Warnings : Yaoi, angst, sap, OOC, Duo POV,
lemon, language and some pathetic attempts to sound technical.
Thanks to Yume Arashi for beta reading this monster and Aya Maxwell and
SteelSong for offering comments! Thanks guys!
I’m supposed to say something about ownership in this space?
Guidance
Part 1
It was another one of those out-in-the-middle-of-no-where
safe houses. A little retreat in the woods. Pleasant enough to start with
but after being stuck there for five days with Wufei, I was starting to
pray for a call to battle.
I missed Heero. I was worried about Heero. I was bored. I was sick to
death of the vegetarian meals that Wufei cooked and he wouldn’t let
me near the kitchen. I do not understand that man at all; he’ll eat
meat if somebody else cooks it but won’t cook the stuff himself.
I had prowled the house from one end to the other until I had found all
the secrets it had to hold and there weren’t very many. It wasn’t
a very old place and not very big, barely a story and a half, so had none
of the interesting quirks that houses attained with age. I had made Gundam
repairs until there was nothing left to do with the possible exception
of a wax job. I had wandered the grounds and though the area was actually
rather lovely, it was also fairly unremarkable. Read that…boring.
There was almost no electricity in the house; just one outlet that had obviously been added years after the place had been built, not even in the wall straight and looking terribly out of place. Cooking was done over a wood-burning stove; light was from candles and coal-oil lanterns; heat from a fireplace. Primitive to the extreme. Thank the Gods someone had converted one of the upstairs closets to a small bathroom, so we at least weren’t bathing in the damn creek. We had regulated to that whole rising with the sun, going to bed when it got dark thing. I felt like I should be plowing some field somewhere and butchering hogs. Or something equally archaic.
Wufei worked on his Gundam, did his katas, or read. I had nothing left to do to my Gundam and had already read everything in the house. I did wind up spending a couple of hours a day doing some of the exercises I had been taught in therapy after my knee surgery. That left a whole lot of empty hours, with nothing much to do but wonder where Heero was and if he was still all right.
After a couple of days, Wufei took pity on
me and hauled me out of bed in the morning to go with him to do his kata.
Or maybe he was just curing his own boredom by torturing me. I didn’t
care; it was something to do. I think I surprised him a little with my
willingness to learn. It took me three or four repetitions but as long
as I could keep him in sight, I could fairly well follow along. There
were a few moves that I just couldn’t manage yet. Though my knee
had come back to near normal strength and seldom failed me any more; I
hadn’t regained the flexibility in it that I’d once had. When
I got to the parts I couldn’t quite handle, I stretched until I couldn’t
any more and held the position while he finished the move. I fell back
into the routine on the return motion and continued with him. I think
it took him a couple times to figure out what was going on. I caught him
looking at me one of the times that I stopped and I flushed hotly. He
didn’t say anything, just letting it go. It embarrassed me though,
just driving home how much weaker I was than him and I vowed to stick
with him until he finished. I was really kind of regretting the impulse
after the first hour. At an hour and a half I was starting to doubt I’d
be able to keep the vow. I’d never really bothered to pay much attention
to Wufei when he did his exercises and sure as hell had never timed him
but at the two hour mark I was starting to suspect that he was trying
to outlast me. I swear he’d never spent this much time out here before.
But I am nothing in this world more than I am pissy-assed stubborn and
despite the fact that my scarred leg was shaking under me like I was a
newborn foal, I refused to stop. I matched him move for move, following
his lead like we were doing some strange dance together. Granted; I was
probably pretty sloppy but I was keeping up. He finally called a halt
himself and it was all I could do not to moan with relief. He picked up
the towels he had brought out and tossed one to me, using the other to
wipe the sweat from his brow. I buried my own face in the welcome softness,
swiping my sweat drenched hair off my face and tried to hide the fact
that I was panting like an asthmatic. When I looked up again, Wufei was
just standing there regarding me with a completely alien expression on
his face. He caught my eye and bowed to me slightly. I awkwardly returned
the bow and must have looked like a deer-in-headlights as he walked away.
