GW - newtype tidbits that i wrote long ago and maybe posted idk??
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kinsugi cause she was reading it for the first time today and yeah it does stop in a relatively mean place. .____.
i would not call this fic quite dead (though haha 2009 haha ahem) but it is in deep hibernation yes. but when i'm done with the psychic wolves one it'll be nice to fall back on for my GW dose so idk.
Wufei had been wondering how Maxwell was going to get them through Customs without leaving behind any witnesses. Granted, on L2 it should be easy to find customs agents on the take, who'd let the crate through without even looking in it... but they would have no reason not to report its existence later on, and a box that size and shape was damning enough.
The solution was apparently not to go through Customs at all. Certainly bold enough for Maxwell.
How that was made possible, though...
"... Where is the hull?"
"Your guess is as good as mine!" Maxwell exclaimed cheerfully, and directed the little ship toward the debris field that surrounded the breach. Wufei shot Heero an appalled look over the back of the command chair.
All colonies had several outer layers before you started getting into habitable 'underground' zones and the empty center and aboveground buildings. A colony that old only had three; Wufei knew the model, it was pretty much the same as home used to be.
This one seemed to be down to two layers, though most of the outer hull was in fact still in place. Merely... rusted through until bolts disintegrated, panels only holding together through, oh, force of habit. One of the panels in question seemed to have caught wanderlust and floated off; the rest of that section was so pitted with meteor dust impacts he could see flashes of support beams in the ship's lights.
They looked a bit crooked. He tried to tell himself it was merely that the ship was moving and the light unsteady.
At his side, Heero considered the main viewscreen and the radar screen, and then tapped Maxwell's shoulder. "Right. My turn."
"Aw, you don't trust me to aim?"
"That hole's big enough to let the ship through," Heero replied dryly, "but only just. You're the one without depth perception."
Wufei frowned some more as he eyeballed the screen and tried to remember the ship's specifics. "... How much clearance is there, Maxwell?"
"Oh, at least ten inches," Maxwell replied as he slipped out of his seat to let Heero take over. "It's fine, really."
"On each side?"
"Well, no."
For a second 'I want to go back and get arrested after all' hovered on the tip of his tongue, dry and mock-dismayed. He swallowed it, reminded himself he wasn't amused. None of this was amusing.
None of this was exciting. He had Nataku to protect, and this was as far from a safe place for her as could be. The colony was losing enough oxygen to rust in space, for god's sake! He braced on the back of the seat and shoved himself off toward another handle, scowling. "I'll be in the cargo hold."
"Mmh," Maxwell acknowledged absently, leaning over Heero's shoulder. "Take a suit from the locker. Couple meters in vacuum once we're parked."
... Of course there'd be no secure tunnel to disembark. He needed to make sure Meiran's crate was still airtight and her oxygen tanks filled. He flipped around to face the ceiling of the corridor and opened the locker, grabbing an old, patched-up spacesuit and helmet. The bulky type; it'd take him longer to put on than to travel the three meters from ship to station airlock, and after that he'd have to waste more time taking it off, but it wasn't exactly optional.
"Don't be afraid to bang her up against the sides to slide her in, Yuy," he heard from the cockpit. "The old girl has seen worse."
He sealed the cargo hold door behind him, checked the crate, and then started to shimmy into the suit. Awkward with no gravity, but the trick of it came back fast, even though it had been years; so many hours of training as a young teenager to put one on, take it off, store it properly, put it back on... (Meiran had always been faster; more bendy at the waist, easier for her to twist around to pull up the back...)
At least with this type of suit he didn't have to take his pants or shoes off, and the cap he'd stuffed in his pocket didn't get in his way too much. Breathing out, he put on the helmet, and started a pressurization checkup routine as the ship quietly murmured around him with purring motors and gargling coolant in old pipes.
One last clang, some faint metal-on-metal screeching, and the ship came to a stop. The airlock whooshed open and a suited man came sailing out. Maxwell, Wufei recognized instantly, somehow; his face was invisible behind the glare reflecting on his helmet, but he just didn't move the same. Also, logic told him a couple seconds later, if Heero had been piloting, he wouldn't be suited up yet. A perfectly normal deduction. (He blew a bothersome lock of hair away from his nose and reminded himself he was not thinking about the hair band Heero was not returning.)
