FIC: Forgive and... Fornicate? [Gundam Wing, Duo & Sally & Hilde]
Title: Forgive and... Fornicate?
Author: Omnicat
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Platonic, Romance, Friendship, the whole shebang. Humor.
Spoilers & Desirable Foreknowledge: Specific details up until episode 23, general knowledge of everything.
Warnings: Some innuendo and a few ‘Hell’s.
Pairings: That’s a surprise. ;)
Disclaimer: *checks tickybox*
Summary: Trowa and Quatre are discovered in a compromising position, enlightening conversations are held, and revelations about Duo and Heero’s love lives are had. “It must be something in the gundanium.”
Author’s Note: Enjoy!
Forgive and... Fornicate?
Duo stumbled onto the balcony through the gym’s rear entrance, looking very much worse for wear. With the Mediterranean sun highlighting every bruise and blotch in his complexion and sweat streaming down his face, making stray strands of hair stick to his skin, he grabbed the balustrade for support. When he heard the door open again, he turned around and found Hilde and Sally stepping out into the sunlight, only slightly out of breath.
“You girls... are monsters,” he panted. “Isn’t it against the rules to kill your opponent?”
Hilde laughed and slapped a hand down on his shoulder. “Don’t tell me losing bruised your ego, buddy?”
“It’s a game of the devil, I tell you!” Duo exclaimed in a hoarse voice.
“You shouldn’t have turned down Heero’s offer, Duo. Taking both of us on on your own was just asking for trouble,” Sally said, her smile as smug as only a winner’s can be.
Duo grumbled and slumped over the stone balcony railing, too sore and exhausted to argue. He’d get back at them later. Emphasis on later. His weary gaze drifted over the rooftops behind the hotel grounds, the glittering blue ocean beyond that and the shadowy blue ripple of mountains on the horizon, at the other side of the bay, before he wiped his brow and his eyes fell to the pool right below him. Something at the far end, by the outdoor showers, drew his attention.
“What the...” Suddenly no longer feeling like he’d been trampled by a herd of ungulates, he leaned over the railing and squinted his eyes. “...hey, ladies?”
Hilde scrubbed a hotel towel over her face. “Hm?”
“I’m hallucinating, right?”
“What?” Sally said distractedly, busy re-braiding her hair, which had gotten mussed during their game.
“I’m seeing things.” He knuckled his eyes and looked again. “Aren’t I?”
“Duo, what are you talking about?” Hilde demanded, swinging the towel across her neck.
He pointed. “I think I’m seeing Trowa and Quatre under that shower together doing things that are frowned upon in public places. Did I miss getting hit over the head or something back in the gym?”
Peeking over Duo’s shoulder, Sally concluded: “Well, there’s nothing wrong with your eyesight.”
“You mean it’s real?!”
“You mean you didn’t know?” Hilde said, at which Duo whipped his head around fast enough to make the muscles in his neck scream in protest.
“Know?”
“About Trowa and Quatre?” Hilde said, in a tone normally reserved for explaining complex abstract concepts to ten-year-olds. “They’ve been making eyes at each other for ages!”
His own eyes going wide as saucers, Duo’s eyebrows were lost in the mess of his sweaty bangs. “They have?”
Sally tsked. “Don’t look so surprised, Duo. I thought you of all people would understand.”
“Well - I -” Duo spluttered. “Look, I’m not averse to that kind of thing myself, it’s just that... Trowa, okay, I could see that, but Quatre... he never struck me as the type. Never.”
Hilde snorted. “Next thing you’re saying that I never struck you as the lesbian type.”
Duo grimaced. “You’re never gonna let me live that down, are you?”
“When blaming you makes you so easy to blackmail and guilt-trip? Hell no.”
“I still don’t know how you can honestly blame me,” Duo said, eying Hilde as she leaned her elbows on the balcony next to him. “As long as they’re into men, everybody falls for my charms, whether I’m trying or not,” he declared confidently, and added as an afterthought, thinking about how completely unflappable Heero was when it came to him, even in the face of blatant innuendo: “If they’re human, that is.”
Hilde snorted again, but this time she was fighting a blush and a smile. “My sexual preferences are none of your business unless you make them your business,” she said, giving him a meaningful look.
Duo pointedly ignored her, huffing through a blush of his own. “Quatre never came on to me or anything, either. And we spent weeks holed up together in a tropical oasis, do you know how naked that gets?”
