Chang Wufei thought he was getting used to the eccentricities of his partner. They’d been working together for quite near a year now, after all, and with time one was bound to pick up on the habits of those closest to him. Still, Duo managed to find ways to startle him—today it was with a non-sequitur.
“Isn’t Une German?”
Wufei looked up from the mission report he was reviewing to see Duo standing in the doorway of their office, staring thoughtfully out the window. He was sipping something hot out of a cup and judging by the weather outside and the smell beginning to permeate the air Wufei guessed it was hot chocolate. Duo caught his gaze and walked over to perch upon the corner of Wufei’s desk; he offered him the drink.
After accepting the cocoa, Wufei shook his head, “It’s French for ‘one’.” He took a sip of the cup and nodded; it was good, but nothing like coffee.
“Not the word,” Duo chuckled, “Hilda.”
The Chinese boy leaned back in his seat as he considered that along with another draught of Duo’s cocoa. When he caught the braided pilot giving him pouty looks, he handed the drink back with a smirk and received a gentle kick of Duo’s heel against his thigh. “I think she is, yes. Why?”
“Her birthday is tomorrow.”
“And you needed to know her ethnicity for that?”
“I want to give her something. I needed to know if it was appropriate,” an alarming grin spread across his partner’s face and Wufei instantly became worried. Worried and, he had to admit, a little intrigued.
When Duo didn’t continue and sat sipping his drink instead, Wufei crossed his arms over his chest and studied the other boy. “Alright, I’m listening.”
“First… what are you doing later tonight?”
**--**--**
Duo and Wufei sat in the Preventer’s parking lot on the top of Duo’s “vintage,” beaten up hatchback Mazda as the liquid sunlight of dawn poured over the cityscape spread out beneath them. The box of donuts between them was half emptied and for once Wufei couldn’t bring himself to care about the empty calories or even the fact that he didn’t have any coffee to go with them. Instead he sipped at the bottle of orange juice that he and Duo were sharing.
Duo popped another piece of chocolate slathered donut into his mouth. “She’s going to be suspicious if we’re the first ones here…”
“She’s going to be suspicious when she wakes up,” Wufei reminded him with a chuckle. The grin that slapped itself across Duo’s face was proof enough that the other boy didn’t really care—in fact he still found all of this to be quite to his sense of humor. Wufei loved to see that smile; it was genuine and happy, two things that Duo had rarely expressed a year before.
“No regrets?” The braided boy asked as he reached for the orange juice Wufei was holding.
“None,” Wufei confirmed. Their fingers brushed together and they both looked back out to the sunrise glowing on the horizon. “Besides, her face is going to be worth it.”
In the distance a cloud of red balloons broke free into the morning air.
**--**--**
Her alarm clock buzzed at precisely five-thirty in the morning, just as it did every Tuesday, Friday and Saturday; the rest of the week she rose at four. Only Sunday was she allowed to remain in bed any longer than that, and even so she rarely took advantage of the opportunity. Hilda Une knew what day it was immediately—such a thing as loosing track of the date was beneath her, after all—but she never expected to wake with a bed partner.
Sleep forgotten in a second, the woman stumbled out of the bed even as she pulled a tiny pistol from underneath her pillow. The ‘click’ as she cocked the gun was the only thing to be heard in the otherwise silent bedroom as she stared at the pink and white monstrosity currently occupying half her bed. It was made of velvet and mohair and had had the word’s “Happy Birthday” scrawled in scarlet embroidery across its bulbous stomach.
Une released the breathe she hadn’t realized she’d been holding and let her arms fall uselessly to her sides. A teddy bear? Frowning in confusion, Une ran her hand into her long, sleep-tangled hair and glanced at her bedroom door. Sally, she decided after a moment—the over-sized stuffed mammal was precisely that woman’s version of a birthday “surprise.” Une slipped the pistol back under her pillow and then made her way into the bathroom.
Sally wouldn’t wake for a few hours yet and they rarely went to the office together, so there was little reason for Une to rush out to thank her. She made a mental note to take the woman out for lunch and threaten her life if she so much as breathed a word about it being her birthday to the rest of the staff. There were certain things that Une was willing to share with her roommate but she didn’t care to find out what the Preventer’s office would decide was appropriate for her birthday—she’d purposely kept the date off of the office board in order to discourage them from doing to her what they’d done to Agent Malory or Jenkins.
Though a cake would have been nice.
The surge of adrenaline so early in the morning left her feeling somewhat weak and worse for the wear when it began to ebb as suddenly as it had come. Une ran a cold shower to wake up and quickly washed herself, shampooed and rinsed her hair. It wasn’t until she was blow drying her long chestnut locks that she realized there was something wrong.
Frowning blearily at her mirror, Une leaned in closer to inspect the wet clumps of hair. She lifted some to her nose and sniffed: strawberries. Her shampoo wasn’t supposed to smell like strawberries! She frowned at her hair as she began to note the strange way the light was reflecting off of it. Almost as if… as if…
With a single flick of her thumb, Une switched the hair dryer off and laid it upon the counter top as she turned behind her to grab the bottle she’d used. It was in its accustomed place at the corner of the tub, but it was a brilliant pink and it sparkled. There was glitter in her hair.
Une resisted the urge to roll her eyes and felt her eyebrow twitch. Irritated, the woman yanked open the bathroom door so that she could read the glowing LCD numerals indicating the time upon her alarm clock. She didn’t have the time to rewash. In fact, she was already five minutes behind schedule and didn’t even have the time to give Sally a dressing-down for messing with her shampoo. With a snarl, Une returned to drying her hair. Without much other option, she plaited it back into the side-buns which she hadn’t worn her hair in since the war. It felt odd to look like Lady Une again; she’d given up that side of her nearly two years ago… after all, what did the world need with a ruthless killer? Une liked to believe that she’d found the happy medium between her two sides, but some days she just wasn’t sure.