"Got a gun on you?" Maxwell asked through the radio in the helmets, though there was enough air left in the cargo bay that the question came echoed with his real voice.
"No," Wufei replied. "I can defend myself without. Having a gun in hand just invites escalation."
Maxwell groaned. "Maybe when you go against cops. 'round here not having a gun invites the rats to descend en masse and leave you without even a scrap of underwear." He pulled a sawed-off shotgun from a cache in the wall and loaded it. "Whatever, you'll be busy with the crate anyway. I'll play escort. And Heero can stand around looking like he has about fifty guns hidden away on his body, and do you punks want to try your luck finding them all... Yeah, it'll probably do."
Wufei clicked his radio mike off rather than snort in involuntary amusement where Maxwell could hear it.
Ship powered down and secured, they waited as Heero put on his own suit, and then the ship's airlock hissed open and Maxwell kicked his way across the dark, empty cavern behind the first hull. Holding onto the edge of the airlock, Wufei took a look. A few other ratty little ships were anchored under the hull, maneuvered somehow between support beams and into unlikely crevices. The only light came from the beacons outside, through the holes. Those plates should have been changed years -- decades -- ago. If the rest of the colony was in such a state, it was a deathtrap.
It had been a deathtrap for a good forty years, if he wasn't missing his guess. He sighed and nudged the weightless crate toward the airlock.
Yuy locked the ship and followed, touching a corner of the crate to correct its trajectory by about ten inches on arrival. Wufei couldn't even mock-glare at him, truly irritated by how easily Yuy had interacted with Maxwell, like no time had passed at all and Maxwell hadn't been killing people right and left -- and incidentally creating a major power vacuum in the mafia world that might well result in a turf war or three before too long, with all the collateral damage that implied.
The airlock wasn't very long; they had to wedge the crate in diagonally, and fit themselves in corners over and under it. Wufei hoped the restrains wouldn't give Meiran sores. He checked his oxygen levels as he waited for the airlock to cycle through, red lights blinking patiently for a bit too long before shining green at them.
On the other side there was gravity, which meant he and Heero suddenly had to grab onto the edges of the trolley and lower it cautiously. It was heavy, but they managed to put it down without hurting anything or bumping it too hard, and off they went.
"Locker room," Maxwell indicated with his thumb, pulling his helmet off as he walked inside said room. The lockers were just as old and rusted as the rest, but the locks on them were, if not new, then just as good as. Still...
"You trust these?" Wufei asked doubtfully, even as he started taking his off.
"Not really, but if someone steals my stuff I get to have it reimbursed." A thumb indicated the other exit, the silhouette of a man sitting there with a rifle over his knees. "And the thief gets to be blacklisted. Or kneecapped, either or."
Of course this illegal little docking station would be manned by some kind of protection racket. "And the... caretakers of this place never steal anything either?"
"With how much we pay 'em? They better fuckin' not, else we'd be the ones kneecapping them. Honor amongst thieves!" Maxwell concluded brightly, and stuffed his empty suit in a locker. Wufei shook his head, mildly disgusted. "I'm sure they go through the lockers from time to time looking for loot that'd be worth it, but you'd have to be real stupid to leave anything like that in there in the first place."
"And if one day your suit is gone when you need it?" Heero inquired mildly.
"Steal your neighbor's," Maxwell replied. Of course. "Better know what size they are ahead of time, though, else you'd need to break into all of them until you find the right one, and that's a pain."
Wufei finished undressing and stashing his suit, and closed the locker. He pocketed the key and put his cap on, tucking it low on his face.
"Yo! Max and two guests." Maxwell stopped in front of the man and fished a handful of bills from some place down the front of his pants Wufei didn't want to think about too much.
"Yo, Max." The guy looked them over closely, though when he met Heero's eyes suddenly he didn't seem very interested anymore. "Got a tax on shipment, you know that."