“Apparently he already had someone else in mind,” Sally reasoned, calmly rolling the kinks from her shoulders.
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” Hilde said, smiling down at the oblivious couple at the pool. “After they started out the way they did. Trowa said Quatre didn’t hesitate a second.”
“Huh?”
“Trowa told me how he and Quatre first met,” she explained, flashing him a toothy grin. “I was trying to flirt with him, but he told me he was already spoken for, so we got talking and naturally Quatre came up.”
Duo scratched his head. “So? What’s the big deal?”
With one last glance at the snogging couple below them, Hilde turned around and leaned back against the railing to face Duo and Sally.
“Well, when you guys first came to Earth in your gundams, you’d all turned against the original Operation Meteor separately, right?” she asked Duo, who nodded. “But because there wasn’t any contact between you guys, whenever you met another gundam pilot you had to be on your guard, because you didn’t know if the other pilot had defected as well, or if he was there for the real Operation M.” Duo nodded again and settled next to her, arms crossed over his chest.
“Well, that’s what happened to Trowa and Quatre when they first met,” Hilde said, gesturing enthusiastically. “They got into a fight with their MS and reached a kind of stalemate pretty soon, because Trowa was out of ammo and Quatre wanted to play it fair, you know what he’s like. Either way, they had each other backed into a corner. Their MS were holding on to each other so that the other suit couldn’t strike them, but they couldn’t strike the other either without creating an opening for the other guy to get a hit in.”
Duo grinned at her lively imitation of MS manoeuvres.
“So Trowa and Quatre were facing each other down, watching each other’s moves and waiting for an opportunity when suddenly...” Hilde stilled and leaned her upper body towards them, holding up her forefingers. “get this - Quatre opens the hatch of his gundam, steps out onto the hatch and says ‘You and I shouldn’t be fighting each other!’.”
“He did?” Sally laughed. “Oh, that move just has Quatre written all over it, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, no kidding. He goes and steps out of his mobile suit in the middle of a fight and expects the other guy not to crush him with one slap of a giant robo-hand because he says he shouldn’t!”
“So what did Trowa do?” Sally asked.
“Came out with his hands in the air.”
Sally and Hilde laughed until they were blue in the face.
Meanwhile, Duo stood by scratching his head and wracking his brain, trying to remember what that story reminded him of.
“You know...” he said eventually. “that sounds freakishly similar to what happened when I first met Heero and Relena.”
“Huh?” Hilde tried to catch her breath, still hiccupping with mirth.
“I wonder if that means they’ll end up together too some day...” Duo wondered absently.
Sally pointed toward a pair of deck chairs on the side of the pool opposite from Trowa and Quatre. “If what they’re doing down there is what I think they’re doing, they already have.”
Duo and Hilde turned around so fast, Duo’s braid smacked her in the arm.
“No way, is he -” Duo started.
“Is that his hand in her -” Hilde followed.
Sally smirked. “Well, she certainly doesn’t need sun block down there.”
“Oh wow,” Hilde breathed. “What is it with you gundam pilots and public places?” She bit down on her thumb to stifle a squealing laugh.
“See, told you they were just as crazy as Trowa and Quatre.”
Hilde’s brow furrowed with equal parts repressed mirth and confusion. “I knew Heero and Relena were into each other, but what does that have to do with Trowa and Quatre?”
“You mean Relena never told you how she and Heero met me?” Duo exclaimed, a hand pressed to his heart in mock hurt.
“It never really came up...” Hilde said thoughtfully, at which Duo whooped.
“Great! That means I get to tell you. Might wanna sit down, ladies. If you thought Trowa and Quatre were wild, wait till you hear this,” he said, rubbing his hands gleefully. “This happened in April ’95. A true story!”
“Oh boy.” Sally crossed her arms and leaned her hip against the railing. Hilde kept glancing down at the pool as she listened.
“Okay, so here I was,” he started, almost as animatedly as Hilde had told her story about the other two pilots. “minding my own business, biding my time until Deathscythe would come to the surface with the crashed gundam - that’s Wing, if you’ll remember. Heero managed to get into a fight with Zechs the moment he entered the atmosphere. Don’t ask me how, I’m only human. I was planning to salvage his MS and use it for spare parts for Deathscythe, because I thought nobody could have survived that crash, even in a gundam. But of course, turned out it was Heero Yuy I was trying to apply basic laws of nature to.”