Leaving the bathroom behind, she quickly threw on her uniform and was pleased to note that it, at least, hadn’t been tampered with. At six-twenty-five she fled the small house she shared with her comrade-in-arms for the shiny red station wagon she had left in her parking spot the night before. Too busy digging her keys out of her pocket and fumbling with a stack of files she needed for that day’s work, Une didn’t even notice the balloons until she opened the car door. The first one hit her in the face, and the second grazed her chest as she stumbled back in surprise. Bewildered, Une could only stare as ninety-nine red balloons drifted their way out of her vehicle.
By the time that Une entered the office she was growling. It had taken her twenty minutes to clear the balloons from the car, during which Sally had made an appearance to question what on Earth was going on. The only thing her “help” had accomplished was to establish that Sally was not the guilty party. Now over half an hour late, the office was already alive and vibrant by the time she entered at her usual, fast clip. Agents, secretaries and office boys alike scurried out of their gossip circles at her approaching steps; they’d been acting like clucking chickens, all worried over their prestigious leader’s unusual absence.
Though the buns were wrapped tightly against her head, Une felt that they all could see the lingering glitter dusting her skin and coating her hair. It had begun to dust her shoulders already and by the end of the day it would be everywhere—such was the nature of glitter.
“Director-General,” her private secretary scuttled up to her side, a harried look written upon her features and her usually primped hair frizzed and sticking about, “Ma’am, we’ve been trying to reach you.”
“Have you?” Une replied in as detached a voice she could manage. The device in question had remained quite notably silent all morning and Une wondered what surprise was waiting her there—she’d shoved it into her pocket without so much as glancing at it. Rather than try and juggle the files she was carrying in order to get at it, Une continued on to her office.
The pair of them stopped outside the closed door and Une stared at the wood only a moment before she cast an annoyed glance at her free-handed secretary. “Ms. Keene, if you would be so kind…?”
“Actually, ma’am, that is a part of the problem,” the woman chewed her bottom lip nervously and Une began to wonder why she’d hired someone with such fragile nerves.
“My door is a part of what problem?”
“Well, I can’t seem to open it ma’am. We’ve called maintenance; they should be here soon enough.”
“I’ll assume, then, that the key doesn’t work,” Une replied dryly; she didn’t really expect an answer. Ms. Keene gave her head a shake.
“No… and… that isn’t all.”
“Save it.” Une cut the woman off before she could even begin and then quickly dumped her burden into Ms. Keene’s arms. The secretary stumbled a little but managed not to drop anything. Facing the door, Une gave it her most menacing glare before she twisted her body and slammed her foot into the wood directly beside the lock. The door splintered, a crack sounded out through the suddenly quiet office and then the door swung open.
Une’s satisfied smirk froze upon her face as balloons began to drift out of the office. Half filled with helium, the red orbs floated between the ceiling and floor in the office and unlike the balloons from earlier, each of these had a number and a message scrawled across it. One particularly snarky balloon floated right up to her shell-shocked face and presented her with the second “happy birthday” of her morning.
“What was the other problem, Ms. Keene?” Une heard herself ask.
“It’s the remote desktop, ma’am. Someone has hijacked all the computers in the base—er—office.”
Shoving balloons out of her way and ignoring the stares of the Preventers agents and office workers alike, Une forced her way to the desk in her office. She ignored the seat and touched the mouse to her computer to find that the machine was already running. Blinking on the screen in bright red letters were the words “something’s out there.” Une closed her eyes and sighed.
“And ma’am?” Ms. Keene set the papers down on her desk and backed away timidly from the furious commander, “You’ve got a package at the front desk…”
“I really can’t take any more surprises like this.”
“But ma’am—it’s a cake.”
**--**--**
At around mid-afternoon the pair was still entrenched in the piles of paperwork that had been shoved into their office sometime that morning. Wufei couldn’t be certain, but he had an idea that Une had realized who was responsible for that morning’s… interruption. Of course she would never be able to prove anything. He sighed and rubbed his eyes, a smirk crossing his lips as he raised his fifth cup of coffee to his lips. It had absolutely been worth the sleep deprivation, he decided, as had the video feed they’d gotten out of it. That wouldn’t make it to the light of day until Christmas night at least.
Across from him Duo was chewing on the end of his pen as he went over yet another mission report from one of the lower-level agents. Their thoughts must have been on the same wavelength because a moment later Duo began to hum. Swallowing a chuckle, Wufei found that he couldn’t help but join in.
Those brilliant cerulean eyes glanced up from the paper work to meet Wufei’s. As one they began to sing, softly at first but with growing strength as they went on, “Hast Du etwas Zeit fur mich, Dann singe ich ein Lied fuer Dich Von Ninety-nine Luftballons! Auf ihrem Weg zum Horizont Denkst Du vielleicht grad’an mich, Dann singe ich ein Lied fuer Dich Von Ninety-nine Luftballons! Und dass sowas von sowas kommt!”
A familiar shadow appeared in their doorway and both boys froze in place when they realized who it was. They turned in unison and each threw his most cheerful grin at the birthday girl.
Une stared at them, anger in her eyes and tension in her lips. It melted as suddenly as it had come and the faintest of smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. “Most people just send cards, you know.” She sipped at her coffee and shook some glitter out of her hair as she returned to her office and shut the broken door.
