Rapunzel: Look, M.E., I finally finished your birthday fic! M.E.: Only three and a half months late. Not bad for you. Rapunzel: Eep! ::does Crouch of the Wild Tiger:: I'm sorry! I'm sorry!! My muse abandon me! When you told me you wanted a 2+5 fic, she told me that she only writes 1+2. Then she left!! M.E.: Hmph. Warning: Shounen ai, 5+2 Disclaimer: I don't own them. Never have, never will. End of story.
Projected Images Wufei couldn't quite pinpoint the cause of his return to consciousness, but if he had to name one, he would have said it was the tapping. That annoying, incessant tapping caused by the other occupant of the cell. He stifled the urge to throw something large and heavy at his companion for waking him. Wufei didn't particularly want to be awake. Sleep was, if nothing else, a way to pass time. Nothing was happening; nothing had changed. They were still locked up in an OZ cell on the Lunar Base, Heero and Trowa were still away fighting the new Gundam, which might or might not be piloted by Quatre, and his cellmate, Duo Maxwell, was still bored out of his mind and determined to make everyone else suffer for it. In this case, everyone else consisted of Wufei. Finally, Wufei got fed up. "Maxwell, will you knock it off?!" "Hey, Wu-man! Didn't know you were awake," Duo replied. "Knock what off?" "The tapping. It's going to drive me up the wall." "Cool. Can I watch?" "MAXWELL!!" "All right, all right. Keep your shirt on; it's just a nervous habit. Besides, watching you climb the walls sounds like a source of entertainment to me." "Anything is a source of entertainment to you," Wufei grumbled. "Oh, now don't tell me you're not bored too." "I wasn't." Wufei tried to sound dignified. "I was asleep. Thanks to you, I am no longer asleep. I shall now try to return to my former state, and if you wake me again for no reason, there'll be hell to pay!" "Hell to pay! Hmph!" Duo snorted. "As if that scares me. I'm Shinigami, remember?" He suddenly reverted to what he liked to call his Spooky Voice. "I shall bring death to anyone who stands in my way! MWAHAHAHAHA!!" "Enough!" Wufei snapped. "All right, all right," Duo muttered, sounding glum. Wufei looked over at his teammate, who was sitting in the corner looking unhappy, and felt a twinge of compassion. Poor Duo. With all his energy, it must have been torture for him to have nothing to do for days on end. He was liable to go stir crazy. "If I give you the image projector so that you can study the new design for your Gundam, will that keep you occupied?" Wufei asked him. Duo perked up. "Yeah, for a little while anyway." "Here." Wufei tossed it to him, then rolled over as Duo began to study the images. /At least he's quiet,/ he thought. /That's not why you gave it to him,/ another part of his mind interjected. /You gave it to him because you liked to see him smile at you, even for just a second./ Wufei was left to ponder that thought as he fell asleep again.
