Word Count: 35,067
Pairing: 1x2

Notes: Mind you, I've taken a few liberties with Heero's "condition", if you will, in this story if you're a hard-core horror fan, but I don't think they're too drastic. A lot of what I've based him on is from actual but lesser-known myths that I took time to look up, rather than just take from stereotypes. It was basically sparked by the Modest Mouse song, "Satin in a Coffin", dubbed after a Snow Patrol song, and then carried away by my own aberrant, morbid imagination and odd sense of humor. Enjoy!

Summary: It's not Duo's average Friday night. Usually, he doesn't have anyone to talk to, and he shouldn't, seeing how he works at East Central City Morgue.

12:04

It was a Friday and Death was merciful tonight. It was a pleasant surprise in the East Central Morgue and it gave Duo the opportunity to watch a few late-night Grade B horror movies.

Currently, he'd picked up somewhere in the middle of an odd horror thriller about a colony of disproportionate and bloodsucking flies infesting a hospital and the janitor had just stumbled across a nest of maggots, each as long as he was tall, writhing in a storage closet.

As cheap, suspenseful music poured out of the set, Duo's fingers picked hungrily through a bag of potato chips and he grinned lopsidedly at the tacky attempt to scare him with a close-up of the maggot's masticating, slimy face. The combination of water and glue that looked like the topping on old cinnamon buns was interesting but did little to evoke fear in him. Instead, he had a sudden craving for Cinnabon.

The janitor who had stumbled across this horrific find stumbled back from the closet, but soon, through the snowy reception, it was clear that the maggots had caught his scent and started gnawing on his leg, drawing him helplessly into their nest of ooze.

"Chrriiist! Oh, god, can anybody hear me? God, please -- someone! Help!"

Duo just snickered as five wiggling, overgrown lards devoured the poor, overacting man from the feet up. "Oh please," he grinned, digging his fingers through the chips like he was stroking the spinning lottery numbers. "Who does he expect to come to his rescue at that hour? The geriatrics?"

The janitor let out a scream as bones started crunching loudly. More gratuitous shots of slimy maggot faces made him laugh again.

"'Help, someone!'" Duo mocked. "'I'm being devoured by a pack of fanged anuses!'" He laughed again, simultaneously devouring and crunching the handful of potato chips between his teeth as if it were a helpless custodian.

He laughed at and mimicked the low-budget film for another ten minutes, kicking the rabbit-ear antennae when the signal fizzled out in a flurry of dissonant snow and yelling out in jeers at the characters, as they were oblivious to the unstoppable creatures lurking behind them. When he had finished the bag of chips during a commercial break, he balled the trash up and, still reclining in the chair behind the desk, attempted to make the shot across to the wastebasket.

As the charming tip of his tongue peeked out he said to himself, winking one eye close to aim, "Maxwell lines up his shot... it's down to the wire; what does he think he can do at that distance? Folks, if he can make this shot, he'll have just made history here in New York and single-handedly carried his team all the way to the playoffs! He jumps, he shoots!"

The crumpled plastic wad flew from his hand in a magnificent, a perfect arc that flew gently down toward the metal wastebasket with promise and Duo sat up in his chair sharply. "Hold your breath, folks!" he narrated. "Three seconds to go, your beloved hometown team down by two and -- "

It hit the rim of the basket and unceremoniously flopped to the floor.

"He chokes." Duo disappointedly brought both of his hand up to cup around his mouth as he made the wailing noise of the final buzzer sealing the fate of his fantasized game. "Well, folks, time to spit out those hot franks and go home."

He sighed and dutifully pulled himself from the chair to go pick up his fumbled shot and toss it successfully in the basket. He dusted off his hands and meandered back to the desk to pick up the pop can that sat, half-emptied, by the fuzzy television. As soon as he got near, the reception cut out and he groaned.

"Ah, shit. How am I supposed to see the hot doctor get killed if you keep ducking out on me, buddy? I'm nothing but nice to you, and this is how I'm repaid?" he grumbled, setting down the can to wrestle with the antennae. It was hell-bent on disagreeing with him and, in the end, won the battle.

The horrible reception only worsened and when Duo finally told himself, "To hell with it," it had become a thick blizzard of hissing snow. Defeated and grumbling, he turned it off and sauntered back to the desk.

Before he had taken three steps, lightning flashed in the window glass of the doors at the entrance and lit up the dimmed hallway leading up to the bright space where Duo stood. He stopped to watch the dark night outside momentarily light up in sharp, skeletal-white relief before it disappeared with a rumble of thunder. It was raining in sheets down the windowpanes and he swore under his breath as he went to sit back down.

He kicked the chair leg angrily before falling into it and slumping down. "Lucky me. I'll be driving home in the storm of the century tonight," he complained dully, reaching up and snatching a pen off the disarrayed pile of files.

"Knowing Trowa, he's probably eaten everything in the house, too," he complained with a sigh, twirling a ballpoint between his fingers as he stared at the malfunctioning television. He made a very displeased face. "Wet and hungry. I can see already this is just going to be a great night."

Sitting alone and a pen his only source of entertainment, his mind was left to wander. It settled eventually on the fact that he was spending his weekend working by himself in a morgue, and that he really should quit the graveyard shift. He was afraid, as he watched the whitewashed walls and kept inhaling that awfully sterile smell of disinfectant into all hours of the night, that he was going to loose his mind in this place.

Luckily for him, he would have something to do very soon. Sometime a few minutes later, someone knocked on the back door, leaving behind a body on the steps.

Duo heard the knock at the back door and, with a little foresight, he would have immediately labeled it as trouble and ignored it completely. Even without that future knowledge, he made a skeptical face. It had to be some damned kid trying to pull a prank on him -- no one ever came to the morgue by the back steps. Bodies came through the front only, that was policy. So naturally, he walked to the back door expecting only some obnoxious kid with a rattling spray can vandalizing the wall.

The thick, rectangular windows lit up again with bluish-white lightning and the overcast heavens rumbled in the black. As he walked down the short corridor to the double doors, he could see the never-ending buckets of rain falling, highlighted by a distant white streetlight. A second later, another bolt of lightning slithered across the sky, branching out into the underbelly of the clouds. He squinted at the glass as he drew closer, trying to look through the rain-coated window, when the culprit who was responsible for pulling him from his comfortable spot for a game of ding-dong-ditch stood up. He seemed to almost just appear in the window.

Duo saw only the shadowed face, obscured by a baseball cap and dark clothing, but the entire stance was that of secrecy, of being caught red-handed in something undesirable. The person caught sight of Duo approaching and rushed down the stairs toward the back alley.

It was not a feeling that Duo liked. A wave of defensive tension filled him -- he was all alone in the downtown morgue, on the lonely graveyard shift -- so naturally he rushed toward the door and yelled at the intruder.

"Hey! What are you doing out here? Hey!"

It only seemed to spur the shadow of a man on and he began his escape down the rain-soaked alleyway. A flash of honey blonde hair swung in a long ponytail under the cap. A girl? Duo swore as he struggled with the locked door and only managed to shove it open when the culprit had already turned the corner, the water from the puddles spitting up at her feet as she disappeared in the sheets of rain and the darkness of midnight.

"Hey!" Duo yelled after her, leaning out the door and scoffing as she disappeared in a hurry. "Yeah, real funny, missy! It's way past your bedtime, princess!" He shook his head, feeling a chill from the cold air run through him to the bone.

He took a step forward to glance around the door, keeping an eye out for any troublesome companions she might have conveniently lurking in the shadows, when the door hit something.

Sudden images of someone crouched behind the door, knife at the ready jumped to mind. With considerably less courage than before, the lone worker peeked his head around the door. He found himself squinting in the onslaught of rain at a body lying at the top of the stairs, wrapped up in a crinkled blue tarp. The rain poured down upon it like bullets, also silently striking the pale, dead hand that protruded, clutching lifelessly at nothing.

Duo looked to the right, then to the left. He looked at the tarp-covered body and ran his eyes up and down it crookedly.

"She could have left a note. Even orphans get at least that much."

The door opened again a few minutes later and the wheels of the stretcher clacked as it was rolled out onto the stoop in the pouring rain. Duo pushed it to the side, curled the raincoat around him, and half-way closed the door, shivering from the cold as he looked down. The body still lay there, fully dead. It wasn't really about to go anywhere.

"And who would?" he muttered to no one. "Nobody in this weather, that's for sure."

As the thunderstorm raged on, threatening to obscure the only sources of light with thick sheets of rain, Duo crouched down, cursing to himself. There were puddles of water pooling in the folds and creases of the tarp and streaming from the edges down the stairs. And now that he was closer, with a growing grimace, he could see the traces of blood on the exposed white fingertips. The nails were ragged and torn. There'd either been a struggle, or he'd bitten his fingernails to death.

Duo frowned down at it. What could have happened to this poor person to merit them some kind of awful death and then to be unceremoniously dumped on the back steps of a morgue? What, they weren't even important enough to be at least dropped off in front?

The shivering morgue worker realized that it was probably not a natural death, seeing how it hadn't come in a ambulance, and that it was probably not a very good idea to even get involved if it did indeed turn out to be murder -- he'd be in deep shit if his supervisor caught wind of him dragging bodies out of the back alle -- but he felt a little sympathy for the poor thing nonetheless. The least he could do was get it inside.

He shifted a little closer, leaned down and sniffed. At least the body wasn't starting to rot. Then it would just be shit out of luck. He made a policy of avoiding decomposing bodies whenever he could, and it wasn't really his responsibility if the body didn't arrive with the ambulance or police.

At the same time, another bolt of lightning flashed, and the consequential thunder roared, but somehow it seemed even angrier, and the rolling purr stretched clean across the dark sky, even rumbled in the earth. Duo glanced up, then adjusted the hood over his head before he started to lift the twisted body off the concrete.

"You know, you're damned lucky I've got nothing better to do, else I would have just left you for the next shift, and you probably wouldn't have been a happy camper then. I'm just too nice for my own damn good," he grumbled to himself.

He had his arms scooped under the shoulder and the leg, cautiously -- he didn't want to get it wet, thus speeding up the rotting process, but the more pressing reason was that he didn't think he could really stand the sight of a dead body if it wasn't on a sterile operating table, tagged, and in plenty of light. He was a mere mortal, after all, and who the hell liked looking at corpses?

He prepared himself to pick it up, let out a deep breath, and tensed his muscles to lift.

"Oof! Christ!" he let out as he struggled against the weight, managing with a little less than ease to raise the covered cadaver up to chest level and quickly turn around. The body flopped onto the stretcher, which was drenched by the rain now, and the wheels rattled.

Duo straightened out with a rush of air out of his lungs. "You're heavy for being such a scrawny thing, man!" he complained, tapping his fist against his back and cracking it. He looked over at the pale arm that hung down from underneath the tarp as it lay bonelessly on the stretcher.

"You must have had some courteous murderer, pal, and I'm being pretty generous to ya, too," he told the body. "You'd better say 'thank you,' man. This isn't in my job description. Plus, I'm probably going to have nightmares from this, so you had better be worth it," he muttered.

He dutifully turned the stretcher around and faced the doorway. But before he started to wheel the unwanted present inside, he hesitated, catching sight of something dark on the white and fairly muscular arm that hung over the side. He reached out to look at it more closely -- it seemed like a tattoo of some kind, but it was impossible make out. He came close enough to see and squinted, more confused than unable to see.

7 7

What the hell did that mean? Reaching out without knowing it, he stopped himself a moment later.

"Ah, shit! What am I thinking?" he squeaked suddenly, drawing his hand back and shaking it out. "I have no idea where this guy has been -- I need gloves, dammit!"

He made a slightly twisted up face and put his hands securely on the stretcher to push it inside, very grateful to be coming inside from the pouring rain.

"I'd better be getting a little something for this when pay day rolls around. Retrieving the dead bodies from alleyways is for the cops and necrophiliacs, not me; I'm just the guy who has to fix them up for their nice funeral. And considering the manner of your arrival, buddy," he told the covered corpse in a conversational tone as he patted his foot, walking around the table to find his tools, "there's probably not going to be a whole many attending."

He laughed to himself at the poor cadaver's expense as he passed by, reaching for the drawer full of clean gloves. With a sadistic tint to his smile, he pulled them over his hands with a sharp snap as he let go, in the mood to taunt the dead body though it couldn't hear him.

Hey, a morgue is no lively place, by any stretch. I've gotta have my fun somehow or another.

Pulling a medical apron over his head and tying it behind his back, Duo shuffled around on the cold, cement floors for a few seconds, finishing the knot, making sure that he wouldn't get blood on his uniform again. Strolling into the Laundromat with a basket full of bloodied shirts never quite made the impression he was looking for, and just getting the stains out was enough pain in itself. His footsteps echoed back to the closed door leading out to the reception area as he turned around, pulling his braided hair securely over his shoulder and even brushing back some of his stray strands. He caught his breath in his throat, somehow upset about the lethargic trickle of blood that began to drip from the table to the drain at the foot than he would have thought. But it was a dead body, and he worked at the morgue. Blood was a necessary evil in his line of work.

He readjusted his gloves, pulling them just a little further up his forearm. Under the dripping, and now bloodstained tarp was a dead body that had once been someone living, family to someone, maybe even a lover and best friend. He owed it to the poor fool to at least if any teary-eyed loved ones happened to show up looking for him -- but not really wanting to find him in a temperature-controlled steel box in the wall.

"Alright, pal," he told the corpse as he wheeled the petite metal cart housing the examination tools over with him, keeping it close to his hip. "Time to get to know each other better."

He ripped off the tarp with few theatrics, listening to the collected water drip off it and down into the build-in drain at the foot of the examination table. Tossing it to the floor, out of the way, Duo saw for the first time the murder victim's pale white face under the stark white lights. He opened his mouth in amazement, letting forth a low, impressed whistle between his lips as he moved the tousled, dark bangs out of the defunct face to more fully grasp its beauty.

"My, my," Duo wondered out loud. "What you'd look like with a little color in ya, I wonder?"

His latex covered fingertips traced the almond-shaped eyes, unable to help himself, and then traced the thick, stern brows above them, free of whatever stress that had harassed him before his death. His very untimely death.

His young face was ashen white but nearly perfectly sculpted: a small, Asian nose, enticingly high, exotic cheekbones that added to the exquisite shape of his face, and a pair of thin, bloodstained lips set in a peaceful expression. The dark, chocolate brown hair splayed out around that face in a ragged corona and the long, muscular neck didn't make him any tougher on the eyes, either.

"You're just another fantastic lady killer, aren't you, pal? Well, you were, that is."

He took away his hand to examine the rest of the body and had to make sure the air-conditioning was working than once -- Christ, this was one very good-looking but very deceased guy, his entire body covered with nicks and cuts and bruises and dried blood. And what a body it must have been when it had been living, breathing, and moving, he thought to himself. He shamelessly ran his eyes up and down again.

"I'm quite the lucky guy today. Usually I get the fat ones," Duo chuckled as he ambled alongside the table.

He trailed his gloved hand down the pale skin of his nearest leg, stopping just short of the grievous gash halfway down that perfected thigh. It was as if someone had simply slapped it down and taken a kitchen knife to it, creating a ragged, vividly red slash that encompassed his whole leg. Like they'd sawed at it. Duo let out a little admiring hiss at the injury.

Beneath the stark industrial lights, the amount of blood on the cadaver was shockingly relieved against the ashen white skin, and Duo traced a trail of blood slowly dripping away from the leg wound. He squinted at it for a second. That was too much blood. He surmised that the nicking of his femoral artery was what had bled him to death in the first place, if he wasn't already killed by some other method, judging by the extent of the other various injuries scattered across his body -- bruises, cuts, gashes, and even what appeared to be a glancing blow from a gunshot.

Duo made a twisted face as he leaned over the naked cadaver, his black work clothes opposed by the white apron he wore, staring critically at the steady trickle of blood on the gleaming examination table.

"You're not supposed to do that. Hate to be the bearer of bad news, my friend, but you're dead as a doornail. And you should be pretty much bled out."

He then put one hand on either side of the nearly severed thigh to help further examine the femoral artery, which seemed to be the source of the inexplicable red liquid. As he felt the fine muscle tone between his fingers, lifting the appendage just for the kicks of it and putting one hand under the foot to display it fully, in all its ruptured glory, he lifted an eyebrow and glanced over to the pale, motionless face.

"What a shame," he muttered, turning his attention back to the beautiful extremity again. "I work so hard for my scrawny legs, and here you come, dropped, dead as dead can get, on my doorstep with the heavenly legs I've always dreamed of. Not fair. If you were alive, I think I'd have to envy you," he offered the dead body with a chuckle as he dropped the appendage, shaking his head. "And maybe take you out for dinner."

The room was silent around them, him and the cadaver, the doors with the misted, square windows set at chest level shut, the walls enclosing them full of dead bodies and tiny, gleaming, steel doors. The storm still rumbled outside, like the dissatisfied voicing of some horrible beast in the skies, the lightning his teeth bared in frustration. Every few seconds or so, in increasing proximity to one another, the rolls of thunder would vibrate in the very building, up through the cement into Duo's living toes, through the metal and into the pale cadaver. He remained there silently for a minute, looking bemusedly at the white skin of the leg he held, not saying a thing for once to the body.

And out in the reception, the television screen flickered once, dimmed, flickered again, and finally came back to life just as the credits began rolling, one final frame of a white and terrified face blackening out to the dramatic crescendo of music.

Duo snapped from his mild reverie, shaking his head, staring blankly down at the cadaver. He had to laugh at himself, at growing so absent-minded. "I'd better hurry before you decompose, huh?" he asked the corpse, thankfully not expecting any sort of answer.

As he turned his head, he noticed a little blood weeping from the corner of the anonymous body's mouth -- a little internal backup, he labeled it, and simply wiped it away. It didn't become him at all. Duo smiled to himself as he started some more small talk with the cadaver -- he was lonely, so sue him. He'd become preoccupied, forgotten about the blood, and it was slowly but steadily increasing without his notice.

As he was reaching for a tool at his hip, he went rambling on to his lifeless friend, as if coaxing him through an uncomfortable procedure at some clinic. "Don't get me wrong, I like you and all, but you know what would really suck? If you just suddenly sprang back to life and scared the living daylights out of me," he joked.

Though he truly meant it only as one, he still hesitated and looked over at the cadaver, awaiting him to shoot bolt upright on the table, taking in a horrific gasp of air, eyes wide -- what color would they be, anyway? -- but he didn't move and remained completely dead.

Giving a theatric sigh of relief and grinning, he just patted the body on the leg and reached over for an instrument to start his examination. He bit at his lip as he tried to pick out the right one. "Thanks, man. I'd like to stay out of a cheaply made horror movie tonight, if you wouldn't mind -- "

"Would you mind if I asked you to sew up my leg in exchange, then?"

"FUCK!"

Duo screamed, hearing the voice whispering near his ear, brushing the fine hairs just near his ear, hot, tangible, and very much alive. His entire body flung itself backward with the eruption of shock that began pouring through him like fire, as if someone had just poured boiling water down his mouth and pinched it close. The scalpel in his hand went flying backward, striking the wall with a violent sound and clattering to the tiled floors. The floor flew up to catch him and he was instantaneously scrabbling backwards on hands and knees, filled with his blind reaction, eyes wide. He was sure he was going to have to crawl back and get his heart, because it felt like it had been forcibly propelled out of his mouth. It was beating so fast it was one terrific throb throughout his body.

Only when his back hit the wall, almost forceful enough to bruise it, did his senses catch up and tell his brain that he was staring at the beautiful corpse sitting up on the examining table, lit under the fluorescent lights like some twisted messiah in a corona of white. He blinked at Duo once, then twice.

"Well, will you?" he asked.

Duo could not breathe as his jaws worked to catch the air. Fish-like.

He could do nothing before the dead body moved, as if to hop off the table. But then he had plenty of energy to frantically snatch up the scalpel lying at his side, fling it at the moving, talking, blinking body, and bury it in the side of his head. A strangled sound escaped him as he finally managed that breath and bolted up, flinging himself for the door for what felt like a matter of life and death. It fell a tad short, though, and Duo Maxwell gracefully fell to the floor, bashing his forehead squarely into the tiles, earning him a row of perfectly proportioned imprints from the tiles across the face and a trip into unconsciousness.

Blue. They had been blue eyes, thought the swimming brain pleasantly.

