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"Grounded"Written By: ExecutiveShrimp Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing, it belongs
to Bandai, Sotsu and associated parties. Written for pleasure not
profit. Rating: NC 17 Warnings: unbeta'd, sexual, violent content (graphic,
at times). Pairings: 2x1 Summary: A Preventer mission goes horribly wrong. Co-captains Duo and Heero both survive, but as changed men, and they have to rebuild their lives from the ground up.
"Grounded" Part VI – Duo's POV "He doesn't remember anything?" WuFei verified, still sounding perplexed although both Duo and Sally had told him several times at that point. "It's all gone," Duo confirmed and it was the only thing that offered him some comfort in the horrible situation they were in. At least he wouldn't have to remember that nightmare. Although it didn't absolve Duo of any guilt. "A lot of it will probably come back to him," Sally cut in. "But it's not unusual for some of the retrograde amnesia to be permanent. The brain has its way of shielding itself from trauma." Duo nodded. He squeezed his hands between his thighs and secretly crossed his fingers. The three of them were in Major Chang's office, up on the twelfth floor. Heero was still downstairs in the medical bay on the fourth. He had been there for over seven weeks and he would stay there for a while to come. For all intents and purposes, he was paralyzed at the moment and rendered immobile. As much as the Japanese man resented it, he couldn't take care of himself, so he had to let others take care of him. That alone would soon prove to be a battle. He'd only been awake for six hours and already he was starting to become a handful for the nursing staff. "He intends to come back into the field," Sally said. Chang snorted. "I admire his determined mindset, but he ought to realize that will not be possible. He has to prepare himself for that. Such disappointment can be more crippling than his physical limitations." Duo idly sat by as Chang and Po discussed Heero's rehabilitation plan and Sally spoke with high praise of the physical therapist that was coming up from earth to assist Heero during the process. Every possible resource would be made available to him to aid him during his recovery, regardless of the costs. Chang and Une had had a meeting about the financial repercussions and she agreed that money was not an issue they needed to take into account. Each prosthetic leg alone cost a fortune, with the overall costs of the dozens of surgeries he had underwent, including brain surgery to plant the action-receptor, which acted like a remote control for the legs, the transportation fees and the rehabilitation, everything tallied up to a dizzying number. All that money to make Heero complete again, but still not enough to make him himself again. Some things money couldn't buy. Duo – growing up poor – used to believe money could solve everything, as long as you had enough of it, but he knew better now. As they talked about concerns he couldn't be bothered with – such as the political and legal ramifications of three perished agents - he thought of the mission, like he had so many times over the past weeks. He felt like he was still sitting in the bulkhead of that shuttle, too far away from anyone to be able to help. He felt useless, like he had been in those crucial moments. He remembered hearing the explosion in his left ear and the following static as the result of Haywire's and Viver's headset getting destroyed in the flames. Everything had gone so horribly wrong. The mistakes compounded into catastrophe. But it had all started with one mistake, one poor decision that lay at the root of everything: Duo letting the three inexperienced agents coming into the field with them. At the time he thought he was making the right call, but he shouldn't have trusted himself to be able to make that decision unbiased. Three people had paid for Duo's mistake with their lives. And Heero continued to pay for Duo's mistake. The wry fact was how unfair it was that Duo himself had escaped unscathed. It should have been him in that hospital bed. No, it should have been him in the body bag. He had seen Beck's body after it had been recovered and shipped to L1 to hand over to his next of kin. The face was unrecognizable as Beck. The body was unrecognizable as human. The skull had been concaved, the features of his face pressed into a crater of exposed bone and brain matter. The ribcage had been crushed and flattened, with the pattern of the metal grates pressed into the flesh and even into the sternum. The sheer weight of one of the steel beams that had fallen on top of him had separated his upper body from his lower body. His lower body had been cut into several pieces by the recovery team, to get it out from underneath the rubble. They hadn't been able to free his right foot. All that had been found of Haywire and Viver were pieces of space suit, the burnt remnants of his backpack and the metal clasps from her utility belt. At their proximity to the explosion, a blast that powerful turns the human body into red mist. They had been arrogant and foolish, but neither deserved to meet their end like that. "… What do I tell him?" Duo wondered out of nowhere, disrupting WuFei's and Sally's discussion. "What do you mean?" The doctor asked. "About… About Beck and the other two? About how I got him out?" "I will