.

“I wasn’t intending to come on to you!” Tahani snaps, clearly flustered. He reaches behind him to separate his hair into its normal sections. The sections are well trained into his hair, so even damp, he finds them easily. It would be better to brush the mess first, but he doesn’t have time, and the conditioner did enough that it can be braided. As soon as the braid is done and tied off, he grabs the towel to give the braid a final hard squeeze. When he checks it, there are pink stains on the towel and he sighs, taking it with him to the bathroom. If he’s ruined a towel, he may as well keep the damage to one. He uses a damp corner to quickly clean off his phone and credentials, tucking them into their respective pockets without much thought. Then he needs a gun.

He checks the tie and tweaks it, then checks the guns. Six guns, and they all need a cleaning. His eyes find the one that is in the best condition, and he uses the towel again to get the worst of the blood off, then tucks it into his waistband. He’ll put the jacket on over it when he gets to the hospital, despite the sweltering weather. He throws the lock on the bathroom door as he steps back into the room and closes the door behind him. It’s a stupid cheap lock that wouldn’t keep anyone even remotely determined out, but he doesn’t want anyone to wander in to so many weapons on accident.

Duo admits he’s a little surprised Tahani is still there when he turns back to the room. “I’m not sure when I’m going to be back, but I’ll deal with everything in there. Please tell the staff to just leave it.”

She stands up and has his jacket in her hands. “You certainly clean up well,” she says, then holds his jacket out to him. He checks the pocket automatically for his wallet, and takes about thirty seconds to make sure everything is where expected.

“Thanks,” he says.

“I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

It’s not quite an apology, but it’s not not one either. “You didn’t,” he tells her. “I’m pretty shameless, so it’s hard to embarrass me.”

“Thank you, for your help with Kizito. I do appreciate it.”

“Happy to help,” he says, because he is. She’s Quat’s sister, and given the chance, of course he’d help.

“If you give Zuhair a heads up when you head back, we can make sure to include you for dinner, or we can set aside a plate for you to warm up?”

He recognizes the peace offering for what it is and gives her a small smile. “I’ll do that. Thank you.”

He gets into the hospital with his gun by virtue of his credentials and uniform, so it was a good thing he went with the whole uniform.

Reynard looks exhausted when Duo finds him. He supposes it’s well deserved; they’ve effectively been up for close to forty-eight hours at this point, and probably five or six of those were spent slogging through dense jungle, not to mention the sheer stress and adrenaline of the actual rescue. That should have been better planned.  He can vaguely sense his own exhaustion beginning to tickle at the back of his mind, but he’s unlikely to crash until tonight. It does make him glad he stopped to grab coffee though.

“How are they doing?” he asks, handing Reynard his cup. He is still in his tactical gear, but unlike Duo, the worst he’d done was walk through blood. He probably sweat like a pig, judging by the smell of him, though, so even though he doesn’t have to change, he’d probably really like a shower.  

Reynard rubs a hand over his face and accepts the cup gratefully. He takes a big gulp without even really blowing on it before he answers Duo. “Chuol and Ali are very sick, but it looks like they might be okay,” he says, referring to Joel and Patience respectively.

“And Florence?”

Duo doesn’t think the new lines on Reynard’s face are his imagination. “They’ve taken her in to do an emergency amputation on that leg, but it didn’t sound good.”

Heart sinking, Duo closes his eyes and lets out a long breath. “Have you had a chance to contact their families?” he asks.

“Yup. Chuol’s mother and Ali’s brother are both coming, but it’s unlikely either will get here until later today.”

“Not Florence though,” Duo says, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“She’s got her village,” Reynard suggests, though it sounds weak even to Duo. “But no, no one person. Francis Apio was her next of kin.”

It hurts because she deserves so much better, so much more. It’s never the ones he kills who linger in his mind—it’s the ones he couldn’t save. It looks like she’ll linger with Reynard too. He says, “Look, I’ve got a room at the local WinStar. If you wanna go and check in under my name, feel free. I, uh, got picked up by a friend, so my shit’s there. You look like you could use a really good shower and at least six hours of shut-eye.”

Reynard eyes him curiously, but he’s obviously too tired to nag. “You got these guys?” he asks instead.

“And a laptop,” he says, patting the bag over his shoulder. “I can start writing up the whole damn thing. With their base blown to hell, I don’t think the Earth First freaks will be interested in reclaiming their engineers anytime soon, so it should be quiet.”

“Think the kids’ll be able to tell us anything?” Reynard wonders, his mind still trying to work even though his body is clearly over this whole “being functional” thing.

Duo shrugs. “Maybe a little? If you want, I can wait till you get back so we can do joint interviews. They could probably use a good day or two to recover physically before we start asking them any questions.”

“What about Nabirye?”

“I’ll check with her docs. If they say it’s bad, I’ll try to talk to her as much as I can. I won’t wait.”

Reynard runs his hand over his face again, then covers what looks like an epic yawn. “I’d like to say I should be here for that, but…”

“But you’re going to probably pass out in the cab to the hotel?” Duo offers.

“That,” he agrees wearily.

“Go on,” Duo encourages. “I got this.”

Reynard gives him a strange look. “Before this whole mess, I don’t know that I would have believed that,” he admits.

Duo raises an eyebrow, honestly surprised. “And now?”

“Now? Now I’m not sure you shouldn’t be the senior partner in this pair.” Reynard yawns again, and Duo thinks only the exhaustion allowed that acknowledgement.

“Get some sleep, Reynard. You’ve done good work today,” he says.

“I think I should be telling you that.”

“I’m young with energy to spare. Go. Before you fall over.”

For a heartbeat, Reynard looks like he wants to argue, but he yawns yet again and decides it isn’t worth it. He all but drags his feet down the hall, and Duo pulls out his phone to call the WinStar and let them know of the change of plans. It’s technically in walking distance from the hospital, but he asks for a shuttle for Reynard anyway. The rate he’s moving, the shuttle will probably be waiting for him when he gets out.

He goes into the room to check on Joel and Patience, but they’re both out cold. He looks over their charts, familiar enough with medical jargon to be able to tell that the biggest threat is the dehydration. He shakes his head. Fanatics are always the worst. He doesn’t want to think about what they did to these kids to get the kind of work out of them they got while they were also limiting their food and water.

He drags a cheap chair into the hall outside their room so he can both keep an eye on them and keep an eye out for Florence while he works on his report. He’ll probably send off the rough draft to Une because he knows there’s going to be fallout from this one, and he wants her to have as much information as she can.

Time kind of blurs for a while as he bounces between tasks. There are a lot of notes and details to make. He decides not to include all the specs of the power source Florence had developed for the buster rifle. She designed it to catastrophically fail, but no one who wasn’t an expert would have known that, and had it failed the way she intended, it would probably have incinerated the area around the silo for miles—not that a working model might not have done the same, but her failure wouldn’t have hit atmo, much less a colony. He mentally flags that to talk through with Heero later.

He saves and puts the laptop away when Florence is wheeled into the room next to the other two.

“How is she?” he asks the doctor. To his credit, he looks Duo up and down thoroughly.

“You one of the agents who got her out?” he asks.

Duo nods. “I’m hoping it was ‘in time,’” he says.

“For the other two”—he nods to the closed door—“It should be. For Miss Nabirye?” He sighs. “The infection’s advanced. I’m hoping that removing the leg and getting some fluids and some heavy-duty antibiotics in her can take it out, but the next twenty-four hours will tell.” He frowns. “That said, if she has any family, I would recommend they not dawdle.”

“Orphan,” he says. “And her fiancé didn’t make it out.”

The doctor spits something nasty under his breath in a language Duo doesn’t speak, but the tone is universal. “I thought there were supposed to be five.”

“I wish we’d been able to get here sooner,” Duo says.

“It was just you and your partner?” he asks. Duo nods, and the doctor shakes his head, putting a hand on Duo’s shoulder that he thinks is meant to be comforting. “It’s a miracle you got them out at all. They all mentioned the miles of jungle you dragged them through to save them. To make it through that? In their condition? You are only human. You did more than anyone else could have.”

Exactly how much of a colossal failure this whole fucking disaster is has been shut away tightly in Duo’s mind, in that place he won’t think about until he’s safe, but the doctor’s words pry open the door a little bit.

“Save her, doctor,” he says, and it comes out like a command.

The doctor meets his eyes, dark and solemn. “I will do my best.” He pats Duo’s shoulder again and leaves.

“Agent?” a voice he doesn’t know asks while he’s checking on Florence. She’s starting to come to, and he doesn’t want her to wake up alone. A man in a uniform that’s somewhere between police and military has stuck his head in.

“Are you looking for particular agent or just who happens to be here?” Duo asks, setting his laptop down and moving to the doorway. He took off his jacket a bit earlier, and the long sleeves of his shirt are rolled up, but he’s still got the tie on at least.

“I was looking for the lead agent? I understand that’s an Agent Reynard?”

“Reynard is catching some sleep,” he says. “I’m Darkside, his partner. Is there something I can help you with?”

He moves him into the hall and closes the door mostly behind him because he doesn’t want Florence to wake up to a pissing match, and this guy is practically chomping at the bit to start a fight.

“You are Darkside?” the man—his name plate says Birungi—sounds both incredulous and condescending. Under other circumstances, Duo might be impressed or amused, but as it is, the last few days are catching up with him.

Duo crosses his arms. He still has blood under his nails—some of it probably Francis’s—and no patience for posturing. “I am,” he says.

He gets a onceover that is not unlike the one Duo gave Mbabazi earlier. “The Preventers are quite desperate then,” Birungi concludes.

You should hope to have someone of my caliber working on your team, he thinks. “What can I help you with?” he asks instead, ignoring the attitude.

“Our president would like to speak with the agent in charge regarding the great explosion on our border, where you were operating.”

“I’m sure Reynard or I would be happy to speak with your president about it once we have backup here.” Une is sending them some after Duo’s two-minute rundown made it clear that they needed it. It’s much easier to find backup who can cover people guarding than deep-jungle infiltration and search and rescue.

“If you don’t mind, I will stay with you until your backup arrives.” The phrasing is polite but the intent isn’t. Birungi isn’t making a suggestion.

“Knock yourself out,” Duo tells him, and means it literally. “Miss Nabirye was just waking up. If you could keep an eye out here so I can check on her, that’d be appreciated.”

Birungi frowns but Duo set it up in such a way that he really can’t refuse to help without being an obvious asshole. He nods, and Duo slips back into Florence’s room.

“Francis?” she asks, that particular mix of drowsiness and gravel that coming out of surgery tends to have in her voice.

“Agent Darkside,” he corrects softly, letting the pieces come together themselves.

She wakes up a little bit more and immediately gasps, that mournful sound that is a precursor to serious crying. He pours her a little bit of water and gives her the straw.

“Try and take a drink. Slow sips. I know,” he tells her, patting her hand where the IV is, taking care not to disturb it. “I know.”

“Francis is—” she chokes off. “Why… why am I even here?” she demands. “I told you to leave me!”

“And I told you I wasn’t doing that,” he reminds, feeling her forehead. She’s still running a fever, and that is not a good sign.

“You knocked me out!”

“I wasn’t going to leave you, and I wasn’t going to fight you every step of the way up twenty-five flights of stairs and through three miles of jungle. I think that would have killed you as certainly as leaving you there.”

“I did not want you to get me out! I wanted to stay there! I wanted to be…” she chokes and gasps. “There is nothing for me here!”

“Your life does not begin and end with your fiancé,” he tells her, gentle but firm. “You have so much more to give—”

“I don’t care anymore! Francis and I—how can a child like you possibly understand?” she demands again. “We have been together since I can remember. We were all we had!”

Part of Duo wants to yell at her, take her down a few pegs for arrogantly believing that just because he’s young, he can’t understand real loss. Most of him aches in sympathy though, because he does know exactly how it feels to lose the people who are the center of his world, to know that there is no one left waiting for him, to know no one would miss him if he just died like everyone he loved. “I know it doesn’t help, but I do understand,” he says. “I know how empty the world is when everyone you’ve built your life around is gone, and you’re left standing in their ashes, alone.” He takes a deep breath. “But you’re not alone, Flo. You have more to give. You’re brilliant, and you deserve more than to be a casualty in a footnote of a shitty terrorist group’s file.”

“More to give to who?” she snaps. “Why should I care about saving the world if Francis is not in it?”

He’s been there—God, he has been exactly where she is. He didn’t take G’s offer because he wanted to save anyone; he wanted revenge. It was only during the course of the war that he started understanding the bigger picture, caring about the bigger picture. It was only after meeting the other pilots that he found a reason to live, to stay alive, again.

“Then survive to create things that will destroy the people who took the man you love,” he tells her. “If you can’t keep going to help people, then keep going to make sure no one else has to lose their Francis.” But he can relate to her pain. What he would do if he lost Heero doesn’t bear thinking about.

Tears are pouring down her face, which, not really all that great, because she’s already dehydrated. Also not a good sign that she hasn’t even noticed her leg is missing yet. “You wasted your time saving me.”

Duo hears it then—it’s like a gong in his chest—and his eyes snap to hers. There’s nothing there—no will, no resolve, just… emptiness. He calls a wisp of Shinigami’s power up and touches her hand. Her flicker is dimming, like the wick has come to its end. She’s dying. Even if she had the will, there’s nothing left to burn.

He closes his eyes against the feeling, allows himself two breaths to mourn, then places a hand on her forehead, gently pressing her back.

“Saving someone is never a waste,” he tells her. He brings up both hands to brush away her tears. “Rest.” His throat is suddenly tight, but the command comes out clear.

“Your hands are cool,” she says, drowsy. The flicker of her life throws its last, sputtering sparks. “They feel good.”

“Rest,” he tells her again, brushing an errant dirty curl off her forehead.

Birungi sticks his head in the room as the beeping in the monitors starts to get farther apart. “Should I call the nurse?” he asks.

Duo brushes a last curl back as he feels a tickle of Shini’s power reach out and quench her faltering flame; the Reaper’s hand giving the only mercy it knows.

The sound of a life-support machine flatlining is universal.

The hospital reacts quickly. Duo backs into a corner, watching them work, but he knows the effort is wasted—she’s already gone.

Duo is sitting in the chair outside Joel and Patience’s room, Birungi still at his side, a solid, surprisingly nonjudgmental presence when Reynard comes rushing down the hall.

“Darkside, I came as soon—”

“She’s gone,” he says, interrupting him. “Sepsis.” Insidious and sometimes frighteningly fast, it had probably cut her wick before Duo decided not to leave her behind. He thought that Patience was the dying flicker, but it wasn’t—it had been Florence, even though she’d seemed stronger outwardly. He should have known when he was carrying her, but either Shini shielded the knowledge from him or he just hadn’t thought to look for it.

“Fuck,” Reynard says with feeling.

“You are Agent Reynard?” Birungi asks, holding out his hand.

“Yes, and you are?” Reynard asks, taking his hand.

“Inspector of Police, Birungi, at your service. I’m sorry for the passing of Miss Nabirye. Our president would like to speak with yourself regarding the operation the Preventers undertook on our border?”

Reynard looks at Duo, which is nice. “I told him we’d be happy to speak to him once our backup arrives, but feel free to clear with Une.”

“You haven’t spoken with her?” he asks.

“I sent her a rough draft of our report—figured the sooner she had it, the better.”

Reynard nods in approval. He still looks tired, but this mission is going to need more than just sleep to recover from. “I agree with my partner’s assessment,” he says to Birungi. “I’d like to check in with Director Une, but I think it’s irresponsible for us to leave until we’re certain of Mr. Chuolo and Miss Ali are stable and no longer at risk, especially given Miss Nabirye’s passing.”

“I understand, Agent Reynard. Agent Darkside has been most… attentive.”

There’s something in his tone, but Duo can’t be assed to unpack it at the moment. He stands and shrugs on his jacket. “If you can relieve me, I could use some food. I’m assuming you ate before you passed out?”

“It’s funny—the shuttle that picked me up had two breakfast sandwiches waiting for me,” Reynard comments, looking at Duo as if he orchestrated that.

“Funny,” Duo agrees simply. Losing Florence is a gut punch he wasn’t expecting. He’s not used to this rescuing people thing, but you don’t have to be a math whiz to know two of five hostages recovered pretty much qualifies as a catastrophic failure. “I’m gonna hit up the cafeteria and get something to eat.”

Reynard frowns. “You haven’t eaten? Anything?”

“Not since I relieved you. Take a seat, relax, wind our good inspector down, if you would.”

“You should probably go and get some sleep yourself,” Reynard says, but it’s definitely a suggestion and not a command, so Duo brushes it aside, handing him the laptop bag.

“I copied you on the draft I sent Une, if you wanna take a look at it. Feel free to make any changes or add anything I missed,” he says. “You can log in under your username. I’ll rest when our backup gets here.”

He doesn’t say that he doesn’t want to leave Patience and Joel. Judging by Reynard’s nod, he doesn’t have to.

Their backup arrives before dinner. Duo is released to go back to Tahani’s place—not that he thinks Reynard realizes he’s staying on a Winner personal property—and even though his own exhaustion is setting in hard, he takes the time to painstakingly clean his guns and knife sheathes. The holsters are, indeed, a total loss, and go into the trash bag. The vinyl straps of the knife sheathes survive better. He borrows some bleach to scrub every surface that might have blood on it. He doesn’t want Quat’s staff to have to deal with it, no matter how willing they might be.

Once the bathroom is so clean it’s basically sterile, he runs a bath in that little swimming pool posing as a tub, making the water as hot as he can stand it. He soaks until the water has well and truly cooled, but it gets the rest of the blood out of his hair, from under his nails, and out of his ears.

Heero calls as he’s finishing brushing out his hair, and Duo puts it on speakerphone so he doesn’t have to hold it.

“Can you talk?” is Heero’s first question.

“To you, always,” Duo quips, a small smile pulling at his lips. “Can you?”

“We caught the would-be terrorist,” he says, and he sounds irritated, so he thinks that the locals should have been able to handle it. Duo loves Heero’s dichotomies—the fact that with most difficult things, he believes he knows better than 99.9% of everyone, but he still has those weird blind spots where he doesn’t realize things that he finds simple aren’t necessarily simple to other people. Just because Heero thought it was easy doesn’t mean it actually was.

“So the princess is safe yet again,” Duo concludes, teasing.

“She is. We’re heading home in the morning. Do you have a return timeline yet?”

“Not yet. Backup arrived today, but when you blow up shit on borders in countries that are a little touchy about outsiders running around on their land in general, there’s a lot of pandering and explaining and making nice to do,” he says, putting the brush down and using the towel to squeeze out the rest of the excess water. It’s a relief when the white towel comes away pristine this time.

Heero hmphs. “You made international news,” he warns.

“Oh goody,” Duo returns sarcastically.

“You haven’t heard?”

“Nah. Probably shoulda kept an ear out, but… it’s been a day.”

“News is saying you rescued three of the hostages,” Heero says, an invitation to either talk about it or shut him down. He’s gotten better at that lately, with them having separate partners and separate assignments.

“Only two of them made it,” Duo says, laying back on the bed. He can almost hear Heero frown. “Really don’t wanna talk about it right now.”

“You sound tired. Have you slept since you left for the mission?”

“Assignment,” Duo corrects absently, then yawns. “And no.”

“Do you want to call me later?”

Even after the bath, there’s a lingering chill he suspects is from pulling on Shini for so long. What Duo wants is to curl up on Heero, let Heero’s heat seep into his marrow to warm him, and to be lulled to sleep by the steady beat of his heart. What he doesn’t want is for Heero to hang up.

“Do you have anything you need to do right now?” he asks instead.

“No,” Heero says. “Wufei and I already submitted our reports. I’d catch a red-eye to Brussels, but…”

But you’re not there. Duo smiles at Heero’s unspoken reasoning. He climbs under the covers and pulls the phone up onto the pillow next to him.

“Read to me?” he asks.

Heero actually sighs, and it makes Duo smile again. “You know I’m terrible at this.” He really is. Heero is not an overly expressive person at the best of times, but he goes into total monotone when he reads aloud. It bothers him for the simple reason that he hates being bad at anything, but Duo enjoys just listening to his voice sometimes. Besides, listening to some of the humor and sarcasm in Heero’s dead monotone can be funny on its own.

“You can’t be here with me,” he says, which is both explanation and plea. “Just till I fall asleep?”

“What do you want me to read?” Heero asks, and if Duo weren’t so mentally and emotionally worn down by the last, well, almost three days at this point, he’d whoop. Instead, he closes his eyes and smiles again.

“Pride & Prejudice?” Duo suggests.

“You have that whole book memorized,” Heero says, almost accusingly. “I have no idea what you see in these trashy romance novels, anyway.”

“Austen is not trashy romance,” Duo argues, but there’s no heat in it. There’s no need to confirm that he has the book memorized. “Our real life is an adventure novel. I don’t need it in my books. They get all the details wrong anyway. I just… I like my fiction to have happy endings. That’s all. There aren’t enough of them in real life.”

