General Disclaimer - The Mobile Suit: Gundam Wing characters used within this story are © Bandai, Sotsu Agency, Sunrise, etc. This work of fiction is intended for free entertainment purposes only. It is not suitable for readers under the age of 16.
Title: Never Turn Your Back on the Sea (1?)
Section Title: Transaction
Author: Alleyprowler
Rating/Warnings: M for language, violence, and adult subject matter.
Pairings: 3x4x3, 1xR and 2xH.
Summary: It's AC 206, and humankind have settled into a an era without war. However, the petty human motivations of greed and revenge are still very much active on a smaller scale, as Quatre soon finds out.
Note: Requested, inspired, cheerled and beta read by sevenall, who is shy but brilliant. I just want to cover her in honey and lick it...oh, wait, this isn't a yuri fic. Never mind.
Of the five basic senses, the one that is most closely linked to memory is smell. Everyone has their own personal inventory of smells and their associated memories, be they of people, events, locations, times of day, or emotions.
For Quatre, the smell of reheated pesto sauce was forever imprinted into his psyche with the person of Trowa, the event of breakfast, the location of their tall, narrow townhouse in District 7 of colony L41X95, the time of way too early in the morning, and the emotion of mild revulsion.
At first Quatre thought that his lover was eating pistachio ice cream, but upon rubbing some of the sleep out of his eyes, he realized that Trowa was, indeed, sitting at the kitchen table wearing his brown plaid pajamas with a leather jacket over the top, munching away contentedly at a plate of pesto-covered pasta while reading a textbook.
"How can you eat that for breakfast?" he muttered as he shuffled for the coffee pot at the other end of the kitchen.
"Eat what?" Trowa replied absently. He wasn't concentrating so much on his food as on the textbook he had propped up against the sugar bowl. Quatre glanced over his partner's shoulder to see which one it was, and pulled away with a grimace when he saw the full-color plates that illustrated the text.
"Ugh. Are those worms?"
Trowa swallowed the mouthful of pasta he'd been chewing on and nodded his uncombed head. "Ascerius suum and Syphacia obvelata, to be precise." He looked up at Quatre's horrified face and flashed him a small, mischievous grin. "That's pig roundworm and mouse threadworm to you. Want some vermicelli?" He held out his plate.
Quatre winced and turned away from the ex-Gundam pilot turned veterinary medicine student and went to the refrigerator to find something less, well, wormy to eat.
He supposed that he was partially to blame for their unappetizing discussions. He was the one who had talked Trowa into accepting the Peacecraft Scholarship in the first place, which was why his partner had his nose buried in Veterinary Parasitology and was eating reheated leftovers at 0530 on a Sunday morning rather than sleeping in like a normal person.
Trowa's lack of formal education as a youngster had been a major hurdle in the beginning, but Trowa was bright, determined, and above all, too stubborn to quit. His instructors, many of them jaded by generations of apathetic and sullen students, thought he was a gift from the heavens.
Quatre himself had decided to accept the scholarship as well. It wasn't that he needed the funds, but he thought doing so would be seen as a gesture of goodwill between the Winners and the Peacecrafts. He also hoped that if other young veterans saw him as another scholarship student they might be encouraged to accept it as well. It was, after all, open to anyone, soldier or civilian, who had taken part in the wars. Quatre knew the importance of education in breaking the cycle of poverty, oppression and revolution and felt that, in a roundabout way, he was doing something to promote a lasting form of peace.
He had recently completed his advanced degree in Electrical Engineering and was working toward his doctorate...and by working, he really meant working. Though he was nominally the head of the Winner Enterprises Reconstruction Division, he worked as a regular employee. He ran residential wiring for thirty hours a week at a modest rate of pay and spent at least another thirty hours at his real work, which was development of cheap, efficient, mass-producible conductors.
The kitchen vidphone bleeped obnoxiously while Quatre was still on his hunt for an edible breakfast. He rose from his crouch in front of the refrigerator, banging his head sharply on the second shelf, and growled out a curse.
"Who the hell would be calling at this hour?" he asked aloud, rubbing his sore scalp.
The phone was sitting on the serving bar that separated the small breakfast nook from the kitchen proper, which meant that Trowa had a better view of the screen than he did. Trowa had apparently seen the identification code at the bottom of the screen, since he called out, "Do we know a D. Maxwell, Quat?" in a highly amused tone of voice.
