THE BIG BOOM

Wufei hates the way Duo drives. He’d never admit it, but it makes him car sick. It’s ridiculous, but the fact remains. It’s just different when you’re not controlling the vehicle. 

 

And Maxwell drives like his ass is on fire. 

 

The countryside blurs around them as they careen down hair-raisingly narrow lanes and for what? Some sketchy lead someone in intel dredged out of someone, let’s ask no questions how. But the lead is a lead and the only one they have on a potential cell of new revolutionists, who liked the way the world was before peace, thank you very much, and are invested in making it so again. 

 

Or at least causing enough trouble to make the higher-ups look very embarrassed. 

 

Wufei grips the handle of the car door and breathes deeply. 

 

The tip-off is this: the cell has a cache. Over a period of months there have been a series of air drops to a farm house out in the back of beyond; deliveries of a presumed dangerous nature. Weapons, is the assumption, or drugs. The whole thing is stinky with dirty money. 

 

And really, it doesn’t take two senior agents to go poke around a musty old house and unearth some cheap weapons, except there’s a rumour of Gundanium and beam rifles, and Duo wanted to drive and play detective. 

 

And perhaps Duo would be operating by himself except he’s still on a black mark from the last time he decided to go out on a solo mission, which means Wufei is on baby-sitting duty. Besides, it’s nominally one of his cases, so really it ought to be him.   

 

“Think this is nearly it,” Duo yells over the roar of the engine, slowing from the needle-shaking red end of the speedometer to merely fast. Wufei supposes they’ve made good time considering the length of the journey. He’s not especially looking forward to the trip back, but with any luck they’ll find something and he can order in transport and hitch a ride with the payload. 

 

They pass a property, the first in a long while, which consists of a run-down slumping farm house and, much removed, a barn. Wufei peers at it, but Duo doesn’t stop. 

 

“Bit farther.” Duo flashes him that old devil-may-care grin; the nice one. The kind of grin that elbows you conspiratorially in the ribs all ‘you wanna be in my gang?’, and try as he might to ignore it, always makes Wufei wanna. He takes another deep breath and turns his attention to the window again, lest Duo realise he’s thinking some things that should strictly be reserved for out of uniform hours. 

 

Not that they’ve ever, of course. 

 

The landscape outside is generally flat, populated with trees between wide swathes of agricultural land. Beyond that, in the distance, rise the humping backs of the mountains. It’s afternoon, but the sky is thick with clouds that block most of the sunlight, making it seem like dusk. 

 

‘We’re going to be driving back in the dark,’ Wufei thinks.

 

Duo slows the car down to the actual speed limit, looking ahead down the road for the place they’re looking for. They nearly miss it. 

 

The the entrance drive is a narrow gateway, the gate itself drunken on it’s hinges and overgrown into the hedge. Possibly an old vineyard, the drive arrows away towards the house, lined with linden trees along a ditch. It must have been imposing once, but there are weeds encroaching on the dusty mud of the drive, and the house itself is nothing to brag about. 

 

Duo kills the engine and eases the car towards the building, eyes peeled for movement, or signs of recent activity. There’s nothing. Not even ruts or scuffs on the driveway to suggest anyone’s been there. Certainly nothing as obvious as lights left on. They roll to a stop. 

 

“Guess nobody’s home.” 

 

They get out in silence, leaving the doors of the car slightly open as a precaution. Wufei puts his hand on the butt of his gun and nods his chin towards Duo. “Might as well split up. You take the back, I’ll take the garage.” 

 

“Sure.” 

 

Duo ducks away, braid swinging, off on the trail like a hound after a rabbit. 

 

Wufei inspects the front of the house. It’s a big blank face, wood forming the greatest part of it’s construction in a very old style, shutters closed and no sign of entry around the front door. He moves quietly around to the garage, which is locked. The lock is rusty, and the hinges cobwebby. 

 

Really, it seems like the whole place is abandoned. 

 

___

 

Round the back, Duo has found something more than cobwebs. The rear of the building is hotchpotch in shape, with a funny appendix added on, and a long sloping shingle porch that shelters, to his interest, a car and a collection of other things.  

 

He picks his way towards the car on cat’s paws and notes that it, unlike much else around here, seems to have been handled recently. There’s a newspaper tossed in the back seat, which is only a few days old, and there’s a smudge of finger marks around the door where someone’s opened it. 

 

They don’t maintain it too well though. It’s leaking oil, or else Duo’s a monkey in a police suit and needs to give up being a mechanic. 

 

Still, begs the question. Where the heck are they now? 

 

The car is parked perpendicular to a pair of doors. One must be the rear door to the ground floor, papered over with significantly older newspaper. The other leads to something else. Maybe down through the funny appendix bit to a basement. 

 

Other than the car, there’s a pile of cardboard and a greasy stain on the floor. Duo frowns at it. Oil, probably, although not motor oil. This has a smooth gelatinous quality to it, odourless, and such a pale colour it’s almost clear. Lamp oil? There’s the broken shell of a lamp tangled with the nettles and he notes that the overhead power is cut, so maybe. The oil seems a little too thick to be lamp oil, but maybe it’s dehydrated in this heat. He finds a few empty spray cans too. Paint and lubricant mostly. 

 

Duo flips through the cardboard. It’s all one and the same, with a manufacturer’s name stamped on it here and there. 

 

‘Etarc,’ Duo reads. Curious. He’s come across that name before - on mining gear. It’s a legit business set up on the edge of L4, one of those little bitty colonies that’s more industry than habitation. They make heavy-duty cabling and automatic gear boxes, circuitry and power cells for kit designed to pummel through space rock. 

 

Pricey stuff. Good quality. 

 

‘The hell are they doing with high-spec mining kit out here?’ Duo wonders. 

 

He drops the cardboard and rises. Eenie-meenie-minie-mo. He picks the basement door. If you were going to hide something, downstairs seems more likely. He crouches and picks the lock; it’s not hard. Gratifyingly the door opens outwards. On the other side is a grimy bead curtain which he parts with the back of his hand and slips through, easing it carefully back into place without clicking. 

 

Stone steps lead down into a basement room, presumably the old kitchen. There’s another greasy splatter down one side, partially against the wall. Someone dropped something. 

 

Resting his hand on his gun again, Duo descends. 

 

___

 

Back at the front of the house, Wufei is making some of the same decisions. The padlock on the front door is a child’s challenge. He leaves it on the step and goes inside. The entrance hall is not as dusty as the porch, and disappointingly, there’s no sign of anything untoward. A flight of stairs stretches up before him, and the hall itself is roughly square-shaped, with four doors leading from it. One of them, he’s willing to bet, is the under-stair cupboard, so he ignores it. The door to his right may form the old drawing room; it’s south facing, which would make the ones on his left some combination of kitchen, dining room or other habitable space. 