Wufei woke up a little while later to a loud noise, and the realization that something wasn't right. Duo was swearing a blue streak next to him. "They turned our air off! We're going to suffocate in here! Can you think of a worse way to die?!" "Slow starvation?" Wufei suggested. "And you complain that I'm never serious!" "Calm down, Maxwell! Getting agitated isn't going to do any good." Wufei leaned over and picked up the image projector from where Duo had dropped it, and began calmly flashing the images on the wall. /Focus. Focus on the pictures. Study them. Don't panic. You've got to stay calm. Duo's already not thinking clearly./ "Why are you even bothering with those?" Duo asked. "It's not like it'll do you any good. It'll take something pretty drastic to save us now." "I'm doing all I can in case that something pretty drastic does happen,"(1) Wufei told him, then went back to studying the pictures of his Gundam. He paused to watch Duo throw himself on the floor and begin to complain about uncool it was to die from lack of oxygen. Wufei was about to snap at him and tell him that being cool hardly mattered now, but stopped himself. /He's scared. Just as scared as I am. This is just his way of dealing with it. He doesn't want to die any more than I do./ Suddenly, Wufei felt closer to Duo, seeing him as more than just that loudmouthed American idiot who piloted that other Gundam. /Well, of course he's more than that. Surely no one is really as cheerful as he pretends to be./ "Duo," Wufei said suddenly. "Stop it." Duo stopped, and Wufei suddenly wished that he hadn't. The silence was permeated with fear. The same fear he saw in Duo's eyes. "Don't make a scene yet. We're not going to die." Duo snorted. "Why's that?" "This has got to be some kind of blunder on their part. OZ doesn't want us dead just yet; we're useful to them." "Heero's useful to them," Duo said, and Wufei thought he heard a note of bitterness in his voice. He decided to pursue the subject, cautiously of course. "You know Heero pretty well, don't you?" "As well as anyone can know him, I guess," Duo answered. "He never gives out any information, either about himself, or anything. He's so closed off; no one can get through to him, not even the people who are supposed to be his friends." "Are you his friend?" Duo laughed. "Heero doesn't have friends. As for me, most of the time I was around him, I was torn between being infuriated with him for being so cold, and feeling sorry for him because he felt that he had to be like that. Oh well. I guess it's people like him who are the 'useful' ones in this war." "You're not useless," Wufei told him. Duo shook his head. "You wouldn't think so, to hear the way some people talk about me. They make it out like I'm nothing but a loudmouthed idiot." Despite the fact that Wufei was fairly sure that "some people" was probably Heero, he still felt a twinge of guilt. He had regarded Duo in exactly that fashion until recently. But then, he'd never really had a chance to get to know Duo before. Now that he was starting to, he felt an undercurrent of something else beneath the mere physical attraction he had for Duo. Wufei had decided early on that he found Duo attractive. Meeting him in person had only made the conviction stronger; Wufei felt that the visual link in Nataku would never be able to do Duo justice. "You're not an idiot," Wufei muttered very softly. "Huh? What'd you say?" Duo asked, without much interest. Wufei didn't repeat his former comment. Duo waited for him to answer, but the silence stretched on. Finally, Duo turned away muttering, "Oh well. I guess it doesn't really matter now." Wufei looked at him, and was started to realize that he was trembling slightly. /From fear? Soldiers shouldn't be afraid to die./ /But then again, very few people are ever really ready to die when you get right down to it. Soldiers are no different from everyone else like that./ /Except for Heero./ Aloud he said, "You're scared." He stated it as a fact, not a question. Although his tone didn't sound particularly accusatory, Duo stiffened. "What makes you think that?" Duo asked. "You're shaking," Wufei pointed out. "Well, it is kind of cold in here." A realization hit Wufei suddenly, and he said, "Duo, Heero's not here, and I'm not going to sneer at you just because you're afraid to die. Everyone is." "Heero's not," Duo whispered as the quiver that ran through his body became more pronounced. Wufei found himself desperately wishing that his hands weren't cuffed, that he could reach out and hug Duo to him, reassure him, tell him that it would be all right... "Heero's no different. He's just better at concealing his fear," Wufei said. "It's okay to be scared, just don't panic." Duo let out a harsh laugh. "And if I start to, what are you going to do? Tell me to take deep breaths?" /I can manage this,/ Wufei told himself. /I've got to manage this./ Mentally thanking Nataku and any other deities that came to mind that his hands had been bound in front of him, Wufei lifted his arms and rather awkwardly tried to slip them around Duo. It was a clumsy process at first, but then Duo caught on to what he was doing and wriggled until he was nestled against Wufei's chest. Belatedly, Wufei realized that now that Duo was in his embrace, it would be awfully difficult to get him out again. Then Duo let out a sigh and leaned against his shoulder, and Wufei began to think that maybe continuing the hug wasn't such a bad thing after all. Duo's body was a warm and reassuring weight in his arms. Duo's hair smelled nice, despite the fact that it was rather oily after not having been washed for several days. "Thanks, Wu-man," Duo said softly. "I really needed a hug." /I'm in over my head,/ Wufei thought when he realized that he hadn't even minded Duo's use of a formerly aggravating nickname. They stayed like that for several minutes until Wufei's arms protested being kept in that position for so long. Regretfully, he lifted them, and Duo slipped away and went to sit on the other side of the cell. Wufei lay back on the floor and tried to focus on anything except his possibly imminent death and the pilot in the cell with him.
