Kracken
Disclaimer:I don't own them and I don't make any money off of this.
Warning:Male/male sex, graphic, language, violence, torture, abuse, attempted
NCS
Burning Candles
Cloak and Dagger
Heero met Trowa just outside of a small airstrip. The man was leaning against a jeep that was almost bare bones metal, and he was wearing a wide brimmed hat, a pair of ragged jeans's, and a shirt that had a beer slogan printed on it. Trowa was even taller than Heero remembered. He topped Heero by five inches, but he had the slouch that tall people often developed to put themselves on a level with the shorter world around them.
"Mr. Onigowa," Trowa greeted.
"Mr. Escavera," Heero replied as he tossed his bag into the back of the jeep and climbed into the passenger side.
Trowa smiled and hopped into the driver's side seat. The engine roared and he took off at breakneck speed, not down the main road out of the airport, but onto a side dirt road into the jungle.
"I've secured a small fishing boat," Trowa told him over the sound of the laboring engine and the rushing wind. "We won't need a crew and it's not unusual for that type of vessel to be out that far. If we're questioned, the vessel is old enough to have engine trouble. We can claim to be adrift. They won't risk killing us and having our boat reported as missing. That would cause a search of the area."
Heero nodded as he pulled out a map and checked tides and currents. He didn't bother taking off his coat, despite the tropical heat. When Trowa spun the jeep half way around and drove straight into a roadless jungle, Heero wasn't surprised. The squat, black shape of a ship crouched under palm fronds up ahead and Trowa stopped the jeep a few feet from it and killed the engine. He jumped out without hesitation and Heero was only a few steps behind him as he paused to grab his bag.
They boarded the ship, Trowa tossing his hat aside and Heero stowing his bag behind his seat. There was barely enough room for two in the cramped cockpit. The ship itself was only a collection of struts and support webbing around an engine and a large fuel tank. It was a military jump ship, made for short hops to the upper orbital space stations, but severely modified to foil radar and satellite surveillance. If anyone had followed Heero's trail to South America, they were about to lose it now.
Heero was at the controls this time. He took off straight up, foliage flying as the thrusters shot them away from Earth. He felt the pressure of gravity trying to make him one with his seat. A space suit was required for that fast of a jump, but those rules had been made for ordinary pilots. While Trowa checked oxygen levels and seal reports and called out greens, Heero took them through the atmosphere like a shooting star, arced the ship into orbit in a graceful rollover, and then rode their own momentum as he cut the engines.
"Sweet," Trowa murmured with a quiet smile as gravity dropped away and left them floating in free fall. "You haven't lost your touch."
Heero glared. "Why would I?"
"Desk jobs do that to a man," Trowa replied with a shrug.
"Desk job?" Heero's glare deepened. "I'm a Preventer field agent."
Trowa looked at him then as he readjusted a filter unit. Those green eyes were curious and they seemed to have the power to make Heero re-evaluate his entire career with the Preventers in only a few heartbeats. Easy missions any agent could have accomplished, paper work, leg work, crime scene investigations, and a few close calls... nothing memorable.
Heero ground his teeth together. He wasn't sure what to say to this sudden peeling open of his life. Finally, he managed, "Duo was my partner." It was attempt to legitimize himself again, reaffirm that he hadn't chosen to do anything unusual.
"Was he?" Trowa wondered.
"What are you trying to-" Heero stopped. Trowa was trying to tell him something."What do you know?" he demanded.
Trowa turned his attention back to his instruments. "When Quatre asked me to accompany you, I evaluated the situation."
"And?" Heero snapped.
"Une knows," Trowa told him calmly as he flicked switches and checked the debris warning system. "You know her as well as I do. She is not a soldier who sits back and waits for developments. She is a phenomenal tactician."
Heero didn't want to hear anymore. He didn't want to hear that Trowa thought that Duo was working with Une, that he had known all along about Madagar and, perhaps, had allowed himself to be kidnaped. It would explain Une's insistence on the incident being top secret, on declaring Duo dead, on keeping Heero as far away as possible from the case.
Trowa didn't elaborate. The man knew that Heero had put it together himself. He could see that by the way Heero went pale and tense and by the way his hands went white knuckled on the controls.