 

One is squashed by the wall, suggesting it leads down. In which case, Wufei concludes, he’ll start with the first ground floor room, and take it from there. Without further ado, he turns the handle and opens the door. 

 

___

 

The stairs reveal a slice of a basement kitchen, designed in the days pre-dating electricity, or reverted for the days when electricity was scarce in more recent years. The air is chilly, but the room isn’t actually dark. There’s a yellowish light, although if there’s a window somehow at the other end, it could just be daylight. The weather is strange today. 

 

Duo turns the corner at the bottom of the stairs and freezes.

 

He’s not alone. 

 

The man has his back to him and earphones in, nodding along to music as he works. The light spills from a signaller’s lamp, carefully hooded so that the light only spills where the man needs it to see what he’s doing. It hisses as it burns. 

 

The man puts down the fine tool he’s using and Duo silently cranes to look. 

 

Dials and electrics and some other mechanical jib-jabs. A couple dozen things in various stages of completion. The guy is busy lubricating the mechanics of one thing, but next to his elbow he has a couple of completed items; digital pressure dials, the kind you can manipulate with a finger tip. Duo’s seen them on sound systems in their smaller form but these big fat ones are designed for easy power control for long-range equipment. You sit all cosy in your control room half a mile away, and power up and down your cells as needed or use it to trigger -

 

Duo has only half the thought before the man notices he has company. The glass-fronted cabinet opposite them both betrays Duo’s slight movement in the form of a shadow that shouldn’t be there. Duo reaches for his weapon. 

 

___

 

Three faces stare at him in complete disbelief. Wufei likewise stares back. One of them already has a knife in hand, apparently in the middle of cutting his nails. There’s a firearm on the coffee table. And coffee. 

 

“The hell-?” One of them begins. Wufei doesn’t wait to hear how he finishes. 

___

 

The man at the table doesn’t wait for Duo either. He whips around as fast as thought - unbelievably fast - spray can hissing. Duo prides himself on being quick off the mark, and he’s quick enough to throw his arms up, but still gets a faceful of industrial lubricant for his troubles. 

 

He falls back, gagging, eyes gummed up, throwing out a boot in a calculated blow at where the man was. His heel catches a graze and then empty air. There’s a crash of glass and a yell. He’s hit the lamp. 

___

 

The cell, to a man, launch something at Wufei. One, the knife, one a scalding hot beverage, the third the coffee table sans firearm. They’re professional, and co-ordinated. They know each other too well to need to yell orders. As Wufei distractedly kicks the airborne coffee table away from him, a soft noise behind him alerts him to the fourth man just stepping out from the blindspot behind the door. He’s fast. A hand closes in and Wufei has to wrestle for his pistol. A fist scuffs across his ear.

 

Wufei twists like a weasel, squeezing off two rounds as message. In the next thirty seconds he needs to not be overwhelmed before Duo can bust in to help. Thirty seconds is plenty to mop up just four people. The big fourth man tosses him into the mess of the coffee table. Knife-man skids on his knees in the opposite direction with a yell, scooting for the open door. Wufei fires another round, but to his fury, misses. 

 

Coffee-man, in contrast, rears up with another knife and goes down with a fatality. Table-man fires back. 

 

“Fire, Fire!” someone else is shouting, “Fucking go!” 

 

Wufei has to duck behind an armchair, which puffs out stuffing as Table-man pumps it full of ammo. A bullet thumps into Wufei’s back through the fabric, but lacks the impetus to pierce his jacket. Then the gun clicks. 

 

Wufei rises to take his shot, but Table-man dives behind the door and flees. In the meantime, the Big Guy has silently circled. He’s good. He’s very good. Worryingly quiet and focussed. He gets the jump on Wufei again; a smart move that rattles Wufei’s pistol from his hand to even the odds, or would, except Wufei brought his personal weapon with him. He punches his way free again, and reaches for his sword. 

 

“Really? You can’t fight fair?” Big says. Wufei lets go of the handle. 

 

“Alright.” He doesn’t trust Big an inch. If Big gets the sword from him, there’s a chance Wufei’s going to end up on the sharp end of it. But the man’s older and has a weak left leg. Wufei can see him shifting his weight to the other. He doesn’t waste time. 

 

They meet in a crash of blows, and Wufei drops, punching his foot out to strike hard on Big’s ankle. It’s a good kick, with the full force of his weight behind it. Something snaps audibly, and the ankle, not Big’s, buckles up in a blinding flash of pain. It’s bad enough to make Wufei scream before his back hits the floor. Big looks down at him and grins. He teases up his trouser leg to reveal the solid metal of a mech-prosthetic. ‘Custom,’ Wufei can’t help but note with a strange hint of admiration. That was cleverly set up. 

 

Nevertheless, he’s crawling on the floor trying to get his good foot under him and ignore the pain and Big’s coming for him. Wufei draws his sword. All deals are off. 

 

But it doesn’t matter. Big makes a snap decision, and bolts. 

 

Wufei turns, and sees what Big saw. Smoke, trickling in through the shutters. 

____

 

The gunshots from above are unbelievably loud. They make Duo duck on instinct, even though he’s pretty sure it’s Wufei doing all the shooting. 

 

There’s smoke in the basement, thickening all the time. 

 

Duo rises, scrubbing furiously at his eyes. As his vision clears, he’s surprised to discover that he’s been ditched. The man’s made a dash up a second flight of stairs.  The broken lamp is burning fiercely, the oil splashed out in bright fingers underneath spewing black clouds. Duo’s kick has swept it off the table to wind up behind him as it’s bounced from the wall and rolled. Even as he watches, the fire finds the second greasy spill and just erupts. 

 

Up inside the house, the basement mechanic is yelling. “Fire, fire! Fucking go!” 

 

No kidding!

 

The flames roar faster up the stairs Duo came down than he’s ever seen fire move before, burning a shocking white-blue that’s hard to look at directly. Duo staggers up, alarmed, and takes the other set of stairs up, following the mechanic. He’s not even at the bottom step when the front door slams. 

 

“Duo!” 

 

Duo ducks into the living room, gun covering all angles, to find Wufei climbing to his feet, sword in hand. Duo scurries forward to pull him vertical, noting the body on the floor. “What happened?” 

 

There’s a slam of metal outside and the roar of an engine. 

 

A familiar roar. 

 

“My car!” Duo cat-leaps the wreck of the living room, abandoning Wufei. He gets to the door and wrenches it open just in time to see the tail end of his car revving out of the yard and veering off down the driveway. He squeezes the trigger, and then yells as the car moves out of range. 

 

The car! The one at the back of the house!

 

He wheels around and comes smack up against Wufei. 

 

“We should go out the back door.” 