Heero is quiet for long moments before he says in an unusually gentle voice, “No, there aren’t.” He goes quiet again, probably pulling up the book on his phone because he has staunchly refused to memorize it. “Chapter 1,” he says, and Duo can tell he’s changed it to speakerphone. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” He stops, then says, “You don’t even like women.”

“I’m not sexually attracted to women. I like them just fine,” Duo corrects with humor.

“I just don’t see—”

“Reading, not editorializing,” Duo tells him, barely suppressing a laugh, but he thinks Heero can hear it in his voice.

Heero sighs again, and this time it must be for effect, because he continues. “However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood…”

Duo drifts off to sleep with Heero’s voice in his ears and a smile on his lips.

Chapter Text

Duo isn’t surprised when Reynard asks for reassignment. He also hears through the grapevine that he takes a leave of absence. Une considers it a win on paper, but neither Reynard nor Duo do. While there’s no question they worked well together and Reynard’s regard for him has clearly come leaps and bounds, their relationship will always be tainted by that first failure. Patience and Joel are recovering, and that’s something, but it’s not enough. Duo lets him go without an argument. It grounds him for another three weeks, but that’s fine. It’s actually kind of nice to be able to go home with Heero at a set time and not have someone’s life be on the line somewhere.

Duo doesn’t really count partner five. She’s named Jayne Dou, pronounced like “doe, a deer, a female deer.” (Heero may never forgive Hilde for making him watch Sound of Music. It might trump the Jane Austen novels.) Her call sign is Fawn, which makes him very skeptical. She’s supposed to transfer to Brussels from London, which shouldn’t be that big of a move. That said, he’s on his fifth partner in just over three months, and he’s getting a reputation. He thinks it’s undeserved since only two of his partners have ended up in the hospital and both of them are back at work by now, but he can’t control scuttlebutt. The day before they’re supposed to meet, Une calls him into her office to let him know that Fawn has decided to pursue opportunities outside of Preventers.

In other words: she quit. If he’s honest, he’s never entirely sure that Une wasn’t fucking with him anyway, because, really? Jayne Dou, call sign Fawn? Would someone really do that to themselves? On purpose?  When he looks—and they really need to do something about Preventers information security, because it’s OZ-level, and that means it’s pretty much an open book to Duo and Heero—she has a file. Duo would totally build a fake file to fuck with someone, but he doesn’t know if Une would go that far.

Une decides it doesn’t matter and sends him to L4 anyway. There’s a summit that Relena will be at, and Une wants Preventer presence there to make sure nothing goes sideways. Usually that would be Heero and Wufei’s gig, but they’re in the middle of something weird trafficking going on in Africa around the Wakanda border. They’ve gotten looped into it because neither the Ugandan president nor the Wakandan king wants the agents who blew up a terrorist base on their border near them at the moment. After that, there’s a spooks conference that she wants them to attend anyway. Duo doesn’t see why, because as far as he understands from Quat, those conferences are more about connections than training, and Duo would be way better suited than either Mr. Taciturn and Mr. Misanthropy, but whatever. He can admit that people tend to take Heero and Wufei more seriously than him. At least he gets Une to let him hop a Sweeper ship to L4, so he’s not neurotic after three days of being in a ship with a pilot he doesn’t know or trust.

He doesn’t expect to be coordinating with Dorothy Catalonia. He knows Dorothy has been Relena’s aide, but he doesn’t really know her, and he isn’t sure how good she actually is. What little he does know about her comes from Quatre, who is uncharacteristically holding a grudge. It’s not exactly a great sign. Trowa dislikes her on the principle that she stuck three feet of steel in his lover, so he’s not exactly a reliable source either. Heero is his usual closed book when it comes to people judgments, and Wufei devolves into near incoherence when Duo asks. Duo doesn’t hold that against Dorothy since Sally can still induce the same reaction on occasion, which leaves Duo going in blind and making his own call.

Duo decides if he can figure out how to work with Une, Dorothy probably isn’t much worse—especially if Relena’s keeping her around. Relena has many faults, but she’s actually shown to be a decent judge of character in the last couple of years. That said, it’s his first face-to-face with Princess Peace herself since the Mariemaia Incident, and he’s not sure if she’s harboring any resentment for the fact that part of the reason Heero is unavailable to her is because he’s with Duo.

Well, he thinks Dorothy can’t be much worse than Une until he gets to the hotel and can hear her haranguing someone when he’s still a good twenty feet from the door.

He has a key card, so he knocks in warning, then lets himself in. “Agent Darkside reporting,” he says, cutting Dorothy off midrant. The guys who must be the security detail look suitably terrified and relieved to have a Preventer around, at least until they get a good look at him. He sees a couple faces fall, and he really hopes their professional faces are better when they’re actually working.

“A moment,” she tells him, then turns back to the security goons. “If I have made my instructions explicitly clear this time, go and secure your positions,” she tells them. They take off without another word, giving bare nods of acknowledgement to Duo on their way out. She runs cool eyes over him. “Maxwell, right?” she asks.

“One and only,” he agrees, stepping in closer. “Under normal circumstances, wouldn’t ask, but seeing as I’m supposed to be helping with the security in this thing…” He throws a thumb over his shoulder. “What was with the verbal beatdown?”

“Oh, that,” she says loftily, as if she’s already half forgotten about it.

“Yeah, that.” Duo can’t resist.

“They brought anonymous gifts up to Ms. Relena’s room,” she says.

Well, that’s a problem. You don’t bring anonymous gifts to VIP rooms until they’ve been cleared. Period. It’s like, VIP security 101. He scratches at his eyebrow trying to figure out how to diplomatically ask if the team here is a first-time team or just stupid.

Dorothy seems to understand what he’s struggling with because she says, “Apparently a nasty round of stomach flu went through most of the normal hotel security. The people they’ve backfilled with are emergency and not all that experienced,” she explains.

That makes Duo perk up immediately. “That seems…”

“Suspicious?” she asks, going to an overstuffed couch, and even though she looks like she wants to fling herself onto it, she sits down primly, ankles crossed and everything.  

“Yeah, more than a little. I mean, it’s not impossible that it’s a coincidence, but…”

“But you would raise the security rating?” she asks.

“Was thinking more along the lines of I should probably worry less about securing the location than just physically securing Relena,” he admits. “Speaking of—where is Relena?”

“She’s reviewing arguments for the summit,” she said, waving her hand in the direction of one of the closed doors.

She managed to focus through Dorothy’s rant? Duo wonders, not sure if he should be worried or impressed. “I’ll just go stick my head in and let her know I’m here,” he says.

“Once you do that, I can give you a rundown of everything,” she says, dismissing him.

He doesn’t think that requires a reply, so he knocks on the door Dorothy indicated. “Re—uh, Vice Minister Peacecraft?” he calls. He can barely make out a reply through the door and assumes it’s okay for him to enter. “Vice Minister Peacecraft?” he asks.

Relena is sitting at a small desk, though she’s turned to face him. He doesn’t like that the desk faces away from the door, but he knows that’s it’s just the hotel layout and he’s probably being excessively paranoid. Still, the thing with security makes him uneasy, so he’s not sure if he considers the in-room balcony a bonus or a negative.

“Duo!” she greets with surprising warmth. “Please, none of that Vice Minister nonsense. We’re friends after all.”

They are? News to him, but he can work with it. Hopefully that means she’ll listen to him. “Nice to see you too, princess,” he says, a little teasing. “I just wanted to let you know I’m here. Sorry it couldn’t be ’Ro.”  

“Don’t apologize. It’s nice to see you as well. I’m sorry that the Director still seems to think having one of you at these events is necessary.”

He shrugs. “Keeping you safe is a pretty big priority. You’re important, whether you like to admit it or not. Besides, from listening to what happened with the local security, it sounds like the concern could be legit this time.”

She sighs. “I was hoping you would help calm Dorothy down, not make her more paranoid,” Relena admits.

“I don’t intend to make her more paranoid. She seems about the right level for the moment,” he replies cheekily, and gets a smile.

“Really, it was an honest mistake with the gifts,” she says.

He raises an eyebrow at her. “C’mon, princess. It’s a pretty big mistake, and you know it. Looks like they were harmless, but if they hadn’t been? I’m gonna talk strategy with Catalonia, but I don’t think you should be out anywhere in public without me by your side. At least for the length of the summit,” he says.

Her brows furrow. “You really think that’s necessary?” she asks.

“I’d rather be cautious than wrong. Heero might kill me if something happens to you, after all,” he says, but he smiles to make it clear he’s teasing.

“I’m not sure he won’t kill me for real if something happens to you while you were protecting me,” she teases back, catching him off guard. She thinks Heero likes me, he realizes. Which means she doesn’t realize they’re actually together, which, well, if Heero hasn’t told her, Duo’s not going to.

“Nah,” he assures after a beat. “He couldn’t kill you when he had every reason in the world to do so. He wouldn’t kill ya now.”

She smiles at him, a little indulgent, and he doesn’t know what he’s done to deserve it. “I think you underestimate your value to him.”

He really doesn’t know what to say to that, and since he isn’t going to discuss their relationship with her,  he decides to go with a subject change. “Anyway, I just wanted to let you know I was here. I’ll figure out what the schedule and the summit look like with Catalonia, and we’ll figure out how much our paranoia is acting up together.”

“Thank you, Duo.”

He nods and goes back into the main room. “The gig doesn’t really get going until day after tomorrow, right?” he asks Dorothy.

She looks up at him from her laptop. “Correct. Why?” she asks.

“Thinking about dinner tonight,” he admits, looking at the small but perfectly adequate kitchen in the suite. “I’m assuming there’s a pre-event dinner tomorrow, but anything tonight?”

Dorothy frowns. It is getting late in the day cycle. “No. I suppose we can order room service or take out.” She doesn’t look happy about it though.

Duo doesn’t like the option either, instead going through the cabinets and making a mental list of what he has to work with. The small kitchen is equipped with the basic utensils, enough for him to make a halfway decent meal from at least, assuming he has, you know, ingredients.

There’s nothing in the fridge except bottled water that he’ll have to look at more closely before he trusts, and couple of energy drinks.

“What are you doing?” Dorothy asks, sounding bewildered.

“Making sure I’ve got the stuff to make dinner,” he says.

The look she gives him is comical. “You? Cook?” She doesn’t ask so much as mock.

“Yes, me, cook,” he repeats back, deadpan. “Unless you do?” He’s betting not. She’s too prissy and privileged to have spent time in her own kitchen.

She gives him a considering look. “Can you cook? Really?” she asks, not so mocking this time.

“Really can,” he assures. “And I see you’re not any happier than me about getting take out or room service. Let’s do this. I’ll bring my stuff here. I can crash on the couch. I’ll feel better if I don’t have more than a wall between me and Relena for the time being. Can go to the store and pick up enough to cover us—probably for the next three meals, and scope out the area while I do that. It’s L4, but.” He pauses and scratches at the back of his neck. He can’t tell what it is, but some instinct says something’s wrong, and he’ll feel better if they limit Relena’s movements unless absolutely necessary. “Give me the full rundown while I cook?”

She frowns but nods. “That works.”

“Any preferences? Dinner? Breakfast? Lunch tomorrow?” he asks.

“Miss Relena and I are both foodies. We’ll try just about anything.”

“Oh goody. L2 nobody cooking for two foodies,” Duo says, laughing. “Should be fun.”

Nobody would be more surprised than Duo to find that it, in fact, is fun. L4 has the best hydroponics of any colony, so their veg and even some fruits are excellent. He doesn’t do anything terribly impressive, both because he’s a little worn out from the travel and because he is not going to try to be elaborate in a kitchen that is best-described as “adequate” for foodies. Better to go simple. He makes an apple juice chicken recipe that Catherine gave him and was a favorite at the circus. It is pretty much poaching chicken breasts in apple juice until it cooked down to a thick sauce. He picked up green beans that could be tossed in the oven and baked, plus some fresh spinach for a salad. The spinach and leftover chicken can be used to make a salad for lunch the next day. He also picked up eggs and peppers for morning omelets. He couldn’t resist some strawberries that can be a nice munchie, but also go in the salad tomorrow.

Duo avoids dairy. Dairy products from cows are devilishly hard to get ahold of in the colonies—even L4. Cows don’t do well in space—either on the route there or living there—and even if they did, the space requirements are absurd, not to mention the air-cleaning and feeding, so the only cow-dairy products that make it into space are typically imported. They’re insanely expensive—assuming you can actually find them at all—but Duo has grown fond of them living on earth. That said, goats—nature’s living compost disposals—are usually fed organic waste that colonists separate religiously in places that are better organized than L2, take up way less space, are way less stinky, and make good milks and cheeses, so their dairy is usually the preferred in the colonies. He’s both familiar and comfortable with the tang of goat dairies, but he knows a lot of dirtsiders aren’t, so better not to risk it, even if Dorothy claims she and Relena will eat anything.

 Relena oos and ahs over it, and Dorothy looks mildly impressed. He’s supposed to be going over event and security details with Dorothy, but it ends up being a crash course in basic cooking, complete with a story about Relena forgetting to set a timer on making rice, getting distracted, and not remembering until the fire alarm went off.

“The entire building had to be evacuated because the smoke was so bad, it set off not only our alarm, it set off the one in the room above us, and we couldn’t stop it,” Dorothy tells him while Relena blushes and sputters. “We did have to replace the pot. There was no saving it.”

“Better the pot than the building or the stove,” Duo points out, trying very, very hard not cackle because Relena looks like she’d very much like the ground to open up and swallow her.

“The hotel offered us free room service for the rest of our trip if we promised not to try cooking in the room again.”

That does it. Duo can’t stop the laugh at that, because he can absolutely see a hotel manager trying not to make things worse and doing just that. “How did that not end up on the news?” he asks. He can’t imagine he would have missed that a whole hotel had to be evacuated because of Relena setting off a fire alarm.

“Very good public relations,” Dorothy explains. “The hotel kept Miss Relena’s name out of it.”

Duo shakes his head, still smiling but managing not to laugh as he sets Relena’s plate in front of her. “Here you go, princess.”

“It smells delicious!” she announces, barely waiting until he sets a plate in front of Dorothy and gets his own to dig in. He eyes them as they do an amazing job of being both prim and exact in their manners, but the food is disappearing off their plates at an impressive speed.

“Forget to eat lunch?” he asks. They both look guilty.

“I think we got carried away with the security snafu,” Dorothy admits, looking chagrinned.

Since Duo isn’t starving, he’s been eating at, what for him, is a rather slow pace. “That reminds me. I’ll ask the stupid and obvious question. You’re on L4—ring of all things Winner. Why didn’t you just ask Quat to borrow a few Maganacs? I know there’s, uh, history there, but it’s Relena, and they’d be professional.”

“That’s my fault,” Relena jumped in. “Dorothy suggested it. Since you were already on your way, I insisted it wasn’t necessary. I’m sure they’d be professional, but I didn’t see any reason to risk friction if it could be avoided.”

Duo thinks the fact that he doesn’t bang his head on the counter shows personal growth and professionalism on his part. He doesn’t manage not to sigh though. Small victories. He looks at Dorothy, “I know you’re her aide and not security, but it’s clear you’re used to coordinating with her security, so you’re not a gleam. Should have overridden her.”

“A what?” Dorothy asks, looking affronted.

“A gleam,” he repeats as if it’s obvious. “Something bright and shiny and new and untested? Not an Earth word?”

Dorothy processes that and seems to realize he said she’s not a gleam, then says, “No, definitely not an Earth term.”

He shrugs. “Still should have overridden her. Her safety is the priority, not her comfort.”

“Have you ever tried to tell Miss Relena no?” she asks.

Duo opens his mouth, stops, thinks about what he knows about Relena, then concedes, “Point.” He shifts his attention to Relena. “Don’t override people who are supposed to keep you safe. Asking for trouble, you are,” he tells her.

“I wouldn’t have if you weren’t coming.” She sounds like she’s trying to reassure him, but it doesn’t really work.

“Whether I’m coming or not is beside the point. I can’t actually replace an entire security team because I’m still one person. I can’t be everywhere at once,” he informs. “That said, we’ve already got the backup security in place, so I won’t ask Q to borrow some Maganacs. But you will listen to me—crystal?”

She nods. “Crystal clear.”

“Finish your dinner,” he tells her, but he smiles when he says it to take the sting out.

Relena calls it an early night and retires to her room, so Dorothy and Duo can hash out the solid details of keeping her safe. When he thinks they have all the bases covered, Dorothy sits back and gives him a long, thoughtful look. “What?” he asks. He’s honestly impressed, because while he said that Dorothy wasn’t a gleam, he didn’t expect her to be as good as she is. She definitely pays attention when working with Heero and Wufei, because she calls out a lot of their typical red button areas. She doesn’t just understand that they pose a threat, but why they pose a threat, which makes her more amendable to resolving the issues.

Then again, she did control the Mobile Dolls, so maybe he shouldn’t be surprised by how well she multitasks and manages multiple threats.

“You’re… different than I thought you would be,” she admits. He raises an eyebrow in a silent question. “I didn’t think you were stupid or anything, but you’re…” She hesitates, looking for a word. “Nonjudgmental.”

“As opposed to…?”

“You haven’t given me one suspicious look the entire time you’ve been here. You haven’t been condescending or arrogant. I was concerned you’d hold a grudge,” she admits.

Duo can guess where the condescension and arrogance remarks come from. “It’s not personal with ’Ro and Fei,” he tells her. “Heero mostly thinks everyone is incompetent on some level, and, well, Fei’s still working on playing nice with girls.”

“Yes, but I was given to understand you were closer to Winner.”

It’s not exactly a question, but he gives her the answer because they need to work together and he doesn’t want her waiting for the gravity to fail. “Quat and I are the most… I guess ‘personable’ is the word? We get people better than the others, so we’re close on the account that the two of us tend to remember that we’re human the most, and we both have put a fair amount of effort into helping the others remember that. If you’re asking why I don’t hold a grudge for you stabbing him, well.” He shrugs. “It was war.”

She snorts, a distinctly unladylike sound that seems strange from her. “It can’t be that simple.”

He scratches the back of his neck, sifting through what she needs to know to understand and believe, and what’s overshare. “Look, I love Quat, okay? He’s family. But… he grew up in a world that had most of its sharp edges removed. Not that he didn’t go through other stuff, but…” He sighs. “I’m doing a bad job of explaining this.” He ties his braid in a knot, then lets it unravel, then starts again. “As smart as he is, Quat finds it easy to put people in boxes. Most of the people in his life before the war fit in them nicely. There were good people”—he made a box shape with his hands to his right—“and bad people.” He made the box shape to his left. “He knows logically that not everyone belongs in those boxes, but for war, you don’t have the luxury of feeling out people’s nuances in most cases. The guy who is shooting at you? You need to take him out. If he’s a church-going guy who volunteers every weekend and loves his family and is a new father—you don’t have time to care. You can’t care. He’s shooting at you. He will kill you if he can. So you have to kill him first. It’s war. It paints things in black and white—it has to, or everyone fighting in it would go crazy.”

Dorothy looks at her hands and her posture has gotten really stiff. “Many people go crazy anyway,” she says softly.

“They do,” Duo agrees. “Some during, way more after, when they have time to think about who that guy they killed might have been. But my point is that the circumstances forced Quat to reinforce his boxes. He knows people aren’t all one thing, but knowing and understanding aren’t the same thing.”

“And you do.” It isn’t a question when Dorothy says it. She says it like a fact, like it surprises her, even.

He gives her a helpless shrug. “I’m from L2. Plenty of people would say there’s no one worth saving there. That everyone is rotten. You learn that few people are all one thing. There are plenty of people who are objectively ‘bad’ people who still do good things, just as there are objectively ‘good’ people who do bad things, or can be pushed into doing bad things.” He smiles. “Quat’s not dealt a lot with those gray areas. He’s learning. Give him time.”

“You can’t tell me you would be so inclined to forgive me if it were so personal with you?”

Duo laughs at that. “Did Relena never tell you how me and Heero met?”

“No. Why?”

He flashes his best mischievous grin. “I shot him.” She startles. “Twice,” he adds both because it’s true and it doubles the impact.

“But, you’re…”

He softens the smile. “He got over it, though breaking him out of an Alliance hospital might have helped speed that along. Give Quat time. He’ll get there.” He does give her a pointed look before adding, “That might have happened sooner if you had overruled Relena.”

She sighs, but she seems more relaxed. “If the opportunity comes up again, I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Do that,” he says.

Though the next day unofficially kicks off with a “pre-event” dinner, it starts at four in the afternoon and runs till after ten. Duo glues himself to Relena’s side through it. He’s wearing a suit, which he hates. Preventers uniform is one thing, but a suit always makes him feel like he’s somehow woken up in some alternate universe. Relena introduces him as an intern if anyone inquires, but she makes it politely clear that he’s there to observe, not interact. He’s not the only one of those at this conference apparently, so he’s mostly ignored. It’s perfect to both keep to Relena’s side and be unremarkable.

It’s six long hours of being on moderately high alert, and he’s more than ready to go back to the hotel room by the end of it. He doesn’t expect Abernathy—that’s the poor kid’s first name—to grab his arm as he’s getting ready to leave. He’s lucky that Duo has mostly stood down and is able to not just slam him up against the nearest wall, or it would have been bad.