Wufei was jerked back into awareness by a loud sound followed by a breeze blowing through the cell. The air! They had air again! Simultaneously, he and Duo took deep breaths. Duo promptly let his out again in a loud whoop of victory. Even Wufei had to smile. "You were right! We didn't die!" Duo shouted. He somehow managed to turn a couple of cartwheels in the small cell. The he ran at Wufei, grabbed his face, and proceeded to kiss him. It wasn't a particularly steamy kiss; Duo just pressed his closed lips against Wufei's. Still, Wufei hadn't been expecting it, and he froze in shock. Duo had the good grace to blush and look sheepish. "Sorry, got carried away," he said as his cheeks turned a lovely rose color that Wufei found rather appealing. Desperate to focus on something else, Wufei looked towards the door, suddenly noting that it was open. This was just too good. "Hey Duo," Wufei said, gesturing at the open door with his head. "What say we get out of here?" "Yeah! I know where the scientists were hiding our Gundams! Let's go!" "Have they finished working on our Gundams yet?" Wufei wondered. "Even if they haven't, anything is better than staying in here," Duo pointed out, with some truth. Duo took off at a run, and Wufei hastened to follow him. Never had he seen Duo so happy. He kept turning around to grin at Wufei like a small child playing chase. In the reduced gravity, his braid seemed to acquire a life of its own, and it whipped along behind its owner, half floating and nearly smacking Wufei in the face several times. Wufei tried to grab it, only to realize with dismay and chagrin that his hands were still bound. "Duo," he attempted to attract the attention of the boy in front of him. "What about our hands?" "Don't worry about that until we get there," he said easily. After going through some narrow and rather dark corridors, they arrived in the room where their Gundams had been left. Wufei was quite frankly amazed that Duo had managed to find it again. After all, he had only come from there once, and he'd been in pretty bad shape then. Wufei winced as he remembered how bad Duo had looked when they'd tossed him in the cell, and made a mental note to speak to Master O on the subject. (2) Duo stopped abruptly, and Wufei found his nose embedded in a head of hair. /Ow,/ he thought ruefully, since his dignity prevented him from saying it out loud. "There they are! And they look almost finished! It's like seeing an old friend." Duo stepped into a room, and Wufei followed, anxious to see his Gundam. Cliché as Wufei found Duo's remark about his Gundam being like a friend, that was the feeling he got. Nataku had been upgraded, and her colors changed slightly, but she was still Nataku. And she looked strong. "Now I'll finally have the strength to fight OZ," Wufei murmured. "Oi!" Duo was already climbing into the cockpit. "Why are you always harping on strength?" "Am I?" Wufei asked absently. "Yup. It's either that or justice. How come?" Wufei sighed. "It's a long story." He shook himself out of his reverie, climbed into Nataku's cockpit, and began checking her condition. She was mostly complete, and certainly fit for flying. He would still have to tweak a few thing later but... Duo's voice came over the comm. link. "Tell me about it sometime, 'kay?" "Huh?" "The story. The really long one. Maybe you can tell me about it next time we see each other." Wufei suddenly felt a strange wash of feelings as he listened to Duo. The first was the inevitable and familiar sadness that came whenever anyone asked him about Meiran. The others, however, were more pleasant, as well as being more confusing. He felt the sudden urge to tell Duo the whole story about his unfortunate marriage and its end, something he had never done before. He also felt a warm feeling in his stomach at the thought that Duo wanted to see him again. "Sure," he said. "Next time. Now let's get the hell out of here!"