 

“It’s on fire!” Wufei snaps, shouldering him back. “Get out the building!” 

 

There’s a dull bang from the rear of the property and Duo recalls the spray cans and the broken paraffin lamp. “I am out the building,” he throws over his shoulder, skipping back and looping around to the rear of the house.

 

He arrives just in time to witness the groping fingers of the fire leap up the curtain at the rear door, lick the edge of the spill on the concrete and then bloom out to underbelly of the car. 

 

“Are you shitting me?” 

 

Duo retreats a sensible distance and the car smoulders before flames appear around the engine and that’s the end of that idea. 

 

“The fuck just happened?” he yells, stomping back to Wufei, who is lurking around the front of the building, glowering his face off. 

 

“Bad intel just happened,” he snaps back. The fire is growing, eating its way around the edge of ground floor. The wood is old and dry, the paint flaking. Soon the boards behind to catch. Duo mooches back a ways to evaluate its progress, and even as he does so, it starts to drizzle. Wufei looks up, even more displeased. The lowering clouds just carry on anyway. 

 

“Hey, what’s this?” Duo says, gesturing to his foot. 

 

“I’m fine… I just won’t be running any time today.”

 

Duo sighs, reaching for his radio. “I’ll dial us in and get-“ he pauses, an alarm in his brain suddenly going off at a million decibels. Dials. Oh God-! The surprise of the attack and the lube facial had shaken it from his mind. 

 

“Oh fuck!” 

 

“What?” 

 

“We need to move.” He grabs Wufei’s elbow, and Wufei moves with him, automatically leaning on him to hobble faster. “Packaging,” Duo babbles, speeding up, “dial on the table really bad intel oh shit we need to move more, they were building a surge in there and fuck shit damn it Chang, can you really not run?” 

 

Wufei is trying, between sword and Duo and one good leg to bounce along as fast as he physically can, despite not being certain why they are trying to sprint. “What surge?”

 

“Really fucking big bomb,” Duo pants, grabbing Wufei around the ribs and almost lifting him off the ground. 

 

“How far?” Wufei growls between gritted teeth. Duo looks frantically back at the house and the rising flames and then down the length of the drive. There was a lot of cardboard there. A lot. 

 

“Fuck, too far, jump.” Duo lets go, skids to a halt and squats. “Up!” he yells and under any other circumstances Wufei would argue, but Duo doesn’t get that bug-eyed without a good reason, so he ups. Duo hitches him over his shoulder, one hand darting carelessly close between Wufei’s legs. Scrabbling, Wufei sticks a wrist back for Duo to complete the fireman’s lift and then Duo puts his head down and hustles for all he’s worth. Wufei glances back, sword dangling in his free hand. The fire has found a hold now; all these lovely chemicals and dry furnishings and broken windows behind draughty shutters. It’s roaring up around the second floor and then there’s black hair-like line down the front of the building where the top is starting to collapse into the bottom. 

 

Wufei drops his sword and covers his ears as best as he can. 

 

___

 

The next thing he knows is that they’re significantly further down the road than they just were and he’s got dirt in his mouth. 

 

And it’s raining. 

 

Wufei lies, his heart palpating horribly, like it’s about to shake loose at the roots, hardly able to breathe. He sucks in water and air, coughs and rolls on his back, grasping his chest. ‘I’m having a heart attack,’ he thinks in horror, unable to call out or move other than in tiny helpless back and forth rolls. It goes on and on, but doesn’t worsen, and then gradually his hiccuping pulse subsides. 

 

He lies in the dirt, the rain a wonderful misery on his face, and recovers. 

 

Slowly.

 

Eventually, Wufei picks up his head, which hurts, and by increments the rest of him, which also hurts. But it is all still attached and (with the exception of the ankle) largely in one piece. It’s comforting to know that he’s still young enough to bounce. 

 

The house is literally gone, except for a few toothy sticks left sticking up out the dirt like chewed bones. The beams. 

 

Then a new thought hits him with a cold rush of panic.

 

“Duo?” 

 

He shakes his head to clear it and finds Duo incongruously rolled off the drive behind him and far to his left, or what had been his right when the bomb had gone off. Duo’s face down, hair thrown at an angle from his body. 

 

“Duo!” Wufei calls again. How long has he been unconscious? A while, at least. It seems a little darker than it was a moment ago, but that could just be the weather, or the weird way the flash of the explosion has made his vision dance.

 

Overhead, thunder grumbles. The storm has caught up with them full force now. It’s both good luck and bad. On the one hand, it’ll dampen the fire down, but on the other, they’re both sitting in it. Duo stirs and to Wufei’s yelp of relief, begins worming aimlessly in the dirt. 

 

Wufei manoeuvres to his knees and struggles over to help him, picking up his sword on the way. 

 

“Are you hurt?” 

 

Duo registers Wufei’s knee in front of him. The ground has made a mess of his chin and the one side of his face is already puffing. “Wu…” Duo croaks, evidently both surprised and pleased to see him. He feels at the raw graze, distracted, and then flops over onto his back. “You’re alive?” 

 

“I’ve been better.” 

 

“What?”

 

“I’ve been better,” Wufei yells back, patting his hands over Duo’s chest, checking. “Anything broken?” 

 

“Aches… like… a motherfucker,” Duo rasps back. “I can’t hear anything.” He plants his hands in the dirt and then with a colossal groan, sits up. He rubs at his chest and spits blood from his bust lip, wheezing a moment. “Ow…” 

 

“The blast must have thrown us.” 

 

Duo blinks around them, taking in the remains of the house and comes separately to the same idea. “Shit, we got tossed like… how many feet?” 

 

“Some,” Wufei says, grabbing Duo’s elbow. They stagger together upright, nearly pulling each other over. 

 

“Did I chip a tooth?” Duo bares them through bloodied lips. Wufei peers upwards and then shakes his head. 

 

“No.” 

 

“Fucking feels like I chipped a tooth.” Duo feels at it tenderly, smearing gore on his fingers, and then bares it to the increasingly heavy rain with a whimper. Wufei needs to sit down. They bungle their way to the end of the drive and sink at the base of a tree. 

 

“What happened? Look at me. Bomb,” Wufei repeats, gesturing to the house for Duo’s benefit. “What was it?”  

 

“Surge,” Duo says, still mopping his face with his fingers. He never has tissues or a handkerchief or anything, the little street rat. Wufei unpockets his own and bats Duo’s hands away to do a better job of it. “Kind of… electro-gel… shit inside a shell. Owwww!”

 

“Sorry…Go on. You were saying?” 

 

“The gel stores a charge like a battery and goes boom if you rack the incoming charge up when you install a- listen, it’s a bomb, ok? They use small ones to bust up space debris and core through asteroids.” 

