CLOSE PROXIMITY

Chapter 7

Day Two 09:35

I stood there, bracing myself on the other side of the door. The stale smells of cheap fried breakfast crept across the trailer park and in through the gaps under the sill, teasing at my nostrils; the roar of the traffic on the highway five miles or so away growled in my ears. Nothing else sounded amiss. And yet every hair on the back of my neck stood to attention; my mind had already snapped more alert than it had been for months. I had a sudden, very vivid memory of how we’d often been, Heero and I, facing things together, high on adrenalin and arrogance and the pure enjoyment of each other’s company. How it once had been -

Not as the reluctant companions of today.

Heero hissed rather loudly, trying to get my attention – he scowled at me from his stance on the other side of the doorway. Ever the stern taskmaster, ever the perfectionist. “You with us on this planet, Maxwell?”

“You care if I am or not?” I hissed back. Kind of difficult to get the full force of contempt behind a whisper, but I guess we both managed it.

“No dogs…” His eyebrow raised in question.

I nodded. Smart guy had registered the change outside as well as I. “I know ‘em,” I murmured back. “They bark throughout the day and night, on and off. They’re our early warning system, our protection.”

He raised an eyebrow again, maybe at my familiarity with life here. Maybe at other stuff. “Any other doors?”

I shook my head.

“OK. I’ll take the high shot, you cover the low. On five, on my count. You good for that?”

I winced. “You think now’s the time to doubt it?”

He grimaced. It looked like he bit back another hiss. “OK, right. Guess I should know you better than that.”

I looked straight at him then, and God knows what emotion showed in my eyes. Guess you should, I thought. But you don’t, anymore. You don’t know me at all, Yuy.

I startled even myself with the depth of bitterness in my heart. I wondered just how long I’d been carrying it so deep – and for how much longer it might stay embedded there.

*

The slamming of my trailer door as Heero flung it open wrenched me back from my thoughts. It was a shock, but I was quick enough on his heels. I dropped to a crouch, gun held with both hands, forced out in a full stretch. My eyes peered into the sharp morning light, a little hazy over the rooftops of the other trailers. I took most of it in within seconds. Zac’s trailer, which he shared with a wide range of pets, always adding to them every time he went into town. I’d seen everything from raucous, green-plumed parakeets to somnolent snakes that I suspected had never had an official visa out of their own country. The smaller, neater trailer owned by his neighbour, Ruthie, a grandmother of twelve, with kids who were equally divided between loving and loathing the menagerie next door. A car’s hood was still braced open at the trailer beyond that, where I knew Phil ran his ‘rare parts’ business. There was an empty dog bowl, rolling gently on its rim outside Junk’s pimped-up place. The space underneath that trailer was dark and hidden; there were the old tracks of dusty footprints all over the place.

Business as usual – but no caretakers. It was as if everyone had been chased away. By what?

Heero was also evaluating the scene, measuring up the risk. “Nothing,” he murmured. “It’s gone, whatever – or whoever it was.” He shook his head slightly, as if he were responding to voices in his head. I once accused him of using witchcraft to tune in to potential danger, as he had such an uncanny ability to judge the peril of a situation. He never denied it – the witchcraft thing, that is. Maybe he never appreciated the humour.

My eyes still smarted as I stared around the park. Felt a bit damn stupid with the gun out in the open, so I let it slip gently down to my side. But I didn’t put it away. “Maybe it’s nothing, like you say. I’ll go check.”

I started down the shaky trailer steps. He looked at me, as if startled. “We’ll go together –“

“No we won’t!” I snapped. “You’re not even here, Yuy, remember? You’re invisible – you’re in hiding.”

He snorted. “What the fuck does that matter –“

“No,” I said again, firmly. Something in my tone made him stop his descent down the steps after me. “This is my place. I’ll do it.”