As the small shuttle approached Peacemillion, Wufei sat deep in thought. Having not originally intended to come here, he was still wondering if he had made the right choice. Still, Nataku needed repairs, and he could always attack Libra later. And maybe then, he would have comrades to help him. Comrades. When Wufei cared to examine his motives closely (which he didn't), he always came to the same conclusion. The real lure of Peacemillion had nothing to do with facilities, fuel, or repairs to Nataku. If Wing Zero really had foretold the future, then Wufei was destined to fight with Duo, and the Deathsythe pilot was almost certainly on that ship. The voice talking to Sally over the comm. link sounded familiar. It took Wufei a moment to recognize it as Noin's voice. /What is that onna doing here?/ he thought, with a mild feeling of apprehension. After all, their fist meeting hadn't exactly established any feelings of friendship, and he had certainly given her no good reason to like him since. Aloud, he said, "Quite the party they're having there." "Aa," was all Heero said. /No wonder Duo had problems with him,/ Wufei thought. /Great idea, to stick the person who talks all the time with the one who never says more than three words at a time./ He glared silently at Heero's back for a moment. He had been doing it a lot during the trip. After their conversation in the cell all those months ago, Wufei had gotten the impression that Duo had, at some time or another, had a crush of sorts on the silent Wing pilot. Now, whenever he looked at Heero, he was seized by an irrational feeling of dislike. /It feels almost like- but it can't be- jealousy./ /Me?! Jealous of him? Feh. Not possible. Why should I be jealous of Mr. Never-Opens-His-Mouth Yuy? Oh, damn, there I go again!/ Fortunately, Wufei was spared further reverie by their arrival. After getting off the ship and away from Heero, Wufei felt slightly better. He greeted Quatre, who chattered on about how glad he was to see all of them, assured himself that Nataku would be looked after properly, and then, trying to appear calm and nonchalant, looked around for Duo. When he finally spotted him over talking to Heero, the feeling that felt like, but couldn't be, jealousy returned in force. "Wufei!" Quatre had come up beside him. "How have you been since you left Earth?" Wufei grunted a response as he tore his eyes away from Heero and Duo. Ignoring the question, he asked, "Where can I room?" Quatre kindly consented to give him the brief tour of the ship, finishing off at the room that he was to stay in. When Quatre asked if there was anything else he wanted, Wufei simply replied that he wanted to be left alone for a while.
When the knock on the door came, Wufei jumped. He hadn't expected anyone to come and seek him out, since Quatre was probably the only one who would anyway, and Quatre had agreed to leave him alone. Opening the door a crack, he cautiously peered through and was surprised, and delighted, to see Duo. "Hi," Duo said once Wufei had opened the door fully to admit him. "What's going on? Is there an attack or a mission?" "Nope," Duo replied cheerfully. "I just didn't really get to say much to you earlier, so I thought I should say hi now. My room's right next door, so I'm paying a neighborly visit, so to speak." "Aa," Wufei muttered, unable to think of anything else to say. /Damn it!/ he thought. /I'm starting to sound like Heero!/ "And anyway," Duo continued, unperturbed, "It's almost dinner time, and I thought I'd show you where the mess hall is." "Quatre showed me earlier," Wufei said. "Oh." Duo looked mildly disappointed. "Well, would you walk there with me anyway?" "Certainly."
