[fic] The Long Way Home, Pt 1 I GUESS.
My take on the age old "Duo gets hurt and Heero takes care of him or vice-versa" fic. Nothing really groundbreaking going on here, I just always wanted to play with this a little.
LJ says this post is too long so this one-shot is getting broken up into 2 parts. bleh.
Title: The Long Way Home
Pairing: 1x2
Rating: R?
Warnings: Post-EW, Preventers, brief lemon, a little angst
The bullets whiz by them before they even realize they’ve been discovered. Duo swears under his breath even as he’s ducking behind a shipping container, fast behind Heero, and reaching for his gun.
A setup? A trap? Are they losing their touch? Duo has no idea how this could happen. The situation has become wildly out of control and he hates that feeling. He knows Heero hates it even more.
“What the hell,” he mutters, as footsteps warily approach. He ducks out around the side of the crate to land a shot on one of the guys trying to blow their heads off. He goes down hard and Duo thinks, maybe they’ll get out of this all right.
“They knew we were coming,” Heero says. “That source was a plant, or they got to him first. I thought it was too quiet when we got here.”
“Shit. Can we call in backup?”
“I already did. But.” Heero pauses to swing around the edge and fire at another combatant. “We’re going to have to extricate ourselves first.”
They are at least two miles from the road, deep in a maze of shipping containers and cranes, and they parked their vehicle another two miles past that. If the nearest Preventers agency can mobilize immediately, they have probably twenty minutes before anyone steps foot here to back them up. In twenty minutes, either these guys will be dead, or they will be.
That’s the kind of math Duo hates. The guy he shot open is wearing tactical armor. He had to land one between the eyes to hit a weak spot. These guys are dressed for us, he thinks. They’re surely blocking all the exits.
“Fuck.” He’s not offering much in the way of plans. The math is still swirling in his head, the shitty odds and the increasingly desperate ideas he’s coming up with to tip them in their favor, even slightly.
“You said it.” Heero has the balls to grin at him.
They shoot a few more guys, but they’re quickly being surrounded and they know it. They need to create an opening to get back out to the road.
“We should head to the northwest exit,” Heero says. It’s redundant, because they always go over escape routes before a mission, even when they don’t think it’s going to go totally sideways like this one suddenly has. The northwest exit is closest to their vehicle, it has some cover along the way, and they’ll have better odds where they won’t have to worry about covering all their blind spots, just what’s immediately ahead and immediately behind.
They reload their ammo, and look at each other, waiting for a break in the hail of gunfire. Heero doesn’t look afraid. He looks wild and gorgeous, Duo thinks insanely. Heero is always gorgeous, he thinks it all the time, but now and here of all times and places. He wants to laugh at himself.
Duo is suddenly, stupidly, afraid they might die. He wants to say something to Heero, but it seems even more insane to say anything now. He’s pathetically afraid to even say something like “good luck,” even though he knows that’s what they need now more than anything. Anything more than that, well, he’ll just have to hope they see each other on the other side of this.
The gunfire quiets, and Heero gives him a nod.
“Okay.”
The next twenty minutes are a blur. Duo covers Heero’s back, Heero taking the front, and they push forward from point of cover to point of cover, dropping a guy or two each time. Bullets ricochet off the metal containers around them, and they use the deafening noise to hide their footsteps, succeeding in sneaking up on an enemy or two. Heero drives his knife into their backs and tears it upwards, loathe to waste bullets, dropping the dead men to the ground when he’s satisfied they’re no longer a threat, scavenging their weapons for ammo.
They are a half a mile to the exit, ducking between containers and equipment, and Duo stops feeling like every step is the last he’s going to take. They’re so close, and this last part is easy, they’ve dropped probably twenty guys already. Heero is a stoic comfort in front of him. There’s just something about them, together, that makes him feel invincible, like pulling off an escape from an ambush where they’re outnumbered twenty to one is no big deal, just another day in the life of Duo Maxwell and Heero Yuy, a pair of lucky sons of bitches. He’s going to feel so stupid later for being scared they wouldn’t make it out.
The bullet with his name on it is a lucky shot, one of those awful random freak occurrences that plague his life. It’s wildly off the mark, but it ricochets just right off the shipping container to Duo’s right and lodges in his chest. He can hear a rib crack, and strangely, that’s the first thing he thinks, that it’s disgusting that he can hear himself die. The bullet tears its way out of his chest and makes its final destination in Duo’s bicep. Great, another hole. They’ll have to put him in long sleeves at the funeral.