“What?” he asks, managing to keep the agitation out of his voice.

“Hey, Maxwell, right?” Abernathy asks. “A bunch of us interns are going out tonight. Thought we should invite you,” he says.

Duo blinks at him, and he can think of precious little he wants less than to go barhopping with a bunch of overprivileged brats who are still somehow older than he is. Something has been niggling at him all evening, and he can’t tell if it’s just that being surrounded by people with this much money and privilege always winds him up or if there’s something he’s legitimately missing.

“I don’t think—” he starts to say, only to have Abernathy cut him off.

“It’s a Spacer bar,” he hisses in Duo’s ear, looking way too pleased.

Duo stares at him, and Abernathy apparently takes his reaction as disbelief instead of the horror it actually is. Spacer bars are, well, Spacer bars. Not that Spacers are bad people, but they tend to be on the rougher side. The colonies have an interesting relationship with Spacers since most of them originally came from L2 and, as a general rule, tend to view most laws as guidelines rather than rules. He can understand why a group like these interns might find them exotic or fascinating, much like animals in a zoo might be, but Duo knows exactly how well Spacers appreciate that treatment.

It is not my damn job to babysit stupid interns, he thinks, knuckles white from being clenched so hard. Relena is his job right now, not these stupid kids who don’t know how to follow basic xyz direction on a zero-g ship.

“You coming or not?” Abernathy asks.

Duo wants to say no, but if something happens at the bar, it’s going to be blamed on the Spacers instead of the idiot Crawlers who never should have been there in the first place.

“Gimme ten. Gotta let R—Miss Relena and Miss Dorothy know,” he says.

“Sure. Meet in the lobby then,” Abernathy says with a wide, excited grin. Duo kind of wants to punch a few of those perfect teeth out.

He catches up to them at the elevator. Fortunately, they’re alone on it, and he says, “I’ve been invited to go barhopping with the interns.”

Dorothy blinks, but Relena looks delighted. “You should go. You deserve to unwind.”

He trades a look with Dorothy, who shrugs. At least she understands his reluctance.

“I’ll keep Miss Relena locked up tight once we get back to the room. Neither of us will leave or let anyone in. You should go.” Her eyes are calculating, and he has to admit, if he wants to get some information about any of the other summit attendees, their interns might be the best place to do it. He kind of doubts that their potential problem is anyone attending the summit officially, but it probably doesn’t hurt to get a little bit of grime on any of Relena’s opponents while he’s there.

And keep the ringlovers and dirtsiders from getting into trouble at Spacer bars.

They head to the room, and Duo clears it thoroughly before letting Relena and Dorothy in to roam as they want. He gives Dorothy and Relena both emergency buttons disguised as bracelets. “Don’t fall,” he recommends. “If any of these break, I’ll get a notification right away. I’ll call to check on you. If it goes to voicemail, I’m going to assume the worst.”

“Got it,” Relena says with a smile.

“No cooking. No ordering in,” he warns.

“Of course.”

Duo eyes her suspiciously.

“If you don’t want to go in your suit, you should get changed,” Dorothy warns.

“Not helpful,” he tells her, but grabs his bag and steps into the bathroom. He abandons the suit jacket and tie, though he keeps the button-down. He has more nice shirts and silently thanks Heero for reminding him he’d need them, but the suit jacket and pants have to last him the event, so off those go. Risking them in a bar is stupid. He does take off the button-down for a few minutes to put on a black compression top and his slimmest wrist sheaths. Between the top and the poor lighting they’ll be dealing with at the bar, they should be invisible when he rolls up the button-down’s sleeves later. He pulls out a pair of jeans that Quatre bought him as a supposed gift for joining Preventers. He has not looked up the price of them and refuses to because he loves them. Another thin sheath goes around each calf before he pulls on his boots. He takes twenty seconds to check his reflection and is satisfied with the relaxed but somewhat respectable look he was going for.

Part of him itches to bring along his gun, but the Spacer bar will throw him out on his ass so fast his head will spin if they catch him with it, and it will be really hard to explain to the interns. The blades will be hard to explain too, but at least the Spacers won’t lose their shit. Walking into a Spacer bar unarmed isn’t usually recommended anyway.

After a last warning to Relena and Dorothy, he slides a couple of cards into the wrist sheath, pockets his phone—front pocket where it’s harder to lift, thank you—and heads down to meet the other interns.

There are six of them, which is a sufficiently large group that Duo’s dislike of this little adventure just skyrocketed. One or two or even three, he’s reasonably confident he can keep out of trouble. Four is pushing it. Five and up is pretty much a guarantee that something’s going to go wrong. He’s the only one who has really dressed down. For the others, it looks like just the suit jackets have largely been abandoned, but button-downs are in place pretty much across the board except for one young woman who has a dressy top instead. Slacks are still in place, as are dress shoes. Even the girls haven’t bothered to change into shoes that are easier to walk in, and they’re all wearing some piece of jewelry that is going to get stolen in ten minutes or less. L4 or not, they’re going to a Spacer bar, and Spacers play by different rules.

He’s tempted to let it go—let their shit get stolen if they are this unaware of where they’re going—but he’s going to be the one running interference when it does. It’s going to be rough for his cover, but he’s not letting these kids go out this way.

“Hey, Maxwell, what took you—hey, what?” Abernathy cuts off as Duo strips him of his watch in the most overt way he can manage and dumps it in his hands before moving on to the real diamond studs in his ear. Spacers do wear diamond studs, especially cuts with sharp points because diamonds can be useful in weird places on a ship, but they also have special backs on their earrings that make them difficult to take off. The downside is, if it gets caught or yanked, chances are good you’re getting an ear torn off. To keep from losing valuable and useful, not to mention pretty, trinkets, most Spacers take the risk. Ringlovers and dirtsiders use nice little snap-on backings that pull right the fuck off. Uh, no.

“Put those in your room. Your ring too.” He points to what looks like some sort of school-based ring, then turns to the next person, stripping him of his obvious valuables just as efficiently.

“Do you really think this is necessary?” the third guy, Jason, asks. He’s a tall, slim, guy with the vaguely Asian features that, along with his accent, pegs him as an L1 product. “This is L4.”

“Uh huh,” Duo says, letting his assessment of Jason’s intelligence show in his voice. “And this is a Spacer bar. Any of you been to a Spacer bar before?” he asks. Cue headshakes all around. “I can tell,” he says, moving on to the first woman—Andromeda, and he’s pretty sure he can bet on her being a colonist based on her name alone—also taking a couple of chains off her neck.

“You really think these will get stolen?” the remaining woman asks, taking off her own jewelry. The last individual, a Hercules of all things, has taken off their own watch and even a chain Duo hadn’t seen yet.

“I do,” he says. “When you put them in your room, you should all also wear some sort of athletic shoe instead,” he warns. “The grav tends to be low in Spacer bars, and walking in heels it tricky enough in standard g. Dress shoes will usually slip. You want something with ankle support if you have it unless any of you are used to working in low g?”

“How do you know this?” Hercules asks. Their appearance is comically mismatched with their name. Beyond the glamor of their well-styled hair and subtle, tasteful makeup, they’re so average as to be entirely forgettable. They’re wearing a tasteful pencil skirt that is also not ideal for low grav.

“I’d go for pants too,” he adds. “Anything that hinders your range of motion should be avoided.”

Hercules frowns. “I said, how do you know this?” they repeat.

“Because I know Spacers, and I know Spacer bars,” he says. “I didn’t get this job because of family connections. Think of me as a charity case, if you have to, and be really glad you invited me.”

Andromeda frowns. “So you’re not related to the L3 Maxwells?” she asks.

“I didn’t even know there was an L3 Maxwell family,” he says, a little bit of bite in his voice. “If you are all so determined to go stick your idiot necks out in a Spacer bar, then at least be smart about it. I’d grab a jacket too, if I were you. These aren’t the nice space ports you’re used to—they’re freight ports. They don’t keep them as warm as traveler ports, so if you don’t have a jacket, you’re going to be cold.” He crosses his arms and looks at the lot of them. “What are you waiting for? Go put your things in your rooms and make your changes and we can go. Or we can not. Not is an option,” he adds.

Jason straightens and glares from behind his glasses. “After today, I need a drink, and the only place I hear you get them in this area is in Spacer bars.”

Duo blinks because he hadn’t forgotten, exactly, it just wasn’t top of mind that L4 doesn’t sell alcohol in most establishments. A hangover from being established by Muslims and Quat’s father had been much more devout than Quat is, so he’s been slow to repeal some of those older laws. Besides, they’re popular with a lot of the established L4 families. The Spacer bars are some of the only locally available alcohol. He wonders if that means that L4 Spacer bars are more used to Crawlers than most on other colonies.

They are and aren’t. L4 Spacer bars are definitely more familiar with Crawlers wandering through, but that doesn’t mean that they really deal with it any better than other Spacer bars. From the moment their group sets foot in The Black Hole, the Spacer crowd has tagged them, and the sense of go away is so thick, Duo thinks he could choke on it. He knows that the bartender will serve them, but probably quadruple the price. The kids can probably afford it—quadruple Spacer prices is usually not outrageous unless you know the Spacer price.

He glances at his group of determined interns, and heaves an internal sigh when he sees they’re still determined. It was too much to ask them to give up and leave now that they’d made the trek. And they’re not allowed to leave with alcohol, so they have to stay here and drink. It’s… awesome. He should have done his best Heero impression and scared off anyone who might have thought of inviting him on this escapade.

Then again, he’s here as much to protect the Spacers from the Crawlers as the reverse.

Hercules is the first to rub their arms at the temperature drop. “You weren’t kidding,” they tell him. They had put on a jacket, but Duo can tell it’s thin and Hercules doesn’t have a lot of extra body fat to insulate them.

“Freight ports—and the Spacer bars attached to them—are usually between 7 and 10 degrees.”

“It’s not that cold here,” Abernathy says with a frown.

“Celsius,” Duo corrects, already tired. “Between 45 and 50 Fahrenheit.” He doesn’t bother explaining that most Spacer ships aren’t much better. It costs energy and fuel to heat ships, and real Spacers just get used to living in the cooler temperatures. Howard and G had kept Peacemillion around 65° F because they admitted they were old men and the cold made their bones ache. “Watch your step then,” he sighs. They’ve been moving into areas where the ring’s spin gravity has been lessened for at least fifteen minutes, but even colonists don’t always recognize it immediately.

Jason, who kept the impractical formal shoes—or maybe just didn’t have anything else with him—about faceplants two steps in.

“Crawlers spinside,” the bartender calls. “Sit. Send a one to take your order.”

He sees Jason and Andromeda try to go in different directions, grabs both their arms, and pushes them toward the right where he can see other Crawlers settled in. “Spinside is the right side on ring colonies,” he says.

“But one of us needs to order—”

“She said she’d send someone to take our orders. She probably doesn’t trust Crawlers not to spill between the bar and the table.”

Yulian, who looks like he could be Peacecraft cousin, complete with the dirtsider tan, says, “Crawlers?” in a scandalized tone.

“That’s the nicest thing they’ll call you,” Duo tells him, since Crawler is the most polite term that Spacers have for outsiders. He all but frog-marching them to a booth in what, upon closer examination, is clearly a designated Crawler side of the bar. “Save your indignation for someone calling you a worm to your face.”

“They really do that?” Simona, the last of the party and an obvious dirtsider who is struggling with the decreased gravity, asks in dismay.

“They really do,” Duo says. You wouldn’t think it’d be tricky to move in just low grav, but it has a way of throwing off your sense of your limbs and your center that always messes with people the first time they’re exposed to it. Duo isn’t a true Spacer—he lived on a ship for three years, yes, but Peacemillion kept the living areas at Earth-equal gravity and he was colonist before that. He’s comfortable in low and zero g environment, but he’s not born to them like a real Walker—what Spacers call themselves—is.

He must be close enough though, because when the waiter wanders over to their table, he looks straight at Duo first and asks, “What’s a pretty Flier doing with so many Crawlers?”

Duo should really have a better answer for that than he does. “Steel in sight, right?” he finally says.

“Keep your steel in sight,” the waiter says, giving Duo elevator eyes. Duo laughs at the obvious, and bad come-on.

“Maybe you should just take our orders,” he suggests.

The waiter frowns, looking disappointed. “Linked?” he asks.

“Linked,” Duo confirms.

The waiter sighs theatrically. “Pretty ones always linked,” he complains, but finally acknowledges the group. “Know what be wanting?” he asks.

When Duo glances over, he sees faces full of confusion. “Tell me what you usually order. I’ll translate,” he says.

He does until Hercules says, “I’ll just have a beer.”

“Don’t bring them beer,” Duo tells the waiter. “Other than beer, what do you usually drink?” he asks.

Hercules shrugs. “I’m not a big drinker. I’m usually the designated.”

Duo sighs. “Spacer beer is flat. Most Crawlers don’t like it. I don’t recommend it if you’re not used to it.”

Hercules frowns. “Rum and coke?” they suggest.

Duo translates it. With this many Crawlers, the bar probably has carbonated drinks, though he doubts they cave to serving carbonated beer.

“And you, pretty Flier?”

“Water for this Flier,” Duo tells him.

The waiter frowns again. “First drink for taking for Walkers.”

“Tell the keeper thank you,” he says.

“If Flier insists.”

“Flier insists,” Duo assures. The waiter doesn’t look happy, but he goes.

The instant he’s possibly out of earshot, Abernathy leans forward. “What was all that? He was totally coming onto you.”

Do you even realize that I’m seventeen and that guy has to be at least midtwenties? he wonders. The come-on didn’t surprise him from a Spacer—if you were old enough to be in a Spacer bar, drinking Spacer drinks, you were old enough to get in bed with. He thought dirtsiders cared more about those things though. He rolls up the sleeves of his button-down, mostly so he has better access to his knives if he needs them. He doesn’t think he will. The bar has a good atmosphere, despite the obvious division between Crawlers and Walkers, but you’re only paranoid if people aren’t really out to get you. “Not interested,” he says.

“Well, that was clear,” Andromeda says. “What’s a Flier?”

He doesn’t feel like explaining Spacer culture or terms, so he keeps it short. “A Spacer who goes down the gravity well. Can you just get your alcohol fixes so we can go?” he asks.

“You’re a Spacer,” Yulian says, and there’s a tone in his voice that makes Duo’s hackles stand up. If Yulian spoke to any Spacer in that tone, he’d be picking a fight he wasn’t likely to win.

“Lay off, Yulian,” Jason says. “Save your bullshit for someone who wants to listen. It’s clear that we’re better off with Maxwell with us.”

“And we’re here—let’s make it worth the effort,” Simona says.

“You do know this is just the pre-event, right? Don’t get trashed or tomorrow is going to be a nightmare,” Duo warns.

“Such a killjoy,” Andromeda says. “Why did you invite him, Abernathy?”

“At least he’s not like Miss Relena’s usual shadow. That Yuy kid is creepy,” Abernathy defends.

Surprised, Duo turns his attention to Abernathy. “Do you guys usually attend these events? I know Miss Relena travels a lot, but I didn’t realize a lot of the same people are attending them all.”

“Ah, it’s kind of a split. Andromeda, Hercules, and Jason’s patrons are usually at the colonial events. Simona, Yulian, and I usually get the Earth-based ones. The summit’s different because we all get to be together. My patron, Frederick Fitzhugh, is the brother-in-law of Andromeda’s patron, Mrs. Weatherwatcher, née Stroh,” Abernathy explained. “So we all met through the two of us. And we’ve all encountered Yuy. I can’t say we’re sorry to see him replaced with someone more amendable. Have you met him?”

He’s amused by the description of Heero, even though keeping track of all the connections is annoying. “You could say that,” Duo says, a little smile curling his lips.

“You have to tell us what Miss Relena is really like,” Andromeda insists. “She seems so sweet! Far too kind. You must have something to dish!”

Since he has the recent ammunition—and it certainly won’t hurt her—he shares the story about Relena setting off the smoke alarm. Their drinks have been delivered by the time he finishes, and when the waiter comes back, there’s something reserved and respectful about him that makes Duo think he may have figured out who Duo is. Spacers often do—G and Howard’s boy is kind of a known thing, and he’s certainly recognizable by description alone. He places both a sealed water bottle in front of Duo, and a shot of what smells like strawberry moonshine. He meets Duo’s eyes, nods, then backs up so Duo can see the bartender across the room. He had vaguely taken note of her burn scars either, but she raises a shot glass to him. He nods, raises his own, and downs it before opening his water bottle. The waiter backs away, leaving them in peace.

He notices some curious looks from the group—these are all political interns, so they’re being trained to notice things—but he doesn’t pay them any mind, instead deflecting to get stories out of them. With alcohol in them, they begin to open up more. He gets silly stories, mostly of the same variety he shared of Relena—things that are amusing but can’t hurt anyone politically. By the third round, they’ve moved on from the relatively harmless stories to less harmless stories about other attendees.

“Anyone particularly interested in Miss Relena that I should keep an eye out for?” he asks, catching the waiter’s eye to cut off the group. They might complain now, but they’ll thank him in the morning.

“Simona, do you know if Jean Avideté is coming?” Hercules asks.

“Avideté?” Duo asks, because he doesn’t remember seeing that name on the summit invite list.

“Jean Avideté,” Simona says, and even with only three drinks, her internal filter has taken a hike. “He’s a pig. Old Alliance guard. No idea how made it out of the Eve Wars with no repercussions. He shows up at these events as he desires.” She gives a little hiccup, and Duo wonders if maybe he should have cut her off at two drinks. “He’s very interested in Miss Relena. Creepy. He’s old enough to be her grandfather.”

“If he’s not invited…” Duo says, sounding confused. “I thought the security on these events was tighter than that.”

“It is, but Avideté has so many friends, he always gets exceptions,” Hercules explains.

“Really?” Duo says thoughtfully, then takes a drink from his water before wheedling more gossip out.

It takes the group nearly half an hour to realize Duo had cut them off. Duo makes them walk back, helping Simona, who is apparently the biggest lightweight in the group, walk without falling over.

“She’s going to hate herself in the morning,” Duo says, bemused. He’s closest to her in height, so it’s easiest for him to help. Hercules is keeping pace with him.

“She never does. One of those rare people who just doesn’t get them,” they tell him. “It means she often overindulges.”

“At least it doesn’t take much?” Duo suggests.

Hercules makes a hmming sound, but even though Duo’s half carrying Simona, they’re outpacing the rest of the group by a fair bit. “That was well-done of you, by the way,” they say.

“Hmm?” Duo asks.

“I know you didn’t want to come with us. You didn’t come to protect us—you came to protect the Spacers from us, didn’t you?”

“What makes you say that?” he asks, and really, at this point it would be easier to just carry Simona, if it wouldn’t look weird. He doesn’t look like he should be that strong. “Here, help me get her on my back,” he suggests, since that at least won’t look as bad as him just picking her up and doing a bridal carry. Hercules does, and once she’s settled, they easily regain their ground on the rest of the group. On other colonies, Duo might be worried about them in the fringe areas between the freight ports and the nicer areas, but L4 colonies are about as safe as they get.

“You’re not just an intern,” Hercules says.

“Aren’t I?” he asks, still amused. It really doesn’t do any harm if they figure out he’s a Preventer. It’s clear that Heero’s cover is laughably bad. At least they bought Duo’s for a bit.

“You’re too… aware. The way you watch people. Even at the bar—your eyes were always moving, always checking.”

Okay, he’s clearly off his game because he’s usually more subtle than that. “If so?” he asks.

“Just curious as to why Miss Relena would have security disguised as an intern.”

“Because obvious security makes people nervous?” Duo volleys back. “And people don’t usually take me seriously,” he adds.

“Why would they, when you’re so young.”

Duo sighs, because the badgering and hinting is getting old already. “Does this have a point?” he asks.

“Not really,” Hercules says, and clasped behind their back, looking up at the dark dome overhead for the night cycle. “I just like puzzles.”

“You’re in the right field then,” Duo says.

“That ‘steel in sight’? What did that mean?”

Duo blinks and looked over at Hercules. The question seems lazy and innocuous, but Duo’s instincts are screaming that they’re looking for something more. “In that context, it means ‘staying safe.’ When you’re spacewalking, you usually want to keep the black at your back, and steel—your ship—in your sight. Losing sight of your ship is usually a problem.”

Hercules turns their head to look at him, and even in the dim lighting, their pale eyes seem bright. “That was all?” they ask, surprised. They must have expected it to mean something more significant. It can be, for Spacers. It’s evolved into a way that Spacers greet each other, but it can also just be an acknowledgement of safety, and there’s no reason to give Hercules the more meaningful bit of information.

“That and a really lame come-on based off it,” Duo says, laughing it off. It does get a smile from Hercules, which softens their features further.

“And the shot?”

“You’re full of questions.”

“I told you, I like puzzles.”

Duo smiles and shakes his head. “Let me know when you figure that one out,” he says instead of answering, relieved when the hotel comes into sight. Most dirtsiders don’t realize how close the freight districts can be to the high-end areas on colonies. “Uh… do you know Simona’s room?” he asks.