Duo's lips sleepily stretched into a smile, focusing on the image of those blinking Prussian blues in his semi-conscious haze rather than choosing to think about how they belonged to the dead body he had found on the back step. That dreamy smile spread a little, the image of the body's pale face coming a little sharper into view. Humming contentedly, Duo tilted up to meet it, but stopped when he felt a cold drop fall onto the tip of his nose, bringing his eyes open abruptly on the real world, lit with industrial lights and overshadowed by the body as he sat close, his face hovering so near he could count ever single dead pore.

And the single cold drop was blood from the scalpel lodged in his temple.

"F-f-f -- " came the start of another scream.

The body's blue eyes flickered, frightened by the possibility of another curdling scream, and quickly put his palm over Duo's mouth, physically driving it back into him. Duo suddenly felt like he had naught an ounce of air in his chest. The clammy hand made him freeze up against the wall he was sitting against. No, he wasn't sitting, he was lying down, staring up at the steel rafters, just beyond the dead body's face fringed by the light overhead.

Very much animated, the corpse bent further forward until their noses were very narrowly separated. Naked, he was bleeding on the white apron between them, crouched at Duo's side.

"Now," he was saying firmly, "I'm going to lift my hand. And you will not scream." His blue eyes flickered at him once, twice, blinking. The hot breath from his mouth made Duo nervous, and his husky, slightly accented voice only made that fact worse. "Nod your head if you understand what I'm saying."

Duo clawed the fingers off his mouth and pushed his voice to the top of his lungs, lunging away from the cadaver as quickly as he could. "Get your hands off me! Oh, shit! Don't touch me! Get the fuck away from me, man!"

"Not exactly a nod, but -- " the dead body muttered, then shrugged. "All right. You won't like it," he warned casually, his face drawn into the picture of indifference.

He complied; his other hand lifted itself from where it had left a hot little nest on the left side of his chest.

"Oh, no, I think I'll be much happier if you get the -- " Duo stopped in mid-sentence, his mouth sculpted to pronounce the beginning of his favorite go-to cussword, an anxious finger jabbed in the corpse's direction. Frozen up.

The dead body's stern brow lay hidden behind his disarrayed, dark bangs, but he saw it raise at him as if almost amused. "If I what?"

The morgue worker groaned and crumpled up against the wall again, trying to bury the palms of his hands directly into his forehead, the source of a new and unrelenting headache of mythical proportions.

"Shi-yit -- what the fuck did you do to me?" he whined, pressing his knees up into his chest, his stomach heaving against his thighs from the pain that overcame him.

"I didn't do anything," the dead body growled in defense, in a voice that was almost luscious to hear. "You did it to yourself."

Even worse than the fear that had thrown him to the floor, clawing across the floor like a crustacean with its head cut off, was the acute, stinging pain that lived in his temples, drumming and thundering. The image of the scalpel buried into the risen cadaver's head, the sensation of whipping toward the floor came back to him with a dull ache.

"Oh, man... don't remind me," he groaned. "Shit."

The dead body sighed at him, but Duo could barely see straight through his new and nauseating headache.

Amongst the unbearable throbbing in his head, he felt the cold hand sliding up his calf sear straight through the fabric his blue jeans and settle on his knee. And as quickly as it has struck him, the crippling pain faded away and he lifted his head to gape at the strange, living cadaver.

He just lifted that same eyebrow in response, causing Duo's expression to contort into utter bewilderment as he looked down at the hand on his leg and up to the pale face it belonged to. "Who are you?"

"I can't tell you that, but I am going to bleed to death if you don't fix my leg," he replied, as if the fact that blood was spilling out in slow, rhythmic drips from his ruptured femoral onto the tiles was painfully obvious.

Duo shook his head, unable to grasp the insanity that sat so close to him, the feel of his thigh against his adding to the frantic spin of his mind.

"But you're dead!"

The dead body arched an eyebrow. "I've noticed. Now, will you please repair my leg so that I may be able to so kindly grant your request and leave you 'the fuck alone'?"

"No," Duo told him, amazed his voice had not scurried away in shock. Quickly, he put as much space as the wall against his back would allow between him and the naked, bleeding corpse and it watched him carefully, gently.

"What I'm going to do it pretend that I never picked you up off the street and you never even thought about coming back from the dead and sitting up on my table and scaring the -- "

Nausea and head-splitting pain, his newfound and awfully loyal companions, rushed back to greet him and soon Duo was grounded once again, pressing his palms viciously against his temples to ebb it.

"Shit... maybe later."

The corpse gave a sigh, rolled his eyes beneath his ragged bangs, and grumbled something to himself. Duo was plenty absorbed in dealing with the monstrous headache he'd acquired, no doubt a result from his brains bouncing around from hitting the floor in the manner that he did, so he didn't give a second thought to the sound of the dead body shuffling over to his side again and sliding his hand underneath Duo's own bangs, pressing his palm against his temple. Most surprisingly, it was warm. Not hot, like he was alive, but simply lukewarm. Room temperature. And that was the most disturbing of all.

He jerked away from it. "Hey -- D-don't touch me!" Duo warned him sharply, giving him his best offended and unwelcoming look.

But at the time, that capacity was considerably dwindled, seeing how the corpse's lips only twitched with a hint of mild amusement and his hand reclaimed its spot on the side of his face as if it belonged there. And again, the pain dissipated in matter of seconds. As the morgue worker's face began to bend into an expression of astonishment, the corpse grunted at him with the slightest twitch of the corners of his mouth.

"You fool," he mumbled at him. "Hold still."

He blinked at the corpse and slowly the words began to form in his agape, wondering mouth. "You're not one of those average, run-of-the-mill corpses, are you?" he managed out cautiously as he finally made the connection between that disturbing and comforting hand and the mysterious disappearance of his headache.

"Whatever gave you that idea."

He tried a sheepish smile at the flat humor but it soon faded. He was suddenly much more aware of their situation. Duo's eyes flickered from the blue eyes hovering so close to the very much unclothed, bleeding body just beneath it, and back again.

"Uh, dude, you're sort of bleeding on me. Do you mind?"

The corpse didn't even twitch, let alone obey. "Sew up my leg."

"Yes, done, fine, you've got it -- just get off me!" Duo answered hurriedly, suddenly overwhelmed by a hot flash at the realization of that perfectly realized (and perfectly dead) body just over him. He moved away momentarily, silently limping on the one unsliced leg he possessed, and another thick line of blood dribbled down the length of his thigh, coming to pool in the grouted crevices of the tiled floor.

Feeling something hot and vaguely embarrassing rising up in his face, he quickly looked away as he stood up and brushed some of the blood off his apron.

The dead body watched him carefully and the stoic corner of his mouth twitched again. "Something wrong? It's nothing you haven't seen before. Or am I wrong?"

Duo, flushed, jabbed a finger at the examination table, his head still turned securely toward the wall. "Hey, hey, just get your butt over there, alright? You want your damn leg fixed or not? Then git!"

"Fuck, my head hurts! I can barely see straight, let alone patch your leg up."

The body's voice was unaccommodating. "Just do it."

Duo's severe scowl had seemingly no effect on him. "Fine! C'mere, then, give me your arm and just do whatever you do to make the pain go away, okay, Supercorpse? Unless you want a crooked stitch job."

The morgue worker stood cautiously at the examination table where the cadaver sat up awaiting his medical attention, bathed in the stark white light, making his blue eyes glow beneath the shadow of his disheveled dark hair. Those eyes squinted unhappily at him.

"You think your head hurts," he deadpanned at him.

Duo blinked up at the scalpel in his temple, dripping casually down the side of his face and continuing down his neck. He didn't dare watch it trail any further and mentally cursed him. Why the fuck doesn't he just wipe it away?

If Duo didn't know better than to think that dead bodies could have senses of humor, he would have thought it was being ignored just for the sadistic reason of making him squirm. Of course, those dead bodies shouldn't have a pulse or brainwaves, they definitely shouldn't be scowling at him, very much animated, and they most definitely should have left him the hell alone. Hearing that low voice in his ear had shaven off at least a few years that might have come in handy down the road.

The sight of that sharp metal lodged in his temple made Duo wince and crack a half-hearted, sheepish smile. "Well, not as much as yours, I guess, but hey," he mumbled, giving a nervous chuckle, "come on, I'm not the dead one here. I still gotta deal with headaches, okay? And the stiffs like you."

The cadaver just stared at him, being quite helpful. The trickle of blood continued onward down his unbelievable physique. So Duo bared a falsely undisturbed grin at him and reached up for the embedded scalpel.

"All right, then. Hold still. I'll get it for you, since you asked so nicely," he grit out, forcing an obliging expression onto his face. His fingertips brushed against the cold metal, he hesitated, but found no fear in that face and resisted a scowl just before he yanked the scalpel out.

The dead body barely flinched after he had done so, his cryptic stare trained unwaveringly on Duo's face, only adding to the strangeness that overcame him when he stood there, the bloody blade in his palm and a thick stripe of red dribbling down the flawless curve of his jaw. His only reaction to this was a blink, and a casual swipe at the cold stream resulting in just more smeared across his hand and cheek. Duo winced and hissed at the sight.

This night only gets better.

"Uh, hold on, I'll get you something for that," he started nervously, before the dead body cut him off.

"No. It'll be fine." His hand went to snatch Duo's wrist before he turned and got him to stop pretty quickly. Just the touch of his once dead, lukewarm skin was enough to send considerable shivers down his spine and somehow he felt compelled to do whatever was asked of him as the pain melted away again.

That stare leveled at him without an extra ounce of expression. "Fix my leg first. I can handle the rest."

With the other hand, he snatched up the dirty rag hanging off the side of the examination table. Leaving the blood already smeared across the side of his face to stain, he pressed it over the wound, slowly drawing the bleeding to a halt. Duo made a face at it, but was forced to shrug. What else was there to do about it?

"Ooo -- kay. Whatever you say, Supercorpse," he muttered, palms up, rolling his eyes.

The medical supplies in the City Morgue were limited. After all, all their customers were very much dead, or at least, that had been the rule up until that stormy night, and they had no need for a lot of things that Duo thought the cadaver would need. But after the little display with the removal of the scalpel, he didn't think the dead body would opt for disinfectants or painkillers.

There was not a lot of anesthesia lying around either, so when Duo scrounged up some fishing wire and a needle, he didn't ask if he wanted any, just hesitated above his half-severed leg with a clothespin in the other hand to pinch his bleeding femoral close while he worked. Hey, this was all an improvisation, mind you!

Duo looked him in those impenetrable eyes of his, thinking about his breath on his ear when he had come back to life for a second, and again had to wonder out loud, "Man, who the hell are you?"

"Nobody," he told Duo in his unaffected voice, still clutching his wrist with his pale hand. "Just some dead guy. Now sew."

Duo kept a scrunched up, suspicious look on him, but simultaneously strung the fishing line through the eye of the large needle in his hand. He forced a sigh and, "Whatever," out of himself as he put the clothes pin around the bleeding femoral exposed and started stitching up the living, breathing cadaver, taking all his concentration to just not let his eyes stray too far.

"There, that's as good as it's going to get. I'm not a doctor or anything, so you're just gonna have to deal with it," Duo told the corpse as he straightened up, a bloody needle in hand.

The dribble of blood from his leg had disappeared, and the stagnate collection of crimson red was slowly draining through the steely grate of the drain at the lowered end of the examination table. The cadaver had remained mostly silent through the whole process, not showing even a hint of pain or discomfort as Duo had finished the last stitch and yanked, closing up the wound as best he could. Instead of emote in the slightest, he had chosen to fix that debilitating stare at the top of his head, making Duo inwardly squirm and curse him. Bad enough he had to lay his hand on the hottest thing he'd ever seen, never mind the fact that he'd found aforementioned in the morgue in the middle of the night, but he was staring neat little holes into his head with those eyes of his.

What nerve dead guys had these days -- bolting up on his exam table and shaving years off his life in the process, and then, without an ounce of tact, demanding medical attention. He hadn't remembered stiffs being this demanding before, he thought with a crooked grimace as he brushed his hands off on his bloodstained apron. He looked closer at his uniform pants and saw a little had dribbled onto his newest pair.

"Aw, shit," he grumbled. "Well, this is just great."

The cadaver ignored him as he examined the wound again, lifting his leg to inspect the stitching job. As heat flew up into his face, Duo quickly found somewhere to occupy his eyes, but a stain on a wall could only be interesting for so long, you know. He grunted in what Duo assumed was satisfaction and quickly hopped down from the table, the blood slowly drying on the back of his thigh.

"That'll be fine," he thanked the morgue worker unemotionally, turning away to walk out the door almost as abruptly as he had arrived at it. "Goodnight, then."

"Hey, wait just one second, Supercorpse," Duo barked at him, offended.

He kept walking.

"That's your idea of thanks? I drag my ass out in the rain to drag yours inside, you scare the shit outta me, I fix you up, and you think you can just stroll right on out again?" He didn't even turn to face him as the accusation flew.

"Yes."

"Fuck if you're just gonna walk out of here -- what about your bill, pal?"

That made him turn and come to a stop, his bloodstained, naked body drawing to a halt in mid-step on the tiles. "Excuse me?"

Duo, driven by the success of actually drawing a reaction from this unbelievable corpse, jabbed his finger at him. "That's right. Your bill. Haven't you heard? Nothing's free in the world anymore, and least of all medical care. You oughta know better than that. They charge you for just walking into the hospital nowadays, so don't expect to stroll out of here without a little something for my time."

"This is not a hospital," came the growl. "I'm not paying you anything."

"Well, you're just shit out of luck then, because you are!"

His eyes flickered down to illustrate his (distracting) lack of clothing. "Do I look like I have any money?"

"No, but I don't care. Pay up."

"I'm not paying you anything."

"The hell you aren't! Look at my clothes!"

The cadaver's lips were pressing ever so slightly together -- a display of honest emotion as the corners of his mouth sank sourly at Duo's accusation. "They're cheap, replaceable, and unflattering," he said flatly, glancing up. "Your point being?"

Duo's eyes turned an explicit shade of pissed. "Well, fuck you, buddy! They're much more flattering than anything you've got! And now you've gone and fucked 'em up!"

"Huh." He shrugged. "Funny, though, that I'm the best looking one here, and I'm the dead one."

The word 'gape' did not accurately sum up the expression that then filled up Duo's face. It did not begin to describe the frustration that this stranger thought he had the right to talk to him like this. How could he, when he'd done him a very generous favor, if he did said so himself? It added offensively to the shock that he was stunning beyond compare or belief and only a few minutes ago he'd been DOA.

Luckily, his temper was always quick to step in and hide shock with something much more volatile. It was enough to make him temporarily forget the circumstance leading up to his arrival and the unexplainable revival he'd pulled and stomp over, putting himself firmly between the dead and naked body and the door. The midnight atmosphere and the storm grumbling outside did not daunt Duo any more than the simmering blue of the corpse's eyes as he shoved his nose into his face.

"If I ripped that half-assed stitch job clean out of your leg and let you bleed to death all over again for the way you've fucked with me, I wouldn't lose any sleep over it, bud. Not a minute. After all, you're dead, and you're supposed to stay that way! No, once you kick the bucket, you can't be popping back up and asking people for favors. It just doesn't work that way! And if you're gonna pretend your alive and kicking just like everybody else, then you can pay your bill like ev-er-y-bod-y else. You got it? Nod if you can get that through your thick skull," he told him with a sneer, standing up to that rigid expression he received, standing up to the part of him that was too busy with paying attention to the dead body itself to lend much to his mouth as it lectured him. To the blood trickling like temptation personified down that neck, curling around the clavicle in its path.

Slowly, he began to realize that his mouth had stopped moving for a moment, and he was standing nearly nose to nose with this defiant corpse in a silent and otherwise uninhabited morgue. In the absence of words, Duo simply looked into the once pale, ashen face brightened with color, blood, and personality -- filled with life where he had been convinced was only death.

And that's when he grabbed Duo by the neck and lifted him a clean five inches off the tiles. Ruining the romantic moment, he'd say, but hey -- that could have been just him.

Feeling that hand closing around his windpipe, smearing his vision with slow-growing dark clouds, brought a fear to life in Duo he'd never experienced. Something simultaneously primal and fearfully childish. His hands scrambled up the length of the arm holding him off the ground and at gravity's cruel mercy, until he started prying at the fingers crushing into his skin. He drew blood, felt pain fly up the length of his own arm from the sheer stress. He tried gasping, but the air narrowly scraped through his throat as it closed further with each breath. His legs moved on their own accord through the air, pawing, reaching for the earth below, startled by their loss.

Okay, this isn't so bad. It could be worse. He thought in awful clarity for a moment, before he decided it would be in his best defense to knee his job-turned-would-be-murderer. Instead he found himself simply being flung against the opposite wall with the force of a rollercoaster car.

All right, his brain said in one last moment of awareness. Now it's safe to say it's worse. The corpse remained calmly where he was and when Duo crumpled to the floor in the fashion of a ragdoll, sucking for air, holding his throat, he calmly showed himself to the door.

"Jeeze, Duo, you look like you've been to hell and back. What happened to you?"

"I had problems... negotiating with the stiffs tonight," he responded weakly, rubbing at the back of his head, though it only seemed to fuel the thunderous headache. Time for better medication. He groped forward over the bar as Hilde produced a tall, water-beaded glass from underneath the frothing tap and slid it toward him with a sympathetic smile. She chuckled as he threw down more than what was probably healthy in one swig and sighed, setting it on the napkin coaster provided.

"One fought back tonight?" she asked, unable to resist at least a little laughter at his expense. "Maybe the graveyard shift really has done a number on your imagination. I told you working such late hours in a place like that would catch up to you."

"Hell, if I'm just imagining this headache, then I should get a fucking Oscar. And an Emmy and Tony, too, for that matter," he grumbled. "Feels like some took an axe to my head."

"It looks that way, too."

Duo lifted an eyebrow at her, through the wafting smoky air, over the low, intimate din, lit by the neon signs from the windows. He'd taken off the bloodstained apron, scrubbed furiously at the stain on his jeans, and had been doused by a fresh sheet of rain on the way into the bar, his hair still damp. He puckered his bottom lip unenthusiastically. "That was low, Hil."

The young bartender smiled and leaned forward to rest her elbows on the polished bar, her reflection of a sleeveless, low-cut red shirt and styled dark hair blurred on the surface of the glass between her and Duo. "What's the matter? You don't seem yourself. Usually, you've got just as many taunts for me. What happened to that wonderful sense of humor of yours?"

"I told you, I just got the crap beaten out of me by a dead guy. I've just misplaced it somewhere," he muttered tiredly, his eyes falling down into the amber gold of his alcoholic beverage and concentrating dully on the white froth.

That evoked another laugh from Hilde and she said, "Well, I think it's already found you. No worries."

"Oh, right. No worries. Hope it brought some goddamn aspirin with it, though, 'cuz I'd kill for some right now."

Hilde smiled at him, wrapping her fingers around his beer glass and swishing it lightly around, considering the amount he'd already gulped down with a smirk on her face. "You know, Duo, if you're going to skip work because of a headache, I don't think going out drinking's going to help much. You should get home and lay down for a while." She stood up and took a drink, smacking her lips happily when she finished and set it down close to her. "Why don't you get out of here, and I'll catch you tomorrow for dinner, how about?"

"You know, it's breakfast to the rest of the world. Not everyone is a creature of the night like us," Duo commented, somewhat sullen from the fact that she'd taken his beverage and only aggravated by the splitting migraine he was developing. But, pinned by her look, he finally just nodded his head and grumbled as the pain from that little movement hit him. "Fine, fine, I'm gettin', I'm gettin'."

Before he staggered to his feet, Hilde bent over the bar to give him a friendly kiss on forehead, a towel for drying glasses slung over her petite shoulder. "Call me if you don't feel better soon, okay? If it's bad, maybe I'll take you to the clinic."

"What, you have to escort me the three whole blocks?"

"I just want to take you, Duo. I care about you, you know."

"A date with a woman plus outrageous medical bills? Now that sounds like fun." A tiny roll of the eyes earned him another chuckle, and Hilde snapped the towel at him.

"Get going, Grumpy Bear."

As soon as he had stepped outside, pushing the door open ahead of him while his heavy-weighed mind and aching body followed, he could sense something in the chill night air laughing at him. It was waiting, and by coming out into the unpredictable cold of night, he was coming inevitably toward it. As his breath appeared before him a trail of short-lived steam, he glanced up into the darkened sky. The stars were obscured by pollution, but the clouds were calm again.