Pain fills him and he staggers against the treacherous crate, willing himself upright again. He can feel warm blood pour over his shirt. Great, that’s ruined too.
Heero whirls as soon as he hears the sound of Duo’s body bang against the metal, and his eyes go wide. That look scares the shit out of Duo, finally, because Heero looks fucking terrified. He hates it, he hates that bleeding stupidly all over himself like this has put that look on Heero’s face.
An enemy fills the space in front of them, and Duo finds himself pathetically unable to raise his arm to shoot him. Heero takes the guy down, not even really looking in his direction.
“Go,” Duo says, because he feels like he has to, even though speaking make his lungs feel like they’re on fire. Even though the last thing he wants is for Heero to leave him. No, the last thing he truly wants is for Heero to die too, saving his stupid ass, and that means he has to tell him to go on without him.
“Shut up,” Heero says, so quickly it makes Duo kind of want to fucking cry. “Stop talking, just apply pressure. I’ll get us out of here.”
He slings an arm around Duo as delicately as he can. Duo lets himself lean heavily into Heero, half cursing him for being a heroic moron, half ecstatic. He has nothing to press against the wound but his own hand, so he applies pressure as best he can with his palm, his own blood flowing hot between his fingers, until the corners of his vision goes dark and he thinks no more.
****
Heero takes down five more patrolmen on his frantic push to the exit. Adrenaline and combat training kick in until he can sense enemies before they appear ahead or behind him, and no one surprises them again.
Duo is a dead weight under his arm. He’s almost afraid to look at him, because he knows what he’s going to see is horrible, a vision that until now he’s only seen in nightmares. He keeps talking, not sure if Duo can hear him, if he’s still there or unconscious or… he refuses to vocalize the last possibility, even in his mind.
“Duo, stay with me. Stay awake. We’re almost there.”
The goddamn backup is at the gate when he finally arrives, and he’s so grateful to see evac units standing by that he feels almost delirious. Preventers run past him to clear out the rest of the combatants and try to salvage some of this mission, but Heero makes a beeline for the nearest ambulance and pulls the heavy doors open.
“He’s been shot in the chest, likely broken ribs. Risk of pneumothorax. We need to drain the cavity, get a blood line going, and IV,” he says robotically to the shocked EMTs within. They begin setting up the IV and transfusion line as Heero lays Duo down gently onto the gurney. He’s completely out, his lips pale, his hands covered in blood. There’s another ragged hole in his right jacket sleeve that Heero suddenly notices. Shit.
“Duo, hang on,” he says stupidly, as he reaches for scissors himself to cut away Duo’s jacket. “Hey! Move this truck! Now!”
The evac peels away, not nearly fast enough for Heero’s liking. He stares down at the second gunshot wound on Duo’s arm, leaking blood, surveying the damage of the bullet even on a ricochet, and tries not to think about the shrapnel and bone shards floating around in Duo’s chest.
He bandages Duo’s arm, barking orders at the two EMTs, who thankfully take it in stride. They pull out a large syringe and catheter and insert it forcefully into the space above Duo’s third rib on his right side, to let the air escape that’s trapped in his chest and collapsing his lung. Heero wants to find something they’re doing wrong, so he has someone else to blame besides himself for what’s happened. He stares down at Duo and runs the events over and over in his mind, like he can rewind them and make it so this never happened. He keeps one hand closed over Duo’s wrist, feeling his weak pulse through his shaking fingers.
Stolen mobile suit parts weren’t worth this at all. He doesn’t give a damn about what was in those shipping containers, those pirates could build a fucking gundam with what they stole for all he cares now.
He looks at Duo’s pale face, the ashen skin around his eyes, and wants to take the whole thing back, this mission, joining the Preventers, all of it. He wants to put them on an island somewhere, a remote colony, anywhere but in the back of this truck, where he’s watching the only person he gives a damn about bleed out all over the white sheets of this gurney.
He’s happy, at least, to see a veritable crowd of nurses and doctors waiting for them at the hospital. Happy at the moment just means less wildly enraged, but he’ll take it. The staff swarm the evac as soon as it comes to a stop, wheeling the gurney through the hospital doors and away from him. He practically runs after it down the hall to watch it disappear into Operating Room 3, and then Duo is gone to him, his fate in the hands of a slew of doctors Heero has never seen before, in a hospital he’s not familiar with.
He has nothing to distract him now that Duo is gone. He stares at the closed doors of the OR until something like nausea overtakes him and he rushes down the hall to the nearest bathroom, throws the door open and staggers into a stall, and here is where his legs give out and he slides pathetically down the wall, collapsing on the floor. He throws his hands up over his face and shakes uncontrollably, almost dry heaving, his palms pressed hard against his eyes.