"At this hour of the morning, I'm not entirely sure," Quatre grumbled. He checked his fingers for signs of blood and found none. At least something was going right that morning.
"I'll get it," Trowa said with a faint snicker. Quatre heard the electronic boop-WIP! as the connection was accepted.
"Morning, guys!" Duo's voice sounded entirely too chipper for that time of day...at least, until you took into account that the L2 colony cluster ran on a clock that was about four hours ahead of L4's. "Hey, what's with the pajamas?"
Trowa snorted. "Sorry, Duo, but personal grooming isn't exactly high on my list of priorities at," he paused and made an elaborate production of checking his watch, "5:45 in the morning."
There was a long, embarrassed pause after that. Still hovering near the refrigerator, Quatre stifled a laugh behind his hand.
"Er...whoops?" Duo offered at last.
"Don't worry about it, Duo," Quatre said, stepping into the monitor's range of view. He was annoyed to see that the video feed was full of static and that the images that did come through were out of synch with the audio. It was very disorienting. "Duo, is something wrong with your vidphone?"
The image of Duo on the screen dissolved into a haze of electronic snow for a few moments, then cleared up. Duo was wearing a pair of yellow-tinted safety goggles that hid most of the upper half of his face, and the brim of his favorite black cap was pulled down low over his forehead. Like the Cheshire cat, the only part of his face that was clearly visible was his toothy grin. "No, I don't think so. Must be a bad relay satellite or something."
That was entirely possible, Quatre supposed. The economy of L2 had grown a little too well since the end of the wars, and there were more jobs than there were workers. Skilled labor was in especially short supply these days, so it was possible that a faulty communications relay satellite might go unrepaired for quite a while. Still, it was annoying. "That's too bad. I can barely see you." Quatre grinned at his friend, even though it was likely that Duo couldn't see him very well either. "So how are you?"
"Busy, busy, busy! There's a hell of a lot of junk still out there that needs to get cleaned up...which brings me to the point of my call." On the screen, the image made an alarming jolt before Duo appeared again, this time with a clipboard in one gloved hand. "You said you had a job the North Pacific coast this week, correct?"
"Yes, we're restoring a government building in Vancouver. It took some damage in an earthquake a few years ago, but it can be salvaged."
"Yeah, that's what I thought you said. Do you think you'd have time to make a little side trip to the San Juan Islands while you're there?"
Puzzled by the request, Quatre frowned at the vidphone screen and pressed the two buttons at its base that would record both the incoming and outgoing transmissions. This promised to be an interesting conversation and he didn't want to lose any of it to the vagaries of unrepaired relay stations. "You want me to go to the San Juan Islands?" he repeated. "What's there?"
He felt a warm presence at his back as Trowa came up behind him, smelling of coffee and leather. "Nothing but nature preserves and tourist traps, as far as I know," he said. He put a warm hand on the small of Quatre's back and began to massage him with intent to go south. Quatre grinned and leaned into the kneading hand.
"Nature preserves, tourist traps, and the Bell Point Historical Society." Although it didn't show up on the staticky display, they could both hear the shrug in Duo's voice. "I dunno about the first two, but the last one just declared bankruptcy and is trying to sell off some junk to get out of debt."
Trowa's fingers had found their way past the elastic waistband of Quatre's pajama pants, which made it slightly difficult for Quatre to concentrate on the financial problems of the Bell Point Historical Society. "Wh-what sort of junk?" he stammered.
Duo lifted the clipboard and turned a page or two before answering. "Uh...looks like some books, lots of old prints, antique furniture, twenty ingots of refined neo-titanium..."
"Oh, I see," Quatre said in a politely distracted manner. Damn Trowa and his odd sense of humor! It seemed like he couldn't allow Quatre to conduct any business in his presence without attempting to get him embarrassingly hot and bothered in the process. "It sounds like they could sell it to a museum, which would solve..." he stopped himself cold. "Excuse me, did you say twenty ingots of refined neo-titanium?"
"Gotcha!" Duo crowed triumphantly. "I was wondering how long it would take you to actually pay attention!"
Quatre smacked Trowa's roving hands away until the taller man let out an annoyed snort and retreated back to the coffee pot. "Duo, it's inhumane to tease me before I've had my caffeine," he moaned.