"Huh. It stopped raining." He shivered through his coat and pulled it tighter around his shoulders as he began his walk down the sidewalk toward his car. By the time he was at the driver side door and fishing out his keys with bitterly cold fingers, his teeth had begun a telltale chatter in the back of his mouth and he swore with a stutter. "Isn't alcohol supposed to make me at least feel warmer?"

The door jammed a little from the cold, the seats were freezing, it stung to hold the steering wheel, and the engine acted particularly fussy the first few attempts, but Duo barely noticed it all, as tired as he was. He finally drove away from the curb and the headlights of his old, dented green automobile disappeared down the street.

"God! This is the shittiest excuse for a summer night. What ever happened to that thing called 'heat'? Vacation? Tax evasion?"

Duo leaned slightly over to reach for any and every knob that would help produce some warmth in the cold shell of his car. Through the vents came a mixture of cold and lukewarm air, hissing at him, making his condition even worse. He grimaced and decided to turn the radio dial as well.

"Well, if I don't warm up soon," he reasoned with himself, while his icy fingers turned up the volume on the local thrash metal station, "I'll go deaf instead, so at least I won't be able to hear my teeth chatter."

He turned onto Cemetery Drive, coincidentally the location of his apartment and an apt name, considering the personalities of the other tenants with which he lived, and it was quietly snoring. He had never seen it otherwise. Daylight was a far off dream for Duo. He'd been working the night shift at East Central for some time now and last year he had been able to pay off the last of his student loans. But the rent monster waited for no one, and it'd been the horrible muse for many an overworked night.

"Not that I'm bitter or anything. I mean, the pay's good, the super leaves me alone, and hey, there's always a pile of lively conversationalists lying around," he muttered.

Duo casually lifted his free hand up to his neck to gently touch the bruises forming there, underneath his collar, and with the other hand turned the wheel to park on the sidewalk in front of his apartment. He found, though, that the young man abruptly sprinting out in front of him, screaming bloody murder, hindered that process.

"Shit!"

How many times have I used that particular cuss word, in that particular sense by now?

He flung his foot at the brake pedal, but the reaction was too slow. Duo braced himself for the impact, and when it came, in the form of a frightening jolt and a loud thud!, he found himself automatically hissing obscenities under his breath as if it could chase this horrible reality away. Chh, you wish.

He lifted his head and looked reluctantly out the windshield, his leg rigid against the pedal and the stress running hot through the rest of his body, suddenly breathless. He hadn't remembered closing his eyes, but when he opened them, the cold and unmerciful, orange-lit street filled him with dread.

"Oh, shit, shit, shit. I'm dead, I'm just dead!" he swore, flushing, the thrash music still pounding loud enough to shake Beethoven from his grave.

Duo threw the seatbelt off him, threw the door open, and threw himself out of the car like it was a charged electric chair. Another jolt of dread as strong as a body being thrown against his bumper ran through him, electrifying him with fear. As he got out of the car, again into the cold, he stumbled on his feet and swore again, louder, sharper.

A hand lay limp on the blacktop, poking out into sight. The fingers were curled toward the stars, as if clawing after the soul that departed from the body. That hand was connected to an arm, and the consequential stream of red curling down that arm, soaking into the fabric of his shirt.

He decided there and then that he thoroughly hated dead hands sprawled out on the wet concrete.

Duo also dreaded to see the body that was connected to that arm, but before he could lay his eyes on the gory scene, out came a rushing figure from the alleyway opposite, swooping toward the body lying on the ground. It moved impossibly fast, Duo thought, his head nearly spinning just to look at it, and jerked at the sudden movement. He was pressed against the door of his car equally fast, ready to haul ass out of there, feeling the adrenaline throbbing through him almost painfully.

The blur slowed in the orange-black light cast over the street, glimmering in the puddles of water dotting the road, slowed until Duo could see that it was not a streak of pure white, but a person. The second thing he noticed was the lack of clothing, and then the circular scar around the enticing, muscled thigh, streaked with dried crimson blood.

The dead body slowed as he noticed Duo standing there, coming to a complete halt a few feet away from the sprawled body, just near enough for his haunting blue eyes to catch the illumination from the headlights and glow at him. Thrown over his slim shoulders was what Duo assumed was the jacket of the man he'd just bowled over, but the rest of his rather perfect body was as bare as he had found it on the back step, sprawled out in the rain.

No fucking way. Duo's mind hissed in disbelief. His skin, however, was screaming in fright, crawling, burning where the fingertips had dug into his neck and bruised violently.

The dead body watched him remain frozen with shock, frozen with fear, and slowly Duo began to see that beneath that light jacket, he was trembling ever so slightly. His face tightened as if to suppress the shiver completely, while droplets of rain glittered on his face like jewels in the headlights. The entire night had had a certain surreal sense to it, as far as the morgue worker was concerned, but now it seemed almost dream-like. As if he were an intruder on someone else's drug-induced hallucination.

The dead body pulled his eyes away from Duo and looked down at the young man crushed beneath the bumper of the dimpled Camry. "You killed him," he accused softly, his voice shivering from the cold. He barely heard him over the pounding metal.

"I d-d-didn't mean to," Duo stammered. "He just ran out in front of me -- I couldn't see him coming! It wasn't my fault, damn it -- !"

"Shut up already," the dead body growled at him. "I know it wasn't your fault."

The morgue worker's feet seemed glued beneath him, for he couldn't move away, couldn't get into his car and flee from this living, breathing corpse. But somehow, he felt more inclined to move forward, toward it.

Duo's jaw opened once, twice, before any words could escape him. "Well, what were you doing anyway, chasing him like that? And what are those, his clothes?" He found his feet taking him closer, squinting at the corpse. "What were you doing -- mugging him?! Jesus Christ, who are you? What are you?"

"It's none of your business," he said tersely, his face drawn darkly.

He turned away from Duo and bent down beside the body on the rain-slicked street. In the stark white illumination, he could see the blood leaking steadily from his poor stitch job, but saw that there was a scrap of cloth wrapped around it, futilely trying to stop the excess bleeding. His pale skin had taken on some color, but not enough to fool necessarily everyone that he was completely alive.

The dead body then started the process of unbuttoning the other corpse's shirt, crouched at his bleeding side.

Duo's face soured and he sprinted around the side of his car, filled with outrage. He grimaced at the sight of the young man's face, eyes closed, mouth agape and lifeless and the side of his body reddening. "Hey! What the hell do you think you're doing? Don't take his clothes! For fuck's sake, you thief, leave him alone! We've gotta get him some help!"

"No use. He's dead. He doesn't need clothes."

"So are you!" he accused. "And neither do you!"

That's when the dead body turned a harsh expression toward him, his dark blues simmering with frustration, and Duo's eyes took the time to wander onto the very visible expanse of skin illuminated by his glaring headlights. That's when he saw his legs shaking violently trying to support his weight, which couldn't have been that much, seeing the traces of hungry lines in his body just past the light jacket he'd stolen off the young man now bleeding in the streets. No, it wasn't all him -- Duo could hear the droplets of blood dripping at a dependable rate from the dead body's thigh, collecting around his foot.

"You're bleeding again," Duo heard himself say, though he hadn't given his mouth permission. As soon as he had approached him, he found himself wincing again at the sight. He'd been working how long in that godforsaken morgue, and he was disturbed by the sight of blood?

"I realize that," the living, breathing corpse muttered at him, and was just about to snatch the unbuttoned shirt off the other dead body when Duo's hand landed on his arm. He flinched as if offended that he had not see him moving toward him, but his muscles only twitched, he did not recoil. Instead, he shifted a highly disgruntled look onto Duo's face, trying to repel him in that manner.

"Let go of me. Why don't you leave me alone? Don't you have to cause someone else grievous bodily harm with your vehicle?"

"You're pretty cheeky for a guy who came back from the dead," Duo snapped at him. "You know how many people would be grateful for that? I'd have a better appreciation for life if I were you, you know!"

"And if I were you, I'd let me go," he threatened immediately, but in a low, unenthusiastic tone.

Duo felt him swaying slightly beneath his grip, felt the violent shutters running through his body. Every time the corpse began to lose his balance, he would doggedly, almost angrily right himself, but every motion became slowly more and more exhausted and uncontrolled. It was not enough to erase Duo's anger, to see this mysterious body obviously in suffering and desperately in need, but he found it much easier to overlook it. Who said there wasn't a little saint lurking in him, smoking and swearing all the while?

"All right, listen up, pal. I'll only say this once. I'm taking you to a hospital. It's not far from here -- Hell, I can see it from here. And I won't say a word about this to anybody, either. I just don't want to be responsible for your second death, all right? You've disturbed me enough tonight as is."

For an instant, something of color and emotion flickered in the corpse's eye at that comment. Hurt? He wasn't even supposed to be able to feel the cold, for god's sake!

Pushing hesitation aside, Duo took his other arm with his free hand and lifted him from the ground, getting his weak feet beneath him. This time there was not a resisting surge, and he did not feel a tight, violent hand clamping around his throat. Woo who. Progress. He tried to pull the corpse toward the passenger door, telling him, "You need real medical attention, not just a bunch of ten-pound test knitted into you -- "

Again that flash of color, but more fearful this time. "No," he croaked, pushing away in resistance. Only problem was that his ability to resist had dwindled considerably and was dripping away along with the blood on the blacktop. "I can't -- I -- "

"I don't wanna hear it, buddy! You're getting help, and I'm the only one who's gonna get you there in time, so don't even think about pulling the shit you did back at the morgue again."

Of course, Duo knew that the possibility of the repetition of that little stunt was close to nil, with those bloodied hands clutching so tiredly at his arms.

"No, I can't go to the hospital. That's the last place I should be," he growled weakly.

"Well, then you're just shit out of luck, 'cause that's where you're going."

Duo was just about to drag the corpse into his car if the need be, talking firmly over any objection voiced, when he caught a glimpse of that fleeting color in the dead body's eyes flash dangerously, morphing into insurgency, and Duo felt his body momentarily paralyze as his cold fingers dug tightly into his arm. He could not move, and his mind had been crippled, animated instead by this inexplicable urge to heed the command. He heard the alluring voice murmur instead of growl at him from inside his head, and for one tempting second he seriously considered folding to it.

Then the moment passed as quickly as it had come, as if only a bad dream, and Duo jarred him in return.

"Hey, knock that off, whatever you're doing! You're coming, and I already know you don't like it, so keep your paws off of me and deal with it!"

The corpse seemed frustrated by this as he was propelled to the opposite side of the door.

"No, please -- " Almost pleading now, the last vestiges of resistance were gone and the dead body moved at the will of his hands. "I'm not going to any hospital."

"What, like I'm just going to say, 'Oh, okay, then,' and let you go? Pul-leeze."

The door handle clacked as Duo lifted and pulled, keeping the half-naked, bleeding, shivering, and defiant dead body close. Damned if he was going to run off and die on him for a second time that night. He was assured of a few months' worth of nightmares as it was, and having someone's demise on his conscience wouldn't remedy the situation in the least. It was easy enough to convince the corpse's trembling body to enter the car, though his mouth was more than able to retaliate.

He settled reluctantly into the seat, staring, strained, up at Duo. "Don't do this," he implored in that imperturbable voice. "You don't understand."

The morgue worker looked down into those simmering blue eyes and snorted. "You? Understand you? Of course I can't get my head around you. But you need to get help, and that's crystal clear to me." A grin crossed his face for almost the first time that night. And with that, he pulled a blanket out from the backseat, stuffed it into the corpse's lap, told him to get warm, and then shut the door tight.

When Duo returned from dragging the body of the unidentified young man out from underneath his bumper and into the adjacent waterlogged alleyway, the corpse in his passenger side was bleeding, sullen, and glaring. A carefully thought-out slight was waiting on his tongue when the morgue worker slammed the door shut, putting the battered old vehicle into gear to turn it around, headed for the clinic.

"Are you going to leave the evidence out in the open?" the dead body deadpanned at him. Though for all his scorn of Duo's actions communicated through his tone, the blanket was clutched tightly around him, damp from his dripping body and deep crimson from his blood. Duo tightened his lips in a mild scowl.

"You want to join him out there?" he asked pointedly. "And besides, I didn't kill him. He was just about coming to when I dragged him outta the street. Fortunately for everybody, he'll wake up with just a bad headache and a nasty batch of scrapes and bruises. And most of his clothes, though it's no thanks to you."

"I was in more need than him."

"Oh, why didn't you just say so? I totally understand now -- Right." Duo scoffed, leaning on the steering wheel as he pinned a scrutinizing look on him. "I'd like to hear just exactly why you're justified in terrifying a perfectly innocent stranger, as far as you know, and then attempting to steal the clothes off his back. Really. I'm terribly curious," he drawled at the dead body in his passenger seat, the one who had treated him so rudely and -- oh, yeah, had thrown him into the wall after coming inches from throttling him to death.

The bruises on his neck still seemed to burn beneath his collar as he stared at the dead body. "Hey! I'm talking to you here!"

The corpse didn't answer him. He was facing the windshield, the blue of his eyes illuminated by the light from a pair of approaching headlights, his gaze flashing warily.

Duo twisted his head around as well, and grimaced and threw up his hand in the light. "Aw, shit. Hey, thanks for turning off your brights, pal!" he muttered as the car in the opposite lane came casually rolling down the street.

The intense white lights spewed forth from the headlights like a blazing demonic stare in the hazy shadows of Cemetery Drive, making Duo a little nervous. Passing by at an agonizing pace, Duo kept his hand to his brow, shielding his eyes. He thought he caught a glimpse of someone in the front seat, craning his head toward them, obscured by the glare in Duo's eyes.

"Who's this punk? A friend of yours, I assume, Supercorpse?"

"Turn your head. Now," the dead body told him. When the morgue worker didn't move, he hissed, "Do what I say!"

Duo did snap his head around, but only to the side to glare at him, not intentionally following the order. "What?" His eyes widened and he looked down at the corpse oddly, seeing now that he had taken the blanket and himself and was lurking underneath the glove compartment like a snake under a rock, hidden out of sight. "And what the hell, may I ask, are you doing?"

"Shut up!" he growled again.

Duo's face blossomed with offense. "Well, ex -- cuse me! And don't think that you can just boss me around like that, pal! Try some respect, maybe. It's not expensive!"

A hand shot out of the bloodstained bundle sitting on the floor and the pale fingers clenched securely around Duo's calf, making him first jump in surprise, and then expel all the air from his lungs in a cuss. A white-hot poker of pain stabbed through his leg momentarily.

"Shit!" he hissed, resisting the urge to let out a whimper as the painful sensation lingered in his memory and still stung through out his leg. He clutched at his leg as best as he could and lifted his head, squinting as a few tears began to form in the corner of his eyes. "For god's sake, knock that off!"

Breathless, he turned a confused glare at the corpse, expecting him to be curled up in his inexplicable position again. He was abruptly sitting in the seat as if nothing had happened, unruffled, and his pale face painted almost indifferent to the incident.

Duo blinked at him. "Wha -- ?" Spinning his head around with an offended gape, he watched the red taillights puttering away slowly in the opposite direction. "What the hell was that about?" he snapped at the dead body as he looked over again, meeting the simmering blue eyes with a questioning scowl. "I want to know why you just -- you just -- what did you do, anyway?"

He looked away. Shame? No way.

"Hey, I'm talking to you! It's rude not to at least look at me!" When the corpse begrudgingly turned his gaze back onto him, his face still encrusted with traces of blood and dripping rainwater, Duo felt an indescribable pang go through him at the sight, and he lowered his voice, though he still asked firmly, "Well, if you don't want to answer that one, why did you bark at me to turn away, huh?"

Again, no answer, but the stunning and deep blue eyes remained locked on his face, strengthening that nameless pang.

"The guy in that car, he was looking for you, wasn't he?"

Before the dead body could answer, though doubtful that he would with more than a stare, considering the recent trend, the sound of tires screaming on blacktop and an engine roaring interrupted, making Duo's head turn again as the mystery car sped off into the night down the sleepy street, past the bright oasis of light that was East Central Mercy Hospital. He watched it disappear, streetlight by streetlight, until it pulled out of sight and found that his stomach was making uneasy knots in his abdomen for no distinct reason.

"Don't..." the dead body uttered, drawing Duo's attention back to him, also pulling his eyes to the slowly increasing red stain on his blanket near his thigh. He swallowed and found his voice again, though it was beginning to betray his exhaustion. "Don't take me there. He's waiting for that."

"Who?" Duo shook his head wildly, while the car still sat in the road, not moving but the engine purring steadily. He threw his hands up. "You know what? I'm sick of asking all these questions and getting jack shit from you. I still don't even know your name or what the hell you are! I'm sick of it, and we're not moving an inch tell I get some information!"

He took the keys out of the ignition and stuffed them huffily into his fist, staring sharply at the blue-eyed corpse in his seat. When the rumble disappeared, it left them with the silence of the night and the soft sounds of the dead body shivering gently with exhaustion.

Duo sighed once, crossed his arms, and considered the unexpected passenger for a moment with lips pursed. Then he opened his mouth carefully. "First of all," he began almost harshly, but he softened his tone when the dead body's eyes flickered a little, feeding that strong pang, "I'd like to have a name of some kind. Is that too much to ask of you, or should I just stick to 'Supercorpse'?"

"Are you going to take me to that hospital?" Another demanding question which made Duo's brow twitch once.

"No, no I won't," he said, sighing again and rolling his eyes for a moment, as if inconvenienced by answering. "Not if you tell me your name."

"Fine," the dead body said softly, the corners of his mouth turning upwards a twitch. He tightened the blanket around him, and then opened his mouth to answer, still cautious. "It's Heero."

"Heero," Duo repeated carefully, rolling it around on his tongue. He liked it, and felt that sentiment creeping out onto his face without permission. "That's a strange one. But hey -- I'm nobody to talk. 'Hi, I'm Duo, Duo Maxwell, and I'm talking to a dead guy. Couldn't be better.' And how about you? You got a last name to go with that appellation of yours?"

He snorted a little. Amusement, too? Well, the dead had a wider range of expression than he had expected. "Yuy," he answered, though this time it was more difficult to mask the shivering.

Duo blinked. "Yuy? Like that famous politician Yuy? The guy who got shot?" He took the liberty of blinking again. "Wait a minute, wasn't his first name Heero, too?"

The dead body -- Heero, he meant -- just looked at him, narrowly suppressing his amusement.

"You took Heero Yuy's full name? That guy from my history books? The guy who was assassinated by his own government?"

"Aa." He turned to face the windshield again, while the bloodstain grew slowly larger over his thigh and his shivering became visibly stronger. His eyelids drooped considerably and he almost gave a rueful smile. "I always dreamed of being a martyr when I grew up."

Sarcasm and a facial expression? Who knew a stiff could be so... well, not dead. Another part of his mind, a particularly traitorous one, only smiled at him slyly. And more beautiful than any of your living squeezes? Duo quickly found himself tearing his eyes away from him and focusing them on the road ahead, burying his gaze in the shimmering puddles of water on the street. He sighed, stuck the keys in the ignition, and turned the engine over. He felt, rather than saw, Heero turn his head and look at him with a certain cautious curiosity.

"What happened to that talk of getting your answers?" he asked.

Duo politely answered and put the Camry into gear, focusing on driving. "My apartment's a block down. I've got a box of bandages and gauze, and the only Boy Scout badge I ever honestly earned was First Aid, if you're so paranoid of hospitals. I'll try and fix you up, but the operative word there is 'try'." He had a feeling that Heero was turning up the corners of his mouth again. "But afterwards," he intoned quickly, "I'll want my answers."

He was. "I can deal with that."

Duo had parked the car, killed the engine, and was opening his door when Heero apologized without warning or mentioning exactly what for he was issuing this apology. The mortician stopped, his arm extended with hand on the door handle, and blinked at him dumbly for a moment. "Okay," he said slowly, taken off guard. At first impression, Heero hadn't necessarily been the apologetic type, though that may have been a product of his defunct state. "That's nice of you... Tell me again, what did you do?"

"Gave you those," he said vaguely, his bottomless blues shifting toward Duo's neck, somehow making the skin fill with a gentle, tingling heat and causing him to clap his hand over it, rubbing at the brusies he'd left.

"Oh, yeah." Duo muttered absently, before covering it with a laugh, grinning a little too big. "'Bout time you begged pardon for that little stunt."

