[GW] - [FIC] [C] In My Sights
okay... i was intending to try for the gundam_herald February challenge... but i've already missed 2 days! T_T well... here's hoping? ^O^;;;;
Rating: R (language, violence)
Pairing: 1x2x1 (established)
Genre: action (omg. what am i doing???), mild angst, not-a-deathfic (should this be my new genre? ^O^;;)
Warnings: violence?
Notes: Entirely based on the first scene of Marky Mark’s movie, “Shooter” (I loved the whole movie… well, but I’m also quite enamoured of marky mark, so I might not be the right person to ask… but anyway, the first scene just sparked off this drabble in my head. ^O^;;;). The dialogue during the action (like the little sniper dialogue was heavily referenced from the movie because i don't know anything about guns and/or aiming one. ^^;;;)
The sun was blinding, burning.
Duo shifted, mere millimeters, but Heero felt it, sensed it.
“Humidity’s negligible.”
“Wind?”
There was a slight pause while Duo adjusted his scope to focus on the heat shimmer rising off the baking desert floor.
“Negligible.”
Heero peered through his own scope.
“One point two five m.p.h. west.”
“What?” Duo looked at his partner. “Are you kidding me? *Nothing* is moving down there.”
Heero checked through his scope again.
“Heat shimmer off the grass.”
It was Duo’s turn to peer out into the beige on beige landscape again.
“That fucking tiny clump of weed? You think you can see shimmer off something that’s barely got enough surface area to qualify as a plant? That tiny clump of weed growing so close to the surface that even if the wind were 50 fucking m.p.h west it wouldn’t so much as twich? You think you can gauge wind speed off of that.”
Heero nudged him with his foot.
Duo nudged him back, harder.
Heero turned away to fully stare at Duo.
“Fine. Wind is one point two five m.p.h west… off your fucking gillie suit.”
Heero did not deign to respond.
They lay in silence for a minute.
“My elbows hurt,” said Duo.
“Pussy.”
Duo nudged Heero with his foot.
“That’s derogatory to women.”
Heero pressed himself closer into the ground on which he lay, letting his gillie suit blend completely into the sparse desert vegetation.
“Yeah, calling you a ‘woman’ would be insulting women everywhere.”
Duo was sorely tempted to jostle Heero’s elbow on purpose, and if they had been in practice instead of out in the field waiting to cover Quatre and Trowa’s extraction, he definitely would have done it. Heero had developed such a fucking attitude since he started hanging out with the other Preventer snipers.
“Stop propping yourself up so high,” Heero said in a quiet voice. “You’re putting too much strain on your elbows and shoulders. Plus, you’re starting to look less like dessert grass and more like a desert bush. The whole point of making a gillie suit is to blend into the environment. Winner and his Maguanac would spot you in a second. Lay as flat as you can.”
Duo tried to flatten himself like Heero.
“I’m not-”
“Not a sniper, I know.”
Duo rolled his eyes. This finishing his sentences thing was a recently developed quirk of Heero’s too. The other boys got a kick out of it. Duo thought it was cheesy and wished Heero would stop it.
“I was going to say: ‘I’m not from the desert,’ dumbass. Why’d you want me to be your spotter, anyway?”
There was a brief pause and Duo was almost, just about, a mere two milliseconds away from thinking that Heero was actually going to say something terribly romantic, but instead, Heero answered as Heero usually did.
“You need to learn new skills. A diverse skill set and ability to adapt are important assets in our line of work. You’re good at math and you’ve got a good eye, sniper training should be good for you.”
Duo could have bought this answer, except that it really wasn’t normal for the Preventers to send out someone as green as him as a spotter on a covert mission in a hot zone.
“So in other words, seeing as Quatre’s technically here on a ‘diplomatic’ tour, if shit hits the fan, people can blame it solely on the ‘crazy Gundam pilots’. The Preventers were never here, right?”
“One hundred percent Gundam pilot involvement means one hundred percent Gundam pilot liability.”
“Fuck.”
Heero flicked a couple of fingers at Duo in lieu of a nod.
Silence descended upon the two once again.
“Fourteen hundred hours. The Winner convoy is due over that hill any moment. Call it in, Maxwell.”
Duo tapped the mic at his throat.
“CP, this is 02, we are in position, and ready. Over.”
