Moments of Haven Part 45
Things Undone
It was generally considered a bad thing to come out of the shower and find Heero lying on his bed, hands behind his head, staring blankly at the ceiling. Duo assessed the situation, unwinding his braid from the top of his head, where he'd pinned it to keep it from getting soaked as he bathed. Feeling his hair had still gotten a little damp, he fluffed his bangs out, then sat down on his own bed, took out the tie holding his braid together, and undid the plaits halfway to let it dry a little more easily. He'd brush the whole mass out later. After binding it once more, noting that Heero hadn't stirred much in that time, Duo stood, took a few steps over to the side of Heero's bed, and then tilted his head and craned his neck and made quite the point of looking at the spot Heero was staring at, trying to determine just what was so interesting about it. Finding nothing out of the ordinary, he glanced back down, and grinned impishly when he found he had finally attracted Heero's attention. "Hey."
Heero raised an eyebrow at him in wry amusement.
He sat down uninvited beside his partner. "You're thinking again," he accused.
"Hm." It was a sound of agreement masquerading as a loud exhalation.
"I don't suppose I could convince you to stop? I mean, we are off-duty now." Even if they were still on-site. Once again, Duo found himself longing for home, for a chance to recharge and get away from this muck. With the business of Parson-Andersen Financial being unearthed, they'd produced enough new avenues for investigation that they'd been putting in a little overtime, even with many of the leads farmed out to other investigative teams. On the plus side, they never had to think very hard about what to wear for the day.
"Hn."
"I didn't think so." Had they been back home, Heero would probably still be staring blankly at the ceiling, only on a more comfortable mattress. He planted a hand on Heero's chest, and it slithered leisurely down firm muscles as Duo leaned in to engage him in a kiss. He found Heero's lips pliant and willing, his mouth warm and welcoming, and when he pulled back, he found the wry amusement had not left his partner's face. The message written there said, 'Nice try.'
Duo shrugged, a light motion done in good humor to accompany the twist of his own lips. He knew full well how difficult it was to distract Heero once he got his mind on something, but it had been worth a shot. Nothing was lost from the attempt; in fact, he'd acquired a rather nice kiss out of the deal. "So. Work?"
"Hm." An iffy sort of sound. Duo interpreted it as a 'sort of'.
"You're thinking about them again, aren't you?"
A soft sigh, a slight shrug. That meant a reluctant 'yes'.
Duo's hand danced its way up from Heero's hipbone to rub soothingly at a shoulder. "I don't suppose you'll stop if I ask you to stop?"
One of Heero's hands emerged from behind his head to take up Duo's. Heero lifted it to his lips and kissed the knuckles apologetically.
Duo rolled his eyes in a gesture of fond exasperation. "And I don't suppose you'll believe me if I tell you -- again -- how you really shouldn't do this to yourself?"
"I'll try," Heero offered quietly. It wasn't as if he wanted to brood. It just came very naturally to him.
"Well, it's good to know you're even listening, anyway, even if it all does seem to bounce right off of you." Duo pulled his hand back to the vicinity of Heero's belly, taking the other hand with it. "So, once more... you need to stop that, Heero. You need to stop feeling guilty about it, or taking responsibility for it, or wishing you could have done something about it."
"You've never stopped thinking you should have been there when... everything went to hell for you. And you know it's not something that makes any logical sense, but that doesn't stop you from thinking it anyway."
He closed his eyes briefly, wallowing in that feeling, but when he opened his eyes once more, his determination had only been strengthened. Heero had made a mistake: his words, his reminder, only prompted Duo to try more heartily to remove that similar burden from Heero if he could. "My place was with them, only circumstances that one night dictated otherwise. But you are not responsible for the deaths of those people. And need I remind you that, if you should have known, then I should have known, too? Unless you're trying to imply something here..."
"Of course not."
It was a cheap card to play, but oh so justified. Heero couldn't insist they were equals and then go around claiming exclusive guilt for everything. "Then anything we could have done would not have changed things. Davis was the one that was stupid enough to go jumping the gun in his whistleblowing. Those two guys were the ones stupid enough to take the money to cook the books. They were the ones that got themselves involved with Veranti. Even if, after we picked up Davis and Pratt, we could have predicted Veranti would put out a hit on their guys in the company, we would have had to go slogging through lots of paperwork to figure out who their guys were. The accountants in forensics weren't even close to digging those guys out of the woodwork when we heard they were dead, and Davis didn't do enough of his homework to be able to name them, either.