 

“If it’s electric, what caused it to go off?”

 

“Do you really want a fucking science lesson now?” 

 

On balance, Wufei decides that he can wait. He paws at his belt for his radio instead and is annoyed to find it no better than a useless hunk of plastic. 

 

“Electro,” Duo reminds him. “Fries everything. Your heart still jumping? Mine is.”

 

It isn’t, but Wufei feels pretty fucking twitchy anyway. “So we can’t call out.” 

 

“Can’t call out, can’t get calls in. Best just park our asses and wait.”  

 

They wait, growing stiff and cold in the rain, and they wait. Duo dozes, ever the opportunist, whilst Wufei watches the sky and the end of the drive with growing apprehension. 

 

All the while, there’s no sign of any movement on the road. It doesn’t make sense…

 

Someone must have heard something; seen something. A whole damn house just caught on fire and blew sky high. Even if it’s not Preventers, surely the civilian fire services would turn up? 

 

Unless…

 

Wufei reconsiders. A shallow scrape of woodland slope separates this farm and its neighbour, along with a good stretch of empty fields. With a storm coming in, what would a land owner out here be doing? Tending his property, maybe stalling livestock. Who knows? Pre-occupied elsewhere. Wufei eyes the broken house for a long moment, at the next-to-nothing smoke signal and has to conclude that perhaps no one is coming. 

 

The storm seethes in the clouds above them. The rain is steady but under the trees it’s not intolerable; they’ve put up with worse, although Wufei can already feel his jacket getting damp at the seams. The lightning zig-zags in sharp bursts and then thunder crashes, startling Duo from his snooze.   

 

“We need to move,” Wufei says, prodding at Duo to direct his attention. 

 

“Gimme a minute and I’ll hike you to that other farm.” 

 

“No, you’re not carrying me that far and besides, I-“

 

“Why the fuck not? Don’t be a priss. I hauled your butt out the blast zone and you were fine about it. We’ll go faster than with you trying to hobble it. It’s how many miles, like…”

 

Wufei does not wait for Duo to finish trying to figure it out. He grabs his shoulder and makes Duo look at him.  

 

“Read my lips, Maxwell. No, you are not piggy-backing me four miles down an empty road in the middle of a fucking storm, because one, you will drop me, and two, I am holding a fucking lightning rod!” 

 

“Whoa- ok…I…forgot that wasn’t just part of your body,” Duo says, gingerly pushing the tip of the scabbard back from his nose. “You can’t just leave it here? Ok, no, I see that’s not an option.” Wufei brandishes it again for emphasis. 

 

“Barn.”

 

“Ok! Ok! We’ll… go the barn. You’re right; better plan. Geez, man. Gimme a break, I got blown up.”

 

“So did I.” 

 

Another crack of thunder so loud that they can feel it makes them stop arguing and reconsider. “Help me up,” Wufei says. 

 

Duo grasps his wrist and hauls and in silence they start the awkward walk towards the barn. 

 

The ground is muddy underfoot. The clay absorbs moisture at the surface like a sponge and shrugs it off its sunbaked bones underneath. They slither into one another, Duo once again clasping Wufei around the ribs. Under the trees the rain was tolerable, in open field, it’s wretched. It’s fat rain, the kind that splashes up as well as down and there’s enough of it that the wet bits of them start wicking steadily into the dry bits. 

 

“This blows,” Duo mutters, hair straggling into his eyes. They’re obliged to climb a locked gate, which has Wufei all but screaming through his clenched teeth, and then there’s the barn. It looks about as inviting as a corpse, squat and corrugated in the middle of fallow ground. They weave around the thistles, which bristle armpit high with cohorts of nettles that blow in wavering circles with the wind. 

 

“This fucking sucks.” 

 

Wufei couldn’t agree more. 

 

The barn itself is in better condition than it had appeared, although it screams of recent disuse. Tyre tracks leading in and out of the doors seem promising, but they’re the worn ridges of older trips, entrenched the previous winter most likely. A lock and chain on the door provides nothing by way of keeping them out. 

 

The inside is a dusty, gloomy cave with a mezzanine level, cracks in the walls letting in the scanty light. Wufei blinks until his eyes adjust. The ground floor is almost bare, except for a clutter of old machinery and other bulky items under tarps at the other end. Debris from an unused farm. He feels for his torch and flicks it on, and is annoyed to find that, like his radio, it’s fried. Duo feels in his own pocket and flicks a lighter. 

 

“Home sweet home. Hold up here a second.” 

 

He leaves Wufei propped on the door and enters, scooting around by the light of his little flame, checking the place over. “Water’s come in,” he reports from the back. He prods around one of the upstanding beams and then untangles something from it. With a clatter, a ladder runs down and bites the earth at his feet. Duo climbs it, holding his flame away from his body and behind him at arm’s length and squints into the dark a moment before returning. 

 

“Stock take; we got tarps, we got some old hay, we got damp on the ground floor. I’m not really feeling the urge to go scrounging for firewood I won’t find, so I reckon we bunk in upstairs and wait the storm out.” 

 

“Fine,” Wufei says. 

 

“Great,” Duo says, with the ghost of that grin, “And if we get hungry, I’m pretty sure there’s mice.”

 

Wufei doesn’t laugh. He’s eyeing the ladder like it’s personally offended him. At any rate, it’s about to. 

 

The climb ranks as one of Wufei’s lowest experiences in recent times. There have been worse, more traumatic occasions in his life, but the indignity of having Duo Maxwell shove him up a ladder with a hand cupped on his ass really adds that extra special something. 

 

The fact that Duo finds it hilarious doesn’t help either. 

 

The hayloft is just that. A big dim loft partially full of hay. It’s not even fresh hay, with the nice smell of summer grass. Most of it is old and musty. But it’s dry, at least, and something soft to sit on. Duo fetches up a big tarp, shakes the spiders off of it into the void below the loft and spreads it out cleanest side up. 

 

Really, who could ask for more? 

 

They can’t use the lighter. The amount of dust here would set the place ablaze in two seconds flat, and they’ve both had enough of fires for one day. So it’s cold and virtually dark, except for where the gaps in the boards let the light in. The thunder steadily rolls closer. 

 

Duo stomps up and down, shivering and running out of smart comments. 

 

Wufei eases himself onto the crackling tarp, his ankle protesting. Gingerly he tugs at his bootlaces, made impossibly tight by the fact that the joint has ballooned to twice it’s normal size. He growls at it. Duo crouches beside him and then clocks what it is he’s trying to do. 

 

“Taking the boot off? Is that the prevailing medical advice?” 

 

“I want it off.” 

 

Duo can’t hear him, but he’s known Wufei for years and equally isn’t surprised when Wufei carries on regardless. After a moment, Duo moves around in front of him. 