Respect. That had been a hint of respect in his eyes; I’d almost
swear to it. I’m glad he left before he figured out that I couldn’t
follow. I had to sit down on the low stone wall for a good five minutes
before my wobbling leg would carry me back inside.
I met him on the patio the next morning without him having to call me.
I got a look of faint surprise and another grudging bow. He didn’t
go quite the full two hours again after that first day. It became part
of my morning to go out there with him. It gave me one more thing to do
and for those couple of hours each day, I could put my anxiety over Heero
out of my mind. It was quite a gift; I knew how much Wufei valued his
privacy and understood that with me there, he wasn’t quite able to
reach the same level of almost-meditation that he usually obtained. I
wished I could express my thanks, I wished that I could let him know that
I understood what he was sacrificing for me and I wondered if he knew
the dark thoughts he was helping me keep at bay.
The morning of the seventh day found me getting pretty restless. It was
a crappy, rainy day, which only furthered my feeling of entrapment. Not
even a nice thunderstorm, which will catch my attention to this day but
just a cold, drizzly, it’s-gonna-rain-forever kind of day. It had
kept us inside and there just wasn’t enough room indoors for the
katas. I guess I was pacing; I wasn’t paying that much attention.
Wufei was curled in one of the big, overstuffed armchairs in the living
room reading; had been for a couple of hours. I had started out by the
window, watching the rain but had gotten chilled and wandered over closer
to the fireplace. Once warmed, I had gone back to the window to watch
outside some more. Wufei calls this pacing.
‘Maxwell, will you settle yourself somewhere and find something to do?’ He grumbled at me, sounding faintly irritated.
‘There isn’t a whole lot to do in this place.’ I complained in my turn, sighing heavily and leaning against the window frame.
‘There is an entire bookcase full of books over there…find one and sit down.’ He suggested a little testily, his own copy of ‘Great Expectations’ dropping in his lap as he looked up at me.
‘I’ve read them all.’ I muttered, wrapping my arms around my shoulders for warmth. One thing’s for sure; no electricity made for a damned chilly house.
He raised a disbelieving eyebrow, ‘All of them? We haven’t been here that long…’
‘Not here.’ I growled, getting a little irritated myself, ‘But I’ve read every damned book in this whole bloody place. Trust me, I’ve looked three times.’
He stared at me for a long moment and I could see the total lack of belief in his eyes. It pissed me off a little bit, ‘What?’ I snapped.
He glanced away, looking back down at his book, ‘I just wouldn’t have expected you to be the type to read Dickens and Tolstoy and Poe.’
I was too moodily unhappy to work up to getting
really angry with him. I suppose I don’t exactly cultivate an aura
of the learned scholar like Wufei does or the cultured world traveler
like Quatre. I am, after all, just an orphaned street rat; what the hell
do I know about the works of Dickinson and Chekov? I closed my eyes and
heard the lilting voice of Sister Helen,
“At the time when I stood in the churchyard, reading the family tombstones,
I had just enough learning to be able to spell them out. My construction
even of their simple meaning was not very correct, for I read ‘Wife
of the above’ as a complimentary reference to my father’s exaltation
to a better world; and if any one of my deceased relations had been referred
to as ‘Below’, I have no doubt I should have formed the worst
opinions of that member of the family.”
I quoted with all the bemused tonal inflection that the good sister used to put into it. I had found that particular passage terribly funny when she had read it to us. I still don’t really know why, it just gives me the most vivid mental image and never fails to make me smile. Of course, that amusement is tempered with the bittersweet pang of remembering Sister Helen, dead these long years. I sighed, looking out at the rain again. She had loved it when it rained; said God was doing his washing. Damn. Wufei was right; I really needed to find something to do. Maybe I could break something on Deathscythe just so I could fix it.
I turned from the window, deciding a trip
into the woods where the Gundams were hidden wasn’t such a bad idea
after all. Rain or no rain; I needed to get out of this cabin.