"I want you to stop feeling like we should have been able to stop it from happening. It's not like we could have posted a watch on everyone at PAF, and we couldn't have kept Veranti from finding out that Pratt had failed. I don't even want to hear that we were indirectly the cause of their deaths. If we hadn't stopped Pratt from making off with Davis' paper trail, sure, Harper and Tate would probably still be alive, but Davis would probably be dead, and in the grand scheme of things, I'd rather have Davis alive, idiot that he is, than the two guys that sold out."
He paused for breath, looking directly into Heero's eyes as he did, trying to gauge what, if any, success he had achieved with his lecture. Many long seconds passed, and he maintained the visual contact until he thought Heero finally breathed in resignation. "So. Does that just about cover everything?"
Heero blinked several times, shifted fractionally, and then finally tilted his head with a slight smile shaping the contours of his face. "Pretty much." Duo's arguments had certainly been valid and convincing, and even if they failed to soothe away completely that ache in his heart for the loss of life, they managed to chase away the demons whispering dark, reproachful things in his ear.
"Well, good," Duo sighed in relief. "Because I came up with another very legitimate point in the middle of all that and now I've completely forgotten what it was."
Heero suppressed a chuckle and slipped his hand out from beneath Duo's. Reaching up, he flicked some stray hairs away from Duo's face, then let his fingers linger, tracing a soft line from the temple down to the cheek. They paused, then slid around to the back of Duo's neck and drew him down.
With their lips mere inches away, Duo pulled back and put a halt to his descent. "Aha! I remember now. If it weren't for us -- well, admittedly, mostly you -- the cops might not have picked up on the fact that Harper and Tate were murdered. Of course, one convenient accident and one convenient suicide would probably seem a little too convenient, all things considered, but we -- well, you --"
"And you," Heero inserted. He let his raised hand slide down the length of Duo's braid and played with the loose hair at the end. "Both of us found things hinting at foul play. Both of us found... mistakes we wouldn't have made."
Duo used his outside hand and bopped the tip of Heero's nose with his finger. "Hey! I put a lot of effort into cheering you up. Don't you go destroying all my hard work."
Heero took up the stray finger with the hand he still had lying in wait behind his head, turning it until he could nip at the inside of Duo's wrist. "Sorry. You were saying?"
"What was I saying? Oh. We found some important little clues, and now the cops have leads to go on that might even help us crack one of our hitguys. Oh, and we got to show that jerk up. What was his name?"
"Detective Masterson," Heero supplied.
"Yeah, him. 'Masterson,' my ass. He was an arrogant son of a bitch."
"And that makes it all better?" he asked dryly.
"Damn right it does," Duo answered righteously, hiding a smile as Heero kissed the inside of his wrist one more time before letting their entwined hands drop to the mattress. "I enjoyed proving his theory wrong."
"He may have been an idiot, Duo, but not entirely without reason." Heero agreed with Duo's assessment of Masterson's behavior, but his habit of analyzing a situation from more than one angle tended to make him at least a little more forgiving of a person's mistakes. He was also of the opinion that more people needed to look at things from a different viewpoint, and thus avoid unnecessary antagonism, so he found himself playing devil's advocate.
"Isn't being human reason enough?" Duo questioned cynically.
"I meant, he was a veteran, and we were a couple of young upstarts. I'm sure we offended his sense of dignity."
"He could have retained a little more dignity himself if he'd just treated us with a bit of respect. That way, we wouldn't have had to have the pleasure of upstaging him." Despite his glee, they had been quite civil in working with the team and pointing out the little things the others had missed.
With a few subtle tugs, Heero got Duo to lie down beside him. "You found that satisfying, did you?"
Duo paused to rub his nose briefly against Heero's cheek before settling down on his side, propping his head up with his hand. "Not just because we popped his little bubble, you know. I mean, we also helped the investigation. Some bad guys might get -- are going to get caught because of work we did, and I'm finding it terrifically odd that you're having trouble seeing that tonight." Odd, or sad. It showed how much those two deaths were getting to him. He leaned in for a little more reassuring nuzzling, then surfaced to look at Heero with a soft understanding. "We'll find the guys that got Harper and Tate. Maybe not the hitguys themselves, and maybe not the heads of Veranti themselves, but someone. We'll find someone responsible and we'll get them."
Heero nodded once, a slow, solemn thing that seemed both an acceptance and a promise.
They had calmly recommenced the initial attempt at distraction, only this time it was proving significantly more successful, when a snappy ring tone burst into the silence that had only just been broken by nothing sharper than the quiet sounds of two bodies slowly moving against each other. They broke off suddenly, each tense until they recognized the source of the sound, and then they stood down with only two silent sighs to release the pressure.