"Sorry, man, I just couldn't resist," Duo said with a chuckle. "Besides, I wasn't kidding...at least, not about the neo-titanium."
A hopeful smile tugged at Quatre's lips. "Really? You're not just stringing me along, are you?"
"Really!" Duo insisted. "These people got some as a war victim donation and figured that they could sell it at a massive profit, but you know how public auctions can go..."
"Badly," Trowa interjected, setting a steaming cup of coffee on the counter in front of his lover. He received a melting look of gratitude and a quick kiss as a reward.
The display froze again as Duo made a gagging noise. "Ew! Can you guys lay off the mushy stuff till I get off the phone?"
Quatre snickered into his coffee cup. "Oh, and this is coming from the guy who usually wants full video and audio feed from our bedroom, complete with transcripts." He bumped Trowa's hip playfully.
"Yeah, well, I've matured lately." The video display fuzzed out into electronic snow for a few seconds. When it cleared, Duo was looking at his clipboard again. "So, do you want that neo-titanium or not?"
"Yes! You know how much I need that stuff! Er, it is registered, isn't it?" Quatre certainly hoped so. Neo-titanium was notoriously hard to come by, not because it was particularly rare, but because it was heavily regulated by the EarthSphere government as a potentially dangerous substance. It was the primary component of Gundanium alloy, after all. Civilian applications of the metal were just beginning to gain popularity, but there was still a daunting amount of paperwork involved if you wanted to work with the stuff legitimately.
"Yup, it's all pedigreed and accounted for." Duo flipped over another page on his clipboard. "You can trace ownership of this block all the way back to the foundry."
That was wonderful news. "Great! How much are they asking for it? Do you know?"
"Twenty thousand was the initial asking price, but I talked 'em down to fifteen." On the screen, Duo's image was frozen in the act of flipping a page on his clipboard, but his voice radiated smug self-satisfaction.
Quatre's jaw dropped. Fifteen thousand credits for that much neo-titanium was an absolutely unheard-of price. He looked over at Trowa, who gave him a mildly bewildered look and shrugged back at him. "Duo...that's less than half the normal price. How did you do that?"
"What can I say? I'm good!" The vidphone display snowed out, scrambled, and reassembled itself, showing a fairly clear image Duo from mid-chest up. His eloquent grin was saying, 'You may praise me now.'
Quatre was happy to oblige. "Good? You're the best!" He reached out and tapped a sequence of buttons on the bottom of the vidphone that would authorize an inter-Colony payment chip. "Where do I send the money and what is the pickup location?"
Duo told him. He had already purchased the neo-titanium on Quatre's behalf, so all Quatre had to do was insert his bank card into the reader at the base of the vidphone and punch in his personal ID code in order to take legal acquisition of the merchandise. The instructions for pickup were a bit trickier to transfer since the rotten visuals made maps useless. Duo, after several attempts to link, sketch, and verbally describe how to get to the pickup site, finally resorted to a set of GPS coordinates.
"Did you get all that?" Duo asked once he'd supplied the relevant information.
"Got it!" Quatre restrained himself from doing a little victory dance. "Thanks, Duo, this has been incredibly helpful."
"Anything for a friend. Listen, I need to get back to work. You take care now, bye." The connection cut off with another burst of static.
Trowa raised an eyebrow at his grinning partner. "What, no three hour gossip session? You two are slowing down in your old age."
Quatre stuck his nose in the air imperiously. "We're not slowing down, we've just become more mature." He then proceeded to spoil the effect by grinning mischievously and sticking his tongue out. "Race you to the shower!"
According to Quatre's personal clock, it had been one full day since he'd given Trowa one last hurried kiss goodbye before rushing out the door with his favorite travel bag slung over one shoulder. It had been early morning then. The colony lights hadn't yet reached their full daytime intensity and still held the pinkish tint that was supposed to mimic the dawn's sunlight.
Since a full twenty-four hours had passed, the part of Quatre that wasn't quite awake yet was disoriented by the light here in this part of the Earth. It was late afternoon rather than early morning, bitterly chilly rather than mild and breezy, drizzly and grey rather than clear and bright. He took another slug of coffee and twisted the knob on the jeep's dashboard that made the windshield wipers move a little faster.
