Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Friends Will Be Friends ❯ One Shaft, Of Light ( Chapter 3 )

[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]

"One Shaft of Light"

It was late when I got back, very late. It had taken me a while to get
my emotions back under control again, and once I had I stayed out a
little longer so my eyes no loner looked puffy and swollen. There was
no need to let the others know how upset I had been at the idea that I
could not live up to their expectations.

I was surprised when I came in by four pilots busily packing bags and
running around.
Quatre was just busy putting his carry sack in the hall and almost
bumped into me. As he saw me I could see him assess the situation,
from my squelching shoes to my sodden hair. Obviously deciding it
didn't matter, he threw his arms around me and hugged me, hard,
soaking his shirt in the process. With a huge smile he announced,

"We've found him!"

"We think we have found him. The last eight leads turned out to be
incorrect."
#
Quatre turned and faced Heero with a glare,

"This is the right one, I know it. It has to be him."

My heart was beating double time, but I needed more information before
I could truly believe Duo had been found.

"Where is he?"

"He's on L2, using the name John Smith. That's why it took us so long
to find him, there are thousands upon thousands of John Smith's and we
never figured Duo would pick something so simple and commonplace.
Right, I've arranged for places on the next shuttle out to L2, it
leaves in" Quatre checked his watch, "three hours time. We need to be
at the shuttleport in two at the latest, and it's an hours drive."

I was still dripping on the carpet and resigned myself to not getting
any sleep at all that night.

"I can't go. I have a mission to finish." I stated.

All I needed was another day, two at most, to gather the last of the
evidence
I needed. Lady Une had most of it already, but I had spent over a month
working
for a group of the vilest men imaginable. They ran everything that was
illicit and had a high profit margin, with a notable preference for
guns, drugs and people - the people in question mostly women and
children.

If I bailed out now, and I would if I absolutely had to,
then it was unlikely we would be able to mount such an operation again
any time soon. I would happily have gone in there and given the men in
charge 9-mm lead poisoning, however, that was not the way the game was
played nowadays. In the Preventers evidence had to be gathered and
these men taken to trial. I really did not want to screw up a month's
undercover work, the work before that preparing, and more importantly,
the lives of the children and women who had been kidnapped.

I hated the idea of not seeing Duo, if it was Duo, but he had been a
pilot. He would understand why I was doing this, I hoped. If it was
even him, and if he was in any state to even notice my absence. Just
because the others had found him did not mean he was alright.

Heero frowned, but he had been privy to more details of the mission as
he was one of the agents who had originally brought the case to Lady
Une's attention. Quatre had a very unhappy look on his face, and
Wufei, as usual, had no real expression except annoyance on his face
as he pushed by with another bag. Come to think of it, he had been
annoyed a lot more than the rest of us and had missed Duo's presence
first, and was the one who had pushed for us to find him. I wondered
what was going on there?

"We understand. Finish your mission. We will let you know what the
status is and if we need you." Heero said. There it was again - if
they needed me. Lately I didn't feel really welcome around either
Chang Wufei or Heero Yuy, but I didn't know what I had done to cause
this. And he did have a point; it was unlikely that, if he was still
alive, Duo would need three gundam pilots to extract him.

Nodding, I brushed past them, into the bathroom. Stripping off my
sodden clothes, I started up the shower. I needed to warm up and
think, and the shower was the perfect place to do both. I could, if I
was lucky, get two hours of sleep, provided the other pilots where
reasonably quiet. Then tomorrow morning I would see if I could get the
evidence I needed, else tomorrow afternoon, and signal Lady Une. There
would be a raid, as well as the corresponding reports to do, and I
would have to rewrite mine as it had been on my laptop. That would
take me well into the night, possibly the next morning. Then, if it
was Duo, I could go and join them. If it wasn't, they would be on
their way back, and I would go out and get myself a new laptop.

Rinsing off the suds, I ducked my head under the spray and rinsed,
stepping out of the bath only to find wet towels. I never counted on
having three long term houseguests, and I just could not keep up with
all the washing. Running my hands over myself to rid myslf of most of
the water, I slipped on a clean pair of boxers, put my dirty clothes
in the overflowing hamper and walked to the bedroom and my bed. It was
still mine, by virtue of the hours I was required to keep. I know the
others took it in turn to sleep on the couch and a mat we had put in
the living room, but they would be leaving for the airport.

With a quick about turn I walked into the living room.
"I'm going to bed. Heero, keep me informed and I'll join you as soon
as I can if need be. Quatre, if it is Duo... tell him I look forward
to seeing him."

Well, that was an understatement, but I was not even
sure myself what I felt about Duo, I liked him as a friend,
absolutely. I liked all the pilots that way, even if Chang had been
aggravated for the last few weeks. But Duo, Duo was special. I don't
know if this was the way brothers felt about each other, never having
had one, or if this was simply lust, or even, dare I think it, love. I
simply had too little experience to judge these feelings. Though, when
I thought about it, I was tending towards the love side of the
equation. Not that it mattered much with him missing.

"Goodnight."

Without waiting for an answer, I walked back to my room, and slipped
between the covers. I didn't stare at the ceiling long, despite the
turmoil I was feeling; I was too exhausted for that. I slept deeply
and dreamlessly, only to wake up a few short hours later to slap the
alarm clock hard enough to knock it off the night stand and into
little pieces on the floor. That was not what I needed.

