Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ 3 Ties That Bind ❯ Four ( Chapter 4 )

Duo gestured with his head once for me to follow, not even waiting for my response before disappearing down the hall.

I hesitated a moment, then saved what I’d been working on and closing out of my computer.

“Majesty?” the man I’d been talking with asked.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered, meeting his eyes. “I lost track of time, there’s something I need to do.”

He frowned at me, then nodded as he rose. “My apologies…”

I grinned at him, grabbing my jacket as I wondered what Duo needed me for. I hesitated in the door-jamb as the man quickly gathered his things and moved to exit the office quickly. I smiled at him, shaking his hand—I got along with him, and the reason our discussions could get so off track that I would lose track of time was because we muttered to each other about everything short of personal relationships. As soon as I made the extra effort, he’d be a real friend, but that wasn’t my issue.

“I’ll…call you later,” I muttered, looking to my watch. “We can finish up over the phone or you could come up to the apartment.”

He looked almost stunned.

Okay…so the extra effort was painless.

“Later,” I muttered, then darted off after Duo.

It didn’t matter that we were all thirty-two or thirty-three, because in the end, we’d always be the boys we had been during the wars. We’d never lose those mannerisms that had created an unbeatable team. One of us needed the others, and we came.

So what if it was usually Duo anymore…

“Should we head up to the apartments?” Quatre muttered as he joined me, looking around the hall with expectant eyes.

“Probably,” Trowa agreed.

“Where’s Fei?” I asked, looking in the direction of the training ground.

“What do you mean I need to just shut up and obey you?” Jacob was demanded in amusement as Duo half-chased him from another hall.

Duo looked to us all, then nodded once.

We exchanged another look, then followed him.

“Oh,” Jacob muttered quietly. “One of these.”

“These?” I asked, falling into step with my brother as I glanced to the guy.

“Yep, these,” Jacob echoed, moving to walk behind Quatre as I realized we were in a phalanx formation.

“What these?” I protested.

“You should cross the training grounds,” Jacob added happily to Duo. “We’re in perfect formation and not quite marching.”

Duo turned an impish grin on him as we swept toward the royal wing.

“What I mean by these,” Jacob added when we’d actually moved into the area and Duo was heading toward my apartment, “is these nice little instances when you five have a hive-mind going on and expect me to share it.”

“If you’d just think about it a second, you’d have it, too,” Quatre noted.

We moved up the stairs in my apartment, then into the upper hallway where Duo hesitated between his apartment, and Wufei’s. It was only a brief instant before he chose his own apartment.

So Wufei was waiting for us.

Actually, when my knight had reappeared…with my other knight, heh, I’d assumed Wufei was waiting somewhere.

We all moved into Duo’s apartment, focusing on him curiously…as I noticed someone sitting with Wufei on the couch.

“Holy shit.”

- -

“Daddy said they’re up in Duo’s apartment,” I muttered to Lea as I moved close to my friend again and our bodyguard Tad looked between us. “I guess they got Mom to pick up the girls and Dusty. They sent the limo for us.”

She smirked slightly at me.

“Alex! Mar!” We turned, Tad with a hand on his pistol, to Nicholas as he came down the stairs leading to our school and hopped beside us with glowing eyes…ignoring our bodyguard. “Hi.”

“Hey,” I returned, grinning slightly as Tad rolled his eyes and focused on someone else.

Tad really kept us from being startled.

“Nick!” Sammy called, bouncing up beside us cutely.

Marlea gave her a very level look as Tad really rolled his eyes and went back to his vigil.

“Hey, Samantha,” Nicholas muttered, frowning slightly at her. He hesitated, then looked to the gate. “There’s my dad,” he noted, moving around us. “I’ll call you later,” he added to me.

“All right,” I returned, watching him bounce away.

Sammy huffed as he slid into his father’s SUV.

Oh, he hadn’t asked her out? No, that couldn’t be it, he must’ve just forgotten.