“I think she and Andromeda are sharing,” they say.

“Andromeda!” Duo calls, turning to glance over his shoulder. “What’s your room number?”

Before she can reply, Duo’s phone goes off. He knows that ringtone, and he doesn’t hesitate. He crouches to drop Simona to the ground, shoves her vaguely in Hercules’s direction with a “Take her” and dashes into the hotel. He blows past the front desk, hits the stairway, and collides with someone who was making a dash down the stairs he was coming up. Duo gets a good grip and slams the man up halfway over a railing.

“Preventers!” he yells. “What were you just doing?” he demands. He gets a look at the man, and he’s one of the replacement security guards.

“I… Oh, God, please don’t let me fall! Please, let me up!” he yells, clinging to Duo’s wrists. Duo’s relieved he didn’t use the spring-loaded sheathes or this guy would have stabbed himself by now. “I’ll tell you anything, please just don’t let me fall!”

Duo heaves him up and throws him against the wall. “Start talking,” he says, pulling out a knife.

“Uh, sure…” the security guard—Allen—says, gulping at the knife.

“Now.”

Allen swallows again. “Right. Uh, I was asked, to… that is…” He seems like he can’t focus on anything that isn’t the blade in Duo’s hand.

Duo sighs. “For fuck’s sake.” He grabs the collar of the man’s shirt, drags him to his feet, and begins to read him his rights as he marches the guard back toward Relena’s room. “If you try to flee, I’m going to stab you. Just so we’re clear,” he warns when he finishes and bangs on Relena’s door. “Dorothy!”

“Maxwell?” he hears her ask through the door after a moment.

“Who the hell else makes you apple juice chicken. Is everything okay?” he asks.

The door opens, though it stalls on the deadbolt as Dorothy peeks out. She sees his grip on Allen’s shirt, nods, then closes the door to undo the deadbolt before letting him in. He sneezes as soon as he steps inside.

“Some sort of smoking anesthetic was slid into the room,” Dorothy states, closing the door behind them. The balcony doors are wide open, which has helped clear the drug. “I woke up when I fell off the couch, which is when someone was also trying to force the door quietly,” she admits. She lifts her wrist and can see the bead on her bracelet is broken.

“Relena?” he asks, tossing Allen into a chair. “Stay there,” he commands.

“Haven’t checked yet,” she admits.

“Relena,” he calls rather than risking leaving Allen and a not all-together-alert Dorothy alone. “Relena?” he raises his voice. She still doesn’t respond. This day is just getting better and better. He turns and puts his knife in Dorothy’s hands. “He makes one move you do not like, stab him.”

“Anywhere in particular?” she asks, eyes focusing and seeming a little more aware.

“Knee should keep him down. If he seems like he’s a threat”—he presses where his own sternum ends—“aim for here and up.” He makes an upward thrusting motion to demonstrate. “It’ll put him down, and he won’t be getting back up.”

She nods, glaring at Allen, who gulps, and he’s pretty sure the man’s too much of a coward to risk it. He pulls another knife, and moves to Relena’s door. He doesn’t bother knocking this time, instead aiming a kick a where the lock should be. The door gives, and he sees Relena’s still form in the bed. He gets a face full of the drug, and coughs it out, moving to throw open the balcony door to let the room breathe. Someone must have used the connecting room to slip the drug under Relena’s door as well. He knows off the bat that whoever did this is a dirtsider. When that drug hits the colony’s air scrubbers, it’s going to send up some major alarms. A problem for later. He takes a deep, clean breath, then checks on Relena, who is just deeply asleep, before clearing the rest of the room formally. He goes out to grab another clean breath, but he thinks the room is clearing pretty quickly and he’s always been weirdly resistant to drugs. He goes back in and sits next to Relena and begins to shake her.

“Relena? Princess? Wake up for me, can you?” he asks.

She moans and her eyes flutter open. “Duo?” she asks.

“Yeah, it’s me. You okay, princess?”

She snuggles back into the bed. “Tired.”

“I know,” he says. Before he can say anything else, there’s a bloodcurdling scream from the other room. That does more to jolt Relena awake than Duo’s gentle badgering. “Stay here,” he tells her and goes back to the main room where Allen is still yelling, horrified at his now-bleeding knee. Dorothy is standing, bloody knife pointing at the floor.

She gives him a look that isn’t quite innocent, but certainly one that says she isn’t to blame. “What?” she asks. “You told me to stab him if he made a move I didn’t like.”

Duo can’t help it, he laughs, at least partially in relief that Relena is all right, and they have an idiot who is going to tell them everything because he’s too much of a coward not to.

“Thanks, Dot,” he says, holding out his hand. “Give please.”

She sighs like he’s being unreasonable, but hands the knife back. He hands her the clean one and she visibly brightens. “Go sit with Relena, please. Let’s make sure nothing else starts coming under that door. I have questions to ask.”

Judging by the way Allen whimpers, whatever grin Duo is wearing isn’t a nice one.

Allen has about as much integrity as an unwelded hull. He spills everything he knows, and he knows way too much for an idiot thug. When he tells Duo that he’s an illegitimate child of Jean Avideté, being in the know way more than he should be makes more sense, but for a man with an Alliance background, you’d think he’d be smarter than to let someone like Allen in on the details.

Rather than relying on the ordinary L4 police force to keep an eye on Relena and Dorothy as they recover, he calls in a favor from Quatre to both immediately shut down all ports and to borrow some Maganacs. He needs to move fast to keep Avideté from disappearing, and he needs people he can trust. He uses the time waiting for the Maganacs to track down where Avideté most likely is. He also puts a call into The Black Hole and lets them know that a Flier has put the colony on lockdown to catch a worm who thought he could kidnap Vice Minister Relena Darlian-Peacecraft. That little call will ensure that no illegal ships are getting out without Spacers catching them.

Sure enough, less than half an hour after the Maganacs show up and take Relena, Dorothy, and Allen to the hospital to be checked out, he has word on a ship that tried to illegally leave the colony.

Duo does take some of the local police force—and Auda—with him to the port, if only to use the car. When they get to the docking bay his tip reported, he is amused to recognize one of the Spacers he saw in The Black Hole earlier that evening lounging lazily outside. The ship is still fully docked, and he can hear someone yelling inside, which tells Duo that the airlocks aren’t even sealed yet.

“I have commanded you to take off, lockdown be damned!” he hears.

“Master Duo, I do believe that’s our cue,” Auda says cheerfully.

“Yeah, that sure sounds like someone trying to avert lockdown,” Duo says. He pulls out his badge to flash it at the lazing man. “Sir, Preventer Agent Darkside. We need to access this ship to detain an individual who seems determined to break lockdown,” he says.

The lazy man grins. “Pa’s ship—but go in, you. Walkers always welcome,” he says. He lifts his hand to his forehead, the palm facing out.

It’s a quick, almost hidden motion before he drops it to his heart as a fist, but Duo would know that sign of respect anywhere. He’s not sure the L4 police do though. He simply nods so he doesn’t draw any further attention to it, then says to the police, “You heard him. We’ve got permission, so let’s go get ourselves a lockdown breaker.”

“Thank you for the verbal report, Darkside,” Une says.

“Why do you make me give you in-person reports when you make me fill out all this paperwork?” he grumbles, head leaning back in the chair in what is fast becoming a familiar feeling. He’s tempted to put a picture up on the ceiling right there—see how long it takes her to notice.

“I… can’t say I’m surprised Avideté would do something like this. I would have thought he’d be smarter about it, though.” She looks almost disappointed.

“You should have heard the guy rave, Une. Black Death in the void, I think he railed until my ears rang. Shrinks said he had a full break with reality—because that needed a formal diagnosis? He thought Relena was his daughter and he was kidnapping her back or something. He definitely thought Relena belonged to him. Can you get a hangover from listening to someone yell?” he wonders.

“You can certainly get a headache from it, though probably not almost a week later,” Une says, looking a little bemused.

“You would have a headache if you could still hear his crazy ringing in your ears,” he complains.

“And that is why I want your in-person report. For the color commentary,” she says. It’s a deadpan delivery, but he sits up and stares at her. He can see the corner of her mouth curl and counts it as an internal point on her side. “Anyway, the rest of the summit went off without a hitch?” she prompts.

“Relena and Dorothy were fine,” he confirms. “Exposure was limited, and Lena was able to do her thing at the summit. And I think we’ve made some leeway in getting the Maganacs to at least tolerate Dorothy. I think she kind of endeared herself to them when she stabbed Allen.”

“About that… you cannot deputize someone and then give them instructions like ‘stab them if they move funny,’” Une says. Her voice is perfectly stern, but he can see a hint of humor in her eyes and gives himself a point.

“I have officially been warned,” he agrees, grinning back at her innocently.

She snorts to cover a chuckle, and he gives himself another point. “One last thing—I know you used your connection with Winner to lockdown the colony. Keep in mind, that wouldn’t have worked on any other colony. But how did you keep the Spacers locked down?” she asks.

Duo shrugs. “Spacer community is tight. I’m pretty distinctive. I got made when I went to the Spacer bar, so when I put the call in to the bar, they did me a solid.”

Une isn’t smiling or amused now. She looks worried. “I don’t need to tell you—”

“Look, Spacers respect the pilots. They have long memories. Chances are good that you can drop me into any Spacer bar in the sphere and I’ll get made in twenty minutes or less. They’re proud that one of their own is a pilot. But they’re still Spacers. They’re still insular as all hell, and they’re not going to run telling to any Crawlers. Just to stay on the safe side, I’ll avoid Spacer bars in the future, if that makes you less nervous. It kind of knocks me loose to get recognized like that anyway.”

She lets out a long breath and nods. “All right then. That’s a compromise I can live with. Dismissed, Darkside. And thank you again for your good work. Take the rest of the day and the weekend.”

He nods, stands, then hesitates before he hits the door. “If I may… if Dorothy Catalonia ever decides to give Preventers a try? You should let her in.”

“Really?” Une asks, sounding somewhere between appalled and intrigued. He’s not surprised; he got the impression from Dorothy that her and Une’s relationship wasn’t much better than hers and Quatre’s.

“Hell, I’d work with her,” he tells her honestly.

“I shudder to think of the havoc you and Miss Catalonia could wreak together, Darkside. But, should she entertain the idea, I would welcome her based on your recommendation,” she says. “Now go, before some other emergency comes up that I need you for.”

Duo laughs. “I don’t have a partner,” he reminds.

“That didn’t stop me this time,” she says, and he gives her another point. “Your new partner should be here on Monday. Enjoy a long weekend, Darkside.”

He gives her a final grin and dashes out the door.

“When were you going to tell me that Relena has no idea we’re more than friends?” Duo asks, cuddled up with his head over Heero’s heart. Listening its strong, steady rhythm may be one of his favorite sounds in the world. One of Heero’s hands cards through his hair, and Duo cherishes these moments, thinks they’re probably the closest to heaven he’ll ever get.

Hearing Heero hmph with his head over Heero’s heart gives it a bass throb that Duo can feel as much as hear. “Why should she know?” Heero asks, hand still idly stroking his hair.

“She doesn’t need to,” Duo admits, because, really, their relationship is no one’s business but theirs. “I just thought that you got her off your case by telling her about us.”

“I told her you were my roommate,” Heero says. “If she’s still deliberately misunderstanding, throwing it in her face isn’t going to make it better.” He sounds tired at the thought.

Duo curls in closer to him, soaking up Heero’s warmth. He’s a fucking radiator, and Duo loves it. Duo tends to run cool at the best of times, and he handles cold well, but there’s something deeply satisfying in being curled up to Heero’s heat, as if his heat can reach inside of Duo and warm that cold place inside. It’s to his delight that Heero finds Duo’s coolness soothing.

“Does it bother you?” Heero asks, and it’s in that tone of voice that tells Duo it hadn’t occurred to him before.

“What? That Relena doesn’t know?” Heero makes a vaguely affirmative sound. “Not really. As long as she’s given up Heero hunting, it doesn’t matter.”

“I think Dorothy told her that her behavior toward me wasn’t fitting for a woman of her stature.”

Imagining Dorothy trying to explain it to Relena in blunt terms Relena couldn’t misunderstand makes Duo smile. He traces a pale scar on Heero’s ribs that he thinks came from his self-destruction. It’s paler now than it was even a few months ago. Duo thinks that within another year, it may disappear entirely.

“I like Dorothy,” he admits.

Heero snorts. “I’m not surprised.”

“I see why she makes Wufei crazy.”

“They make each other crazy,” Heero says, and it’s about as close to complaining as he usually comes. There’s a thread of strain in his voice that Duo recognizes from talking to Heero when he’s covering Relena. He spares a wince for it, since “big personality wrangler” isn’t a title Duo would attribute to Heero. Managing Wufei and Dorothy’s constant, low-level antagonism is probably more wearing for Heero than doing the whole assignment on his own would be. Duo wonders if part of the reason Une sent Duo to cover Relena this time was less to give Heero a break than to give Wufei and Dorothy a break from each other. He probably won’t ask, but he tucks the thought away in the back of his mind.

“We should probably talk to Une about getting Relena a permanent rotation that isn’t us. If we need to train them or give them our clear, that’s fine, but she can’t keep pulling us out of normal operations just to keep Relena safe. She needs her own, permanent team.”

The tension that had been building in Heero’s frame during their discussion seeped from him at Duo’s suggestion. “That’s… a good idea,” he admits. That hitch in his reply tells Duo that Heero’s berating himself for not thinking of it first.

Duo taps Heero’s forehead. “Stop that. You didn’t think of it because you tend to assume no one can do something as well as you do it. And to be fair—not many people can. But in this case, I think we can find a better solution than assigning her Gundam pilots on a semipermanent basis.”

Heero sits up a little more so he can look down at Duo better. “Are you sure you can’t read my mind?” His tone is going for teasing, but something in his eyes wonders.

Smiling, Duo lifts himself off Heero’s chest to press a gentle kiss to his lips. “I promise. I just know you.”

Heero’s hand shifts from its petting path to cup the back of Duo’s head, fingers tangled in the thick roots. When their eyes meet, Duo’s breath catches at the raw emotion on display. There’s awe, a touch of fear, and a lot of relief and love. It’s everything Duo feels when he realizes that Heero really is his, and he has no idea what he’s done to deserve Heero, but he will never, ever take him for granted.

Duo isn’t sure if he leans up or Heero leans down, but they meet for a kiss that says all the things Heero struggles to say out loud, all the things Duo is terrified to whisper into the universe. When Heero shifts them, Duo goes to his back easily because there is nowhere in the world that is safer than in Heero’s arms, caged by Heero’s warmth and strength, cradled by it.

I love you, every kiss says.

Every touch whispers I need you.

Their fingers lace as they come together, both grasping each other as if afraid they’ll somehow evaporate if they don’t hold on tight enough. They cling to each other while their bodies both ask Never, ever leave me and answer Never, ever leave you. They leave bruises on each other’s skin and carve their names into each other’s souls deeper with every kiss, every gaze, every unspoken promise.

In these moments, they are not separate—they are forces of nature barely confined by skin and bones. We could shatter the world, the thought flutters across Duo’s mind in a flash of an instant when he can think beyond what they become when they’re together.

As long as they were together, Duo thinks he’d be okay with that.

Chapter Text

Isolde Gunnerson, call sign Daffodil of all things, looks pretty much like what Duo expects after hearing her name. She’s a Scandinavian model in person: stop-and-stare gorgeous, six feet tall barefoot with a penchant for boots that have at least a two-inch heel, and pin straight, white blonde hair. She might look like a stereotypical ice queen, but she’s one of the warmest, most bubbly people Duo has ever met. She doesn’t have an actual military background for a change, but she’s from a family that is military so far back, they lose track. She was a disgrace by refusing to pick a side during the Eve Wars but tells Duo that joining the Preventers may yet redeem her in her family’s eyes.

Duo, of course, calls her Daffy. She laughs the kind of laugh that turns heads in public places and tells him that she’ll let him get away with it. Then she calls him Anakin.

If Duo weren’t utterly in love with Heero, he’d be tempted to ask her to marry him on the spot.

He thinks Une is a little frightened of exactly how well they get along, which only makes it better. Isolde is a gun enthusiast and sharpshooter who competes as a hobby, and she’s good. Like, maybe as good as he is if Shini isn’t riding. Duo might be a sharpshooter and very knowledgeable about guns, but he’s not a gun nut—too much of a colonist and Spacer at heart. Spacers don’t like guns. Guns and spaceships are not friends. Spacers prefer knives, and so does Duo, but he and Isolde bond over their respective preferred weapons while Heero’s out of town.

They get along so well, their bonding period is waived after a week. Isolde isn’t a Gundam pilot, but she’s certainly on par with Une and Sally in terms of competence, which means she can hang with him. Even better, not only do they get along as people, they think differently enough that they complement one another in the field. They finish cleaning out that mobile-suit-part ring Duo started with Thuy, break up a White Fang offshoot before it can become anything serious, and are sent to Sudan for two weeks to try to track down the final remnants of the Earth First crazies Duo and Reynard had dealt with.

For the record, Sudanese deserts are not an improvement over Ugandan jungles. Why can’t the crazies ever hunker down in a nice abandoned urban environment?

Murphy must be laughing at him when they finally track the Earth First nuts to Somalia and the destroyed remains of the Alliance Mogadishu Base. Duo’s not personally familiar with the base, so he lets Isolde take a shower while he trawls through old Alliance servers to see if he can dig up the blueprints.

“You should take a shower,” Isolde tells him when she comes out, toweling her hair off.

“Want to find these damn blueprints first,” he tells her, honestly getting a little irritated. The Alliance was a bureaucratic nightmare, so their backups had backups and everyone kept everything, even after its fall, but finding the specific thing he’s looking for in so much noise is a pain in the ass. He’s not even sure what happened to the base, because it wasn’t Gundams.

“Ani,” she says, pushing the lid of his laptop down far enough that he can’t see the screen, but not closing it. “You’ve been running on high alert for almost two weeks. It can wait till the morning, or we can wing it. You need a shower and you need some sleep.”

He has to bite back a snarky reply because she’s mostly right. He hasn’t been quite at high alert, but he’s been in his mission headspace, and he can tell it unnerves her a little bit. He’s actually been sleeping somewhat decently considering he’s sharing a room with a stranger. He likes Isolde, and he trusts her to be professional and a decent partner by now, but he doesn’t really trust her in that gut-deep way that will let him sleep deeply.

“If you tell me what to look for, I can—”

Sighing, he closes the laptop lid the whole way. “Nah. Give me ten, and then I’ll try again. I know we don’t need the floor plans, but I’d feel better if we had them.”

She doesn’t sigh, but he gets the impression she wants to. He’s not the one being paranoid here—these are zealots they’re dealing with, knowing the land is just common sense.

“What are you going to do? Memorize them all tonight?” she asks, eyebrows raised as if he’s being ridiculous.

“That’s… the plan?” he says, not quite sure what she’s getting at. Floor plans are easy to memorize, and he really doesn’t think the Mogadishu Base is that different than other Alliance bases, so he probably knows the bulk of it anyway. He just wants to be sure.

“Of course you do,” she says, sounding suddenly tired. It makes Duo remember that memorizing the extensive floor plans of a complex the size of the Mogadishu Base would be a difficult task for most people. His memory isn’t quite photographic, but it’s close, so once he finds the damn things, it won’t take him long to commit them to memory.

He doesn’t know what to say to make her less exasperated with him, so he just says, “Ten minutes,” grabs a change of clothes from his bag, and disappears into the bathroom.

It’s tight and dingy because the hotel is the cheapest one they could find that had an internet connection. They stand out enough in these parts anyway, no reason to draw more attention to themselves. He brushes his teeth, twists his hair up into a bun, and jumps into a lukewarm shower to mostly scrub what sand he can from him. He doesn’t bother to wash his hair both because the water pressure in the shower would make it take forever, and because they’re going into enemy territory tomorrow and it’s probably going to get filthy again anyway if his last run-in with this group is any indication.

He’s just finishing pulling on his pants when he hears his phone go off in the room. It’s Heero’s ringtone, so he dashes out to grab it.

“Hey,” he says.

“Status?” Heero asks.

Duo leans against the room’s cheap desk and says, “Irritated but safe. Just thinking about you, actually.”

Heero makes the sound that’s equivalent to him raising an eyebrow in inquiry, so Duo continues as he turns around and opens his laptop back up. “Do you remember which Alliance server had the primary base floorplans on it? It looks like the nuts are holed up in Mogadishu, but fuck if I can find the blueprints.”

There’s barely a pause before Heero asks, “Did you try the Antarctic server?”

“I tried it, but I couldn’t connect. I thought maybe they wiped it, and I’m not sure which server would be sistered to it for the backups.”

Because Heero’s memory is, in fact, photographic and he is the better hacker, he of course remembers which server is sistered to it. With Heero’s help, Duo has the blueprints he wanted ten minutes later.

“Thank you,” Duo tells him with feeling.