When he can finally control himself long enough to pick himself up off the floor again, he decides he needs a report on Duo’s condition. He walks back to the operating room and glares through the window until someone comes out to tell him what he already knows, that it’s basically a crapshoot at this point, but they’re doing all they can. At least he’s heard it from someone else now.
There are chairs outside the room and he slumps into one, ready to stay there until there’s news. He forces himself not to think about what he will do if that news is bad.
Instead, he just thinks about Duo, which hurts almost as much. Lately, it’s seemed like it hurts every time he thinks about Duo. He’s become less and less satisfied with the contentment their friendship and partnership brings him, but the thought of doing anything else is also terrifying. He can be risky sometimes on missions, in the war, making snap decisions because his heart pulls him one way or the other, but he refuses to take risks when it comes to Duo. What they have is too important. He knows he’ll never find anything like it again. And now, and now…
Hours into surgery, Noin appears, hurrying down the hall, her pretty face contorted in worry.
“Heero,” she says when she sees him, and sounds like she’s about to cry. “Is he…”
“In surgery. He lost a lot of blood, his blood pressure’s low. We did a transfusion in the evac on the way here.” It sounds like someone else saying the words. The part about a transfusion sounds like an apology, like he tried to save him but couldn’t. He wishes he was talking about someone he didn’t know, not the unwitting love of his life.
“Oh my god,” Noin says. Neither of them are trying to act professionally. Duo brings that out in everyone, it seems. “Oh god.”
She places a hand on his shoulder, and Heero wonders how bad he must look for her to do so. They stand for a while in silence, staring at the operating room like Duo might come tumbling out of it, right as rain.
“He’ll be all right,” she says, for Heero’s benefit.
“Yeah,” he says, for hers.
“Do you need anything?”
Heero has not given this a single thought until now, but he realizes he is hours from home and has no plans to return to their city anytime soon.
“I’ll need a hotel room. And clothes.” The ones he’s wearing are covered in Duo’s blood.
“You got it. I’ll have someone grab some from your apartment?”
Heero nods.
“Thanks.”
“Of course,” Noin says, and looks dangerously close to crying again. She steps out of the hallway quickly and hurries away. Heero slumps back into a chair and waits.
***
They bring Duo out hours later and Heero is immediately on his feet. It’s hard to look at the gurney, the tubes and gauze and breathing apparatus all strapped on and around Duo. The nurses look him over and allow him to follow them into a room with a bed. He takes a position in a corner while they lower him onto it, hooking him up to monitors and hanging up his IV. When they’re finished, they look to him expectantly.
“I’m staying with him.”
He pulls out his badge as if this will help press his case. One of the nurses looks at it, then at him, the bloody clothes he’s still wearing.
“Who are you?”
“I’m his partner,” he says.
He takes advantage of whatever ambiguity that word may hold to them. They look at each other, unsure what to do. He can tell they want to kick him out of the room, but he won’t allow them, short of being arrested, court martialed, and even then. They’ll probably need to shoot him to get him to leave.
A doctor comes in then, approaching Heero like he’s been looking for him.
“Agent Yuy,” he says, and for some reason, that works to shuffle the nurses out of the room at last.
He gives him the surgery debrief and Heero lets the words wash over him as he stares at Duo’s prone form on the bed. Major blood loss. Traumatic injury to the chest and right lung. Coded out. Resuscitated. Pressure in the brain. Medically induced coma. But he is alive. If he can get that far, Heero is sure that Duo can beat the rest of it.
He just doesn’t know when, and neither does the doctor. But Duo isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
The doctor leaves him in the room. Maybe Noin has told them to allow him to stay here. He was sure he would get more resistance to the idea. There is a single chair in a corner of the room, and Heero pulls it up alongside the bed.
He hates to see Duo like this, like a half-dissected science experiment, but he would rather see Duo looking like shit than not see him at all. He puts his hand gently over Duo’s on the bed, mindful of the IV needle and the monitor on his finger. It’s cold. He presses down a little, meaning to warm it with his own.
“Duo, please,” he says, like he can will Duo awake with the words.
But Duo sleeps, and eventually, Heero does too, their hands still pressed together on the bed.
****
In the days that follow, Heero heads to the hotel only to change and shower, and the entire time he’s gone from the hospital he feels almost panicked, like something terrible will happen if he isn’t there to watch over Duo. He first heads there after finally being made aware of how disgusting he is, wearing two day old clothing covered in dried, stinking blood, and in the room he finds his clothing neatly laid out, just as Noin promised. He slips on a sweater rather than another Preventers uniform and the comfort of it is overwhelming for a moment.