But Heero wasn't there; he was just shutting the passenger side door, bringing the black-plaid fleece blanket, now sporting three large blood stains, with him as he walked barefoot up to the step. Duo gave the empty seat a decent round of blinking, then his face screwed up slightly, and he kicked his door open quickly. Standing up and slamming it shut again, he issued a bark across the top of the car. "Oy! I was talking to you, pal," he told him pointedly.

Too preoccupied with staring up at the brick façade of the apartment building to be bothered to answer, Heero simply stood at his steps, blanket pulled perfectly around his short but hewn figure.

"Yes," Duo muttered to himself at the weird fascination the dead body showed for a perfectly average place. "A-part-ment building. Can you say 'apartment building'?"

Heero didn't hear, or didn't seem to notice. Seeing the dried trails of blood caked on his calves made the image all the more surreal, and even endearing in a way that could only be cute to a mortician like himself, he was sure. Who else would let a dead person into their car in the middle of the night? Duo didn't want to wonder about how that reflected his character as he shoved his hand into his pockets and stalked around the car. He'd been almost sweet when giving his name, and even manged to apologize -- but give the guy a lift and he becomes a rude sonovabitch!

Duo walked up beside him and looked carefully at his profile as he stared up, seemingly content to stare at the rather unremarkable building. He then noticed just how disheveled his dark hair was, and how well the Asian tilt of his eyes complemented the color of his eyes. And again, the sly part of him muttered secretly, Everybody else has got a rather uninteresting shade of blue in comparison, huh?

"Something take your fancy? Oh, lemme guess: the molding. I have to say, it's not bad -- it is rather new -- but nothing I'd get out the lawn chair for," Duo said, watching Heero watch the building with a crooked grin. "You change your mind? You want to bleed to death on the sidewalk after all?"

"No, thank you." But still Heero did not stop gazing up at it.

The mortician simply wrote it off as "a dead-man's eccentricity" and started trekking tiredly up the stairs. He hadn't noticed how much this night had taken out of him. When he reached the fourth or fifth step unaccompanied, he turned around and looked crookedly at Heero, the dead man wrapped up in a black and gray plaid blanket, bleeding in the cold. He was still shivering, too. He was just getting worse at concealing it.

"Uh," Duo said, looking around with a crooked brow and jabbing a thumb, "the door's this way, if you didn't happen to know. We living people use them often."

Finally, Heero's blue eyes moved and rested on him, rather unreadable. "Invite me in."

Duo looked around again. You know, I'm starting to wonder if he's all beauty and no brains.

"I thought I did when I said, 'Hey, let's go to my apartment,' " he said slowly, expression extremely skeptical.

"No," Heero told him, looking almost self-conscious to be saying it, "you've got to invite me in. Say it."

"Again?"

The dead body pinned a look on him and he sighed in defeat. "Fine, then." He straightened up theatrically and cleared his throat, making a butler-like motion with his arms, gesturing to the door. "Do come in, Sir Yuy, to my humble abode." He winked at him for flourish. "That better?"

Heero walked up the stairs carefully, though it wasn't enough to hide the fact he'd been sliced up, running rampant in the rain and cold, and was tired from being dead. "It works," he said almost smugly as he passed Duo on the steps and waited for him to unlock the door.

The door of Duo's apartment swung open earlier than usual that night, and in through it stepped a tired mortician, and an even more tired corpse, wrapped up in a blanket and little else. Through the dark doorway came their silhouettes, the keys jangling as Duo stuffed them in his pocket. He reached up quickly for the light switch, feeling Heero resisting a shiver, breathing gently near the back of his neck, waiting to be let in, and not being completely comfortable about it.

"Here we go."

Instead of assaulting their nocturnal eyes with a standard set of bright, white, 60-volt bulbs, Duo flicked on the switch to the multiple hazy lights about the room, also lighting up the red and gold paper lanterns. An old violet lava lamp lackadaisically spit oblong globs from the top to the bottom of its tube, sitting neatly in the center of the adjoining kitchen's island, surrounded by a loyal band of dirty dishes and half-eaten containers of take-out.

Proudly taking it in for a moment, Duo turned his head to look at Heero. He was intently reading the symbols on the lanterns and the corners of his lips were up as he mouthed them silently.

"After working the night shift as long as I have, you start to get accustomed to the dark," the mortician explained with a grin. "Personally, it's more comfortable for me. No need to go about in a world of light when this one suits me just fine. It's not the biggest place for two roomies, but that grows on you, too."

Heero turned to look at him, seeming pleasantly surprised at something. His dark eyes were nearly black, but nevertheless intriguing. "Kind of murky."

"Murky, is it? I'm almost offended, Heero," Duo drawled.

"I prefer murky," he answered quietly.

"Oh, really? You don't sound too enthusiastic about that."

Heero looked at him pointedly, as if reminding him of something he'd rather not hear. But he was strangely missing a biting response, giving Duo time to roll his shoulders in a shrug. "All right, all right," he muttered, unnerved by the look. "Sorry." He turned away, momentarily sullen about it, then strode inside, throwing his own jacket onto the nearby couch and simply walking off into another room.

Heero blinked dumbly as he was left standing in the doorway, still slowly bleeding and still naked beneath the blanket. Seeing Duo simply blend into the shadows of the apartments so naturally, so easily, offset him a little. Despite the familiar atmosphere, he suddenly felt misplaced and the cool, calm urge to turn around and never return went through his mind once.

He didn't belong there; he shouldn't be in the home of the mortician who suspected too much as was. He should have immediately run from the car and the man standing at the open door, gaping at him. If he couldn't control himself, then he would -- No, he had to. There was just no other option but to control himself.

Get fixed up, get cleaned up, and then leave. Use him. But forget him -- you can't worry about how your departure will hurt his feelings. He'll be happy to see you go, anyway.

But, for all his rational thought, his hunger did not relent. Heero bit his lip tightly, feeling an inevitable stir of complaint from his empty body as soon as he imagined himself poised to make the first incision, imagined how the pulse would flutter under his lips --

"Hey, Heero!"

He blinked again, taken off guard and momentarily uneasy, ripped from a very vivid flight of fancy. Duo's voice carried through the dim apartment from another room, as personable and casual as it had ever been. Apparently, he did not yet realize what he had let into his home. "Go ahead and show yourself to the bathroom -- second door down the hall, there. Peroxide and bandages are under the sink. I'll get you some clean clothes quick and I'll be right there," he announced, over the sounds of dresser drawers being pulled open and shut.

Heero felt he should respond, but hesitated again, carefully eyeing the apartment. "Right," he answered eventually, bringing himself to hobble toward the bathroom. He was taking much longer to warm up from the streets than Duo was and shivered as he stepped cautiously inside. Cautiously avoiding the light switch, cautiously limping into the shadows of the room.

A few minutes later Duo returned, more easily visible as his silhouette approached down the hallway against the hazy, candle-like illumination. He carried a lump of folded clothing on his hip as he reached the bathroom doorway, squinting into it.

Heero could see the slightly confused expression perfectly as the mortician drawled, "What are you doing in the pitch dark like that?" and flicked the light switch. These were not as forgiving, and Duo watched the dead body wince under the stare of the bathroom lights. He sat on the toilet lid, hunched with exhaustion. The bright light painted him as pale as death, accentuating the hungry lines in his shoulders and face, and did nothing to conceal the fact he was still finding it perfectly chilly beneath the red-soaked blanket.

Duo tried not to let himself grimace at Heero's state, but couldn't help it. It wasn't like he gave him any more favorable expressions than his little frowns and smug twitches of the mouth. He stepped inside, passing the large mirror over the sink, and held the clothes out to Heero, who simply looked up at him, refusing to take them.

"Don't worry about it. I won't need 'em back, and I'm pretty sure I've been flea-free for a month and a half."

Still, the corpse did not move except to try and still his betraying shudders. Duo arched an eyebrow at him, sighed, and laid the clothes on the counter. "Fine. Let's just see that wound of yours," he said, trying to sound busy and indifferent. By the time he'd opened the cupboards and picked out the needed supplies, the dead body had shed the bloody blanket and was almost wincing at the sight of his leg, as if he didn't expect it to be there.

Duo sauntered back over, already scrutinizing the damage. Much to his surprise, his stitch job seemed to be holding up remarkably well for how improvised it had been. "Looks like it turned out better than I thought. Doesn't seem like you're bleeding too badly, you've just agitated your wound. You know, mugging innocent people and all," he said, standing in front of the corpse, glancing up at the thinly pursed face he made. "Unfortunately, I think you'll live."

"Funny," Heero breathed, grimacing up at him.

"As your physician, I must tell you running around at all hours of the night, robbing and pillaging, is bad for your condition," he continued with a sly smile. "Get plenty of bed rest and hot chicken noodle soup."

The corpse merely lifted an eyebrow at him. "Still funny."

Duo held a roll of bandages in one hand and unrolled a length as he knelt down on one knee, nudging Heero's leg. "But seriously," he told him earnestly, as he began wrapping the bloodstained leg of the corpse sitting in his bathroom, "you can't lurk around all night if you expect this to heal. Hell, it really shouldn't heal at all, you being rightfully dead, but what kind of person would it make me if I didn't at least try and help?"

Heero sat silently for a moment, beaded with rain, bruised and nicked, and wearing another man's beat-up jacket while he simply listened to the comforting rhythm of Duo's speech, cooperating fully as he attempted to fix him up decently. He watched him talking absently to himself as he worked, looking equally tired, harassed by stress, and obviously avoiding rubbing at the bruising around his neck. Then he opened his mouth to answer quietly, almost forlorn, "It'd make you normal."

Duo lifted his head. "What, if I had just left you back there?" He then shook it, smiling. "Nah, it wouldn't at all. I mean, who'd have the heart to leave a sweetheart like you bleeding in the street? If anything, you'd be more of a hazard to the public out there." The laugh he gave gently echoed in the brightly-lit bathroom. "But really, don't worry about it."

The dead body's eyes dropped slightly and he remained silent until Duo had finished wrapping his leg up and straightened up.

"That'll do you for a while, if you're not constantly raising hell. I think you should get your ass to a hospital, though, and soon. I'm no doctor. You could get gangrene and lose the damn thing anyway, running around in the rain as you seem to have a habit of doing," Duo drawled as he rolled up the excess bandage and stuffed it back into his cupboard, brushing off his hands with a few claps. Heero experimentally stretched his leg out from where he had kept it bent the knee, flexing the damaged tissue carefully. For the first time, Duo thought he saw an actual twinge of pain flash across his face, but if it had, he was expert on quickly quelling and hiding it. There was a satisfying little amount of blood to be seen soaking through, and he seemed to have full mobility, though pained, as he stood up, leaving the bloodstained blanket draped over the toilet. The morgue worker tilted his head as he looked him up and down.

"Better?"

"Aa," he grunted. He teetered cautiously on one foot as he gently experimented applying weight to the other leg.

He was so busily testing his physical condition that he missed the almost affectionate smile cross Duo's face as he watched the pale, dead body stand himself up. Before the chance came for him to witness it, Heero found himself raising his hands to catch the lump of clothing that came his way, pinning it against his chest as Duo fluidly strode out of the room again.

"All right, time to get dressed, Supercorpse."

Heero glanced down at the bundle of blue jeans and a red T-shirt, then up at the empty reflection of the mirror in front of which he stood.

Heero did not recall falling asleep on the couch in the living room of a man he'd first met while lying on a cold metal table, but indeed that was where he woke up sometime later. Darkness had reclaimed the awfully silent apartment, and the dead body woke to the sight of a moonlight-painted closed door and no trace of the morgue worker. His entire body ached, though it was not from coming back from the dead. For a few moments, he only blinked quietly, confused as to where his host had disappeared in the dead of night.

Maybe he knows, his mind told him. He left you, he was so terrified. As does everyone else.

"It's to be expected," Heero muttered gloomily to himself. Finally, he let out a groan of a sigh and took the effort to lift his head up from the pillow on the couch ever so slightly, ignoring the constant ache running through his veins. He lifted his arm to run his fingers through his ragged hair, and found it weighed down by a blanket, this one clean of any blood.

That he did not remember either -- the last image he had before the blackness of sleep was that of Duo standing next to him, after he'd handed him a pillow, telling him in a voice that was already sounding distant and dreamy that he didn't look so hot, that maybe he should seriously consider crashing with him for the night. And then, bliss of ignoranct sleep. Now that he was awake this monstrous affliction was brought painfully back to his attention.

With another groan of pain, he was attempting to lift his pained and rather empty body when the door swung open and brought with it Duo Maxwell's distinct silhouette in the golden square of light. He held a brown paper bag to his chest as he swung the door shut behind him and slung the lock.

"Ha. You've got impeccable timing, you know that?" he chuckled at him through the darkness. The lights came on momentarily, again filling the room with the comfortable candle-like cast. "Time for dinner. You just wake up?"

"Aa," Heero grunted, sitting up and scratching less-than-delicately at his disarrayed head of hair. He guardedly watched Duo, though, while he put the brown paper bag on the island and began extracting the take-out meal, filling the small apartment with the warmth and aroma of freshly cooked, hot and greasy food. It was a pity that it was not what for which he hungered so.

"Hope you like cheeseburgers and fries, because fast food and donut shops are the only things open at this god forsaken hour," he said casually, as if Heero were someone he'd known his whole life long, and grinned out at him, sitting in his living room, painted by the soft light. When he didn't give the slightest response, Duo's mouth slung downward in a grimace. "Fuck. You're a vegetarian?"

Heero stared back at him, motionless for a few moments, until his face betrayed him and he actually snorted and smiled in amusement. It was an actual, textbook smile -- movements of both lips into an upward curve of at least ten degrees, and it was as if someone had flipped on a billion-watt bulb in the room to Duo, though it wasn't unpleasant on the eyes in the least.

"No," Heero said quietly, shaking his head. "Not at all."

"Well, than get your lazy ass over here and eat!" Duo told him firmly, turning around to snatch up some clean plates from the very back of the cupboards. "I didn't pay for you to just sit there and ogle your dinner!"

Considering what he really was, and how oblivious the morgue worker seemed to be to that fact, the comment was tantalizing in a very excruciating way, as Heero inevitably found his eyes drifting toward his host's exposed skin on his neck and even his wrists, his body filled with an empty ache. He let out a breath before forcing himself to stand up despite his lame leg and gingerly hitch his way into the kitchen.

Heero felt odd, dressed in Duo's clothes, sitting in his kitchen, and slowly eating the dinner he'd brought home for him, and simultaneously wanting nothing more than to throw him down on the counter and sink his teeth into his hot, thick, pulsing veins and suck him numb -- but that wouldn't be very polite. And after scaring the living hell out of him, causing him to have a minor heart attack and induce a mild concussion, choking him until he passed out, and causing him to run over a hapless young man with his car, Heero was suddenly concerned about being somewhat tactful.

It seems a little late for that, doesn't it? Hunger hissed at him, resentful that it had to settle for some second-rate, cholesterol-doused French fries. Come on, one little nip. He wouldn't even feel it in the morning...

But Heero couldn't do that. And with every bite of greasy burger, he only felt his true hunger deepening. It was a much stronger want, burning in his bones and howling through his veins. Needless to say, this particular hunger was not going to be satisfied by a stomach full of warm food.

"So, Heero Yuy," Duo drawled at him from across the island, spinning his fork idly through the remaining pasta on his plate, "how old are you?"

"Can the questions wait until after we've eaten?" he asked wearily. His eyes were fixed on the blood red tomato sauce drenching the fettuccine noodles.

"No way in hell, bud. I want some answers now. I fixed you up, as promised, so now it's time for you to hold up your end of the deal."

"Fine." His enthusiasm soared.

"Besides, you've done nothing but stare at me since I got back, and I'd like to ask my damn questions, and get you the hell out of here," he continued, casually taking a swig out of the soda sitting beside his plate, as if it were the most commonplace thing to say.

A nerve twitched in Heero's brow at that, and he hid the downward movement of his mouth by concentrating on the chunk of dry beef in his mouth. See? He wants you out of here more than you do, so just do it and leave. He'd be no worse off. Just sore afterwards. He seems like he may even enjoy it.

"Shut up!"

"Excuse me?" Duo asked, sitting up rather rigidly, giving him a pointed look.

Heero hesitated, realizing just how loud his inner hunger was becoming if he was forced to snap at it to drown it out. To ignore the temptations it whispered to him, coaxed him toward. And the morgue worker was staring at him and the way the soft light fell over his face had the most peculiar effect on him. He simply bit his tongue and hoped his own face betrayed nothing. It had been a flawless defense before, but somehow it began to wither beneath his violet-eyed stare, baring him open.

Duo twisted his head to point one eye at him. "How old did you say you were again?"

"About your age," he said calmly.

"Uh huh." The answer obviously didn't make him happy in the slightest. "And where do you come from?"

"Just the other side of town," Heero again answered nondescriptly.

"And why were you dead tonight, exactly?"

"A very good question. I don't see why I had to die."

Heero resisted a smirk at the crumpled and severe look he received. But rather than steam openly at him, Duo's face smoothed with a bright smile, showing too many teeth. "And I'm the one to bring you back to life and you act like I'm the shit that had the nerve to smear on your fucking royal foot. That's rather curious to me, as well."

Heero blinked at him.

See? Hates you. What's there to loose if you just take a little taste and leave? One, innocent taste --

No!

I won't!

The corpse only stared quietly in return, and finding it so excruciating just to keep a perfectly emotionless face after that painful thought -- so much so he was temporarily oblivious to his overwhelming need to feed -- he decided that there was nothing that could be said. He simply stood up and let his eyes drift down to the plate of unfinished food before him.

"It's about time I left, anyway," he bid coldly.

He hoped he sounded nothing but indifferent, but somehow it wasn't how he felt, knowing that he'd be returning the cold streets. "Thank you," he mumbled once he had turned around, preparing to stalk back out down the corridor, down the stairs, and out the door in Duo's clothes, still in the bandages he'd administered, and slinking away into the night.

"Wait a minute, now," Duo sighed in a blustery tone. Heero heard his chair scrape against the floor as he stood up and walked after him, putting a hand on his shoulder.

"Hold it right there. I didn't mean to scare you off, for god's sake! Listen, I'm a real asshole when I'm in a bad mood, all right? I'm sorry. But it doesn't help when you decide to join the jackass society, too -- no, I'm sorry about that too... Sometimes my mouth just runs off with me, ya know." He chuckled half-nervously. "Jeeze, man, don't just split on me like that."

Heero hadn't turned around yet. He was staring quite fiercely off into the shadowy depths of the room, eyes widening, jaw setting tightly. A hot, blood-filled hand lay on his shoulder, burning straight through his skin into the shrieking hunger just beneath. Fuck. This is not good, he thought, while his mind was going white and out of control.

"Come on," Duo's voice was coaxing him, sounding rather apologetic now that the dead body had gone for the door. "Don't storm off. I'll cut the questions, okay? 'Was only trying to get my head around you, all right? I wouldn't mind having someone to talk to for a while who's as... well, let's say as interesting as you."

He chuckled to himself but quit abruptly, now just noticing that Heero had shut his eerie blue eyes tightly and his lips were curling back around his teeth in a pained grimace.

"Yo, Heero? Something wrong?"

The dead body was as tense as an elevator cable beneath Duo's hand for a taut second, before he heard him whisper, his head of tousled brown hair turned away, "Sorry for what I'm about to do in advance."

He glanced around skeptically once, wondering if Heero were speaking to actual voices or just ones residing in his rather pretty dead head. "Well, that's nice of you, but what the hell are you talking about?"

Faster than Duo could even register it, the corpse had turned around and promptly threw a fist into his face.

The force knocked him backwards so hard the air escaped cleanly out of his lungs in one fell blow and he was on his back the next moment he could see somewhat clearly, already sensing his lip was split wide open along with a trickle coming down from his bruised nose. Along with that pleasant sensation, something else was descending up on him, and this one had a pair of long, perfect legs in his old blue jeans and was hungrily crawling up, flush against him. It was all Duo could to do to give the expected gasp of surprise before Heero had pressed his mouth against his, sucking on his bleeding lip. After the burst of movement, the entire body pressed against of him seemed to sigh in relief, and Heero moaned into his mouth, flattening closer to him.

If you're ever going to be assaulted, this is the way to go, Duo's mind told him slyly, and inducing the returning sound he gave to the dead body's... well, dead body giving tiny sparks of friction as he seemed to try and melt directly into his body heat.

