Word Count: 61,049
Pairings: 1x2, R+1 (one-sided), 3x4, others
Rating: PG-16
Warnings: yaoi, POV, some OOC, language, sexual situations, continuation

Summary: Running away from darkness is sometimes just a way to avoid the sun.

It was late, nearly nine hours into the winter night cycle on L3, the colony cluster we'd been bumped over to after the loss of the Peacmillion. We'd landed a few hours earlier to celebration, but that had quickly given way to rescue missions and repair work. Those not qualified or cleared to work were being shuttled off in shifts in an attempt to restore order to the facility.

Lady Une and Lucrezia Noin took no time in burying the hatchet, assuming joint leadership positions without contest and, dividing the work between the two of them, overseeing the massive job of unarming and deactivating three armies. Under their watchful eyes, I can't imagine much that might have gotten overlooked.

Relena and few other political dignitaries had been carted off almost immediately to designated neutral ground where emergency sessions of government were being held to draft peace treaties and accords. I did not envy the former Queen's position; the next few weeks would be hellish for her.

Noin had delegated oversight of all salvage missions and armament cataloguing to Howard and whatever staff he so chose. Wufei got tapped to do some of the scavenging and even a few rescue operations, given that the design of his Gundam was uniquely suited to the task. I think he was just glad for something to do; he'd looked a little...lost during the initial celebration of the end of the war. Of course, we all knew a little of how he felt, but damn, the guy had absolutely nothing to go back to...what must peace mean for him? I felt for the guy and I was glad Howard had a job for him, just so he would stop looking so anxious.

Lady Une had placed Sally Po in charge of the emergency medical care and the outgoing shuttle coordination, in light of the fact that Sally had once headed up the military staff of an Alliance hospital and knew how to mobilize and arrange treatment and personnel. The staff doctors from Peacmillion, Libra and a few volunteer civilian doctors and surgeons from the L3 cluster we'd virtually taken over had their hands full with emergency surgeries and operations, so within a few hours, anyone with even a modicum of advanced field medical training was given a shift schedule and a provisional ward to conduct rounds in. I swear I've never before or since seen such a well-oiled machine of a field hospital.

Quatre and Hilde were among hundreds who were hospitalized that night, but Sally's men lost not a one. I learned later from Trowa, who had volunteered to trade off with Rashid working as Quatre's personal nurse, that Sally had deliberately made men from one army work on or with men of the opposing force and had also bunked former enemies together. The sheer sadistic perversity of it always reminds me of what an in-your-face attitude Sally has. In fact, it was probably that attitude more than any of her other qualifications that got Une's attention and respect, since they'd never met before that very night.

That same mandate of forced reintroduction did not stretch to us five Gundam pilots, however. Quatre was the only patient to receive his own quarters; most of the injured were lying on cots all through hallways, dining halls, stock rooms and empty auditoriums. Trowa had been given a cot to rest on in Quatre's room, and the Maguanac Corp was split up to guard each of us pilots in shifts, or to accompany us, as the case may be. We weren't in any real danger, but I think somebody realized that we were, basically, alone now and horribly outnumbered. I suspect it was Sally who said something; I think she really understood something about that whole guerilla warfare mentality of there being at least an illusion of strength and security in numbers.

But even the slight leveling of the playing field and the private accommodations designated for us, as well as not being shuffled into ranks and given orders like the rest of the soldiers, did not ease all of our paranoia. We were highly-trained one-man armies, after all; no way in hell were we mollified by a few locked doors and some armed guards.

So, I wasn't surprised to see Heero step through the supposedly locked doors of hangar 4F, the one set aside for the Gundams and the remains of their cousins, the Epyon and the Tallgeese. He'd been debriefed at some length, standing in as group leader since Quatre was in surgery. He'd then had his own medical examination, been patched up and summarily ordered to bed, but his adrenaline overload had found him prowling halls, wary and disbelieving of the sudden explosive end of the war. I wasn't too surprised he'd sought out my company, either. He'd just had a near-death experience, killed other people, and been handed peacetime like a salmon dinner when he'd ordered a grilled cheese sandwich. Now was not the time to be alone; left too much time for running in mental circles.

What did surprise me was that he came to sit with me on my open hatch instead of going to Zero to run diagnostics and work on repairs in companionable silence. Not that I was complaining...I needed someone to talk to.

I'd been at loose ends since landing, and while I'd helped Noin with some of the initial mobile suit "parking" and dismantling as well as a few other technical and mechanical odds and ends, I had eventually been cut loose to report to the medics for an examination. I'd visited Hilde instead, knowing I only had bumps, scrapes and bruises which I was more than capable of handling on my own.

After a little bit of time had passed, I'd been collected by my appointed Maguanac, who encouraged me to get some sleep in a room that had been set aside for Heero, Wufei and me. I'd gone in, hoping that maybe one of the other guys would want to play a round of poker or something to pass the time we all knew we wouldn't be sleeping in, but Wufei was still out with Howard and Heero was reporting in to Une. I'd promptly turned back around and claimed I had maintenance to perform on Deathscythe. I was walked to the hangar, but ditched my personal valet by pleading to his own exhaustion. I promised to change the password to the hangar as a precaution, something I'd fully intended on doing anyway.

I had been awake for over 52 hours at a stretch but, while I was definitely tired, I could not leave my Gundam alone unguarded. Not in a base full of ex-White Fang, ex-OZie, ex-Alliance, ex-fucking-everybody soldiers. Didn't sit right on the jittery nerves.

So, Maguanac bouncer gone, I scrambled the password to the hangar and effectively locked myself in, moving first to sit in my cockpit, but found that I couldn't manage to make it further than my open hatch door. Time passed like the movement of cold molasses, and I tried in vain to find something to do with myself or, more accurately, something I was willing to move in order to do. And so I sat, bleached unnaturally pale in the harsh industrial lighting and feeling very small and alone with only hulking metal war machines for company.

I knew I was feeling downright miserable when I couldn't even muster up some indignation that Heero had broken my new encrypted password for the hangar within a minute and a half. I watched him reset the password at the panel by the door before heading towards me.

"Hey, Heero," I called out, my voice sounding rather shaky and faint to my own ears.

"Hey," he returned, pulling himself onto the hatch and settling across from me.

People assume a lot of things about those who aren't bothered by silence, but I think that reflects more on the insecurities of the first person than on the anti-social tendencies of the second. Heero's not a chatty guy, but that doesn't mean he only communicates in grunts and clicks. I learned early that he has a very dry, dark sense of humor; not really twisted, but a sort of wry sarcasm. I found that Heero will do the grunting shtick mostly to irritate people, make them think he's not really paying attention. I can only imagine how it drove good ol' Doctor J up the wall during training.

That said, Heero does usually refrain from idle conversation, preferring to speak to a purpose and not to just establish his presence or make polite exchanges. So, I knew that Heero had something on his mind when he sat down, something he wanted to get out or bounce off of someone else. And it must have been a doozy, because he sat there just chewing on it for a good long while. I didn't mind too much -- I knew he would talk eventually and was perfectly content to just wait it out until he felt ready to try out his subject matter. I just watched and waited, content to study the fascinating figure before me.

I have found in my life that I have a tendency to watch people -- scrutinizing their features and movements -- and that this habit makes many of my subjects quite uncomfortable. The uneasiness probably has more to do with what flaws people perceive about their appearance and are always trying to hide -- or maybe they think I'm just mentally undressing them. But whatever the reason, I have to try and reign myself in from just openly staring, even when I'm curious. That's right, curious. I get fascinated with studying people's faces in the same way others might get nosy about taking in someone else's tattoo or smartass t-shirt. I just find the human form...interesting. Nothing erotic or morbid about it, just plain intrigue.