“Just you and Daffodil are going in tomorrow?” Heero reconfirms. He and Duo aren’t usually this candid about the ongoing state of their missions when they’re on them. Given the way Duo’s last run-in with these zealots went, Heero’s been pushing for more details. Duo would tell him anyway, later, so he doesn’t mind sharing, even if Isolde keeps giving him curious looks. It’s the first time since they joined the Preventers that Heero is showing his protective streak, and Duo kind of relishes the rare occasion. Besides, he almost always welcomes Heero’s perspective on a mission, if only for the contrast of Duo’s own view.

“We are professionals, you know,” Duo reminds, a smile tugging at his lips, even as he starts mentally filing the blueprints away. “You can trust…”

Duo doesn’t mean to trail off, but he props the phone on his shoulder and starts searching through the other files to see if he can pull schematics.

“Duo?”

“Hold on,” Duo tells him, finding an encrypted file. “Damn it. What is that thing?” he wonders aloud.

“What is what thing?” Heero asks, sounding more alert. Duo is only vaguely aware of Isolde coming to look over his shoulder.

“Some sort of… really big gun, it looks like,” Duo says, pulling up the program to start cracking the encrypted file. “Hey, do we know what happened to the Mogadishu Base?” Duo asks Heero.

He can hear the familiar clacking of Heero’s keyboard in the background. “It looks like it was destroyed in the OZ coup,” he says.

“So it wasn’t us,” Duo states the obvious.

“No.”

“Any other details?” Duo asks, hissing a choice curse under his breath when the first program fails. The Alliance’s security wasn’t great, so that the encryption on this file is this good is not an especially good sign.

“Not that I’m seeing. Are you having any luck?” Heero says.

“Not yet,” Duo says, his hands flying over the keys to pull up a second program—one he and Heero built together—to see if it will crack it. He would prefer not to have to use it on this crummy line, but he doesn’t have much of a choice at the moment.

“Let me remote in. I’ll see if I can get it,” Heero says.

He approves Heero’s remote access and pulls the rickety desk chair out to sit and watch as Heero begins to work on the file. Less than ten minutes later, the file opens and the schematics for a truly horrifying weapon pop up on the screen.

“Well, fuck,” Duo says emphatically even though the curse is wholly inadequate to encompass his feelings on it. The schematic looks familiar both because it’s not dissimilar to the buster rifle specs he made Heero give him a rundown of, but also because Duo recently destroyed a weapon that is very much like this one.

Heero hmphs down the line. “From what I can find, it was destroyed in the OZ takeover, so if they’re trying to rebuild it…”

“They’re working on something that’s very broken,” Duo says, mentally filing every detail of the schematic as he looks it over. “We can only hope they don’t have anyone who has this kind of specialized knowledge.”

“I can look into any recently missing scientists,” Heero offers. It’s tempting, but honestly, they’re going in tomorrow, and Duo is going to make sure nothing useable remains of that weapon when he does. If he has to turn the whole base to slag, that’s what he’ll do. They probably don’t have time to track down any missing scientists if they weren’t already on their radar.

“Not enough time to make a difference,” Duo tells him.

“What is it?” Isolde asks, reminding Duo that she is his partner on this mission, not Heero.

“I’ll let you plan with your partner,” Heero says, and Duo doesn’t think he’s imagining the thread of judgement in Heero’s voice. It’s the first time he’s expressed any open reservations about one of Duo’s partners, and Isolde is good, so she doesn’t really deserve Heero’s criticism.

Duo arrows through to the next page of the schematic, getting more concerned. Isolde’s good, but she’s not a Gundam pilot, and this mission just got a lot more complicated. He maybe kind of understands why Heero would prefer she weren’t his partner right now.

“Yeah, thanks again,” Duo says.

Heero makes an affirmative sound. Duo reaches to hang up the phone when Heero’s voice catches him by surprise. “Steel in sight?”

The Spacer check-in feels like a verbal hug, and Duo replies, “Black at back.” He’ll take all the normal precautions.

“Good night, Duo.”

“Good night, ’Ro.” Duo hangs up the phone and continues to read through the schematics.

“You just let Yuy remote into your laptop,” Isolde says, thoughtful rather than accusing. That’s why she’s his favorite partner to date.

“Yup.”

“That’s seriously against regulations.”

“Sure is,” Duo agrees.

Isolde sighs, and it’s the same way that Catherine sighs at Trowa when he’s said or done something that she doesn’t agree with but knows better than to argue about.

"Some day, you're going to get in trouble with this," she warns. 

Duo doesn't mean to snort, but it is a fair response. "What's Une going to do? Fire us?""

"She could," Isolde tells him, serious. 

Rolling his eyes, Duo says, "Yeah, but she's not going to. I mean, there may be some truth to that 'no one is irreplaceable' thing, but me and 'Ro? We're probably about as close as you get." He can feel the skepticism radiating off of her so he looks away from the screen. "Look, she knows that we talk shop. If she doesn't know we do shit like this, it's only because she doesn't want to."

Isolde frowns and sighs. “You know I’m your partner, right?” she asks.

It’s a stupid question and Duo sometimes feels that stupid questions deserve stupid answers, so he turns and says, “Duh.”

“Why didn’t you ask for my help with whatever you were hacking?”

He blinks at her, a little taken aback. He has read her file, because after Thuy, he decided that Heero should not be the only one with insider knowledge about his partners, but he knows she hasn’t read his. That’s not exactly standard operating procedure. Even if he hadn’t read her file, though, he would have known she isn’t a hacker. It’s in the way she navigates computers, the way she handles them. They are tools she uses—not always with grace—not opportunities, not doorways. Computers speak in a language she doesn’t understand, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It just means that if he needs help with a computer, he’s never going to ask her for it.

Before he can figure out how to articulate any of that, Isolde sighs. “We work well together,” she says. “I know that we do. But sometimes I feel like I’m just an extra set of hands to you, rather than your partner. A monkey who just follows your direction.”

“You’re not,” he tells her honestly. “You’re a good sounding board. You think differently than I do—”

“I’m just nowhere near as experienced,” she says, interrupting. “So when things get tough, you default to your own experience.”

She says it like it’s a bad thing, but Duo honestly doesn’t see how. Defaulting to his instincts and experience has kept him alive so far—and kept a few of his partners alive too. Isolde must feel like she’s not reaching him because she sighs again. “Did I tell you what my boyfriend does?”

Confused at the subject change, not sure if it is a subject change, he looks at her and says, “No?” Isolde has mentioned her boyfriend a couple of times, but not what he does.

“He’s a tattoo artist.”

Duo is usually better at following non-sequiturs than this, but he’s got mission on the brain and not personal details. He turns back to the blueprints. “Okay?” he says.

“Have you ever considered tattoos?” she asks.

“Does this have a point?” he asks in return, arrowing through to the next page.

She’s quiet for long enough that Duo dismisses her from his thoughts. One of them should memorize the schematics and floorplans, and if Isolde can’t, he has to. He vaguely feels her get up and move behind him, but he doesn’t expect her to touch him, so he jumps when she runs a finger across his shoulders. Duo suddenly remembers that he hasn’t put on his shirt and his scarred back is on full display. When he turns to face her, she looks sad.

He stands. “I’ll just throw a shirt on—”

“I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable,” Isolde says, almost like an apology, but not quite.

“You didn’t,” he tells her. He’s not even placating her. Ever since Heero admitted they remind him of wings, Duo’s been more comfortable with them. He’s still aware of how they can unnerve other people.

“I meant have you ever considered tattooing over the scars?” she asks, stopping him.

“No,” he admits. “I didn’t think you could tattoo over scars. Isn’t the skin different?”

“It is so it takes the ink differently, but skilled artists can make scars disappear,” she explains. “When we get home, if you want, I can take you to him for a consultation. To my boyfriend, I mean.”

It’s Duo’s turn to wait and measure, but the offer seems sincere. “I’ll think about it.”

She smiles. “You do that.”

If asked, Duo would admit that he didn’t really expect this mission to go smoothly. There’s a reason he wanted the blueprints and schematics, and it’s not just paranoia. They’re dealing with zealots—again. He hates zealots. Being prepared when dealing with zealots was rational not paranoid.

Naturally, it means that they’re running away while being fired at. Duo would love to blow the whole base sky high to ensure that no one ever tries to make that pseudo buster rifle work, but they’re too close to the city. He managed to damage it internally, and he has bombs set to go off if anyone so much as looks at them weird, but he’d like to get more distance between them and it before he sets it off, because it’s going to—

The hangar bay catwalk swings, breaking loose from some of its moorings as the explosives he put on the rifle go off. Someone must have found them or tried to fire the rifle. Even as far from it as they are, the concussion ripples through the base. Duo watches parts of the catwalk ahead of him drop out as they swing in the air. Isolde is right behind him, clinging to the railings. Duo glances up, but instinct tells him their perch is precarious. The hangar floor is a good thirty feet below them. In other circumstances, Duo would take the chance on that drop, but it wouldn’t help Isolde.

He looks back to the still-stable catwalk tethered to the wall. “We need to go back,” he tells her, raising his gun and putting down two zealots who had fallen when the rifle blew. They need to go back, and running straight at people with guns, while a bad habit of Duo’s, isn’t generally considered best practice. Isolde looks back.

“I can’t make that jump,” she tells him. He can see her fighting down panic. She knows as well as he does that their piece of catwalk probably isn’t going to hold much longer. He glances back over to the other piece of the catwalk, but that’s an easy twenty-foot gap. Heero would make it; Duo probably could, definitely if Shini were riding, but no way Isolde is, and Shini isn’t riding right now, not while he needs to be able to communicate with Isolde. Honestly, even if she could, that part of the catwalk is probably at least as precarious as their current part.

Duo catches another couple of zealots out of the corner of his eye and takes them both out even as he feels a bullet whiz past his face. That was rather closer than he liked to cut it. Isolde has crouched and is scanning the perimeter, probably focusing on that to keep from panicking. It’s as good a distraction as any.

“We should be able to make this swing, make the jump shorter,” he says.

“Yes, but we’ll destabilize it more!” she snaps back. She shoots off a couple rounds, but it just keeps someone out of sight. Duo aims toward the wall and manages to ricochet his shot off the wall, judging by the scream he hears. He wishes he could celebrate a little bit—it was a damn tricky shot—but he doesn’t think Isolde will approve.

“We can’t stay here. We’re sitting ducks,” he points out, already beginning to pace their length of the catwalk, feeling it settle into a more stable swinging motion. He can hear the metal groan as he does it, and, okay, she’s not wrong. To make it swing enough, it’s going to require perfect timing to get off it before it falls. “Look, I can help get it moving, then make the jump.” He doesn’t bother to tell her that he can clear that ten-foot gap flat footed. He doesn’t need the catwalk to swing, but she’s going to need his weight to make it swing enough for her to make the jump.

“Duo—stop!” she yells, clinging to the rail as it begins to swing.

“We can’t stay here,” he says, running from one end of it to the other, succeeding in getting it moving.

“We can’t now!” she yells again.

“Did you have a better idea?” he asks as he runs past her.

“It wouldn’t matter if I did, would it?” she demands, sounding sincerely angry. He puts it down to her fear.

“This would go much quicker if you’d help me,” he tells her.

“I can’t make that jump!”

“You can if we get this swinging enough to act as a launch pad. You’re going to have to time it right, but I can help you with that.”

He shoots at the next mook who comes through the doorway, and it’s damned hard to make that shot while he and the catwalk are moving. He misses—Isolde, still clinging to the railing, doesn’t.

The metal holding the catwalk groans ominously, so he makes his leap. He has so much momentum from his own leap and the moving catwalk that he slams into the wall pretty hard, but the catwalk bolted here is far stronger and more stable than the airborne piece they were on. He takes a quick look around, then puts his gun away.

“Daffy—you gotta make that jump, and you gotta do it soon!” he yells, standing at the edge. She’s not moving, and the catwalk is losing momentum, but the damage to its structure is done. She’s losing momentum and still not moving. “Isolde!”

She holsters her gun properly, paces back to the end of the catwalk, but it’s still slowing. He doesn’t dare risk jumping back; he’s pretty sure his weight landing on it would make the whole damn thing drop at this point.

“Take a couple of runs, Daffy—quickly. Get it swinging more! The more it swings, the shorter the jump!”

“Dammit, Duo,” he hears her complain, but she’s at least following his direction now. Two laps, and she’s closer, probably a seven-foot jump. She runs away to the far end again.

“This time, you’re going to leap off the end!” he instructs.

She waits till it starts swinging back to him then runs down the length of the catwalk.

When she gets to the end, instead of just pushing off and trying to keep moving forward, she stops to try and leap. That last bit of gathering force is too much, and Duo watches in horror as the catwalk gives at the same moment she tries to push off and jump.

Time slows as he sees her realize she isn’t going to make the jump, that the catwalk dropping out from under her stole her acceleration, that she’s going to fall.

Not on his watch.

He grabs hold of one of the railings and reaches out as far as he can for her. He clasps his hand around her forearm, feels her hand try to hold onto his as her weight drops, falling, yanking him downward until he’s half hanging off the catwalk.

The full weight and force of her fall hits Duo, wrenching his shoulder, and the whole arm goes numb. Duo isn’t strong enough to hold onto her alone. He meets her eyes as her fall is arrested before her own momentum rips her out of Duo’s numb hand, and she falls.

Duo doesn’t hear her hit, doesn’t hear the sick thud of her body as it breaks on the unforgiving concrete. She lands feet first—which was wrong, wrong, wrong—but he doesn’t hear her scream as she drops, as her head hits the ground. He doesn’t see the red of her blood bright against the gray floor.

Shinigami fills him, too late to save Isolde but maybe in time to preserve his own life. It steals sound, steals color from the world, but also steals the pain. The badly dislocated shoulder is a nuisance, so he puts it back in. The fingers in his right are still numb, but that’s fine—he shoots as well left-handed as right, and he pulls his gun back out as sparks of life make themselves known.

Death pulses through his veins. It is a promise, a reckoning. There will be no prisoners taken this time, no survivors left to carry on in their misguided ignorance. Shinigami will gorge tonight.

One spark remains in the building. One fading spark that Duo seeks out. He’s not going to risk leaving a survivor, someone to become even madder and more fanatical in their devotion. He is bathed in the blood of enemies and he will bathe in more if that is what is necessary.

He’s confused when he finds the blonde Preventer girl. There is blood—a lot of blood. Her legs are shattered, almost certainly beyond repair. She must be in indescribable pain, but she is alive, her will to live is still a fierce thing. It takes him a moment to realize she is speaking to him.

“A…Ani?” her voice, weak and afraid, somehow breaks through the silence.

Shinigami recedes and Duo runs to her side as the world rushes back. They are the last two living people in this Alliance tomb, so he puts his gun away and kneels by her side. The sight of her destroyed legs almost makes him throw up, and he’s got a pretty gundanium-clad stomach, so he knows it’s really, really bad.

“Daffy?” he asks, afraid to touch her.

“I… I can’t feel my legs.”

That’s definitely a mercy.

“How’s your head?” he asks rather than addressing it.

“It hurts…” she admits, and a tear squeezes itself down her face. “I… I hit it, when,” her breath hitches. “When I fell.” She takes a deep breath that has to hurt. “Why can’t I feel my legs?”

Duo has already pulled out his phone and is calling the local ambulance. “Just stay still,” he tells her, gently brushing hair away from her face while he braces the phone on his good shoulder. Now that Shini is gone, his right shoulder feels like it was nearly pulled off, which is basically what almost happened. He hisses as that pain begins to set in, but it’s just pain, and his pain is nothing compared to Isolde’s problems.

He keeps a light soothing touch on her hair as he quickly walks the emergency services through the help they need, where they’ll be, exactly how to get to them, confirms that Isolde can’t feel her legs.

There is a lot of blood on the floor, but it doesn’t look like she’s still bleeding badly, and Duo is loath to touch her legs unless he has to. He’s worried about shifting broken bones or who the hell knows what else and doing more harm than good.

“I need you to stay here. I need to open the bay door to meet them,” he tells Isolde. “They should be able to drive right up next to you if I can get that door open.”

“Please don’t leave me,” she begs. His heart breaks a little, but he reaches for her with Shini and feels her spark. She’s not out of the woods, but she’s not going to wink out without warning.

“Stay here. Please do not try to move. Don’t try to sit up. Don’t try to move your legs. Just… stay still. It’s the best thing for you,” he assures.

“Duo…” His first name. “Why can’t I feel my legs?”

He doesn’t tell lies, and he couldn’t lie to her about this anyway. “They’re broken, Daffy,” he tells her. “They’re…” He hesitates before adding, “really broken.”

She swallows, another tear squeezing free. “Don’t leave me?”

“I’m just going to open the door, okay. I swear I’ll be back. Just stay very still—we’re going to get you out of this, okay?”

Isolde sniffles, looks like maybe she tries to nod, then thinks better of it, and says, “Okay.”

Duo gets up to go to the bay door to figure out how to open it and wait for the ambulance. While he does that, he calls Une to give her a heads up so she can start coordinating with the local military to clean up and help identify all the Earth First nuts.

He almost wishes there were more left. They deserved far slower deaths than he gave them.

Isolde gets the best doctors in Somalia. They teleconference with Preventers’ top doctors in Brussels about the risk of moving her verses treating her in Somalia. She’s going to lose both legs from the knee-down. The tibia and fibula are both shattered beyond repair and the muscles so damaged there’s no hope of reconstructing anything. The knees are a total loss. Severe compression fractures from landing on her feet have also damaged her spine. Given the lack of feeling below the waist, amputations aside, Isolde is unlikely to ever walk again.

Duo stays with her for the first couple of days, until her boyfriend gets there. He refuses more treatment than a sling until he gets back to Brussels. Sally ushers him straight to the hospital to get x-rays and an MRI on his shoulder. Severe dislocation, but his relocation hadn’t done more damage. Though it’s not the first time he’s dislocated a shoulder, it’s definitely the most severely he’s ever done it. Sally is much less upset with him about the injury than usual though.

“You probably saved Daffodil’s life when you caught her,” she tells him.

“I know,” he admits. However briefly, his catch arrested her fall, stopped her momentum, which meant that when she fell, she didn’t fall with the full momentum of jumping from thirty feet. It was more like dropping from twenty. If she’d been prepared to fall, been prepared for the drop, trained to fall from that height, she could have done it safely. Duo certainly could have. But she wasn’t trained, and she wasn’t ready, so instead of landing and being able to disperse the momentum by rolling, she landed straight on her feet and broke her legs and back. He may have saved her life, but he finds it cold comfort.

Sally sighs. “You know the drill,” she says, tapping his good shoulder with her pen. “I know you heal fast, but stay in the sling for at least a week. I’m sending home a list of very light exercises you can begin doing tomorrow. I’m sending the instructions with Heero to make sure you actually listen to them too.”

“Yes, mom,” he says sarcastically, but it doesn’t have its usual humor underlying it.

“If you were anyone else, Duo, I’d be keeping you in the hospital for at least a few days,” Sally warns.

He rolls his eyes. She knows he’d just check himself out AMA the first moment she turned her back, so the warning kind of falls on deaf ears.

“I’ll make him rest,” Heero says from his spot in the corner.

“We need to hit up headquarters first,” Duo says. He completed and submitted the official report while he was waiting on news of Isolde days ago, but Une still prefers he debrief her in person.

“It can wait,” Heero tells him, standing. “I’ll help you get dressed.”

Duo frowns because as much as he wants out of the shitty hospital gown, it’s not like Heero to do things like delay debriefs.

His confusion must have shown on his face. “I told Une she already has your report. If she wants to debrief you in person, she can wait until you’re off medical leave.”

“I don’t need to be on medical leave,” Duo insists, rolling his eyes.

“You’re getting a week of it anyway,” Sally says in that don’t dare argue with me tone that doctors seem to have. Then she softens and adds, “Duo, your partner nearly died. Take the time.”

“You nearly lost your arm trying to save her,” Heero interjects, and he sounds almost angry about it. Duo knows Heero isn’t angry at Duo, but it still throws Duo for a loop. He’s looked over Duo’s MRI and x-rays with Sally—with Duo’s permission, of course—and Sally was forced to conclude that Duo’s healing had accelerated again. Given the force with which his shoulder was dislocated, she’s more than a little surprised he doesn’t need corrective surgery, and by the time she got to him, the damage was already showing weeks’ worth of healing. He’d probably still be out of the field for the better part of a month, but that was fine. He could live with that.

“It was worth it,” he tells Heero.

Heero gives him a long, hard look, and sighs. “I know,” he admits. He threads his fingers into the base of Duo’s braid and presses their foreheads together. The public display of affection tells Duo just how unnerved Heero was by Duo’s injury, even if the “public” is only Sally.

“I’ll let you help him get dressed, Heero,” Sally says. She steps out and closes the door softly behind her.

Duo closes his eyes and soaks in Heero’s warmth and solidness and presence for another few minutes, needing his steadiness and strength.

“Suki da,” Heero murmurs, barely audible, voice rough with contained emotion.