"We may be walking into Une's operation, then," Heero choked out. He cleared his voice, tried again. "Duo and I... we didn't work closely together, he was often out on assignment. I thought..."
"Thought you were working on the same cases?" Trowa finished.
Heero remembered the unexplained bruises and wounds on Duo, the weariness he'd often seen in his partner. "He was working with street kids, after hours."
"He told you that?" Trowa wondered. "According to my research, he volunteered very minimally at a home for troubled children."
All of the pictures, though, all of the sports, the gatherings, the play... Heero shook his head sharply. "You're making guesses."
"Based on facts," Trowa replied. "Don't go into a mission blind, Heero. Know all of the possibilities, or the one you try to ignore, will get you dead."
Trowa's words burned all the way down into Heero's heart as he pushed the ship back into the atmosphere and began re-entry.
___________________________
Duo sat, huddled in his cell, while two of his guards tossed the controller back and forth, laughing at his flinches. A wrong move, a fumbled catch, and the button could get accidentally pressed. They were taking what revenge they could for the death of their comrades.
"This cell is monitored!" Duo choked out.
One of the guards grinned. "We have a friend in control who's having a cup of coffee right now and watching the show."
The control slipped through fingers and tumbled end over end towards the floor.
"Shit!" Duo cried and his chains rattled as he tried to reach it.
The guard caught the control deftly and waggled it at Duo, his eyes glittering with glee as Duo shuddered and bit back a whimper.
"If that goes off," Duo seethed, "Revenant will kill you both!"
"Maybe...," the man flipped the control over in his hand and caught it with a smack against his palm. Duo couldn't help putting his hands between his legs and curling tight. "Maybe not," the man continued. "Are you willing to bet we're not mad enough to take that chance?"
"Yeah," Duo spat, "I am!"
"Well," the man said with relish as he pointed the control at Duo. "You bet wrong."
Duo saw the button depressed. His body jerked and he bit his tongue as every muscle in his body went into a spasm of anticipation. He threw up his lunch, heaving as he clenched tightly around his groin. It was a long moment before he realized that there wasn't any pain.
The men were laughing at him. Duo pulled himself up, forcing his body to uncurl enough so that he could at least pretend to be able to defend himself. One of the guards showed him that the controller was minus it's power source.
"That was too easy," the other one laughed. "Come on, fun times over."
"Next time, I might not take out the power source, piece of shit," the first guard warned. He fished a picture out of his pocket. "I almost forgot. Revenant says you're taking too long. You lost another one of your babies because of that."
The guard flipped the picture at Duo and it landed by Duo's knee. He looked down, as he swallowed the blood from his bitten tongue, and saw a little boy with large brown eyes smirking at the camera and flipping a bird.
"The guy who did it said he was real sweet, right before he gutted him," the guard laughed. "Street trash anyway. Like exterminating rats."
They left him and Duo scowled and moved away from the vomit as far as his chains would allow. He left the photo behind. Rick was one of Jake's. If that boy was dead, then so was Jake. That's the only way anyone would have gotten to him.
Duo couldn't let himself think about it. He couldn't consider what he was paying in blood and humiliation to come out on top. He had to win. He had to beat Revenant. He had to...
Duo ached. His body throbbed with pain and weariness. What he wouldn't give to see Heero's sullen face. He needed that man so badly, needed his steady, constant presence, needed to hear him analyze and solve a situation as if he had the world under his control. The year he had spent being Heero's partner had been the anchor that he had needed to keep from falling to pieces after the war. It was Heero who had taught him discipline, patience, and routine. He needed all of those things now, needed to keep his head and patiently steer his enemies in the direction that he needed them to go. The hot dogging, fly by the seat of his pants, Duo from the war wouldn't have survived this long.
What was Heero doing now? Was he missing him at all? Duo's body shuddered and he spat aside, trying to get the foul taste out of his mouth. His eyes watered and he wiped at them. Somehow, Duo couldn't see Heero breaking out of his routine. He even imagined Heero waiting patiently for Duo to bring him his tea, and probably doing without when he didn't show up. They had become two halves of a solid team and they had each had a set role to play in their daily dance. Heero would carry on, he was sure, but he could only imagine him operating like a man suddenly losing an arm.