"Well, that'll kill a mood," Duo muttered, sliding off of his partner. He squirmed a little to remove Heero's hand from where it had wandered up the back of the tank top he wore to sleep and reached out to grab the cellphone he had left on top of his bedside table. "It's internal," he identified, recognizing the ring pattern as the one he had programmed for the numbers on base.
He glanced briefly at the display, then flipped open his phone. "Maxwell." He felt cold, standing there all by himself, so he returned to his cozy spot next to Heero, who had slid up the bed with some pillows to recline against the headboard. He slipped easily into the ready, familiar embrace and automatically positioned his phone so Heero could listen in on the conversation.
"--doing the research on the chemical," the tinny voice was saying, "I made some inquiries at the coroner's office."
"You already gave us your report," Duo reminded the lab tech levelly, hoping there was some good reason they had been called at this time of night. "Did you find something new?"
"Maybe. Not me. The MEs. Singh apparently remembered me, and I guess she was talking to some others and, well, long story short, I thought you'd want to know... they found some more cases."
They shared a wary look, not liking where this was going. "Like ours, you mean?" Duo asked. "The whatever it was called poisoning?"
"Yeah. Only it might not be poisoning. They've got some new evidence from the other victims. They think it might be narcotic."
A stunned moment passed in silence. "You mean... someone's putting a new drug out on the market?"
"Yeah, maybe. But maybe not quite out on the market yet. We've only come up with a few cases, and they weren't all concentrated in the same area. Plus, according to the analysis, the amount of the chemical found in their bloodstream seemed possibly a little too precise, like someone was testing out dosage levels."
"...Well, shit," Duo finally muttered, after the chill had passed through his system. "Well, we know what an overdose will do to a person. What do you think the drug'll be like?"
"Dangerous," the lab tech replied flatly. "We aren't finding through-the-roof concentrations of the drug in the bloodstream. I don't think it'll take too much for an overdose. Plus, it looks like the victims suffered different symptoms in their final minutes, so it may be unpredictable, too. We'll know more once we get a more thorough report in. I just thought I'd let you know now. Thought it might be something you'd want to know."
Duo ran a hand through his bangs and exhaled in a deliberate fashion. "Yeah. Yeah, thanks, Barry. When do you think that analysis will be complete?"
"Check back with me tomorrow, late morning, maybe? I'll probably have more for you, then."
"Okay. Well, thanks again, Barry. We'll check in with you tomorrow morning, then." He finished up with the obligatory parting material only absently, then flipped his phone shut with a small scowl. Exercising his restraint for a moment, he carefully tossed his phone over to his bed before flopping himself back down into Heero's waiting arms. "Drugs," he muttered irritably. "I hate drugs."
Heero frowned faintly, running through possibilities in his head that he knew just weren't true. "Not... from personal experience, right?"
"Ugh, God, don't even suggest such a thing."
Heero didn't know why he did it, but he found himself taking a hold of one Duo's hands and flipping it over so he could look at the inside of his arm, knowing full well he would find no track marks there. All he saw was the familiar assortment of little imperfections: faint scars from neglected nicks and scratches, one a little less faint from a laceration. Farther up the arm, he knew he'd find a small twisting of skin where Duo had picked up a burn from somewhere.
Duo stared down at his arm, too, imagining track marks he'd seen too often on other arms, and shuddered lightly. "Do you know how often I saw drugs be the death of someone? I swore I'd stay far, far away from them."
"And now you'll have the opportunity to help others stay away from them."
"Well, aren't we Mr. Optimistic all of a sudden?"
"We each have our own little set of hang-ups." Heero shrugged easily, squeezing his partner a little more tightly at the same time. "We'll find someone responsible, and we'll get them."
Duo snorted ruefully. "Don't have to get all sanctimonious about it, ya know, throwing my own words back at me and all. Well, we better get someone after all this. I'll be very unhappy if everyone manages to slip through our fingers."
"We're better than that."
He chuckled faintly, not quite sure if Heero's flatly confident statement had been intended to amuse him or not, but he sobered afterwards in realization. "I'll be even more unhappy if we find out tomorrow that these victims weren't exactly volunteers."
That hadn't occurred to Heero. The first case had involved a user, but he supposed that, if the producers were conducting tests, they could easily be plucking up people that were unlikely to be missed, and from there it was a simple hop to figure out why that would rub Duo even further in the wrong direction. He sighed softly, ruffling the some of the loose hairs floating around Duo's head, and glanced at the clock. "It's late enough. Let's shut down for the night."
Duo agreed, but first they used a little bit of their spare time to chase away the somber mood.
OWARI
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