"Sure," Maxwell said easily. "Twenty percent of the contents, right?" Suddenly Maxwell's smile wasn't friendly so much as slightly unhinged. "You want the head or one of the legs?"
"--oh my fucking god, usually you bring the corpses out of the colony, the fuck?"
... The man wasn't joking along; he wasn't freaked out, but he was disgusted. Wufei held onto his composure. He already knew Maxwell killed people.
"Pff. Just kidding. It's another creepo sex doll, all still and dead-eyed. Ah, that good old Werner. Though it's real pretty, kinda tempted to keep it to myself."
He waggled his eyebrows, the filthiest leer on his face; Wufei knew better than to deck him when he was busy working a crowd, kept his face still and his eyes bored somehow. The man cracked a smile and relaxed his hold on his rifle.
"Two hundred okay with you?" Maxwell asked casually.
"Three. You almost wonder what the fuck he did with Linda, that he needs a replacement already."
"Two fifty. Eh, Werner's just like any red-blooded man out here; who wouldn't want a threesome with a pair of lesbo hotties?"
Maxwell and the man cackled together. Wufei did his best to keep looking bored, since he didn't want to know who and what the hell they were talking about. (Heero looked blank; Wufei briefly wondered if he honestly didn't get it. Likely it was the concept of lifelike sex dolls that caused a problem, and not the concept of lesbian sandwiches.)
(His Nataku as a dead-eyed sex doll. Nrgh.)
"Two fifty-five, Maxy, 'cause I like you."
"'Cause I give you the best rumors, you mean! Okay, sold." Money changed hands; Maxwell dragged them down the narrow maintenance corridor and to the sealed doors that went through the third hull.
A couple corridors, and then they were in an underground parking lot. There was a lift; they got on, screeched up to ground level, walked up toward the exit of the parking lot. Maxwell was still grinning casually, the shotgun across his shoulders. "Yuy, you're rearguard. Pretend there's a knife up your sleeve or something. Try to project 'back off, 'cause I won't even turn around as I leave you bleeding to death in the gutter.' Chang..."
"I'll manage," he bit out.
He got it, he truly did. They'd be left alone as long as they could look like a threat. He was busy with the crate, and the pavement didn't look too flat so that might be distracting, but it didn't mean he couldn't add to the mood.
He knew exactly how to.
When he was undercover with the guerilleros in China Wufei had been playing the angry-at-the-world, sullen asshole with a chip on his shoulder. Which hadn't been hard, in a lot of ways, because it was pretty much him in a bad mood (or him all the time back during the war.) Still, the underlying personality he had to project -- of selfish needs not met, of the lack of higher ideals, merely a wrong-headed sense of injustice over what he supposedly hadn't received that he felt entitled to, even if he had to oppress those civilians who were happy with things in this united Earth Sphere era... that had bothered him. Made him feel dirty, despicable, made him doubt himself somewhere deep down.
Wufei didn't delude himself into thinking he was a likeable person, or a nice one, not even "deep down", but there was a nuance between that and being just plain wrong -- just plain evil -- that he had already flirted much too closely with, during the Mariemeya uprising.
It felt like falling off the wagon.
He trudged along, spine loose, eyes heavy-lidded, bored even as they scanned the road looking for a target, seeing nothing but victims not yet dead.
"Who's Werner?" Yuy asked as they trudged through a crossroad, past a group of people bargaining about a stalled car or whatever the issue was. Wufei kept watching them, the crowbars and wrenches in their hands dangerous-looking enough without worrying about the knives in deep pockets or the steel-capped boots.
"Oh, our lawfully elected mayor," Maxwell answered casually, eye roaming the street and a lazy smile stretching his lips, as if telling anyone who saw his bandaged face to please try it. "He's okay, really; always pays his round at the bar and never pays for any whore his daughter's age or less. One of his cousins got him the job because he didn't have what it takes to hack it in the family business. He's useless, of course, but he's not making it worse."
"Let me guess, the family business..."
"Protection, yep."