Duo swore at himself. He was crediting himself too much in what they had been
to each other, acting as if he were irreplaceable when the reality was probably
that Heero had just deleted his file from memory and acted as if he had never
existed. The man had always been a solo act until Duo had shown up.
Duo's eyes were drawn back to the photo. Working with the kids had been an unexpected
development in his life. Jake had tried to rob him one night and Duo had beaten
him and followed him back to his gang. It was then that he had realized that
there were some parts of Earth and space that peace time would never reach and
that he was needed there as much as he was needed by Heero's side. Duo frowned.
He was doing it again, acting as if Heero couldn't do without him, acting as
if the man needed him. If only he had told Heero about the kids, Heero might
have found a way to protect them. He tried to imagine Heero caring about street
kids. The image came easier than he thought it would. Heero had always been
a protector, even during the war.
"I should have trusted you, " Duo muttered to himself as he curled
up and tried to sleep.
__________________________________________
Heero was forced to land the jump plane onto the heaving deck of a fishing boat in rough seas. Heero compensated for the roll and pitch with nerves of gundanium and didn't even twitch when a sea bird shot through the exhaust and made the plane vibrate and jerk. When they were on the deck, they scrambled out of the cockpit, hauled lines, and opened the cavernous hold. A crane picked the light plane up and lowered it inside.
Heero cast anchor and climbed into the wheel house while Trowa went below deck to secure the plane. GPS told him their position and their destination point. Heero calculated in his head and then revved the engine and took them out.
The console vid screen flashed and Quatre's voice asked, "Secure line?"
Heero checked and confirmed. "Yes. Go ahead."
Quatre's face appeared. He squinted at the old wheel house and then at Heero. "My Trowa in one piece?"
"Securing the plane," Heero assured him.
"You're right on time," Quatre observed. "Anal as ever, Heero."
Heero found a smile. His adrenalin was pumping and he felt exhilarated, like a Gundam taken out of moth balls and put into battle once more.
"My Maguanacs found some interesting data that you might be interested in," Quatre told him. "Some high level secure communications have been going between Une and a ship not far from your location."
Heero lost his smile, remembering Trowa's accusations.
"The ship is called the Celestial Covenant," Quatre continued and then he narrowed eyes at Heero. "It's registered out of Nova Scotia."
Heero considered that information. "Do their communications have a pattern?"
"Twice a day," Quatre replied as he leaned forward to retrieve something. He sat back and looked over a slip of paper. "4:00 A.M. and 9:00 P.M. Sophisticated scramblers, too. My men haven't been able to crack the code yet. It's covered with fishing haul reports and it's tagged as if it's going to a fish house on the coast. We would have missed it if Rashid hadn't noticed a ping at the end of every transmission. They used to piggyback messages like that and bounce them off of satellites during the war." He eyed the screen, very serious. "I suggest that you hack into these messages before you move in. If Une is running her own operation, you could compromise that."
Heero glared. "I'm aware of that."
Quatre chuckled. "Just confirming, Heero."
Trowa's face appeared on a small part of the screen. "My turn, Heero. Log off so I can talk to Quatre down here."
Heero looked disapproving.
"Don't worry," Trowa assured him. "I'll keep it short."
Heero logged off in annoyance, but he was thinking about Duo now and how very much he wished that he could hear his voice and see his face.
Heero dropped anchor a mile from their target ship and deployed the nets. The computerized system paid out the lines automatically. Any casual surveillance wouldn't pick up anything unusual. He calculated that they had four hours before they would be forced to move back towards shore to keep their cover.
The laptop beeped and Trowa appeared. "Hacking the Celestial Covenant," he told Heero. "You ready to assist?"
Heero nodded, set the proximity and scan alarms, and joined Trowa in cyberspace, picking apart the security protocols of their target's computer system through their uplink. Heero recognized the signature of the system right away. So did Trowa.
"Duo," Trowa muttered. "Is there a system that man DIDN'T create?"
For the Preventers, Trowa meant and Heero understood. A ship out of Nova Scotia was carrying security systems devised by Duo and communicating with Une. Heero couldn't deny it any longer. Duo was working for Une and this wasn't a kidnaping. It was a Preventer operation.
TBC
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