Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ II. Mirror Maze ❯ Midnight Echoes ( Chapter 2 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

Midnight Echoes

It wasn’t him.

I sank tiredly onto a cold iron bench, leaning forward to light the cigarette I’d already set in my mouth. I hadn’t been able to stay in my motel room after brooding in it all damn night, so I’d gone for a walk.

After everything, after looking through every name on that damn list…it hadn’t been him.

I inhaled, sitting back and looking to the gray clouds.

I’d thought for sure that Duo would be here. London seemed like the perfect place for him to slip in and hide in the crowd. It had a major sphere government headquarters…and the mix of the population was so vast they wouldn’t notice if he still had his little native girlfriend.

But it didn’t seem like he did.

The idea of looking up the list of Maxwell single males made me want to gag.

I rubbed at my eyes, studying the cigarette in my hand before tossing it into the gutter and exhaling.

Why did I even bother anymore? Was there any damn point to anything? I’d tried, but Duo’d gotten himself out. He obviously didn’t need me. He hadn’t left me any clues to follow, so he probably didn’t want me…it was just…

I’d been trying to deny that I was stressed out. I didn’t have a reason to be stressed out, right? So I wasn’t stressed. I’d slept wrong last night, or looking up had thrown something out of alignment…it’d sounded good before, but it had turned into a migraine for me…probably because the cigarette.

My head was pounding, I was cold, and I had nowhere to go and no one to go to…except back to Brazil…back to them.

Karma hated me.

- -

“If you eat that, it’ll get stuck in your throat and you won’t be able to breath,” Duo informed Camden calmly as he dropped whatever it was his son had picked up from…wherever…while they were in the café. “And then I’ll have to stick my fingers in your throat, which will make you gag, and you’ll just not be happy…and it’d probably hurt.”

“Dad,” Camden protested again—he was feeling vocal.

“I said no,” Duo repeated, shifting the boy to his other arm as he started toward Vasu’s school and took another drink from his mocha. “I got you a cookie, and that means you don’t pick up crap from the floor when I’m not looking at you.”

Camden giggled at that.

Duo wasn’t sure what he’d said that’d been funny, but he was willing to go with it if it distracted the kid from the crap he’d picked up.

“Now, we’re gonna go get brother from school, and then we’re gonna get rained on, and we’re gonna run our happy-asses to the shops, all right?”

“Right!” Camden agreed with the toothy smile all little kids had—those very white teeth.

“Good boy,” Duo muttered in amusement, focusing back on where he was walking. As had become his custom, he glanced unobtrusively at the Chinese man sitting on a bench. He’d felt for a long time that Wufei would show up in his life, even if he’d hidden every trace of himself he possibly could. Like normal, this man was no one he’d seen before, and not someone he’d remember if he saw him again.

It was a little disappointing, actually.

“Drink?” Cam asked, looking to Duo’s coffee cup.

“Hahaha,” Duo retorted. “Coffee’s for big people, not for little boys.

Camden sighed, and started to people watch.

- -

Trowa studied the flight manifest with interest, wondering if Wufei would have used his name or an alias.

Trowa knew that Wufei was looking for Duo, and that he had been since Duo left. Actually, Trowa also knew that Wufei had been trying to help Duo get away before he ran off. He also knew that Wufei had some extensive hacker shit set up on his laptop, but he couldn’t get a reading on the damn thing.

He wasn’t entirely sure how advanced Wufei’s laptop was, because the Chinese man would always be “looking” at porn if he tried to look at the screen…and then the way he smoked.

Trowa had noted that Wufei had a tendency to smoke when hiding something. It worked on a level that he’d blow the smoke in people’s faces if they were getting into his personal space, and that probably had been what started it, because most people would move away at that point. At any rate, whenever Wufei was doing something directly opposite Heero’s wants or wishes, he’d chain-smoke. It wasn’t something anyone else had noted, but Trowa had noticed that when Wufei wasn’t doing things, he had about…one smoke a day.

Wufei was challenging, Wufei was interesting…Wufei made Trowa think, and compared to the psychopaths they lived with, it was a refreshing change. Probably the only reason Trowa bothered hanging around. Well, that and he had nothing better to do. Of course, figuring out how to get Heero to do exactly what he wanted was amusing, and the way the man handled himself was interesting…but still.

So what was Wufei doing?

Not in the general way. He knew he was out looking for Duo, but had he found Duo? This wasn’t the first trip he’d just disappeared on. Where had he gone? What had led him there? Where the hell was the laptop?

That was the key thing. Trowa knew that it was easy to disable a phone, but the laptop was something else entirely. All of their machines had special chips in it that were connected to a network no matter what. No one else could hack into it because no one else knew it existed. It was run through an old satellite the Winner family had launched, that had gone defunct on most levels. It orbited the planet simply because nothing had interfered with it, and that had left an opening for a bunch of hacker-boys to access and use.