It was some time after dinner when the knock came on Duo's door. When he opened it, Wufei stood on the threshold. "Well hello again," Duo said. "What bring you here?" "Boredom," Wufei answered. "Well now, the great Chang Wufei, Bringer of Justice, gets bored, huh?" Wufei nodded. He'd expected the teasing. What he couldn't say was that his real reason for coming had to do more with loneliness than with boredom. He had been wandering alone ever since the destruction of his colony, only stopping when he had met up with Heero and Sally. He hadn't spoken much to Sally on the trip because he suspected that she didn't like him after having listened to all his rants against women. Heero, of course, had remained quiet throughout most of the trip, hardly speaking to him or Sally. But now, with real human contact only a door away, he'd finally given in. Fortunately, Duo seemed to partially understand that. He invited Wufei into his room, got him seated, and then started talking about anything and everything. Wufei sat in silence, soaking up the words until Duo stopped and peered at him. "Are you okay?" he asked. "You're awfully quiet." "Just tired, I guess," Wufei answered. "Tired of what?" "Everything." Duo considered that, then said, "You said you'd tell me about your obsession with justice when we met again. Why not now?" For a moment Wufei considered refusing on the basis that he didn't want to think about such things right now. But the words never left his mouth. Some part of him whispered that he should talk, that maybe reliving all those unpleasant memories in the presence of someone else would help. So he talked. And talked. And talked. By the time he had finished talking, Duo had been told about almost everything. About Meiran and her contempt for him. About his failure and her death. About his determination to be more like the husband she would have wanted. About his gundam, and why he called it Nataku. About OZ, and the battle that had claimed his home colony. Duo sat quietly and let him tell everything. When Wufei finally finished his story, Duo quietly got up, walked over to him, and put his arms around him. Wufei made a startled noise at first, but Duo shushed him, saying, "You look like you need a hug." Wufei then realized that his face was wet. He ineffectually tried to wipe it off with his hands until Duo used the hem of his shirt to dry his cheeks. "Thanks," he mumbled, suddenly embarrassed. Here he was, always talking about strength, and he had just cried in front of one of his fellow soldiers. "No problem," Duo told him. "Hey, you helped me out in the OZ cell." "Not much." "Sure you did," Duo protested. "If you hadn't been there, I would've gone absolutely bonkers." "Now that makes an interesting mental image," Wufei commented. Duo stared at him for a moment, and then laughed. And for the first time in a long time, Wufei felt like laughing along with him.
When Wufei awoke the next morning, he wondered where in the world he was. The room looked nothing like his tiny sleeping space on the shuttle, and it was far too messy to be his. Then he remembered. He was on Peacemillion, in Duo's room. The two of them had stayed up talking until he had finally fallen asleep without making it back to his own room. Duo must have put him in the only bed in the room and taken the floor. This suspicion was confirmed when he looked down and saw Duo stretched out next to the bed with a blanket and a pillow. "Should've made me sleep on the floor," he said aloud. "What?" Duo rolled over and looked up at him groggily. "What time is it?" "I have no idea," Wufei answered him. "I should get up," Duo muttered, suiting the words to the action. "It's probably time for breakfast. "How you can tell what meal to eat when in the middle of outer space is a mystery to me," Wufei said. Duo grinned. "I can't. But it doesn't really matter; a meal's a meal." Wufei had to agree with that logic. Duo suddenly looked hard at him, and then his grin widened. "What?" Wufei asked, not without a little irritation. "Do you know," Duo said, leading him to the door, "that I have never seen you with pillow hair before?" Belatedly, Wufei realized that his hair was mussed from sleeping and coming out of its tight ponytail. Several strands of it had decided to rebel and were sticking out at odd angles to the rest. With a curse, he yanked out his hair band and began trying to comb his hair with his finger. Duo looked slightly disappointed. "Darn, and I thought it looked cute like that," he said mournfully. Wufei glared at him. "Cute?" "Yeah, cute." Wufei glared harder. "You're cute when you glare too." The look on Wufei's face abruptly changed to horrified astonishment, and Duo burst out laughing. Wufei regarded him when he finally managed to stop chuckling. "Cute, huh? Duo, are you by any chance trying to flirt with me?" "Maybe," Duo said, looking sly. "What would change that maybe to a definitely?" Wufei astonished himself by asking. Duo gave him an odd look, then grabbed his face with both hands and kissed him. Unlike their first kiss in the OZ cell, this one was not chaste, and was not meant to be. "That," Duo said smugly, "makes it a definitely." Wufei wondered how everything could seem so bright in the middle of outer space. Duo turned to him with a huge but genuine smile on his face. "So," he said. "Walk with me to the mess hall?" "Of course." Fin.
1) I'm not sure of Wufei's exact words for this part. For those of you have seen that episode enough times to remember his exact words, you need a life. (What, I never said I didn't!)
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