 

“Here.” Duo slips a hand under Wufei’s heel, lifting the foot a fraction. Pain lances up his calf.

 

“No-!” Wufei almost yanks back. 

 

“Relax, I’ll be gentle.” Duo looks up and smiles, just a rough shape in the dark. “Trust me. Super gentle, ok? Just let me help. You’ll twist it worse if you pull it from that angle.”

 

He uses the point of a pocket screwdriver to lever the laces out of their bindings, easing the pressure. Wufei watches him like a hawk, propped on both hands. Duo’s fingers are freezing on his achilles as he carefully eases the boot free. Wufei’s sock goes with it, clinging to the insole with the wet, leaving his skin exposed. Over the drumming rain, Wufei becomes aware of his own shaky breathing. 

 

Duo probes the swelling with his fingertips and nods. “Doesn’t look so bad. Pretty clean break… Just do this-” 

 

Wufei realises how Duo has placed his hands but it’s too late to react. Duo tugs firmly, the bone pops and Wufei yells to high heaven. 

 

“And we’re good!” 

 

“You- BASTARD!” Wufei’s so angry he damn near kicks Duo with the same foot. Instead he groans in fury, gripping fistfuls of hay and breathing hard until he has enough air to yell again. “You son of a bitch!” Even Duo can hear him at this volume. 

 

“You’re very welcome. ” 

 

“You underhand little shit! You’re a fucking piece of work, Maxwell!” 

 

Duo laughs. “I learnt from the best. You know Heero would have set that himself?”

 

“I hate Heero. I hate you!” Wufei hisses in Duo’s ear, trying to pull his foot away. 

 

“We love you too,” Duo replies. “Now sit still. I’m trying to bind this for you, moron.” 

 

Wufei says a few other choice words in Mandarin, which as usual go past Duo like water off a duck’s back, tinnitus or no tinnitus. Duo has unzipped the med-pack from the lining of his jacket and unwound the stretchy bandages, doing a neat job of mummifying Wufei’s foot. “Might be able to put weight on that in a few hours.” 

 

“Better hope not, I’ll kick your ass,” Wufei threatens, tossing hay at him. 

 

“Be nice. Your regulation stock of painkillers will run out before mine will,” Duo points out. So saying he swallows one of the pills dry and then dangles the strip in front of Wufei’s eyes. “And I did a good job.” 

 

Wufei cautiously moves his foot. It still aches like fury but it feels more like one piece again now. Begrudgingly, he has to admit Duo is right. 

 

“You could have warned me,” he yells, not angry now.  

 

“And waste time on all your ‘do you know what you’re doing, Duo?’-ing.” Duo snorts. “‘Sides, you’d have talked me out of it in two second flat. I fucking hate setting bones. It’s gross. Bleh!”  He gets up and stomps around a little again, shaking his arms and squeezing out his braid.

 

Unable to do likewise, Wufei finds himself getting increasingly colder. 

 

“Tarp,” Duo decides, stomping back. “Or we’re gonna freeze. Can you get up a moment?” 

 

Wufei can’t, but he can bum-shuffle aside. Duo works busily, digging around in the hay, rustling. Something zooms past Wufei’s back with a squeak, but lucky for the mouse, he’s not hungry. 

 

He will be though. The adrenaline is draining from his system, and leaving a weird empty feeling from the loss of it.   

 

“Alright,” Duo announces, overly loud. He stumbles back towards Wufei, shaking hay off of his wet jacket and then takes it off completely. He hangs it on the arching handle of the ladder before feeling around his shirt and doing the same with that. 

 

He strips, in fact, to his underwear, stuffing his boots with hay and leaving them upside down to drain. He does the same with Wufei’s left boot and then comes over expectantly for the right. 

 

“You’re not going to get warm in wet kit,” Duo points out, reasonably enough. “And hurry the fuck up, I’m freezing.”    

 

Wufei’s jacket joins Duo’s on the other handle of the ladder, the boots make a quartet, and the hand on ass moment is demoted to the second worst thing that’s happened to Wufei’s dignity today after Duo has to help him pull his trousers off. 

 

“Nice undies,” Duo teases. “Very tight. Very white. Handy if we need to surrender to anyone.”

 

“Fuck off,” Wufei growls to no effect. 

 

Duo has fashioned an envelope from the tarp, a thick layer of hay below it and above it, like the worst sleeping bag ever conceived. Wufei feels very naked sliding about on the plastic, and colder than ever. 

 

“It’ll get warm, trust me,” Duo says, swearing as he follows suit. He wriggles around, which Wufei can’t do without stars flashing around his vision. Duo burrows his head down to breathe on his fingers, shivering. 

 

“This is the fucking pits.” 

 

Wufei curls into a ball and tries to take himself mentally to a place where the physical is irrelevant. He can slow his breathing to three breaths per minute, it’s no harder to distance the pain and discomfort. The consciousness of his near nudity.  

 

His heart skips a beat. 

 

Not in a romantic sense, in a disconcerting faulty sense. Wufei grunts and curls tighter, and it settles again. 

 

“Fuck, it’s cold,” Duo complains. He’s restless, twisting his limbs about. Maybe just unable to get comfortable. The hay is soft but has a tendency to lump up underneath a body. “Shit, I’d tell you to say something, but, ha! What’s the fucking point?” 

 

Duo wriggles some more, and Wufei starts to wonder if it’s not just the cold. The darkness has made the ringing in Wufei’s ears seem sharper, smells stronger. There’s a plaintive edge to Duo’s voice, like the ‘ha’ really wanted to be a yelp. 

 

“Hey, uh…this is…This is temporary, right?” Duo says, as if reading his mind. “I’ll get my hearing back; give it some time…” 

 

Wufei doesn’t know. It’s possible, but it was also one hell of a bang. His own ears are suffering and he’d had his hands clamped over them. Even if Duo’s hearing comes back, there’s no saying right now if it will be exactly the same, or if there will be a whine in his hearing that will bother him for the rest of his life. Right now, they don’t know, and even if they did, they can do nothing about it. 

 

And Duo already knows all of this. 

 

“Don’t worry about it now,” Wufei suggests. 

 

“‘Fei?” 

 

Right. Wufei gropes across the tarp until he finds a rounded portion of Duo. An arm, he hopes. He pats it. 

 

“Your hands are cold,” Duo complains. They are. Most of Wufei is cold, despite the hay. On impulse, Wufei turns his hand to press the back of his fingers against Duo’s skin, somewhere around the ribs. Wufei grins in the dark. 

 

“Fuck,” Duo hisses, “That’s mean.” 

 

“You cracked my ankle.” His voice hums along the plastic. 

 

“What?”

 

‘A-n-k-l-e,’ Wufei writes on Duo’s arm, prodding him for good measure.