Duo's hands were allied, though, with the rational and currently very bewildered part of his mind. He instinctively tried to push the corpse off of him, but only found themselves on his hips, unable to move them an inch if they truly didn't want to be, and making the predicament a thousand times worse (but, according to the sly voice in his head, so much better). He dug his fingers into Heero's side as he did his best not to moan, and therefore invite the corpse to do more.

He finally got his air again when Heero's mouth left, but kept possessively close to his skin as he tilted his head up. His quickened breath ran across Duo's face, his body shifted against his as he moved to lick up the slow stream of red from Duo's bruised nose. And as aroused as he felt he was becoming, Duo had to admit his breath reeked off burger grease and something he feared might be ode de rodent, and that wasn't attractive in the least. He opened his eyes, Heero's bangs falling over them, and stared up at in very close proximity at the corpse that was licking the front of his nose, readily sucking up the blood there.

All he could think of at the time to say was, 'Hey, don't eat the snot,' and in hindsight, it would have been the most ridiculous thing possible if he had had the breath to do so. A strange man had physically assaulted him, was very literally sucking his face, and was on his way to doing god knew what, and the first thing he could come up with was a warning not to ingest any of his nasal mucus.

His tongue stopped where it had been on his cheek, lapping hungrily at a spot of blood he'd missed, and Heero stared at him quite abruptly, as if he had been the one to throw them to the floor. Duo found himself dry of any remark whatsoever looking into those blue eyes, the stain of his own blood decorating his slightly agape lips. That's when he felt the corpse distinctly mouth the words, "Oh, shit," and his rather compelling position was quickly revoked.

He had stood up before Duo even knew it, and he bolted up as well, breathless. His heart was throbbing somewhere in the vicinity of his upper mouth and he felt like he'd been pumped full of electrifying acid, burning through him. Well, rape isn't normal for the first date, but that wasn't so bad...

Heero had already issued his apology, luckily, because he seemed too shocked by what he had done to issue it now, and he momentarily looked down at Duo, the fresh nosebleed resuming down the front of his face, pooling in his lips, and then staggered backwards. He had meant to turn and run, but the back of his legs had hit the coffee table and he was thrown backwards by his own alarmed momentum -- with a thud loud enough to wake the dead, coincidentally.

The next thing that registered with Heero's rattled brain was the stream of icy water hissing as it hit his face. He vaguely heard himself let out a breath -- it was incredibly cold to the touch compared to the hot, blood-filled hands at his hips holding him steady and vertical in a small area. His cloudy mind was confused and still spinning mildly, and above the hiss of the horribly cold water, he heard a familiar rhythm of words washing over him as well, coaxing him hazily from a distance to do something. The hot, comforting fingers on his side steadied his every waver and sway.

But do what? He was occupied at the moment spitting water out of his mouth and gasping for air to nourish his dizzy mind.

Slowly, the foggy, gentle voice grew clearer, and it was Duo's. It was his hand that flew to the small of his back, soaked, when he staggered. "Come on, now, wake up."

Finally, he began coughing, bowing his head in the cold stream of water, and his entire body seemed to ache again, more acutely, though the pang of hunger had been dulled. Heero's awareness still swum slightly in a hazy cloud just below full consciousness, and he moaned tiredly. The hands on him were just so indescribably warm, so alive and pulsing that they pained him, they burned through his waterlogged clothing into his skin. Unfortunately, that pain didn't come with equilibrium, and he felt his weight swaying dumbly forward, with the intention to topple him forward.

"Heero?" Duo's hand shot out and pressed against his chest, preventing what would have been a very nasty spill into the front of the shower and the metal faucets protruding there.

Another hand moved from its position at the small of his back to his face, brushing the soaking bangs from his face as he slumped against the wall, weakly cracking his eyes open into the assaulting bright light. He tiredly spat out another mouth full of lukewarm shower-water and rasped, "Why am I wet?"

The chestnut-brown and peach blur that was the living man hovered close to him and laughed softly. "Don't worry, you're safe. You're in my shower."

Heero coughed again, squinting his eyes close. When it had passed, he leaned his head against the water-beaded wall. "That explains everything," he mumbled.

"You've got a concussion," Duo told him. "Well, I think. I told you before I wasn't a doctor, but at any rate you took a pretty nasty bump to the head. And I don't want you falling asleep on me."

As the stream of water poured down his body, drenching the clothes he wore, and more dripped from his wet, bedraggled hair, very slowly his eyes were adjusting to the light. He saw the morgue worker standing just outside the shower, holding him steady, smiling crookedly, just as he had so warmly before.

"And this was the only way."

"Afraid so," he said gently, shrugging with another smile. "You sleep like the dead."

Heero found the energy to snort at that, but not much else. He felt his shivering, empty body slump against Duo's arm and the next moment of awareness had brought him to the toilet seat again, securely wrapped up in a towel. He felt a weight lifted -- the soaking clothes were absent, and he was naked beneath the bloodless fabric. The chilled shiver had disappeared -- more apparent to him now was the living body standing over him, thoroughly drying his hair with a towel.

He squinted as Duo's hands ruffled his thick hair with a red towel, silent through it all. It was rather enjoyable, he had to admit, and it only got better when he pulled the damp towel away and finished the job by raking his fingertips through his stringy, wet hair, brushing his scalp in a way that was no less than divine.

"There," Duo said with satisfaction. "Much better than dripping all over yourself, am I right?"

"Aa," Heero agreed.

Filled with a sense of peace he'd never experienced before, Heero glanced up at Duo standing before him, who was carefully appraising him to see if he was all right, and found that peace eradicated as soon as he saw the fine bruising along his lips. They were still smiling warmly down at him. The five fierce bruises in a hand-sized ring around his neck had barely faded. He quickly averted his eyes and let his tired head hang.

He's humoring you, the cruel part of him told him. He doesn't want to offend you, so he's being nice. After all, now he knows you're a monster, why would he want to make you angry, after what you did to him? You could have so easily gotten out of control and killed him...

"Something wrong?" Duo asked, in a quieter tone than he'd heard him take all night.

"I really should be going," Heero forced himself to mutter, though it was the last thing he wanted at the moment, to force himself onto the unforgiving world outside. Here it was nice. Here no one was trying to kill him, though Duo came close to it unintentionally and not strictly in a physical way. He still felt voracious pangs in the bottom of his stomach around him, but they were being quieted very gradually.

He grit his teeth once, as another jolt of hunger passed. "I'm sorry," he ground out. The view of his pale toes didn't give him any further confidence in leaving. "I've got to go. You've been very generous, but I can't stay any longer."

"Oh. I see," Duo said, voice unreadable.

He glanced up, his vision adjusted to the bright light, to see the soggy red shirt and jeans balled up on the bathroom floor.

"I'm sorry. That's the second set of clothes I've ruined," he mumbled.

"Well, I was going to give them too you, but what use would they be if you catch pneumonia in them? I'll get you some new ones -- some dry ones -- for you. Keep 'em, don't worry about returning 'em."

"Thank you," Heero said in a voice barely loud enough to be heard, his head still bowed.

When he tried to stand up, the towel wrapped around him tightly to keep what little warmth was remaining in him, another hot hand was placed carefully on his shoulder, easing him back down. Surprised, he stared into Duo's face, pale and almost dreading, as the morgue worker kneeled down to his level to stare evenly back at him.

"Heero." It made him shiver again to hear his voice come off his bruised lips like that and he was defenseless but to listen. "When was the last time you fed?"

Told you, his internal voice mocked in vicious singsong.

"When you brought me -- "

"No," Duo interrupted, his other hand laid on his other shoulder, equally hot. It was only now that he noticed the exact shade of his eyes, an indistinct violet that hovered been blue and indigo, as he arched an eyebrow at him pointedly. "When did you last feed?"

Heero felt his entire body sink despite himself. "So you know."

"Yeah, I do."

"How long?"

Duo smiled gently at him, and only he could make a grin so wide so seem so kind.

"It became kind of obvious after you started licking up my nosebleed like I was a water fountain and all." The sound of his chuckle echoed off the walls closely, not making him feel entirely uncomfortable. "Trowa would be insanely jealous to know I met a real life vampire before he did, you know. He's a head-over-heels horror junkie."

Heero's blue eyes softened, becoming less guarded. He even tried to smile ruefully. "We're overrated," he said.

Duo laughed honestly at his weak attempt at humor and Heero's chin lifted a fraction higher.

"I bet you are," he smiled, lifting his hand from the dead body's shoulder to tentatively touch his mouth. "Can I see?" he asked, and Heero was so intoxicated by the sensation that he numbly granted permission. Duo gently touched his fingertips to the fangs hidden behind his often pursed or scowling lips, needlelike at the point. Heero watched Duo's expression shift from curiosity to wonderment, his mouth curling into its own awed expression.

"Wow," he whispered, his face brightened. "This is so surreal, I can't even tell you. I can't believe this -- they're so sharp."

Heero snorted. The teeth of a living corpse sitting in your bathroom were more surreal than the living corpse himself?

Duo pulled away, willing himself to suppress his endless curiosity for a moment. "They're not what I expected, though, I have to say."

"Let me guess. Not like Dracula, right?"

"No, not at all -- and I've seen enough horror movies to last a lifetime. They're so much more normal than I would have ever thought. I didn't even notice them until I knew what you were, you know," he said, marveling.

"That's how it works," Heero told him quietly. Explaining it seemed so awkward, under the bright lighting, naked except for a bath towel, but as soon his eyes fell on Duo's warm expression that disconcerting feeling was obsolete. What was more important was those moments when his eyes brightened as he looked directly at him. "People can't recognize us simply by our teeth anymore, not until we've already bitten them or we reveal it to them. It's a voluntary thing. We've gotten better over the years at hiding ourselves from the world."

"So, like mind control? Does that mean you could roll me under, you know, with your eyes?"

"Yes, I could," Heero admitted, his gaze lowering slightly, hesitant. "But I wouldn't do that to you."

Duo hesitated where he knelt, running his eyes over the vampire's face again, taking in the pale tint of his skin, and how wearied he looked when he averted his electrifying blue eyes. His hand moved from Heero's shoulder, now that he was sure he wouldn't be attempting to run away, and he carefully took him by the wrist. He tensed, but relaxed immediately as Duo put his other hand in his palm and turned his forearm to the light, displaying the unique tattoo hidden there.

7 7

"Okay, I get that, but what the hell does this mean?"

He ran his fingertips cautiously over this mysterious feature as well, surprised as well as pleased that he was allowed to touch him at all, after how defensive he'd been. Heero had to inwardly bite his lip to resist another shiver.

"That's my label. It's what marks me for what I am," he answered quietly.

"Tattoos cause vampirism?" Duo looked almost horrified.

"No," he said, shaking his head. "It was given to me when I was born, marking me as an undead child, as a monster."

Duo's violet eyes were watching him raptly, silently, as Heero touched the mark, written in tilted writing and deep blue ink.

"There's more than one way to become a vampire, rather than just drinking the blood of one. My father was born the seventh son, and I, the seventh of his. So, you could say, it's for no more than simple bad luck that I've joined the living dead." There was an almost resentful tilt of his lips as he said this. "The seventh son of the seventh son."

Duo didn't say anything, allowing Heero to chuckle bitterly to himself, rubbing his forearm and his eyes momentarily gazing off in another world. "You know, you feel like the odd one out when you're the only child out of ten who drinks blood and has to sleep in the dirt. Needless to say, I didn't have a lot of friends growing up."

Finally, the morgue worker opened his mouth. "Did you have any?" he asked.

"No." Duo was beginning to hate the self-loathing little laugh, that little tug at the corner of his mouth as he detailed his life to him. "Would you allow your child near something like me?"

"Well, fuck 'em. They were idiots. All of them," came the immediate response from Duo's darkening face. "And don't call yourself 'something', you're not a monster."

"No, but I'm not normal either," Heero said quietly. "I can't bleed like you. I bleed the blood that I have steal from the living. A thief. A parasite, even."

"That doesn't mean shit, and that's not true. You know that."

The color in the vampire's eyes dimmed. "Well, I'm glad that's how you feel, but you're the only one." Again, his head dipped wearily.

Duo hated that fact, hated that every word spilling past his lips was tense, tired, and steeped in enough self-depreciation to make his ears burn, and he'd seen enough privately miserable expressions from him in one night to haunt for a lifetime. He took Heero's slightly chilled hand in his, and felt his entire body startle at the movement.

"Fuck everybody else, then," he said, in a low tone. "You can't expect everybody to understand, and even less than that to give a damn about you. I know it sounds grim like that, but it's better than worrying yourself over what others think. And trust me, I know what it feels like to be looked at like you're a worthless freak."

He squeezed the bony fingers he held, simultaneously sending shivers of heat up through his arm and reminding Heero, in stark contrast, what set him so far apart from humanity. He had no warmth. He was not alive, and he wasn't dead -- yet.

At the moment, he would have given anything to remain there forever, to never set foot outside Duo's apartment, simply lay awake in the night with him, watching the valid world sleep oblivious to them. But the ache in his bones once again told him it was an impossible dream -- the morgue worker may be a creature of the night, like him, but he was still living, at the end of that night, and he was still of the undead.

"How did you get hurt?" was the next thing Heero heard, snapping him from his reverie. Duo was firmly planted before him on bended knee, his body radiating so much warmth keeping close, as if he knew how much it secretly nourished him. He seemed to be in no hurry of evicting him from his home, his sanctuary. Heero blinked at him for a moment, not sure what he meant, but Duo quickly clarified it by running a fingertip over the towel where the scar circled his thigh.

"Oh," he breathed, trying to mask the sharp intake of air he suddenly found necessary. "That."

Duo now had folded his arms over Heero's knees and rested his chin on them, gazing up at him with a burning expression of concentration. He silently, devotedly waited for him to speak. The vampire had a feeling that he would not, either, until he had gotten a sufficient answer. It was strange -- someone who actually cared about what he had to say, even waited on it.

Heero took in a breath, and sighed once, closing his eyes. "I was attacked." He tried to make it sound as mundane as was possible. It was not something he wished to discuss, but somehow he knew that wasn't going to be tolerated.

"Who?" Duo responded immediately. No, that answer wasn't going to be good enough.

"A hunter."

"A vampire hunter," he echoed, the word nightmarish in light of what was sitting before him, cold, pale and cheerless. "Wait -- That guy in the car?"

"He was my roommate for three years," Heero confided, feeling his exhaustion slowly creeping back as he began recounting the previous night's incident. "We... Not once, did I ever suspect that he knew about the world of the undead, nor that he ever suspected me of anything. We were oblivious to each other. Unlike you, we were both content to pay rent, have a roof over our heads, and associate as little as possible with each other. After all, he was always out hunting, and I was always out hunting, as well."

"But you don't drink from humans," Duo murmured up at him. When he received a mild expression of surprise, he continued with a smirk. "It's so obvious, 'Ro. You apologized in advance for just a tiny taste of me. And you've looked guilty as hell every since."

"I also hit you."

"Aw, I've been hit harder."

The vampire tightened his stare. "Are you saying that I'm weak? I feel more than well enough to demonstrate my strength, if need be," he said, curling up one corner of his mouth.

Duo's palms lifted in surrender. "Hey, hey," he drawled, raising both brows over a grin, "I'm just saying that you're polite enough to pull a few punches, all right? And I don't see how anyone could have attacked you. You're stronger than us, the living. And I know how you put up on a fight, because I've been on the receiving end. Now, I want to hear what happened to you."

Heero seemed a little more willing when he continued his tale, though not completely pleased to be doing so. "I was sleeping."

Duo's lip curled back in disgust. "What a coward," he sneered unhappily. "Oh, and did he have to restrain you while he was at it, too?"

Heero felt it appropriate for a mild smirk. "Not exactly. He knocked me unconscious."

"Well, that's a little easier to do than you think," Duo said with a tilt of a smile, recalling how Heero had looked, sprawled and knocked out on his floor, legs over the toppled coffee table.

"Shot me with a silver bullet first." He sighed. "It doesn't kill a vampire, but being shot isn't enjoyable to anyone. Hurts like hell. He had a crucifix with him, and I was so tired -- I couldn't do anything to defend himself. He planned on dismembering, decapitating and incinerating me, to secure that I was completely and utterly destroyed, but I woke up sooner than he expected."

"Just as he was cutting into your leg," Duo finished for him, shaking his head in disgust. "That's fucking low. Is that how he kills every one of you? Just how many has he killed?"

"One for every week of the year, so he brags," he answered with clear distaste. "He kills rather indiscriminately, or so I've heard. You would think I would know, though. We ate at the same table, sat on the same couch, slept under the same roof."

"What a guy. Must have had a hell of a day planner. Thursday, pick up dry-cleaning -- Friday, scheduled murder. So, you never once had suspicion that he was a hunter?"

"I had my own horrible secrets to concern myself with. I didn't think much about what secrets he may have had. It was only after he attacked me did I realize he was anything but a late night cashier." He smirked bitterly.

"Then, how did you end up on my doorstep?"

"There was this girl," he answered, his voice weakening. "Relena. She lived down the hall from us. We talked once in a while, and I had collapsed in front of her car, in the street. She thought I was dead, I remember, and put me in her backseat. Covered me up, tried to give me a decent funeral... said a prayer for me..."

He smiled ruefully. The tone of voice he took finally began to reveal his exhaustion, and Heero felt his head warming up for another hearty, dizzy spin. He let his eyes fall close as another horrible pain arose in his bones, keening out for nourishment, louder, more desperate. But it did not tell him to reach out for Duo's warm body this time, it did not scream at him to feed off of him. It only keened out helplessly now.

He felt like shit, basically, and if it weren't for Duo's presence, the sound of his voice, and his warmth so close, he would find no good reason not to succumb to it and pass out, only to relieve himself temporarily of the pain. Speaking of which, he was beginning to feel unnatural levels of it swelling up inside him, pressing out on his bones, and it was not an ache from his hunger. It abruptly stabbed into him, and Heero hissed and bent forward, gritting his teeth.

"Heero?" Duo's voice immediately leapt up, as well as his hands, in concern. He tried to help him straighten up, but he keened out in pain and doubled over. "What's wrong?"

He forced himself to straighten back up, even though it felt like his body was icing over internally and slowly fissuring into a billion of tiny, painful fractures. "Nothing," he forced out.

Duo looked him up and down once, giving him a pointed look. "Bullshit, Heero."

"No, really," Heero rasped out again, trying to raise his hand to stop him as Duo stood up.

"Is it your wound? C'mon, let me see it."

"It's all right, Duo," he pleaded, finding the sound of his name in his mouth somehow comforting while his bones burned in pain. "I'm fine."

"And again, I politely say, 'Bullshit,' " he growled back, planting his feet. He ignored the subtle flashes of color in Heero's eyes as he looked up at him, tenderly squinting in the bright light. "Let me see it."

"No," he croaked out. "You don't have to, I'll be all right in a second. Really."

Duo's eyes flashed in return. "You'll have to forgive me for this, but fuck you and all this martyr stuff you try on me. I'm not going to put up with it. You never seem to want anybody's help when you need it most, and I'm sick of hearing it. You're not fine."

That was when his hands were abruptly gripped around the towel, and Heero felt another horrible sensation running through him -- a horrible, horrible anxiety.

Duo was suddenly the last person who could undress him without invoking certain responses, and Heero was burnt up with self-consciousness. He'd confided some of his most painful things to this man not a minute ago, whom he'd met in a morgue hours ago, and he was just not the least prepared for making himself anymore vulnerable. He clamped his hands over Duo's tightly, feeling flushed, and even more embarrassed that the blood rushing to his face was probably Duo's.

"Let me see," he growled at him, as Heero shot up off the seat, trying to free himself, clutching the towel around him protectively.

"No, Duo -- "

"Just let me see it! If you'd just quit squirming, it'd be over in a second, 'Ro!"

Another voice butted in just as abruptly. "Hey, Duo, rent is tomorrow, so we're fucked -- Oh."

Both turned their heads very quickly to see Duo's roommate standing, mildly surprised, in the doorway, the single eye visible beneath his uni-bang rimmed with thick black eyeliner and his Misfits T-shirt looking rather scuffed up and threadbare. He seemed rather calm, despite watching his roommate crawling over a naked stranger in their bathroom, clawing at the towel between them.

All parties froze for a moment, and eventually Trowa said nonchalantly, "Not my turn? I see," shrugged, and turned and shut the door.

