Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Love Lost and Found Again ❯ Surprise ( Chapter 7 )

A/N: Okay and now it's to Duo. Poor guy has been moping for a long time. Sorry this isn't the normal happy Duo that people usually portray. Oh yeah, and sorry this stuff really isn't beta-read. I looked over it and found some really stupid errors.

Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing.

 

Chapter 7: Surprise

 

(Duo's POV)

 

It'd been five years since her disappearance. Duo hadn't been able to sleep for awhile without being in her bed and crying. He had found the silver cross that had brought them together because she had been in a hurry and forgotten it in her dresser. He wore it constantly, never letting it leave the warmth of his skin. It was torture for him to have arranged it so that no more missions would come up for awhile. He had timed it so he would spend more time with Alex, but instead he ended up using that time to nearly cry his eyes out.

 

When Wufei and Heero had returned, they had read the note. Wufei had gone into a furious rage, and while Heero felt the same way he knew that it was pointless to fume over what had happened when he wasn't sure what he could do. Quatre had calmed Wufei down expediently by snapping at him and saying that he could at least be more sympathetic towards Duo's feelings as he was the most broken up about it. Trowa had been taking care of Duo and making sure he wasn't killing himself. And with that, five years passed.

 

Five years, mused Duo. Well, he thought with morbid humor, at least she can't die because of me like everyone else. He almost laughed if it wouldn't have hurt so much. At least if she would have died, he would have seen it in the obituaries. No, she was alive, he could almost feel it.

 

Duo had been drowning himself in work, trying to forget about the time they had spent together. He stopped going into her room to sleep. He slowly stopped looking expectantly over at Quatre when he opened the newspaper in the morning. He slowly stopped smiling. She had taken his heart five years ago and he was still going crazy.

 

--

 

Out of the blue, it seemed, there was a knock on the door. Duo's heart jumped into his throat. Only one person had ever made it to that front door without instructions. Granted, she was dragged through the front door unconscious, but she had gotten awfully close. He nearly ran to the door and looked on the vid screen monitor. A female dressed in all black. But her hair was wrong. It was… honey blonde? Relena?!

 

--

 

After Duo had let Relena in to the safe house, he had quietly given her some tea and biscuits. He had just informed her that the other pilots were actually due back in a couple hours, so she was in luck. They weren't usually in the same place all at once for long periods of time.

 

Relena was looking thoughtfully at him, as if trying to place something. It was a little unnerving to Duo, so he smiled and said, “It is good to see you, princess. I know Heero and the guys will be glad to see you as well. But I gotta tell ya, I didn't think you'd ever be able to get here on your own. I booby trapped this scrapyard pretty well, and it's hard as hell to even locate this place let alone navigate. You've got some pretty damn good skills.”

 

A smile tugged at Relena's lips, as she said, “Well I had a little help. I finally managed to track down that girl Quatre told me about so long ago -” Relena was busy examining the biscuit on the plate to see Duo's body jerk in shock and his hand close convulsively over the little silver cross around his neck. “—and I told her I needed to find you guys, so she said she'd help bring me to the last place she knew. And Duo I have to tell you, those traps outside, we were lucky to have missed a few of them.”

 

“She's… Is she …. Outside?” Duo choked out. The back of the necklace dug against his skin as he pulled it.

 

Relena frowned as she thought. “Well, she said it would probably take her a little bit to navigate through the booby traps, but she should be leaving soon after that. She has to go back home soon, to Felix.”

 

Duo was halfway to the door, but halted and turned when he heard her mention “Felix”. She had found somebody else. In five years of pining after her, she had already found someone else. He could have cried from grief. Relena, oblivious to the pain she had unknowingly caused upon him, clapped her hands as she remembered the note she was supposed to give to him. She handed it to Duo without much further ado, and he opened it slowly, hating himself for hoping.

 

Dear Duo,

Hope you're doing well. Unhappiness doesn't go well with you, you know. I just wanted you and everyone to know I'm doing well and that you shouldn't worry about me. Give everyone my love, and you too.

Alex

 

It didn't mention anything about Felix. It didn't mention anything about how to find her, how to look for her.

 

“Relena, who's Felix?” Duo asked quietly.

 

“Oh, Felix is her son.” Relena was smiling at the memory of playing with him. “He's the cutest boy, but I wonder who the father is. I never met him, but Alex seems adamant that nobody knows.” She frowned a bit at this. She really did want to know.