 

“Ow! Oh, so that’s your petty revenge, huh? Too bad two can play at that game.” 

 

Duo presses icy fingers to Wufei’s stomach with uncanny precision, making the muscle jump at the shock of it. Wufei pushes at his hands to get them off, making Duo snicker, tickling upwards. 

 

“Cut that out!” Wufei hisses, urgently.

 

“Can’t hear you. Was that, ‘more please’?” 

 

“You’re being weird.” It would be uncharitable to ding Duo around the ear like he normally would. Instead, Wufei clamps Duo’s hands in his own and squishes them. Duo squeezes back, and doesn’t let go. 

 

“Don’t uh… go running off without me or anything if I fall asleep,” Duo tells him. “Or I’ll kick your goddamn ass back to space.” 

 

And there’s that wobble again. 

 

‘Calm down,’ Wufei taps on the back of his hand. Morse. It’s the best he can do in the circumstances, but it helps. Duo takes a deep breath and relaxes in as much as anyone can in their underwear in a barn. Wufei’s thumbs grow warm in the smooth indent of each of Duo’s palms. 

 

 ‘What if the mice get into the tarp,’ Wufei thinks suddenly, with a creeping feeling up his spine. 

 

“What?” Duo says. 

 

‘Nothing,’ Wufei replies, tapping. 

 

“You squeezed my fingers.” 

 

‘Mice.’

 

“Come on,” Duo grins again, the whiteness of his teeth reflecting a flash of lightening. The thunder trembles. “You’re not scared of Mickey and Minnie are you?” 

 

Wufei digs a thumbnail into Duo’s palm in reply to that. It seems low to point out that Duo is afraid of being deaf in the dark. Duo’s knees knock against his own. 

 

It’s starting to feel warmer in the tarp; the hay is a pretty effective insulator after all, but the combination of damp and plastic has the effect of making their legs feel like skinny little chicken wings nevertheless and the darkness is oppressive. Duo makes a vague humming noise that he’s not even aware of making. 

 

‘Talk,’ Wufei instructs. 

 

“What about? I can’t believe we had our asses handed to us like that. Anyone else, sure, but us?”

 

‘Prepared.’

 

“Yeah, they had a slick operation going on. Professional. I guess on the one hand we wrecked their cache.” 

 

That’s true, Wufei reflects. They lost the cell members but the surge is destroyed, which means they’ll have to start over. He wonders where they intended to use it. 

 

Duo breaks in on his thoughts. “Shit, we almost died.” 

 

Wufei pauses. They blundered about this mission shamefully. If Duo hadn’t seen what he had seen and been able to put two and two together, there’s no doubt Wufei would have been blown to bits the same as Coffee-man, without the benefit of being dead first. 

 

‘Thank you.’

 

“What for?” 

 

‘Saving me.’

 

“Ah, come on. As if I’d leave you behind,” Duo says, evidently embarrassed. “Une would piss acid, and besides. We’re friends.” 

 

Morse code is helpful but it’s not quick. It’s more immediate to take the plunge and link his fingers with Duo’s, tightening his grip for a moment.  

 

“You getting sentimental on me?” Duo teases. 

 

Wufei tugs free and rolls over. Never mind. 

 

“Hey.” Duo prods him in the back, shuffling closer. Like this, Wufei can feel the contrast between the cold of the plastic and the living heat of Duo’s presence. “Don’t pretend you’re going to sleep. It’s too damn flashy and cold to sleep. Geez, this is some storm,” he adds, as the building shudders. 

 

He’s not wrong. The storm is still overhead, strobing through the gaps in the boards. Outside something clatters as the wind catches it. “Hope the roof doesn’t come down. That’d really fucking suck. Least L2 has that going for it. Stable weather. Hey, which do you prefer- really hot or really cold weather?”

 

Wufei rolls over again to find Duo just inches from him. ‘No’ he taps.

 

“Neither? Fair.” 

 

Wufei suspects Duo of being deliberately obtuse. Then again, he did tell Duo to talk.  

 

“I like hot weather. Sunny beaches, big blue sky. Sunsets. Or like those big starry skies you can get some places on Earth, with the city in the distance like little lights. That’s nice.” 

 

“Mountains,” Wufei says, between cymbals of thunder that make his heart thump hard again. He remembers seeing mountains for the first time, miraculous and unbelievable after the man-made flats of the colony. You can’t build a mountain. They simply are. The scale of them makes something in his soul fly. 

 

“What?” 

 

‘Mountains.’

 

“Eh, not my bag. Interesting though. I can picture you as a mountain man. Ok, next question. Which would you prefer - “ Duo’s cut off by an almighty flash of lightning at the side of the building that lands with a sharp 4th of July snap and an amber crackle. Something heavy slams into the wall, making the whole loft sway.

 

Duo sits up in alarm, scattering hay, one hand blindly grabbing at Wufei. His voice bounces up half an octave. “Fuck, that was close! What was that?”

 

“Tree,” Wufei says, grasping Duo’s shoulder to pull himself up. He taps it out on Duo’s collarbone. Duo starts as if he’s going to get up. Wufei tightens his grip. The last thing they need is Duo stupidly taking himself outside and getting fried. The other man’s pulse races under his hand. Wufei shakes his shoulder. 

 

‘Calm. Down.’

 

“I’m calm, I’m calm, fuck off, man; trees explode?!” Duo says, too loud. It’s stupid, Wufei thinks, after all they’ve been through that something as mundane as a lightning strike on a tree can get Duo this jumpy. “No one ever told me trees fucking explode!” 

 

It’s ridiculous that his heart is racing too. 

 

“Are there more trees close to the barn? Are they all going to start popping? Fuck this, I’m gonna go see.” 

 

“Idiot,” Wufei says, “Sit down!” He needs both hands to pull Duo back down on his ass. He doesn’t really have the resources to fight Duo right now, and the movement jars his ankle. The pain goads his temper and it gets the better of him in a rush.

 

He pushes Duo flat, left hand to right shoulder, none too gently. Duo’s not braced for it on the slippery plastic, and hits the floor hard enough to knock some of the breath out of him, for a half-second anyway. 

 

“It’s. Just. Weather!” Wufei snarls, trying to scorn it as much as the situation seems to be scorning them, mere mortals that they are. 

 

The thunder drowns everything out, loud enough to feel in their bones. The sound of it isn’t like anything else; not like gunfire, regardless of what poetry says. It has it’s own brand of violence, thrilling and frightening. 

 

Underneath him, the whites of Duo’s eyes show pale in the dark, in contrast to the smudge of injury down his mouth and chin. He doesn’t look like himself. Lightning again, throwing sharp illumination around them in crazed patterns, deepening shadows and making angles blink. The rain is hammering on the roof, rattling on the sheet metal. 

