Gundam Wing: Alleviating Boredom
Title: Alleviating Boredom Recipient: caitirin Fandom: Gundam Wing Characters: Duo, Heero Rating: PG for mild language Summary: Duo and Heero are stranded in a dangerous place when a mission goes wrong. Duo finds this much less interesting than it sounds, so he decides to make it interesting. Notes: This takes place after the series.
When Duo was a little kid, he had thought that being in space surrounded by stars would be like standing in the middle of a rainstorm of light, frozen in time. As it turned out, it was more like staring at holes pricked in a huge cardboard box - from inside the box. The vastness of it was exhilarating at first, but it soon wore off. At times like this, he might even venture to call it "boring as hell."
Not only was he bored, he was also in peril, and that made it even more boring because he couldn’t do anything to amuse himself which might attract attention. He also missed Deathscythe.
But at least the view from the launch deck was impressive, he thought, trying for what must have been the fiftieth time, by squirming and force of will, to make the boxes he leaned against comfortable. He was sitting hidden in a dusty corner of an Oz flagship behind stacks of crates covered in tarpaulin, waiting. The reason he was waiting was the same reason he was in peril – the first attempt at the mission had not gone quite according to plan, and now escape wasn’t an option. The only way to get out of this was to wait until a second opportunity presented itself, force the plan to go right this time, and then make tracks in the ensuing chaos.
It had been approximately thirty-nine hours and seven minutes since they holed up in the unused flight deck. Duo flipped his wrist over and looked at his watch. Eight minutes.
He had searched the entire deck thrice over within the first few hours alone and exhausted anything that might have kept him occupied. And he’d packed light, thinking this would be a quick mission. By his estimations, they had enough food to last another five or six hours before he’d have to venture out to raid the kitchens.
The thing that made it infinitely – infinitely – more annoying was that all this should have been worse if he were alone... but he wasn’t. He just might as well have been.
Duo leaned forward and peered around the rumpled, dirty tarp that covered the mountain of crates beside him. About twenty feet away, in a similar niche, Heero sat with his legs folded and his eyes closed, looking so calm that Duo wanted to throttle him. He’d been sitting like that for more than two hours now. At least, Duo thought, if it had been Wufei, he could assume it was some kind of Chinese warrior technique that involved lengthy deep meditation. Wufei was kind of hardcore like that. Heero, while plenty hardcore, didn’t have that kind of training as far as Duo knew, and Duo was starting to wonder whether Heero had slipped into a coma without noticing or had willed himself into some kind of catatonic energy-saving state. Duo wouldn’t put it past him.
Duo must have looked at him a dozen times in the past couple of hours, but inexplicably this time Heero opened his eyes. Duo made a "geep!" sound. It was really too late to pretend he hadn’t been looking.
"Stop staring," Heero said in a low voice.
Duo felt embarrassed for a couple of seconds until frustration took over. "What am I supposed to do?" he hissed. "Knowing you, you could’ve had a heart attack and I’d have no idea. You’d just sit there, like you’ve been doing for the past five hours."
"Two hours and twenty-four minutes."
"You’ve been counting?!"
Heero didn’t answer. Duo sighed and scooted around the boxes, making sure his footfalls were as soft as possible despite their solitude. He sat down close to Heero.
"How can you just sit there perfectly still like that?" he whispered.
"I’m thinking," Heero replied after a time, and even though he didn’t whisper, his voice was still softer than Duo’s.
Duo scratched his head and looked out the huge plate glass windows that loomed in front of them. "We’ve had almost forty hours to think. We’ve got to sit here for who knows how many more until they take the mobile suits out again and we can get into their holding bay. There can’t be very much left for you to think about."
Heero stared at him for a few moments, and then looked out the window as well. Duo waited, chewing on his lip, and waited some more. "So," he asked eventually, when it became clear that Heero was going to continue the conversation. "What were you thinking about?"
"The failure of this mission."
Duo stifled an incredulous laugh before it became too loud. "Don’t be ridiculous. We’re not going to fail. We’re here, aren’t we? That was the hardest part. We may have to wait another half a century, but we’re going to get done what we need to get done, and—"
"I meant we’ve failed already," Heero interrupted. "We’re wasting time. We may accomplish what we came to do, but we’ve still failed the mission."
Duo wrinkled his brow and tried to figure out how this followed in Heero-logic. "So you don’t think that as long as we finish the job, we succeed?"
"No," Heero said. "That’s only part of it. To succeed, we have to do the job right. The first time."
"But I thought you always said that the ends justify the means," Duo prodded. "So no matter how it gets done, if it gets done, that’s all that matters."
"That’s beside the point. I have to finish the mission no matter what the cost, yes, but to succeed, the execution must be flawless."
"But so much can go wrong," Duo persisted. "You have to be adaptable. Improvise."
"The true soldier," Heero said, not looking at him, "is the one who can still execute a mission flawlessly even in the face of challenges. One who expects every alternative and has a plan for it that still allows for flawless execution."
Duo blinked at him. Heero was blunt when it came to some things, annoyingly so at times, but when it came to others, Duo felt like he had to mine through layers of soldier philosophy to figure out what Heero was actually getting at.
"So you’re saying you didn’t expect this to happen," he said finally. Heero didn’t answer, and Duo took that as a 'yes'. "And by virtue of the fact that we’ve been hanging around in the belly of this ship for almost two days, you already consider the mission a failure."
"You’re awfully slow sometimes," Heero said, glancing at him.
Duo contemplated this for a minute. Then he raised his hand, made a ring with his middle finger and thumb, and flicked Heero in the forehead.
Heero grabbed his wrist and held it. He didn’t say anything, but his eyes were threatening enough. Duo stared back at him, rebellion flaring.
"Cut yourself some slack, man. It’s not humanly possible to predict every variant of what might happen on a mission. You’re just setting yourself up to be disappointed."
"If I cut myself slack, nothing would get done," Heero replied. There was an edge to his voice that Duo couldn’t interpret – he might have been saying "if I need anything done, I have to do it myself," or he might have been alluding again to his own perceived failure. Duo looked at his hand, which Heero still held aloft. He wasn’t squeezing, but his grip felt stiff as iron. Heero followed Duo’s gaze and relaxed his hand, and Duo pulled back, restraining himself mussing Heero’s hair or doing something equally dangerous while he was close enough to have the chance.
"You need to lighten the hell up, my friend," Duo said, rubbing his wrist.
"I see nothing but seriousness in this situation."
"Heero," Duo said, exasperated. "Whether we’ve failed or not, we’re stuck here until we get another chance to infiltrate the mobile suit bay. What point is there in agonizing over what we didn’t do when we have no other choice now but to do it right the second time?"
Heero narrowed his eyes as if Duo were both annoying and incomprehensible. Duo sighed again. "And you call me slow. What I’m trying to say is I’m not going to let you wallow in self-reproach when there’s really no point in it."
"And what are you going to do to stop me?" Heero asked, just as deadpan as before.
Duo considered, and Heero waited with stony patience. Then Duo grabbed both of Heero's wrists, held them tight, and kissed him. It was much more satisfying than mussing Heero's hair, and about a thousand times more dangerous.
Heero barely moved, and after a few moments, Duo pulled back. He grinned, supremely confident. Heero almost, almost looked bewildered.
"Distraction," Duo said. "Classic."
"If your purpose was to make me more angry with you than I am with myself," Heero said, "you've succeeded." He pulled his arms out of Duo's grasp. Then, after hesitating for half a second, he pushed Duo against the boxes and kissed him back.