Was it a good thing or a bad one that their mayor failed as a mafioso? Ancestors above, Wufei wanted out of this place already.
kinsugi cause she was reading it for the first time today and yeah it does stop in a relatively mean place. .____.i would not call this fic quite dead (though haha 2009 haha ahem) but it is in deep hibernation yes. but when i'm done with the psychic wolves one it'll be nice to fall back on for my GW dose so idk.
Wufei had been wondering how Maxwell was going to get them through Customs without leaving behind any witnesses. Granted, on L2 it should be easy to find customs agents on the take, who'd let the crate through without even looking in it... but they would have no reason not to report its existence later on, and a box that size and shape was damning enough.
The solution was apparently not to go through Customs at all. Certainly bold enough for Maxwell.
How that was made possible, though...
"... Where is the hull?"
"Your guess is as good as mine!" Maxwell exclaimed cheerfully, and directed the little ship toward the debris field that surrounded the breach. Wufei shot Heero an appalled look over the back of the command chair.
All colonies had several outer layers before you started getting into habitable 'underground' zones and the empty center and aboveground buildings. A colony that old only had three; Wufei knew the model, it was pretty much the same as home used to be.
This one seemed to be down to two layers, though most of the outer hull was in fact still in place. Merely... rusted through until bolts disintegrated, panels only holding together through, oh, force of habit. One of the panels in question seemed to have caught wanderlust and floated off; the rest of that section was so pitted with meteor dust impacts he could see flashes of support beams in the ship's lights.
They looked a bit crooked. He tried to tell himself it was merely that the ship was moving and the light unsteady.
At his side, Heero considered the main viewscreen and the radar screen, and then tapped Maxwell's shoulder. "Right. My turn."
"Aw, you don't trust me to aim?"
"That hole's big enough to let the ship through," Heero replied dryly, "but only just. You're the one without depth perception."
Wufei frowned some more as he eyeballed the screen and tried to remember the ship's specifics. "... How much clearance is there, Maxwell?"
"Oh, at least ten inches," Maxwell replied as he slipped out of his seat to let Heero take over. "It's fine, really."
"On each side?"
"Well, no."
For a second 'I want to go back and get arrested after all' hovered on the tip of his tongue, dry and mock-dismayed. He swallowed it, reminded himself he wasn't amused. None of this was amusing.
None of this was exciting. He had Nataku to protect, and this was as far from a safe place for her as could be. The colony was losing enough oxygen to rust in space, for god's sake! He braced on the back of the seat and shoved himself off toward another handle, scowling. "I'll be in the cargo hold."
"Mmh," Maxwell acknowledged absently, leaning over Heero's shoulder. "Take a suit from the locker. Couple meters in vacuum once we're parked."
... Of course there'd be no secure tunnel to disembark. He needed to make sure Meiran's crate was still airtight and her oxygen tanks filled. He flipped around to face the ceiling of the corridor and opened the locker, grabbing an old, patched-up spacesuit and helmet. The bulky type; it'd take him longer to put on than to travel the three meters from ship to station airlock, and after that he'd have to waste more time taking it off, but it wasn't exactly optional.
"Don't be afraid to bang her up against the sides to slide her in, Yuy," he heard from the cockpit. "The old girl has seen worse."
He sealed the cargo hold door behind him, checked the crate, and then started to shimmy into the suit. Awkward with no gravity, but the trick of it came back fast, even though it had been years; so many hours of training as a young teenager to put one on, take it off, store it properly, put it back on... (Meiran had always been faster; more bendy at the waist, easier for her to twist around to pull up the back...)
At least with this type of suit he didn't have to take his pants or shoes off, and the cap he'd stuffed in his pocket didn't get in his way too much. Breathing out, he put on the helmet, and started a pressurization checkup routine as the ship quietly murmured around him with purring motors and gargling coolant in old pipes.
One last clang, some faint metal-on-metal screeching, and the ship came to a stop. The airlock whooshed open and a suited man came sailing out. Maxwell, Wufei recognized instantly, somehow; his face was invisible behind the glare reflecting on his helmet, but he just didn't move the same. Also, logic told him a couple seconds later, if Heero had been piloting, he wouldn't be suited up yet. A perfectly normal deduction. (He blew a bothersome lock of hair away from his nose and reminded himself he was not thinking about the hair band Heero was not returning.)