“Is that crash what Relena brought him into my hospital for?” Sally asked.
“No, she took him to you after I met them. They’d already met each other a couple times before I saw them at that military port,” Duo said, rubbing his jaw thoughtfully. “I think the first time she found him on a beach, and he ran away when he woke up and she said she’d called an ambulance for him. Or something.”
Sally’s expression became oddly rigid. “I remember an ambulance being reported stolen around that time.”
Hilde burst out laughing and had to hold on to the balustrade to stay upright.
“Oh man, I wish I’d been there to see it!” Duo gasped between guffaws.
“I wish I’d known this then,” Sally said. “He traumatized some of our best nurses!”
Wiping tears of mirth from his eyes, Duo managed to pull himself back together. “God, and I thought he was crazy when I was around.” He heaved a deep breath, tried to exhale, burst out laughing again, and then just gave up on trying to contain his amusement as he spoke.
“Anyway, I was lurking in a dark corner waiting for my gundam to surface when I heard someone shouting. The area was supposed to be deserted, people walking around was a bad sign. So I went to see what was going on, and what I should do about it. I expected to find some Alliance personnel, but what I saw was two kids my own age next to a pile of torpedoes, a guy in sportswear and a pretty girl with a really expensive-looking dress on. Turns out later that Relena’d run away from her birthday party when she heard about Heero being at the port, so she could try and stop him. So now she was standing on a submarine in her fancy dress, yelling at him to step away from the torpedoes and tell her what the Hell he thought he was doing.”
“Don’t tell me Heero did as she told him just like Trowa did with Quatre?” Hilde said.
Duo snorted. “Like Hell he did! Heero was even more of a psycho back then than he is now. He pulled a gun outta nowhere and was gonna shoot her. Me being the good guy I am, I couldn’t let that happen, of course, so I came out of hiding and shot the gun from Heero’s hand. He tried to snatch it back up, I fired a warning shot -”
Sally gave him a sharp look. “A warning shot?”
“...a warning shot... in the leg.”
“He had another bullet wound in his upper arm, if I recall.” By now, Sally was drumming her fingers on the balustrade and giving him a schoolteacher look.
Scratching himself behind the ears, Duo laughed awkwardly. “Yeah, I may have hit him there too when I shot the gun from his hand...”
“Real subtle, Duo,” Sally sighed.
“What?!”
“Never mind, tell us what happened next!” Hilde interrupted.
With one last look at the suspicious smirk on Sally’s face, Duo conceded, settling back against the railing. “Fine, fine. What happens next is Heero can’t fight back anymore with an arm and a leg busted up, Relena jumps between him and me so I can’t shoot him again, goes all ‘What’d ya go and shoot him for?!’ - and forget about the fact that he was about to shoot her, starts bandaging him up!”
Sally and Hilde looked at each other and promptly had a giggle fit.
“Poor Duo!” Sally wheezed.
“His ego must have been so bruised!” Hilde all but cooed.
Duo stared at them with his jaw scraping the floor.
One look in his direction and the women doubled over with laughter.
Spluttering in indignation, Duo pointed toward the pool. “You’re supposed to be laughing at those two, not me!”
“I’m sorry Duo, but you just make it too easy,” Hilde said.
Sally sighed. “Well, that’s Relena for you.”
“Hey, at least Heero wasn’t armed anymore. Trowa could’ve squashed Quatre with a single flick of the wrist when he pulled his great pacifist stunt,” Hilde countered. She slapped her cheeks trying to get the grin off of them, but it didn’t do much good.
Still a little huffy, Duo said: “Oh, come on! Heero would have shot her if I hadn’t shot him first! If that doesn’t put her on the same level as Quatre then I don’t know what does.”
“She has always been quite reckless in her philanthropy, hasn’t she?” Sally said. Duo suspected she made it sound fond just to spite him.
“You could call it that,” he groused. “The best thing I could think of was that the two of them must be into some really kinky stuff.”
Sally and Hilde burst out laughing again.
“Finally, a sensible response!”
Sighing, Hilde leaned back against her piece of railing and smirked at Duo. “I sure hope that wasn’t what you thought when I did a heel-face-turn and helped you escape from my old squad, back at the moon.”
“Huh?” Duo didn’t really trust his romance radar so soon after being reminded of the ‘Hilde the Lesbian’ fiasco and finding out that the one pilot out of the lot of them he had pegged as straight was snogging a guy. “What gave you that idea?”
