I love Duo dearly, but there are times he can be very… exasperating.
We were on assignment, doing a security audit on one of the Preventers
out-post offices, and while it wasn’t the same as a mission in the
field, we still had more than enough work to do, that we didn’t have
time to be joy-riding around the stupid countryside.
But despite that fact, I still found myself on the back of Duo’s bike going… God and Duo only knew where, at a time of night that should have seen us back in our hotel room, compiling data and getting ready for the next day’s meetings.
Exasperating. And I’m not even sure which part was the more so… that he had insisted on taking this side-trip, or that he wouldn’t tell me where we were going, or why.
I already wasn’t thrilled that he had insisted we drive to the work-site to start with; we could have hopped a commuter flight and been on-site in a rental car in less than an hour, but instead, we’d brought our bikes and taken four hours to make the drive. And it would be another four hours home at the end of the week. It was just very… frustrating.
The radio in my helmet let out with a soft chuckle. ‘You sigh heavily one more time buddy, and I’m going to dump you off this bike and you can walk back.’
‘Sorry,’ I muttered, chagrined that he had noticed. ‘And forgive me for asking, but… are we there yet?’
That got me a laugh I didn’t even need the helmet to hear. ‘I’m not sure,’ he told me after a few moments. ‘Are you going to kill me if I tell you I’m not exactly sure where I’m going?’
I swear to God, he does this crap on purpose.
‘Duo,’ I growled, feeling my frustration beginning to want to be something a little bit more like… annoyance. ‘What the hell is going on? We really don’t have time…’
He snorted, and seemed to make a sudden decision to turn off the road we were on. ‘Chill… our first meeting tomorrow isn’t even until nine o’clock. We’ve got tons of time to crunch a little data.’
The road we found ourselves on did not impress me all that much. Hell, the road we’d just left behind hadn’t impressed me all that much, but the new one made it look like a four-lane highway. The area we were visiting was rural at best, and what we found ourselves on was what I believe even the locals refer to as a ‘cow path’.
‘That’s hardly the point,’ I grumbled. ‘And somehow, I don’t think you’re going to find any restaurants out here in the middle of all these fields of… whatever that is.’
He chuckled again, apparently immune to my less than stellar mood. ‘Soy beans, you uneducated city boy. And I’m not looking for a restaurant. I promised you food, but I didn’t say where it was going to come from.’
‘If you have some crazy idea of coming out here and… and… eating crap off the vine or something… count me out,’ I warned him, but just got another of those chuckles.
‘Heero,’ he said, ‘you have really got to learn to… oh hey! This looks good!’
It took me a long moment to figure out what ‘this’ was, and I could not really agree that it looked ‘good’. It did not, in fact, look like much of anything.
Our cow-path had run straight off from the main road, which was barely even really visible in the distance behind us anymore, unless a car went down it… something that happened maybe once every ten minutes or so. There was nothing much on either side of us but… what Duo said; soy beans. There was a farm house in the distance on one side, and a barn that looked like a strong wind would blow it over on the other, and that was pretty much it.
Duo’s ‘this’ was a wide, flat place at the edge of a field that looked like it was used to drive the heavy farm machinery in to work on the crops. At the side of it was a pile of big rocks that I imagined were dredged up in the spring plowing and discarded there. Nothing about it spoke of a destination, good or otherwise.
‘Maxwell…’ I ground out, pulling my helmet off since he was already removing his own. ‘What in the hell is going on? It’s damn well almost dark! Are you planning on trying to get us arrested for trespassing or what?’
He leaned back, forcing me to lean out of his way, so that he could swing a leg over the front and dismount. He just grinned at me, hooking his helmet on the handlebars and ruffling his fingers through his bangs. ‘Heero, you really have got to learn to just chill out sometimes. You don’t always have to be moving ninety miles an hour.’
‘We still have to go run all the sorts and read through the logs,’ I informed him, though I hardly had to… he knew our jobs as well as I did. ‘We’re going to be up half the night, and for what? So you could see what a soy bean plant looks like?’
He snorted. ‘I could have looked that up on-line. There are just some things that you ought to experience for real. And you wrote those export programs for a reason… they’ll run over-night, and we’ll have hours to go over everything in the morning before the meeting.’
‘And if something goes wrong?’ I prodded, but he just rolled his eyes, going around me to dig into his saddle bag.
‘Chill out,’ he commanded, again, and he took his bag and walked over toward the rock pile.
I couldn’t help frowning after him. ‘You break your ankle in the dark, and I’m going to point and laugh.’
‘I’d do the same,’ he agreed amiably, and settled his bag on a flattish rock before walking out to the edge of the beans, as though hunting for something. I wondered if they smelled odd, or felt weird, or if there was otherwise a reason that soy beans needed to be experienced in person. ‘It’s not quite dark yet anyway,’ he said, sounding slightly distracted.