debrief him," the Major said. "He will tell me all that he remembers per protocol – if he has started to remember anything at this point - and then I'll fill in the blanks for him." Sally seemed hesitant and she carefully expressed her concerns: "I'm not sure filling him in on the details will be helpful to him right now. It appears he is still in shock from the news he got this morning; he hasn't even really come around to accept it yet. I'm afraid of the psychological consequences of telling him too much, too soon. Telling him about the mission could spark traumatic memories of the event and I don't think he is equipped to handle that." "He needs to know what happened," WuFei argued, his tone strict and intimidating, but not to Sally. "He has the right to know what has happened to his body. You can't just tell a man both his legs have been amputated and then not answer his questions." "Well, for starters," she sniped, "he hasn't even asked about what happened to his legs yet. And that's part of my point: he's in shock, none of this has fully registered yet. He won't benefit from being bombarded with gruesome details. And I'm not saying we shouldn't answer his questions and pretend like nothing has happened – which Heero is doing right now, by the way, as a coping mechanism – my point is, let's wait for a psychological evaluation before we decide to give him a copy of Duo's mission report." "Oh, a psych-eval, brilliant!" WuFei bit at his ex. "Let me pull up the reports of his mandatory psych-evals for the past two years…" He pulled a stack of Heero's files towards him, located a blue folder and started flipping through it. "Denial to cooperate. Denial to cooperate… Denial to cooperate," he read as he leafed through the therapists' notes. "The only reason he hasn't been previously suspended for his 'mute condition' during his psychological evaluations is because thanks to ambiguous phrasing in the Preventer protocol, he is only ever required to be present; not required to talk. And because he refuses to talk, no therapist has ever been able to diagnose him with anything, clearing him for duty by default." He bristled like an angry horse. "And Kurasawa let this go on without reporting it and letting HQ make the necessary adjustments to the protocol." "He's not crazy!" Duo shouted in defense of his partner. "I'm not saying he's crazy," Chang placated. "I'm saying he knows how to play the system if he doesn't want to cooperate. He's made it clear that he doesn't like the psych-evals, so of what use will they be now?" "Maybe he'll realize this time around that he shouldn't do it because it's mandatory, but that he should do it because it would be good for him." Duo was as skeptical as WuFei, but he liked the idea of not having to tell Heero much quite yet, so he sided with Sally on the issue and together they convinced the Major to hold off the debriefing. He used the protocol against the Major and pointed out to him that now that Heero had been officially grounded, based on his physical condition, he was not an active agent and therefore should not have access to information on a need-to-know mission. The Chinese agent sent them out of his office so he could continue his work – muttering something about having a lot of phone calls to make - and Duo walked shoulder to shoulder with Sally to the elevator. "You'll have your hands full," she remarked and pressed the down button on the panel on the wall. "You have two stubborn Gundam pilots to juggle." Duo blinked at her. "Are you leaving?" She offered him a sad smile and they stepped into the elevator. "I have to get back to my research team, Duo. There is nothing more I can do for Heero here. The best thing I can do to help him is to get back to work and keep pushing the progress on the technology." He knew the day would come, but he had been dreading it. She had been his rock throughout the lengthy and emotional process. The few times she had flown back to Earth to coordinate with her research team had been lonely and stressful. He trusted Sally to keep a good eye on Heero, so he had only been able to sleep when she was around. He second-guessed every action of the other doctors and even the kind nurses. He had called her in the middle of the night on many occasions to verify if the night nurse really was acting on her orders. "When do you leave?" "Friday." The day after tomorrow. That felt like it would be too soon. "Are you sure you can leave? What if he-?" "What if he, what?" She patted his arm reassuringly. "His condition has been stable over the past few weeks. The decision to prolong his medical coma was only to give his body as much time to heal as possible. The team here will take care of him if need be, but most of it Heero has to do himself now. We've done everything we could to save him, now it's up to him to save himself." "What if he can't?" He countered. "He didn't want any of this. He told me to leave him there," he reminded her. "If he can't, then he'll have you." That didn't make Duo feel right, because he didn't trust himself anymore. They stepped out of the elevator and walked down the hall to Heero's private room. Duo could already hear the raised voice of a nurse. "I told you, you need to eat," the nurse insisted. "I'll eat when I'm hungry." Duo and Sally walked through the door in time to see Heero push the tray of food away. The nurse had her hands on her hips and shot the two