“This is Command Post. Received, 02. Be advised, friendly forces passing your way enroute to the extraction point. Distance, eight miles and closing.”
“Copy that, CP. Over.”
Duo watched the road, one hand holding his scope to his eye, one hand hovering at his mic. As soon as the first vehicle of the convoy crested the hill, Duo called it in.
“02, this is Command Post, possible hostiles heading your way, approaching friendlies at their 12 o’clock.”
Heero heard the announcement over his own comm. link and he instantly shifted his attention, if not his rifle, to the empty stretch of road that the Winner convoy had yet to travel.
Duo saw the vehicle in question before Heero, saw the open-bed truck round the bend at break neck speed, the machine gunner in the back clinging to his bolted down weapon for dear life.
“Target. Vehicle. Belt-fed weapon,” he said, watching it accelerate towards their friend’s convoy.
“Range it.”
Duo glanced away from the target only long enough to check his terrain sketch and range log where he’d noted all the measurements, distances and angles, from their current position to every section of the road they could decently cover.
“Seven hundred, sixty yards and closing.”
“Got it.”
“Fire when ready.”
Heero squeezed off a shot and cleanly took out the gunner standing in the back of the vehicle.
“Hit,” Duo murmured.
A second shot through the back windshield took out the driver.
“Hit,” Duo repeated.
The truck veered off the road into the brush and stopped a short distance away. Both Heero and Duo held their breaths, their eyes darting back and forth between the convoy and the direction from which the hostile threat had come. When it appeared that there had only been the one truck, Duo reported in to their command post.
“CP, this is 02, hostile threat down. Over.”
Command acknowledged and they all waited, still on high alert, as the convoy passed around the bend in the road below the two snipers to disappear into the canyon beyond and the border crossing located therein.
Heero pulled away from his scope and glanced at Duo.
“Mission Accomplished. Call it in, Maxwell.”
Just as Duo tapped his mic, however, his comm. link burst to life.
“02, this is CP. Be advised, larger hostile forces approaching on friendlies’ 6 o’clock.”
The sound of machine gun fire broke the silence.
“We gotta stop ‘em here,” Duo stated. “We can’t let them get past us. The convoy’s still got about five minutes to the border.”
Heero settled back into his ‘ready’ position.
Checking through his scope, Duo counted eight vehicles and roughly thirty men. Despite the fact that they were not in range for the weapons they were using, the gunners were already firing off random sprays at the taillights of the last Winner Hummer.
“Shit! Lead vehicle, thirty miles per hour. Four hundred yards--”
Heero took his shot.
“Secondary. Distance to machine gun, seven hundred yards-”
Heero squeezed off another shot.
The group of hostiles had all pulled to a stop in the middle road, the pursuit of the Winner convoy forgotten, just as Duo had planned it.
“CP, this is 02. We’re holding the hostile forces 500 yards at our 11 o’clock. Break. Have engaged enemy. Break. Receiving small arms and indirect fire from hostile troops. Over.”
The enemy soldiers were a ragtag bunch of rebels, without any apparent knowledge of where the shots that were picking off their members were coming from. They lobbed some half-hearted shots at the hills in which the Preventer sniper team was secreted, but they were also shooting at the rock formations two miles in the direction from which they had come. Already, during the lull while Duo was updating Command of the situation, the soldiers were starting to re-focus on the rapidly cooling trail of the Winner convoy. Both Heero and Duo knew that in order to hold the line, they were going to have to deliberately draw the enemy’s fire.
Duo called out a shot.
And Heero took it.
One hit.
Two.
The red cap behind the camo jeep.
The man yelling into his cell phone in the rear.
It wasn’t long before the hostiles caught on and suddenly Heero and Duo were faced with a rain of fire.
Duo continued to call out the shots and Heero continued to make hit after hit, but even though his were high caliber bullets, and he was a dead shot, it still didn’t change the fact that he was picking them off one by one and they still had at least twenty men firing with everything under the sun, belt-fed machine guns, grenade launchers, assault rifles…
And then Duo heard the telltale throb of a helicopter.
He could tell, instantly, that it didn’t belong to the Preventers, whose ‘choppers had a lower, slower sound.
A hail of bullets pitted the earth all around them.
Duo practically slapped himself in the neck activating his mic.