He stared for a while longer, and then he nodded acceptance. He turned to go back into the trailer - a little angry maybe – and his foot slipped slightly on a cracked rim at the top. Whatever the reason, he fell awkwardly to one side, just for a second, and he leant back against me. Hell, it was far from deliberate! But his body bumped mine, and his hand reached out instinctively to right himself against my shoulder, and he held me.

First time for three months.

I heard my gasp as if it came from someone else. A ‘someone else’ who lifted his hand and pressed it quickly over his, holding it tight as if to stop it being snatched away. A someone else who felt his eyelids droop with desire and his fingers tingle with the need to slide their way down the smooth skin of his upper arm and slide a possessive hold around the taut, muscular waist…

It was so much more shocking than the earlier touch of hands - the desperate reaction of my body was astonishing. It must be like reliving your hidden traumas under therapy - not that I’ve ever had the time or inclination to try that out for myself. Doorways opening; memories flooding back; the sensory overload of things that had once been familiar and fascinating.

Except that these memories hit low and hard and cruel, and the flame of remembrance seared through every nerve end that connected with him.

Memories – they suck, don’t they? And they don’t let you go easy.

*

We’d held it all together right until the end of Mission Dove.

Damned thing had taken nearly three months, while Heero was working his way gradually out of his convalescence. Relena let him back on duty after most of the main peace talks were being drawn to a close, and many of the delegates had already returned to their political day jobs. He complained that he didn’t have a lot to do, but he knew he wasn’t as fit as before, though he’d healed a damned sight faster than anyone I’d ever known.

I caught him doing push-ups late on a Sunday night. I’d been out for the weekend and come back to his apartment to freshen up for my own shift at work. He must have heard me come in, but he didn’t acknowledge me. I stood in the shadows of the bedroom doorway and watched him work, stretched out on the wooden floor. The muscles tensed across his bare torso, again and again, as he lifted his body. He was dressed only in his shorts; the light of the bedside lamp glinting in the smallest trail of sweat down between his shoulder blades. He gave the slightest grunt as he moved, maybe with the effort, maybe counting the presses.

I found I was holding my breath. I hadn’t called him for the last three days. Hadn’t been in touch in any way. As he straightened his body and climbed back to his feet, I looked at the graceful way he moved, and I ached all over for him.

Not just for the easy, vibrant sexuality of him. Not just for the lust that had always been our constant friend. The maelstrom of emotions was deep and uncomfortable and confusing to me. I couldn’t remember what I’d been doing all weekend, and wondered what the hell I was trying to prove to myself.

He stood in front of me, regaining his breath. He pushed sweaty locks of hair off his forehead, rather impatiently, and his dark eyes challenged me. “Are you staying?”

Hell of a question. Maybe he wanted to know if I’d make a late supper, or if I wanted the bathroom before him. Something mildly domestic like that. Or maybe it was something far more significant. Scared of the latter option, I took the first. “Sure,” I said. I couldn’t stop my eyes from raking his body; my nostrils flared gently from the smell of his sweat. “Need an early night; it’s a 5am start tomorrow. A surveillance job on the warehouse near the conference centre where they’re clearing out the final equipment…”

“Me too,” he interrupted. “We’re covering it together, Relena says.”

I was startled, I admit it. We’d not worked directly together since the attack. I saw a shiver in his storm-blue irises that must have been similar to my own expression. “Good,” I said. I took a step towards him. I think I moistened my lips.

“Early night, you said.” His voice was very brusque. “Must have been a hard weekend for you.” His gaze never wavered, though I could see the shadow of arousal under his loose shorts. “I’ve set the alarm for 4 am.” Then he walked past me as calmly as if I were nothing but part of the furniture. When my hand reached to touch at him, he bent away from me – so slightly that I might have imagined it. But I didn’t. He had never refused me before, never turned so deliberately away from what we both wanted. Never denied it.

When he came out of the shower half an hour later, walking into his bedroom and turning out the light, I was still standing in the hallway, shocked. He never said another word to me.