of them an exasperated look. Heero was already getting on her nerves and her shift had only started three hours ago. Sally quirked an eyebrow at Duo, wordlessly reminding him about what she had said about Heero's and WuFei's stubbornness, before she stepped up to the bed and repositioned the tray in front of the patient. "Heero, you haven't had any solids in weeks. Now that we've disconnected the feeding tubes, you need to start eating again. Your body needs the nutrition." "I'm fine." Heero shot a look at Duo, expecting him to back him up. "Heero-" Recognizing in his tone that Duo wasn't taking his side, Heero continued: "I know you all must have gotten used to being in charge of what happens to my body, but now that I'm awake, I'm in charge. I'm telling you: I'm not hungry." Duo winced at the jab. The nurse threw her hands up in the air and walked out of the room, telling Sally along the way: "I demand a reassignment." "Talk to Faulkner, I'm leaving on Friday," Sally said, not about to get into scheduling. "Tsk. Lucky." Heero kept his glare fixed on the nurse until she had left the room. "I don't like her. She doesn't listen to me." "Oh, trust me, Heero, she listens. She just doesn't obey and she'd not paid to obey your orders, so that's fine." Sally routinely checked his charts to keep herself updated on his stats. When she noted no significant or alarming changes, she announced that she was going home for the night and instructed Duo to get him to make Heero eat. Duo weakly nodded in response. He had no idea about how to go about that, but he would try. He wished her a goodnight and then took a seat in the chair he had occupied for the past seven weeks. He crinkled his nose at the sight and smell of the hospital food, but he knew Heero wasn't a picky eater, so that wasn't the problem. "Why won't you eat?" "… I can't." "What are you talking about?" "I can't!" Duo reeled back at the outburst. Heero refused to meet his gaze. He rubbed his golden fingers against the white bedlinen. "My arms tremble too much when I raise them," he admitted through gritted teeth. "She was going to feed me," he said, like it was the most severe insult. "Oh." "I don't want people to see me like this." "Like what?" "Weak," he spat. "… weakness during missions means death… weakness between missions means punishment…" he recited, almost imperceptibly rocking himself back and forth. "You're not weak, Heero," Duo asserted. The Japanese agent snorted. "You're not weak. Not unless you choose to be," he said poignantly and finally Heero looked at him again. "Come on…" Duo scooted closer and grabbed the plastic spork off the tray. After some consideration, he decided to scoop up a mouthful of what appeared to be mashed potatoes. With a dead-serious expression he brought the spork to his partner's lips. "Show them how strong you can be." The cobalt blue stare was defiant and Duo was about to give up when Heero parted his lips and allowed Duo to feed him. Neither of them said anything as Duo served him the mashed potatoes, the peas, some unidentifiable type of meat and half of the dessert. It reminded him of the rations they used to have during the war. It didn't look appetizing, or taste good, but it had all the nutrients they needed. Duo was sensitive to his partner's vulnerability and shame, but he pretended like it was the most normal thing in the world for him to be feeding a grown man like a helpless child. He simply listened and nodded as Heero firmly stated that Duo couldn't let anyone see him like this. He didn't want any of the other pilots, or even Relena to come see him. Duo knew he would have trouble keeping them at bay and he didn't think it was a good idea for Heero to be shutting everyone else out, but he wasn't about to argue with him. When the patient had eaten as much as he could stomach, Duo put the lid back on the tray and put it aside. "I told Faulkner about your trouble sleeping from before. They are going to give you something to help." "I don't want to go back into a coma." Duo shook his head. "No, it's not like that. It's just something to help you fall asleep, for the night." "Will you be here?" The American smiled at the other. "If you want me to be." "Maybe you shouldn't stay. It might be suspicious." Duo sighed. Heero was still worried about getting grounded because of their relationship, not recognizing that it was a non-issue now. Sally was right, the gravity of his condition hadn't registered yet. "I've been here every day and every night. That's my bed right there." He pointed to the empty hospital bed across from Heero's. "Nobody here knows about us. We're partners – co-captains, I mean. Nobody questions that." That wasn't true. In fact, WuFei was probably the only one who hadn't figured it out yet. Heero nodded, put at ease by his words. "Are you in any pain?" "My feet hurt," Heero said flatly, nothing in his tone indicated that he was aware of how odd that sounded. "And the catheter is starting to irritate." "I suppose they'll take that out soon, now that you can relieve yourself." "How am I supposed to evacuate my bowels? I will need to in a few hours." "The same way you pee; in a bedpan." Heero made a displeased face and Duo was sympathetic. Heero had been taking care of himself since he was a young teenager, it was an adjustment to relinquish control and be so dependent on others – on strangers, especially. They were silent for a