And, unlike so many others, Heero is never bothered by my gaze. He's either that damn comfortable in his own skin or he's just never entertained the thought of needing to appear attractive. I wouldn't hazard a guess at that one. I'm also not too sure what he makes of my unabashed gawping, but he never shrinks away or mentions it, just lets me continue my silent study, digesting everything I can.

So, as he mulled over his choice of words, I contented myself to look over him, taking in a few bandages and the way he was favoring his left arm slightly. His movements as a whole were fairly stiff, revealing what havoc the tumble through the atmosphere was beginning to play on his body. He'd been feeling sore and pinched for weeks, the poor bastard.

My eyes latched onto the faint scars from older burns and lacerations. Some of them were solitary souvenirs -- like a puckered scar just below his collarbone that I recognized as the entrance wound of a very familiar bullet -- but if you looked carefully, it was easy to see a pattern of white scar tissue dancing up his arms into the folds of his shirt and peeking out once again at the back of his neck, working their way up into his mass of hair. Those scars were the silent symbol of what was fast becoming the most widely documented of the pivotal events of the war: 01's self-destruction.

I had really only known Heero a scant number of weeks before he'd self-destructed. I'd barely begun a competitive sort of friendship with him before he made his most successful attempt at killing himself. Hell, I learned his goddamn name from an Alliance officer's transmissions over a radio channel in the middle of a firefight gone wildly wrong -- when the poor guy blew up an airplane full of the Alliance's good guys -- so it really wasn't like we were bosom buddies or anything. Sure, he was intriguing and I empathized with the guy, having found in our few encounters that he possessed a dry sense of humor and a pretty mean hook shot, but I'll be the first to admit that we certainly weren't exceptionally close. Mildly amused by each other and in the middle of a Gundam pilot pissing contest, but not close.

To be honest, I couldn't say that I was heartbroken when it happened. I was shocked and distraught, upset at the loss of a comrade and, from what I could tell, a great guy, but that pain had been nothing compared to some of the other horrors I had already experienced in my relatively short lifespan or those yet to come. To be more specific, I hadn't gotten past the curiosity stage where my friendship with Heero was concerned. Nonetheless, I bawled like a baby when I was finally alone, weeks later.

It's a rather moot point that any one of us would have done the same thing were we under the orders of our appointed Doctors. But it had been Heero's puppeteer who'd made an entrance, not my own beloved benefactor. I suppose the whole thing is a testament to the kind of balls J had, not to mention his stony faith that Heero would do as he was instructed and, I bet, his belief that Heero would survive, 'cause he certainly didn't have any problems believing it when his pilot finally reemerged. Kind of a scary thought, ain't it? I try not to think about it too much.

What really struck me about it was...how very little Heero deserved it. Yeah, it's a stupid reason. Bite me. It just struck me that, well, none of those guys deserved to be someone's symbol. We were just a bunch of kids. Hell, I was just a kid, as much as I hated to admit it at the time.

But in truth, we weren't just kids. We were trained soldiers who were fighting for some higher cause that our handlers believed in wholeheartedly. We were frontline warriors who'd throw ourselves on our swords if that's what our trainers thought was best. We'd go down fighting and use veritable burned ground tactics to keep our enemy from gaining anything of value.

So, in the end, what had killed me about Heero's self-destruction act was that this comrade of mine -- this great guy -- had pulled the plug on himself and we, his fellow comrades, had only been ordered to retreat. We'd not been able to aide him because we were all trapped, and so he went down for all the rest of us, to discourage anyone from pursuing our retreat.

You see, symbolism is for generals and politicians. For the soldier, there are only his comrades and his enemies. You want that in plain speaking? J ordered Heero to self-destruct so OZ wouldn't get their paws on a Gundam, and also because the OZies needed a wakeup call. It was J's royal "fuck you" to Colonel Une's cold-hearted tactics. It was a symbol for Treize of the dedication we had to our cause. J had his symbols, but Heero?

Heero self-destructed to protect the rest of us. OZ wasn't going to chase us as we left the battlefield if they thought we were all going to blow ourselves up. And to me, Heero was too nice of a guy to take the fall protecting someone like me. For Trowa? Sure -- I mean, the guy went back for Heero despite the dangers. Quatre? Are you kidding me? I think it's testament enough to the Arab's character that he has a freakin' army of guys following him into a lose-lose situation like a full-blown war with the Alliance and OZ forces. But me? I could not accept that someone as nice, intelligent and, well, valuable as Heero would try to protect me with their life, even while protecting the others. I'd always been a waste of sacrificial love, and I had a huge guilt complex over it.

So Heero imploding himself had kinda...stung in a way that brought up old memories and hurts. Heero Yuy pressed a button that had let the world see what kind of soldiers we were. And two weeks later, I had been securing a bag of flour in front of the false backing of my safe house's kitchen cabinets to shelter my "armory," concealing what kind of civilian I was. It was a painful sort of irony, the proverbial bad apple surviving all the brave warriors and saints.

I had spent the first week or so directly after the implosion with Quatre Rebarba Winner, of all people, after he'd found my hiding place about sixty miles from the rail line we had jointly decimated. And what a fucking mind trip that had been, hanging out with the heir to the entire stinking Winner conglomerate.

I bet you're wondering how an uneducated street punk like me knew who the Winner family was. Well, besides "Economical & Political Bigwigs 101" with good ol' Doctor G, I knew of the Winners from the Plague years. L2 wasn't the only colony with a Plague scare, and you better be sure a big company like Winner Corp. would be on the forefront of the vaccination industry when almost every employee stood a high risk of infection. But why would I care who made a vaccination two colonies away, especially if my friends never saw any of it? Tricky little bit of history, that.

You see, almost every colony has "legacies;" large communities of residents who had been around for generations. And, if you have a lot of legacy families intermarrying in a controlled atmosphere, eventually you're gonna wind up with what we slummers called "cleans." That is, grandchildren and great-grandchildren whose immune systems relax against certain dirt-side toxins and allergies. It's kind of like back when Europeans -- who'd been living almost literally in their own shit for the entire Dark Ages -- started settling all the Americas. Stuff the Europeans had developed immunities to because of constant exposure and evolutionary magic, killed off huge numbers of the natives in the lands being settled. One of the more grisly facts about history: Clean living does not a Roman Empire make.

On top of the growing population of "cleans," most colonies had originally been founded sans animals, and when various quadrupeds were introduced, they were "home-grown." Genetic engineering makes virtually flawless pets, and the kind of people keeping Fidos in space were the kind of people who could afford to make Fido in a test tube.

The only colonists who brought animals up from Earth au natural were those who settled on L5. As that colony was founded by wealthy Asian clans, religion and tradition exalted all creatures, even the uglier mutts. In other words, they weren't such big fans of the God-complex behind genetic engineering. This conscious decision to recreate nature instead of designing a "perfectly" controlled atmosphere eventually saved L5 a lot of the grief the other colonies went through trying to get all the "cleans" dirty again.

It's not like colony officials hadn't figured out after a certain point that their inhabitants were becoming more and more vulnerable to common Earth irritants. The big tip-off had been when a boarding school on L3 sponsored a class history trip to Earth, only to watch a slew of their students die from mosquito bites.

Now only a small percentage of human beings aren't allergic to the liquid a mosquito uses to numb the skin when biting its prey, but for the average dirt-sider, this is a mild allergy at worst. For a clean colonist, it proved to be a deadly allergic reaction.