*

Fuck it. Whatever. Memories – glances backwards, whatever - almost always suck.

The surveillance job was a minor task, but we were both there on time the next morning. It had been a long night and I’d been damned uncomfortable on the couch. We growled at each other over coffee – we sat as far apart in the hired transport as possible. We were on our own in that the other guys were on duty elsewhere on the site, but then neither of us needed our hands held.

We’d always worked well together in the past. Hell, we’d enjoyed it. A job like this might have been a bit of fun, too. No real danger, therefore no prospect of distraction for a few hours. I often wondered later on whether things would’ve been different if we’d chosen to spend some of the time fucking instead of fighting. In the early days of our relationship, we wouldn’t even have needed to think about making a choice.

I think we initially tried to be civil. But the long hours of boredom took their toll. The agents we took over from were yawning after their night shift, and after a while on our own we weren’t much better. The whole exercise was a final check by the Department, just in case some of the external contractors turned out to be less discreet than we hoped about the location of the talks, now that the work was over. We had bugs in all the relevant places, including their own warehouses and offices, picking up their conversations. That morning, though, it seemed that most of the heavy work had already been done, and any activity at the warehouse was nothing more than the shouts and laughs of workmen. Occasionally we heard the creaking of old office furniture being dismantled. We sat in a seedy upstairs room in an abandoned unit across the industrial estate with nothing to entertain us but a portable radio link between the bugs and the Department, and we nursed our resentment. Well, that’s what I did.

The tension wasn’t gonna die down any time soon. It had been a miserable night, and now we sat for hours in the early morning, waiting for something or nothing to happen. The place was cold and damp, and the filth around us implied that it had been empty for months. We were both tired, and I soon got cramp in my left calf. The coffee was drunk far too soon - Heero took the last cup – and there was no food left for a guy like me who’d skipped breakfast. Seemed the final straw was when my numbed fingers dropped the radio for the third time; after that, the reception was so bad it sounded like Trowa was talking through cornflakes.

Up until then, Heero’s only conversation had been to do with the damp and the dust around us, but now he suddenly seemed to snap.

“If you kept your mind on the job in hand –“ he started to complain.

“Not professional enough for you?” I fired back. “See me as some kind of an amateur compared to you?”

He’d stared at me, dark eyes angry. “What the hell do you care what I see?”

In all honesty, I think the aggression between us was mainly to do with the miserable situation we were in, but to me, at that precise moment, he was dredging up the horror of the attack all over again – and my less than glorious part in it all.

“That’s crap,” I bit back. “I’m not getting drawn into this, just so’s you can go another round against me, you and the Department and their fucking dog!“

“Feeling a touch of paranoia, Duo? That’s nonsense, and you know it.”

“Nonsense?” I bristled. “Sums me up, eh? Careless, flippant, practically worthless –“

He was shaking his head, just as angry. “I just think you let yourself down sometimes, but you won’t listen to what I think. It’s easier for you to go for the cheap shot – you’re always speaking for me, as if you reckon you know what I really think -“

“Gotta do that,” I ground out. We were both half out of our uncomfortable seats by now, the surveillance and the radio all but forgotten. “Because you eke out so fucking little for me to go on!”

“I’m not like you, Duo, I don’t feel the need to validate everything with endless words. And anyway, why the hell should I need to? I tell you what needs to be told –“

“So now you’re speaking for me, eh?” I was perilously close to a yell by this time. “Keep Maxwell on a need to know basis, right? He’s only another colleague, and one you think is less than fully reliable –“

He hissed back at me. “You’re not around long enough nowadays for me to know one way or the other! Look at how you just slid back in last night, not a word for days, no sign of you at all. If you don’t see any need to keep me in the loop, that’s fine. Life seems to be one long party to you.”

“Now who’s the paranoid one?” I protested. “I’m not around because I don’t enjoy seeing the look on your face when I am.”