“Don’t you remember? I started out just like Relena, chasing after you because you were up to no good and I had to stop you before you did some serious damage. Only I had a gun and a mobile suit and military authority, I was more or less obligated to do it. And then you went all Quatre on me and I did a Trowa because you turned out not to be such a horrible, trouble-making Heero after all and I realised that it was OZ that was full of shit.”
“Oh, right!” Duo snapped his fingers and smiled at her. “That was when we had that fight and went ‘I’m fighting for the colonies!’, ‘No, I’m fighting for the colonies!’, ‘No I am!’, ‘I am!’ the whole time. I would never forget about that! Converting an evil minion to the good side in mid-combat? Huge ego booster.”
“I have just entered the twilight zone,” Sally said, shaking her head disbelievingly.
“It makes sense if you were there,” Hilde laughed.
“Yeah, it sounds strange if you weren’t there to see it, doesn’t it?” Now it was Duo’s time to become fondly nostalgic. “And it all happened so fast. I almost couldn’t keep up with you, that’s how sudden your defection was.”
“Hey, we were toting guns and beam rifles around and people were shooting at us. We didn’t have the time to think things through properly.” She laughed breathily and exchanged a look with Duo before turning her head up to the spotless sky, a soft smile on her face. “We did everything so impulsively back then. Thought we knew everything, could do everything. That we could change the world all by ourselves and that we were immune to death.”
“Maybe you did.”
Hilde’s smile faded and her gaze dropped to Duo’s suddenly serious expression.
Sensing the change in atmosphere, Duo picked his smile back up and quickly continued: “No, obviously you did. And then I got to bust your pretty little ass out of trouble.”
Hilde tilted her head and squinted at him. “You owed me that one and you know it.”
“I was still the one who changed the world.”
“You wish! You would’ve been nowhere if I hadn’t put my life on the line to get you guys that information on Libra.”
While her younger companions bickered, Sally laughed quietly to herself, thinking: I’m glad me and Wufei didn’t start off as enemies. If Quatre and Trowa, Heero and Relena, and now these two are anything to go by... Heh. It must have been something in the gundanium.
PSAN: Hope you liked it. ^_^
Author: Omnicat
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Platonic, Romance, Friendship, the whole shebang. Humor.
Spoilers & Desirable Foreknowledge: Specific details up until episode 23, general knowledge of everything.
Warnings: Some innuendo and a few ‘Hell’s.
Pairings: That’s a surprise. ;)
Disclaimer: *checks tickybox*
Summary: Trowa and Quatre are discovered in a compromising position, enlightening conversations are held, and revelations about Duo and Heero’s love lives are had. “It must be something in the gundanium.”
Author’s Note: Enjoy!
Forgive and... Fornicate?
Duo stumbled onto the balcony through the gym’s rear entrance, looking very much worse for wear. With the Mediterranean sun highlighting every bruise and blotch in his complexion and sweat streaming down his face, making stray strands of hair stick to his skin, he grabbed the balustrade for support. When he heard the door open again, he turned around and found Hilde and Sally stepping out into the sunlight, only slightly out of breath.
“You girls... are monsters,” he panted. “Isn’t it against the rules to kill your opponent?”
Hilde laughed and slapped a hand down on his shoulder. “Don’t tell me losing bruised your ego, buddy?”
“It’s a game of the devil, I tell you!” Duo exclaimed in a hoarse voice.
“You shouldn’t have turned down Heero’s offer, Duo. Taking both of us on on your own was just asking for trouble,” Sally said, her smile as smug as only a winner’s can be.
Duo grumbled and slumped over the stone balcony railing, too sore and exhausted to argue. He’d get back at them later. Emphasis on later. His weary gaze drifted over the rooftops behind the hotel grounds, the glittering blue ocean beyond that and the shadowy blue ripple of mountains on the horizon, at the other side of the bay, before he wiped his brow and his eyes fell to the pool right below him. Something at the far end, by the outdoor showers, drew his attention.
“What the...” Suddenly no longer feeling like he’d been trampled by a herd of ungulates, he leaned over the railing and squinted his eyes. “...hey, ladies?”
Hilde scrubbed a hotel towel over her face. “Hm?”
“I’m hallucinating, right?”