“CP, this is 02! We are under direct fire from enemy air support! I repeat, hostile forces have air support! Requesting Preventer air cover for our extraction! Over!”
The ‘chopper strafed the hills, laying down a steady stream of fire across the brush land.
Heero turned his attention away from the troops on the ground to try taking down the enemy ‘chopper. The air crew picked up on the sniper team location a lot faster than their land-bound counterparts. And it concentrated fire on the little plateau on which Heero and Duo lay. As it bore down on the two lone Preventers, Heero gave up all pretense of camouflage and took a crouched position, firing shot after shot at the chopper, facing it down without a flinch. Duo, too, rose up and fired his own assault rifle at the beast as it rounded back on them, even knowing that his rounds were not strong enough to pierce the hull or do much damage at all. All he could hope to do was take out a gunner, or maybe a rotor.
The noise was deafening as the ‘chopper swept overhead, showering Heero and Duo with bullets.
A sudden loss of one particular sound, however, froze Duo’s heart in his chest.
The clockwork-like shot, reload, shot, reload, of Heero’s sniper rifle was gone.
Almost in slow-motion, Duo turned to look at his partner… laid out flat on his back, arms flung wide, rifle carelessly dropped in the sand just out of reach.
“Yuy!”
Duo was torn between keeping an eye on the ‘chopper and checking Heero’s status. The hostile ground forces were completely forgotten.
“Shit… Come on, man,” Duo shouted, his gaze swinging wildly from Heero’s prone form, to the helicopter now, having overshot them, starting to bank for a second pass.
Heero’s trigger finger twitched, then his arm, then his leg, and then he tried to sit up. Duo’s heart leapt back into action.
“Shoulder, upper abdomen…” Heero gasped, just barely loud enough for Duo to hear. “Call…”
Duo tapped at the comm. unit at his neck. And again. There was nothing but static in response.
“It’s down! Line’s down!”
Heero swore.
“We’ve been left behind!”
“So much for fucking ‘semper fi’, motherfuckers!”
“We’re not Navy Seals!”
“Shut up and stay down, Yuy!”
Duo pushed Heero flat and knelt as close to his partner as he could. He dropped his own rifle and picked up Heero’s with its high caliber rounds.
The ‘chopper had almost completed its turn and was starting to lay down fire again at their position.
Duo didn’t have time to check if the fall affected any of the rifle’s settings. All he could do was aim and fire.
He missed.
Heero had another bullet in Duo’s hand almost before Duo realized he was blindly patting Heero’s pockets for one.
“You have to hit one of the rotors, Maxwell!”
“I know!”
The second shot ricocheted off the body of the ‘copter.
“THE ROTOR, Maxwell! You’ve got two to choose from!”
“I KNOW!”
“If you know, then DO IT!”
Duo chambered the third round and fired again.
“Shit!”
It ricocheted off the tail.
“Just aim for the big fucking whirly thing on top! Why did you choose the tail?”
“I didn’t choose the tail, it turned around at the last second!”
“Bullshit!”
Heero made a valiant grab for his gun.
“Heero! For God’s sake, just stay, the fuck, down!”
“THEN TAKE OUT THAT FUCKING ‘CHOPPER, DUO!”
Duo loaded the fourth round, closed his eyes, and whispered a quick prayer as he chambered it.
“Hit, hit, hit, hit, hit,” he murmured to himself as he took aim.
And even though bullets were flying all around them, sending up dirt and sand and whatever vegetation there was in this baked landscape, Duo felt a moment of stillness and calm. He could feel the heartbeat of the ‘chopper as it closed in on them once again. He could feel the wind of a thousand bullets as they flew past him.
He could feel Heero’s hand, clutching his hip.
The fourth shot flew true and caught the top rotor.
As the pilot fought for control of his craft, he veered off from his original flight path and so when it fell like a flaming chunk of the sky, it, coincidentally, landed right where its ground troops had been ranged on the road below.
Duo peered over the edge of their little precipice and watched as the remainder of the enemy fled the scene back the way they had come.
“Lucky…” he breathed.
But there was no rest for the weary and Duo, feeling that there was no need for any kind of stealth at this moment, stood up to take stock of their situation.
From their earlier reconnaissance, he knew that their escape routes were: 1) up and over the mountain on whose foothill they were currently taking refuge, 2) down the road, open, and unprotected, or 3) a Preventer air extraction… which had been their emergency back up when they had still thought that their employer cared whether they lived or died.