When he can stand it, he gives Noin his mission debrief, that they were ambushed, clearly set up from the get go when they arrived to inspect the suspect shipping containers for stolen mobile suit parts. That combatants opened fire, and they returned it, and Duo was hit, the bullet ricocheting off his ribs and lodging in his right arm. In all, he learns, Duo and he killed twenty-five enemies. Some of those remaining are now in Preventers custody.
“Jesus,” Noin says. “It’s a wonder both of you made it out alive. I’m proud of you.”
Heero has done absolutely nothing to be proud of, he thinks later, running his palm over Duo’s hand at his bedside.
Word gets out about Duo. Heero suspects that Noin might have called their compatriots, because Wufei, Quatre, and Trowa show up at the hospital, one by one, then Hilde, who nearly collapses when she sees Duo on the bed. She cries against Heero’s chest and comforting her almost feels like getting comfort himself. The room is frequently bustling with activity as friends visit, and Heero finds himself standing in the corner most of the time, happy but also feeling a little possessive, like he wants to shut the door and have Duo all to himself again. It’s an ugly feeling that he pushes away.
He never leaves the room to sleep, electing instead to spend his nights in that uncomfortable hospital chair, his hand over Duo’s. He has nightmares there. In one, Duo collapses in his arms and fades away as he screams his name. In another, Heero tries to save Duo from a great wave that crashes around them both, separating them with incredible force. He sees Duo’s fingers slip away before he’s gone entirely.
He also has dreams where he and Duo stand in a field, looking down at a city Heero is pretty sure he’s never seen in real life. Duo sometimes wears his Preventer’s uniform, but other times it’s the strange priest habit he used to know him by. Duo slips his fingers through Heero’s, their palms flush.
“Do you want to go see what’s down there?” he says to Heero, but Heero is cautious for some reason he can never remember when he wakes, and asks Duo to stay in the field, the two of them. Sometimes Duo does, and other times he walks away toward the city, Heero left watching him go.
He tells Duo his dreams, even though he’s pretty sure he can’t hear him. He tells him other things, too, deeply hidden things, because it doesn’t feel risky anymore to tell Duo how he feels. Once he starts talking about it, he finds it hard to shut up, and he thinks that if Duo can hear him at all, he’s probably wishing he’d knock it off.
“There was that time we were assigned to the Sanc Ministers’ Ball, remember?” he says, running his thumb along the back of Duo’s hand, the IV needle hard beneath the skin. “There were bomb threats called in a couple of days before. We had to wear suits and ties to try to blend in, not cause alarm. I snuck a couple of drinks because I couldn’t stop staring at you in those dress pants.” Heero laughs at the memory now, remembering how mortified he was that Duo had this effect on him. “I felt like a fool. But I thought about how good you looked that night for months.”
He tells him how all those requests for sparring in the gym are mostly just excuses to be close to him, to touch him surreptitiously. How the nights alone together, poring over mission details in a hotel room, their thoughts so in sync they find they barely need to speak, are the most intimate moments of his life, his most cherished memories.
“You have no idea how often I look at you and want to kiss you,” he says, his face flushing pathetically, even though they are alone in the hospital room. “It’s really distracting. I wish you’d knock that off.”
But he doesn’t really, and if Duo wakes up, he’ll never tell him to knock anything off again. Heero aches to hear his voice.
He thinks of quitting the Preventers almost every day. The thought of going back on another mission, of Duo putting his life in danger again, is nauseating. Even if he stays, he decides, Duo’s going to need a lot of time to get back to fighting condition, and someone is going to need to help him with that, and Heero feels like he might literally shoot anyone else who tries to do that besides him. He is going to be the one by Duo’s side for the rest of his life, and the only person who can tell him otherwise is Duo himself.
Other than coming to visit Duo herself, Noin leaves Heero alone as a supervisor. She doesn’t seem surprised the first time she walks in to find Heero with his hand on Duo’s, just amused. She squeezes his shoulder and they watch Duo sleep for a while.
“He’ll be all right,” she says, every time.
“Yeah, he will.”
The hospital food is terrible, not that he has a particularly sophisticated palate. He tells Duo about it, because he knows Duo would find it hilarious.
“Maybe I can request an IV of my own,” Heero says, chewing on a cold sandwich. “You’re really the lucky one here.”