I'm sure you can imagine the uproar at the discovery that evolution and isolation had taken their natural course, downsizing apparently unnecessary immunities to concentrate on the necessary adaptations. Nature's sensible; you gotta give her that much credit. Problem was, Nature hadn't gotten the memo that we wanted to go back and forth between our old environs and the new ones. So, the research for vaccinations began and strict shipping and traveling sterilization codes were written and enforced. The matter became generalized to the point that all such scares were cases of what was referred to as "space disease." They'd eventually gotten the vaccinations and import management down to a fine art around AC160, after the Alliance had firmly settled into the colonies, and it seemed like the genetic-crisis scales were pretty well balanced again. Only, nothing is ever perfect.

In the slums of L2, we knew what cleans and legacies were, even if few of us ever even dreamed about getting off of L2 and heading to Earth. Most of us were cleans, because there's nothing like a ghetto for stagnant gene pools, so having "dirt" in you became a item of pride. Men with "dirt" got more action; women with "dirt" were more likely to see an altar at some point in their lives.

What we didn't know was what a flea is. Or that a flea could carry diseases. So, the day a little girl from Earth got caught coming off her flight to the shuttleport on L2 with a bird feather stuffed in her backpack, not even the customs manager thought twice about it. Just put it in the trash for sterilization and moved on with her day. But the flea had already gotten away and bitten a "clean" who worked in the shuttleport.

The flea had been carrying a virus strain that normally only infected birds. The damn thing probably died in the shuttleport within 24 hours, as sterile as they kept the place. But the virus was already in at least one person's blood, mutating against a colonist's unique immune system. All the poor guy had to do was leave the shuttleport for the day and thus began the L2 Plague.

The virus spread slowly at first, thankfully not airborne, or we would have all died in a matter of weeks. Doctors initially treated it as a flu strain, but the virus only mutated further when subjected to the antibiotics. The hospitals uptown were just beginning to panic when one other nameless man in history decided to pick up a garden variety hooker down in my neighborhood. He hadn't begun to show symptoms at that point, but his girlfriend did in a matter of days. And with the sanitary nature of street living, it wasn't long before the whole colony was in an emergency situation.

We were hit hardest because of overcrowding and insufficient prevention measures, but the truth was that all of L2 was suffering. Without a government or conglomerate looking after us, L2 was facing eventual extinction. Everyone was very concerned, of course, but from a distance, clucking to themselves about the "sad state of things on L2." And then came the Winners.

Quatre's grandfather, Sakhr Winner, was still head of the company at that time, though his son was managing many of the day-to-day affairs by that time. Since the first great scare in the late 140s, Winner Corp. had put a great deal of money into a research and development lab for the sole purpose of producing immunizations against outbreaks of Earth diseases on the colonies. They gained experience combating the yearly surge of flu viruses and adapting some traditional medications for colonial use, and the lab cropped up in the news from time to time when spacer disease struck in one place or another with hypotheses, analyses and vaccinations. In fact, many of the shots administered to colonists when traveling to Earth or to people who frequently commute between the colonies and Earth were developed by Sakhr's hand-picked team. Mostly though, the lab had been an expensive pet project -- one that many of Winner Corp.'s board members advocated phasing out.

When the L2 Plague broke out however, Sakhr's bullheaded refusal to liquidate his "Gloom and Doom Clinic" into "more useful" pursuits was vindicated tenfold. Samples of the plague virus were sent from the frantic L2 doctors to Winner labs on L4 and the work began almost immediately. Within a few weeks, they had determined that the strain was most likely a mutation of infectious mononucleosis; glandular fever in laymen's terms. It took the scientists close to month to develop a successful treatment for the symptoms, and as soon as they could mass-produce it, Winner Corp. began shipping the medicine by the metric ton. Use of the medicine began immediately and the death toll dropped dramatically within weeks.

But then the Alliance big shots on Earth got...uppity. They raised cries of distress over the fact that Winner Corp. was selling the drugs directly to the colony's hospitals, without the involvement or oversight of the Alliance Consumer Goods Administration., the ACGA for short. Talk of lawsuits was thrown around, already fragile Earth-Colony relations sunk to a new low, and the Alliance military was deployed to strong-arm the Winners into compliance with pharmaceutical sales codes. A moratorium was issued on the sale and distribution of the drugs and all our life-saving medicine went under lockdown until the matter could be resolved.

That was when the epidemic reached its worst. Those patients in the middle of recovery crashed when taken off of their medicinal crutch. Spread of the plague shot through the roof, since people had begun to be less careful with hope on the horizon. Free vaccinations hosted by hospitals and the L2 General Assembly were suspended and the slums were helpless as Alliance soldiers successfully kept the black market from getting its hands on the proscribed medicine.

The moratorium lasted for weeks, nearly two months. ACGA officials took their damn sweet time with tests and paperwork, citing the original unorthodoxy of the medicine's release as the reason for the delay, as volunteer patients were studied both on and off the drug. Other drug companies lodged complaints that Winner Corp. was "monopolizing the industry" on L2. The ACGA investigated and allowed the protesting companies to pitch their own vaccinations in order to "ensure that the people of L2 received the best possible solution." Thus, the sick and dying of L2 became an industry in search of a solution. By all reports from over on L4, Sakhr Winner was seeing red.

It had been five months since the Plague had settled its fangs into L2 by the time the ACGA had finished compiling its report and we were suffering in every way imaginable. Our shuttleport was a ghost town; no one would buy goods made in the cluster, and even getting supplies shipped to the cluster was like pulling teeth. Food got pricier and we down in the slums began to starve. Necessity and desperation pushed my friends and me to steal, what with our caregiver unable to feed herself as well as her own children and then us on top of that. And it was on one of those occasions that we were out stealing food that we first met Father Maxwell.

He was a spry, beanpole of a man in his mid-fifties. He greeted our attempted theft with something akin to amused graciousness and I remember thinking -- even while the collar of my shirt had been employed as an impromptu collar in the steely grip of an Alliance soldier -- that he looked like the friendliest person in the whole world. He was well groomed, as was to be expected, but it didn't make him look like the military officials with their short crops of hair and rigid demeanor.

Looking back on it now, he was just a nice man, a grandfatherly sort, but at the time, I knew nothing about good men or grandfathers. Women were nice, but in my limited experience, men were either the brusque bullies who smelt of liquor and grease, wandering aimlessly like lifeless husks in search of a hit or a willing woman, or were soldiers, thus falling into a whole other category of mean-spirited. But Father Maxwell? He was an even-tempered man who radiated kindness and generosity. I would have believed you in a heart-beat if you had told me that he was Jesus, and not merely a servant of the faith.

He ascertained our situation quickly on that street corner and, putting on a stern look that didn't reach his eyes, he convinced the lazy soldier that he would see to our punishment, taking the responsibility off of his hands. The soldier agreed all too quickly and we were left to explain ourselves to the Father, who led us to the church with the promise of a full meal. There he pieced together our foster home arrangements from what we got around the food in our mouths, and within a few days' time, we were all moved into the mostly uninhabited convent quarters and placed under the tutelage of Sister Helen. I will probably never know what exactly transpired to have our guardianship transferred so quickly, but I suspect that Father Maxwell's offer to take us in was sweetened a little with some cash under the table, since our caretaker did earn some steady wage from the L2 government for looking after us.

And the Father's generosity did not end with our particular group of orphans. He began looking into the state of all foster homes and orphanages in the surrounding slum areas and, where he deemed it necessary, he extended an invitation to take more children into the custody of the church. Very few declined to give up their charges, as the depression and the plague squeezed down on us all, the already paltry government stipend the homes received becoming a drop in the ocean of expenses.

But even in the cleaner living conditions and controlled environs, the Plague was only briefly delayed from rearing its ugly head. It started with a cold. Really, it was that simple. Bobby, one of the newer kids, came home from the primary school one day with a cold. By the next day, he was bed-ridden with a soaring fever and his throat was closing up by the time the doctor arrived midday. We were all brought home and quarantined, but it was really only a matter of time.