The stretch of coastal highway he was driving on was nearly deserted at this time of year. Most people around here tended to reside in the cities where it was cheaper and more convenient to live, rather than out here in the middle of nowhere. Quatre thought that was a shame; this was a place of wild, desolate beauty even in the dead of winter.
He had been lucky to find accommodations near the pickup spot. Most of the hotels, motels and inns were closed for the off season, but there was a bed and breakfast run by a year-round resident that remained in operation, and he had secured lodgings there for the time being. The proprietor, a talkative man in his mid-60s who shared the house with no other company than his six cats, was only too glad to have another human being around.
"What brings you here, Mr. Winston?" the man had asked after Quatre had signed the guest registration and paid for his stay. "We don't get many visitors here in February."
Quatre had looked at the registry page at that point to make sure he hadn't accidentally used one of his wartime aliases when checking in, but even upside-down he could recognize his true signature. He attributed the man's slip to the rather smeary condition of his thick spectacles, which seemed to have a habit of creeping down his long, bony nose whenever he looked down.
"I'm here to pick up something from the Bell Point Historical Society," Quatre had explained while stroking one of the cats and shooing another one away from the contents of his bag.
The man had shoved his glasses up with a long forefinger—a futile gesture since they immediately began a slow slide down his nose. "There's a Bell Point just a half hour drive from here, but I never heard they had a historical society. You sure about that, Mr. Widmer?"
Quatre had felt an odd pang of unease when he heard that, but he quickly dismissed it as travel fatigue and a desire for lunch. "I'm pretty sure. A friend of mine sent me here on their behalf. Maybe they're new?"
Settling the wayward glasses up on the bridge of his nose once again, the man had shaken his head. "No, I've lived here for over twenty years now and I've been on the township council for fifteen of those. If it was a new outfit, I'd know about it."
"Well, maybe they're out of the council's jurisdiction," Quatre had suggested. The man with the smudged glasses didn't seem to be the type to lie, and his body language and tone of voice indicated that he was perfectly comfortable with his assertions. If he had lived in this sparsely-populated area and served on its council for as long as he had, wouldn't he know about all of the new businesses and such that might affect the area?
The man had merely shrugged at Quatre's question, however. "It's possible, Mr. Wilson. To tell the truth, those meetings are so boring that I generally fall asleep halfway through. I try to review my notes and keep up with the bulletins, but I'd guess that they could run a proposal to knock down my house and build a new bypass over it could get through with my vote if they made the meetings boring enough."
Quatre could certainly relate to that, and he'd told the man so. They had shared a laugh, and later, a lunch, and now Quatre was on the road in his rented jeep, sipping a cup of very strong black coffee and looking for the appropriate off ramp that would take him to Bell Point.
He had the GPS unit attached to a metal clip mounted on the dashboard, along with the written directions that the proprietor had given him, and according to both, he should be near...ah, this was it. Quatre flicked on his turn signal to let any nonexistent motorists behind him know that he was cutting across two lanes and steered into the curve of the off ramp while he decelerated. At the end of the ramp was a traffic light that blinked a blurred red through the wet windshield, but since there was no traffic coming from either direction, Quatre only made a courtesy pause before he turned the jeep to the left and drove at a sedate pace onto the spit of land that was marked Bell Point.
The two-lane road was narrow and flanked on both sides by wide, gravelly shoulders that ended in sheer drops to the cliffs below. This little bit of land stuck out from the coast like a hitchhiker's thumb rendered in granite, and it sheltered a small bay to the north where a marina full of sportsmen's yachts bobbed in the hard winter wind like brightly colored bits of driftwood. Quatre smiled. He remembered being taken out on his father's little racing yacht a few times as a child, and how fast the sleek craft had seemed to go as it sliced through the waves, pitching and yawing as the wind caught the bright spinnaker in unpredictable spring breezes, and how tightly his father had held onto him as he tacked sharply to steal the wind from a rival's sails...
Quatre clamped down hard on the bittersweet memories and drove on. It was all well and good to remember his father in a happy way, but he tended to get lost in those recollections and lose focus, and right now he was on a schedule. He pressed a little harder on the accelerator and narrowed his eyes as he drove on.
