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"On the Wings of an Eagle"Written By: Kaeru Shisho Disclaimer: I don't own any part of Gundam Wing
or its characters, nor do I make any monetary profit off this story. Rating: NC 17 Warnings: AU, male/male pairings, language Pairings: several Summary: When Trowa Barton and Duo Maxwell pay Quatre Winner a visit, he coerces them into archeological site destruction and matchmaking A/N: My deepest thanks go to the kindness of Snowdragon and WaterLily for editing and encouraging me to complete this. Sequel to For a Lark "On the Wings of an Eagle "
Chapter Four I Can Picture Friendly Faces I met up with a rather harried-looking boyfriend a half minute later. He was half in and half out of the door to the patio and Merquise and Winner were still visible in the great beyond. Duo clung to me like a vine, blinked once over his shoulder as if to check if the devil were nipping at his heals, and then gazed up at me with his gorgeous eyes. Nice. "Do not," Duo pleaded, "do NOT let me wander off alone again." I had my own reasons, but, hey, "I won't," I promised. "Wu-fei," he whispered. "He wants answers. He wants to know. He's like a shark." Duo looked about again and clutched me tighter. He pitched his voice lower. "But I watched those shows." He nodded, knowingly, not that I knew. I hadn't a clue what he was ranting about, but it sounded to me like Chang needed lunch. "Yeah," Duo went on, "On those nature shows, if the prey didn't move the shark wouldn't know it was there, sometimes, if there wasn't a lot of blood and guts around." Blood and guts? "Anyway, I figured to make myself invisible-like, you know, discreet, so he could fortify his appetite elsewhere, consequently I hunkered in the bathroom-- even though he pounded and pounded, and screamed, I know you're in there, Maxwell!" Like magic, there was an echoing call, "Maxwell!" Duo's eyes were wide as saucers. "He's coming!" "Did he make a move on you?" That was the only thing I could come up with that might have freaked him out so much. "Ah!" Chang stepped outside to the patio, passing up the two lovebirds with hardly a wave, and heading directly for Duo and me. "Barton! Just the man I wanted to see." Okay, so he wasn't on the make. I pealed Duo's arms away from the strangle-hold he had on me, but kept an arm firmly around his shoulders. "Oh?" "You knew Yuy rather well, right?" Chang asked me, but I must have said "no" or he read my expression as "no" because he clucked his tongue at me. "Yes, you must have. You nursed the brave fool for months, bringing him from the brink of death back to the prime of health—" Was everyone crazy here? Oh, I know what that means. When everyone seems out of their minds, the problem is with the perceiver, who in this case would be me. I had gained the love of my life, at last, and now I had lost my mind. How fucking unjust, to paraphrase the man standing before me. "Barton! Trowa? Are you all right?" I stopped his hand from fanning my face any longer. It was too much like a strobe effect from a mental test I'd once been given. I hated doctors and their tests. "I'm fine." "Well, you seemed to have gone a bit blank there." Wufei chuckled without mirth. "What AM I thinking? It's Trowa Barton I'm speaking to. Shacking up with Maxwell couldn't possibly have changed you all that much." Ah, but it had. "You must help me," Chang said, trying a new track to get something out of me. "Okay. What do you want to know about Yuy? I haven't seen the dude in years." "That's what I said!" Duo agreed, cheery again. Chang was frowning now. "So that's what you were screaming behind the door?" He gave me a "pity the fool" look, and then said, "You got close to him once. He let you inside his personal space. How?" "Are you talking about when he nearly blew himself up? That was years ago." Wufei hung on every word I said, which wasn't much. His lips moved, repeating his question, "How?" even though no sound came out. It jolted me into talking. "Yuy was helpless. Until his broken bones and injuries were healed, he was pretty much a typical invalid." "But you talked," Wufei insisted. "Some, yeah." "What about?" "How the hell should I remember that? Nothing! Stuff like: 'does it hurt here?'; 'want something to eat?'—" That all must not have been dicey enough for Chang because he waved his hands around again. When had he become so outwardly emotional? He was making cutting motions in the air, so I cut the crap. "What are you hunting for, Chang?" "Did he never say anything about me?" he asked. "That asshole? Why should he have? He didn't send me a thank you note either, if you're thinking he left you out of some group hug thing. My only interactions with Yuy were during the war. He never asked me jackshit about what I thought and let me get jerked around by OZ more than once when he had the means to put a stop to it, and wasn't around to save my ass when Quatre blew me to Hell and beyond. We were sometimes on the same side in the war and that's about the best I can wrap up my relationship with the infamous Heero Yuy. That what you want?" When pushed, I could rant, not like Duo or even Chang, but I could hold my own. I must have said something to lead to Chang's consequent depression. "Maxwell fell for both of you," Wufei sighed as he said that. "I thought you might be able to give me some insights. I was wrong. Sorry to have troubled you." Chang had gone from buoyant to crestfallen in less than five minutes. Only Yuy could do that to a person without even being present. Did I have a problem with Yuy, you ask? Yes, he hurt Duo once and that was worse than anything else I could think of, giving me a perfectly good excuse to hold it against him forever after. Duo, on the other hand, bounced to upbeat