 

And neither of them moves. 

 

They’ve pinned each other like a pair of cats, eye to eye, tense, each waiting for the other to do something. Wufei’s back grows cold even as the hand pressed against Duo’s shoulder, keeping him down, grows hot. Duo’s knees dig into his hips, thrown against him on instinct when Wufei pushed, one hand in the hinge of his elbow, the other gripping his chest. Wufei’s leg is pulsing, a throb of heat and pain that lances up to the knee, making him bare his teeth. He’s breathing hard. 

 

When the thunder sounds next, the voice of it shakes down Wufei’s core, makes them both inhale. Fear and anger are only other names for arousal. 

 

He shudders. 

 

Duo’s thumb, the left one, moves. It glides over the pectoral, a deliberate pivot of the digit, slowly sweeping over Wufei’s nipple. If it’s a test, Wufei fails. His belly hitches. Duo’s skull-like grin becomes a smirk. 

 

He does it again, pushing upwards, watching for Wufei’s reaction. Duo’s other hand slides down from Wufei’s elbow to the wrist, curling round it, almost caressing. Abrupt as the lightning, he pinches the nipple. Wufei hisses; Duo arches and heaves. 

 

They land heavily, reversed. Wufei clenches his fist uselessly by his own ear, caught in the vice of Duo’s hand, but the right hand is free, pushed in a claw at the hollow of the man’s throat. 

 

Duo leans his weight against it. “Calm down,” he suggests, voice low. His thigh slides between Wufei’s, where he is anything but calm. That grin is back as soon as Duo feels how hard he is. 

 

“Or don’t…” Duo adds, in a murmur. He undulates lower across Wufei’s body and shocks him by licking his ear. It drags a noise from him, half arousal, half disgust. 

 

A strobe of lightning again. Wufei returns the favour, twisting his head to one side and kissing down the side of Duo’s neck, the skin tasting of hay dust and sweat. In one patch, his tongue picks up the faint alkaline of this morning’s soap. Duo’s teeth rasp his shoulder. 

 

Wufei drags his hand down from Duo’s throat, nails skimming his chest and then, cold and unerring, further still. He pushes his fingers abruptly under the fabric, curling them around Duo’s cock. Duo stutters an inhale at the touch. 

 

He curves, moves his head like he’s lost what he wanted to touch and then thrusts into Wufei’s fingers. Duo needs both hands on the floor now, teeth bared, he moves to the pace Wufei sets. His thigh rocks in the crook of Wufei’s legs, tantalisingly close.

 

“Fuck, you don’t waste time,” Duo pants. That’s true enough. 

 

‘I’ve got you,’ Wufei thinks, arching, tugging roughly with a dry hand though Duo has no complaints, not when he twists his wrist. Duo’s weight is crushing his wrist into the tarp, making his fingertips tingle and even if his ears weren’t already singing then the blood rush would make them do so. 

 

Duo’s breath clouds against his chin and his neck. The tarp becomes humid with their sweat where it covers them, and chilly where it doesn’t. Duo murmurs something that might just be nonsense but the storm swallows it anyway. 

 

Wufei twists his hand again fiercely. “Come on,” he demands. “Come on.”  

 

He feels Duo make a noise, deep in his chest, just a rumble before his hips snap and the grip on Wufei’s wrist finally loosens. The spill of semen on his belly, when it happens, is astonishingly cool.

 

Duo eases to the side, knocking Wufei’s leg by mistake. 

 

“Shit, sorry,” Duo slurs, rubbing Wufei’s hip in apology. He laughs, a weirdly giddy noise, and moves to kiss him before wincing back, lip cracking around the graze. Wufei daubs at the mess on his stomach with a wisp of hay, smearing it. 

 

“It’s fine.”  Wufei stretches his hand to get the feeling back into it and shifts, erection aching, reaching down for it. 

 

“Nuh-uh.” Duo worms into his personal space again, pushing Wufei’s hand out of the way and replacing it with his own. “Not a fucking chance, buddy. You’re mine.”

 

But he doesn’t go right for it the way Wufei had. Instead Duo takes his time to catch his breath and tease him with the flat of his tongue across his collarbone, the playful rasp of his teeth catching on Wufei’s skin. 

 

“Fuck, if we were anywhere else,” Duo promises, his touch light down Wufei’s pained leg. “Anywhere else, none of this bullshit, God, I’d do it, alright.”   

 

Wufei leans up on one elbow, pressing his mouth close to Duo’s ear. “You think you’d have the stamina for me?” he asks.  

 

Through the ringing in his ear, Duo can’t make out the words, just the low throb of Wufei’s voice and all the implication. Thunder shakes around the barn, and Duo’s reply is lost. Instead he presses his hand to Wufei’s chest and pushes him back to the tarp. 

 

Wufei lets him. His back hits the plastic with a slap, and it’s cold, the air is cold over his chest, making his nipples tight. Duo’s hands are chilly on his hips too, but his breath leaves a hot damp path down his belly. Wufei closes his eyes. 

 

The rain crackles overhead like static on the roof. Through his eyelids Wufei catches the blink of white that is all he can see of the lightning. He counts: yī miǎo zhōng, liǎng miǎo zhōng, sān miǎo zhōng, sì-

 

Before he can finish the count of four, Duo closes his mouth over him. 

 

The world turns raw and minute, reduced to the tactile weave of the tarp under his fingers and the itch of hay, the smell of it sweet beneath the moulder like grapes fermenting on the vine. Duo’s hair snags against his numb fingers, still wet through as if Duo’s just crawled from the sea into his lap.  

 

And here’s the thunder, now like the distant engine of a jet taking off.

 

The dab of Duo’s nose against him is a wild contrast to the heat of his mouth. Wufei breathes, wills his lungs to pump evenly, billowing the dust into strange shapes in the darkness above them. His leg pulses with pain as a counterpoint to orgasm, which dances a pleasing little way out of reach. He rides the ebb and flow of Duo’s tongue against him in time with the retreating storm, creeping to the edge between the flash and the growl and slinking away again.

 

Once.

 

Twice.

 

Again. 

 

He loses track of time, though the storm keeps fading. Duo’s fingers trail a spiral on his buttock.

 

Wufei breathes. 

 

When Duo’s hand slaps against bare flesh, the sound of it is sharp and surprising. It startles a shout from Wufei that changes to a gulping noise when Duo does something with his mouth and two fingers that throws him over the edge with a bang. 

 

Duo surfaces laughing, same fingertips finding the tingling patch of skin that he’d smacked. 

 

“I could feel you yell,” he says, satisfied. He leans in and dabs his tongue on Wufei’s jaw, a proxy of a kiss. Wufei can feel the dampness of his touch, warm in the case of the tongue and cold from the tip of Duo’s nose. 