The doctors say his vitals keep looking better, his dressings come away clean. He appears to be recovering normally. But they don’t know how long it will be until he wakes up.
It’s okay. Heero will wait.
LJ says this post is too long so this one-shot is getting broken up into 2 parts. bleh.
Title: The Long Way Home
Pairing: 1x2
Rating: R?
Warnings: Post-EW, Preventers, brief lemon, a little angst
The bullets whiz by them before they even realize they’ve been discovered. Duo swears under his breath even as he’s ducking behind a shipping container, fast behind Heero, and reaching for his gun.
A setup? A trap? Are they losing their touch? Duo has no idea how this could happen. The situation has become wildly out of control and he hates that feeling. He knows Heero hates it even more.
“What the hell,” he mutters, as footsteps warily approach. He ducks out around the side of the crate to land a shot on one of the guys trying to blow their heads off. He goes down hard and Duo thinks, maybe they’ll get out of this all right.
“They knew we were coming,” Heero says. “That source was a plant, or they got to him first. I thought it was too quiet when we got here.”
“Shit. Can we call in backup?”
“I already did. But.” Heero pauses to swing around the edge and fire at another combatant. “We’re going to have to extricate ourselves first.”
They are at least two miles from the road, deep in a maze of shipping containers and cranes, and they parked their vehicle another two miles past that. If the nearest Preventers agency can mobilize immediately, they have probably twenty minutes before anyone steps foot here to back them up. In twenty minutes, either these guys will be dead, or they will be.
That’s the kind of math Duo hates. The guy he shot open is wearing tactical armor. He had to land one between the eyes to hit a weak spot. These guys are dressed for us, he thinks. They’re surely blocking all the exits.
“Fuck.” He’s not offering much in the way of plans. The math is still swirling in his head, the shitty odds and the increasingly desperate ideas he’s coming up with to tip them in their favor, even slightly.
“You said it.” Heero has the balls to grin at him.
They shoot a few more guys, but they’re quickly being surrounded and they know it. They need to create an opening to get back out to the road.
“We should head to the northwest exit,” Heero says. It’s redundant, because they always go over escape routes before a mission, even when they don’t think it’s going to go totally sideways like this one suddenly has. The northwest exit is closest to their vehicle, it has some cover along the way, and they’ll have better odds where they won’t have to worry about covering all their blind spots, just what’s immediately ahead and immediately behind.
They reload their ammo, and look at each other, waiting for a break in the hail of gunfire. Heero doesn’t look afraid. He looks wild and gorgeous, Duo thinks insanely. Heero is always gorgeous, he thinks it all the time, but now and here of all times and places. He wants to laugh at himself.
Duo is suddenly, stupidly, afraid they might die. He wants to say something to Heero, but it seems even more insane to say anything now. He’s pathetically afraid to even say something like “good luck,” even though he knows that’s what they need now more than anything. Anything more than that, well, he’ll just have to hope they see each other on the other side of this.
The gunfire quiets, and Heero gives him a nod.
“Okay.”
The next twenty minutes are a blur. Duo covers Heero’s back, Heero taking the front, and they push forward from point of cover to point of cover, dropping a guy or two each time. Bullets ricochet off the metal containers around them, and they use the deafening noise to hide their footsteps, succeeding in sneaking up on an enemy or two. Heero drives his knife into their backs and tears it upwards, loathe to waste bullets, dropping the dead men to the ground when he’s satisfied they’re no longer a threat, scavenging their weapons for ammo.
They are a half a mile to the exit, ducking between containers and equipment, and Duo stops feeling like every step is the last he’s going to take. They’re so close, and this last part is easy, they’ve dropped probably twenty guys already. Heero is a stoic comfort in front of him. There’s just something about them, together, that makes him feel invincible, like pulling off an escape from an ambush where they’re outnumbered twenty to one is no big deal, just another day in the life of Duo Maxwell and Heero Yuy, a pair of lucky sons of bitches. He’s going to feel so stupid later for being scared they wouldn’t make it out.
The bullet with his name on it is a lucky shot, one of those awful random freak occurrences that plague his life. It’s wildly off the mark, but it ricochets just right off the shipping container to Duo’s right and lodges in his chest. He can hear a rib crack, and strangely, that’s the first thing he thinks, that it’s disgusting that he can hear himself die. The bullet tears its way out of his chest and makes its final destination in Duo’s bicep. Great, another hole. They’ll have to put him in long sleeves at the funeral.
Pain fills him and he staggers against the treacherous crate, willing himself upright again. He can feel warm blood pour over his shirt. Great, that’s ruined too.