“What?” Sally said distractedly, busy re-braiding her hair, which had gotten mussed during their game.
“I’m seeing things.” He knuckled his eyes and looked again. “Aren’t I?”
“Duo, what are you talking about?” Hilde demanded, swinging the towel across her neck.
He pointed. “I think I’m seeing Trowa and Quatre under that shower together doing things that are frowned upon in public places. Did I miss getting hit over the head or something back in the gym?”
Peeking over Duo’s shoulder, Sally concluded: “Well, there’s nothing wrong with your eyesight.”
“You mean it’s real?!”
“You mean you didn’t know?” Hilde said, at which Duo whipped his head around fast enough to make the muscles in his neck scream in protest.
“Know?”
“About Trowa and Quatre?” Hilde said, in a tone normally reserved for explaining complex abstract concepts to ten-year-olds. “They’ve been making eyes at each other for ages!”
His own eyes going wide as saucers, Duo’s eyebrows were lost in the mess of his sweaty bangs. “They have?”
Sally tsked. “Don’t look so surprised, Duo. I thought you of all people would understand.”
“Well - I -” Duo spluttered. “Look, I’m not averse to that kind of thing myself, it’s just that... Trowa, okay, I could see that, but Quatre... he never struck me as the type. Never.”
Hilde snorted. “Next thing you’re saying that I never struck you as the lesbian type.”
Duo grimaced. “You’re never gonna let me live that down, are you?”
“When blaming you makes you so easy to blackmail and guilt-trip? Hell no.”
“I still don’t know how you can honestly blame me,” Duo said, eying Hilde as she leaned her elbows on the balcony next to him. “As long as they’re into men, everybody falls for my charms, whether I’m trying or not,” he declared confidently, and added as an afterthought, thinking about how completely unflappable Heero was when it came to him, even in the face of blatant innuendo: “If they’re human, that is.”
Hilde snorted again, but this time she was fighting a blush and a smile. “My sexual preferences are none of your business unless you make them your business,” she said, giving him a meaningful look.
Duo pointedly ignored her, huffing through a blush of his own. “Quatre never came on to me or anything, either. And we spent weeks holed up together in a tropical oasis, do you know how naked that gets?”
“Apparently he already had someone else in mind,” Sally reasoned, calmly rolling the kinks from her shoulders.
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” Hilde said, smiling down at the oblivious couple at the pool. “After they started out the way they did. Trowa said Quatre didn’t hesitate a second.”
“Huh?”
“Trowa told me how he and Quatre first met,” she explained, flashing him a toothy grin. “I was trying to flirt with him, but he told me he was already spoken for, so we got talking and naturally Quatre came up.”
Duo scratched his head. “So? What’s the big deal?”
With one last glance at the snogging couple below them, Hilde turned around and leaned back against the railing to face Duo and Sally.
“Well, when you guys first came to Earth in your gundams, you’d all turned against the original Operation Meteor separately, right?” she asked Duo, who nodded. “But because there wasn’t any contact between you guys, whenever you met another gundam pilot you had to be on your guard, because you didn’t know if the other pilot had defected as well, or if he was there for the real Operation M.” Duo nodded again and settled next to her, arms crossed over his chest.
“Well, that’s what happened to Trowa and Quatre when they first met,” Hilde said, gesturing enthusiastically. “They got into a fight with their MS and reached a kind of stalemate pretty soon, because Trowa was out of ammo and Quatre wanted to play it fair, you know what he’s like. Either way, they had each other backed into a corner. Their MS were holding on to each other so that the other suit couldn’t strike them, but they couldn’t strike the other either without creating an opening for the other guy to get a hit in.”
Duo grinned at her lively imitation of MS manoeuvres.
“So Trowa and Quatre were facing each other down, watching each other’s moves and waiting for an opportunity when suddenly...” Hilde stilled and leaned her upper body towards them, holding up her forefingers. “get this - Quatre opens the hatch of his gundam, steps out onto the hatch and says ‘You and I shouldn’t be fighting each other!’.”
“He did?” Sally laughed. “Oh, that move just has Quatre written all over it, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, no kidding. He goes and steps out of his mobile suit in the middle of a fight and expects the other guy not to crush him with one slap of a giant robo-hand because he says he shouldn’t!”
“So what did Trowa do?” Sally asked.
“Came out with his hands in the air.”
Sally and Hilde laughed until they were blue in the face.