The worst of my symptoms had been a runny nose. Bobby was sustained for two weeks on an IV until he slowly began recovering, but others weren't so lucky. Solo, my closest friend from my time at the resource center, was one among the many who succumbed to the illness. Sister Helen and Father Maxwell, as well as a few of the other nuns, took turns watching over the sick children and, occasionally, each other. Father Maxwell developed a fever, but recovered in a few days' time.

It was four weeks into our own struggle with the epidemic that Winner Corp. succeeded in overriding the embargo on their medicine. Sakhr Winner himself came to help deliver the crates that had been sitting in cargo bays as well as new shipments. Solo was gone by then, but a few of the others at the church were holding on by threads. Not many months more and the Winners had stamped out the L2 Plague, creating vaccinations that other colonies paid millions for, but that L2 received for free.

Of course, I didn't understand why I'd lived while so many of my street friends had died, waiting for the vaccine trickling in past the red tape at a snail's pace. I was only eight; "dirt" meant nothing more to me than a slang word for someone from Earth. I didn't yet understand that "dirt" was desirable to ward off space disease. It had been Father Maxwell who had explained to me one night after a particularly bad nightmare that someone relatively recent on my family tree had to have been a ground bounder. I was a "dirt." And, despite Father's best intentions, that revelation had only made me feel worse; like I'd cheated somehow. With a few more years and a Gundam pilot's education, I'd accepted that genetics were what they were and that mine made me useful.

But though I've since put the circumstances of my survival behind me, the confusion and horror of that time still haunts me. Disease is an intangible thing for a healthy child, so death was that much more beyond me. The dawning understanding of disease and death most children experience had been denied me for a gruesome crash course.

And while vaccine and medicine was equally arcane to an 8 year old orphan, I think there will always be that hopeful flutter in the pit of my stomach associated with the very name "Winner." It had been one of the first words I'd ever learned to read, it had been the encouragement of renewal, and it had been a million thoughts and childish prayers. I was just young and innocent enough then that I couldn't indulge in complexities of emotion to be both resentful and thankful for the Winners' sometimes impeded attempts at medical aid. I was also too young to really understand the concept of "us and them" more than it just applying to the Alliance soldiers and us slumming civilians.

Really, when I'd just been a kid running around on the streets of L2, it had never been in my head to question our conditions, our lifestyle. It had never occurred to me that vaccinations were easier to come by on other colonies. It had never occurred to me to question why we had to be saved by a benevolent outside party. That was just the way it was. But when G had taken me in for Terrorism 101, part of my practical education had been a crash course in socio-economic and cultural influences across the Earth and the colonies. I had learned, for the first time in stark blacks and whites, that the world I knew wasn't all there was and, still reeling from the trauma of the events of my childhood, my anger had fueled an intense desire to understand why L2 was what it was; why my life and the lives of those I'd cared for had been so difficult and dangerous.

Initially, my purpose was to find the injustice, to search for my vindication in someone else's cruelty, in other people's neglect. I had finally reached that much coveted age of 12, but I had felt like someone had ripped from me what I felt I deserved, perhaps more than I ever understood I deserved. In my immaturity, I searched for a scapegoat.

There were many people I could have accused and countless charges I could have laid at their collective door; charges of murder, of neglect, of greed, of sins against the humanity of L2. But the longer I had spent digesting my colony's history, the more I understood that no one had wanted Solo, Sister Helen, or Father Maxwell to die. No one had set out to make L2 a shit heap. It was only the generally good intentions of flawed humans that stared back at me when I tried to account for the slums of L2 and the plague that had ravaged the colony.

Of course, there were true villains, like the Alliance soldiers who had done the unthinkable to my first home, but even then there had been someone Earth-side who had thought they were doing the right thing by sending stricter, tougher men to the mean streets of L2. He or she hadn't known that those same soldiers would kill innocent people, would be so jaded by bloodshed and violence that they had lost compassion for civilian lives. I learned that all the things I wanted to seek revenge for were merely effects of understandable -- if repugnant -- causes and rational patterns and circumstances.

When I realized that, sitting in G's facilities with records and historical documentation strewn on a table before me, I think I let go of the last of my lingering self-righteousness. Wearing Father Maxwell's old cross was no longer a symbol of a wrongdoing I wanted someone to acknowledge and admit to, it was a treasured piece of my history, a part of something that had fallen prey to consequence. There were good guys. There were bad guys. All of that depended on choices and results.

I made my choice then and there to be an emissary of the condition of the colonies, no longer believing myself to be a cursed omen of loss or a vengeful angel of ruin, but beginning to understand my role in an impending war and the choices that would soon be mine to make. I would be a merciful angel of death when necessary, taking the lives of those enemies who put themselves in my hands, all in an attempt to prevent further, more desperate suffering and the potential creation of another place like L2 with more innocent victims like Solo, the kids, and my surrogate parents. Well, I'm not really being fair. Like I said, nobody set out to create L2 in the way that it ended up.

L2 was originally sponsored by an international company down earth side that had been worth well into the trillions. L1 and L3 had been funded similarly, via coalitions of powerful companies and allied nations. Of course, L5 and L4 had been famously sponsored by several influential Asian clans (primarily those of Chinese descent) and the massive Winner family (who had money going back into the ancient Ottoman Empire) respectively.

L2 had been intended as a business hub between the other four colony clusters, a colony of trade and commerce. The entire colony was designed for that purpose, downplaying major residential districts and constructing a huge spaceport and supporting facilities. It would have been a tremendous resource to the other colonies had it ever been completed and the vision ever brought to life.

L2 had been about eighty percent completed when the company that had sponsored the construction skidded itself into a disastrous tax fraud scandal. Despite valiant efforts to stay afloat and unmarred by the trial, investors lost faith in the stock and sold off shares like hot cakes. It was only a matter of time before the business pulled out of investment in its fledgling colony venture. It tanked completely a few years after that.

Inhabitants, primarily workers and small business owners who had been looking to make it rich when the new colony opened its doors to trade, were stranded on a colony which, though fully-functional to live on, was littered with unfinished buildings and lacked the bells and whistles that made other colonies like L4 appealing. Few people wanted to move to an unfinished colony so retail prices had sunk dramatically, especially after L4 began attracting the high-volume traffic L2 had been designed for. Small businesses and retail chains resisted supporting installations where there was no proven profit margin. Large businesses were uninterested in completing the work and funding the expensive ad campaign to once again make L2 enticing.

The port did eventually open with some government funding and lots of pro bono work from the workers and spacers that had already moved to the colony. Areas around the ports flourished modestly, but could not steal back the business L4 commanded.

Eventually, a few small retail chains and private business men came and set up a mini-governing system so that L2 could keep the lights on and the systems running. Some of the economic depression lifted, but not before some of the districts that had never been completed became ghettos for those who had not been able to keep their heads above water when L2 lost value and for those who had, after retail prices had dropped, intentionally sought out L2 to hide from debt or the law. The colony's new governing body, desperate to accommodate the port and its tenuous grasp on prosperity, quarantined the ghetto areas and petitioned the overburdened earth-side government to invest money into these areas in order to protect the interests of the colony.

The Earth-Sphere had interpreted "money" as "policing" and...well, things just sort of stayed the same. The rest of L2 eventually came out from under the intense financial stress and managed to achieve enough success to maintain steady and thrifty trade.

However, the ghettos and the primarily blue-collar industries as well as the minimal residential accommodations kept a damper on a potential influx of citizens looking to set up house and home on L2. And, of course, that sort of stagnation would be what eventually facilitated the L2 plague.