instantly. "I get it! You've fallen for Mr. Coldhearted Bastard!" Wufei's face color paled ten shades lighter, making his dark eyes pop starkly off his face. He slapped his hands over my lover's mouth and fell on him, who was already all over me, pressing us both against the stucco wall of the villa. "Shh!" he hissed. Oh. My. God. I struggled to breathe. Chang liked Yuy and not in a platonic way—no one could just plain like the jerk. Inches from my ear, but mostly below it because Chang was several inches shorter than me now, he said, "He's coming here." "Not yet, Fei-man, so back off before you give us both a hard-on." Leave it to Duo to find the exact words to move Chang. Now he was snarling at me. Good thing I'd had experience handling dangerous animals. Down boy. "That's right," I put in, quickly. "I was with Merquise and Winner earlier (Shudder. Add note to self: do not play the good listener role again) and they got a call from him saying he was running late and that we should eat dinner without him." There, I did a nice thing. "Oh." Chang Wufei crushed by his own feelings is a sad, sad thing to see. Duo wasn't fazed by the earlier vision of Mad Dog Chang, I guessed, because he threw an amiable arm over the man's shoulders, while still retaining my waist with his other. "You've got balls, 'Fei, I gotta give you that. I learned my lesson. That guy wouldn't be less untouchable if he were surrounded by a moat filled with man-eating lawyers." Chang simply sighed in agreement. God, he and Yuy deserved one another was the problem. Put it to music and I'da had a song to sing. "Not lately," Chang said. "He's been quite cordial. We exchanged email. Planned to meet. Jobs interfered --." I don't know how much longer Chang might have gone on describing his one-sided affair with Frosty Soldier, but I was tempted to just walk away. What they didn't know and I did was what Cathy had confided to me, and that was Heero's rumored conversion to type gay. As much as that information might help Chang, what would Duo think if I just offered it up now? How long had I known? Why hadn't I told him? Didn't I trust him? Ugh, there loomed an ugly, twisted, alternate universe full of bad, bad questions I wanted to avoid answering badly. Then he stopped. "-- one thing after another, preventing our meeting, until this." Duo cocked his head. He'd been paying attention. "So, he might want to be friends, but take it from me, that next step is more than a leap of fate, it's—" It's a real possibility, my inner good guy screamed! Duo met my eyes for confirmation, which I was avoiding like STD's. "It's a dive to Hell itself, right 'Tro?" Here's another one of those times when Duo and I weren't tracking one hundred percent. Did I say I couldn't deny Duo anything? I could side with him and avoid lying and telling the truth by saying next to nothing. "Yuy treated you like shit for just telling it like it was." Duo smiled and nodded. "Right. Like the man says." I needed to keep my trap shut more. "I remember," Chang said. "Yuy was entirely out of line at the time, but later he was remorseful and Winner made him promise to stay away from you. If he damaged one hair on your head, Winner promised to send the Maguanacs after him." Duo dipped his head. I don't think he knew our little blond friend had done that. "Did he think 'Ro wanted me or wanted to kill me?" "Honestly, Maxwell!" Chang said. "Yuy was not attracted to you. He did not want to BE with you. Winner was trying to protect you from Yuy's revenge for humiliating him that way." I tried to say "Heero" and "Yuy" at the same time, got my tongue tied up with the "humiliating" part and out came, "Humiliating Heuy?!" I simply moved on. "How about how Duo felt? You didn't help," I pointed out, deftly deflecting the guilt onto Chang, "but then, none of us did," I added, dishing it back onto the rest of us for good measure. "We all left Duo dangling in the breeze." And as much as I wanted to think that what Chang said about Yuy not being attracted to Duo was wishful thinking on his part, it was wishful thinking on my part, too. "It was a cowardly thing to do," Wufei said. "Disgraceful, and I apologize for my inaction at the time. It wasn't something I wanted to know was real at the time. We were comrades in arms, survivors of the war, men ready to strike out on our own, and then Maxwell up and confessed his love for Yuy. And you were serious! Nobody wished for the stigma homosexuality would bring them." "I was more shocked," I confided. "Nothing wrong with being gay in my book," Duo said. "No one ever told me it would make me a pariah or anything. And I was sure he felt the same way." Duo shrugged away the bad feelings. Oh, yeah? Why was that? What had he done to make you think he liked you? Damn, not talking was hard, too, but I held my tongue. "Maybe he did," Chang said. "Deep down but it was your saying it out loud and in public like that, embarrassing him, that angered him so. But, Yuy felt terrible later. He told me so. We had many discussions and sorted out many of our feelings toward other people." "I meant that I thought he felt the same way about gay folks being equal and okay and all. I hadn't a clue that he felt I was anything more than one of his war buddies, I was just hoping he might. I was wrong big time. Did he tell you his feelings 'bout faggots, 'Fei? 'Cause if you're crushing on him, you're one too, and then where's that friendship you're pining over going to go? Straight to Hell—I'll put my money on that race horse." Now, would have been a good time to tell Chang what I knew. "Wufei!" Winner called as he split apart from his Platinum Prince to welcome him. "Come and greet Zechs." And maybe I would have clued in Wufei on the Heero's-gay rumors, had he not left me for Merquise. |