I grinned at the female as Tad gave me a curious look. The man communicated in small expression I swear. I shook my head very slightly and he grinned as he looked away again.

“I’ll call you guys later, too,” she noted, frowning between us…as the limo pulled into the driveway and almost everyone stopped to watch it. It might be a school for rich kids, but most had some form of caretaker in some form of a nice car to get them when their parents…frequently…didn’t pick them up.

“There’s our ride,” Lea noted to me happily, starting down the stairs.

“Don’t you dare,” I snapped, studying the driver. “You know Tio Duo would freak if we just hopped in.”

“I got it,” Tad reassured us, bouncing down the stairs himself.

“Tio?” Sammy asked blankly. “What the hell are you talking?”

“It means uncle, Sammy,” Lea muttered with a roll of her eyes. “It’s this language called Spanish, and it happens that half of Lex’s heritage stems from the country below the United States.”

I snickered, shoving at my cousin.

“Sir Maxwell’s not even your real uncle,” Sammy retorted.

“Because all relationships only rely on blood,” I agreed sarcastically as Tad waved the okay to us and moved to pull the back door open. “The others are the closest things to family my dad has, and my Abuela, which means ‘grandmother’, is the only person I care to deal with on my mother’s side.”

“Sucks coming from a broken home, doesn’t it?” Sammy asked dryly.

“I’m sure you’d be the expert,” I retorted, and moved down to do as my guard commanded.

Sammy laughed like it was a joke she appreciated.

“Come on, Lea,” I added darkly. “Tio Heero sent the limo to fetch us.”

The name took only a second to register on Sammy’s face, and Lea grinned as she waved happily at the girl…and bounced along after me.

- -

“So I roamed Armenia for a while, then started syndicate jumping,” Jesse mused. “I have a position in most of the ones you chased out…except Jaded.” He sighed. “I miss Jaded.”

“You miss being in charge,” I retorted, grinning slightly at him. “There’s a difference.”

“I miss being able to kill off the ones who are dangerous,” he shrugged.

I nodded.

“That’s cold blooded,” Quatre informed us both with raised eyebrows.

“What?” I asked blankly.

“You miss being able to kill off threats.”

I nodded again, not sure I what he was getting at.

Trowa sniggered.

“Honey, I’m home,” Lex called as she bounced into the apartment…and stopped completely as she looked at her once uncle.

Jesse sat up, his eyes going wide as he studied her…and then Lea moved into the room.

The girls, I realized, were gorgeous…perfect light and perfect dark. You could see intelligence in their eyes and they weren’t suffering from teenage angst…yet. They carried themselves with a personal pride, no shame in either of them…and they were very much Quatre and Trowa’s daughters.

I grinned, glancing toward the still open door.

Tad was standing at attention, and saluted me from his formal stance.

I grinned in return at the bodyguard and saluted him, making the dismissed gesture. He nodded and re-saluted me before disappearing.

“Uncle Jesse!” Alex was squeaking, having darted across the room with her cousin on her heels as Jesse started laughing and cooing over how big they both were.

It was nice to talk to Jesse again, but we all knew very well that we were still supposed to arrest him for the next…seven months or so. The actual dates were a bit messy since it’d been after the Deniel campaign that they’d put the warrant, or whatever you want to call it, on Jesse’s head.

The only reason Jun had been released early was good behavior and expensive lawyers. If Heero or Relena cleared Jesse just like that, it’d cause an uproar, especially from the syndicate leaders we still had.

I watched as Jesse turned amazed looks onto Trowa and Quatre and wondered what he’d think of my daughter.

“You girls have a good day?” Trowa asked after a while…which had both girls sitting on either side of Jesse and beaming at the rest of us.

“Normally that opens a floodgate about Nicholas,” I noted, smirking slightly.

They reacted in disbelief, gasping their shock at me as Wufei reached over and hit me.

“Nicholas?” Jesse asked, looking from one to the other. “You girls realize you’re not supposed to share, right?”

Alex died laughing as Marlea blushed and smacked him…even Q was groaning for that one.