Duo quickly packed all their essential gear into one rucksack and then turned to Heero.
“Think you can walk? If we start heading into the mountains, we can zigzag to the border. There are caves all along the way where we can hole up for nights.”
With Duo’s help, Heero shed his heavy gillie suit and they refashioned some of the burlap into bandages for his wounds. They tied them tightly to help staunch the flow of blood and to hopefully keep the wounds from tearing open as they moved.
“Duo… if I don’t make it…”
“I know.”
He gave Heero a reassuring pat on the hand.
“No… Duo, I need to tell you…”
“And I’m telling you, Heero, I KNOW. Don’t worry. Save your strength.”
Duo managed to shoulder the rucksack on his right and then haul Heero to his feet with his left hand. Slowly, and with Heero leaning quite significantly on Duo, the pair made their way towards the cave-pocked hills.
“I wasn’t going to profess my love for you,” said Heero.
“I know. You were going to tell me that I need to work on my target practice. That plotting shots and making them are different. That a sniper rifle is different from my assault rifle and that I clearly I’ve been hanging out with Trowa too much because I was pulling a ‘Heavyarms’ back there. That if you don’t make it, ask McManus, your usual spotter, to help me train. Because, and I quote, ‘I need to learn new skills’.”
Heero smirked.
“You’re good…”
“You should see me in bed…” Duo responded automatically with his own version of the “that’s what she said” joke.
“Meh,” Heero gasped as they stumbled a bit on the uneven terrain. “You’re not *that* good in bed, asshole.”
Duo smacked Heero on the side of the head.
And they trudged on.
“I do love you, asshole.”
“I know.”
They ducked into the first cave that was big enough to fit two but small enough to defend easily, and together they waited for night to fall.
“You think Quatre’s going to be pissed that we were left behind?”
“They’ll come for you, Duo.”
“Shut up. We’re both going to make it. They were clean shots and you heal fast.”
Heero sighed.
“But if I-”
“I said shut up, Yuy!”
For a while there was nothing but the sounds of the desert as the daytime creatures wound down for the night and the nocturnal creatures began to wake.
“Hey, I think the bleeding’s slowing down.”
“I love you too, Heero.”
END
Rating: R (language, violence)
Pairing: 1x2x1 (established)
Genre: action (omg. what am i doing???), mild angst, not-a-deathfic (should this be my new genre? ^O^;;)
Warnings: violence?
Notes: Entirely based on the first scene of Marky Mark’s movie, “Shooter” (I loved the whole movie… well, but I’m also quite enamoured of marky mark, so I might not be the right person to ask… but anyway, the first scene just sparked off this drabble in my head. ^O^;;;). The dialogue during the action (like the little sniper dialogue was heavily referenced from the movie because i don't know anything about guns and/or aiming one. ^^;;;)
The sun was blinding, burning.
Duo shifted, mere millimeters, but Heero felt it, sensed it.
“Humidity’s negligible.”
“Wind?”
There was a slight pause while Duo adjusted his scope to focus on the heat shimmer rising off the baking desert floor.
“Negligible.”
Heero peered through his own scope.
“One point two five m.p.h. west.”
“What?” Duo looked at his partner. “Are you kidding me? *Nothing* is moving down there.”
Heero checked through his scope again.
“Heat shimmer off the grass.”
It was Duo’s turn to peer out into the beige on beige landscape again.
“That fucking tiny clump of weed? You think you can see shimmer off something that’s barely got enough surface area to qualify as a plant? That tiny clump of weed growing so close to the surface that even if the wind were 50 fucking m.p.h west it wouldn’t so much as twich? You think you can gauge wind speed off of that.”
Heero nudged him with his foot.
Duo nudged him back, harder.
Heero turned away to fully stare at Duo.
“Fine. Wind is one point two five m.p.h west… off your fucking gillie suit.”
Heero did not deign to respond.
They lay in silence for a minute.
“My elbows hurt,” said Duo.
“Pussy.”
Duo nudged Heero with his foot.
“That’s derogatory to women.”
Heero pressed himself closer into the ground on which he lay, letting his gillie suit blend completely into the sparse desert vegetation.
“Yeah, calling you a ‘woman’ would be insulting women everywhere.”