The chips were more of Winner funding being used for the family son…before he went insane. They’d all been given laptops with the thing in it, and there was no way to disable the signal. Interference was simple, of course, but disabling was nigh impossible, even if the chip itself was thrown into the water it could be found. Getting it out would basically kill the machine, so unless Wufei had bought himself a new laptop, he would have it with him.

Trowa set the manifest down with a frown. He didn’t know what name Wufei would use if not his own. There was always the take on Long, but that would have been obvious, and it hadn’t shown up on any sheets he’d used…so what would Wufei have done?

A beeper started on Trowa’s laptop and he grinned evilly as he looked to the screen.

Wufei’s laptop had been found.

- -

I grumbled irritatedly as I flicked through the information I had stored, looking, re-looking, and looking again at the names. There were some listings for Maxwell that were not him, and plenty of them I’d went to investigate, so I could tell weren’t him.

Basically, I had to assume that Duo’d dropped the girl and kid and went off on his own. At that point it’d be easy, even within the military confines, for him to take an entirely new name. That name would be completely unlinked to his old name…and since the old name wasn’t a proper name anyway, but an affectation, it wouldn’t be hard for him to drop it.

He was a damn chameleon…he always had been.

I smacked the crap laptop I’d bought in aggravation, wishing my own machine wasn’t traveling air-mail back to Brazil the long way.

Quatre’d had this ingenious idea before he’d gone nuts to keep us connected. This was pre-abuse, pre-insanity, pre-power for all of us, so we’d taken one of his family’s satellites and made it network our five laptops. Actually, it’d probably been an attempt to know we’d never be separated as his fucking mania had condensed inside him past his means to control…which lent credence to my thoughts on him being depressed because we weren’t five.

At any rate, the bit in each of our laptops that correlated with the satellite couldn’t be disabled without ruining the machines entirely, so they’d always be tracked. I’d realized this on my own the first time I’d tried to get Duo out…and that had also been the first time I’d thought of what to do.

I sent my laptop air-mail…places. I had it set up so it’d get back to the Manaus depot about when I planned to be back with a tag on it that lasted a week. If I was longer than a week, it got delivered out to our base with a note in it I’d specially written for them all. Something about ‘if you’re getting this I’m probably dead…’ something like that, rambling a tad and ending with ‘FUCK YOU ALL.’

It was probably the most mature thing I’d ever done, but if I were dead or that late I wouldn’t really have to deal with the fall-out, so until that point no one had to know I even had an ounce of pettiness in me.

It still made me grin.

I dropped backwards on the mattress, sighing heavily.

At this rate, it would get there first.

It reminded me…the situation…of once when I’d been little and my nanny had taken me to a carnival. The rides had been fun, and the people had been exciting…and the cotton-candy had been yummy…and then I’d seen the fun-house with its rotating tunnel exit and moving stairs…we’d gone in…and it’d been a mirror maze.

I’d had nightmares about her standing there gesturing me to catch up with her…but I couldn’t find her. She was always just beyond my reach, but I knew she was there…

“Come on, Baobao,” she’d called, “right here…”

And then I’d been alone…all I could see was myself reflected in every direction…before she’d showed up again, giving me that impatient look.

This was that damnable maze…and Duo was all around me, encouraging me to find him.

- -

Duo laughed as Nassaiya complained about a woman from her work named Sophie. Sophie thought she was better than everyone, and had the habit of doing the stupidest things around the office that drove the basin-girl insane.

Unfortunately, her stupidity often led to Nas cleaning up her messes and saving her ass…which Duo had told her repeatedly to stop doing, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She knew it was because the way she’d been raised, and the fact that Duo was laughing meant very little to her.

“It took me all of three minutes to do right,” Nas added, rolling her eyes. “The woman is intolerable.”

“So leave her to her own demise,” Duo suggested, moving across the room to wrap his arms around her waist and rest his cheek on top of her head as he studied her in the mirror.

“What are you thinking?” Nas asked, studying his eyes.

“You’re beautiful,” he supplied, kissing her ear. “You’re smart,” he kissed her cheek. “You’re compassionate…” she kissed him back, turning properly in his arms. “And you’re all mine,” he noted.

She laughed at that, biting at his lip.

“Mine, mine, mine, mine,” he persisted, kissing her each time.

She laughed at him, backing with him toward the bed.

“Mine?” he asked, his eyes sparkling evilly.

“Yes, yours,” she agreed in exasperation. “All yours all the time.”

He laughed delightedly at that, then stopped to meet her eyes.

“What?” she asked, grinning at him.

“You have no idea how happy that makes me.”

She gave him a look.

“What?” he protested, pouting cutely at her.

“Shut up and kiss me.”

Duo complied.