I grinned at them innocently as Jesse gave them both the same sort of innocent look.

- -

“Take care,” I muttered seriously to Jesse as I studied the parking tower over quietly. “Remember. Don’t come back until January. Follow every law and get your ass across that border. If the authorities catch you, we’ll have to arrest you and detain you and all sorts of things that you’ll find unpleasant.”

“I know,” Jesse reassured me with a grin. “I’m sorry I was early.”

“We told you to wait eight years,” I retorted. “We made sure that it was printed in the newspapers so you’d see it.”

“Associated Press,” he agreed with a roll of his eyes. “I figured I could come see you, blondie, I thought it’d be fine.”

“It’s not good for you to be here,” I muttered with a sigh, leaning in to hug him slightly. “Get you gone.”

He snorted at that, turning his engine on and nodding at me as I stepped backwards…and drove away.

I shook my head a bit, glancing at the camera not far away before starting back into the building.

It was good to know he was still alive with all the death reports we were getting for some of our wanted syndicate bags…for those people who’d gotten out of Sanq before we’d found them.

I just hoped he stayed alive until January.

- -

“Something doesn’t feel right.”

I watched with interest as Alex and Marlea moved down the hall and stopped.

“We should…” Lea indicated a side hall.

“No,” Alex muttered. “If we go anywhere, it’s back.”

Lea frowned, thinking a moment. “Is that wise?”

“If we just go running through the halls we could get lost and back ourselves in a corner,” Alex retorted.

“But if they’re following us, they’ll probably have people behind us and waiting where we’re going.”

“So the question becomes which way has less,” Alex noted.

I grinned slightly.

“Wufei,” Quatre snapped irritably at me. Trowa was standing on the other side of me with his arms crossed, and we were in the monitoring room.

“Logically, they won’t expect us to freak,” Lea mused, thinking a moment. “Duo always says to call him when shit comes down.”

“Oops, turned my phone off,” Duo noted, clicking a button.

I flicked mine off as well as Trowa hesitated and did his own.

“Quatre, come on,” Duo muttered. “We want to see what they’ll do.”

“No answer,” Lea noted.

“Not my dad, either,” Lex agreed.

Quatre turned his phone off.

“Chances are they’re watching us,” Lex noted, closing her phone and looking to the camera. “So what would Duo do?”

“Duo would go on with it and kick their asses,” Lea retorted.

Duo sniggered.

“They’ve got you pegged,” I noted to the male.

“Hey, when you got it, you got it,” he shrugged innocently.

“What would Wufei do?” Lex countered.

“Assess the situation,” Lea returned.

“We did that.”

“So he’d act on his assessment,” Lea tilted her head at her cousin. “I think standing here like bumps on a log is a bad idea.”

“Tio,” Alex whined at the cameras.

“That works,” Duo noted sardonically, rolling his eyes.

“That works,” Lea muttered in almost the same tone.

I sniggered.

“Well, really,” Lex grumped, considering things again. “Basically, we can’t go forward, and we probably shouldn’t go backwards.”

“So take a side-hall,” Lea agreed, looking from one wall to the next.

“We need to head to the more populated areas,” Lex muttered.

“But that could have more…more people hiding.”

“They want us vigilant, not paranoid,” Alex snapped back. “Come on.”

She turned left toward the front of the building, and the rest of us scrambled to find the right camera…well, not all of us. Duo had no issue following their progress.

Duo snorted, moving toward the console I was on and typing something in so the camera angle changed to a long shot of the hall they were in as the girls moved almost silently the way they’d chosen. At one point, they came across a fire-escape map and stopped to study it…and I hoped they’d do the quick thing and hop out an exit. It would sound an alarm that would instantly have our soldiers checking it out and that would interfere with the specials Quatre had lent to Duo and me for the exercise.

“Hey,” Lea whispered, “I bet we should go out a fire exit.”

“What?” Lex protested back. “No!”

