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"Close Proximity"Written By: Fancy Figures Disclaimer: I don't own 'em, wish I did, just
enjoy writing about 'em for free etc Pairing: 1x2, 3+4, Warnings: AU, Duo POV, drama, yaoi, lemon Rating: NC 17 Summary: Duo Maxwell and Heero Yuy are members
of the highly specialised Project Team, dealing with those matters
that are too sensitive for normal political channels. But there was
a time when they were something very much more than that – until
one particular mission went horribly wrong. Written for the 2005 Novella Challenge - voted 2nd place
"Close Proximity"
Chapter 2 Day One – 06:30 The trailer park was still quiet with the early morning. Well, quiet in that the only background noise was a mixture of barking dog, shrieking spouse and the melancholic turning over of a dead car battery. The usual. No-one got up to work in the city from around here. The guys left with the same care and secrecy that they’d arrived with. Relena went to call her assistants and Cissy came over quickly to guide her back to the car, a dull-coloured vehicle with its plates artfully obscured which had been parked round the back of the gravel heap. That’s where most of the vehicles from the site were left, a close jumble of vans and cars that often vanished or changed mysteriously overnight. Greg was somewhere around by a nearby trailer and came running over to help Cissy shield Relena with his body, the pair of them always looking out for any threat. I almost laughed aloud when a large Rotweiler poked its head around the trailer after him, and snarled aggressively. The kid lost several steps in his surprise; seemed to speed up a bit after that, too. And so off they went, rolling quietly through the back streets, returning to the Department with their Mission Nursemaid – or whatever they might call it in memos – well and truly accomplished. Quatre had been the last to leave me, but also the most eager – the look on his face might have been described as mounting hysteria. He was worrying about Trowa – I knew it. We all knew it. Trowa would feel the same, if the situation were reversed. It had been a bit of a joke when I first joined the Team – the way that the two of ‘em seemed joined at the hip. Not physiologically, you understand, but in the way that they understood each other without a load of hand signals, in the way that they cared for each other. They didn’t make much of an issue of it, keeping anything they shared outside work pretty discreet – but they weren’t making excuses for it, either. When I got to know what genuine guys they were – and after I had some experience of my own… well, it wasn’t such a joke then, was it? I rather envied them, to tell you the truth. Heero had nodded to Relena as she left, but when I turned back from seeing them off, I found he’d barely moved from his stance in the corner of my room. A narrow shaft of morning light sneaked through the broken blind, dissecting the shadow of his body. For a few long, silent moments we stared in tandem at some disturbed particles of dust that glittered within it. When they settled at last on the cushions of the couch, I cleared my throat. This was my place, after all. “No-one’s going to steal any of your stuff,” I said. “You can sit down at least. You make the place look untidier than it already is.” My voice sounded very brittle in the suddenly empty room. I’d abandoned my tea mug a long time ago, it seemed. I couldn’t remember if I’d eaten anything since last night’s supper. The call had come from Relena less than three hours ago – it felt like weeks. His sigh sounded like it was dragged out of him. He shifted on one foot, then the other, but he still didn’t sit down. “I feel the same way you do,” he said at last, his voice a ripple of something rich and angry. “If that’s any consolation to you. I tried to find someone else – tried to convince them I’d be OK somewhere else. You know what Relena’s like, though.” I didn’t answer that one. It was unnerving enough, listening to him. Having to listen to him. The voice was just as I remembered. Just the same as the late-night dreams, the mockery, snagging at my nerve endings. Fuck. For the first time, I wished the others would come back. I wondered why basic training had never covered this precious scenario. He looked like he struggled with words, with talking to me. Hadn’t that always been the case? I felt the wave of frustration from him as clearly as I read the clench of his fist. “Duo – we have to cope with this, right? Just for the bare minimum of time. I can’t go out yet – you have to keep a low profile too. We’ll have to sort out some compromise.” Obviously ‘fuck off and leave me alone’ wasn’t an option, I thought. Then I despised myself for the sudden, childish aggression. My social skills were lapsing, rather. Perhaps I was becoming the loud-mouthed boor that many have accused me of being in the past. Perhaps – just at that moment – I could care less. * He sat at last – even his iron-cast limbs couldn’t keep him up indefinitely. I drew the stool out from under the kitchen counter and dragged it into the room in front of the couch. I sat myself down on it somewhat gracelessly; he folded himself down on to the couch itself. He moved a little gingerly. I felt the familiar buzz inside me as I watched his movements. Partly because my job was to evaluate a person’s characteristics. Partly for other reasons. He was nursing an injury to his left leg, probably the hamstring – he had some hearing restriction in his left