Heero whirls as soon as he hears the sound of Duo’s body bang against the metal, and his eyes go wide. That look scares the shit out of Duo, finally, because Heero looks fucking terrified. He hates it, he hates that bleeding stupidly all over himself like this has put that look on Heero’s face.
An enemy fills the space in front of them, and Duo finds himself pathetically unable to raise his arm to shoot him. Heero takes the guy down, not even really looking in his direction.
“Go,” Duo says, because he feels like he has to, even though speaking make his lungs feel like they’re on fire. Even though the last thing he wants is for Heero to leave him. No, the last thing he truly wants is for Heero to die too, saving his stupid ass, and that means he has to tell him to go on without him.
“Shut up,” Heero says, so quickly it makes Duo kind of want to fucking cry. “Stop talking, just apply pressure. I’ll get us out of here.”
He slings an arm around Duo as delicately as he can. Duo lets himself lean heavily into Heero, half cursing him for being a heroic moron, half ecstatic. He has nothing to press against the wound but his own hand, so he applies pressure as best he can with his palm, his own blood flowing hot between his fingers, until the corners of his vision goes dark and he thinks no more.
****
Heero takes down five more patrolmen on his frantic push to the exit. Adrenaline and combat training kick in until he can sense enemies before they appear ahead or behind him, and no one surprises them again.
Duo is a dead weight under his arm. He’s almost afraid to look at him, because he knows what he’s going to see is horrible, a vision that until now he’s only seen in nightmares. He keeps talking, not sure if Duo can hear him, if he’s still there or unconscious or… he refuses to vocalize the last possibility, even in his mind.
“Duo, stay with me. Stay awake. We’re almost there.”
The goddamn backup is at the gate when he finally arrives, and he’s so grateful to see evac units standing by that he feels almost delirious. Preventers run past him to clear out the rest of the combatants and try to salvage some of this mission, but Heero makes a beeline for the nearest ambulance and pulls the heavy doors open.
“He’s been shot in the chest, likely broken ribs. Risk of pneumothorax. We need to drain the cavity, get a blood line going, and IV,” he says robotically to the shocked EMTs within. They begin setting up the IV and transfusion line as Heero lays Duo down gently onto the gurney. He’s completely out, his lips pale, his hands covered in blood. There’s another ragged hole in his right jacket sleeve that Heero suddenly notices. Shit.
“Duo, hang on,” he says stupidly, as he reaches for scissors himself to cut away Duo’s jacket. “Hey! Move this truck! Now!”
The evac peels away, not nearly fast enough for Heero’s liking. He stares down at the second gunshot wound on Duo’s arm, leaking blood, surveying the damage of the bullet even on a ricochet, and tries not to think about the shrapnel and bone shards floating around in Duo’s chest.
He bandages Duo’s arm, barking orders at the two EMTs, who thankfully take it in stride. They pull out a large syringe and catheter and insert it forcefully into the space above Duo’s third rib on his right side, to let the air escape that’s trapped in his chest and collapsing his lung. Heero wants to find something they’re doing wrong, so he has someone else to blame besides himself for what’s happened. He stares down at Duo and runs the events over and over in his mind, like he can rewind them and make it so this never happened. He keeps one hand closed over Duo’s wrist, feeling his weak pulse through his shaking fingers.
Stolen mobile suit parts weren’t worth this at all. He doesn’t give a damn about what was in those shipping containers, those pirates could build a fucking gundam with what they stole for all he cares now.
He looks at Duo’s pale face, the ashen skin around his eyes, and wants to take the whole thing back, this mission, joining the Preventers, all of it. He wants to put them on an island somewhere, a remote colony, anywhere but in the back of this truck, where he’s watching the only person he gives a damn about bleed out all over the white sheets of this gurney.
He’s happy, at least, to see a veritable crowd of nurses and doctors waiting for them at the hospital. Happy at the moment just means less wildly enraged, but he’ll take it. The staff swarm the evac as soon as it comes to a stop, wheeling the gurney through the hospital doors and away from him. He practically runs after it down the hall to watch it disappear into Operating Room 3, and then Duo is gone to him, his fate in the hands of a slew of doctors Heero has never seen before, in a hospital he’s not familiar with.
He has nothing to distract him now that Duo is gone. He stares at the closed doors of the OR until something like nausea overtakes him and he rushes down the hall to the nearest bathroom, throws the door open and staggers into a stall, and here is where his legs give out and he slides pathetically down the wall, collapsing on the floor. He throws his hands up over his face and shakes uncontrollably, almost dry heaving, his palms pressed hard against his eyes.