long time. Both looked out the windows as the colony slowly dimmed the lights to simulate nighttime. A team was running drills on the obstacle course in the spreading darkness. "Have you really been here with me all this time?" Heero asked. Duo blinked a few times to wake himself from his trance. "Of course. I haven't even gone home once. I had Quatre get me some of my things. He packed a bag for you as well, for when you woke up. I can help you change out of that hospital gown, if you want?" "No, it's fine for now," his partner replied, pulling the hem of the sheets up further. "So Quatre does know about us?" "I had to tell him." It hadn't been a conscious decision. As soon as the former Sandrock pilot arrived, Duo had collapsed in his arms. He'd spent days fighting – fighting with the doctors, fighting with the nurses, fighting with himself, fighting with the vending machine – when his eyes met that soothing shade of aquamarine, the anger had drained out of him and all he had been left with was his despair. He had cried and Quatre had let him. He had told the other pilot everything and Quatre listened. "He won't get us in trouble." "I know. I trust him." Duo smiled. It warmed his heart to know that Heero acknowledged all four of the other pilots as his friends, even though his relationship with each of them was very different. "When was he here?" "He's come by a couple of times. He was here last two weeks ago, when they were initially going to wake you up from your coma. But Sally had decided against it at the last-minute; she wanted to keep you under a little longer." He scrubbed his face with his palms. "I- I should at least call him. Even if you don't want to see him, I should let him know you're back." "Am I back?" Heero wondered. With his hand he made a weak gesture down his body. "Is this me?" "It's the part of you that matters." Heero's face was unreadable. Duo prided himself on being able to interpret the minute facial expressions of his partner pretty accurately – certainly better than anyone else – but oftentimes the former Wing pilot was still a mystery to him. At times it was enthralling, but it could also be disconcerting. Duo couldn't help him if he didn't know what was going on in his head. Doctor Faulkner, the head of the L1 medical team – forced to play second fiddle in his own medical wing while Sally Po was on colony – walked into the room, trailed by that same nurse from before. She spotted the nearly empty tray of food and she shot Duo a grateful look and rewarded him with a secretive 'thumbs up'. She seemed in better spirits even though it looked like she had failed to convince doctor Faulkner to assign her to a different patient. "It must have been quite the day for you, agent Yuy," Faulkner said without looking up from the tablet he was holding. He scrolled through Heero's records. "Agent Maxwell informed me you've been dealing with chronic insomnia. Why have you never alerted your team's physician-… Doctor Maeda?" "It hasn't been an issue I haven't been able to solve on my own." "And how do you solve it?" "I run." "Hm. I see. For now," he motioned for the nurse to give him a small plastic cup with two pills and he reached them out to Heero, "take these." Duo wanted to accept the pills for him, but Heero pressed his lips tightly together and raised his arm off the bed to take the cup. He rested his hand in his lap. The nurse brought him a cup of water, but she recognized his weakness and put the cup on the bedside table, right by Duo. "Thank you," Duo said, knowing Heero wasn't going to. "The pills will help you sleep; give them half an hour. You need your rest," Doctor Faulkner said. "I'll be on call tonight for emergencies. Doctor Ahi will be here for anything else." Heero nodded curtly. "Thank you, doctor." Over the weeks, Duo had learned to make an effort to be polite. It had taken a while. Faulkner and the nurse left them alone again. Heero popped the pills into his mouth and Duo put the cup to his lips and tilted it so he could take a drink to wash the pills down. Duo got up to get himself a cup of water as well. Other than a hasty lunch that afternoon, he hadn't been tending to his body. "Did you miss The Twelve because of me?" "Don't worry about stuff like that." The last of the test rounds ended last week, but Duo hadn't even thought about it once. He had no interest in participating, for many good reasons, one of which being that he did not intend on going back into the field anyway, so he needn't work to renew his clearance status. As of last week, by default, he was officially grounded too. "Did Beck pass?" Duo froze at the question. He stared into Heero's eyes, waiting for the spark of a memory, but the blue orbs were unusually dull. He cleverly phrased his answer: "The entire team passed." He didn't want to have to tell Heero that, nowadays, "the entire team" meant only Swagger, Cho and Rubo; the surviving team members. Duo hadn't even seen them since they left for that doomed mission, but WuFei had mentioned in passing that he had taken charge of the team to keep the individuals from derailing their careers within the agency. "Good. Are the results official yet?" "Not yet. But they did good." "Even Beck? On the obstacle course?" "They all did good." "Did Viver and Grace help him?" Duo sighed. "Let's not talk about this. It's not important." "They didn't, did they?" He surmised. "They helped him," Duo