Meanwhile, Duo stood by scratching his head and wracking his brain, trying to remember what that story reminded him of.
“You know...” he said eventually. “that sounds freakishly similar to what happened when I first met Heero and Relena.”
“Huh?” Hilde tried to catch her breath, still hiccupping with mirth.
“I wonder if that means they’ll end up together too some day...” Duo wondered absently.
Sally pointed toward a pair of deck chairs on the side of the pool opposite from Trowa and Quatre. “If what they’re doing down there is what I think they’re doing, they already have.”
Duo and Hilde turned around so fast, Duo’s braid smacked her in the arm.
“No way, is he -” Duo started.
“Is that his hand in her -” Hilde followed.
Sally smirked. “Well, she certainly doesn’t need sun block down there.”
“Oh wow,” Hilde breathed. “What is it with you gundam pilots and public places?” She bit down on her thumb to stifle a squealing laugh.
“See, told you they were just as crazy as Trowa and Quatre.”
Hilde’s brow furrowed with equal parts repressed mirth and confusion. “I knew Heero and Relena were into each other, but what does that have to do with Trowa and Quatre?”
“You mean Relena never told you how she and Heero met me?” Duo exclaimed, a hand pressed to his heart in mock hurt.
“It never really came up...” Hilde said thoughtfully, at which Duo whooped.
“Great! That means I get to tell you. Might wanna sit down, ladies. If you thought Trowa and Quatre were wild, wait till you hear this,” he said, rubbing his hands gleefully. “This happened in April ’95. A true story!”
“Oh boy.” Sally crossed her arms and leaned her hip against the railing. Hilde kept glancing down at the pool as she listened.
“Okay, so here I was,” he started, almost as animatedly as Hilde had told her story about the other two pilots. “minding my own business, biding my time until Deathscythe would come to the surface with the crashed gundam - that’s Wing, if you’ll remember. Heero managed to get into a fight with Zechs the moment he entered the atmosphere. Don’t ask me how, I’m only human. I was planning to salvage his MS and use it for spare parts for Deathscythe, because I thought nobody could have survived that crash, even in a gundam. But of course, turned out it was Heero Yuy I was trying to apply basic laws of nature to.”
“Is that crash what Relena brought him into my hospital for?” Sally asked.
“No, she took him to you after I met them. They’d already met each other a couple times before I saw them at that military port,” Duo said, rubbing his jaw thoughtfully. “I think the first time she found him on a beach, and he ran away when he woke up and she said she’d called an ambulance for him. Or something.”
Sally’s expression became oddly rigid. “I remember an ambulance being reported stolen around that time.”
Hilde burst out laughing and had to hold on to the balustrade to stay upright.
“Oh man, I wish I’d been there to see it!” Duo gasped between guffaws.
“I wish I’d known this then,” Sally said. “He traumatized some of our best nurses!”
Wiping tears of mirth from his eyes, Duo managed to pull himself back together. “God, and I thought he was crazy when I was around.” He heaved a deep breath, tried to exhale, burst out laughing again, and then just gave up on trying to contain his amusement as he spoke.
“Anyway, I was lurking in a dark corner waiting for my gundam to surface when I heard someone shouting. The area was supposed to be deserted, people walking around was a bad sign. So I went to see what was going on, and what I should do about it. I expected to find some Alliance personnel, but what I saw was two kids my own age next to a pile of torpedoes, a guy in sportswear and a pretty girl with a really expensive-looking dress on. Turns out later that Relena’d run away from her birthday party when she heard about Heero being at the port, so she could try and stop him. So now she was standing on a submarine in her fancy dress, yelling at him to step away from the torpedoes and tell her what the Hell he thought he was doing.”
“Don’t tell me Heero did as she told him just like Trowa did with Quatre?” Hilde said.
Duo snorted. “Like Hell he did! Heero was even more of a psycho back then than he is now. He pulled a gun outta nowhere and was gonna shoot her. Me being the good guy I am, I couldn’t let that happen, of course, so I came out of hiding and shot the gun from Heero’s hand. He tried to snatch it back up, I fired a warning shot -”
Sally gave him a sharp look. “A warning shot?”
“...a warning shot... in the leg.”
“He had another bullet wound in his upper arm, if I recall.” By now, Sally was drumming her fingers on the balustrade and giving him a schoolteacher look.
Scratching himself behind the ears, Duo laughed awkwardly. “Yeah, I may have hit him there too when I shot the gun from his hand...”