I wondered absently if Heero had ever gotten vaccinated against L2 plague, or if he'd been dirty enough to avoid space disease. I knew that he'd been trained somewhere on the L1 colony cluster, but I really had no clue about the rest of his life. To be fair, he didn't really know much about mine either, except that I had been brought up in the slum areas of the L2 cluster and that I had, at one point or another, been under the care of a priest. And he only knew that because he had wanted to know where on earth I had gotten a set of clericals from. He'd been guessing that my flair for the dramatic had taken me to a costume shop for something edgy. On that score, my wounded pride for Father made me correct him. But really, he didn't need to know anything more than that I was wearing hand-me-downs.

I wondered if someday I wouldn't feel like I had to guard my sentimentalities from the guys I hoped were my friends. I wondered if I could tell them about Father Maxwell's clericals and how the fire chief had given them, as well as Father's bent and scuffed sliver cross, to me at the funeral, under the false presumption that I would place them upon his casket to be buried with him. How I'd scavenged through the remains of the convent and found Sister Helen's daily journals. How I'd pilfered a pew Bible that had been only lightly singed. How I had fastened slivers of the rose window glass onto the inside cover. I wondered what they would think of me if they knew how hard I'd held on to those few good years of my life. I wondered if they'd had to do the same thing in other ways.

They all had their little quirks, little things that meant something to them and nobody else. Trowa's pull to the circus when he seemed like the most serious guy on the planet. Wufei's pet name for his Gundam and his almost neurotic obsession with the maintenance of his sword. Quatre's persistence in wearing his dorky-as-hell goggles, even while we were in space and far away from the sands of the desert. Heero's intermittent use of Japanese in conversation, even though we all spoke Common. I suppose we all had our little, innocent skeletons. Well, maybe not really innocent, but in relative terms...oh, nevermind.

Heero was fidgeting, which pulled me from my reverie about the very little I had to go back to now. I was a bit surprised he was ready to talk; it had only been about five minutes...hadn't it? I glanced at my watch. Um, make that thirty-five.

"Sorry, bud. Didn't mean to zone out on you there."

He shook his head slightly, looking at me with a little bit of concern.

"It's okay. Are you alright? They said you never checked in with the medical team for a physical examination; were you injured in battle?"

I chuckled a little bit. Heero Yuy, closet worrywart.

"Nothing but some bumps and bruises. I didn't have anywhere near the wild ride you and Winner had today. Not to mention Chang."

"You were lost in thought, then. Did you get a communication from your Professor G? Is there another threat?"

"Down, boy. First of all, I don't think any of us will be hearing from the geezers until we reach the pearly gates. They went down with Libra, as far as I know. And if there's another damn army out there somewhere, they better just sit the hell tight. I am not in the mood to be chasing down another group of fucking idealist crazies. They ain't even imagined the God of Death like the pissed off, sleep deprived one I'd be if they decided to crash the party."

He subsided, processing this information, grunting a little in amusement at my admission of being both tired in general and tired of trying to get all the mental patients with mail-in philosophy majors to settle down and stop waging war in order to end war. I know how frustrated he must have been trying to slap some sense into Milliardo earlier today. I think I would've just given up on reasoning with him, myself. Just gone for the throat and thrown reformation of the schizo to the wind. But that's why they call me the God of Death and not the Perfect Soldier.

"You do look tired, Duo," he told me kindly. It warmed me to hear the genuine concern for my well-being in his voice; under the circumstances we considered normal, there wasn't much time to worry about your own -- not to mention anybody else's -- health.

"Yeah. I sure hope Relena gets it all hammered out down there, 'cause once I hit the sack, you won't be able to wake me up for a week. So, if the shit hits the fan, Heero-buddy," I clapped my hand to his shoulder to reinforce the deadpan, my words oozing sarcastic solemnity and earnestness as I tilted my head just so in order to imitate the pose of many a movie hero, "you're on your own."

He laughed then, a bark of pure delight at the absurdity of what I was doing. I grinned manically in return, slightly embarrassed at my own antics, but also reveling in the levity that same ridiculousness had achieved for our conversation. Heero's nervousness had melted away and now we were equal partners in whatever confidence it was he wanted to share with me, his fear of disapproval or humiliation put aside. We took a moment just to breathe off the amusement and to do that post-laughing thing where you simply stare at each other, smiling like freakin' loons, just sort of absorbing the other person's presence.

And that was when the peace set in for us. I could almost hear it clicking into place in our respective minds. We weren't stealing that moment from our missions any more; we didn't need to buckle down and get back to work sorting out a conflict that was spiraling out of control. We really could just sit there and laugh and breathe and just be for as long as we felt like it. It was a startling thing to come to grips with, more so than the fact that we were all out of a job.

He spoke first.

"Did your Professor tell you what to do...? After...?"

I leaned back, resting my head against the cool metal of my fighting machine, tilting my face up to look into the bright glare of the hangar's industrial lighting. I knew what he was really asking, but I chose to answer the literal question and not the one we were both too afraid to voice outloud: "What the fuck do we do now?"

"Nope. The screwy bastard worked more in the way of reverse psychology than suggestions or orders. He liked to put things on the table and let me figure the hell out what to do with them. So....cutting the long story short? No. With G joining the heavenly choir and all, I'm at loose ends. Although...I do have some funds he set aside for me. Y'know, my stipend for repair parts and incidental expenses. And, of course, I've got 'Scythe here."

He grunted in a way to indicate he was still actively listening, but there was nothing really to be said about my conditions upon G's death; they were what they were. I had to wonder about Heero's set up, though. J had shown distinctly more interest in Heero's day-to-day functioning than it seemed any of the other scientists had with their respective pupils. Perhaps J had left orders for him and so now Heero was trying to find out if those orders were unique or generally issued?

I had the feeling that Heero had begun ignoring some of the little things J had either taught him or ordered him to do towards the end of the fighting, especially if he knew that he was the only one who was under those orders. A sort of stubborn teenage rebellion, if you will. And, to be perfectly honest, I think J was sort of tickled that Heero was acting on his own initiative more anyway. Not that he really had a lot of choice; the good ol' scientists were jailed for a considerable amount of time there.

"What about you, Heero? Any big plans to celebrate your retirement?"

He chuckled a little and smiled up at me before looking away towards the heavily damaged, but miraculously whole Wing Zero.

"No. Nothing beyond finding a place to store and repair Zero."

He looked at me in a manner that spoke of both paranoia and a stubborn refusal to bend. Evidently, he wasn't going to wait around and see what the new government thought should be done with his suit, not that I blamed him. I was planning on making off with Deathscythe as well, finding it a nice hidey-hole, patching it back together, and then locking the door behind me. I told him as much and the tension that had crept into his expression drained away. I grinned, hoping to make light of our nervousness when it came to official...people having an inordinate interest in our doings.

"Hey, if they come knocking I'll just tell 'em all to bite me. I ain't letting any bureaucrats poke around in Deathscythe, even for reference. I don't trust the bastards any further than I can throw 'em. Your Relena not withstanding, of course."

He snorted at the possessive qualifier.

"I didn't know I kept Relena in my back pocket."

"Really? The way she's always popping up wherever you happen to be would suggest otherwise, Mr. Yuy."

He laughed, but didn't give up protesting my analysis of the situation either. I wondered at that, but brushed it off as embarrassment; I mean, even if they did like each other, they wouldn't have had any time to really start dating or anything. All the more reason to tease him about it then, I told myself, whilst the giddy elation of a mutual crush was still tempered with nervousness and anxiety. It wouldn't be too long before they were comfortable in their love and then the teasing would be directed at me, the cranky bachelor. Better to vent a little of the bitterness off before we reached that stage than to snap at them later for unintentionally wounding my pride.

You see, I too had a crush I'd been harboring until the storm of war passed. Only mine was an awkward little, one-sided thing. And it had its rather unruly eyes set firmly on the boy who sat before me. The boy who was -- whether I liked it or not -- quite rapidly becoming attached to the hip of one Relena Peacecraft. And he was, apparently, quite comfortable with that reality.