When he can finally control himself long enough to pick himself up off the floor again, he decides he needs a report on Duo’s condition. He walks back to the operating room and glares through the window until someone comes out to tell him what he already knows, that it’s basically a crapshoot at this point, but they’re doing all they can. At least he’s heard it from someone else now.
There are chairs outside the room and he slumps into one, ready to stay there until there’s news. He forces himself not to think about what he will do if that news is bad.
Instead, he just thinks about Duo, which hurts almost as much. Lately, it’s seemed like it hurts every time he thinks about Duo. He’s become less and less satisfied with the contentment their friendship and partnership brings him, but the thought of doing anything else is also terrifying. He can be risky sometimes on missions, in the war, making snap decisions because his heart pulls him one way or the other, but he refuses to take risks when it comes to Duo. What they have is too important. He knows he’ll never find anything like it again. And now, and now…
Hours into surgery, Noin appears, hurrying down the hall, her pretty face contorted in worry.
“Heero,” she says when she sees him, and sounds like she’s about to cry. “Is he…”
“In surgery. He lost a lot of blood, his blood pressure’s low. We did a transfusion in the evac on the way here.” It sounds like someone else saying the words. The part about a transfusion sounds like an apology, like he tried to save him but couldn’t. He wishes he was talking about someone he didn’t know, not the unwitting love of his life.
“Oh my god,” Noin says. Neither of them are trying to act professionally. Duo brings that out in everyone, it seems. “Oh god.”
She places a hand on his shoulder, and Heero wonders how bad he must look for her to do so. They stand for a while in silence, staring at the operating room like Duo might come tumbling out of it, right as rain.
“He’ll be all right,” she says, for Heero’s benefit.
“Yeah,” he says, for hers.
“Do you need anything?”
Heero has not given this a single thought until now, but he realizes he is hours from home and has no plans to return to their city anytime soon.
“I’ll need a hotel room. And clothes.” The ones he’s wearing are covered in Duo’s blood.
“You got it. I’ll have someone grab some from your apartment?”
Heero nods.
“Thanks.”
“Of course,” Noin says, and looks dangerously close to crying again. She steps out of the hallway quickly and hurries away. Heero slumps back into a chair and waits.
***
They bring Duo out hours later and Heero is immediately on his feet. It’s hard to look at the gurney, the tubes and gauze and breathing apparatus all strapped on and around Duo. The nurses look him over and allow him to follow them into a room with a bed. He takes a position in a corner while they lower him onto it, hooking him up to monitors and hanging up his IV. When they’re finished, they look to him expectantly.
“I’m staying with him.”
He pulls out his badge as if this will help press his case. One of the nurses looks at it, then at him, the bloody clothes he’s still wearing.
“Who are you?”
“I’m his partner,” he says.
He takes advantage of whatever ambiguity that word may hold to them. They look at each other, unsure what to do. He can tell they want to kick him out of the room, but he won’t allow them, short of being arrested, court martialed, and even then. They’ll probably need to shoot him to get him to leave.
A doctor comes in then, approaching Heero like he’s been looking for him.
“Agent Yuy,” he says, and for some reason, that works to shuffle the nurses out of the room at last.
He gives him the surgery debrief and Heero lets the words wash over him as he stares at Duo’s prone form on the bed. Major blood loss. Traumatic injury to the chest and right lung. Coded out. Resuscitated. Pressure in the brain. Medically induced coma. But he is alive. If he can get that far, Heero is sure that Duo can beat the rest of it.
He just doesn’t know when, and neither does the doctor. But Duo isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
The doctor leaves him in the room. Maybe Noin has told them to allow him to stay here. He was sure he would get more resistance to the idea. There is a single chair in a corner of the room, and Heero pulls it up alongside the bed.
He hates to see Duo like this, like a half-dissected science experiment, but he would rather see Duo looking like shit than not see him at all. He puts his hand gently over Duo’s on the bed, mindful of the IV needle and the monitor on his finger. It’s cold. He presses down a little, meaning to warm it with his own.
“Duo, please,” he says, like he can will Duo awake with the words.
But Duo sleeps, and eventually, Heero does too, their hands still pressed together on the bed.
****
In the days that follow, Heero heads to the hotel only to change and shower, and the entire time he’s gone from the hospital he feels almost panicked, like something terrible will happen if he isn’t there to watch over Duo. He first heads there after finally being made aware of how disgusting he is, wearing two day old clothing covered in dried, stinking blood, and in the room he finds his clothing neatly laid out, just as Noin promised. He slips on a sweater rather than another Preventers uniform and the comfort of it is overwhelming for a moment.