In only a few minutes, he had reached the end of Bell Point, which ended in a cul de sac in front of a handsome and new-looking lighthouse. Quatre parked on the gravelly shoulder close to the edge of the cliff and looked at the lighthouse with a critical eye. From what he could see in the dim, overcast light, it was a pretty good copy of a genuine pre-Colonial lighthouse. It was a tall, stately column that connected to a small residence at the bottom and soared upward to a windowed room that would contain the bright, circling warning light, its machinery, and not much else. The entire structure was painted white except for the peaked roof of the tower, which was tiled in dark green, and the matching pitched roof of the house.
In the summer, with a blue backdrop of hot sky and the sun shining on the fresh paint, it would look quaint and charming; a perfect photo opportunity for the tourists. In the dull light of winter, though, it looked out of place and slightly sinister.
Quatre turned off the ignition and tucked the keys into the pocket of his parka. In the ensuing silence, he shivered a little; the wind sounded a little like human voices as it whistled through the triangular wing window on the driver's side door, and the voices were all saying, "Who...?"
He forced a laugh out of his suddenly-tight throat. "I have been watching far too many of Trowa's horror movies," he said out loud. "I'll be jumping at my own shadow next."
But in the afternoon gloom, there were no shadows to jump at. Quatre shoved the door open, working against the prevailing wind, and jumped out of the vehicle. His breath was temporarily stolen by the cold, damp wind, which wrapped around his exposed face like dense silk. He sucked in a breath with effort.
The air reeked with the peculiar combination of fecund seaweed, decaying fish, and seashell minerals that some people called 'fresh salt air'. Quatre had smelled it before and had never understood the romantic implications of odor of the seashore. It was better than the smell of raw sewage, he admitted (having been taken on an "educational" tour of the sewage-treatment plant of his home colony at a young age), but only by a very narrow margin.
The smell would have been bearable if it hadn't been accompanied by a stinging slap of cold rain and the mischievous wind that found every gap and seam in his clothing. Within seconds of exiting the warm interior of the jeep, Quatre felt chilled to the bone.
He jogged across the road to the little white house and yanked on the door handle, expecting it to be locked, and he nearly lost his balance when the door swung open easily. The code-breaker, crowbar and mechanical lock picks he had brought with him were all for nothing, then. Quatre wasn't complaining. Just because he had the means and the knowledge to open nearly any kind of lock didn't mean that he liked doing so, but since Duo had said the place would be deserted and hadn't mentioned anything about a key or a passcode, he'd come prepared.
There were no lights on inside and the gloomy afternoon did little to illuminate the interior of the little building, but Quatre stepped inside immediately, wanting to get away from the cold wind that nipped and pinched at every exposed bit of skin.
Quatre waited a minute to let his eyes adjust to the dim light. He smelled new concrete, along with the hot scent of freshly-welded steel, which led him to believe that the foundation and framing of the building were very new, perhaps erected within the last couple of days. That might explain his host's ignorance of its existence. But then again, did it make any sense that an organization on the verge of bankruptcy would start a new construction project? A shiver that had nothing to do with the chilly air shuddered up Quatre's spine.
As his eyes adjusted, Quatre saw the familiar debris of construction in progress scattered around the otherwise empty room: A broken drill bit, a handful of finishing nails, a couple sheets of drywall propped against a sawhorse, a roll of fluffy pink insulation material. Those were certainly things that one would expect to find in a not-quite-finished building, but while they looked right, they felt wrong. They were a little too randomly placed, perhaps. They looked like objects in a rather bizarre window display, or like props in a play.
"Or maybe I'm letting my imagination get to me," Quatre muttered under his breath. He laughed quietly to himself and shoved his damp bangs out of his eyes. Wet weather on the Earth had always spooked him a little. You couldn't control it, and you certainly couldn't predict it like you could on the Colonies. Colony rains fell at precisely designated times and in precisely designated measures in order to clean and freshen the air, but on Earth, the rain just...happened. It had no consideration for the health and well-being of the humans, animals, and plants that it fell on, or failed to fall on. Sometimes it didn't fall for months. Other times, like now, it threatened to go on forever. For a Colony brat, it seemed overwhelming.
Quatre shook himself out of his state and looked around the large room for the cargo Duo had promised him. He hoped that they were stored in the visitor's building and not behind the bolted door that led to the lighthouse. He didn't want to explore any more. He just wanted to get his neo-titanium, pack it into the jeep, and go to his work site in the morning.