“I know,” Duo replies. Heero’s hand tightens in his hair, and he presses a hard, desperate kiss to Duo’s lips. Duo yields, knowing Heero needs this, needs to reassure himself that Duo is there, is alive, is whole. It softens to something sweet and worshipful that Duo wishes could carry over into other acts, but he doesn’t fool himself into thinking Heero is going to let him do anything as active as sex for at least the week he’s on leave. Even if Duo could really use the reassurance himself. When the kiss ends, Heero presses their foreheads together again, and they simply breathe each other in for a few minutes, their breathing falling into sync the way it always does when they’re this close.

“Take me home, ’Ro,” Duo says, breaking the almost desperate silence.

Heero slowly moves his head back, separating them as if by one molecule at a time. He presses a gentle kiss to Duo’s forehead, then slowly untangles his hand from Duo’s hair. “Okay,” he says in the same soft voice Duo had used.

Duo knocks on Une's door before letting himself in. Une is standing behind her desk, flipping through a stack of files that's close to two feet high, her whole desk crowded with other files. 

"Has anyone told you that you need a secretary?" Duo asks, closing the door behind him. 

"Administrative assistant," Une corrects, pulling out a file, then hurriedly catching the stack as it nearly overbalances. Duo lends his one good hand to help her resettle it, and she says, "Thank you." She takes the file with her as she goes to her seat, so Duo goes to his own usual choice. "And yes, I'm aware of my need for an admin, but good admin are worth their weight in gold, and I haven't found one that satisfies all of my requirements yet."

"Fair enough," Duo says, settling in and trying to get comfortable. His shoulder still hurts like a bitch, which is why he's still in the sling, and the arms on the chair are at exactly the wrong height, forcing him to shift to try and fit without agitating it. 

Une frowns at him. "I'm surprised you're still in this much pain," she comments. 

"You and me both," Duo admits. It's probably a sign of how severe the dislocation was that he's still in considerable discomfort over a week later. There's not much he can do for it that he isn't already doing, and painkillers are as good as useless for him, so he just has to suck it up. "You wanted to see me?" he asks, deciding he's as comfortable as he's going to get. 

“Yes,” she says, allowing the subject change. “We need to talk about your assignments.”

He raises an eyebrow. “What about them?”

“Specifically, your body count.” He just stares at her, waiting for more detail. She sighs and adds, “Maxwell, your body count accounts for fully a third of all agent-involved deaths in this agency since its founding. Now I know we’re not that old, but that’s a worrying statistic, and one that I don’t want tied to you.”

“What the hell do you expect?” he demands, angry. “Two of my last three assignments have been dealing with fanatics. Fanatics don’t surrender—they fight to the last damned man. You want me to arrest them and bring them in, I need more than a partner to do that!”

“I know.” She raises a hand to calm him. “That’s my failing. I was more concerned about neutralizing the threats than in apprehending the perpetrators. You’re absolutely correct—I should have equipped you better. You’re not here to listen to me criticize your decisions. I wouldn’t have even brought it up in this case, but the Somalian authorities expressed concerns with the sheer magnitude of violence you enacted.”

He wants to cross his arms, but it will not feel good, which will make the defensiveness way too obvious. “I didn’t chase anyone down,” he says firmly. “No one ran. They came at me to the last man.” He doesn’t say because that’s what the crazies do, but he thinks his look implies it.

She raises her hands again, placating. The gesture is so at odds with what he knows of Une that it does calm him down a bit. “I know. And I believe you. As I told you, this isn’t a reprimand.” She clasped her hands over the file. “I do, however, want to make you aware of it. I’ve seen firsthand the destruction you can leave in your wake. It can be… very unnerving, to say the least. And the magnitude of the violence is concerning”—she raises her hand again as Duo shifts to stand—“no matter how appropriate the response,” she says over him. “I have closely reviewed each of your assignments. You’re… quicker to go for the kill than I think law enforcement generally prefers, but”—she sighs—“I don’t think I would have done much differently in your place.”

“I don’t maim, and I don’t deliberately drag out death,” Duo says.

“As I am aware. I think your… efficiency is part of the problem, actually.”

He cocks his head, watching her closely. “How so?”

“Obviously you can’t shoot to wound, but… there are not many you leave behind who bleed out or die of their wounds because they can’t get help soon enough. If they get in your way, they don’t tend to survive, and that could be construed as deliberate.”

“It is deliberate,” Duo says flatly. “I’m not a sadist. I don’t get off on hurting people,” he growls out, then grits his teeth and forces himself to take a long breath. Calmer, he continues, “Look at me for a second, and just forget for a minute that I’m a pilot. What do you see? Describe me like you would if you were giving a description to police.”

She looks curious but after a bare hesitation says, “You’re 5’3”, thin, maybe 110 pounds—”

“Exactly,” he says, interrupting her before she can go on. She looks confused for a moment, running her own words back in her mind. He sees the moment it clicks, and she closes her eyes.

“You have to kill fast,” she says. “You can’t afford to leave wounded in your wake.”

“Exactly,” he says. “Heero’s got superstrength on his side. He can knock someone out because if that someone comes to and gets back up, Heero can deal with them again. I, however, am usually at a severe disadvantage just because I’m small. I can’t let the guy who’s got fifty pounds of muscle and eight inches on me get back up. I let that guy get back up, I might be the one who goes down when he does.”

“But you are a pilot,” she points out.

“Yeah, and speed and skill make up for some of the disparity,” he concedes. “They can’t make up for all of it, though.” Shini, when it’s riding, can overcome most of the disparity by sheer supernatural strength, but Shini requires its price, and the more he kills the stronger it gets. It isn’t a thing that seeks to spare, and it’s not something he can explain to Une, so he’s left with the mundane explanation. It helps that it’s true, at least. He learned young to get in fast and make his kills sure, when he was smaller, when Shini didn’t ride him the way it does now, when he hadn’t taken so much life.

Une taps her finger against her closed fist thoughtfully. “I can’t disagree with your logic or your actions under the circumstances you were in. I won’t ask you to stay your hand if doing so puts you in imminent danger. What we need is a bigger team to allow you to complete your objectives without having to permanently neutralize every threat in your way.” She meets his eyes, then adds, “It’s not the war anymore. There shouldn’t be any reason we can’t apprehend instead of terminate.”

“I will… try to do my best,” he says. It’s a vague and mostly meaningless promise from him, but it’s really all he can agree to.

Une seems to realize that because she says. “That’s all I ask.”

“Is that all you needed?” he asks.

“Yes. Dismissed.”

Duo stands, relieved to be out of the chair. Before he can get to the door though, Une speaks again.

“One last thing, Agent Darkside.” He glances over his shoulder at her. “Agent Daffodil would like you to visit.”

He blinks at her, surprised. “Really?” he asks.

Une hums an affirmative as she opens the file under her hands. “She explicitly asked I tell you next time I saw you.”

Biting his lip, he asks, “Even though I…”

“Saved her life?” Une interrupts, looking up. Duo slouches and looks away because he certainly doesn’t feel like he saved her. “You also stayed with her in Somalia, refusing to be treated, until her boyfriend arrived.”

“She was my partner,” he says. He doesn’t deserve credit for doing the bare minimum.

“Yes, she was.” Une watches him before adding, “But I believe she is also a friend. And she could use friends, right now.” She looks back down at her file. “Since you are still clearly not fit for duty, you might like to make a stop at the hospital to see her.”

She says it like it’s a suggestion, but Duo knows it’s really not.

“Yes, ma’am,” he says, not willing to have this fight.

“I don’t want to see you back here until next Monday, and that’s only if Sally clears you. You are still officially on medical leave.”

He doesn’t sigh, but he really wants to. “Yes, ma’am,” he says instead. He dashes out the door before she can think of anything else she wants to tell him.

Duo could continue putting off visiting Isolde or he could suck it up and go see her. Knowing it will get worse the longer he waits, he decides to head to the hospital. It’s close to headquarters, which also means it’s not far from their apartment.

It’s probably not a great sign that the head nurse recognizes him and tells him Isolde’s room without asking.

She’s only been there for three days since being transferred from Somalia, so Duo really hasn’t been avoiding her for that long, but she was his partner, and she was his friend, and he has been kind of shitty.

When he finds the room, he can hear voices talking and knocks on the doorway before he can use it as an excuse to leave. He hears Isolde call “Come in,” in French. His limited French has definitely been getting a workout living in Brussels.

“Hi, Daffy,” he says, pulling out the bouquet of daffodils he picked up on the way on a whim. The tattoo-covered guy in the chair next to her must be her boyfriend.  

“Ani!” she says, sounding happy, the way she usually does. Her boyfriend is getting to his feet, face a thundercloud, but before he can go too far, Isolde grabs the back of his shirt. “Guillaume, we talked about this,” she says.

He turns toward her, and mutters, “But it’s his fault,” in quick Flemish under his breath.

Honestly, it’s a little insulting that he thinks Duo lives in Brussels and is monolingual, but almost clever that he chose Flemish, betting that if Duo weren’t monolingual that he’d be more familiar with French than Flemish. He is, he just also happens to pick up languages easily. He doesn’t speak Flemish well yet, but his comprehension is good enough to take a statement in if necessary.  

“He can understand you,” she replies in a normal tone of voice. Duo has to bite his lips to keep from laughing. “Sit,” she tells him, yanking his shirt back toward the chair.

After a moment, he goes, but he doesn’t look happy about it. Duo doesn’t really blame him. In his place, Duo isn’t sure he’d want Duo there either.

Isolde waits a beat to be sure that Guillaume isn’t going to get up and try to attack Duo, then faces Duo again and stretches out her arms. “Gimme,” she demands.

Duo wanders over to her and hands her the flowers. Her whole face lights up as she takes the vase from him, bending her neck to take a deep inhale of their sweet scent. While she does, Duo gets a good look in.

Mostly, she looks good. A little thin, a little pale, but nothing overly worrisome. Considering she had lost both legs at the knee and will probably be permanently paralyzed from the waist-down, she looks almost startlingly normal.

She puts the vase in her lap, cradling it with care. “Thank you,” she says.

He shrugs his good shoulder. “Someone tried to teach me manners once,” he says.

Guillaume makes a disgusted noise, and Isolde’s smile falters for a moment.

“Ani, this is my boyfriend, Guillaume. Guillaume, this is—was.” She takes a breath. “Was my partner,” she continues on. “Duo Maxwell.”

Duo is a little relieved when Guillaume glares at him rather than offering his hand. “I’m sorry we couldn’t meet under better circumstances,” Duo says.

“She would not be in this state if it weren’t for you,” he says with that peculiar accent Duo has come to expect from Brussels natives.

“Guillaume!” Isolde snaps, censure thick in her voice.

“He’s not wrong,” Duo defends, and Guillaume’s head turns to stare at him so fast, Duo wonders if you could give yourself whiplash.

Isolde rolls her eyes. “What more could you have possibly done?” she asks.

“I could have let you jump first,” he says. He doesn’t tell her he could have made the jump standing flat. Doesn’t tell her that if the worst had happened and the catwalk gave out, he could have safely landed from the fall. He thinks she knows.

“Yes, and watched me fall to my death without you there to catch me,” she says sarcastically. “Look, I know what I’m capable of, and you did everything you could to help me make that jump. If you hadn’t caught me, I would have lost my life, not just my legs.” Duo must not have looked convinced because she adds, “I don’t blame you. You don’t get to blame you either.” She turns to Guillaume and pokes him. “You don’t get to blame him either.”

“He’s a fucking kid. Why were you in that situation with a child as your backup?” Guillaume demands.

Usually, that accusation would have Duo bristling like a hissing cat, but there’s something broken in Guillaume’s voice that keeps him from losing his shit this time. If he were in Guillaume’s shoes, with his lover in the hospital, missing limbs, and he saw someone who looked like Duo who was supposed to keep them safe? Duo wouldn’t be happy about it either.

Isolde looks stricken at his words and turns to Duo, as if he can somehow make this make sense. They were partnered for long enough that she knows he’s the senior agent, knows that he’s experienced and knows his shit. She’s never once treated him like a kid—unlike Thuy and Reynard who seemed to have to remind themselves he wasn’t—and if he’s not mistaken, it looks like she had totally forgotten that Duo won’t be legally seventeen until October.

Duo wishes he could fix this. He knows he can’t. Isolde might have suspicions about Duo, but she doesn’t know, and even if he were okay with her knowing, he’s not okay with her boyfriend knowing. At least, not right now. Not when he’s angry at the world and looking for a target to take it out on. The best he can do is, “I was vetted under the Old Souls Statute. If you don’t trust my judgement, trust Une’s. I wouldn’t have been on that mission if I weren’t capable of handling it.”

Whether or not Isolde would have been on that mission had she not been his partner is a separate question, and it’s not one Duo is willing to address. Isolde is—was—good. She’s as good as Sally, but he wouldn’t have wanted Sally running around with him in that base either if he had a choice. Normal people just weren’t as sturdy as Gundam pilots.

Of course it’s Isolde who breaks the stalemate. She’s literally lost two limbs, but her boyfriend and her ex-partner having a stare-off is more upsetting to her. Really, Duo doesn’t think he deserved her, and he’s really not convinced Guillaume does either. “I actually wanted to introduce you to each other,” she says, and it comes out as awkward as it is under the circumstances.

“Why is that?” Guillaume asks, but he softens his tone for her. It’s not a lot, but it’s something.

“Ani—” she starts, excited, then seems to deflate. She looks back at Duo, but he knows what she’s asking and he’s already undoing his shirt to shrug out of it. She smiles, relieved, and that alone is going to make this next part worth it. “Ani has some scarring on his back. I thought maybe you could take a look and see if it might be covered with some tattoos?”

Guillaume is watching him with suspicious eyes, so he says, “Daffy’s gorgeous, dude, but I don’t swing that way,” he assures. “My phone rang before I finished getting dressed and she saw them. That’s all.” He finishes shifting his shirt off one shoulder as he walks around to Guillaume’s side of the bed. He pulls his braid over his shoulder as he turns sideways to present half his back to Guillaume. He’s not stupid, though, he can still see the man over his shoulder.

The hospital lights reflect off Guillaume’s eyebrow piercings as his brow furrows and he leans forward to get a better look. He hisses a nasty Flemish curse under his breath when he shifts Duo’s shirt to get a better look at the scars.

Duo really doesn’t have a lot of issues with his scars. They’re borderline gruesome, but they’re a part of him; he earned them fair and square. It does not mean that he likes being under the magnifying glass like this. Guillaume’s hand raises, and Duo starts to step away, not sure of his intention. Then Guillaume looks up and meets his eyes. “May I?” he asks.

The question is surprisingly sincere and Guillaume’s eyes are sad, not pitying, so Duo says, “Go ahead. I don’t have a lot of feeling in a lot of them.”

If he weren’t watching, he’s not entirely sure he’d feel Guillaume’s featherlight touches. He shifts Duo’s shirt as much as he can so he can see much of Duo’s back at once as possible, and traces a few vague shapes. Apparently satisfied, stands up, then holds up the sleeve to allow Duo to slide it back on. As he buttons the shirt, he turns back to face them, not wanting Guillaume at his back any longer than absolutely necessary.

“What do you think?” Isolde asks. “Could you cover them?”

Guillaume is staring down at Duo like Duo is a different person, and maybe after seeing the scars Duo carries, he is. There’s no mistaking the intent in the scars on his back, no explaining it away as a freak accident. Someone did that to him, on purpose, and even to untrained eyes, it’s pretty obvious. It means that Duo survived someone doing that to him, so maybe he isn’t some dumb kid after all.

“Gui?” Isolde prompts. Guillaume startles.

“I’m sorry?”

“Do you think you could cover them?” she repeats the question.

“No,” he says immediately, shaking his head. “No, I can’t. I’m not good enough to cover those.” He pauses, thoughtful, then looks back at Isolde. “But Abby might be.”

Duo glances between them, officially confused. Isolde seems to realize this because she looks at Duo and says, “Abby is the owner of the shop Guillaume works at.”

“She’s one of the best in Europe,” Guillaume says with quiet certainty. “Abby could cover them,” he decides.

Duo finishes doing up the last button and says, “Thanks. I’ll, uh, look her up, if I decide to do anything about them.”

Guillaume shakes his head. “No. Have Isolde call me. I’ll give you an introduction. Abby’s booked sometimes years in advance, but I think she’d make an exception for you. She’s already said she’ll make an exception for Isolde if she wants.”

“I told you,” Isolde said, giving him a gentle pat on the side. “I want you to do it… if it won’t make you uncomfortable.”

His face twists in sympathetic agony, and Duo suspects it will be a while before Guillaume can even think of what Isolde’s lost without pain.

“We’ll have to see how they heal,” he says. That’s not an agreement, Duo knows, but he doesn’t push.

“What are you thinking of doing?” Duo asks to get them past this odd little impasse.

Isolde lights up. “Oh! I was thinking maybe something like some Norse saga all up and down my legs. I’ve always loved tattoo art, but I’m a needlephobe, so I could never suck it up and get one. But since I can’t feel my legs, it won’t be a problem!” she says, as bubbly and irrepressible as ever. A knot loosens in his chest.

“Have anything drawn up yet?”

“Sit!” she tells them both, motioning Duo to a chair. “Guillaume’s got some sketches. Gui—show?” she asks.

The guy doesn’t stand a chance against that look. He melts and reaches around to a bag to pull out a mostly full sketchbook while Duo sits in the visitor’s chair on Isolde’s other side. He settles in to oo and ah over Guillaume’s sketches and act as a sounding board.

Isolde may not be able to be his partner anymore, but that doesn’t mean she can’t still be a friend.

Duo’s shoulder aches from his physical therapy, but he knows it’s the good kind of ache, the ache that says it’s healing and getting stronger. It still hurts though, so he lets Heero coddle him and brush his hair.

Heero loves brushing his hair anyway, but he doesn’t usually have an excuse to do it. Besides, Heero has been a little clingier than usual since he got back. The best thing to do seems to be to let him hover, even if Duo doesn’t really need it. He’d usually find it stifling, but Heero’s definition of “hovering” is miles away from most people’s. Duo didn’t think most people would even notice.

Music is playing softly on Duo’s phone, the volume so low that they’re hearing the music more than the lyrics. Duo hums along with it anyway, relishing the comfortable quiet between them. Heero’s one of the only people he has been able to simply be with sometimes. Times like this, he feels no compulsion to fill their silence, no need to drag Heero into a conversation.

These times, when Heero’s reverent touch says more than a thousand words could, are precious. Duo craves the care he takes when he hits a tangle, the way he will card his fingers through Duo’s hair with awe, like he’s not quite sure he should be allowed to touch, into his memory.

The brush is set aside, and Heero’s hands start their carding, pulling all the loosened strands free and winding them up, sticking them on top of the brush so when Duo cleans it out later, that hair ends up in the trash and not their bed. Well, less ends up in their bed, anyway. Hair as long as Duo’s finds its way everywhere.

Heero’s hands pass through it for a few more minutes, starting at Duo’s scalp and massaging it until he pulls through the ends, being careful not to yank. He’s been brushing it dry for over an hour, so it falls like a silken curtain. Duo loves when it’s like this, but he almost never bothers to get it to this state himself.

Finally, Heero’s hands find the parts that have been trained into Duo’s hair after a decade of wearing a braid, and he begins the plait. He takes far more time than Duo does, not because his clever hands don’t know the motions blind by now, but because he seems to enjoy watching the braid come together, like it’s some kind of puzzle or piece of art.

When he finishes, he ties off the end, never tight enough, as though he’s afraid that he can break the end of it off if he wraps the elastic too tight, then he shifts the braid over Duo’s shoulder so Duo can inspect it.

Duo takes it with his sore arm gingerly, then pulls on the hairband, getting another stretch and looping it over the end to make it more secure. That done, he runs his good hand over the length. Heero braids looser than Duo does, and it somehow makes the braid feel lighter, airier than Duo’s own tight and heavy plaits.

Heero handles Duo’s hair like it’s precious and fragile. He knows Heero doesn’t think he’s fragile, but Heero can be almost afraid of his own strength at times. Duo knows how invaluable Heero’s tenderness is, knows what it sometimes costs him. When Heero puts a light hand on Duo’s waist and leans forward to place a tender kiss at the nape of his neck, Duo sighs, relaxing even more, even though he didn’t think he could get more relaxed. His shoulder twinges with the weight of his arm, but it’s easily ignored as Heero trails barely-felt kisses across the back of Duo’s shoulder blade, ending with a kiss to the back of the injured joint, as if he could kiss it better.

Duo taught him that—the healing magic of a kiss. Sister Helen taught it to Duo. Even when he was a kid, he didn’t really believe it, but he wanted to. There was an unspeakable comfort in the fact that someone loved you enough to wish a kiss could make a wound better. Heero’s free hand traces from the center of Duo’s back over his shoulder blade and down again, following ridges of scars, tickling the sensitive skin where it joins damaged, mostly senseless patches.

“Hey, ’Ro,” he says, so softly the words almost blend in with the quiet music.

Heero simply hums an inquiring sound that Duo more feels than hears against his skin as Heero continues to place delicate kisses around his shoulder.

“What would you think if I said I wanted to tattoo my back—over the scars, I mean?”

