He hated pain charts. The first time a doctor asked him to rate his pain he laughed. Use a scale of one to ten, where one is no pain and ten is the worst you can imagine. What a joke. He could imagine quite a lot. Next they said try to imagine ten as unbearable pain and that was a joke, too. All pain is bearable until you're dead. So when they said to rate his pain he never went above a five or six because he didn't want to lie and didn't like being a bother to others. And that meant doctors and nurses never took him seriously.
Which is how he found himself in Noventa Memorial Preventers' Hospital, ignored by the staff while he barely managed to breathe. Occasionally someone would look in his direction but an outward calm, his default in an emergency, only placated hospital staff further. About twenty two minutes earlier a young nurse asked if there was anyone he wanted to call. He just shook his head silently. Who could he call? There was no one. There hadn't been for years.
Sometimes the nurses would whisper. He'd end up in the hospital and hear them talk in hushed tones about his lack of visitors. About how he had no emergency contact other than Commander Une. But that came with the job. It was the deal he made when Une recruited him: No one could ever know he worked for Preventers. Especially the other Gundam pilots. He would work for Une as a ghost and only as a ghost. And ghosts don't have next of kin.
Duo didn’t want to be found. He didn’t want to reconnect with people. He wanted to protect himself from the pain that friendship and love caused. Disappearing and throwing himself into work seemed like a great solution at the time, but now he was trapped and so very tired. Maybe Une was right and the other Gundam pilots wanted him in their lives. Maybe, even with all the anger he still carried, things would be different this time around.
My notes: What can I say? I'm a sucker for a good Duo-disappears-in-a-cloud-of-angst-and-watches-over-the-boys-from-afar-until... fic with lots of pain and emotion.