Duo was sorely tempted to jostle Heero’s elbow on purpose, and if they had been in practice instead of out in the field waiting to cover Quatre and Trowa’s extraction, he definitely would have done it. Heero had developed such a fucking attitude since he started hanging out with the other Preventer snipers.
“Stop propping yourself up so high,” Heero said in a quiet voice. “You’re putting too much strain on your elbows and shoulders. Plus, you’re starting to look less like dessert grass and more like a desert bush. The whole point of making a gillie suit is to blend into the environment. Winner and his Maguanac would spot you in a second. Lay as flat as you can.”
Duo tried to flatten himself like Heero.
“I’m not-”
“Not a sniper, I know.”
Duo rolled his eyes. This finishing his sentences thing was a recently developed quirk of Heero’s too. The other boys got a kick out of it. Duo thought it was cheesy and wished Heero would stop it.
“I was going to say: ‘I’m not from the desert,’ dumbass. Why’d you want me to be your spotter, anyway?”
There was a brief pause and Duo was almost, just about, a mere two milliseconds away from thinking that Heero was actually going to say something terribly romantic, but instead, Heero answered as Heero usually did.
“You need to learn new skills. A diverse skill set and ability to adapt are important assets in our line of work. You’re good at math and you’ve got a good eye, sniper training should be good for you.”
Duo could have bought this answer, except that it really wasn’t normal for the Preventers to send out someone as green as him as a spotter on a covert mission in a hot zone.
“So in other words, seeing as Quatre’s technically here on a ‘diplomatic’ tour, if shit hits the fan, people can blame it solely on the ‘crazy Gundam pilots’. The Preventers were never here, right?”
“One hundred percent Gundam pilot involvement means one hundred percent Gundam pilot liability.”
“Fuck.”
Heero flicked a couple of fingers at Duo in lieu of a nod.
Silence descended upon the two once again.
“Fourteen hundred hours. The Winner convoy is due over that hill any moment. Call it in, Maxwell.”
Duo tapped the mic at his throat.
“CP, this is 02, we are in position, and ready. Over.”
“This is Command Post. Received, 02. Be advised, friendly forces passing your way enroute to the extraction point. Distance, eight miles and closing.”
“Copy that, CP. Over.”
Duo watched the road, one hand holding his scope to his eye, one hand hovering at his mic. As soon as the first vehicle of the convoy crested the hill, Duo called it in.
“02, this is Command Post, possible hostiles heading your way, approaching friendlies at their 12 o’clock.”
Heero heard the announcement over his own comm. link and he instantly shifted his attention, if not his rifle, to the empty stretch of road that the Winner convoy had yet to travel.
Duo saw the vehicle in question before Heero, saw the open-bed truck round the bend at break neck speed, the machine gunner in the back clinging to his bolted down weapon for dear life.
“Target. Vehicle. Belt-fed weapon,” he said, watching it accelerate towards their friend’s convoy.
“Range it.”
Duo glanced away from the target only long enough to check his terrain sketch and range log where he’d noted all the measurements, distances and angles, from their current position to every section of the road they could decently cover.
“Seven hundred, sixty yards and closing.”
“Got it.”
“Fire when ready.”
Heero squeezed off a shot and cleanly took out the gunner standing in the back of the vehicle.
“Hit,” Duo murmured.
A second shot through the back windshield took out the driver.
“Hit,” Duo repeated.
The truck veered off the road into the brush and stopped a short distance away. Both Heero and Duo held their breaths, their eyes darting back and forth between the convoy and the direction from which the hostile threat had come. When it appeared that there had only been the one truck, Duo reported in to their command post.
“CP, this is 02, hostile threat down. Over.”
Command acknowledged and they all waited, still on high alert, as the convoy passed around the bend in the road below the two snipers to disappear into the canyon beyond and the border crossing located therein.
Heero pulled away from his scope and glanced at Duo.
“Mission Accomplished. Call it in, Maxwell.”
Just as Duo tapped his mic, however, his comm. link burst to life.
“02, this is CP. Be advised, larger hostile forces approaching on friendlies’ 6 o’clock.”
The sound of machine gun fire broke the silence.
“We gotta stop ‘em here,” Duo stated. “We can’t let them get past us. The convoy’s still got about five minutes to the border.”
Heero settled back into his ‘ready’ position.