“Real subtle, Duo,” Sally sighed.
“What?!”
“Never mind, tell us what happened next!” Hilde interrupted.
With one last look at the suspicious smirk on Sally’s face, Duo conceded, settling back against the railing. “Fine, fine. What happens next is Heero can’t fight back anymore with an arm and a leg busted up, Relena jumps between him and me so I can’t shoot him again, goes all ‘What’d ya go and shoot him for?!’ - and forget about the fact that he was about to shoot her, starts bandaging him up!”
Sally and Hilde looked at each other and promptly had a giggle fit.
“Poor Duo!” Sally wheezed.
“His ego must have been so bruised!” Hilde all but cooed.
Duo stared at them with his jaw scraping the floor.
One look in his direction and the women doubled over with laughter.
Spluttering in indignation, Duo pointed toward the pool. “You’re supposed to be laughing at those two, not me!”
“I’m sorry Duo, but you just make it too easy,” Hilde said.
Sally sighed. “Well, that’s Relena for you.”
“Hey, at least Heero wasn’t armed anymore. Trowa could’ve squashed Quatre with a single flick of the wrist when he pulled his great pacifist stunt,” Hilde countered. She slapped her cheeks trying to get the grin off of them, but it didn’t do much good.
Still a little huffy, Duo said: “Oh, come on! Heero would have shot her if I hadn’t shot him first! If that doesn’t put her on the same level as Quatre then I don’t know what does.”
“She has always been quite reckless in her philanthropy, hasn’t she?” Sally said. Duo suspected she made it sound fond just to spite him.
“You could call it that,” he groused. “The best thing I could think of was that the two of them must be into some really kinky stuff.”
Sally and Hilde burst out laughing again.
“Finally, a sensible response!”
Sighing, Hilde leaned back against her piece of railing and smirked at Duo. “I sure hope that wasn’t what you thought when I did a heel-face-turn and helped you escape from my old squad, back at the moon.”
“Huh?” Duo didn’t really trust his romance radar so soon after being reminded of the ‘Hilde the Lesbian’ fiasco and finding out that the one pilot out of the lot of them he had pegged as straight was snogging a guy. “What gave you that idea?”
“Don’t you remember? I started out just like Relena, chasing after you because you were up to no good and I had to stop you before you did some serious damage. Only I had a gun and a mobile suit and military authority, I was more or less obligated to do it. And then you went all Quatre on me and I did a Trowa because you turned out not to be such a horrible, trouble-making Heero after all and I realised that it was OZ that was full of shit.”
“Oh, right!” Duo snapped his fingers and smiled at her. “That was when we had that fight and went ‘I’m fighting for the colonies!’, ‘No, I’m fighting for the colonies!’, ‘No I am!’, ‘I am!’ the whole time. I would never forget about that! Converting an evil minion to the good side in mid-combat? Huge ego booster.”
“I have just entered the twilight zone,” Sally said, shaking her head disbelievingly.
“It makes sense if you were there,” Hilde laughed.
“Yeah, it sounds strange if you weren’t there to see it, doesn’t it?” Now it was Duo’s time to become fondly nostalgic. “And it all happened so fast. I almost couldn’t keep up with you, that’s how sudden your defection was.”
“Hey, we were toting guns and beam rifles around and people were shooting at us. We didn’t have the time to think things through properly.” She laughed breathily and exchanged a look with Duo before turning her head up to the spotless sky, a soft smile on her face. “We did everything so impulsively back then. Thought we knew everything, could do everything. That we could change the world all by ourselves and that we were immune to death.”
“Maybe you did.”
Hilde’s smile faded and her gaze dropped to Duo’s suddenly serious expression.
Sensing the change in atmosphere, Duo picked his smile back up and quickly continued: “No, obviously you did. And then I got to bust your pretty little ass out of trouble.”
Hilde tilted her head and squinted at him. “You owed me that one and you know it.”
“I was still the one who changed the world.”
“You wish! You would’ve been nowhere if I hadn’t put my life on the line to get you guys that information on Libra.”
While her younger companions bickered, Sally laughed quietly to herself, thinking: I’m glad me and Wufei didn’t start off as enemies. If Quatre and Trowa, Heero and Relena, and now these two are anything to go by... Heh. It must have been something in the gundanium.
PSAN: Hope you liked it. ^_^