said, carefully choosing his words to avoid lying, even though Heero wouldn't catch him in a lie anyway. "They helped him get ahead. Beck was very grateful." "That's good." "Hm." "You should get back to work soon. There's no point in you wasting time waiting for me." "There's no point in you wasting time waiting for us." Duo squeezed his eyes shut and pushed away the memory before it would consume him. "You're my co-captain, I can't do anything without you." "That's not true at all.. And you need to keep the team in shape. When I get back, I don't want to deal with the results of everyone's slacking." Duo only nodded in response. He didn't want to tell his partner that the only capacity in which he could come back, would be in an administrative function. Duo didn't doubt that Heero could get back on his feet – what an awful pun – sooner than anyone else. Heero was the strongest person Duo had ever known, both physically and mentally, but the bar for a Preventer field agent was set too high. The hardships of trying and failing would break Heero's resolve at some point. He didn't know how the former pilot would handle it. His sense of self-worth was entirely linked to his physical prowess. "I'm starting to feel tired," Heero announced. Duo touched his hand to Heero's. "That's good." "Are you spending the night here?" "Yes." "Where will you sleep? In that chair?" Sally had warned Duo that forgetfulness was one of the side-effects from the sodium thiopental that had kept him in his medical coma. It was nothing to worry about and most of it would fade over the course of the next few days and within a few weeks his mental capacity would be back to normal. It was, however, not the cause of him not remembering the mission. The trauma was at the root of his retrograde amnesia; his inability to remember events that happened before his coma. Waking up out of a sodium thiopental coma was paired with anterograde amnesia, meaning he had trouble storing new information in the long-term memory. With a light voice Duo answered: "I have my own bed, right there." He pointed across the room, bringing Heero's attention to the bed opposite of his, as he had done before. He didn't want to let Heero know that he had told him that already, he didn't want the forgetfulness to cause the Japanese agent additional frustration and distress. "Can you recline the back-support?" Heero asked. His words were soft, his eyelids were at half-mast. "I think I'm… I think I'm falling asleep." "Sure." Duo pressed the button on the remote to lower Heero into a horizontal position. He watched his face closely and noticed the minute twitches of his features as the movement of the bed disturbed his body, resulting in some pain. Once the bed was flat Duo helped Heero adjust the pillow and the sheets. "Are you comfortable?" "My feet hurt." Duo glanced down the prone body at the two prosthetic feet pointing up under the sheets. He wondered if Heero's forgetfulness could have gotten so bad that he had forgotten about the news Sally had broken to him that morning. But then Heero asked, with comically dry inflection: "Did they at least make me taller?" A short chuckle escaped Duo. "I don't like that I'm shorter than you." Duo scoffed. "Deal with it, Yuy," he jested. "You're two inches taller than before, but still not as tall as me." Before, what a weird thing to say. "Hn." His eyelids drooped shut. "I don't want to sleep," he said, but he couldn't open his eyes again. "I've slept too much." "You need your rest." He leaned forward and pressed a kiss to his cheek. Heero's face scrunched up. "You can't do that here. What if someone sees?" "I don't care. I'm going to kiss you again." The next kiss landed on Heero's lips. Heero was unresponsive but the kiss was sweet and exactly what Duo needed regardless. "It's good to have you back." "I'm not back," he muttered. His eyebrows pinched together. His eyes were still closed. "Not yet. But I will be." Duo didn't know what to say other than: "I love you, Heero." He had never told his partner that before, even though it had been the wry truth for the past two years. Duo had always been too afraid of scaring Heero off with his admission, because he knew the Japanese agent wasn't ready yet to say it back and the imbalance would cause a strain on the relationship. He had been waiting for the right moment all that time, but it was apparent now that there was never a right time. All they had was now. Duo was afraid of how this would change Heero and how it would change them. He himself didn't feel like the same person he was before. He used to have confidence in his own control and his abilities. For the first time, he was scared of himself. Scared of his selfishness and how his mistakes never seemed to hurt him, only the people around him; the people he loved. Heero didn't respond. His face relaxed and his breathing evened out. At least the pills were actually helping. "I love you so much," he choked and he thought he had stayed in control of his emotions until he saw the tear fall on Heero's cheek and slide down and Duo realized he was crying. "I'm so sorry," he said to the sleeping figure and he made a face at his pathetic apology. He wiped his tear off Heero's cheek. Heero would never forgive him once he knew what Duo had done. He didn't know if either of them was strong enough to handle this 'after'.
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