The other pilots, it seemed, had left silently, though they had only
packed the bare minimum by the look of it. Still yawning, I made my
way out of the door and to work.

Once there, I quickly got myself a cup of what they called coffee. I
am not a coffee snob by any stretch of the imagination, but this is
truly terrible coffee. Drinking it down to wake me up, I started
logging the codes for orders that had been put in my desk. Now I knew
what I was looking at, I could read the numerical codes like words.
Gender, year born, hair colour, eye colour, skin colour, and date
'obtained', all in nice, neat numbers. No non-numerical values, I
suspected they where in text files in the database. There where
several pages, from over the world and the colonies, and my next job
would be match customer specifications, also all in numbers, to the
numbers imported and give them a top ten list, if possible, but at
least five close matches.

Naturally, I wasn't officially allowed into the database that held the
actual details on these numbers, and I had been told this was for
statistical analysis by the supervisor, but I knew how to get in and
out virtually unnoticed. I say virtually, because before I knew it, I
heard the safety of a gun click off, while I had the complete database
burning onto CD.

"Put your hands where I can see them Barton, stay seated and turn the
chair around."
Being rather fond of being alive, I did so, and assessed the
situation. Jozea, one of the men I had rarely worked with, was
standing at the door. It was too far to tackle him, but close enough
to get a good shot at me if he wanted. The door was the only way out
of this room, and he was already on the radio.

If backup came, I was probably going to end up in a very bad
situation, so I stood up. Bad idea, Jozea was having none of it, as he
fired into the desk next to me.

"I said, sit down!" He bellowed, "or I'll blow your head off."
Okay, he was very high strung and tense. In the hall I could hear
footsteps, and before I knew it, I was surrounded by five men, all
pointing guns at me. This was not good.

***

It was the middle of the night when we left the apartment, sneaking
around as quietly as we could into the taxi I had called.
Trowa was, after all, sleeping in the
bedroom, and he looked exhausted when he came back from his walk. Poor
thing, he should have been sleeping instead, but Lady Une keeps him on
a short leash with this assignment. I don't care what anyone says, no
matter how much training they have had; constant sleep deprivation is
not good for anyone.

I'm also loath to admit it, but it would be cowardly of me not to do
so, if I didn't say that we probably have not helped. I know Trowa has
been feeling the intrusion on his space, he is a very solitary person
by nature and to have us staying in his space 24/7 must have been hard
on him.

"Wufei? Don't you think you where a bit hard on Trowa last night?" I asked.

"Hard? Winner, I merely asked him to stop distracting us. We needed
the space to find Maxwell, and he was disturbing us."

Dismissive? Yes, and he did have a bit of a point. I still felt
obliged though to protest.

"But you could have asked him to stop in a far nicer way."

"He is a gundam pilot. I'm certain that he was not offended by the way
Wufei asked him." Heero pitched in.

Hmm. Seems they agreed. Maybe I was wrong too, but I could swear that
he looked like he was upset, though with Trowa it is very hard to
tell. He is almost as stoic as Heero.

Talking about Heero, I looked to my side, where he sat; taking
in everything around us even though the streets were mostly empty. He
packed lightest of us three, but all three of us packed very light. We
could probably take our bags on as hand luggage, the laptops the only
really heavy thing. Though, to be fair, spandex weighs less than
cotton or denim.

One of these days, I'm gong to take the others out
shopping, and get them some clothes that would dress them to the
nines. Of course, they probably wouldn't wear them, but that's not
the point. I think Heero would look extremely hot in a suit, or a
pair of black leather pants and a white t-shirt. That mental image
alone, made reality, would make the entire expense of getting all four
of them new clothes worth while, even if they only wore them
that one time. I only needed a minute or so to burn that image into my
brain, and if I had to take them all out to avoid him becoming
suspicious of me only dressing him up, then so be it.

Then again, maybe I could come up with some reason why he should be
dressed up and maybe even get a photo of it. Maybe a good cause or
something like that. Yes, that might work; after we find Duo, of course.
Now there's another one I'd like to dress up and drool over. Wufei is
usually fairly smartly, if exotically, dressed anyway and while it would be
nice eyecandy, it is really Heero and Duo I want to see smartly
dressed.

Enough of my little clothing fetish though. Even though it is
not a real fetish, but more of a chance to drool over beautiful men in
a way that would not tell everyone what I was thinking. After all,
I've done the math. What are the chances of even two of us being gay
or bisexual? I'll tell you. One in ten is gay, another two in ten are
bisexual. Now, there's five of us, so that means on average about one
and a half of us is gay or bisexual. Cut that down to three: Heero,
Duo and I, and you are talking roughly one of us. That would be me.

"We're here." Heero announced, as the car came to a stop. Yes, I'd
figured that. Still, even at this time of day, the shuttleport was
bustling around. Luckily we got into a fairly empty terminal and soon
boarded. The flight to L2 was not in popular demand, and I'm not
surprised why, as the colony is the poorest one, with very little
reason to visit there. Well, unless you are into sex-tourism. Oh no. I
certainly hoped Duo hadn't been kidnapped by anyone for those
purposes! Once that thought took hold, it wouldn't let go, but I wasn't
sure how to voice it without the others wondering exactly what kind of
perverted thoughts I had been thinking.

Unfortunately, Heero must have caught something in my face, as he asked me.

"You're worrying about something. What is it?"