ear. That was apart from the external cuts and bruises. My appraisal of his condition was swift and instinctive, even as I hated myself for bothering. “So how bad was it?” He looked up quizzically, and for a moment my breath caught in my throat. It was the way that his chin thrust up, in a familiar, defiant move, the way that his dark eyes widened as they met my focus. He never asked me what I was talking about – because he knew, of course. He was damned smart. “You want to know?” “Asked, didn’t I?” Christ, I thought, was this how it was gonna be? He continued regardless, his voice quiet. Almost a monotone. I knew it was his way of controlling his emotions, but it could still grate on your ears. “It was bad. Happened last night – early evening, about 19:25. It was pure luck that we were on our way out to get some takeout and were almost out of the building. Otherwise we’d have been caught in the full blast of it…” He paused, swallowing a lump in his dry throat. “As it is, the main structure of the building was completely demolished. They took out the ground and first floor; it must have been a ring of connected detonators around a central charge, heavy duty explosives, staggered timing. It’s a style that some terrorists and saboteurs use.” I wondered if he were cataloguing the materials used, considering the likely suppliers. Appraising the efficiency of the job. It was his speciality, after all. “The police are giving out the message it was some kind of gas explosion – they don’t want anyone thinking it’s terrorism. But it was directed specifically at us, no doubt of that. The charges had been set over a period of days – there’d obviously been detailed surveillance of the site. They’d have seen enough comings and goings to be able to establish who was at home and who wasn’t, and we don’t allow civilian tenants there, you know?” It was a rhetorical question – it was as if he were giving an official statement all over again. “The other floors just crumbled down on top. My – the apartment was buried under the weight of the floors above; almost all the stuff has been crushed or destroyed. It’ll be months before it’s safe to go back, let alone consider rebuilding.” I had to open my mouth, didn’t I? I felt pain; I felt aggrieved. I let the resentment and the shock tumble out in ill-chosen words. “Guess it won’t be such an issue now then, me forgetting to return your spare key –“ He shuddered. “Cheap shot,” he said, in a very tight voice. “Cheap? That’s me all over!” I hissed. Comeback was automatic. “As you were so fucking keen to tell me!” “It was the only fucking thing you wanted to hear, Duo!” My eyes widened at his vehemence; my breath shortened. I bit my lip, knowing I could take him on – knowing I could escalate an argument beyond belief, in short, stunning seconds. I didn’t do it, though. I dragged my control back from the brink – teased the nonchalance back into my voice. “The Board will get you another place soon, I expect.“ His eyes narrowed. With anger? Suspicion at my sudden change of mood? “Sure they will,” he replied, his voice also calm again – though I could hear in his tone what an effort that took. “They say they just need to evaluate a couple of other potential properties; make the areas secure; investigate the previous tenants and surrounding industry. Then I can move on. They said that the apartment at Westbridge was nothing special. That there are plenty of others. It was only a place to live, right?” I stared at him. “Right.” He made a sudden noise of impatience that startled me, his leg jerking against the small card table by the couch. Relena’s half empty mug rattled nervously on it, the reflections from the overhead strip lighting shivering in the skin of the cold tea. Heero righted the mug with exaggerated care, but the scrape of the china on the plastic tabletop was still too sharp for my ears. It seemed to affect Heero just as badly. He lifted his hands as if to bury his head in them, but then he paused, and let them fall back to his lap. His voice hitched up a couple of notches on the volume control. “But it wasn’t just a place to live, Duo! Was it? It was my home! So maybe I’ve had to move around in the last year or so; learned to be ready to mobilise at a moments’ notice, never let my roots go very deep. But that place –“ “Don’t.” I said just the one word. I knew he’d know what I meant. I knew he’d ignore me, too. “Not just where I lived,” he persisted. “It was more than that.” His voice faded, and stopped. He looked damned pale. I suspected he was still in some kind of shock. I sighed. This was my room, right? But it seemed an alien place right then, an unfamiliar room, miles away, perching at the wrong end of a telescope. There wasn’t much else except the ratty furniture to distract me – I’d never been one to collect trinkets of any kind. Even the pictures had only been sheets of crass advertising colour that had just caught my eye. There was nothing and no-one but Heero to draw my attention. It had been a while since I’d heard him raise his voice like that. And for once, I agreed with everything he said. “It was indeed, Heero. Much more than that. I liked it. Good place.” He looked up at me again then, the anger fading as quickly as it had come. Maybe he recognised something in my expression. There was too much we could both have said – but not enough to ease the moment. “Were you badly hurt?” I asked. He shrugged. His limbs looked weary. “I doubt you need to ask. You can assess me as well as I can myself.” I winced inside. He knew me