There’s a breath of hesitation before Heero places a final kiss on top of Duo’s injured shoulder. He then moves forward, plastering his chest to Duo’s back, wrapping both his arms around Duo’s waist.

“I wondered if you would consider it,” Heero says, hooking his chin over Duo’s good shoulder.

“They don’t bother you though,” Duo says.

He feels Heero shrug. “We all have scars. They’re just....” A finger finds a scar on Duo’s abdomen and traces it before he continues. “They’re just part of you. Physical proof you survived.”

“They’re ugly,” Duo tries, but there’s teasing in his voice.

Heero snorts. “Nothing about you is ugly, Duo.”

It’s exactly, sincerely how Heero feels, and hearing it will never not leave Duo a little awed that Heero somehow chose him.

“They’d still be there,” Duo says. “Under the tattoos. I’m not talking about plastic surgery.”

“I know,” Heero says simply. He’s quiet for a moment, and Duo can hear him thinking, so he lets him work out how to say what he wants. “Did you have a design in mind?” he asks. It’s not the question Duo expects, but leave it to Heero to jump straight to pragmatics. He knows Duo well enough to know Duo wouldn’t bring it up if he weren’t most of the way to a decision.

“I was thinking wings,” he admits.

He feels Heero’s relieved sigh more than hears it, even with Heero’s mouth so close to his ear. “I think that’d be… appropriate.”

Duo laughs even though it jars his shoulder a little. “Appropriate?” he asks.

“We fell from the heavens,” Heero says. “I think it’s only appropriate that one of us have wings.”

Surprised, Duo turns to look at Heero. Even after two years, the poetry of Heero’s thoughts can still catch Duo off guard.

“Even devil wings?” he asks.

Heero leans back a little, and Duo can tell he’s looking at the shapes of the scars. After a moment, his fingers trace from Duo’s side downward toward the center of his back.

“Angel wings,” he says.

“I’m not an angel,” Duo reminds.

Heero pulls Duo back against his chest, taking care not to jostle his shoulder, and he sets his chin on top of Duo’s head.

“Fallen angels are still angels.”

Against his will, Duo smiles. “I’ll think about it.”

Chapter Text

Given Une’s warning about his body count, Duo thinks she’s starting to maybe like him. He reconsiders that when she partners him with Rhys Septum—grandson of one General Septum, who Duo is 98% sure Une killed, but he seriously doubts the kid knows that. If it had been up to Duo, he would have rejected Septum—call sign Sabre—outright for Preventers, but Une assures him she needed a better reason to reject someone than a “bad feeling.” The scope Preventers are being tasked with needs bodies, so really, unless they fail their psych evals, no one is being turned away, and really, being an asshole rarely gets people fired.

The fact that Duo is Sabre’s fourth partner in less than a year raises red flags. Sure, he’s technically Duo’s seventh in six months, but none of Duo’s died—one of Sabre’s did.

Because they’re both relatively experienced at this point, they don’t have the normal bonding period and are instead thrown back into the fray the minute Duo is cleared for field work since the world is going fucking insane. It’s not just a couple of random super-peoples running around anymore, but actual superheroes, including Captain fucking America. Oh, and aliens. Aliens are apparently very real. Which is just… great.

It takes him about ten minutes in the field with Sabre to realize that Une didn’t assign Sabre to him because she thought they might complement one another; she paired them because she can probably throw Sabre about ten times farther than she trusts him. It’s weirdly gratifying to realize that she trusts Duo to keep him in line and out of trouble, but he wishes she’d found a different way to show her favor.

The problem is the fact that’s she’s counting on Duo to keep someone out of trouble. The irony is not lost on him.

“You are from L2, correct?” Sabre asks as they pick their way through alleys and toward a warehouse that they have reports of being a possible gunrunning site.  

“Uh huh,” Duo says shortly. It’s daytime, and though he can hear the activity of the port in the distance, it’s a muffled sound, separated. Amsterdam is largely a socialist dream of a city, but the Eve Wars were felt here, and there are scattered bums, addicts, and homeless. This part of the warehouse district had been abandoned since the war ended, so it isn’t showing the signs of long-term decline that Duo is familiar with, but he can see the direction it’s going.

A couple of working girls give them long looks. Duo inclines his head but keeps moving. He doesn’t like the feel of this place—it reminds him far too much of L2.

“Don’t want to go trade tips?” Sabre asks in a sneering, condescending tone.

He’s mostly had his senses tuned to around them, but at that, he turns to look at Sabre, whose lip is curled in disgust and has pulled his chest so upright, Duo thinks he should squeak when he walks.

“What?” he asks.

“Don’t want to go trade tips with the whores?” Sabre repeats, turning his sneer on Duo.

“Trade tips?” Duo demands, fuming.

“Well, you are an L2 orphan,” Sabre says.

Duo stares, not sure if he should be outraged at Sabre’s assumption that he must have been a whore or surprised it took six partners before one accused him of it. L2’s reputation precedes it, and the idea that all L2 orphans are whores has even begun to filter into mainstream consciousness. It’s not true—although a lot more orphan kids end up turning tricks on L2 than they seem to in most slums, not all of them do. Not by a long shot. Duo himself only turned tricks so kids under his care didn’t have to. If he’d just been taking care of himself, he wouldn’t have needed to, even if he were pretty enough that he always would have been dodging rapists.

There is no way in hell Duo is going to give this asshole the satisfaction of being right though. “Which means what, exactly?” he asks.

“Well, you know…”

“No, I don’t know,” Duo says, crossing his arms and planting his feet. He thinks he knows, but he doesn’t know for sure. A fine line, but he’s more than happy to walk it under the current circumstances. “Explain it to me. After all, I’m just an uneducated L2 orphan. You have to tell me what you mean.”

Sabre has the nerve to look longsuffering, and Duo’s odds on the guy making it out of their partnership alive are going downhill quickly.

“There is one thing L2 is known for.”

Duo is going to make him say it. “I can think of several—”

“Quit playing coy. Obviously you’re a whore. I don’t know who you slept with to get this job, but it’s clear that Une partnered us so I could keep an eye on you,” Sabre explains to him with the kind of put-upon patience that suggests Duo is too stupid to understand.

None of Duo’s partners have died so far, but the chances that Duo will kill his current once are climbing. Duo can feel his pulse thudding more powerfully, feel the rush of blood in his veins, notices the colors bleeding from the world. Shini perks up in the back of Duo’s mind.

“You think,” he begins slowly, forcing Shini back enough to speak, “that Une partnered us so you could keep an eye on me?”

Anyone with a shred of self-preservation instinct would be nervous by now. Sabre simply rolls his eyes. “I understand she was General Khushrenada’s aid, but this is a clear case where the powers that be have made an error in putting her in charge of Preventers. Such a woman is just too weak-willed to be the director of such an organization.”

To call Une merely Treize’s aid is a laughable misunderstanding and underestimation of both her role as Treize’s second-in-command and the power she had in her own right. She was a colonel. Whatever role Treize must have played in getting her promoted to that rank so young, Duo has it on good authority that he wasn’t the kind of man who would have done it if she weren’t worthy of the regard. And while Duo and Une have their own rocky history, the last thing he would ever call Une is weak-willed.

“Hold up,” Duo says. “You’re going to have to run that by me again. Why, exactly, do you think Une is not a suitable head for Preventers?” This really isn’t the time or the place to be having this discussion, but it isn’t one that will wait.

“An aid is not a leader,” Sabre says. “She has better things she should be worrying about.”

“Better things,” Duo repeats, voice flat. “Better things to worry about than intersphere peace? That seems like a worthy thing to dedicate yourself to. Isn’t that why you joined?” he asks.

Sabre sighs like Duo’s being deliberately obtuse, and he kind of is, but only because he wants Sabre to say exactly what he means. “She’s taken custody of the young Miss Khushrenada. Surely that should be her priority.”

It’s taking conscious effort to suppress Shinigami now. “Are you saying that she could handle running an international war but can’t handle being a working parent?” he asks, and anyone who knew Duo would be very wary of that cold, even tone.

“I’m saying that her maternal instincts must be clouding her judgment. I think your present status is a reflection of that. It’s a shame that my skills are being wasted to coddle you.”

“Just to make sure I’m understanding you correctly,” Duo says, and he has to force the words out because he’s only barely keeping Shini at bay. “You think you were partnered with me to keep me out of the way because I whored it up with some somebody and that Une lets me stay on because she’s a weak-willed woman?” Every part of those words sound absurd in Duo’s ears.

“It sounds so sordid when you say it aloud, but yes. If you must put it in such terms.”

Duo is going to kill him. Slowly. Starting by removing his tongue.

“Let’s clear something up here,” Duo starts, and the only reason he isn’t yelling is because this would be a bad place to do it. “I was partnered with you to keep you from being a disaster, not the other way around. I didn’t get this job because I fucked someone—I got it because I’m one of the fucking best there is. If anyone’s ‘talents’ are being wasted, they’re mine because Une can’t trust you with the kind of stuff I usually deal with.”

Sabre sneers. “I’m the disaster? You’re the one who has been through six partners in as many months.”

“At least none of my partners died. And mine mostly asked for transfers because they couldn’t handle the types of assignments I pull, not because they had a problem with me personally. Can you say the same?”

“They couldn’t keep up with you?” Sabre says, the skepticism clear. “We’re being sent on this little side-trip—”

“It’s gunrunners,” Duo hisses. “If you think that’s below your paygrade, I don’t know what to tell you.”

“You obviously think it’s below yours.”

Duo closes his eyes and takes a long, deep, meditative breath because if he doesn’t, he’s going to deck his partner or maybe just break his damn neck. No matter how much he deserves it, Duo is the one who will end up looking bad. “I don’t,” he says flatly. He’s a bit of a big gun to be using on an operation of this suspected size, but—in theory at least—Duo’s experience with smuggling should make this a relatively straightforward cleanup. They are short-staffed, after all. There shouldn’t be much that can go wrong, despite Sabre, that Duo can’t handle more-or-less singlehandedly if necessary. Sabre hasn’t figured out that this isn’t the type of operation you usually send a pair in to deal with, you usually send a team. Sabre apparently thinks that the operation is so small that it only needs two of them, not considering that there’s only two of them because Duo is one of the two.

“Well—”

“Black fucking Death. Shut your mouth, and let’s get this over with,” Duo interrupts, because if Sabre says anything else stupid, Duo is really going to hurt him. Possibly permanently.

They don’t speak as they make their way to the warehouse in question. When they get to it, there’s a heavy padlock on the door.

Sabre sighs, irritated. “Looks like this is a dead end,” he says.

Duo rolls his eyes. “Let’s take a look around and see if there’s another way in,” he suggests. Under most circumstances, Duo would have just picked the lock—it’s just a padlock, he can pick it in nothing flat—but he can only imagine the bitching that Sabre will do if he pulls out his picks and starts going at it. It would, technically, be illegal, and if his partner were just about anyone else right now, Duo would risk it. But Sabre is his partner, and Duo can throw cars farther than he trusts him.

“That padlock has been there forever. Nothing is going on here,” Sabre says, impatient.

Except it’s not an old padlock. It’s one of those brushed stainless-steel types that looks like it’s been around the block a few times when you first get it at the store, but to Duo, it’s obviously a recent addition. Recent as in a few weeks—it hasn’t even had a chance to get any grime or salt buildup on it. Sabre can’t be a total idiot, but his lack of street smarts could get them both killed.

Rather than wasting time arguing with Sabre, Duo begins to make a circuit. If he gets petty pleasure out of forcing Sabre to keep up with him, well, at least he hasn’t punched the man yet.

Sure enough, they find an open second-story window around the next side. Duo stands under the window and links his fingers to make a step. Sabre just stares at him.

“What are you doing?”

“You need a boost, right? So, this is a boost.”

“You can’t lift me up there. I can’t reach.”

Duo just manages not to call Sabre an idiot, but it’s a close thing. “I can give you a boost. It’s not that high.”

“It’s probably fifteen feet!”

“It’s ten, maybe,” Duo corrects. “I’m 5’3. You’re, what? Almost six foot? If you could stand on my shoulders, the top of your head would probably be able to see in the window. And I can definitely give you a boost.”

“You just want me to go in there alone.”

What are you, twelve? Duo thinks, incredulous. “I can get up to that window without help, thanks.”

“Well, I need a ladder.”

“Or a boost.” Duo mimes lifting his palms up as if giving said boost.

“A ladder.”

Fuck it, Duo thinks. He wanders over to a trash heap nearby and sorts through it, finding a decent rope. It’s not that surprising because they’re so close to the docks, a rope that’s only about fifteen feet is too short for most tasks on the ships, and he can see where an end had frayed, so it’s probably compromised and thrown out because of it. That said, it should still be plenty strong enough to take the weight of a single adult man. Duo loops it over his shoulder, then takes a running start. His shoe gets a good grip on the wall, and he pushes up, easily catching the ledge of the window. He heaves himself up and inside as quietly as possible. It’s an office of sorts, an old desk right under the window, and an older radiator against the wall, which is perfect.

Duo ties the rope to the radiator, then quickly puts a couple knots into the length. He doesn’t trust that Sabre is athletic enough to climb the rope on grip strength alone. That done, he climbs back on the desk and tosses the rope down, then sticks his head out. “You coming?” he asks, pitching his voice so it doesn’t echo off the buildings around them.

The way Sabre is staring up at him is at least a little gratifying. A long moment passes, then he can hear Sabre cursing and bitching, but he’s climbing the rope. Once his weight is on it, Duo goes and sits on the radiator, keeping a hand and a close eye on the rope to make sure it stays secure. He glances around the office while he waits. It’s mostly empty and abandoned but is oddly clean for a place that supposedly hasn’t been in use for over a year. After a minute or so, Sabre lumbers himself in gracelessly.

“I am not a God-damn monkey,” Sabre informs, but he’s not huffing or overly out of breath, so Duo ignores it. Besides, he’s pretty sure that monkeys would be insulted by the insinuation that Sabre was one of them. He pulls the rope up and winds it quickly, setting it on the floor, though he doesn’t untie it from the radiator. When he looks back, Sabre has his hands on his hips and asks, “So what now?”

“Now we go take a look around.”

“Isn’t this illegal?”

Duo makes a so-so motion with his hand. “It’s gray. Now shut up.”

He unlocks the office door and listens to the silence around them. Shini still flutters in the back of his mind, but Duo settles it. He’s not expecting to kill or need to kill, and Shini’s price for its power is too steep to use needlessly. This should be strictly reconnaissance.  

Slipping on soundless feet down a wrought-iron staircase to the first floor, Duo hears the clang and ringing of Sabre’s steel-toed boots behind him. It’s gratingly loud in the warehouse. Duo tries his best to put Sabre out of his mind, only vaguely tracking him at his back, as he moves through the space.

For a place that was supposed to be abandoned, there’s quite a bit of equipment left. Free-standing steel shelves, many with boxes—wood, plastic, and metal—on them creating pseudowalls and the vague sense of a maze. They also interrupt sight lines and throw deep shadows in a building that doesn’t have enough windows to begin with. There’s also discarded construction materials strewn over the floor: rebar, pipes, beams, boards, even nails and screws. It could be haphazard, but something about the distribution of items is too perfect. It’s the random that people produce when they want something to seem random, not genuine randomness.

Increasingly certain they’re in the right place, Duo pulls out his gun and flicks off the safety, keeping it pointed at the ground as he moves.

While Duo may be moving like a ghost, Sabre more than erases the advantage. He can’t seem to take more than two steps without bumping into something or stepping on something or kicking something, and as loud as those metal boots are on the detritus, his cursing and mumbling at every run-in is almost as bad.

When Sabre nearly faceplants after putting his foot down on some sort of pipe, Duo wheels around to hiss, “Quiet!” at him.

Sabre glares, then kicks the pipe. It rings and echoes through the warehouse as it flies and lands and rolls. Reaper pass over us, Duo thinks, because if there were anyone else here who hadn’t been aware that someone was there, they most certainly are now.

“This is a waste of time,” Sabre declares in a distressingly normal tone of voice. “There’s nothing here but junk, and I’m going to break my neck on this crap—”

The door creaking open is far too loud in the silence, and Duo rushes toward Sabre, slapping his hand over Sabre’s mouth before quickly shoving them both down and behind a shelf. Sabre isn’t going to have to worry about breaking his neck on any of the crap on the floor because Duo is going to break it for him if he doesn’t stay down and shut the fuck up.

The door slams, and Duo can hear voices floating to them, a mix of Dutch and accented English that’s hard to make out with the way the sound bounces around the huge space. He releases Sabre, crouching low to try to get a look at the men.

The voices float over to them, and Duo can pick out enough words to know that they have, indeed, found their gunrunners, and these are them.

Fuck.

There is no way in hell that Sabre can creep back over to that stairwell and back up it without alerting someone that they’re there. As far as Duo can tell, the man doesn’t have a sneaky bone in his body. Their best course of action was to lay low—

Someone whistles as a box is opened. Duo barely peeks over the box they are behind in time to see a rifle of some sort silhouetted in a man’s hand. Just fantastic. They definitely found their gunrunners.

Duo is distracted when Sabre moves and has to yank the man back down. He tries to sign in Standard at him, but the blank look he gets tells him that of course, Sabre doesn’t know Standard signs. He risks a hissed, “What are you doing?”

“We have found our gunrunners,” Sabre says bluntly, though he at least as the minimal sense to keep his fucking voice down. “We should arrest them.”

Are you stupid? Duo wants very badly to ask, but he can’t. Not a helpful question under the current circumstances, and besides, it’s pretty obvious that Sabre is stupid. “There are at least five of them,” Duo says instead. Five that Duo had counted. That didn’t include however many were left outside to “inconspicuously” guard the door. Duo does not like how comfortable they are conducting business in broad daylight, no matter how poor the area. That implies that these gunrunners aren’t just using this warehouse, but that they have some wider control.

“And we are Preventers,” Sabre says, like Duo is being the stupid one.

“They will kill us,” Duo hisses back.

Sabre rolls his eyes, and Duo is seriously beginning to consider killing the man on principle. He’d be doing the human race a favor really—clearly Sabre is too stupid to live. Wouldn’t want that kind of stupid to breed, now.

“There are only five of them.”

At least five of them, Duo wants to correct. Which is totally beside the point anyway. The problem isn’t the number of them—under most circumstances, Duo would laugh at the idea that he couldn’t handle five-to-one odds—the problem is they are gunrunners. It’s not the same class of just bug-fuck crazy that zealots are, but in some ways, they’re worse. Fanatics aren’t known for their intelligence and cold pragmatism. Their extremism can make them unpredictable, but it also means they’re rarely trained and the quality of opponent isn’t usually that great. Gunrunners, and most heads of organized crime, are whole different problem. They are doing this for the money and the power, and they think the money is worth the risk of the heavy penalties that most intersphere laws carry against gunrunning. But that also means, they’re in this business with their eyes wide open. They are ready and willing to kill to keep their businesses going, and gunrunners in particular? In Duo’s experience, they arm their people really well. They train them too, just to make it more irritating. The gunrunners here are hard, experienced muscle.

“If we keep down and keep quiet, we might get out of here without a fight,” Duo says, keeping his voice as soft as possible, trying to avoid the sibilants that carry over distance. They’ve found the place, that’s fine. Now they can get a warrant and come back when a buy isn’t going down in the middle of the day. They can come back with adequate firepower, adequate backup—Reaper knows that Sabre doesn’t qualify.

When Sabre’s eyes narrow and some kind of resolved expression fixes itself to Sabre’s face, Duo knows that they are not going to get out of here without a fight. Sabre is not going to let that happen.

“Coward,” Sabre says in a far too normal voice before he stands up. “Freeze! Preventers!”

Duo stares at him, some part of his brain insisting that this cannot be happening, that Sabre cannot be this stupid and incompetent. No, it’s worse than incompetence—it’s greed. He accused Duo of being a coward because he wants the glory. He wants the prestige of the collar. Duo wants to be able to go home to Heero in one piece.

He hears the gunrunners scrambling as Sabre gets off the first shot.

His body moves before Duo makes the conscious decision, but Duo hasn’t lost a partner yet, and he’ll be damned if Sabre goes down on his watch unless Duo is the one who gets to kill him. Sabre is standing there, stock still, a fucking perfect target for the trained gunrunners, so Duo jumps up and pushes him down.

Getting shot is a peculiar thing. It doesn’t always hurt right away. Sometimes, it can be one of those funny things where your body doesn’t realize it’s hurt until it sees the wound, registers the blood.

This is not one of those times.

Duo knows as soon as he’s hit, feels the collarbone break, the bruising force of the bullet radiate out from where it hit like a tiny bomb going off in his shoulder. He drops behind the metal box, less because the shot felled him than because it’s cover, though it won’t be for long. Judging from both the pain and the amount of blood, it’s a bad wound. TV shows and movies like to play off wounds through the shoulder as if they’re as good as harmless or safe places to be shot, and they are so not. Just because there aren’t organs in the shoulder doesn’t mean there aren’t muscles and arteries and, Duo is reminded, a major nerve network. Black fucking Death, nerve pain is the worst, and Duo can barely feel his left arm. It’s hard to tell if that’s because the pain of the gunshot wound is overshadowing it or if it’s because the nerve system in his shoulder has been hit—probably both, if he had to guess.