Unfortunately, the perpetually guarded, disgruntled look had taken its position again, and Heero had it trained cautiously on Duo's roommate, looking ruffled in a second pair of the morgue worker's jeans and a black T-shirt lettered with a smart-mouthed phrase. And judging from the severity of the wary stare he was receiving from across the room, as he sat silently, sullenly, and not slouching an inch on the barstool at the kitchen counter, that either it was his shirt, or he had committed some awful faux-pas in being forcibly undressed by his roommate. And not surprisingly, Heero really hoped that he was wearing his shirt.

Trowa's eyes, though not narrowed in threat, were guarded and stony as they ran over him more than once. He had his arms folded over his chest, revealing the multitude of tattoos decorating his forearms. Heero stared straight back, feeling no reason that he should leave until he wanted to, if Duo had invited him in willingly.

"So," his roommate said calmly, "vampire, huh?"

"Yeah," Heero grunted. He didn't want to be a freak show tonight; he hoped he wouldn't want to see any proof of this claim. Trowa carefully looked him over once again, lips pursed tight.

"Cool."

And that was that. He turned around impassively, as if the undead wasn't there at all anymore, slipped on a pair of headphones and picked through a bowl of trail mix sitting before him.

Thankfully, Duo came back out of the shadows of the apartment only a few moments later, looking as casual as ever about a vampire in his living room and relieving the two of each other's dubious company. He had changed his own clothes, which had been encrusted with old blood, and strode confidently into the room in a pair of black pants that were perfectly identical. And a large rat squirming in his hands.

"Look what I've got for you, Heero," he announced, holding the rather plump rodent in one hand out toward the vampire on his couch. He arched his eyebrows. "Dinner."

Trowa sat up immediately and threw off his headphones. He turned around on the seat and shot icy daggers at his roommate. "Hey. That's my rat."

"Yes, your rat, Trowa. But your rat has been shitting on old newspapers that I bought, in the cage that I clean every damn week, and when you set him loose, I find him chewing holes in my clothes," Duo told him as calmly as could be, and all the while the aforementioned rodent was busily trying to wring his bulky little body through Duo's fingers. "And since Heero's officially in my charge, I'll decide if he eats your rat." He smiled so brightly afterward it was borderline savage. "Understand?"

"Fine," Trowa relented, his stoic face blistering cold. "But if he kills my rat -- "

"You can get another one from the kitchen cupboard, Tro. That's where you got this one, for god's sake! They're everywhere in this damn city."

"But I like this one," he growled flatly.

Heero found it necessary to politely interrupt, while the massive rodent stared him in the face with a pair of beady, crusty eyes and a pair of jagged incisors protruding from his closed mouth. "Thank you for the offer," he said, successfully suppressing the hint of distaste, "but I'm not hungry. Really."

"What?" Duo had now turned his attention fully to Heero, looking almost horrified at that. "Don't give me that bullshit, either!" He leaned briskly down and took the vampire by the forearm, lifting his bony arm up to display. "You're a goddamn rail! And you're as colder than a penguin's ass. Don't think you can fool me with that 'I'm all right' shit, 'Ro. I told you before I can see straight through it."

"But," he reminded him, "I'm dead, remember? What does it hurt if I go hungry for a while?"

The sudden flashes of color in the corpse's eyes were painful to watch, though beautiful, and Duo found himself growing even more frustrated at the tone of self-effacing constantly haunting his words, the constant flickering sadness in his expression. Heero gazed up at him, his lips as motionless as ever, but the emotion in his eyes pained and distant. Duo hated to see it. Unintentionally, he felt his fingers tensing into a fist, squeezing around the rat, but too late. It let out a terrible sounding shriek of fright and bit him.

"Aw, shit!" Duo yelled, shaking his hand out furiously. The fat rodent landed below with the sound of a large melon hitting the floor, his ugly, naked feet clawing at the air as he flipped his bulbous body over. And in a second, he was waddling as fast as was possibly out of the room and into the shadows in the corner.

"Watch it!" Trowa growled at him, immediately flying out of his seat after his pet.

"That fucker has teeth!"

"It's not his fault. You were gonna pop him! You never give him anything to chew on, either. He can't help his teeth growing."

"I never remember so generously giving him my favorite jeans, but he took them anyway, Trowa!" the mortician hissed at him as he disappeared, chasing his rat into his bedroom and forcibly slamming the door behind him, his extensive preventive measure against any vampire sucking his precious pet dry.

After disappearing sullenly into his room, Duo still had a few healthy strings of cursing waiting on the tip of his tongue, but instead decided that it could wait and grumbled them under his breath. His other hand had flown up, gripping his finger tightly, trying to distract him of the pain. It also served to help squeeze the blood out of a good-sized bite out of his index finger. It looked like a thick, maroon liquid oozing out in the dim lighting.

His face contorted into a half-disgusted wince. "Ugh," he grunted with a crooked smile unfurling across his face, "this stuff looks worse every time I see it."

Heero didn't realize he was standing so close to Duo all of a sudden until he flinched abruptly, widening the gap between them to a fraction and a half. Magnetized by the scent of blood and already hellishly tempted by the radiating waves of body heat coming off solely him, the lean vampire was hungry beyond compare, and it pushed all his cautious, rational thought out the window. The mortician let slip a sharp, startled intake of air as he lifted his head and felt the side of his mouth brush against the dead body's jaw, so close that they looked like puzzle pieces about to clinch together when he glanced, flushed, down his nose.

"Heero?" he breathed, inadvertently peddling the words directly into his ear. A chilled hand had wrapped around his, letting the tiny, intermittent drops of blood drip onto the back of the vampire's knuckles, a river of fire on his cold skin.

For a moment, he didn't respond. He only stood there, silently hovering between one option and the next in his mind, slowly drifting toward Duo's body and the abundance of heat it always gave off. The blood still dripped freely onto his hand as he gripped Duo's, though it ebbed as it began to clot. For an instant, the image of Heero putting his bleeding finger in his mouth and sucking him dry rose to mind, unbidden, and he had to swallow rather dryly.

And just as suddenly as he had risen to his feet, Heero spoke up.

"I'm sorry," he muttered, letting his head hang slightly, brushing his wild hair against the side of Duo's quiet face. He hesitated, and the mortician waited. He didn't step back. He didn't move away.

"Why are you doing all these things for me? Why have you let me into you house, and, when you know what I am, why do you let me stay?" Heero asked, his voice drifting, wretched. It made something tighten painfully in the pit of Duo's throat to hear it, and all the more difficult to think and all the easier to respond in a soft tone.

"You needed somewhere to go," he answered. "I was only doing what was right."

Heero waited again, letting out a breath. His fingers had begun softly toying with Duo's, letting the maroon liquid pass between them, unnoticed. "And buying a bloodsucker dinner, that was the right thing to do? Giving clothes to the undead is only being polite?"

Duo's brows hitched together, staring past his shoulder into the glowing apartment lights. "I wasn't going to leave you out there," he said firmly.

"I would have. If I were you."

"No, you wouldn't have," he countered. "I haven't known you all that long, Heero, but I know you wouldn't have. You would have done the same in my position. Well, you had better have," he intoned with a gentle smile that Heero felt, rather than saw.

His voice had drifted into another territory again, his tone vague. "I wouldn't have. I would have been too afraid, if I had been you, after what I did to you."

"What, shave a few years off my life expectancy? Chh -- that's nothing. It's all right. I won't even notice that they're gone, I promise you. For all I know, I could go to sleep right now and never wake up the next day. It's not really for me to decide, ya know? So don't worry about it."

"No," he whispered, almost too faint to hear, and edged with a thick anger at himself. "When you were scared, frustrated, and confused, I used you. I was selfish and rude. And then I hurt you."

"Was I all that?" Duo chuckled nervously. "Heero, I -- "

That breath in particular had left him very quickly, as soon as he felt the vampire's mouth brush once against the side of his mouth, his finely-scuplted head shifting so finely, and then his lips reappear on his neck. Hey, he thought hazily, unable to breathe, when did all these stars get here? They're kind of nice...

And just as abruptly, the darkening bruises on his neck burned, so intensely that his knees weakened and he groaned in pain. When he found himself able to breathe again, the brief, terrible agony abating, he had an arm clutched to Heero's waist, steadying himself.

"See," he muttered, bitter, in his ear, "I hurt you. And I'm still hurting you."

Duo had to wait a few minutes before he could think above the pounding of his heart in his throat. "No," he said, "you're not. If you really want to hurt me, you'll keep talking like that about yourself. I don't want to hear that, either. It wasn't your fault, and you didn't mean it. I can understand -- you had just been attacked, you were probably terrified, and probably no warmer than you are now -- you were just a little crabby, that's all."

"I still am terrified," he said, comforted by Duo's words but not yet secure. "Every night I'm terrified of what I might do, of who I'll hurt next. I feel like I'm nothing but a monster, nothing but a bloodsucker. And the sad part is, I am. I even feel remorse about feeding off the mice in the streets."

"You did what you needed to, and you're not a monster if you feel remorse, 'Ro. To tell you the truth, you're more thoughtful than most of the living people I know."

"' 'Ro.' "He chuckled in a familiar rueful tone and the breath brushed Duo's ear as he continued, his exhaustion wearing through. "Am I really that fascinating just because I'm dead?"

Duo hesitated. He still had his arm around Heero's waist, and it sent electricity clean through him when the vampire let out a final sigh and closed the agonizing, microscopic gap between them. He shivered as he pressed hungrily into his body heat, soaking it in silently -- he felt so cold. On that metal table, in the bright lights, he had never really been very warm, but what had been there was gone. He was icy to the touch, and bone thin beneath. He wasn't quite alive, but he didn't need to be a skeleton, for god's sake, Duo thought.

"Heero," the mortician said finally, after the vampire had rested his face in the crook of his neck, silent and needing that silence at the same time, "you need to feed."

"No," he whispered.

"You do, and I don't want to hear any more guilt from you about it," Duo argued, taking his free arm away from Heero's waist, while the other hand was cradled close to the vampire's chest, intertwined with his fingers, slowly absorbing the heat they gave off. He used it to take his long, braided hair and pull it neatly away while he craned his neck in a graceful curve, opening it up to Heero's lips while they breathed slowly over his bruises.

"Just do it. You have my permission and all that jazz, so don't worry about it," Duo told him, closing his eyes as he exposed his skin willingly to him, preparing himself for the bite and the unknown sensation it would cause.

Heero very slowly straightened up, and Duo felt his eyes upon the side of his face as it was turned away. "I can't," he said, almost ashamed.

"You mean you won't."

"Yes."

"Do it anyway. You need it more than you want it."

The vampire didn't move for one very long, very quiet moment, pressed close and slowly warming from his body. Then he moved his head slightly, tilting it, and his body shifted against the mortician. Duo squeezed his eyes shut tight, setting his jaw even tighter, and pinching his lips together, determined not to show fear as he moved in for that first incision. But it was not sharp, diving teeth he felt after that long, drawn moment. Heero cupped his chin with one hand, turning his face toward him, and kissed him.

Duo felt like the world had been gone for years, a faint and unimportant memory, when he finally pulled back only a fraction to tell him against his mouth, "I care about you more than I need it."

Duo Maxwell had no more trouble breaking and entering than reciting the alphabet and it was still a ridiculously simple task for him even when cradling a laundry basket of moth-bitten sweaters and woolen socks on his hip. After the lock above the doorknob on the door of the apartment down the hall clicked, he stuffed the bobby pin securely back into his pocket and stepped inside. Not surprisingly, it was pitch dark, lit only by the distant hazy light drifting in from the windows facing the nighttime streets and the dim flicker of a TV screen.

The mortician strolled into the room as if he owned the entire building, not bothering to close the door behind him, breezily making his way through a complete stranger's home toward the laundry room. He passed that complete stranger as he lay, snoring deeply into the night, on his ratty couch, bathed in the dancing silver and blue cast of his lonely television.

Forgotten and unheard, save for by the intruder, the sounds of late night infomercials continued in their nightly, unseen juggernauts. Duo skirted around the couch, darting through the shadows as silent as a thief, and made his way finally to the laundry room, kicking his way through a multi-layered pile of neglected clothing as he stacked the laundry basket on top of the dryer. Without a moment's hesitation or even a glance backwards over his shoulders, he stuffed each sweater inside, turned the crank to the hottest setting possible, and let it run.

He then strolled back into the living room. The stranger snored on, luckily oblivious to him, as Duo casually sank back into his recliner and scrounged the remote (which incidentally, this stranger had tirelessly complaining about) out from under the cushion and flipped through the channels. He surfed through the hassling commericials and mediocre shows and aberrant movies until the buzzer sounded and summoned him back into the cramped laundry room. He came striding back through the living room with a basket of piping hot sweaters and left as quickly and as casually as he had entered, feeling not an ounce of stigma or misdoing.

He was smiling as he entered the hallway, leaving the door ajar behind him, and trotted up the stairs. The stranger, oblivious that anything had happened at all, mumbled in his sleep and turned over on his shabby substitute bed.

A few minutes later, he had crossed the threshold of his own apartment with his collection of warmed clothes radiating heat on his hip. The lights were still murky and comfortably dim, but there were very few signs of life. The dirty dishes remained dirty and untouched on the counter and spilling into the sink, the couches were musty and alone, and from behind Trowa's closed door the sound of music thudded dimly. Duo continued through the empty room and into his own. That's where he was assured he would find the vampire, in the complete darkness that soothed him so, and he did, and he squinted at Duo rather unhappily for even the soft lights that he switched on.

"Hey, Heero. Good to see you and Trowa aren't at each other's necks... er," Duo hesitated and grinned almost sheepishly. "Well, how're you doing now?"

Heero considered his monotone response very carefully before he delivered in an unenthusiastic tone. "Wonderful."

"Well, at least your humor's not affected by hunger. Otherwise, I think I'd fine you too crabby to stomach," he chuckled good-naturedly. The mortician shut the door behind him as he stepped inside, balancing his load of laundry on one hip.

"I am not crabby," Heero spoke up, pursing his lips in the most adorably disgruntled manner, giving him an edged look from underneath a head of severely bedraggled brown hair.

"Hell, if hadn't ate a decent meal for as long as you, bud, I'd be grouchy as fuck, too."

The vampire simply tightened his lips and gazed back at him, refusing to respond to that. Duo still found it an irresistible time to smile with his entire mouth, noticing the not-unpleasant lightness in the pit of his stomach.

"Got a little present for you," he announced with a grin, as the undead sat up, his disheveled hair worsened by the fact he'd been laid out on Duo's bed in the futile attempt to get some rest. If he hadn't already been driven to mad awareness by his hunger, then Duo's mystifying generosity and undying hospitality and the fact he was lying on his bed would have.

Heero glanced at the basket. A twinge at the corner of his mouth accompanied the lifting of one eyebrow. "My. You shouldn't have."

Duo's mouth widened. "Don't get the wrong idea. It's not like I'm that generous or anything like that," he quipped playfully as he ambled over and took a seat beside Heero, balancing the laundry basket on his knees as he extracted a red sweatshirt and held it up. "Here, put this one on first."

A moment later the article of clothing found itself crumpled up on Heero's lap, while the mortician busily began digging through the pile and pulling more ratty woolen things out. The vampire first looked crookedly at the sweatshirt, not quiet sure of what to make of the gesture, and then turned that gaze on Duo's face. His tone was carefully measured. "First?"

"Don't give me that look," Duo told him quickly, stuffing three more zip-up sweatshirts and a few woolen sweaters onto the crumpled pile on Heero's lap. "When an ungenerous person gives you things, you'd be best advised to take them, right?"

And when Heero opened his mouth in protest, he was very quick to continue in an unyielding tone.

"No way, nuh-uh -- I don't want to hear any more of your guilt trip. Take 'em. You feel like a goddamned refrigerator, for heaven's sake, 'Ro. I'm likely to get freezer burn from just sitting here with you." His eyes lingered strictly on Heero's tentative face, physically reiterating the message, and finally, he let out a low, weary sigh and began to weakly shimmy his way into the first sweatshirt, freshly warm from the dryer.

Then another, and another following another, until he seemed to have gained nearly forty pounds and a considerable amount of bulk on his hungry frame. The mortician couldn't help but feel a little surge of affection glowing in his face as he watched the vampire, pale face set into a dogged, disgruntled pout, as he struggled in his exhausted condition to conquer the challenge of the final, red and black horizontally-striped sweater over the ridiculous amount of clothing he already wore. He readjusted himself, the mattress squeaking as he turned and helped yank the woolen garment over Heero's head with a final, sharp yank.

Heero sputtered, spitting out a piece of lint, making a sour face as he did so. "Were all of these really a necessity?" he ground out, trying to smooth down his static-charged mop in futility. He pinched his lips together and looked up at Duo, who lent a hand as well and combed his fingers through his thick, chocolate brown locks one more time with a grin.

"Ah, maybe not in your opinion -- but you're warm now, right?"

"I guess," Heero admitted, folding his arms against his chest. His expression flickered within a few moments, as he felt the heat oozing from the wool deep into his skin, and due to the entire wardrobe of sweaters he sported, remained trapped against him. It almost felt as good as Duo's heat. Almost.

The mortician beamed. "See, what did I tell you?"

"I don't know," Heero answered, smirking to himself with the telltale corners of his mouth. "I don't remember what you said. After a while, it all sounds the same. One constant drone."

Duo's look twisted mischievously. "Oh, we got a wise guy, eh?" he drawled in a ridiculous gangster tone of voice as he sat up on his knees on the comforter, gazing devilishly down at Heero, whom was completely unprepared for Duo taking him by the shoulders and tossing him down on the bed. He even let escape a dumbfounded grunt of surprise, which escalated into a growing flush as Duo, snickering wickedly, straddled his stomach, snatching down at his exposed, cold toes. And, above the distant, throbbing din of Trowa's heavy metal music, Heero could hear himself making all the oddest whimpers and sounds as Duo's fingers attacked the sensitive bottoms of his feet and in between his toes.

"Duo!"

"Yanno, it's even harder to listen when you're being viciously tickled, 'Ro!"

He let out a bark of surprise, desperately suppressing a completely involuntarily burst of laughter, and the onslaught only worsened.

"My, you are a loud one once somebody gets you into bed!" Duo teased impishly. "Bet you haven't made his much noise in your whole life, huh?"

"No, and I don't intend to ever again!" Heero managed out, still kicking and thrashing and resisting every peal of laughter that came bursting out of him, and that was rather frequently as Duo discovered and exploited every ticklish inch on his foot and began poking his fingertips into the backs of his knees.

"Ha! Wonder what the neighbors will think, with us making all this noise? We'll be keeping the old Andersons up all night long," Duo drawled fiendishly, relishing every little reaction he could pull out of Heero, the vampire that had been dead only few hours ago and now lay on his bed, in his old sweaters, begging for mercy. Well, actually, they were quickly escalating into death threats of every shape and color, but who was counting?

"Duo, stop, I swear -- !" Too busy gritting his teeth and squirming to respond, Heero instead let out a mangled laugh, his defenses slipping as the attack continued.

"Me too, Heero, every damn day!"

"Stop!" he cried out breathlessly, one last time, before he gave in, unable to bear it as a knot began tightening in his stomach.

Duo let off his own devilish laugh as Heero's protests degenerated into uncontrollable laughter, unable to resist any longer. "What's that? I didn't quiet catch that last part, Heero," he grinned, filling with a certain swell to hear his breathless, deep and illegally elicited laughter.

It could be considered rather cruel, you know -- sitting here, torturing a poor deceased man when he's much too tired to retaliate in the slightest... but it's too much damn fun to be bad, right?

"Right!"

"Duo -- knock it off -- stop -- Duo!"

"Well... I guess could -- " The mortician's smile spread as he temporarily relented and let go of Heero's poor, assaulted toes. His expression turned wistful and musing, but his fingers were claw-like and at the ready. "But then again..."

"No, no -- "

Oh, yes, Duo's mischievous voice told him, and he started up again with renewed zeal, sending Heero into round of laughter, though it had begun to come naturally, and Duo had to steal less and less of it from him.

"Duo, please! I can't breathe!"

"That's the point, 'Ro!" he laughed.

Then, suddenly, Heero had stopped laughing. He abruptly felt as if someone had taken a hand to the caverns of his chest, clenched it around his heart, and jerked it like extracting a plant by its roots, pulling it every agonizing inch out of the soil where it belonged.

Soil, home sweet soil

He nearly screamed at Duo, some terrifying, strangled noise as the pain instantly spread to every inch of him, to the tips of his fingers down into the hollow of his bones. "Stop!" he grit out, blinding reaching out for Duo as he felt all the air flying out of his lungs again, and thrashing once, racked with pain. He felt his fingers wrap around something, which Duo knew best as his hair, and then felt said mortician being spun around and flopping gracelessly down on top of him, the music of his laughter absent.