I don't really know when I had begun to admire Heero a little more than what was considered normal amongst friends, but I had and I did and there was really nothing to be done about it.

Besides, it wasn't like it was an all-consuming thing. I was quite adept with simply pushing my strong feelings for Heero to the back of my mind so I could get on with my life. I had learned at a young age, after all, that pining after someone did absolutely nothing about how much food you had in your stomach or where the hell you were going to sleep that night. And while the romantics may be able to survive on lost-love alone, I wasn't anywhere near that maudlin.

"I don't know what I'm going to do, man. I've got some stuff I'd like to...get straight in my head, y'know? Before I go out into the big, wide world as whoever the hell I am."

I was rambling and I knew it, but Heero was sitting quietly, just listening, and I found it somehow comforting that there was someone at hand who knew what I was talking about. We couldn't just sign up as veterans or ex-soldiers for the Earth-Sphere census. We were teenaged boys and ex-Gundam pilots; we had been trained with the understanding that we could die at any moment, our wartime actions had been coordinated -- not by an army -- by a handful of rogue engineers and scientists. We were unique in a sort of frightening way. We weren't just at loose ends; we were floating off through space without a lifeline to pull us back in, just drifting until we collided with something.

"I don't know what to do. I don't know where the hell I'm supposed to go. It started off really simple -- sort of a whole lone wolf kick, but now there are all these...people around and they all want something and I just want to scream. Tell 'em all to fuck the hell off and go bother somebody else. Don't call us; we'll call you. Sorry, I'm out for getting-my head-on-straight; will be back at: whenever-the hell-I feel-like-it. Am I the only one who's claustrophobic with all these...Gundam groupies? Nah...Wufei hates it, I'm sure. The kid hates everything that's even remotely unconstructive."

"I'm not sure he'd take being called a 'kid' well," Heero ventured. I gave him a lopsided smirk in return.

"No, he probably wouldn't, but then again...he'd never have to know, would he?"

I sent a pointed look Heero's way and he grinned back, acting for all the world like he was going to run off in the next minute to report in to Chang. Then he sobered and I felt my grin falling away as my expression began to mirror his own.

"I've never known any sort of life where I didn't have something that needed to be done. To be left completely without instruction, except for the obvious need to secure Zero, makes me uneasy. I do not even know from what source Doctor J received his intelligence so that I could continue his investigations and reconnaissance. I have never felt powerless before, but I am beginning to believe that I am."

"Now don't say that," I chided, "You just stopped a chunk of space station weighing God knows how many tons from creating a veritable nuclear winter on Earth. I think that makes you anything but powerless..."

I saw the hamsters working behind his eyes and I amended my statement.

"But I know how you feel. It's a different kind of weakness. Not the kind that keeps you from physically doing anything, but the kind that makes you think you can't do anything. I don't know which is worse, but both fucking suck."

He grunted in a pitch that made it seem like he agreed with me, but didn't elaborate on what I had said.

We sat for long minutes, just staring out across the hangar. I couldn't venture a guess at what he might have been thinking about, but I was just trying to catch up to every one of the frayed threads of thoughts flitting around my mind and find a way to sort through them all. There was no particular thought that I had energy enough to really examine in depth, but the swirl of them, the sheer staggering number of concerns that were popping up like some sick mental version of whack-a-mole, were giving me a headache all on their own without any extra effort on my part.

"I don't want to go back," he said all of a sudden, breaking the reverie.

I did not know quite what he meant, but I was hesitant to ask for fear of him dropping the subject or backtracking once he really realized what he had said. When he said nothing more for several long moments, I feared that he was going to plug up the thought anyway, but then he tentatively continued.

"I need to complete the remainder of J's work if I can, but afterwards...I do not wish to continue living my life in that fashion."

He was clearly frustrated with his own ability to articulate what he meant, so I kept silent, allowing him to try it out anyway he needed to in order to get his point across. Finally, he came up with an explanation he was happy with.

"I do not want to be scared of not knowing what to do, anymore."

I snorted softly and smiled at him kindly when he looked my way.

"Nobody wants to be scared or unsure, buddy. The whole object is not to let the fear keep you from getting the things you do decide you want. And don't worry about that either. Things will always be popping up and, every once in a while, you'll see something you really want. Then you'll go after it and, given your tenacity, you'll probably get it. But you don't have to know what all the things you'll eventually want or need are right now. Living your own life is a damn chaotic thing, but you have to just let the beast be what it is."

"Fight the battles you can win?" he quipped with a lopsided almost-grin and I beamed back at him.

"Exactly."

He looked away again, searching out all the shadows of the room with a laziness of interest that belied his usual paranoia. We hadn't found the perfect solution to the problem and neither of us would have claimed that our suspicions and doubts had been soothed by the knowledge of what we should do, but we had at least sounded out the strategy we would employ in our fight with the cosmos.

Nothing else of significance was discussed, though we stayed a little longer in our manufactured sanctuary, bantering about what we knew were inanities. I think we were both aware that these were the last moments we would spend together for quite some time, if not for forever, and so we were stretching it out until the inevitable could not be avoided. Best friends in war, no matter how close, do not necessarily stay together when the job is done, and we both knew that we would be heading in separate directions when we left L3, though I doubt he knew where I was intending to go any better than I knew where he would be heading.

Finally, we agreed that we were tired enough that we should probably go get some sleep, neither mentioning that we wouldn't have slept without the other there to watch out for our backs. I grumbled that I would have preferred to just sleep in the cockpit of Deathscythe for the night and Heero rumbled in wholehearted agreement, both of us knowing that our Maguanacs would never allow it.

We made sure to reprogram the locks of the hangar doors behind us on top of activating the highest security locks on our individual Gundams' systems before walking together back to our designated dorm room, purposely -- without verbally agreeing upon the tactic -- taking a winding route through less populated hallways with shorter stretches between turns and intersections. Once a soldier of guerilla warfare, always a soldier of guerilla warfare.

Once we made it to our quarters, Heero unthinkingly kept a look out as I entered our password to access the room and then pushed the door in, holding it open against my back for him to enter. It was a classic you-watch-my-back, I'll-watch-yours maneuver and we had not thought a thing of it while we were in the middle of the little ritual. Things like that make me wonder how ready I actually was to face the rest of the world and the life of another random civilian.

Once inside, we talked very little, just went through the basic bedding down process, selecting cots on opposite sides of the room from one another, a tactic employed so that a gunman entering the room by the door would only be able to shoot one occupant before the other could react. Like I said, we weren't going to be losing our training anytime soon, especially in a building swarming with all our old enemies.

We said our goodnights and I know that I lay awake for quite some time in the well lit room thinking about the events that had transpired in only the past few days that now felt so very far away as I was trying to decide what tomorrow would have in store for me. Nothing like the future to diminish the weight of the past. I'm not really sure when Heero fell asleep or if he even was asleep, but I nodded off at some point and woke to find him gone, blanket folded and pillow placed atop it in a neat pile on the cot he had inhabited the night before. I didn't need to ask anyone; I knew he was long gone from the cluster, Wing in tow.

Nine months later, I was on L2, walking back to my apartment.

It had been five days since I'd last been home and, despite my constant paranoia of being discovered to be an ex-Gundam pilot and having my anonymity compromised, I could feel my shoulders roll forward into a lazy slouch as soon as my feet passed through the door from the stairwell to the fourth floor hallway.

My black boots scuffled roughly over the deteriorating brown and burgundy carpeting as I moved down the dim hallway to my apartment door. I smiled warmly at the chipping gold paint on the fake brass numbers set neatly below the peephole and I wearily riffled around inside my duffel's side pocket for the key card and metal bolt key for the top lock.