The look of total consternation on Wufei’s face as I turned was priceless.
He looked like he wanted to leaf back through the pages to see how close
I had come to getting it right. That look made up for the earlier irritation.
I grinned at him; ‘I can quote from ‘The Summer of ‘42’
as well; the sprinkles scene, if you’d like.’ And I breezed
out of the living room, stopping in the kitchen long enough to grab one
of the long drovers coats hanging by the back door.
‘I’ll be back before dinner.’ I called and went out the door. All I caught of Wufei’s probably caustic comment was ‘…rain…’
There was a small brick patio out back, where we always worked out and there was a stone walk leading around the cabin. At one time it had been nicely landscaped with a lot of those big decorative rocks and a whole bunch of different ground covers. It was gone rather wild now but I found the effect rather pleasing. I left the stone path and headed into the woods, the collar of the long coat turned up against the chill wind and the drizzling rain. Once under the cover of the trees it wasn’t as bad but I was still soaked by the time I made my way to where Deathscythe was hidden. He seemed to be looking at me from where he was sitting in the rocks next to Nataku, under the cover of some camo netting and a lot of tree limbs, as if admonishing me for leaving him out here alone in the rain.
‘Hey old buddy.’ I said softly and keyed my password into the remote, popping the hatch. I clambered up over his outstretched ‘legs’ and climbed into the open hatch. It’s funny, sometimes getting into that pilot’s chair feels like crawling into the comfort of the womb…and sometimes it feels like crawling into a coffin. Today, it was more of a comfort.
I tinkered for a bit, adjusting things that didn’t need adjusting, straightening things that were already organized to a fault. I checked the harness for signs of strain, looked through the med-kit to see if I needed to resupply, even though I knew I’d done that just last week. I pulled out my handgun to check the load and finally admitted to myself what I had come out here for.
I booted up the onboard system, calling up the internal monitor files. I wound my way through a myriad series of folders, hunting for one of the copies of the file I had replicated and hidden away. My recording of Heero, sitting in Deathscythe when he didn’t know he was being monitored. It was buried deep and password protected six ways to Sunday.
Heero would kill me if he knew I still had
it.
During that first mission I had undertaken after my surgeries, quite honestly,
still recovering; Heero had taken to talking to my Gundam. Surprised the
hell out of me. I would never have guessed the level of anguish my going
off on that mission was going to cause him. I knew he was going to be
angry with me, had known he would be upset but I never in a million years
would have pictured him climbing into my Gundam and hugging my flight
suit with tears in his eyes.
I played the recording now and listened to him tell Deathscythe how much he loved me, how much he missed me. Heard him say again how scared he was that I wouldn’t come back to him, how he couldn’t carry on without me.
Sounds really morbid, doesn’t it? I wasn’t listening to the damned thing because I liked hearing the pain in his voice. I was just listening to his voice. It was the only recording of him I had. It wouldn’t have mattered if it were a recording of him reading the damn New York phone book. I just needed the sound of his voice. It was a guilty pleasure, that recording, which is why I jumped like I’d been shot when Wufei’s voice rang through the external pick-up, ‘Maxwell! We’ve been called; we have to go!’
I scrambled to shut off the playback and popped the hatch, climbing out to talk to him face to face.
‘Where? What’s the assignment?’ I felt a little guilty that I was actually relieved to be heading out and getting away from this place.
‘I’ll patch the coordinates through to you from Nataku.’ He informed me, ‘We’re meeting up with the others to stop a supply convoy carrying raw gundanium ore in-system.’
I couldn’t keep the grin off my face and flushed when he answered it with a knowing smirk, ‘Take it easy going out of here, we’re coming back to this safe house after the mission.’
I didn’t care; I was going to get to
see Heero for the first time in over a month. I just managed to keep from
laughing out loud until after I was back in the pilot’s seat and
the
hatch was sealed. Then I let myself crow with delight while I powered
up my Gundam.
End part 1