well. But then – we’d been trained well, too, hadn’t we? That was my speciality – the evaluation and measurement of people: their strengths; their vulnerabilities. The professional perception of place and opportunity. Critical to any – and every – mission. “Maybe. But tell me how you think you are.” “Just shock I think. Some bruises.” I nodded, knowing he was in pain, and knowing he knew I knew he was in pain, and that I knew – well, the hell any of that mattered! “You want to sleep?” The moment of truth had come at last. I had submitted to the Department’s demands and was resigned to offering what sparse hospitality I could. Hurrah for me. I braced myself for Heero’s scorn – for the inevitable resistance and resumption of hostilities. None of it came. “Yes,” he replied quietly, and rare though it was, he surprised me with his tone. Guess he was definitely in shock. Or maybe I’d never seen him in such a position before. “I just want to lie down here and crash out for a few hours,” he said, softly. “If you’ve got a blanket, fine, but I’m not cold or anything. If you need to work here or something, just say. If I’m in the way, I can go somewhere else.” I was listening to his words, but not hearing. I was just watching his mouth, alert to his body language. He was fucking unhappy, I can tell you that. And tired beyond exhaustion. “It’s been a hell of a time, Duo. I reckon you’ll agree with me on that.” We stared at each other then, for a few long, painful seconds. His eyes were full of shock and horror and sadness and anger. Hell, maybe that’s what mine looked like, too! I turned away from his gaze, in the end. It was all just that little bit too uncomfortable. “I’ll get a blanket,” I said, levering myself off the stool with a smile that was more of a grimace. “Damned couch is more like the back of a drunken camel – but I guess that’s all there is on offer in a mansion like this. You’re welcome to it.” * Day One 21:00 In the end, he slept right through the day and on into the night. The flatbed trucks screeched over the gravel paths, the dogs barked and the kids shrieked in some homicidal superhero game. Life at the trailer park made no concessions to him. I mean, I was used to it by then. But he must either have been extraordinarily tired or medicated, because he didn’t stir. I got on with my usual stuff – well, I cleared up and read the paper and pottered about with some projects that I’d been dabbling in. The details weren’t important to anyone but me. There hadn’t been very much else in my life for the last couple of months, not that I was complaining. Well, OK, maybe I was. But it wasn’t like there was anything I was prepared to do about it. Not at the moment. I walked around Heero a couple hundred times. Sometimes I stopped to watch him sleep, his body stretched out as best he could on my miserable, second-hand couch. Head cushioned on his arm, dark hair caught up against his cheek, legs half folded, hips shifting occasionally, seeking a more comfortable position. But I tried my hardest to resist that entertainment – it didn’t exactly give me any peace. I napped for an hour or so myself, though thanks to Relena and Quatre’s visit, I was a little less relaxed than I might have been. When it grew dark outside the trailer and things quietened down a bit, I ate a cheese sandwich, drank some coffee and decided to spend my time in wondering what the hell was going on. When Relena set up the Project Team we all knew the risks. She’d gone out on a limb with the Board as it was – but she believed there was a need for a specialist team to take on the more sensitive and challenging missions of the Department. She chose her own guys – ran it her own way. She was a very fair boss, with an unusually compassionate care for her staff – and that was for all of them, right down to her devoted assistant Cissy and the drivers and clerical guys in the office.. A couple of early successes and she was cautiously settled in place. There’d been a foiled assassination attempt of a Presidential candidate, then an expose of the taxation frauds of an evangelical TV preacher. We brought it all to book, quietly and effectively, and without the glare of publicity. We had a unique balance of skills, y’see. I’ll run through the major players – kind of like the cast list. I was on infiltration – everything from surveillance of a target to donning the old false beard and trying to sell ‘em bibles on the doorstep. I’d had a fairly varied life, and I had a knack of understanding what made people ‘tick’. Pretty good at encouraging it to go the way I wanted, too. No client ever believed that Duo Maxwell could be anything other than a loud, vulgar extrovert, but that was before I blended into their particular crowd for a couple of hours of harmless play. They never noticed me as the guy who sold them their groceries or the kid who played baseball on the pitch at the end of their block. Or the guy who was fixing the elevator on their floor. Or the man who took their wife’s elbow at a cocktail party and left her with no memory of individual features except for the waft of an expensive cologne, an offering of an overly dry martini, and a smiling insolence that could bring a shocked blush to her cheeks. Never noticed until I told ‘em, that was. I’d been described as a chameleon, and I didn’t dislike the comparison. I liked surprising people. A personal character that’s ‘in-your-face’ can be as much a sleight of hand as a nondescript mouse of a man, right? Trowa Barton came from an army background, so they said.
