Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ II. Mirror Maze ❯ Perpetual Reminders ( Chapter 4 )

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

Perpetual Reminders

“Baobao, keep ahold of my hand…”

I gripped Leixiang’s hand tightly.

“Baobao, don’t let go of me…”

The act of rolling over in my sleep brought me into awareness so I blinked across my empty hotel room, then sighed.

There was something beyond depressing about knowing I had no home to go back to. Not that any of us really did. Quatre was the only one, and it still wasn’t quite a proper home.

…I’d been raised normal.

Okay, a warrior in a warrior clan, but I’d had a proper family and education before I started in on mobile suits. Shit, I’d been married…even if that had gone horribly wrong.

That’d be fun, wouldn’t it? I could just imagine some little girlfriend staring at the paperwork for getting a marriage license thing, and demanding what I meant, this was my second marriage.

“Oh, I’m sorry? Didn’t I tell you? My first wife died because Treize Kushrenada was an undying bastard…its okay, though. That life may as well have been a dream, because there’s none of it left.”

Wow, I was depressed.

The moments like this, when I could analyze why I did things without interrupting myself were always the worst. It was like denying I was stressed when I could feel the tension all through my shoulders.

If I could find Duo, I could live with him, right?

Right.

I rolled onto my other side as I followed my own logic. I was more like Quatre than the others. We were safe as five…we were a family as five…but we had an abusive father and an alcoholic mother…or something. It wasn’t really all that like Quatre. I felt safety in numbers, and was alone with the other three, and had been alone when it had been all four. Now Duo was out from under Heero and could possibly be someone with me. I was really no better than Heero. I’d been sunk in my own depression since I’d first realized that Heero’d lost his mind.

Trowa’d been apathetic since the beginning. He’d fought in the second war because it was expected of him.

Actually, he probably still resented me for that Marimea shit.

Fuck, they could all go insane, but I try to find the truth and I’m the evil bastard?

Fuck Trowa.

What I still didn’t understand was why we didn’t have someone looking out for us, why we hadn’t had psychological counseling. They’d started it after the first war, before Marimea had cropped up. We’d all started going through it, but then it’d nose-dived and we’d saved the world again.

I shouldn’t have to fight anymore…

I sat up and moved to the window, staring down at the city streets below my room.

I’d destroyed Nataku. I’d resigned my active duty….and I’d gotten bitch-slapped by…karma.

I didn’t begrudge Hilde her strictures…her rules that she had to follow. Shit, I didn’t even mind Duo disappearing…but couldn’t I just…be with him?

He had a kid.

I focused on my own reflection as the realization struck me, amazed. That had to be it! He must have stayed with the native woman…maybe he’d actually married her in those two months after I’d found him…it didn’t mat…was that why he’d ran like he had? Had she been pregnant?

Fuck, Heero would have a complete and total meltdown if he’d gotten her pregnant like that…

I turned toward my laptop, booting it up as I ripped the note-page off of my note-book and grinned slightly. Hilde’d been letting me know, because she wasn’t entirely against me finding Duo…he’d try to keep me on his safe-list. Her sniggering had made me assume he’d left the native girl initially…but…even the way she’d asked what I was searching for suggested…

He had a kid.

I stared at the screen as the colors burst to life, feeling something like pride, or maybe just happiness…

Duo had a real life.

Maybe he wasn’t in London…maybe he was in the colonies, even, but…

I expanded the search perimeters to two children, biting at my thumb.

Going to see Hilde was probably the best thing I could have done.

- -

“So he was all upset,” Hilde muttered from where she was standing in Duo’s office. “He wanted to find you…he looks a bit worse for wear.”

“How did I look when you first saw me?” Duo retorted, giving her a look before grinning. “Not so bad, huh?”

“Not really, no,” she agreed in amusement.

Duo smiled, looking toward the office window. “I miss the rain.”

“It rains here all the time, Duo…”

“No, the monsoon rains,” he argued, meeting her eyes again. “The kind that raises the river and sends man to live in the trees…the kind that means you step outside and you’re soaking wet, even when it’s thirty degrees out…” his eyes went distant as he remembered the sound. “I don’t even know what he was doing all day long,” he noted, thinking of Heero leaving early every day, showing up around lunch, then disappearing until supper. “I had hours…every day…and I didn’t do anything…just listened to the rain.”

“I don’t understand,” she muttered, moving to sit next to him on the desktop. “Why did you stay?”