It was barely nine o'clock, but jet lag and a four hour time difference put my mental clock at one in the morning, and I had only had three hours of sleep in the past four or so days -- it was kind of all running together by then. Home had never looked so good before, not that I'd had a lot of experience with the concept.

I'd lived places before and even felt safe and secure in a handful of them, but having your own space and making your own damn hours is a little bit of a different concept. Hell, if you'd have told me when I was five and living in the shelter that I would not only reach the age of sixteen, but would be off of government support and sleeping in my own apartment with my own damn bed, I probably would have kicked you in the shin. As a child, I thought being 12 years old was as good as it got, a view that was perhaps a result of my awe for Solo's more finely honed street sensibilities combined with the perceptions I had of most anybody I ever saw older than about fourteen.

After twelve, you became ugly under the crushing weight of the environment and the harsh face of whatever vice you chose to alleviate that pain, however briefly. After twelve, everyone was angry, tired and driven by strange, almost frenzied impulses to do what Solo had called "the two-man squat," a rather grotesque and painful looking thing that made people even more angry and sometimes violent. After twelve, the street bosses started looking you up, started asking favors and promising big things that usually got those same teenaged messenger boys caught in deadly crossfire. After twelve, everything Solo had ever warned us about in all his childish seriousness would come looking for us. So sixteen was never an age I'd actually aspired to reach.

But here I was, only a few months shy and back in the place it had all started for me; at least so much as I could remember. And that was why I was here really. To figure out as much as I possibly could about who I was, even if that meant only in the figurative and not the literal sense.

I'd never really intended to end up back on my home cluster, but after my talk with Heero, after remembering how much I clung on to my past despite how little of it remained, I got to wondering about what there was to go back to. More precisely, I had begun to look at those journals of Sister Helen's -- the ones I had salvaged from the church's rubble -- in an entirely new light. They weren't just clumsy relics of my childhood; they were keys to what my life had been. They held records of all the happenings at the church, both official and off the record.

I spent a week or so with Hilde right after leaving L3, assisting with her homecoming -- the first time in over a year that she had seen her family, as she'd not been able to return to them when on the run from OZ for insubordination -- and seeing her comfortably settled in. I'd then gone to Quatre's estate, where he too was recovering, and discussed the hazy outline of my future plans with him.

I broke down and shared with him a highly censored account of the existence of the journals and my unlikely possession of them, saying merely that I wanted to spend some time investigating the contents of its pages before making good on my contract to join Preventers. I softened the story of how the journals had ended up with me in the first place by only letting slip that my caretaker at a church I'd once lived in had passed away and left them to me, not enlightening him further that I had been the only survivor of a rather infamous massacre. Well, it was infamous on L2; I had no idea how well known it was in the rest of the Earth Sphere. Somehow though, I think Quatre had previously suspected the truth, but -- diplomat that he is -- he held his tongue.

At Quatre's insistence, I retrieved the journals, along with their companion mementos, from the safe-deposit box I had had them secured in down on Earth. Returning with all the little fragments of my past, Quatre and I began to pour through the pages and memories of my surrogate mother's history.

There were years' worth of entries from before I'd ever arrived at the church, dating from only a few weeks after she was sent to serve at Saint Michael's -- it was only "The Maxwell Church" after the massacre, when newscasters had needed an all-encompassing moniker to embellish the human face of the story; to me, however, it would always be Saint Michael's -- and Quatre and I found that Helen had had something of an ironic tongue when it came to relating the little inanities and bizarre happenings within the church life. She spoke of L2 politics with an exasperated tone, using acerbic language when writing of what she considered flawed, outdated policies and privately berating crooked politicians with ceaseless energy.

These were facets of Sister that I had never known as a child under her care, but learning these things about her created a more realistic, more loveable impression of her within my mind. I finally had a fleshed out image of my beloved mother figure, instead of the airy idea of her I had carried with me for years. I also found myself pleased that circumstances had kept me from reading the journals before then; I knew that before the war and all the growing up I had found myself doing in the midst of the fighting, I would not have been half so pleased to learn that Sister was a more multi-faceted personality than the gentle woman I remembered from my childhood. During the war, I had needed the image of a saint to rock me to sleep in her phantom arms, but now I found far more peace in the knowledge that Sister had lived a full life and that, for a few of those years, she had known and loved me.

When we neared the Plague years in the journals and -- consequently -- my own eventual arrival at the church, I refused to let Quatre continue reading the journals with me. He would often sit in the room as I read though, lending me a solid presence in my little world of ghosts and dreams.

She had been skeptical of Father's decision to house us in the church's walls at first and her concerns sounded a little like those of a daughter worrying after her somewhat out of control father. She had warmed to us quickly though, and the gentle mother hen I had known so well began to manifest herself in the journals which became less and less about goings-on amongst the parishioners and the diocese and more and more about the day to day at Saint Michael's, particularly her growing absorption into the management of the orphans Father brought home.

The first passages simply described the technicalities of setting up space for us and receiving special permission from the bishop to provide this charitable service to the community. She noted, with no small degree of amusement, that Father Maxwell might never have gotten away with it had he not been such good buddies with the bishop.

The first passages that truly addressed the orphans' situation and new lives came a few weeks into our stay and was about, somewhat unsurprisingly, our education, the responsibility for which had eventually become Sister's.

"The children are wild things, completely unaccustomed to rules and restrictions. Fortunately, they are young enough that they may still be taught to appreciate the security of the boundaries we will set for them. A few of the children in particular are both very eager to please and very independent minded..."

It seemed that here Sister Helen was called away from her writing; because the pressure of pen to paper increased following her intermission and her tone became much more irritated and severe.

"It is becoming increasingly evident that the children's previous caretaker had little time for them; whether by the nature of her own occupations or for some far more sinister reason, I do not care to speculate.

"No further evidence of the negligence is required than that which manifests itself in the classroom. The children have -- at least on paper -- been attending the regional primary school as mandated by Colony law, but their basic math and reading skills are what can only be described as horrendous. I have resolved, with the permission of Father Maxwell, to see to the basic education of the children myself, with the assistance of my fellow Sisters. I pray that God will grant us success in this new undertaking."

Another journal entry told of the first experimentations with our dorm arrangements and another entry related in extreme detail the preliminary attempts at disciplinary measures before Sister had suggested that we be given regular chores and that punishments be supplementary, thus giving the evildoers a taste of the punishment before the crime in order that they might choose to avoid the extra work. It seemed to work quite well in most quarters, by Sister's own admission.

"There are those among the children, however, who cannot seem to help the trouble they get into, or perhaps it is that they cannot help getting into trouble. I wonder whether it is a manifestation of a craving for attention, an activity or whether, in some cases, they truly do not see the evils in some of their choices. It is of little matter where these impulses to get into trouble come from, so long as they come to learn the benefits of Godly living along their path. And, in the mean time, the brass and silver will remain polished to a high sheen."

The first softening of Sister's tone in the lines of her journal that closely resembled the woman I had known was a few entries later.

Saint Michael's had not been located very far from the resource center I had been living in prior to my arrival there, but what a difference a handful of city blocks could make in the socio-economic hierarchy! The money was still stretched thin, but Saint Michael's neighbors were generally able to stay off of government support, owned their own metal buckets instead of being forced to ride the colony's public metal buckets, and their children could afford the public schools' meal plans. Only a single rung higher on the ladder, but they were so goddamn proud of how much better off they were that it made the arrival of a herd of state wards a bitter thing to swallow. We were a symbol of those people over there and the animosity to Father's charitable efforts bled from the parents to the children.