He was a guy who didn’t waste words, and
he’d never mentioned anything more prestigious than a decorated grandparent
or two, but there was definitely more to it than that. Few months
back, I was around when the Department was visited by senior military
personnel. There was a classic moment when the general in charge
saw Trowa – did a double take – and then looked deeply confused, like
he was seeing someone familiar but out of context. Not just that,
but I saw him snatch back an instinctive salute, hoping none of us
had noticed the faux pas. There was stuff to Trowa that went way
back, and whatever it was struck a certain amount of fear and respect
into the institutional heart. He was an expert on communications
of all kinds, including an unhealthily deep knowledge of the Quatre – well, the earnest, spectacularly efficient Quatre Winner had analysis skills to match my own, but he’d used them for slightly less legal purposes in his past life. He came to us from a minor correctional facility where he was serving a short-term sentence for a rather sophisticated computer fraud. They’d been sorry to let him go – not because they didn’t want him to go ‘straight’, or because they were worried about issues of national security, but because he was the only one who’d proved up to the task of redeveloping their transport facilities. He’d also motivated the whole damned place into a new workflow pattern that had increased efficiency by 25% over the year, and his revolutionary new training plan had reduced the rate of re-offending by 40% over the same period. Damned guy should have been running the country. Rumour had it that there were talks with one of the political parties at one time… but maybe that was yet another urban myth. Wufei Chang was the other main player – he was of Chinese extraction, built like a brick wall but with considerably better muscle definition, and with a steely self-discipline that could chill a normal guy’s blood. He brought the most incredible knowledge of combat into the group; no fighting style had been invented that he hadn’t heard of – and probably mastered. He was a ruthless and extremely effective teacher – hell, he’d taught me a few styles and I’d hated him passionately for every damned second of it! So I’m not the most amenable pupil at the best of times, but Wufei was a walking block of relentlessness, and never flinched from criticising me for all the things I - apparently just to infuriate him - persisted in doing wrong. I assumed his other pupils felt the same way about him, and yet they were all devoted to him at the end of training like they’d follow him over the cliff edge in battle like lemmings. He advised Relena on matters of strategy in any conflict – as did the others. He was the only guy who could match her in martial arts. And that’s all I care to say about him at the moment. And there was Heero Yuy, of course… Hey, so he was critical too, right? I hadn’t forgotten. He’d appeared from some unknown background, with knowledge of both hand-to-hand weaponry and tools of mass destruction like you couldn’t imagine outside of a sci-fi film. He knew it all – had, apparently, lived it all, read the book, worn the tee shirt, you name it. Never talked about it much – but it permeated everything he was, like a simmering gas that sometimes seeped from within him, especially on a mission. I sensed a predatory violence coiled inside him like a sleeping snake, only bursting out then. And when he did release the aggression, it would be both tightly controlled and hideously effective – he rarely killed unless there was no other choice, or so it appeared to me. Of course, I may have been a little naïve there. He, also, was an excellent trainer, and exemplary leader of his team. Fit – strong – quiet in company, unassuming as far as general chatter went. He just absorbed a mission and carried it out. It had been his intervention that had disarmed a thirteenth-hour challenge to the peace talks. A mainly peaceful opposition group had been hijacked by a rather more militant faction, and it quickly threatened to develop into a full-scale physical riot. Then Heero and a couple of choice acolytes had moved swiftly and secretly in amongst the ringleaders. The protestors’ weapons had been removed and ‘lost’; their principals had been persuaded to take their provocation elsewhere - preferably somewhere under close police supervision - and the danger had passed. He was a powerful and dangerous guy, was all. That’s all I was saying. Day One 23:45 It was coming on for midnight. I stretched rather awkwardly on the floor, perched on some cushions and flicking through a catalogue of various ‘might be useful if I ever got back to active duty’ goods. God knows what the other guys on the trailer park thought I was up to when they saw me rummaging in the waste site next door, collecting up a wide selection of discarded, dog-eared publications. Stage Makeup and Costumes for Halloween; ‘Be Seen in the