He studied the floor a long moment in silence before shrugging. “I had nowhere else to be, and it seemed like no one cared about me…but then he wouldn’t even let me sleep around…he never…” Duo shook his head. “He would always bitch at me…and I went to run off…and he caught me.”

“Why didn’t you just leave?” she demanded, the conversation with Wufei bothering her on some level. “Why did you run?”

“Because I couldn’t just leave,” he retorted, meeting her eyes. “After the first time I’d try to run, he started to beat the shit out of me…and no one did anything to stop him. I was scared…confused…disbelieving, really…and every time I tried to leave for a while…” he trailed off, thinking to the times Heero’d come storming down the hall.

“We were in China still…and I kept trying to go, and then one night he was acting weird, gave me something to drink…it made me feel sick…”

“He kidnapped you?”

Duo met her eyes, sighing heavily. “I didn’t know we were in the Amazon for a reason, Hilde,” he reminded her. “I woke up in an entirely new room, a new building... The first year, the flood terrified me out of trying to run…initially, when the water started building up…and then it rose however many feet…next time I tried, I got caught in the flood…and I could never get more than twenty miles from the base before they’d catch up to me…and Quatre was a sadistic bastard to me all the time…Trowa didn’t care, and Wufei…” he sighed.

“What? What did Wufei do?”

“Brought me food when Heero was pissed,” he noted, looking toward the window again. “They’d hear it all over the base…when he’d be hitting me…at least some of them. He’d come in and make sure I was all right…in retrospect, he distracted them from finding me as long as he could manage…”

“Why didn’t he just take you and leave?”

‘Because he wanted me to do it myself,’ didn’t seem like the proper thing to say, and Duo wasn’t really sure if that was why Wufei hadn’t just done that. Actually, Duo wasn’t sure why most things had happened the way they had.

Hilde looked down and shrugged at him. “I don’t know where Wufei is staying,” she noted. “I don’t know if he’s left, or if he’s still around. I can’t tell him where you are, or what you go by now…and I don’t know what to tell you.”

“I’ll figure something out,” he reassured her. “I don’t know if I really want him to find me. What he doesn’t know, the others can’t drag out of him.”

“He said Quatre’s flipped it,” she remembered.

“He never had it,” Duo retorted dryly, then made a gesture toward the office door. “I have paperwork to get done.”

Hilde gave him a look and nodded, pushing away from the desk. “I did what I told him I’d do.”

“Good girl,” Duo noted.

“Haha,” she grumbled. “I’m in charge of the military, paper-pusher.”

“I saved the world, figurehead.”

She giggled at that, flipping him off, then headed out the door.

- -

“Where is he?” Quatre asked eagerly, looking to Trowa.

“I don’t know, we have to find him,” Trowa retorted. “That’s why we came.”

“He would choose a central location,” Heero noted, looking the city streets over. “For whatever he’s doing.”

“So we have to figure out what he’s doing,” Trowa agreed.

“Can we hurry?” Quatre asked, looking around. “And we need to find Wufei.”

Heero rolled his eyes slightly.

Trowa grinned and gestured toward a taxi. “It’s cold here. Let’s find a hotel.”

“Ooh, Heero!” Quatre muttered, eyes landing on a candy dispenser.

Heero sighed and passed Quatre a coin. The blond bounced across the distance to kneel next to the thing and put the coin in, his head moving in small circles as he watched the gumball spiral down the long chute.

“I wish I were so easily entertained,” Trowa muttered.

“You and me both,” Heero agreed. “Quatre? Come on…”

Quatre took his candy and moved to follow them as he picked at it interestedly. “Why don’t we have the location of his laptop?”

“I don’t know, I can’t get a feed on it,” Trowa retorted.

“I bet you he did something else with it…I bet he doesn’t have it with him.”

Heero watched the shell crumbling off the candy and wondered at the lucid thought accompanying it.

“He has all sorts of accounts,” Quatre added, looking up to them. “All over, like spiders.”

…and there was the end of the lucidity.

“Spiders bite,” Trowa informed the blond helpfully.

Quatre shuddered, moving quickly to stand in the supposed safety of Trowa’s personal space.

“We’re bigger than spiders,” Heero reminded the blond before he could have a freak-out. “We can squish them…”

“Unless they’re the real big ones,” Trowa agreed, indicating an exaggerated size of a tarantula.

Heero gave him a look.

Trowa grinned at the other pilot, running his tongue along his teeth. “They bite hard.”

“Let’s go,” Heero muttered, shoving Quatre ahead.

Sometimes, he wondered why Trowa couldn’t keep his damn mouth shut.