Moving cautiously, he walked toward the darkest corner of the building and was very happy to see a pile of three metal boxes stacked onto a red hand truck. It had to be the neo-titanium! Even if it wasn't, he was more than eager to get the hell out of the building and apologize later, if necessary, for taking the wrong thing.
Neo-titanium, even refined and pressed into ingots, was not dense stuff. Three packing cases of it should have been easy enough to manage, especially taking the leverage granted by the hand truck into consideration, but Quatre found that he had to give the handle of the truck a sharp jerk backward to get the damn thing tipped back on its wheels so he could push it.
He winced at the slap of rain on his face as he exited the building. This was definitely not Colony rain, which was kept temperature-controlled so as not to damage fragile Colony flora. This rain had an icy bite to it that stung his exposed face and hands. He wished he'd worn his work gloves, but they were back in his room at the nice cozy Bed and Breakfast house, perhaps being played with by a curious cat or two. Quatre lowered his head and gave the hand truck a good shove to get it over the low curb that separated the small garden in front of the house from the road.
The packing cases were not secured to the base of the hand truck by anything except for gravity, as Quatre discovered when one of the wheels rolled over the slight dip of a manhole cover in the middle of the road. The whole hand truck tipped slightly to one side and the top crate began to slide off the middle one. Quatre quickly rolled the hand truck to even ground, but before he could get a good grip on the slippery aluminum surface of the crate, it fell onto the wet asphalt with a flat smack.
"Oh crap!" he shouted, loudly enough to startle a pair of gulls from where they were sitting on the roof of his jeep, which was parked just a few meters away. They launched themselves into the air and circled over his head, wailing their complaints at being disturbed loudly.
All Quatre really wanted to do at this point was to throw the damn cases into the back of the jeep and go back to the little café where he'd gotten his coffee earlier, which had a nice little reading nook in the back with a fireplace and a half a dozen mismatched but comfortable chairs that one could lounge around in while reading the moldering old books and drinking sinfully strong mochas with real whipped cream floating on the top.
But it wasn't going to happen. Not anytime soon, anyway.
Quatre knelt down to check his cargo. The ingots themselves would not be damaged by such a minor fall, but unalloyed neo-titanium, like its older cousin pure titanium, did not react well to nitrogen or oxygen, so he needed to be sure there were no breeches in the packing cases.
The thin aluminum skin of the case seemed to be undamaged at first glance. It had landed upside-down on the black asphalt, so Quatre flipped it over to check the top side. It was also undamaged, aside from a few scuff marks. The exterior looked fine.
A normal businessman would have chucked the case into the back of the jeep and assumed that all was well at that point. Quatre was not a normal businessman. He didn't consider himself to be a businessman at all, actually, but he'd had a businessman's breed of paranoia built into his psyche from a very early age and he had a good dose of natural curiosity as well, so he decided to open the case.
A normal civilian would have been puzzled by the contents. Quatre was not a normal civilian. When he unhooked the latches and lifted the hinged top, he heard a muted popping noise that put him instantly on alert.
The act of opening the case had also removed the cap of a chemical detonator, which was a fist-sized cylinder with a black housing and a red top. The top had been glued to the upper half of the aluminum packing case. Opening the case and popping the cap from the rest of the cylinder had activated the irreversible chemical process in the main housing of the detonator, which was embedded in the middle of a series of eight blocks of something that looked like modeling clay. Each block was wrapped in cellophane and consisted of smaller strips of the stuff about the width of a forefinger and the length of one's hand; this was standard packaging for plastic explosives.
As soon as the chemicals in the detonator had sufficient time to mix they would reach a critical heat, which would in turn cause the blocks of plastic explosives to combust violently. The angle of the packing crate's raised lid was meant to force the charge of the blast out to whoever had opened it, provided that the opener of the lid was confused and puzzled enough to stay in place for the three seconds it took for the reaction to have time to work.
Quatre was not confused and puzzled. He recognized a suitcase bomb when he saw one, and he ran like a jackrabbit for the nearest cover he could find. The jeep.
He'd have liked to run for the lighthouse, but the jeep was much closer, and he figured he could duck behind one of the sturdy vehicle's wheels and stay out of the most powerful force of the blast...
Or at least that was the plan until the bottom fell out of his world in a deafening roar.
TBC