Checking through his scope, Duo counted eight vehicles and roughly thirty men. Despite the fact that they were not in range for the weapons they were using, the gunners were already firing off random sprays at the taillights of the last Winner Hummer.
“Shit! Lead vehicle, thirty miles per hour. Four hundred yards--”
Heero took his shot.
“Secondary. Distance to machine gun, seven hundred yards-”
Heero squeezed off another shot.
The group of hostiles had all pulled to a stop in the middle road, the pursuit of the Winner convoy forgotten, just as Duo had planned it.
“CP, this is 02. We’re holding the hostile forces 500 yards at our 11 o’clock. Break. Have engaged enemy. Break. Receiving small arms and indirect fire from hostile troops. Over.”
The enemy soldiers were a ragtag bunch of rebels, without any apparent knowledge of where the shots that were picking off their members were coming from. They lobbed some half-hearted shots at the hills in which the Preventer sniper team was secreted, but they were also shooting at the rock formations two miles in the direction from which they had come. Already, during the lull while Duo was updating Command of the situation, the soldiers were starting to re-focus on the rapidly cooling trail of the Winner convoy. Both Heero and Duo knew that in order to hold the line, they were going to have to deliberately draw the enemy’s fire.
Duo called out a shot.
And Heero took it.
One hit.
Two.
The red cap behind the camo jeep.
The man yelling into his cell phone in the rear.
It wasn’t long before the hostiles caught on and suddenly Heero and Duo were faced with a rain of fire.
Duo continued to call out the shots and Heero continued to make hit after hit, but even though his were high caliber bullets, and he was a dead shot, it still didn’t change the fact that he was picking them off one by one and they still had at least twenty men firing with everything under the sun, belt-fed machine guns, grenade launchers, assault rifles…
And then Duo heard the telltale throb of a helicopter.
He could tell, instantly, that it didn’t belong to the Preventers, whose ‘choppers had a lower, slower sound.
A hail of bullets pitted the earth all around them.
Duo practically slapped himself in the neck activating his mic.
“CP, this is 02! We are under direct fire from enemy air support! I repeat, hostile forces have air support! Requesting Preventer air cover for our extraction! Over!”
The ‘chopper strafed the hills, laying down a steady stream of fire across the brush land.
Heero turned his attention away from the troops on the ground to try taking down the enemy ‘chopper. The air crew picked up on the sniper team location a lot faster than their land-bound counterparts. And it concentrated fire on the little plateau on which Heero and Duo lay. As it bore down on the two lone Preventers, Heero gave up all pretense of camouflage and took a crouched position, firing shot after shot at the chopper, facing it down without a flinch. Duo, too, rose up and fired his own assault rifle at the beast as it rounded back on them, even knowing that his rounds were not strong enough to pierce the hull or do much damage at all. All he could hope to do was take out a gunner, or maybe a rotor.
The noise was deafening as the ‘chopper swept overhead, showering Heero and Duo with bullets.
A sudden loss of one particular sound, however, froze Duo’s heart in his chest.
The clockwork-like shot, reload, shot, reload, of Heero’s sniper rifle was gone.
Almost in slow-motion, Duo turned to look at his partner… laid out flat on his back, arms flung wide, rifle carelessly dropped in the sand just out of reach.
“Yuy!”
Duo was torn between keeping an eye on the ‘chopper and checking Heero’s status. The hostile ground forces were completely forgotten.
“Shit… Come on, man,” Duo shouted, his gaze swinging wildly from Heero’s prone form, to the helicopter now, having overshot them, starting to bank for a second pass.
Heero’s trigger finger twitched, then his arm, then his leg, and then he tried to sit up. Duo’s heart leapt back into action.
“Shoulder, upper abdomen…” Heero gasped, just barely loud enough for Duo to hear. “Call…”
Duo tapped at the comm. unit at his neck. And again. There was nothing but static in response.
“It’s down! Line’s down!”
Heero swore.
“We’ve been left behind!”
“So much for fucking ‘semper fi’, motherfuckers!”
“We’re not Navy Seals!”
“Shut up and stay down, Yuy!”
Duo pushed Heero flat and knelt as close to his partner as he could. He dropped his own rifle and picked up Heero’s with its high caliber rounds.
The ‘chopper had almost completed its turn and was starting to lay down fire again at their position.