"Got a gun on you?" Maxwell asked through the radio in the helmets, though there was enough air left in the cargo bay that the question came echoed with his real voice.
"No," Wufei replied. "I can defend myself without. Having a gun in hand just invites escalation."
Maxwell groaned. "Maybe when you go against cops. 'round here not having a gun invites the rats to descend en masse and leave you without even a scrap of underwear." He pulled a sawed-off shotgun from a cache in the wall and loaded it. "Whatever, you'll be busy with the crate anyway. I'll play escort. And Heero can stand around looking like he has about fifty guns hidden away on his body, and do you punks want to try your luck finding them all... Yeah, it'll probably do."
Wufei clicked his radio mike off rather than snort in involuntary amusement where Maxwell could hear it.
Ship powered down and secured, they waited as Heero put on his own suit, and then the ship's airlock hissed open and Maxwell kicked his way across the dark, empty cavern behind the first hull. Holding onto the edge of the airlock, Wufei took a look. A few other ratty little ships were anchored under the hull, maneuvered somehow between support beams and into unlikely crevices. The only light came from the beacons outside, through the holes. Those plates should have been changed years -- decades -- ago. If the rest of the colony was in such a state, it was a deathtrap.
It had been a deathtrap for a good forty years, if he wasn't missing his guess. He sighed and nudged the weightless crate toward the airlock.
Yuy locked the ship and followed, touching a corner of the crate to correct its trajectory by about ten inches on arrival. Wufei couldn't even mock-glare at him, truly irritated by how easily Yuy had interacted with Maxwell, like no time had passed at all and Maxwell hadn't been killing people right and left -- and incidentally creating a major power vacuum in the mafia world that might well result in a turf war or three before too long, with all the collateral damage that implied.
The airlock wasn't very long; they had to wedge the crate in diagonally, and fit themselves in corners over and under it. Wufei hoped the restrains wouldn't give Meiran sores. He checked his oxygen levels as he waited for the airlock to cycle through, red lights blinking patiently for a bit too long before shining green at them.
On the other side there was gravity, which meant he and Heero suddenly had to grab onto the edges of the trolley and lower it cautiously. It was heavy, but they managed to put it down without hurting anything or bumping it too hard, and off they went.
"Locker room," Maxwell indicated with his thumb, pulling his helmet off as he walked inside said room. The lockers were just as old and rusted as the rest, but the locks on them were, if not new, then just as good as. Still...
"You trust these?" Wufei asked doubtfully, even as he started taking his off.
"Not really, but if someone steals my stuff I get to have it reimbursed." A thumb indicated the other exit, the silhouette of a man sitting there with a rifle over his knees. "And the thief gets to be blacklisted. Or kneecapped, either or."
Of course this illegal little docking station would be manned by some kind of protection racket. "And the... caretakers of this place never steal anything either?"
"With how much we pay 'em? They better fuckin' not, else we'd be the ones kneecapping them. Honor amongst thieves!" Maxwell concluded brightly, and stuffed his empty suit in a locker. Wufei shook his head, mildly disgusted. "I'm sure they go through the lockers from time to time looking for loot that'd be worth it, but you'd have to be real stupid to leave anything like that in there in the first place."
"And if one day your suit is gone when you need it?" Heero inquired mildly.
"Steal your neighbor's," Maxwell replied. Of course. "Better know what size they are ahead of time, though, else you'd need to break into all of them until you find the right one, and that's a pain."
Wufei finished undressing and stashing his suit, and closed the locker. He pocketed the key and put his cap on, tucking it low on his face.
"Yo! Max and two guests." Maxwell stopped in front of the man and fished a handful of bills from some place down the front of his pants Wufei didn't want to think about too much.
"Yo, Max." The guy looked them over closely, though when he met Heero's eyes suddenly he didn't seem very interested anymore. "Got a tax on shipment, you know that."