‘Close enough for government work,’ I muttered, but he didn’t laugh at the old line, either not hearing me or too enthralled with his plants.
He straightened suddenly and turned around to face me, a wide grin on his face. ‘This should be perfect!’
‘Perfectly insane,’ I agreed, but he ignored the gibe. Or maybe he really couldn’t hear me. I left the bike and walked down the tractor ruts toward him, stopping about half way, and not quite able to contain a heavy sigh. ‘Will you at least tell me what in the hell we’re doing?’
‘Uhm… not yet?’ he said, with that cock to his head that asks me for patience. ‘It shouldn’t be long now?’
‘I think this is the part that is getting on my nerves,’ I confessed. ‘The part where you don’t really seem to know what in the hell you’re doing.’
‘I do so!’ he retorted, planting his hands on his hips and trying for an offended tone. ‘Well… sort of…’
I resisted the urge to pull my hair out, and settled for just rubbing at the bridge of my nose to cover another gusty, exasperated sigh. ‘I want to go back to the hotel. I want a shower, I want food, and I want to get back to work.’
There was a kind of funny silence during which I heard crickets chirp. It made me blink for a second… that’s just a term, right? I’d never actually heard real crickets chirp to punctuate a silence. It was… weird. I dropped my hand away from my face and found myself contemplating the toes of my boots. I love him, I told myself, and would be really, really upset with myself if I actually strangled him.
Really.
I closed my eyes and began counting down from twenty in my head. Very slowly.
And then he called my name and it was in a tone of voice that was sort of reverent, and sort of excited, and sort of nervous and when I looked up to see what was the matter, I swear to God my first thought was that he’d found a way to work magic.
He was still standing just at the edge of the field, half lost to sight in the near dark, and behind him, the bean field had somehow… taken light. Tiny little lights. Thousands of them. Rising and flashing and… dancing. They seemed to be dancing. As far as you could see, out across the fields.
I turned around slowly and they were everywhere, drifting up from the ground, blinking some strange code and vanishing when the code was sent. I tried to track one, but it was hard to keep them in sight when they weren’t lit up.
‘Fireflies!’ Duo laughed, though his voice was still subdued, as though he thought he might frighten them away if he got too loud. I turned back to face him, and found him picking his way carefully along the rutted track toward me, his hands cupped together in front of him. ‘Look!’ he whispered, when he came abreast of me, and opened his hands. There was an annoyed looking little bug crawling across his palm, and it stopped when the fresh air hit it. Its whole back end flared into light right before it opened its wings and flew away. I tried to keep my eye on it, but it quickly blended into the dance and was gone.
Lightening bugs. Fireflies. Glow worms. As a boy on the colonies, I had thought the things a myth… like mermaids and unicorns. Fanciful creatures no more real than the Easter Bunny. I suddenly remembered a conversation about the things. There had been… candles, I think, that had sparked the topic. We’d been hiding out… some cracker-box rented room. There had been no power and so the candles. I remembered dried meat and fruit, a shared bottle of water as an evening meal. There had been not a lot to do but wait, so there had been a lot of idle conversation.
And eventually… a first kiss.
‘You remembered,’ Duo smiled, standing close enough to watch my expression in the almost dark. ‘Told you they were real. Father Maxwell wouldn’t lie.’
I snorted and shook my head, leaning in to kiss him softly. That argument had been settled long years ago, but… ‘Some things you just ought to experience for real?’
‘Yeah,’ he agreed and taking my hand, led me over to the pile of rocks. We settled ourselves and he pulled our dinner out of his bag; we shared a laugh as he divided the beef jerky and put the bag of dried fruit where we could both reach it.
‘This doesn’t get you out of buying a real meal when we get back,’ I teased, and he chuckled darkly.
‘In this town?’ he asked. ‘Are you kidding? There won’t be anything open at this hour.’
I took a swig from the bottle of water he passed my way and sighed. ‘I think I hate you.’
‘I know,’ he said, and I had to listen for the wide grin, because I couldn’t see it in the dark. He leaned in to give me a teasing kiss on the cheek, but I turned to meet it and made it into something more.
‘So you’re not really mad?’ he asked, when I let him.
‘I’ll tell you tomorrow morning, after we see if we’re ready in time for the meeting,’ I grumbled and he chuckled softly, resting his head against my shoulder.
We sat for awhile, just watching the lights dance across the field, sharing our meal and listening to the crickets.
‘Thank you,’ I told him eventually, and he tilted his head around to try to look up at me.
‘Welcome,’ he said softly, and then… ‘You just have really got to start slowing down; you’re missing out on all the little things.’
I grunted softly and he just chuckled again, nestling into me. ‘We should probably be getting back soon.’
‘Yeah,’ I agreed, but neither of us made a move to get up. ‘Maybe after dinner.’
Duo just passed the water, and we watched the stars dance.