Duo didn’t have time to check if the fall affected any of the rifle’s settings. All he could do was aim and fire.
He missed.
Heero had another bullet in Duo’s hand almost before Duo realized he was blindly patting Heero’s pockets for one.
“You have to hit one of the rotors, Maxwell!”
“I know!”
The second shot ricocheted off the body of the ‘copter.
“THE ROTOR, Maxwell! You’ve got two to choose from!”
“I KNOW!”
“If you know, then DO IT!”
Duo chambered the third round and fired again.
“Shit!”
It ricocheted off the tail.
“Just aim for the big fucking whirly thing on top! Why did you choose the tail?”
“I didn’t choose the tail, it turned around at the last second!”
“Bullshit!”
Heero made a valiant grab for his gun.
“Heero! For God’s sake, just stay, the fuck, down!”
“THEN TAKE OUT THAT FUCKING ‘CHOPPER, DUO!”
Duo loaded the fourth round, closed his eyes, and whispered a quick prayer as he chambered it.
“Hit, hit, hit, hit, hit,” he murmured to himself as he took aim.
And even though bullets were flying all around them, sending up dirt and sand and whatever vegetation there was in this baked landscape, Duo felt a moment of stillness and calm. He could feel the heartbeat of the ‘chopper as it closed in on them once again. He could feel the wind of a thousand bullets as they flew past him.
He could feel Heero’s hand, clutching his hip.
The fourth shot flew true and caught the top rotor.
As the pilot fought for control of his craft, he veered off from his original flight path and so when it fell like a flaming chunk of the sky, it, coincidentally, landed right where its ground troops had been ranged on the road below.
Duo peered over the edge of their little precipice and watched as the remainder of the enemy fled the scene back the way they had come.
“Lucky…” he breathed.
But there was no rest for the weary and Duo, feeling that there was no need for any kind of stealth at this moment, stood up to take stock of their situation.
From their earlier reconnaissance, he knew that their escape routes were: 1) up and over the mountain on whose foothill they were currently taking refuge, 2) down the road, open, and unprotected, or 3) a Preventer air extraction… which had been their emergency back up when they had still thought that their employer cared whether they lived or died.
Duo quickly packed all their essential gear into one rucksack and then turned to Heero.
“Think you can walk? If we start heading into the mountains, we can zigzag to the border. There are caves all along the way where we can hole up for nights.”
With Duo’s help, Heero shed his heavy gillie suit and they refashioned some of the burlap into bandages for his wounds. They tied them tightly to help staunch the flow of blood and to hopefully keep the wounds from tearing open as they moved.
“Duo… if I don’t make it…”
“I know.”
He gave Heero a reassuring pat on the hand.
“No… Duo, I need to tell you…”
“And I’m telling you, Heero, I KNOW. Don’t worry. Save your strength.”
Duo managed to shoulder the rucksack on his right and then haul Heero to his feet with his left hand. Slowly, and with Heero leaning quite significantly on Duo, the pair made their way towards the cave-pocked hills.
“I wasn’t going to profess my love for you,” said Heero.
“I know. You were going to tell me that I need to work on my target practice. That plotting shots and making them are different. That a sniper rifle is different from my assault rifle and that I clearly I’ve been hanging out with Trowa too much because I was pulling a ‘Heavyarms’ back there. That if you don’t make it, ask McManus, your usual spotter, to help me train. Because, and I quote, ‘I need to learn new skills’.”
Heero smirked.
“You’re good…”
“You should see me in bed…” Duo responded automatically with his own version of the “that’s what she said” joke.
“Meh,” Heero gasped as they stumbled a bit on the uneven terrain. “You’re not *that* good in bed, asshole.”
Duo smacked Heero on the side of the head.
And they trudged on.
“I do love you, asshole.”
“I know.”
They ducked into the first cave that was big enough to fit two but small enough to defend easily, and together they waited for night to fall.
“You think Quatre’s going to be pissed that we were left behind?”
“They’ll come for you, Duo.”
“Shut up. We’re both going to make it. They were clean shots and you heal fast.”
Heero sighed.
“But if I-”
“I said shut up, Yuy!”
For a while there was nothing but the sounds of the desert as the daytime creatures wound down for the night and the nocturnal creatures began to wake.
“Hey, I think the bleeding’s slowing down.”
“I love you too, Heero.”
END