“Yeah, it’d have an alarm,” Lea agreed. “The soldiers of the palace check out any alarms they hear.”

“But that would warn whoever’s after us, too.”

Duo tapped another screen, which showed one of the recruits moving along the hall looking for them.

“But the soldiers would come,” Lea persisted.

“No, let’s just go,” Alex whispered.

Trowa sighed.

The girls moved on, and I glanced sidelong at Quatre whose hair was excessively mussed and his agitation hadn’t cooled. He met my eyes and turned away from me, starting to pace behind us.

“Hey,” Duo muttered, stopping him with a hand on his shoulder. “I want to know what they’ll do if shit comes down.”

“I know,” Quatre snapped.

“Your daughter had the idea,” Duo reminded him. “Alex is scared, though,” he frowned and looked to Trowa.

“She’s not taking charge,” Q noted, gesturing toward the screens. “She should take charge.”

“I’m not an expert on the hierarchy of fourteen year old girls, but I think these two hold to their order.”

Trowa smacked me upside the head.

I tsked at him.

“Your man is being awfully sneaky by an awfully lot of cameras,” Duo mused, studying the soldier.

“I told you, he’ll make a good field operative. He can stand around and listen in, but he’s not good at the skulking,” Quatre gestured at the woman he’d had out. “She’s fine.”

“I’m married,” Duo protested.

They both laughed a bit at that as Quatre hit him.

“You two are stupid,” I informed them happily as the girls went off camera. “Duo?”

“Hm? Oh,” Duo moved over to the console and typed something else in…and it showed an empty hall.

If Duo’d been an animal, his ears would have perked up.

“Where’d they go?” Quatre demanded.

Duo moved to the wall of cameras.

“Sir?”

We looked at a soldier who was monitoring the halls.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he muttered, looking us all over. “The girls ducked into an air-duct.”

We stared at him.

“In hall D,” he added, moving around me and standing at attention beside me until I moved from in front of the console. He typed into the machine quickly before panning the camera to show girl fingers pulling a grating back into place.

I started laughing.

They’d used to hide in those as kids…never far away from us, but out of immediate sight.

The fingers disappeared.

“Wow,” Quatre noted, blinking.

The woman who’d been tailing them moved around the corner and stopped, looking around as I defaulted the camera back to its original position.

“She should have seen that,” Quatre mused, moving closer to the console himself as Duo watched from the appropriate camera on the wall.

“I really have to talk with Alex,” Trowa said with a sigh.

“Don’t tell her she was wrong,” Duo suggested, looking to another camera. “Just tell her that Lea has valid ideas.”

The bad skulker moved up behind the first woman and they started muttering together.

“Wow,” Quatre groaned, smacking his forehead.

“You’ve only had them for a month,” I reminded him. “They’ll figure it out.”

“I know,” the blond sighed. “I was just hoping this would be a successful trial so I could get into the interesting stuff.”

The pair nodded at each other and started off up the hall.

“Wow,” I muttered.

The third man, a guy Quatre’d had for a while longer than the other two…more like six months…moved up the hall behind the other pair and looked at the camera, rolling his eyes before stepping around the corner and stopping as he watched the other two head toward the front.

“What are the girls doing?” Trowa muttered.

“If we change the camera angle, he’ll see it,” I reassured him. “I’m sure they’re fine.”

The man was obviously listening to something before looking down at the approximate level of the air-vent and…tearing it off.

I heard Lex squeak.

…I wasn’t surprised that both fathers were gone.

“Hm,” I muttered as Duo moved to join me.

It was Lea, though, who came out swinging. She kicked at the man’s face as Alex darted out after her. The darker haired girl swung with her legs as Lea regained her balance, and that toppled the man to the ground before they both turned and bolted like bunnies.

“Yeah!” Duo shouted happily, watching them race down the corridor and around another corner.

The trained man was after them just as fast, and I wondered what the general populace would say about our training methods.

The girls broke past the two from before and they stared in disbelief before starting to run after them as well.