 

“Her… SON?!” Duo choked again. It was becoming a very bad habit. Duo closed his eyes for a moment. Alex could have fallen in love with someone else still, the boy's father. But he still wanted to see her again, if only to confirm. If only just to see her once more before she walked away from him again. He whirled around and grabbed Relena. “Where can I find her? I need to talk to her.”

 

“I can't, Duo,” Relena said in a small voice. “I promised her I wouldn't tell any of you how to find her. That was her condition of bringing me here.”

 

The black clothing Relena was wearing smelled faintly of her. It was driving him a little crazy. Then he thrust Relena away and ran outside, disabling the trap system so he could cover more ground. He was so desperate he didn't stop when he ran past the other stunned Gundam pilots as they walked through the door. He just gave Quatre a frantic “I need to find her” and Quatre, understanding his friend, just nodded and stepped aside. Then he ran like hell out the door.

 

--

 

It was dark by the time Relena finally told the other four Gundam pilots what she had told Duo. They had been panicked at first, trying to see if they should help Duo, but with Relena refusing to help, they had conceded that Duo was the only one with full information and the others might be a hindrance. It was an agonizing to sit and wait for Duo to return, but the four pilots finally snapped and interrogated her.

 

“She came this close and you didn't keep her HERE?” Wufei exploded. Heero put a calming hand on his shoulder even though internally he was as furious as his lover.

 

Quatre looked depressed, and Trowa said, “But Relena was right to let her go, if it was what she really wanted. I just wish I could have seen her.”

 

Relena bit her lip. “I'm sorry, I didn't know how much she meant to all of you. I would have tried to keep her here.”

 

Heero said, tightly, “It's not your fault. It was Alex's decision. She left.”

 

“Don't I get any say in this?” cried out Wufei. “I'm only her cousin, I know, but she could have said something.”

 

Relena's eyes opened in shock. Wufei's cousin. Their adopted little sister. Duo's… “Oh my. It's Duo,” she whispered.

 

“What?” Quatre asked, the first word he'd spoken since the news had been broken.

 

“Duo. Well, Alex, um,” Relena frowned, not knowing how to start. She took a deep breath and explained, “Alex has a son named Felix. She wouldn't tell me who the father was, but she let me play with him. I should have known, from those extraordinary violet eyes… Duo's his father.”

 

“I'm what?” a weak voice said from the doorway. The braided man staggered and fell to the floor, gasping with sobs. “She didn't let me find her. She didn't even tell me I was a father.”

 

Quatre moved to seat himself next to Duo on the floor and wrapped his arms around him and rocked and crooned tunelessly until Duo had finally calmed.

 

Abruptly, Heero asked his question, “Relena, what did you want?”

 

--

 

At least Relena wasn't making up any lame excuses to talk to Heero again, but Duo couldn't forgive her for awhile because she had been the one to bring the news that broke his heart into pieces again. Her fiancée of ten months was missing and she had received a ransom note telling her to avoid signing a bill that would allow the colonies to put equal tariffs on their goods to Earth as Earth had been doing with them. The Earthside residents were not too thrilled about the idea, she knew, but it was the best way to even out trade arguments and it was the fairest thing to do. They had also put in a demand for a ridiculously high amount of hard cash to be transferred to an account in Switzerland. Relena was at her wits' end. She couldn't afford to stop the bill from passing because of all the support she had put into it as well as the fact that it would go against her morals. And because of the bill being in the political spotlight, she couldn't very well openly ask the police or the captors might be aware. The cash was another problem: it would wipe out much of the Peacecraft Company, an organization that she started to help stop upcoming wars that was headed up by Zechs and sometimes aided by the former Gundam pilots.

 

By the time she was done with telling them all about it, she was sobbing on the couch with Quatre lightly rubbing circles on her back to calm her down. Duo felt slightly bitter, he had only had ten days with her, unlike Relena's ten years. But he stifled the bitterness because he knew it wasn't her fault. Heero and Quatre immediately stepped into Mission Planning Mode and assigned everyone to their jobs. Quatre was going back to scan the news on any leads of who would want the bill not passed. Heero and Duo were to work on a hacking program to find out exactly who the kidnappers were. Wufei and Trowa would be in charge of infiltration.

 

Duo sighed and stretched, left the couch, and turned on his laptop. This was going to require some work, and a better deal of concentration than he had. He pulled up the files for the Swiss bank account and started programming a trace that could be undetectable and locate who the owners were. He only hoped that this would be over soon. He had to start looking for Alex again. This time, he would find her.