"Sure," Maxwell said easily. "Twenty percent of the contents, right?" Suddenly Maxwell's smile wasn't friendly so much as slightly unhinged. "You want the head or one of the legs?"
"--oh my fucking god, usually you bring the corpses out of the colony, the fuck?"
... The man wasn't joking along; he wasn't freaked out, but he was disgusted. Wufei held onto his composure. He already knew Maxwell killed people.
"Pff. Just kidding. It's another creepo sex doll, all still and dead-eyed. Ah, that good old Werner. Though it's real pretty, kinda tempted to keep it to myself."
He waggled his eyebrows, the filthiest leer on his face; Wufei knew better than to deck him when he was busy working a crowd, kept his face still and his eyes bored somehow. The man cracked a smile and relaxed his hold on his rifle.
"Two hundred okay with you?" Maxwell asked casually.
"Three. You almost wonder what the fuck he did with Linda, that he needs a replacement already."
"Two fifty. Eh, Werner's just like any red-blooded man out here; who wouldn't want a threesome with a pair of lesbo hotties?"
Maxwell and the man cackled together. Wufei did his best to keep looking bored, since he didn't want to know who and what the hell they were talking about. (Heero looked blank; Wufei briefly wondered if he honestly didn't get it. Likely it was the concept of lifelike sex dolls that caused a problem, and not the concept of lesbian sandwiches.)
(His Nataku as a dead-eyed sex doll. Nrgh.)
"Two fifty-five, Maxy, 'cause I like you."
"'Cause I give you the best rumors, you mean! Okay, sold." Money changed hands; Maxwell dragged them down the narrow maintenance corridor and to the sealed doors that went through the third hull.
A couple corridors, and then they were in an underground parking lot. There was a lift; they got on, screeched up to ground level, walked up toward the exit of the parking lot. Maxwell was still grinning casually, the shotgun across his shoulders. "Yuy, you're rearguard. Pretend there's a knife up your sleeve or something. Try to project 'back off, 'cause I won't even turn around as I leave you bleeding to death in the gutter.' Chang..."
"I'll manage," he bit out.
He got it, he truly did. They'd be left alone as long as they could look like a threat. He was busy with the crate, and the pavement didn't look too flat so that might be distracting, but it didn't mean he couldn't add to the mood.
He knew exactly how to.
When he was undercover with the guerilleros in China Wufei had been playing the angry-at-the-world, sullen asshole with a chip on his shoulder. Which hadn't been hard, in a lot of ways, because it was pretty much him in a bad mood (or him all the time back during the war.) Still, the underlying personality he had to project -- of selfish needs not met, of the lack of higher ideals, merely a wrong-headed sense of injustice over what he supposedly hadn't received that he felt entitled to, even if he had to oppress those civilians who were happy with things in this united Earth Sphere era... that had bothered him. Made him feel dirty, despicable, made him doubt himself somewhere deep down.
Wufei didn't delude himself into thinking he was a likeable person, or a nice one, not even "deep down", but there was a nuance between that and being just plain wrong -- just plain evil -- that he had already flirted much too closely with, during the Mariemeya uprising.
It felt like falling off the wagon.
He trudged along, spine loose, eyes heavy-lidded, bored even as they scanned the road looking for a target, seeing nothing but victims not yet dead.
"Who's Werner?" Yuy asked as they trudged through a crossroad, past a group of people bargaining about a stalled car or whatever the issue was. Wufei kept watching them, the crowbars and wrenches in their hands dangerous-looking enough without worrying about the knives in deep pockets or the steel-capped boots.
"Oh, our lawfully elected mayor," Maxwell answered casually, eye roaming the street and a lazy smile stretching his lips, as if telling anyone who saw his bandaged face to please try it. "He's okay, really; always pays his round at the bar and never pays for any whore his daughter's age or less. One of his cousins got him the job because he didn't have what it takes to hack it in the family business. He's useless, of course, but he's not making it worse."
"Let me guess, the family business..."
"Protection, yep."
Was it a good thing or a bad one that their mayor failed as a mafioso? Ancestors above, Wufei wanted out of this place already.