For a few, pained seconds, Heero was blind except to the dizzy, spinning colors behind his eyelids, his ears rushing with what little blood he possessed. And then, those sounds faded, along with the hot waves of agony, ebbing away eventually, leaving him aching and breathless, with Duo's warm body flat on his and in silence. The only sound for a moment was the mortician trying to catch his own breath as he stared down at him, the space between them so very meager.

"Heero," he breathed, stunned. "I... -- Shit! I'm sorry! Oh, man, I'm so sorry! Are you okay? I didn't mean to hurt you, I swear, Heero -- "

He put his palm to the side of Heero's face without conscious thought, staring anxiously at the severely pained lines in his crushed expression, gritting his teeth, breath hissing through. He'd come back from the dead, had a scalpel buried pretty securely in his head, and had been stitched up, without a drop of anesthesia or so much as a flinch, and now he lay, chest heaving in pain, beneath him.

"Heero? What happened?"

"N-nothing." He sucked in a deep breath, though it didn't sound well nor comfort Duo in the least. He still had his eyes closed tight, grimacing. "I'm all right -- I just... overreacted. Hurt myself... Only a little -- "

"A little? Sorry again, but bullshit, Heero! You call that 'a little'? You were just about screaming -- "

"I'm fine," he grit out, not daring to open his eyes. The pain had faded by now, leaving only the shock to dissolve, but Duo's hand was solid and warm against his skin -- and agonizingly so. "Really, I'm fine."

The mortician remained where he was resolutely, with absolutely no intention of moving without an answer to his questions. "Then open your eyes," he told him in an unreadable tone, his mouth set in an unhappy, thin line. And he did, once Duo had removed his hand from the side of his face and replaced it upon his shoulder, merely repositioning Heero's discomfort. The vampire eventually, almost cautiously, did obey the command, though he knew immediately by the fierce expression in Duo's face that he was unpaid and overdue in explanation.

"You're not fine," Duo said in a soft voice. "I can tell that you're not. I can see that you're not."

"But I'll be all right," Heero tried wearily, shying his gaze away to his pursed lips when he uttered the lie. "Don't worry about me."

"That's not as easy as you think sometimes," Duo told him. "And it's not as easy as you think to trick me into believing that you're alright when you're definitely not."

The vampire stared up at him ambiguously, masking his expression as best as he could. "It wasn't your fault."

"Yes, but it is my fault if I let you ignore your own well being. After all, if you're unwilling to do it, then it's my job."

Heero looked up at him as if he'd just claimed an impossible thing, and before he could smother the emotion, Duo had caught it. It involuntarily yanked a heartstring, and he felt himself wishing he would never have to see that so utterly sad look in his eye, once he'd heard him laugh. "Now," he said, pulling himself off of the poor vampire and settling on the bed next to him, "I want you to tell me what's wrong."

After cautiously sitting up, Heero spoke up with even more caution. "Why do you care, Duo?"

"Heero!" Duo cried out, exasperated.

The thin vampire, buried beneath layers and layers of old, ratty sweaters stopped at that, blinking at Duo, visibly on the edge of something in his expression.

The mortician looked at him almost as if he were crazy, but smiled gently despite it. "Because I want to, and it's as simple as that -- and no, you're not a monster, and no, you're worth it completely, and no, Heero, I'm not just saying that to make you feel better because I think you deserve to be happier." He let out a sigh, let the smile grow back again, and smirked over at him. "I think that just about covers it, right?"

Heero glanced down at his hands for a moment, noticing that the sleeves of the red and black sweater over top were much too long and only the tips of his fingers were exposed, then nodded silently, though a corner of his mouth managed to twitch upward without quite knowing why. "Sounds right," he murmured.

"Good," came the reply, gentle, but not untainted with his usual mischief. "The sooner I help heal you, the sooner I get to tickle you again, you know."

"I can hardly wait," Heero said, turning his gaze up and meeting eyes with the living person who had done more for him in a single night than the sum of humanity had during his long and lonesome existence. A hint of a smile was an inevitable thing when he looked at him, and he felt surprisingly warm when Duo returned it, a seeming billion watts brighter.

Trowa felt rather peeved, to find upon his next venture out of the safety of his room a little while later, with one corpulent rat in hand, to catch the final glimpses of his roommate's dark silhouette flittering out into the flimsy light of the hallway, in his dark clothing, and with his undead friend close behind him, one hand on the door as he prepared to leave as well. To where, Trowa had no effing idea, but somehow he found it irritating that Duo would breeze off early in the morning with a vampire and not at least give him a heads up. It was nearly dawn, anyway! To what else was bothering him, he couldn't quiet put his fingers on -- which may have been due to the oversized rodent squirming in his hand. Before Heero stepped through the doorway, in a ridiculous red and black striped-sweater and countless others beneath it, he hesitated, taking notice of Trowa at the door of his room, staring out analytically at him.

His deep, stoic blue eyes flickered to the rat, then up to Trowa's face as it dropped a shade whiter, making the connection. And, without the slightest expression otherwise, curled a corner of his mouth and ran his tongue once over his top lip.

Trowa threw him the finger immediately and slammed the door shut, clutching his rat protectively to his chest and giving it access to his clothes, which he immediately began gnawing upon.

It would be exactly fifteen minutes and forty-two seconds later when Trowa realized that Duo had abandoned him on rent-day with all of the money.

Heero sat again in the passenger side of Duo's dented-to-hell Camry, fully clothed with garments to spare this time. But time was becoming dreadfully short for him. Twilight was creeping ever so gently into the skies above, tinged a hazy pink by the wear and tear of pollution on the city's skyline, and it made his stomach uneasily turn in his stomach, his head ring with a distant, warning tone. They were traveling the emptied streets, in that rare moment when the city actually slept, between the retiring of the night owls and the awakening of the early risers, toward a neighborhood where the darkness was deeper and more crowded. Heero kept his eyes keenly trained on the blacktop in the headlights, avoiding the glances of the certain, pale people he could see hovering just out of mortal sight, in the spaces and crevices void of light.

Duo again turned to look at him, not meaning to blatantly do so but doing so anyway. He pursed his lips slightly. "Hey. You okay, Heero? You're looking kind of pale."

"When do I not?" he said dully, snorting once. "But yes, I'm fine. For the moment, at least."

"You wan' take my shades for a little while? It's getting a little bright out, and I know you don't like the sunlight. I don't want you exploding on me, pal."

The corner of Heero's mouth twitched. "I'll be fine. Anyway, that's nothing but Hollywood corrupting your imagination. It's an overly romantic notion. The truth is far less attractive. Far less neat and clean."

Duo's face turned a shade whiter itself as he looked over at Heero. "There's something messier than an explosion? Bloody hell," he drawled.

He shook his head and turned his gaze onto the windshield, watching the skyline slowly warming, drawing closer to dawn with every passing second. "A vampire dying of extreme sunlight exposure is somewhat similar to the Wicked Witch of the West's reaction to a bucket of water."

"You mean -- " Duo started, swallowing awkwardly as a corresponding image sprung to life in his imagination, complete with horrific screaming noises and a large crooked nose disappearing into a pile of sizzling green goo. He didn't know what quite to make of it, instead picturing the man sitting beside him, and quickly flushed it out of his mind.

"It's not good for white carpet," Heero continued, secretly relishing the reaction he could pull from the mortician, of how bright his skin could glow when he smiled, or filled with a flush, filled with liquid warmth. It was a shame that he had to go and ruin the moment by letting his lips escape his control. "It's almost as bad as what remains of those who slept without their native soil," he muttered quietly. He soon realized that the silence that followed was thick with unspoken concern on Duo's part.

"That's not going to happen to you, Heero, so don't even think about it." His voice was thick with some nameless color, and it made something warm twist within the vampire's chest, and only intensified it when he made eye contact, meeting a pair of violet eyes that simmered determinedly.

"I promise you, you're going to be just fine. We'll go to your apartment, get your dirt, and then we can conk out for a while at my place. God knows we both need it," he said firmly, his words growing even more reassuring when he looked him in the eye. He smiled. "Can't have you bleeding all over my seats again, now can I? And besides," he said, tilting his head happily, watching the road, "we're almost there."

Heero glanced out of the window and again laid eyes on the dark, uninviting apartment building that had once been his home, before he had died and ended up on Duo's doorstep. "Drive past," he said, eyeing it warily. There was no sign of life in the windows on the third floor.

"Rather shady looking place," Duo muttered. "Hell, the whole neighborhood looks it's got a set of teeth. I hate to say it, but I expected to find a few undead around here in the physical sense, but a few here are pretty deceased hygiene-wise."

"Yeah, well," Heero answered while they crept past, "I did say that we're overrated."

Once parked around the corner, safely doused in the shadow cast by the building, Duo caught the eye of his undead companion again, and asked, "You ready?" The vampire nodded a silent affirmative and both slunk out of the car in unison, stepping foot on the rain-damp sidewalk ringing the uninviting building of brick and crooked windows that seemed to almost sway and shiver in the wind.

Duo distinctly heard the rusted wrought iron beneath his feet give long-winded, eerie metallic squeals, an indication that the rickety structure holding him up was actually moving, but more disturbingly, he felt the shiver and sways reverberating up through the soles of his Chuck Taylors proving it. Beaded with water, the dark, forbidding metal that shivered somehow reminded him of the vampire he'd befriended -- in a word. The swaying staircase perched on a heaving building brought back fleeting memories of his thin, undead frame pressed against him, cold as death.

Undaunted, Heero was climbing just steps above him on this particular staircase on the fire escape, running his hand and over-sized sleeve over the water-beaded rail as he climbed seemingly effortlessly. Yes, considering he's dry as a bone of any blood, that might make him considerably lighter, he thought, a bemused grin coming across his face, painted in stark shadows by the obscured alleyway.

They continued climbing the fire escape until Heero reached the third floor, able to see the gleam of what little light there was reflecting off the window to his former home. He hesitated, his cold fingers fiercely gripped around the railing, and felt Duo accidentally pile into him unwittingly, his nose digging between his shoulder blades. Instantly, he heard Duo let out a noise of annoyance and he turned to look over his shoulder at him, secretly welcoming the contact of a warm, blood-filled body.

"Sorry," he apologized in a low voice.

"No, no," the mortician whispered and waved it off. Heero felt a little of his guilt relent, though it probably showed despite himself. "I'm fine. You're like a walking pillow, anyway, seeing how you're wearing nearly half a department store. Should'a been paying attention, tha's all. Now, come on, are we just window shopping, or are we going to break into your apartment?"

Before finishing the climb, Heero reminded himself to try that particular trick again sometime, pleasantly recalling the weight of Duo's body against his. When he finally did continue, the mortician took a wary backward glance over his shoulder at the darkened, narrow alleyway, out into the shadowed street without knowing why. The glimpse of a cat stalked out of the night and slipped as quickly and silent back into it a moment later. He followed Heero, and when he crouched beside him at the window, speaking in low, conspiring tones, he asked, "You're roommate's out for the night, right?"

Heero had his eyes trained intently on the lock just showing in the black, glassy reflection, his brows tightened together. "Hopefully."

Instead of raising his voice and letting out "Hopefully? You're just taking a chances that the nastiest hunter in all of New York isn't waiting for you to stumble into his living room?", Duo simply felt a corner of his mouth twitch into an uneasy grimace and stared at Heero as he stared into the glass.

"Window shopping already?" he asked quietly, eyeing him a tad skeptically. "If it's locked, 'Ro, I can pick it quicker than you can say -- well, say just about anything -- "

"Wait -- " Heero told him suddenly, his deep blue eyes taking on a foreign tint for a moment, as if entranced -- or rather, enchanting something -- putting a hand on Duo's wrist to make him pause.

And, as silently as a ghost and as suddenly as if he'd been summoned from nothing, to the window came a spectral-looking gray wolf, its face paled by the light drifting inside, making its amber eyes glow like coal in comparison. Heero smiled as Duo let out a cussword in surprise and jumped back a little ways, his hand gripping his shoulder tightly and turned to look at him and the look of stunned surprise he wore.

"Holy shit, 'Ro," he managed out, catching his breath. "You can't be serious! Is that your pet? But -- how did you -- what -- where did you get him? Where do you keep him? Jesus!"

"Duo, meet Fridolf."

The eerie image of the wolf in the window titled his head toward the mortician then, silent as death, and with a certain knowing expression that was severely unnerving to Duo, as if he could see straight through him, pierce him down to his soul just with a well-placed stare. Though, he reminded himself, dogs had a habit of growing to resemble their masters.

"Hi," he breathed timidly to the wolf, then turned to the vampire. "Seriously, Heero, what are you doing with a honest-to god wolf in your apartment? I don't think I've seen his kind down at the local shelter as of late, yanno."

His undead friend smiled at him briefly, in that sublte, nearly invisible way he did, and turned an affectionate look toward his pet. "In older days, vampires and wolves were as thick as thieves," he whispered. "We were inseperateable. Fridolf was my only friend, until I met you."

He said it in such a way that Duo wondered how old the eerie creature must be, with those ageless and discerning amber eyes, and then wondered for how long he'd been with Heero, then how long Heero had lived in the horrible, lifeless way that he had, cold, perpetually hungry and scorned from all living society.

Wait a minute... then how long will I be with him?

Duo shook his head quickly, clearing the thought before it stirred up the hoards of winged insects in the bottom of his stomach that appeared when it came to Heero and matters of time, of how close he was, and of how blue his eyes were. Luckily, Heero speaking to the wolf presented him with a distraction from that and he indulged eagerly.

"I'm glad you're all right. Unlock the window, please," Heero told his pet, his hand still on Duo's wrist, pleasantly forgotten.

Fridolf put his paws on the windowsill and reached for the lock, bearing his jaws wide to turn the small, bronze switch with his bleached white fangs. And, as promptly as he had accomplish his assigned task, he slunk back into the shadows, awaiting his master. He moved with a finely controlled strength of sinew that was very familiar to Duo. Heero threw the window open then, and tightened his grip around the mortician's wrist, inviting him to enter first. When Duo had slipped inside, he gave one last wary look over his shoulder and followed, entering the complete darkness of the apartment.

"Oh, great," Duo mumbled as he stood there, blind but not unaware of the continuing unnerving sway. "The goddamned floorboards move too?"

Heero was quickly beside him, his shoulder at his, the entire lengths of their arms touching. Duo swore, becoming momentarily unable to breathe, that he felt his fingertips brushing against the back of his hand. "I need to find my the container of my home soil. I'll be back as quickly as I can," he said in a hushed, calm voice. "Don't turn on the lights. Walker will be able to notice them from miles away. And keep watch."

"Listen. I know this darkness's just peachy for you, 'Ro, but I'm only a mere mortal. I couldn't see my hand in front of my in here," he whispered. "That sort of hinders the 'keep watch' thing."

Heero's hand clenched around his and placed them in the thick fur of Fridolf's coat, as the wolf suddenly appeared at his side, his canine head at the level of his hip. He started and felt Heero pressing gently against him as reassurance, steadying him in the blinding darkness.

"He'll help you," came the whisper, closer to his ear than it had been before. He closed Duo's hand around a fistful of thick fur. "I'll be back soon."

"You've already said that," Duo drawled in return, purposely avoiding the instinct to turn his head toward Heero's face with a grin slowly pulling at his face.

"Just making sure." He still hadn't moved.

"You know, if I didn't know better, Heero, I'd say you were whispering sweet little nothings in my ear for fun."

"Ah. I didn't know you knew better," came the response, then a squeeze around his hand, and he disappeared into the shadows. If he'd been able to think clearly, he would have been taken aback at the near mischief in his voice. Rather, Duo felt odd, light-headed, and at a loss for words for a moment. He could barely think straight above the flutter of winged insects just below his lungs, the heat on his skin left by a cold hand, and when he remained there, motionless, Fridolf gently nudged him toward the window facing the street to keep watch.

Heero found something bitterly amusing about lurking silently through his own home, carefully avoiding the loose floorboards as he skirted from room to room in the darkness. He was on high alert in the place where he had spent years, hungry and lonely, and he couldn't help but resist a chagrined quirk of his lips as he crept into his bedroom. It still hadn't been cleaned from the night before.

Heero stood momentarily in the doorway, again seeing himself lying beneath the thick comforter, still bitterly cold and sleeping miserably from hunger. It was nothing new. He knew, even then, that Walker was there. Being undead was nothing to be proud of, in his opinion, but certain abilities allayed that condition. He knew that his roommate was standing silently in the doorway as the sun was just setting behind the thick black curtains. He knew that Fridolf was no longer lying at the foot of his bed, lured into the basement to hunt rats for his master. He knew that his teddy bear still lay clutched to his chest, with a small, brown glass vial slung around its neck on a rusted chain.

What he didn't know as he slept was Walker was equipped with some crucial new information about his roommate.

Heero dully watched Walker leave doorway beside him, approach his sleeping figure, raise a gun loaded with a pair of silver bullets, and fire. He heard himself let out an involuntary gasp, thrown to the ground with a tremendous force, bringing the blankets with him to the floor. He heard his head strike the floorboards with sickening force and his dizzy groan of pain immediately following. A blossom of red was blooming on his shoulder. The bullet had only skimmed him, merely nipping into his skin, but a bullet was not a pleasant thing, and neither was a silver one. Heero continued to watch his illusionary memory play out before him without knowing why. He knew what happened all too well.

While the vampire was pulling himself off the ground, bleeding the blood of rats and stray cats, Walker strode over and fisted his hands around the back of his shirt and threw him into the wall, knocking over the first piece of furniture of many to come. Heero witnessed himself being attacked, too hungry and weak to fight back. Healthy vampires could have ripped a human such as Walker clean in half, but Heero was anything but. The last time he'd had the taste of a decent meal was a hazy memory in his mind -- years, decades maybe. Definitely not since he'd come to this godforsaken tenement.

He heard himself swear dizzily as he was finally knocked unconscious and slumped to the ground, pale and seemingly lifeless. He grimaced, not realizing how much blood he'd spilled throughout his battering, and scowled even further as Walker stood over him, chuckling and victorious. The vampire hunter turned to stalk out of the room to retrieve a kitchen knife, and Heero turned back to stare at his bleeding body in this strange recollection that he had never really had.

Heero suddenly knew that Fridolf had come into the room moments after his master's attacker had left, roused from his morning hunting by the sounds of a body striking the floor through the paper-thin walls.

The massive gray wolf silently padded over to Heero's own prone body, slumped against the wall, bleeding over his green tank top, head limply hanging over his chest. He cautiously nudged him with his nose, body low and waiting for Walker's return. When Heero didn't respond, Fridolf hesitated, then carefully closed his jaws around the worn, scraggy stuffed bear, which was splattered with red, one button eye missing. With a whimper at his motionless body, the wolf nudged the teddy bear toward him, trying to press it into his hand to wake him, but Heero knew that he wouldn't stir.

Walker's voice erupted from beside Heero, startling both him and the illusion of Fridolf, crouched at his own still body, bristling and growling savagely through the stuffed animal pinched in his jaws. The small vial filled with dirt that hung from its neck swung in the air, glinting off a fraction of light and immediately catching the hunter's attention. Walker's eyes lit up beside the corporal Heero with understanding and was immediately filled with an almost wicked conceited smile as he lifted the gun at the snarling wolf, barking at him to drop it.

Fridolf glanced back at his master, and Heero could see his indecision. Unsure whether to defend his master to his death, uncertain if he could kill the hunter, or flee with his own life and leave him to Walker's questionable mercy. Glowing amber eyes looked back upon the vampire hunter looming in the doorway, who fired without remorse, the bullet biting into the floorboards where Fridolf had been only seconds before. The wolf fled through the curtains and out the open window, teddy bear in jaw, and leapt the three stories to the ground.

Walker, with a laugh, made his way to the window, sneering happily as he peered out the opened window, expecting a pile of roadkill splattered thirty feet below. But all that greeted him was the sound of a cat yowling and feet disappearing into the darkening night. He swore, but soon turned toward Heero, lying prone on the floor, pale face contorted into a pained expression even in unconsciousness. Walker readjusted the knife in his hand and crouched down beside him, pulling out a crucifix from under his shirt and raising the sharpened blade for a task Heero knew all too well was coming.

He would have stayed there, watching this illusion, until he would have woken and fought and fled, exhausted and bleeding into the street, where Relena would find him, collapsed in front of her headlights, with a wolf standing protectively at his side, a teddy bear clutched in his jaws.