“You’re not around long enough to see anything!” He was really incensed, but I couldn’t see past my own fury and distress. “Don’t accuse me of the very thing you’re doing yourself! You pride yourself on your honesty and openness – but it’s pretty damned convenient that it seems to exclude your own behaviour!”

We glared at each other for a split second, as if we’d suddenly reached the exact same level of anger and hurt and confusion. And then – even as I watched it happen, with horror and some amazement that I could lose control quite so spectacularly – I laid right into him.

I wasn’t thinking straight by then; I had a huge pile of umbrage smouldering in my heaving breast and it was itching to get out and be heard. I’d never thought I was so wild – I’d always thought I could rein myself in, if need be. Perhaps I didn’t see the necessity anymore; perhaps I’d just had enough. Perhaps I was – just for that brief moment – completely insane. I told him it was wearing me down, his lack of empathy and tolerance, and his inability to communicate in ways that were familiar to the rest of the human race - hell, I think I suggested he’d been some kind of alien changeling since birth. It was a pity he’d had to lose a chunk of skin before he realised it, but it was obvious that I was nothing but a raw edge in his smooth life, and if he couldn’t get over that and accept me as I was, there was fuck all point in going on together. I said that, basically, if I didn’t see him again this side of the next millennium, it’d be too soon for me.

He was feeling very much the same way, he growled.

So OK, I said, but if he wanted other company, at least be honest about it, if honesty was so fucking important to him.

He’d stared at me then, eyes wide and accusing, and – though I didn’t want to see it right then – hurt.

And then I really lost it and accused him of fucking Wufei on the side.

*

The argument had begun with words; it escalated swiftly to fists. Shit, the guy could land a punch! The crack to my jaw sent me sprawling, the first time. Every tooth rattled in my head - my eyes couldn’t focus. But I was so fucking angry that he’d hit me that I got straight back up and pitched in my defending blow. I caught him kind of unawares, too, and I was ridiculously pleased to see his head snap back from my own fist connecting!

We stalked round each other, eyes blazing, breath rasping in our chests as we struggled to balance angry words with even angrier, uncontrollable actions. And I kept bouncing back, kept ploughing in with my own efforts, despite the increasingly fierce knocks and the pain of the cracked bone in my jaw. I was not going to go down again, of that I was sure - and I think I was yelling it too, most of the time.

Like anyone was going to let the situation continue like that.

It all ended with Wufei hammering down the door and racing in to break us up – he’d been called in from the conference centre itself, and I believe he ran all the way. In the background, we had Trowa screaming at us to break radio contact because every word was being broadcast - albeit through crackly cereal – both to the Department and to the warehouse we were meant to be watching. But still we fought. It took a couple of Wufei’s ninja-type minions to hold me back, while he personally pinned Heero to the opposite wall, shouting orders into his face to pull himself together. Someone smashed the malfunctioning radio, and all the voices in the room were silenced. Then all we could do was pant painfully and glare and spit at each other like a couple of alley cats.

I don’t remember much else of that time. There were other agents appearing in and out of the room, pale, shocked, inquisitive faces staring through the doorway, muttered sounds on another of the radios. Eventually Relena appeared like the Wrath of God herself, bearing the divine twin gifts of her anger and disgust - and immediate suspension from the Project Team.

*

It had felt like I left the Team as much a stranger to Heero Yuy as I’d been his companion. Damned odd, how things go. Close together like Siamese twins – then as distant as prince and pauper. But I was still mad - I was still hurting. And after the fight, I had a whole pile of bureaucratic shit to plough through, too.

The last thing I wanted was to face more shit from – or because of - him.

We both went through the disciplinary procedure; we were treated just the same. Partners in crime, you might have thought. But instead it was the final dissolution of our partnership. We never spoke to each other during the proceedings. We were never left alone together, saw nothing of each other at the Department except at a glaring distance. Outside of work, we stayed each in our own apartments. And so we never spoke again at all, even when I left the city.

