Hunter the Hunted
I
by Shira
The phone in the bedroom rang obstinately, creating an unwanted distraction.
It rang again and again ignored, before there was movement in the room to
acknowledge it. “Just leave it,” a soft voice whispered, too engrossed in
what it was doing to care about the phone. Sheets rustled, and a sweaty hand
reached to the nightstand, to the remote for the video communication unit on
the bedroom wall. The unit came on, in voice only mode. A disappointed sigh
was heard and more sheets rustled.
“Yeah,” a second, deeper voice asked, annoyed.
“Heero Yuy?”
“Speaking.” Heero lay with his eyes closed and his head nestled in the crook
of his lover’s arm as his mind tried to place the voice, but he was unable
to concentrate. His mind and body were still too numb from the afterglow of
great sex on a quiet Saturday morning.
There was no response from the other person on the line now, and Heero
opened his eyes to look at the video unit even though it was in voice mode
only. Then holding his neck up, he craned around to look at his bedmate
quickly before speaking again. “This is Heero Yuy. Who’s calling?”
The call disconnected with a click.
“Crank call,” said Duo Maxwell in a sultry, sleepy voice as he wrapped his
arms over the other man. “Now put down the damn remote and pay attention to
me.” His eyes were closed, but Duo wore a sly grin on his face as he
demanded that his lover stop allowing the moment to be spoiled by phone
calls from no one.
Heero reached over to place the controller back onto the nightstand and
missed, the remote thudding to the carpet, but he ignored it this time.
“Well excuse me, your highness,” he laughed, burying his face into soft skin
and miles of chestnut hair.
Duo nuzzled back, attacking Heero with a devouring kiss, then momentarily
pushed the two of them apart. He opened his eyes to a cockeyed squint as
something outside their second floor bedroom window caught his attention.
Heero heard it too, and he listened as well, both of them frozen for a
moment.
“A little low for helicopters in a residential neighborhood,” Duo said,
noting that the noise was growing loud enough that the resonance from the
low-flying aircraft’s rotors could be felt. For a moment more the two simply
lay there, naked in bed, until Heero’s eyes went suddenly wide. Before Duo
could question him, he was being shoved off the left side of the bed.
“Get down!” Heero dove off his opposite side of the bed as Duo fell between
the bed and the wall, and the rotor noise sounded like it was directly
outside of the house now. Within seconds the room was a mass of
automatically-fired bullets as the glass in both windows was shattered,
sending a spray of shards into the room and over Duo, who was down on the
floor and scrambling to get his back to the wall between the two bedroom
windows. Shots rang in rapid succession, peppering the mattress and the far
wall with bullets, sending chunks of drywall everywhere as they embedded.
“Holy /shit/!” Heero heard Duo yell from across the room as the longhaired
man pressed himself as close to the wall as he could, frantically trying to
avoid the bullets whizzing past him and into the bedroom. Heero remained
hidden on his side of the bed, flat on his stomach, unable to lift himself
even the slightest bit to see if Duo was all right. He looked under the bed
to try to see, but the comforter hanging down on Duo’s side of the bed
blocked his view.
Then as quickly as the barrage started, it was over, and the shots ceased.
The chopper flew off into the sky, but neither Heero nor Duo acknowledged it
until there had been complete silence for minutes. The only sound that could
be heard in the room now was heavy, anxious breathing, and the occasional
sliver of glass still falling from the destroyed windowpanes.
“Duo? Y-you alright?” Heero said in a muffled, panting voice from
practically under the bed. He was very shaken, having been taken so off
guard the way they were, and his instinct wouldn’t allow him to extract
himself from his protective hiding place yet.
After a few tense moments as he recognized that the shooting had stopped,
Duo answered him. “I t-think so.”
For at least a minute or so neither of the men moved as they gathered their
wits, until finally Heero got up off the floor, dusting particles of drywall
off him. He turned to look at the wall behind him. It was littered with
holes and missing chunks of sheetrock. The bedding hadn’t fared much better,
but Heero ignored the rest of the details as he made his way to the other
side of the bed to Duo.
“Oh shit, you’re bleeding.” Duo had been covered with the exploding glass,
and there were now many tiny red welts over his face, chest and thighs, from
the sharp glass cutting him. His back and shoulders had remained unscathed
due to the thickness of his extremely long hair, which was loose and had
acted as a sort of blanket over his soft skin, protecting him from any more
glass shards.
“Don’t worry, nothing important was cut,” the longhaired man said
sarcastically as he looked down to inspect his “important” area in search of
anything that looked out of sorts. He breathed a sigh of relief to see that
everything looked fine, but the tremble to his body was evident, as he was
equally as shaken as Heero was.
“You alright?”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine. Just gimme a few minutes to chill out.”