 

Still catching his breath, Wufei pushes his fingers into the root of Duo’s braid and wishes he could kiss him hard without busting the other man’s lip open again. When he feels Duo’s mouth in the dark, it’s puffed and slightly wet, Duo’s breath unsteady against his fingers. 

 

Wufei kisses his cheekbone instead, then the opposite line of his neck. 

 

“I felt you holler,” Duo says again, still chuckling. He can feel the flush on Wufei’s chest, and the rise and fall of his ribs. Duo shivers. 

 

The thunder trembles in the distance, no more threatening now than the throbbing of a loose sheet of metal. Duo exerts the effort needed to pull the tarp and the hay back over them, wriggling close against Wufei’s side in the pocket of it. It’s warm at least, where they’ve been lying, and now that the storm is moving away, it’s darker. 

 

“Are you getting sentimental on me?” Wufei asks, when Duo butts his head into Wufei’s shoulder and burrows against him. 

 

“Nah but you’re the closest thing to hot stuff in a 20-mile radius,” Duo tells him. “Other than the smoking crater back at the farm.” 

 

Wufei flashes a grin to the roof and lies there for a long time, pushing the pain aside as Duo crashes hard into sleep. 

____

____

 

Duo wakes no longer so deaf but half blind to a beautiful morning. Wufei is greyed out next to him in the tarp, though he rouses as Duo moves before grimacing back to sleep again. Duo struggles free onto the bare boards of the loft, picking his underwear out of his ass. His eye has swollen to what must be a beautiful shiner, and the scabs have set hard down his jaw in a crust that prickles when he pushes at it. 

 

The storm has flushed the sky clear and the sunlight floods in when Duo pushes a loose board back. He has no idea what time it is. Mid-morning perhaps? The sunshine warms through his stiff limbs and highlights with awkward cheer the dry, dust-stuck smudges of the unmentionable on his torso. It rubs away under his fingertips, tugging at his skin. 

 

Duo breaks the broken board away completely, drenching the loft with a beam of light and feels at their clothes. The uniforms are still damp to the touch and he hauls them over into the sun to improve while he finger combs the muck from his hair. It’s probably a damn good job there aren’t any mirrors. 

 

The tarp crackles as Wufei emerges, never one to hang around if anyone else is active. He crawls out slowly, limping straight for the med-pack and downing painkillers dry. 

 

“Hey.” 

 

Wufei just grunts, fiddling with his bandage. His ankle has ballooned, the flesh watery around the joint and grotesque. Like Duo he’s battered from where the blast threw him against the ground, with his own pattern of bruising marbling his body from his thigh to his bicep on the right hand side. Hunched up in nothing but his underwear, he is all elbows and knees, and so miserable-looking that Duo grins even as his pulse goes whoops. 

 

“Hey handsome,” he croaks.  

 

Wufei looks up. His gaze shuffles slowly over Duo’s busted face and the way the man’s sitting with arms folded across his skinny chest, goosebumps rising on his arms and Wufei finds a bitter little smile for him. “Hey.” 

 

“Feeling ok?” 

 

Wufei grunts again. “Still deaf?” 

 

“Better,” Duo replies, rubbing at one ear. There’s an intermittent whine that he reckons is going to annoy him every time he notices it, but he can hear a little now, which is glad tidings enough to be going on with.

 

He lapses into silence as Wufei collects his trousers and slits the seam on one leg with the screwdriver. He doesn’t offer to help as Wufei painstakingly pulls them on; it’s different in daylight.

 

They both sit around for a hot minute thinking ‘now what?’. In the immediate, they have to get out of the barn, which is going to be a whole new type of fun with the way Wufei’s foot looks, and then they need to contact HQ. Duo sets his jaw and then reaches for his clothes. 

 

“I’m going to go call it in. Sit tight.” 

 

“I’ll come.” 

 

“You can hardly walk,” Duo points out. “Sit tight, I’ll be back.” 

 

Wufei glares. “I’m not made of glass.” 

 

“I’m offering to let you take a fucking load off for a couple of hours. We don’t both have to hike to the phone,” Duo says, tugging up his pants and buttoning them. “So don’t be a dick about it.” He says this last part with something like a tinge of embarrassment. Wufei hunkers into himself, brooding. 

 

“I’ll be back as soon as I can.” 

 

Wufei grunts, only glancing up from his foot when Duo pulls on his shirt. His eyes flick right back down and then right back up again. Duo pauses, hands on the open front of his shirt and holds off on buttoning it.  

 

“Hey,” he says, leaning on the arch of the ladder carelessly. When Wufei looks up again, Duo indicates the tarp with his chin. “We going to do that again sometime?” 

 

“We work together. It’s not a good idea,” Wufei says, not looking him in the eye but in the naval. Subtle. It feels good. It’s a real fucking ego boost to hit this level of pathetic and know Wufei’s still hot for him, and Duo can’t resist teasing. 

 

“Oh, but you want to.” 

 

The fact that Wufei only looks sly in response is enough. Duo prowls barefoot forward. As he does, Wufei stops cradling his ankle and leans back on one hand and one elbow. He could be about to spring up or lie back, could be either. Hoping for the second but knowing it’d never be that easy, Duo slides to his knees at the last minute and closes the distance at the same eye level.  

 

“So…let’s get all of today’s bullshit out of the way, and maybe this evening, I’ll help you find an interesting way to keep that ankle elevated.” Wufei’s knee deliberately stops him from getting any closer and then the man nudges his good foot into Duo’s belly to push him away. 

 

“Go and find a phone,” Wufei tells him, dark-eyed and not even bothering to pretend he’s not looking. “And I’ll think about it.” 

 

“Bullshit!” Duo says, delighted, bouncing up. “You already decided.” 

 

“Phone,” Wufei says, with a hint of a smile.

 

“I’m going.” Duo swings himself off of the loft with more energy than he has, ignoring the scream of his shoulder muscles. He pauses on the top rung for one more look, just to be sure, but there’s still that hint of a smile and his whole chest goes whoops again. Distracted, Duo’s hand slips on the rung and the ladder clangs as Duo grabs it again, the whole thing creaking. Duo looks down to see that the feet of the ladder have slipped a little thanks to his fooling around. Great.  

 

The hay rustles. “What’s the matter? What happened?” 

 

“My heart just fucking skipped a beat. I’m fine. Dislodged the ladder. Your fault. You’ve given me ideas.” 

 

Wufei snorts, hiding concern with derision. He’s covered the distance between the tarp and the ladder in a blink. “Don’t be stupid. That was just the big boom.”

 

Duo tilts his head, hanging on over the edge and thinks about kissing him. “Yep. That’s one word for it.” 

____

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END

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