Facing the Board had been one of the grimmest times of my life - dammit, my work was one of the few things in my life that I was truly proud of! - but they made me feel like a troublesome school kid who’d disappointed his parents and put his friends in the direst danger. Took several days, too, to grind salt into that wound. Fuck ‘em! I’d thought. Do I really need this? Of course, I never answered myself. Nor did I wonder if Heero had been subjected to the same trial. Nor care. When the internal investigation was over, all I did was hammer back to the apartment and pick up the minimum that I needed to exist. I would run for cover - it’s what I’d done in the past, though not since I’d joined the Department. Sure, Heero had a key to my place, but I didn’t care about that - he was welcome to it. I had other places I could go; I always did. Places that no-one else knew. Not even Heero.

It was my second investigation in six months, of course. Odds were looking bad for me all around. I reckoned it was the best thing I could do, to make an escape while I still could.

It still took me a long, lonely hour to pluck up the courage to leave.

I’d stood there in my cold hallway for the first half an hour, staring at a jacket he used to like, which was hanging on my wall. But I couldn’t feel anything of him there: no ambience; no vibrations at all. Despite a smattering of his stuff in every one of my rooms, it was as if that final fight had erased the whole of our relationship. I was too tired and too dispirited to remember anything other than misery and anger between us. I spent the last thirty minutes piling as many of his belongings as I could find into a couple of bags, and I left them in the hallway for collection. Or not. To be honest, I didn’t care what he did with it all - or if he threw the equivalent of my belongings at his apartment right out of the window. Perhaps he was already planning to move on - had duplicated his toothbrush and flannel elsewhere, at some other guy’s place. Or so I tortured myself, with a warped kind of masochism.

There’d been several messages blinking on my phone, probably from the other guys. Whether they wanted to help or to scold, I didn’t care at that time. I decided that I’d contact them when I was good and ready - at my choice.

So I escaped to my anonymous trailer and I stayed there. Comforted only by my own self-pity and the false warmth of my arrogance. In hiding. Licking wounds. Grieving. Whatever.

It fucking hurt, whatever it was.

Thinking back on the fight, I realised that it was destined to have happened at some time or another. It had been brewing since the attack on Heero – and maybe from before that. It was difficult to remember when we hadn’t been at each other’s throats. And whose fault had it all been?

I hated to admit it but I had to, deep in my dreams, late at night in my solitude. Whatever Heero might or might not have done, however much he’d betrayed me, or dismissed me, or hurt me – hey, despite all that, I’d royally fucked up.

And lost the whole damned lot.

*

Everything fucked up. Everything finished.

He never denied it, you know? Never told me to go to hell, he’d never fucked Chang, I was talking out of my ass. He never said anything like that. But he could have done, couldn’t he? It’s what I would have said. So what was a guy to think?

Fuck it.

*

Something was calling my thoughts back to the present…something insistent.

Heero’s fist on my jaw. Heero’s angry voice in my head.

Heero Yuy in my bed. Curled against my body. The rhythm of his breathing in my head. Heero inside me.

Heero, on the steps of my trailer, murmuring something under his breath, something that sounded angry. His body next to mine again, my hand on his arm, my head leant slowly in towards him…

I felt the sweat spring up on my forehead, and I wrenched myself away from him. He started – his body swayed slightly as he regained his step. I thanked God my senses had returned quickly to the present time before he’d seen the look in my eyes, or guessed the thoughts in my head.

“Get back inside!” I hissed, my anger far too fierce for the situation, but I wasn’t going to be justifying that to him. “Get back!”