When he can stand it, he gives Noin his mission debrief, that they were ambushed, clearly set up from the get go when they arrived to inspect the suspect shipping containers for stolen mobile suit parts. That combatants opened fire, and they returned it, and Duo was hit, the bullet ricocheting off his ribs and lodging in his right arm. In all, he learns, Duo and he killed twenty-five enemies. Some of those remaining are now in Preventers custody.
“Jesus,” Noin says. “It’s a wonder both of you made it out alive. I’m proud of you.”
Heero has done absolutely nothing to be proud of, he thinks later, running his palm over Duo’s hand at his bedside.
Word gets out about Duo. Heero suspects that Noin might have called their compatriots, because Wufei, Quatre, and Trowa show up at the hospital, one by one, then Hilde, who nearly collapses when she sees Duo on the bed. She cries against Heero’s chest and comforting her almost feels like getting comfort himself. The room is frequently bustling with activity as friends visit, and Heero finds himself standing in the corner most of the time, happy but also feeling a little possessive, like he wants to shut the door and have Duo all to himself again. It’s an ugly feeling that he pushes away.
He never leaves the room to sleep, electing instead to spend his nights in that uncomfortable hospital chair, his hand over Duo’s. He has nightmares there. In one, Duo collapses in his arms and fades away as he screams his name. In another, Heero tries to save Duo from a great wave that crashes around them both, separating them with incredible force. He sees Duo’s fingers slip away before he’s gone entirely.
He also has dreams where he and Duo stand in a field, looking down at a city Heero is pretty sure he’s never seen in real life. Duo sometimes wears his Preventer’s uniform, but other times it’s the strange priest habit he used to know him by. Duo slips his fingers through Heero’s, their palms flush.
“Do you want to go see what’s down there?” he says to Heero, but Heero is cautious for some reason he can never remember when he wakes, and asks Duo to stay in the field, the two of them. Sometimes Duo does, and other times he walks away toward the city, Heero left watching him go.
He tells Duo his dreams, even though he’s pretty sure he can’t hear him. He tells him other things, too, deeply hidden things, because it doesn’t feel risky anymore to tell Duo how he feels. Once he starts talking about it, he finds it hard to shut up, and he thinks that if Duo can hear him at all, he’s probably wishing he’d knock it off.
“There was that time we were assigned to the Sanc Ministers’ Ball, remember?” he says, running his thumb along the back of Duo’s hand, the IV needle hard beneath the skin. “There were bomb threats called in a couple of days before. We had to wear suits and ties to try to blend in, not cause alarm. I snuck a couple of drinks because I couldn’t stop staring at you in those dress pants.” Heero laughs at the memory now, remembering how mortified he was that Duo had this effect on him. “I felt like a fool. But I thought about how good you looked that night for months.”
He tells him how all those requests for sparring in the gym are mostly just excuses to be close to him, to touch him surreptitiously. How the nights alone together, poring over mission details in a hotel room, their thoughts so in sync they find they barely need to speak, are the most intimate moments of his life, his most cherished memories.
“You have no idea how often I look at you and want to kiss you,” he says, his face flushing pathetically, even though they are alone in the hospital room. “It’s really distracting. I wish you’d knock that off.”
But he doesn’t really, and if Duo wakes up, he’ll never tell him to knock anything off again. Heero aches to hear his voice.
He thinks of quitting the Preventers almost every day. The thought of going back on another mission, of Duo putting his life in danger again, is nauseating. Even if he stays, he decides, Duo’s going to need a lot of time to get back to fighting condition, and someone is going to need to help him with that, and Heero feels like he might literally shoot anyone else who tries to do that besides him. He is going to be the one by Duo’s side for the rest of his life, and the only person who can tell him otherwise is Duo himself.
Other than coming to visit Duo herself, Noin leaves Heero alone as a supervisor. She doesn’t seem surprised the first time she walks in to find Heero with his hand on Duo’s, just amused. She squeezes his shoulder and they watch Duo sleep for a while.
“He’ll be all right,” she says, every time.
“Yeah, he will.”
The hospital food is terrible, not that he has a particularly sophisticated palate. He tells Duo about it, because he knows Duo would find it hilarious.
“Maybe I can request an IV of my own,” Heero says, chewing on a cold sandwich. “You’re really the lucky one here.”
The doctors say his vitals keep looking better, his dressings come away clean. He appears to be recovering normally. But they don’t know how long it will be until he wakes up.
It’s okay. Heero will wait.