Heero's eyes widened. That was it -- Relena had taken it, and assuming Heero was dead and therefore no longer in need of a stuffed animal, had kept it for herself! But where had that frightened girl taken it?

"Shit," he growled, feeling another sting of pain as the dawn drew steadily closer. It would not be long before he needed the native soil, before the sun would rise again.

Heero was just turning to leave when Fridolf squealed, a shrill, pained yip, then stumbled heavily to the floor. Duo then let out a loud cry in the other room and then was stifled, filling him with a horrible flame of electricity.

Walker was home.

Duo hadn't heard the sound of a footstep, or the door swinging cautiously open behind him, for he'd been too busily staring out into the rain-slicked street. He was not so much as scrutinizing the glowing orange puddles in the pavement as replaying the impossible night over in his head to pinpoint just exactly why he couldn't stop remembering the moments when he saw the corners of Heero's mouth twitch upward, when he heard him laugh, when he would divulge his dark origins with a heavyhearted expression, when they would touch -- if by brief accident, or with dizzying purpose.

(But it was not sharp, diving teeth he felt after that long, drawn moment -- Heero cupped his chin with one hand, turning his face toward him)

He distantly felt his mouth move again to smile without his knowledge as he stared out the window, with Fridolf standing lightly at his side, gazing up at Duo with his piercing amber eyes as if curious to his thoughts. The wolf watched him absorbedly, bathed in the hazy orange cast from the streetlights just out the window, and even he, in all his long experienced years of life, could not hear or sense the second and unwelcome presence behind them. It quickly acquainted itself with him, though.

Fridolf careened suddenly into the wall ahead of them, his body crumpling to the ground as he let out a horrible sound of pain. Squealing like a kicked mutt. Duo's eyes widened in confusion for an instant, before he was also acquainted with the mysterious force. A rough hand clapped over his mouth, brutally clutching at his face and muffling his cry of surprise, and ramming him backwards, slamming him back against the chest of Heero's less amicable roommate with bruising force. Duo gasped for breath, suddenly dizzy and filled with panicked adrenaline, and found a knifepoint quickly jabbed to his neck. His arms flew up instinctively to protect it, but he had only twitched and the assailant had forcefully shoved the blade against his exposed neck, his white-knuckled fingers digging in and throwing his head back, leaving his mortal flesh to be intimately acquainted with a finely-sharpened six-inch blade.

Duo felt the blade point gently slicing into his skin, making an excruciating tiny cut as the pressure was continually applied. Walker's mouth was at his ear, heaving hot and offensive breath on the back of his ear. His voice had not one hint of hospitality, and Duo found himself not surprisingly disappointed it was not Heero's husky tone instead.

In fact, I'd rather not be forcibly held up at knifepoint either, but it just doesn't seem to be going my way tonight.

"What the hell," the hunter enunciated angrily, moving the knife tip around the soft circumference of Duo's neck, around the dancing pulsation of his jugular, "are you doing in my place?"

Fridolf was suddenly on his feet again and his growling voice filled the darkened room like an engine. Amber eyes glowed like fire and his jaws were open, lips grotesquely drawn back into a furious expression that would have sent any relatively sane person at least through the door, if not out of the building, but Walker simply snorted at it. Snorted as the tremendous wolf bristled, stiff-legged, eyes burning.

"What, don't you like me anymore, Fri?" he asked with a laugh.

Fridolf wasn't amused. He lunged, fangs bared, ready to tear the hunter from head to toe, tooth and nail, and Walker only smirked and slashed, slicing into the soft skin with a flash of his hand. Duo let out a scream of shock more than pain and clutched at his rent shoulder as blood began to throb out of it. He could barely breathe as the pain spread surely through his body, and the adrenaline in his head thundered away, fresh from terror.

"Ah, shit!" he cursed, gasping loudly as his fingers tried to close around the gash. "Oh, just fucking perfect! That's another shirt ruined!"

Walker jarred him. "You keep quiet," he told him, putting the knife against his unblemished neck, smearing his own blood over it. He looked down at the wolf and sneered. "Yeah, that's what I thought. You move and I'll slit this nobody pal of yours quicker than you can blink."

Duo squeezed open an eye. "Hey, pal, I'm not the fucking nobody here! Jeeze, you're more messed up than I even thought -- and damn, man, buy some breath mints!" he hissed, earning himself another sharp jerk. He grit his teeth, trying not to keen out from the pain of his fresh wound.

Walker kept Duo close and in pain, and one eye firmly on the bristling wolf as he shifted to turn his head ever so slightly, watchful. He carefully scanned his eyes over the darkened room. "You're right -- the real nobody is still somewhere in here. Now, where'd your little dead friend go? I know you came here with that rottin' piece of -- "

Duo heard Fridolf snarling a split second before Walker let off a scream of pain and staggered forward, but the mortician was staring straight at the wolf when the hunter threw him to the floor, blood streaming down the side of his head from the pearly white fangs of a wolf digging into it. One of pure white -- still airborne, claws digging into the hunter's shoulders viciously, and snowy muzzle stained red.

Walker screamed and toppled forward, dropping the knife that had been held to Duo's neck, but not before he grabbed a hold of the snarling creature on his back and threw it off him. Duo fell to the floor with jarring force, hissing in pain, and immediately clutched at his shoulder. Fridolf was at his side within an instant, gently tugging him up into a sitting position so he could dizzily watch the hunter collapse to the floor, bleeding.

But then where had the other one come from?

Walker was more resilient than Duo gave him credit, for he was on his knees, pulling a concealed gun from his boot within a few seconds. His face was suddenly very pale, contrasted by the brilliant red coursing down the side of his hateful expression. He whipped the gun up at where the wolf had fallen, sneering as he staggered up, panting.

"Don't you move!" he screamed at Heero, who was somehow lying on the floor there, the target of Walker's Browning. Duo's head spun abruptly again, though it was not from his painful wound. When the vampire shifted onto his stomach, obviously weak and his movements pained, the mortician first saw the turbulent blue eyes burning up at Walker with nothing short of hatred and then saw the blood dripping down the front of his face. Something in the pit of his stomach twisted in confusion and fear, but mostly pain, as his shoulder had begun to throb horribly.

"I'll blow you to bits, Heero," Walker snarled as he stood up. The gun was leveled evenly at the vampire, who laid on the ground and simply glared in return, but the hand that held it was pale and unsteady and the blood running down his face wasn't relenting.

"You know you can't fight me in your condition," he hissed, contemptuous and breathless. "You're so weak you can't even hold a transformation! You know you wouldn't survive a bullet to the head, because you're too chickenshit to feed and now you're on the brink of death, but you'll never be able reach it!"

"I'm not too 'chicken-shit' to face you," he growled, Walker's blood dripping down his lip as he curled it in hatred. His blue eyes burned in the shadows. "Leave him out of this. Face me without a hostage. Or am I still too much of a threat to you, like this?"

Walker snorted behind the safety of his gun. "You're scum, that's all. You should have never existed, bloodsucker -- why should I do what you ask?" He laughed, as if it were the best joke he'd heard in a week, and readjusted his sights, his entire body poised for the imminent gunshot. "Man, it's such a pain dealing with you now. I should have paid attention and just killed you off years ago."

Duo cut his narration instants before his finger began to squeeze the trigger with the nearest weapon possible as he stood and flew to Heero's defense, brandishing a single empty beer bottle from a nearby side table. He grunted and swung down as hard as possible onto Walker's tenderized head, shattering into thousands of green beads. The hunter screamed this time out of surprise, his cry slurred by pain, and crumpled to the floor again, barely able to prevent himself from collapsing completely. Duo could see bits of glittering green buried in his hair and dripping with blood. He hesitated, holding the jagged mouth of the bottle, momentarily watching the carnage, dizzying as his own bleeding intensified, his heart beating close to his tongue.

Heero staggered to his feet and rushed to Duo, instinctively putting a hand on his arm, asking if he was all right. Instinctively lifting and brushing his fingertips over the wound in his shoulder, pursing his lips together in a crooked grimace.

The mortician hesitated to answer, carefully raking his eyes over the vampire's face, over the blood on his mouth, but quickly seemed to break from his trance and breathe a response. "Yeah, I'll be fine. Let's get the hell out of here, 'Ro," he muttered, still unable to take his eyes off of Heero, whose only response was attempt an anemic smile and to take him by the wrist and pull him away from the groaning hunter, rushing for the doorway. The human, the undead, and the wolf fled from the blood-stained room into the hallway, Heero leading the way as they ran, without a moment's thought to who may have been sleeping behind the doors they passed.

As they neared the end of the hall, Heero suddenly snatched Duo by the wrist again and whirled into apartment 23B, throwing the door open. He stopped to hold it open for the mortician and his face paled, catching sight of Walker staggering out of the door at the end of the long, whining corridor. He saw the fury on his red and white face swell, spurring the Browning up into the air again, leveled remorselessly at them.

"Go!" he said, pushing Duo through the door. Fridolf rounded the doorway at a sprint, barely dodging Walker's shot. It bit into the wooden frame like a hammer, spurring Heero to slam the door shut, throwing the locks as soon as he had. When he whipped his head around, the mortician was standing at the window, grunting as he tried to open the stubborn thing.

"God damn it, does anybody fix anything around here? This whole place is a walking death trap," Duo complained loudly, his knuckles turning white as he braced his legs and shoved. The mortician bit down on his bottom lip in concentration, muttering curses all the while. Heero glanced at him momentarily, then back at the locked door. An instant later he was breezing by Duo into the empty apartment's bedroom, making the living human turn to look at him, baffled. "Heero?" Another blur passed him with the tattoo of claws on the wooden floor, only deepening his confusion. "Fridolf? What are you guys doing?"

"Relena must have gone for her early walk -- thank god," Heero muttered to himself as he strode fearlessly into the startling pink room, scanning it hastily, painfully conscious of the footfalls of his disgruntled roommate approaching, heavy and furious, down the hallway. "She would have only gotten hurt if she'd been here -- and fussed over me, anyway." That was when he crawled onto the pink comforter and began tearing through the piles of stuffed animals amassed there, throwing them over his shoulder as he went through the collection, frowning at each respectively.

"Heero, what the hell are you doing?" Duo asked as he watched, one hand on the windowsill, the other at the back of his head, scratching. "This ain't no time for a tea party with your dolls, ya know."

Fridolf trotted about the room, sniffing at the other piles of girly things Relena had collected in her frighteningly colored room, dodging the stuffed rabbits and unicorns that came pelting through the air as he moved.

The vampire picked up a mauve teddy bear, scowled at it, and sent it flying carelessly over his shoulder.

"She must have kept it. That's all she loved to do, collect those things," he said, his face set tightly, as dawn drew carelessly closer, a knowledge that ached deeply in him. He reached for another, pushing the last great pile over and scattering the playthings, when there came a pair of gunshots and a following crash as Relena's door flew cleanly off, the hinges shot through.

The mortician was in the pink bedroom faster than even Heero could register, slamming this door shut and cursing, "Shit, man!" as he dragged a salmon colored vanity across it, kicking the chair in front of the blockade for good measure. He looked up at Heero as he tried to catch his breath, still pained from his bleeding shoulder. He couldn't help but laugh at the vampire, kneeling on the fluffy rose-colored comforter, in his clothes, face covered in red, glaring at the stuffed animals as he scattered them to ever corner of the cramped room. "If I had ever been told I'd live to see this day," he muttered to himself.

Heero looked at him, as if he was going to say something, then his deep blue eyes widened and he lunged up off the bed, toward Duo. "That's it!"

Duo confusedly looked to both sides of him, then spun around to see a shabby old brown teddy bear sitting quaintly on the vanity he'd moved, its stubby arms matted and seemingly reaching out for Heero as he reached for it. Around its neck hung a quaint little vial of dirt, which was Heero's key to survival. He sighed as he picked it up, but he smirked tiredly as he held it in his hand, reminded of the absurdity of it all.

"Risking life and limb for a teddy bear," he said, running a finger over the button eye that remained. "It hardly seems sane when I think about it."

"Well, sanity's overrated, as you and I both know. So, if we've got what we came for," Duo responded, looking warily around the pink walls and finally at the blockaded door, "then how the hell are we going to get out of here?"

Heero looked at him silently, still oblivious to the bloodstain marring his face, then his head turned, eyes silently pointing toward a small metallic square breaking up the pink floral pattern decorating the walls. An old blouse hung halfway out of it, and more dirty clothes lounged in a pile beneath it. His eyes traveled back to Duo's in consultation in the shadowed, rosy room, and immediately the mortician's mouth gaped in shock, rebuttal even. He enthusiastically shook his head as he declared, "Oh, no, no, 'Ro, I am not going there."

"What's the matter?" he asked, smirking back. "You're thin; you'll fit. Unless you'd prefer to spend the night here?"

Duo glanced at him, holding a teddy bear tightly to his chest, with wolf standing at his hip, nearly half his height, mouth rimmed in red, and then tossed his hands into the air. "I can't believe this!" he muttered, stalking over to the opposite of the room, grumbling, "Fine, fine! But only if it's the only way out!"

Fridolf trotted ahead of them, putting the laundry shoot open, resting both paws on the metal cover as he looked over his shoulder at Heero and Duo. Then, at a nod from his master, leapt fearlessly into the narrow metal chute. The flap shut reactively behind him, and they could hear the distant metallic thuds as he traveled the three stories down, down, down. As soon as Duo didn't hear the wolf land, he began to grow nervous again -- "What the hell am I supposed to land on, exactly? Man! This is some plan you've got, 'Ro!"

The vampire stood close to him again, smiling only in his eyes, which compelled Duo silently to climb into the laundry chute, though begrudgingly, feet first. Heero followed him closely as the mortician shimmied in a ways, clutching tightly at the rim. He gave Heero a pointed look as he sat, body halfway into the narrow metal space, and pursed his lips nervously. "You sure you know what your doing?" he asked. "Well," he grit out, "what I'm doing, more exactly?"

Heero bent down as silent as a shadow and put the scruffy stuffed animal into Duo's arm, keeping their faces consistently close as he did so, running his deep blue eyes over his face. Duo swore he saw a smirk growing there as Heero told him, "Trusting me," and pressed his lips against Duo's abruptly, surprising the mortician so his eyes flew open and his fingers loosened. Their mouths ripped apart as Duo dropped in a blink of an eye, and Heero smiled as he heard Duo let out a groan of complaint below. The vampire gave one more glance to the blockaded door, noting with a certain anxiety that Walker had made no attempt to intrude, and jumped inside himself.

And after no ambiguous distance, fell into a large canvas hamper with a loud thump! and a pair of socks flopping onto his hair. Duo was beside him, pushing a pair of tattered gym shorts that were suspiciously odorous off of him as he tried to stand. Heero got to his feet first, taking Duo by the arm and pulling the both of them out of the knee-deep pile of clothing and into the cobwebbed laundry room on the first floor. Through the filthy windows, Heero could see the dawn reaching her colored fingers out into the lightening sky.

"Come on," he urged and he bolted for the door, with Fridolf close at his side. Duo staggered out, cursing, and followed at a similar speed with teddy bear in hand.

Heero threw the door open, leading to the dilapidated foyer, and as soon as he had stepped out into the hallway, the door leading to their freedom outside only a few feet out of their reach, he had jerked back inside, jarring Duo, who had just caught up with him. He barely had time to breath, "What?" before Duo heard the vicious bark of a gunshot and the wood only a few inches from the vampire's head bursting as an angry bullet bit through it.

"Damn!" Duo cursed automatically. He could hear Walker's vengeful footsteps thundering down the stairs just beyond the door, and could feel Heero's entire body tensing and shuddering, exhaustion competing with surging adrenaline and fear as he took Duo's hand tightly in his, cold and determined, and bolted for the door. He felt as if his arm might fly from the socket at first, and they sprinted for the door, as the space of only twenty feet seemed to stretch impossibly. The rug slipped beneath their feet as they ran, and Duo looked over his shoulder to see Walker stop and level the gun, face contorted and bloodied.

"Shit!" he barked, pushing Heero toward the door as another bullet bit into the wood, not far. His accuracy was improving, Duo noticed with a dry swallow.

Fridolf yipped and jumped clean into the air as another thunder crack came -- there was a neat hole in the wooden floor at his feet.

The vampire grabbed the doorknob and twisted it, throwing the door open into the dawning light as Walker's footsteps thundered down the agonizingly small corridor toward them, raising his gun again. Duo staggered onto the sidewalk just behind Heero and dashed for the dented shape of his car, parked on the opposite side of the road. The glowing orange puddles burst beneath their feet as Heero threw open the passenger side door, reaching it first, and slid hastily inside, breathless as he sidled into the driver's seat, Duo only a hair's breadth behind. Fridolf leapt into the car, then dove into the backseat. The mortician hesitated, and spun his head around at the sound of a fist pounding on the door, which had slowly begun to swing shut. It flew open again, and Walker sent a furious stare across the street, where he caught Duo's gaze for a moment.

A second was spent just staring, and then time burst remorselessly back into motion. Walker lifted his gun as Duo dashed inside, slamming the door. He squeezed the trigger, sending a bullet careening into the backseat window as Duo yanked the keys from his pocket and tossed them to Heero. As the shattered glass fell, the engine turned, roaring into life in the silent street, and as Fridolf cautiously lifted his head again to peer out the broken window, Heero's foot fell on the pedal and one dented Camry hauled off into the dawn, tires squealing.

They passed one streetlight -- then two, three... ten -- before they turned off, leaving the streets only in the hazy glow of morning dawning.

They passed one street, then another, crossed through one intersection, one green light, then another, all in silence. It was only punctuated as they slowly caught their breath, still coursing with adrenaline. Heero's hands, clenched around the steering wheel, loosened eventually and, even wincing in the brightening light, found himself stopping in front of Duo's door, the mortician resting his head against the window breathlessly. His warm breath clouded on the window as his breathing finally evened out, teddy bear clutched tightly underarm. His eyes opened tiredly and he blinked at the familiar image of his apartment for a few moments, doing nothing. Heero let out sigh, and leaned back in the seat after pulling the key from the ignition. His eyes drifted close in exhaustion -- looking bone pale in the dawning light -- but opened again as Duo suddenly let out a chuckle.

Heero turned his head to see the mortician gazing down at the scruffy brown stuffed animal he held, and smiling. He laughed again, louder this time, and laughed again, until he couldn't help it but to continue laughing, staring at the one-eyed teddy bear. Without really knowing why, Heero smiled and chuckled himself, leaning tiredly against the seat.

"That was some first date, Heero," Duo murmured, chuckling again. "Points for originality, at least."

"Well," he whispered quietly, eyes closed as his head tilted back, "I hope you won't be bored if the next one is just dinner and a movie."

The first sunrays were creeping over the horizon, spilling slowly out over the spread of the city, creeping over the skyline in red outlines, painting the streets orange, when Duo leaned over in a small car to rest against the vampire he'd brought back to life, felt an arm go around his waist, and rested his head on his shoulder, dead tired.

Cleaned up and changed, with the curtains drawn, Heero and Duo lay curled up in the mortician's bed, beneath a collection of thick comforters as the first early morning commuters were boarding their buses in the world of light outside, coffee cups in hand and on the brink of another workday. In the tangle of red and black sweaters and arms and legs that was their comfortable shelter, clutched to Heero's chest by two pairs of arms was a tattered little teddy bear with a vial of dirt around its neck. Both slept deep and peaceful like the dead as the world brightened outside, driving the creatures of the night into their darkened corners, their reservoirs of shadow.

At the foot of the bed, curled into a warm ball, lay a great gray wolf, remaining protectively at his master's side as morning crept over the city and tried in vain to peer through the drawn curtains into their room. Fridolf suddenly lifted his head, ears turned toward the door, and silently unfurled and slunk down from the bed onto the floor. The mattress moved as his weight disappeared, but both the living and the undead did not move except to sleepily draw closer, and the wolf navigated his way silently through the piles of blood-stained clothes left on the floor to the door.

Open a crack, he nudged it with his muzzle and peered curiously into the dim living room. Suddenly, his bright amber eyes lit up and a smirk came to his mouth, baring a wicked tooth as he spotted a portly rodent wandering across the floor and ran his tongue over his lips. He trotted out to pursue his newly found, succulent prey, and gently closed the door behind him with a paw, letting the vampire and the mortician sleep in peace, at least until Trowa would find what was left of his precious pet.

la morte.