Heero offered his hand, which Duo took, and helped his lover to his feet. He
peeked cautiously outside of the destroyed windows “just in case.”
“Damn, Heero, I knew you were exciting in bed, but /what/ the hell was all
/that/?” There was no response to Duo’s sarcastic comment.
“Careful.” Heero lead his nude and barefoot lover away from the windows
pointing out all the shattered glass on the carpet. He took him into the
bathroom. The bathroom door was full of bullet holes as well. “I have no
idea what that was,” he then said, his face stern and concerned.
“That phone call…just before it happened. Recognize the voice? The person
called you by name.”
Heero held Duo’s hair out of the way as the other man began to inspect
himself in the mirror. Thankfully it was still intact, even though the
bathroom door had been open, and there were a few stray bullet holes in the
far bathroom wall as well. “No.”
Duo took a washcloth from the towel rack and rinsed it under warm water from
the bathroom sink. His eyes looked up, filled with question as they
connected with Heero’s in the big mirror. “Someone trying to /kill/ you? But
why?”
Heero didn’t answer right away, and instead took the cloth from Duo’s hands.
Wringing it out, he began to gingerly wipe the small, scattered drips of
blood that had already begun to dry on Duo’s skin. “I don’t know,” he
finally said. “But it’s not as though I haven’t made enough enemies in my
life.”
Unfortunately, he was right.
At the young age of only twenty-four, Heero Yuy had a lot going for him, and
a lot of reasons for people to hate him as well. The reigning power of the
five Gundam pilots, Heero had gone on, as had the rest of his comrades, to
work for the Preventers organization run by Sally Po and Lady Une. He was
their best agent, and was regularly handed the trickiest cases, from drug
cartels to weapons smuggling rings to radical militant groups intent on
disrupting the hard-won peace in the universe. He was a born and bred
killing machine thankfully on the side of good, and he’d already seen more
death and destruction in his short career as a soldier and an agent than
most people would see in two lifetimes.
Realistically, there were countless possibilities of who could possibly want
to see Heero Yuy dead, and the thought sat very heavy with both he and Duo,
who had been his working partner and “significant other” since they began
their careers with the peacekeeping group.
“You don’t think what’s his name is behind this, do you? The guy running
that group that was smuggling all that blow to the colonies?”
“Ramon Valdez.”
“Yeah, him. You think he could have anything to do with this? Remember, he
was so damn hostile toward you during his conviction hearing.”
Heero was lost in his own world, methodically rubbing the blood off Duo’s
chest, and he did not hear the second question. His eyes were cold and
withdrawn, the look that he adopted whenever he was particularly concerned
about something, as Duo had long ago realized. Duo took Heero’s hand and
stopped it from moving, taking the cloth back from him.
“Heero?”
Raising his eyes to meet Duo’s, he looked through him. “If someone is trying
to kill me, you aren’t safe around me.”
Duo’s face lit up with surprise. “What? And what the hell am I? Chopped
liver? I’m a freakin’ agent too, and every bit as good as you. Well, almost.
You’re a little better at sneaking around during those stealth missions than
I am… but still!”
“Duo, if someone out there wants me dead…”
“Then what?” Duo’s tone was edging on annoyed. “One of us has to move out of
our own house so that we’re separated, just because someone is pissed off at
you? Gimmie a break.” He roughly fingered the washcloth in his hands now,
rinsing it under warm water again, and then proceeded to wipe away the rest
of the blood on his chest and face. Hissing as he wiped over one of the
micro-fine incisions, Duo cursed.
“What is it?”
“I think there’s still a piece of glass in this one,” Duo said, pointing to
a freshly bleeding line on his face, along his forehead. A new red path ran
between his eyes, the cut having been aggravated by the washcloth.
Heero stepped close to inspect Duo’s face, until his face was close enough
to kiss, but the mood was long past fun and games by that point, and though
he normally would have, Duo did not venture there. “Hold still. I see it”
Skilled fingers advanced to meticulously and gently push on pliant skin
until the tiny shard stood up slightly, and Heero grasped it between his
short fingernails, just barely able to reach it. Bringing his hand back
down, he rolled the bloody shard on the pad of his finger for himself and
Duo to see. Duo blotted the fresh blood on his face with the washcloth.
“Look, Heero,” Duo began once more, noting the chill that still surrounded
his mate. “Lets get out of here and go down to headquarters, and at least we
can start getting to the bottom of this. Until then, I promise to be
extremely careful, OK? But, I mean, its not like I’m just going to stand
back and let someone try to bump you off and not do anything about it, you
know? And I’m not about to let some idiot run my life, either.”
Heero turned on the sink faucet, rinsing his fingers off, washing Duo’s
blood and the sliver of glass down the drain. Turning his head so that he
did not have to make eye contact, Heero replied grudgingly with “Yeah,” and
then exited the bathroom to get dressed.
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