Quatre and Trowa broke into the corridor the girls had been using to hide and I sniggered.

“What?” Duo glanced at me, then smirked at the pair of dismayed faces before moving to the controls and doing something that caught Quatre’s attention…before he and Trowa started running as well.

The smaller guy dived at Lea, but she was a flexible little girl and managed to avoid him, almost falling as Lex grabbed her wrist and yanked her after.

“Alarm!” Lea squeaked…and dived out an emergency exit.

The alarm sounded all over the halls.

“Yes!” Duo was laughing happily as he followed the action proudly.

Alex followed her cousin outside and the pair stayed near the wall as they pelted straight for the front.

I laughed myself.

The two under-trained didn’t have enough sense to melt away and darted after the girls as the man who’d been following stopped at the sound of the alarm and looked around…before coming to sharp attention as Quatre and Trowa pelted around the corner. He sighed after they’d gone out the doors and started up the hall. As the soldiers started converging on the area he called what had been happening as part of the group broke away and darted toward the front of the building.

Duo promptly turned his phone back on, grinning at me as he watched the girls spilling out in front of the palace and diving over the steps to hide on the stairs under a big planter as the people walking there stopped in confusion.

The under-trained pair spilled out a breath later and stopped, looking around blankly.

“If we coulda had music playing,” I noted as Quatre and Trowa burst into the open, “it woulda been a nifty chase scene.”

Duo started sniggering as I turned my own phone back on.

The soldiers spilled from the front doors, looking down at the girls and instantly moving into formation around them with their weapons pointed at the now-caught spies.

“Lea?” Quatre demanded.

“Daddy?” Marlea returned, popping her head up very slightly as the soldiers realized who the people were who were standing there.

Alex’s head popped up that bit, too…before both girls were flying over the brick into their father’s arms…and almost at the same time, the under-trained ones were pinned to the ground—that had been good training and the girls’ quick movement, not the under-trained ones.

I grinned slightly, looking to Duo.

Someone in the field area answered a phone.

“This is Maxwell. This was a drill under code zero-five-three. The two detained on the ground are not to be harmed or treated badly. They’re trainees under Winner.”

The man who answered it started shouting orders, making gestures all around before the two under-trained were let up and stood sheepishly at attention.

“Sir!” the third man muttered, moving around to stand in front of the soldiers. “I’ll take responsibility, sir.”

“Well, at least they’re loyal,” I muttered with a sigh, pushing away from the desk. “From here on this falls to those two.”

“Yeah,” Duo agreed, stretching some and looking around. “Come on. Let’s take the video and put a sound-track to it,” he moved to the console I’d been sitting at. “Then we can replay it to the girls and tell them what they did wrong and offend them at the same time.”

I sniggered, hitting him in the arm.

He grinned his would-be-innocent grin at me, and led me from the room.

- -

“How’d it go?”

“Disastrous and wonderful,” Duo replied dryly.

“Oh?”

“They ended up all right, but their approach left something to be desired—Lea didn’t take charge until they were basically in blind-flight.”

“Great,” I muttered, dropping back onto the couch. “Tro and Q are still in one piece, aren’t they?”

“Mostly,” he agreed, moving…to straddle me.

I raised an eyebrow at him.

“Quatre hates testing Lea, because he hates her being scared,” he started to unbutton my shirt.

“Duo,” I muttered, catching his wrist and studying his eyes seriously.

“Oh, stop,” he returned, brushing my hands away and resting his palms against my chest as he studied my eyes. “Trowa pretends he’s fine with it, but the moment Lex squeaked they were both gone.”

I nodded, shoving his hands off and sitting up…which didn’t unseat him, it put him in my lap.

I started laughing, giving up as I dropped backwards before we could be eye to eye.

He sniggered himself, crawling off of me to sit on the floor and rest his head backwards.

I considered Selena coming in and bitching at me after Duo’d asked her if she thought he cheated. Selena was well convinced that he would never and had never and that it was nothing more than a passing thought in his mind just like the rest of us—which made me note that they weren’t normal.