Scene’ - this season’s ladies’ fashions; How To Build Scale Models; Amateur Film-Making Techniques; Calligraphy for Beginners; ‘When Sports Stars Misbehave’ – you name it, it was likely it’d have use for me at some stage. Heero expelled a breath, shifting a little uncomfortably on the couch. I assumed he’d sleep through until morning now. I wondered what I had to offer for breakfast, but then he never ate much in the morning, I knew. Some memory tugged at me, a flare of anger stabbed through me. Damned Department, still hounding me, landing this particular bombshell on my front steps… I punched viciously at a cushion, and settled myself again. So was this threat to the Team really to do with Mission Dove – with the intercontinental peace talks? From what Quatre had said, there’d been attacks on enough places and people connected with it to substantiate the theory. There were always a few people who didn’t want success – who didn’t want peace, for whatever warped reason they personally thought justifiable. I thought we’d weeded most of those out – neutralised ‘em, one way or another. Guess a couple may have escaped our clutches. I’d left the tidying up at the end of the mission to Relena Peacecraft, our boss. Relena had been the favoured daughter of a famous political family. An independently rich family, too. It had been expected that she’d marry a high profile governor, or equally disgustingly rich industrialist, or perhaps even a member of a minor royal family… Instead, she’d shown the lot of them the virtual finger, and gone her own way. Used her family’s influence to get accepted into the Department, then cut a swathe through it so that she was in a senior position after eighteen months. I wasn’t there then, but the stories still rattled through the canteen of how she’d become the first woman on the Board; of how her innovative approach to budgeting changed the whole way of resourcing missions; of how her arbitration skills saved more than a couple of the Department’s missions from disaster. Oh, and she kicked ass, too, had I mentioned that? People still talked in whispers about the disgraced Director who made a crass pass at her, and how he still found it difficult, one, to get a job elsewhere, and, two, to make a proper fist of his crushed right hand. So we moved in dangerous waters, as a matter of course.
But then why had the target suddenly changed to include members of
the Project Team themselves? To me, that was of more concern. The
members of the Team had never been high-profile – even some of the
Board members didn’t know us individually - and we worked damned hard
to maintain that anonymity. Otherwise we’d never have been able to
do the things we did, reach the people we did, or involve ourselves
in the organisations that we did. OK, so we couldn’t all hide away
in some So where had the security been for Heero’s home? Heero’s home… I felt the return of familiar nausea. He might have been killed. It had been a matter of luck that he wasn’t. I hadn’t seen him for three months, and when I did, he was stumbling free of the jaws of a crumbling, crushing death. No point being coy about this, of course. You need to understand things that maybe I’ve only hinted at so far. You need to know the context of this whole mess. I’m not trying to justify anything – not begging for sympathy or anything. But Heero and I had history. You know how it is? Like, we weren’t born glaring at each other the way we did today. No, we’d been excellent colleagues and fellow operatives: mature young men with a commitment to the Department and the Project Team. We’d been bright and appropriately aggressive and everyone had rated us well. At least, that was in our professional life. I couldn’t stop my thoughts returning to the accident. Relena had told me sparse details, but Heero had confirmed that his apartment was completely gone, now - it presumably lay in a mess of brick and exploded mortar in a city that was a state boundary away from here. I’ll tell you now - the thought of that wreckage stung me almost as much as it had distressed him. Even leaving aside the injury to Heero and others in the building, there’d been things in that apartment that were now destroyed for ever – things that I’d known. No, not just that. Things that had been mine, or at the very least shared between us. Things that were treasured for memory alone – for a sentiment that nowadays I tried fucking hard to despise. Things from a time that I tried even harder to forget. For many months, you see, I’d spent more time there than at my own apartment. There was a time when we virtually lived there together: ate together; did laundry together; watched TV; played chess; rehearsed our parts in upcoming missions, and rested after the frenzy of completed ones. Lived, washed, cooked, breathed, laughed together. Went to bed together; or the couch; or whatever square metre of floor we reached first. Yeah. You get the picture. A time when we were lovers. |