He paused in the doorway, his head tilted just slightly to the side, his eyes temporarily distracted from glaring at me. He looked a little flushed. “There was a movement, Duo. Behind the black trailer –“

“I know,” I said, curtly. It was Junk’s trailer. Big beast of a thing, with exotic graffiti scrawled across the sides, and bars across the smoked windows. A huge thing that looked like it’d never travel, even if he’d wanted it to; a home usually filled with various relatives of all ages, from babes in arms to impossibly grizzled old ladies, and all protected by his dogs. The fiercest, wildest dogs on the whole site. The noisiest dogs on the site. The ones that seemed to have gone astray this morning. I’d seen the shiver of movement behind the trailer, too. I’d heard the faintest echo of a human body on the morning air.

“I know Junk. This is for me to sort out. Leave it to me, for God’s sake.” This time, I was thinking. This time, trust me to do it properly.

Heero moved back into the trailer, obviously reluctant to be left out of the action scenes, and the door closed behind him, softly. I was reminded of the metal that was warped at the bottom of the sill and the hinges that groaned in the spring weather – but Heero managed to close it softly.

Right. I sighed to myself.

I slowly turned back round, mentally shaking myself back to full attention. The impact of that stupid, stupid touch had been so vivid that I still felt the trail of memory like goose bumps on my goose bumps.

But now he was out of sight, if not out of mind. Now I could concentrate on the matter in hand.

Couldn’t I?

*

A pigeon called mournfully from one of the trees on the outskirts of the trailer park. A discarded page from a newspaper rustled around the wheels of one of the silent homes.

I stepped carefully across the trailer park floor, my boots brushing up the grit and dried oil. There were people moving in the distance, where the perimeter of the park ran into the surrounding neighbourhood, and where more regular folks drove their cars to work and bussed their kids to school. But everywhere around my own place was deserted. No shouts from the kitchens, no shrieking of children’s battles. No cigarette smoke, no revving of bikes’ engines.

The black trailer loomed large in front of me, and I stopped a little way away so that I could see the track around both sides. There was no further movement, but awareness still thrummed on the fringes of my mind. My gun felt strangely sticky in my sweaty palm. I knew that something was wrong – of course I did. This was the first time I’d called on my training in three months. But you didn’t forget those sorts of things.

I just wished I could get the memories of ‘old’ Heero out of my mind. It was all too damned distracting. We’d parted in the most final of ways, and there wasn’t much that could be salvaged from that. I thought I was still angry with him – I knew it still hurt to have him around. But he was only here for a day or so, surely. Would soon be on his way again – would soon take his scowling face out of my home and leave me to get on with my exile in peace.

I wished that were true. With all of my heart.

*

The wind round the trailer park hissed in my ears and teased the loose hairs at my neck. I peered carefully at the dark chasm under Junk’s trailer, which was the only hiding place I could imagine, though you’d have to be pretty small, and with a damned strong stomach to crawl about under there…

When the noise finally came, I admit that I was unprepared for it. I was prowling round like some kind of macho hero, but in all honesty, my mind was far away, months ago, seduced by the memory of so many things. Aromas of cooking food in Heero’s kitchen; the rustle of clean sheets in the bathroom cupboard; the muted sound of the evening traffic outside the Westbridge block. The soothing pictures he once had on his wall, black and white sketches of a place he used to live, long before his time with the Department. The feel of his thick, soft hair, snagging between my fingers as I ran a hand through it to pull his head towards me…

I remembered so much more of that apartment than just the bricks and mortar. The same bricks and mortar that were now a pile of scalded rubble.

I let my attention drift for a few vital seconds, just as a dog finally started barking somewhere beyond Junk’s trailer. I saw the sudden burst of movement from behind it, and I turned to cover it, but maybe I was just a little too slow; maybe I was just a little blinded by the angle of the early sun reflected on the polished roofing.

Whatever the reason, I never saw any gun, or any sniper. I heard a low whistle and that strange whine you sometimes get from a gun that hasn’t been oiled for a while. There was a breath of new wind by my left ear, and a distracting flash of brightness.

Then the shot hit me and I went down on my knees.