“It’s shit like that that makes me think you’re not so loyal,” I noted quietly to him. “You may not be thinking about it, but sitting on me and starting to strip me doesn’t make me think of innocence embodied.”

“I wasn’t stripping you,” he retorted.

“You had four buttons undone.”

He laughed a wicked laugh and looked at me again. “The lord forgives all sin, huh? Wasn’t that your wisdom?”

“That was before I was married,” I noted almost clinically.

“Oh, when you cheated on her…I always forget you did that.”

…okay, that wasn’t funny. I frowned at him.

“I couldn’t figure out why that’s where your mind went,” he noted, sitting to properly look at me. “I forgot why I ever even met Kayla.”

The woman’s auburn hair and sunny smile flashed through my mind and I looked away from him completely.

The fact that he’d loved her had made me happy, had made me feel better because Relena’s and my child’s-game had hurt her. I’d used her to hurt my then girlfriend, now wife, and then I’d set her up with someone who love her. We’d all been happy with Jacob dancing around trying to talk any of us into sleeping with him for a laugh before turning right away to someone else. We’d all been together and making money and…thriving…before Donovan Charles, the leader of a syndicate called Gray Day had realized Kayla was in love and with another man. I’d split Kayla up from Donovan, and it had embittered him…and finding out she was happy with someone else had enraged him. He’d hired Keith Raoul, Ace, the Lunatic…to do a hit on Kayla.

Duo’d barely made it home in time to even get her to the hospital, and all through that interminable night we’d waited…and finally, when everyone else needed to sleep I’d left…for five minutes, maybe ten…and when I got back the waiting room we’d been in was destroyed, Duo had been sedated…

Kayla was dead.

I ran a hand down my face as the grief struck me again.

Kayla Green…sweetness embodied…she’d deserved so much better…

I heard a choked breath and looked sharply up to Duo, noting that he was breathing hard and fast and looking anywhere but at me.

That’s right…he had been the one who loved her.

He shoved himself to his feet, and I wondered how much of my thought process he’d had going on at the same time.

“Duo, wait,” I protested, shoving up off the couch to move after him…but he was gone.

I pulled the door open to the main hall—he’d closed it after him—in time to see his apartment door closing.

Wufei was standing in the door to his apartment with an expression of uncertainty on his face as he looked back to me.

I shook my head at him, not wanting to go into it as I stepped back into my apartment and closed my door behind myself.

…Yeah, there was a reason I’d always assumed he’d cheat, because I knew how easy it could be to do. Yeah, I was alone in that assumption, because Relena’s endeavors had always and only been to hurt me. She didn’t think it was easy, but she could act petty if she were given the right situation.

And really, Duo would have told us…or someone else would have noticed. Of course, if it were Wufei he would sooner choke on his own tongue than ruin something for Duo, even if it had been Duo’s fault that he’d lost his fiancé.

Or did that really count? Obviously with how quickly that relationship had fallen, Miguel was Alex’s biological uncle, there had been other problems in that relationship.

Duo didn’t lie, not really. His relationship with Nira was complex to the point of sheer idiocy, meaning that I’d never been able to make sense of the fine subtleties they employed…and he would have told her if he’d cheated on her right after it happened.

So was I bad for thinking it? Was I bad for letting him know I was thinking it? Were we all bad for being so scared of what he could do when it’d been two years out of his entire life that we hadn’t been able to find him? Sure, he’d changed when he’d gone to chase down Kayla’s killer. He’d become bi, for one, he’d lost any qualms he’d ever had for killing…he’d lost his self control.

He’d lost his faith.

I rubbed at my temples as I moved to sit on the couch again. That had been two years, and he’d been here with us, raising his daughter for seven years…eight.

I’d always trusted him, but he did those little things—like sitting on me and unbuttoning my shirt—a little too casually, and a little too frequently.

…maybe I should let him finish and see what he’d do.

I really needed to see how far my friend would go.