There is a lot of blood flowing too. That’s bad, but he’s having a little bit of trouble focusing on why through the pain.

More shots sound, but they are getting more distant, fading to vague echoes. Sabre is finally starting to look nervous, but at least he keeps his fool head down. It won’t save them. It’s not going to be long before the gunrunners come around and put bullets in their brains. They need to attack. Now.

Color seeps from the world, leaving the shadows heavier yet clearer in some way Duo could never fully describe if someone asked him, but he manages to say, “Call for backup. Keep your fucking head down. Let me do my job.”

Then the world goes gray and silent as he surrenders to Shinigami.

Things after that get hazy. He knows that he kills the gunrunners—and their potential buyers. No one gets away. He loses count of them—there were definitely more than five though. He thinks he remembers Sabre trying to get him to stand down.

He floats in and out of an awareness. To call it consciousness would be wrong because he doesn’t think it’s really consciousness. It’s more like… well, awareness. Duo knows the way he perceives the world when riding Shinigami’s power is different than how humans perceive the world. He knows how he grows in strength from the kills, the deaths, how it keeps pain at bay. It’s like a false dawn—where you can see the light of the sun coming over the horizon before the it crests—the pain is like that. It’s there, and he knows it’s there, but it’s beyond his perception. He can’t see the sun yet, but it’s close at hand. If he stares too long, he’ll blind himself when the sun crests the horizon.

There are a few of those crests—where he looks too long, and the pain hits like a fresh shot all over—before Shini drags him under again, as if it can reverse time and force the sun back down. But the sun has to rise. It’s is part of the nature of the world, and it can only be held delayed for so long.

When Duo comes to for real, he feels like someone is tearing his shoulder apart. The pain is unlike anything he’s ever felt before, and Duo knows pain. Instinct has him reaching for Shinigami and pulling on it hard, forcing it to silence the pain. There are searing lights and masked faces and Duo is going to kill them all as soon as he can get up.

He manages to sit up and yank the tube out of his throat—and that pain is still there, its false-dawn light perceptible but not yet felt—when a face he didn’t expect appears in his sight.

Duo sees blue eyes, the blue of the night sky before the sun slips below the horizon—rich and deep and endless.  

Someone moves closer and tries to stab him, and he wrenches away from that face to twist the arm and drive the needle into the spark that dared approach, dared to try to harm him.

“Duo!”

His name, spoken in that voice, pierces the silence, and Duo turns to look at Heero. Now he knows it’s Heero, knows that Heero will keep him safe, will protect him.

The sounds of the room and the colors filter back in. The masked strangers are doctors; there’s shouting and the sounds of life-supporting machinery screaming, and Duo feels cold. He’s always cold after riding Shini’s power, but this is different. This is cold in his core, in the center of his bones.

“Duo, you’re in surgery. You need to lie down,” Heero tells him in a firm, controlled voice. Duo follows it with a whimper, because Reaper take him, his shoulder is on fire, and it’s all he can do to focus on Heero’s voice, follow Heero’s instructions. He’s trying to focus, but it’s so fucking hard.

A jumpy doctor or nurse—Duo honestly can’t tell at the moment—comes over with another tube.

“Don’t bother trying to intubate him again,” Heero says harshly before turning back to Duo.

“We can’t do surgery on him awake,” someone masked says. It occurs to Duo for the first time that Heero isn’t masked, and he feels like that should be important? Or meaningful?

Oh, there’s a mask that’s been yanked down to his chin. He hadn’t been Heero until Duo could see his face. Shini was funny that way sometimes.

“Duo, listen to me,” Heero commands, voice cold and mission-flat, but it makes the solider in Duo come to attention. “They can’t give you any more anesthetics and they can’t stop the surgery now. You’re bleeding way too much. You need to lie down and stay still.”

“Stay,” Duo croaks. He grips Heero’s hand so hard—when had Heero grabbed his hand?—that he’s sure it’s going to leave bruises—if he doesn’t break bones—but he can’t let go.

“I’m going to be right here,” he promises, stepping around behind Duo’s head. Duo tilts his head back to follow him, eyes locked like Heero is the Earth and Duo is the moon whose face would forever follow it. “And it’s going to hurt, but I need you to focus only on me. That’s your mission, pilot. Focus on me. Am I clear?”

Duo forces himself to relax. He’s cold and Heero’s hand is almost scorching in his grip, but there is no way in hell he’s going to let go. “Mission accepted,” Duo says. His throat is scratchy and voice hoarse from ripping out the tube the way he did, but it’s a very distant irritation compared to the white-hot agony in his shoulder.

After a moment, Heero risks a glance up and nods at someone. “Good. Focus on me, pilot. Stay absolutely still.” Eyes still on Duo, he adds to someone Duo can’t see. “Go ahead.”

Several voices mesh and wash over Duo—protests, he thinks—but they may as well be in a language he doesn’t speak because he can’t make sense of them.

“If you don’t start working, he’s going to bleed out. You’re doctors—do your fucking jobs,” Heero snarls, but his gaze holds Duo’s.

Duo lets his world narrow to Heero’s eyes, the too-hot heat of Heero’s hand in his, and tries to let the rest of it—the noise, the pain, the people who aren’t Heero—fade into the background. They never go away, but some part of Duo knows how critical it is that he stay still for the doctors, no matter how much it hurts, so he does. He stays still and focuses all of his attention on Heero and Heero alone.

He and Heero stay locked together in silence until the wound is closed and stitched together. Heero glances up, seems to get what he’s looking for, then says, “Mission accomplished, 02,” in soft Japanese. “You can stand down.”

This time, the world goes black.

Duo wakes up slowly. That’s not typical. He reaches for memories, but his head feels fuzzy.

A warm hand rests on his forehead, and Heero’s familiar brand of gun oil and cheap soap makes Duo stop fighting to get up. It also makes him realize he is in a fuckton of pain. “’Ro?” he croaks, opening his eyes. The lights are really fucking bright.

“Relax,” Heero says. “It’s been a rough few days.”

“Days?” Duo asks, beginning to try to struggle upright.

“Stay still and I’ll raise the bed,” Heero says, fond exasperation in his voice.

That’s… odd. Not that Heero isn’t decently demonstrative with Duo in private, but he can’t quite think of what he might have done to earn that tone. The bed raises up, and wow, being upright hurts his shoulder more than laying down did, but Duo feels better for being closer to vertical.

Memories are still muddied, like a mental file folder has been opened and tossed in the air. Flashes are coming back, but they seem out of order.

“You’ve been unconscious for three days,” Heero says, taking Duo’s right hand in his.

Shot. Right. Surgery. There are scattered images of what, in retrospect, must have been surgery, but the clearest memory Duo has of the event is the steady focus of Heero’s eyes.

Heero gives him a sip of water and then the rundown: shattered collarbone, damage to the brachial plexus, a nicked artery—it’s apparently a damned miracle he didn’t bleed out from that one alone—they had to pin his clavicle back together, but the rod used should facilitate bone regrowth. Nerve damage is always tricky, and damage to as major a system of nerves as the brachial plexus tends to be something of a wild card. Duo is really tempted to shift his shoulder and see how it feels, but honestly, it feels so shitty even stabilized as it is that he doesn’t really want to know how much moving is going to hurt.

“I woke up during the surgery,” Duo remembers.

“You did,” Heero confirms.

“Why were you in the OR?” he asks because things are starting to slide into place, and logic is rearing its head. There is no way Heero could have calmed him if he hadn’t been in the room to begin with. Duo would have probably killed not only the nurses and doctors trying to help him, he probably would have killed himself in the process. That means he’s relieved Heero was there, but he still doesn’t understand why.

“Une got us word as soon as she heard there was an issue on your mission.”

“Assignment,” Duo corrects automatically.

Heero rolls his eyes. “It’s fortunate you were just in Amsterdam. We headed your way immediately and got here not long after you were brought in. They had stabilized you, but they wanted to get you in for surgery right away. They needed someone to approve the surgery, and they had to deal with me since I’m your next-of-kin.”

Duo grinned. “Told ya that would come in handy.”

He doesn’t roll his eyes again, but Duo can tell he wants to. “I approved it, but insisted that I be allowed in the OR.”

The surgery itself is still mostly a blur and Duo doesn’t think it’ll clear. That’s probably for the best. “Why?” he asks instead of trying to remember.

“With the way you’ve been reacting to drugs lately, I was concerned you wouldn’t stay under. Rightfully so, as it turns out. I checked the medications after you passed out. What they gave you to try to keep you from fighting when you came to could have been a lethal dose. You didn’t seem to react to anything they pumped you with once you woke up though.”

“Is that why I’ve been out for so long? I wasn’t even out for three days after my back.”

Heero shrugs. “After checking with Sally, I’ve refused most of the drugs they’ve wanted to give you. She was… quite upset when she heard you woke up during surgery. She spent some time talking to your doctors about the doses and medications you were on, but we both decided that unless you were showing signs of infection, the best route was to let your body heal itself."

It probably was for the best, if Duo were honest. Even if it sucked when he was conscious. “So that’s why my shoulder hurts like a motherfucker.”

“Sorry,” Heero says, though he doesn’t sound it in the least.

“Nah,” Duo says, sighing, trying to shift and get more comfortable. “I get it. I’d have probably done the same. So how soon can you get me out of here?”

“You’re staying until the doctors release you,” Heero says in that I-am-giving-you-an-order tone.

Duo blinks. Who is Heero kidding? Duo never stays in hospitals. Neither does Heero for that matter. Hypocrite. “C’mon, ’Ro. They aren’t giving me any medications that need to be monitored. You know I’ll rest better at home.”

“You almost died,” Heero says, and he looks—scared. “You’re staying here until the doctors release you.”

His mouth opens to protest, then shuts. Duo doesn’t want to stay in the hospital. Now that he’s awake, it’s going to make every paranoid bone in his body stand on edge. If the doctor isn’t Sally, Duo doesn’t really trust them, and he hates being in a place where people can poke and prod at him. He just feels vulnerable, and he knows that Heero knows he feels that way. Heero is, if anything, worse about hospitals than Duo is, so if he’s insisting Duo stay, Duo must have really frightened him.

“One day,” he bargains.

Heero doesn’t budge. “Until you’re released.”

“Two at the absolute maximum.”

“Until you’re released.”

Duo doesn’t argue, but he doesn’t agree either. Heero is smart enough to know that’s the best he’s likely to get, so he doesn’t push it.

“What happened to Sabre?” Duo asks, finally remembering how he got into this fucking mess. Heero’s grip tightens almost painfully on Duo’s hand for a moment.

“He was shot three times. You managed to drag him out to the ambulance after you killed all the gunrunners. They say he’ll live, but I doubt he’ll be returning to active duty.”

“Neither should he,” Duo says, angry. “Good chance we could have hid until they left if he hadn’t stood up like a fucking target.”

“You’re probably going to have to have some rehabilitation too,” Heero says, apparently unwilling to keep talking about Sabre. Probably because if they do, Heero is going to do something unfortunate to the man. Since Duo is usually the one likely to make those types of bad decisions, he lets it go.

Instead, he starts to shrugs, feels his shoulder spike in pain, then stops and thinks better of it. “I’ll heal,” he says. He may not be Heero, who survived self-destructing his Gundam, but he’s hardly made of glass either. Of the pilots most-likely-to-survive-shit-that-would-kill-anyone-else, Duo’s easily second after Heero.

He could remind Heero of that, but Heero isn’t in the mood to hear it, so he shifts topics. “So how long are you staying before you have to head out?” he asks. He knows Heero well enough to be sure that Heero’s been at his side the whole time. Now that Duo’s woken up and can speak for himself regarding the medications, chances are good that Une will want to put Heero back to work.

“I’ll be here until you’re released.”

“What?”

“And I won’t be going back to work again until you’re able to return to desk duty.”

Duo stares. It probably won’t be that long—he does heal fast, after all—but still, he’s having trouble wrapping his head around what Heero’s saying.

“But… work?” is his feeble protestation.

“You are more important than the job,” Heero says, and the way he says it, it’s as certain a thing as the sky is blue or the sun rises in the east. It makes Duo’s heart catch in his throat, because he knows Heero loves him, but Heero putting him before the mission is something that he’s only ever done once before.

He’s saved from having to come up with an answer to Heero’s declaration by a nurse coming in and fussing at both Heero for not notifying a nurse that Duo was awake, and Duo for getting injured so badly in the first place. She reminds Duo a bit of Sally, so he thinks that he might manage the two days—as long as Heero stays with him.

When he glances over, he’s reminded that Heero is still holding his hand, and he realizes that Heero isn’t going anywhere.

Une doesn’t expect to find Chang waiting outside her office hours before most agents came in. She hadn’t realized he was back in town, if she were honest. Yuy and Maxwell weren’t scheduled to return until tomorrow, and she thought they’d come back together.

“Dragon,” she greets.

Anyone else would have been leaning against the wall while they waited, but Chang is standing upright and inclines his head, if only slightly.

“Director. May I speak with you? Privately?”

If Chang’s unexpected presence so early weren’t enough of a red flag, that tone definitely is. It’s as deferential as Une has ever heard him. She honestly didn’t know he knew how to speak to a woman like that.

She unlocks her door. “Of course,” she says, letting him enter first before following him in and shutting the door behind them. She walks around her desk and sits. “Please have a seat. How is Darkside?”

 “Maxwell is recovering well. He and Yuy should be home tomorrow,” he says, and she sees what looks like relief in his eyes. Une is relieved as well. That Maxwell was in the hospital for over a week speaks to how close they came to losing him. “I prefer to stand,” Chang adds, and though the words could be taken as attitude, he’s still using that careful tone of voice. It’s making her stomach churn. What could possibly make Chang be downright polite?

“All right,” she grants. It isn’t worth the battle when he’s trying to be civil, and he’s not trying to loom or use it as a power play. His posture, as correct as it is, is somehow relaxed. She didn’t know he knew what relaxation was. “What did you want to talk about?” she asks, getting to the point. The sooner she gets this bizarre Chang facsimile out of her office, the happier she’ll be.

“I would like to be reassigned,” Chang says. He reaches into his jacket and pulls an envelope out of an inner pocket. He sets what is certainly the transfer request on her desk with care.

“Reassigned?” she asks, confused. Chang and Yuy are her crack team. Are they both asking for reassignment?

“Agent Water and I have discussed it, and we believe that our partnership would be beneficial for us both,” he says. “Her request for a partner reassignment is there as well.”

“This is… irregular,” she admits, taking the envelope and opening it. She flips through the two reassignment requests—they read identically, though one is definitely in Sally’s hand—and feels confused. The paperwork is all in order, but she says, “While I appreciate the enthusiasm and dedication, I’m afraid reassigning you to work with Agent Water causes more issues than it resolves.”

He raises an eyebrow just a hair. Une has never known anyone who can do subtle condescension the way Chang Wufei can. “How is that?” he asks.

“If I reassign you to work with Water, I need to find a partner that can work with Force. Forgive me if I believe that finding someone to complement Force would be a bigger task than finding someone to complement Darkside.” She wouldn’t usually be that blunt with an agent, but the pilots are unique. She knows they can’t be treated like the rank and file. Besides, she has a good idea as to what’s really driving this request.

Chang gives her a look that all but screams I thought you were smarter than this. It’s oddly reassuring to be back on familiar ground with him. “I thought the answer should be obvious,” he says in a tone that clearly says he’s done pandering if she’s going to be this stupid. She gives him a flat stare and he sighs. “May I be candid?” he asks.

Surprised, she inclines her head.

“While I respect what you’re trying to establish with the nonfraternization policy, refusing to allow Maxwell and Yuy to partner based on it is borderline irresponsible at this point.”

Well, she said he could be candid. At least he didn’t call her stupid to her face. “Maxwell and Yuy—”

“Are the most complementary partners I’ve ever seen,” Chang interrupts. “Yuy and I work well together, but partnering us gives you a team of exceptionally skilled agents. Partnering Yuy and Maxwell would give you a team that is functionally superhuman.”

“They are also romantically involved. What happens to their partnership when they break up?” she asks, leaning back. The pilots are all exceptional, but Maxwell and Yuy are still teenagers in love. Risking relationships dissolving and impacting work is the whole reason she instituted the policy.

Chang snorts, dismissive. “I can tell you what happens if you don’t partner them,” he says instead.

“Oh?”

“You will lose them both.”

Une sits back up. “Is that a threat, Agent Dragon?” she asks, cold and warning.

“It’s simple fact,” he says, not at all impressed. “The reason I’m here and not Yuy is because Maxwell is coherent enough to stop Yuy from beating down your door. Maxwell has gone through seven partners in less than six months and ended up injured with three of them—not through any fault of his own, but because the agents he was partnered with are not capable of keeping up with a Gundam pilot.”

“I’m well aware of Maxwell’s track record.”

“And Yuy is well aware of yours,” he says, equally as cool as her own voice had been. “He is at a tipping point. He joined Preventers for the same reason I did—to make amends. Maxwell joined because of Yuy’s need to atone. Yuy is well aware of that. While Maxwell may be unorthodox, you have to admit he’s an exceptional agent. That said, I don’t think it’s overstating things to say Maxwell is also Yuy’s humanity.”

The statement doesn’t surprise her. She’s seen how much more… human Yuy can be around Maxwell in private. She she’s also seen firsthand how much Maxwell allows himself to lean on Yuy. If they were normal teenagers, it might have been sweet. With Yuy and Maxwell, it is deeper, more intense, the kind of relationship that could make or destroy them both. “All the more reason not to partner them,” she says, trying to keep her tone reasonable.

“If they were anyone else, I’d agree. They are not. After this catastrophe with Sabre, Yuy no longer trusts you to find a worthy partner for Maxwell. If you refuse to partner them, you are forcing him to choose between being a Preventer and keeping his lover safe. I don’t think you’ll like his choice.”

She turns that over for a moment before asking, needing to be sure, “You really think he will quit if I don’t partner them?”

Chang doesn’t roll his eyes, but Une thinks it’s only because he thinks it’s beneath him. “Sabre nearly got Maxwell killed. If Maxwell had been almost any other agent, he would have died. You partnered Maxwell with Sabre knowing full well that Sabre was a problem. You partnered him with Maxwell because he was a problem. In Yuy’s mind, you’re responsible for nearly getting Maxwell—Yuy’s humanity, maybe his source of sanity—killed. At this point, if you want to retain them as agents, I think you have no choice but to allow them to partner.”  He nods at the requests on her desk. “Sally agrees, which is why she’s agreed to partner with me to free up Yuy.”

It’s tempting. She’d seen firsthand what Maxwell and Yuy were capable of as a team during the war. She shakes her head though. “If something happened to one—”

“You’ll lose them both anyway,” Chang interrupts. “Maxwell doesn’t feel any need to atone. If Yuy leaves, Maxwell has no reason to stay. Your only option to retain them as agents is to partner them.”

Une lets out a long, slow breath. “And how do I know that I won’t have the same issue with you that I had with Maxwell?” she asks.

“Sally and I have worked together before,” he says, crossing his arms. “She’s an acceptable partner.”

Quite the compliment from Chang.

“And as for breaking my own rules?” she asks.

Chang does roll his eyes at that. “Give them two months together, and you’ll be able to hold up their record. They aren’t demonstrative, so no one who doesn’t know them well is likely to realize they’re involved anyway. Even if someone does figure it out, the kinds of missions you’ll be able to use them for will more than justify the policy aversion.”

“Assignments,” Une corrects absently. Chang is serious, and it makes Une consider it seriously for the first time. The biggest reason she hasn’t considered it is because of a problem Chang is neatly solving—repartnering Yuy would have left her in the same unenviable position of finding a partner for Chang. Chang is nowhere near as personable as Maxwell. He’d have gone through twice as many partners by now if he were in Maxwell’s position, and she is certain at least some of them would have been Chang’s fault. “Is that all, Agent Dragon?” she asks.

His eyes narrow, but he nods.

“Good. I’ll have an answer for you on your reassignment by Monday. You’re dismissed.”

Chang looks like he’s considering pushing further, but he’s made his points and knows it. He inclines his head slightly. “Thank you, Director.”

“I haven’t approved it,” she reminds him, voice tight.

He looks at her for a long moment before he says, “Of course not.” His eyes say, But you will.  He gives another minute incline of his head before he disappears out the door.

Une sighs as he closes it behind him. She wants Chang to be wrong. She doesn’t want to be breaking her own rules so early in Preventers history. She already feels like she makes too many exceptions for the pilots.

She does already make too many exceptions for the pilots. She makes exceptions for them because they’re worthy of the exceptions. Yuy and Maxwell are frighteningly competent on as individuals—they’re downright terrifying together. Can she continue to handicap both them and the organization by refusing to let them partner? Is this the line in the sand that costs her them both?

In her heart, Une knows the answer. That doesn’t mean she’s going to give Chang the satisfaction of being right a millisecond sooner than necessary.

He can wait till Monday for his reassignment.