We soon learned to play within the church yard gates, to keep clear of the public parks, such as they were, unless one of the Sisters accompanied us. We had not been accustomed to the snobbishness that we were suddenly inundated with, except from the Alliance soldiers; no one else in their right mind came down to our side of the proverbial tracks, so we had never really had to deal with all the rest of society's impressions of us. Father protected us as best as he could and honestly, it really wasn't a consistent problem, just an occasional taunt every now and again. Father had headed quite a bit of the slurs off by preaching quite a number of sermons about tolerance and loving one's neighbor, knowing that many of the perpetrators of these crimes were the children of his own parishioners and that the trouble was mostly born of frustration and willful misconceptions. But, there was still the occasional problem and it seemed to be these little tragedies of human compassion that touched Sister's deepest heart.

"One of the children -- who calls himself Dodger -- came home from the primary school today very upset and confused. The little dear was trying so hard to keep from crying and his closest friend, Solo, was vowing to do some other child from the neighborhood harm as long as the boy would be happy. I called the boy over while the other children played in the yard this afternoon to see what the trouble was and, so out of character for these little monsters, he asked me in the most innocently troubled voice whether or not he smelled bad. This struck me as rather odd; I'd not noticed that one among them worried about his or her hygiene anymore than is normal for a child. He confessed with some hesitance that the child his friend had threatened had told him that he smelled like a sewer.

"Poor little Dodger was beside himself, not quite understanding -- I do not think -- what the slur meant apart from the fact that it implied that he was somehow deficient. I could think of nothing to do except hug him, let him know that both God and I loved him and saw no imperfections that made him undesirable. I promised him that he smelled nothing like a sewer and I went do far as to offer him the use of the sweet soap in the parish hall's ladies' room for his bath that evening.

"I took him to the bathroom to run cool water over his face and wipe away the last of his tears. As he began to settle down, I asked him about his name, who had given it to him. He told me that a social worker had once called him by the name, claiming that he was 'just like Dodger.' I asked him if he were particularly attached to the name and he confessed that he'd gone by the name so that he would have one. Before this social worker came along, it seems that the boy had only been called 'Kid.'

"I usually leave the Bible stories to Father's bedtime recitations, but I felt that perhaps little 'Dodger' should have a name he could truly identify with, rather than a character from a book I am sure he has never heard of, let alone read. I told him of David and Goliath and he warmed to the story, telling me in a proud voice that he too knew how to use a slingshot and that he was 'a pretty good shot.' I asked him if he wouldn't like to be called 'David' instead of 'Dodger,' and he thought about it for some time before agreeing to try it out for a little while.

"We went through the sanctuary on the way back to the yard and I took the time to point out David in one of the windows along the nave. He stared at it for some time before we continued back out to the other children. Solo came running to greet us and I took the opportunity to remind him that we should love everyone, even those who hurt our feelings. He promised to try and forgive the other child and to refrain from 'pummeling' him. David told his friend that he had a new name and Solo seemed happy for him. The two of them went back to the children talking about giants and slingshots.

"I made certain to enlighten Father Maxwell to the situation at the dinner hour. He took some time afterwards to speak to both boys and to congratulate David on his new name. He told all the children the story of David and Goliath that evening for their bedtime lesson with some interjections from our own David. In the evening prayers, Solo prayed aloud for the child from school and asked God to forgive him.

"I have never known children to take so quickly to the Biblical stories and characters, thinking back on the Sunday School classes in recent years. I suppose it is in the nature of these particular children, who have had nothing to rely upon except a trust in each other and in their understanding of their being some greater good existing in the world, to identify with those rugged characters in the Bible stories. They are good role models for these children and I pray that David, Solo and all the others may continue to accept the teachings of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ, into their hearts."

That passage just about undid me right there in the middle of Quatre's library, the boy himself not ten yards away reading his own book. I felt myself very carefully replace the bookmark of frayed red ribbon that I had found marking Sister's last entry in the last volume of the collection of journals. I set the book down on the table before me and then sunk my head into my hands and began to shake.

I remembered that particular event all too well, the details of it springing to life in my mind upon reading the account. The boy at school had been called Miles Benningfield and he had pushed me down in the hallway when I was in line at the water fountain, telling me that I should go drink from the outdoor faucet instead. I asked him why and he said because I would contaminate the water for everyone else otherwise. Better yet, he laughed, why didn't I just go drink the sewer water? I smelled like it anyway.

Solo had appeared then, ready to start busting skulls with a few of the other church kids, but a teacher had intervened and told Miles that one more word would see him sent to the principal's office. She had then sent Solo, my friends and me on our way back to class. It had stung in a way that I had never felt before. Sure, I had been the victim of name-calling before, but I had never been talked down to like that by anyone of my own age. Kids calling other kids names or playing the game of one-upmanship was a little different than what had happened. I hadn't really understood it and so had been slow to bring up my fists.

After talking to Sister, Solo and I kept our word and never went after Miles Benningfield, but I'd heard a few years later that he had gotten his what-for from one of the high school gangs for messing around with somebody's sister and then dropping her for being a 'trashy slut.' Heard that they broke his jaw. I couldn't say that I was too surprised when I heard about it, though I was a little sorry that Solo's prayers for the kid had gone to waste.

I felt a hand touch my shoulder and another rest gently on my back and it was then I realized that I was trying to swallow my tears in big, gasping hiccups and failing miserably. We stayed like that for a few minutes as I got control over myself by inches. When I began to straighten, his hands lifted and he moved to pull up a chair beside mine, discreetly allowing me the time to wipe my sleeve over my face to mop away some of the evidence. He was turned in the chair so that he sat facing me, looking concerned and a little upset himself, waiting for some clue as to what he should do next. After a moment, I was able to crack a crooked smile and tell him:

"Jesu, Quatre. Leave it a dead nun to be able to get me to bawl like a baby."

"It's okay, Duo. It's okay to cry sometimes."

I laughed. "You know, you're the first person who's ever said that to me, Quatre buddy."

I looked away when he didn't have a reply for that, studying the clear panes of glass that made up the windows in the room. I could still vividly remember that stained glass window with the boy David, standing straight and proud, looking Goliath in the eye across the frame of his slingshot, unshaken by the failures embodied by the two pebbles that already lay at the giant's feet. David had been clothed in red and purple, colors which Sister Helen had told me represented royalty since that little boy had become a great king later in his life. The colors, especially the purple, had made the boy seem powerful and even braver than his pose could represent by itself. I wondered if Sister had named me David as an inspirational thing or because she truly saw some resemblance.

"Quatre?"

"Yes?"

"Do I look like a David to you?"

I think I caught him a little flat-footed, because when I turned to look at him, he had the oddest expression on his face, caught between utter bewilderment and a sort of amused understanding.

"How do you mean?"

"Ah, never mind. Just an old memory."

"The name 'David' means 'beloved,' if that helps," he delicately ventured.

"Really?" I asked, more out of the need to respond to what had been said than to prompt Quatre to expand on what he had told me. I eyed the cover of the volume I had set down, torn between my hunger to know more and my fear of being further wounded.

"It's a good name," he submitted, but said nothing further when I didn't immediately respond. After a long, quiet pause to digest and reconcile what all of the thoughts floating around in my head meant to me, I answered him.

"Yeah, I guess it is."

We sat like that for a long time that evening and while Quatre eventually returned to his reading material, I left mine closed on the table. Shortly thereafter, I had told Quatre I was going to return to L2 and do some research, look up some people if I could find them. He had supported the idea but, upon learning that I had no real plans about money or accommodations, had insisted on setting me up with an allowance so that I could rent an apartment and feed myself. I told him that I preferred to be left alone for the time being after observing how the fledgling government, news crews, and everybody else who thought they needed to know something was beating down Quatre and Wufei's door; Trowa and I were yet to be identified on a public scale and Heero had yet to reappear on anybody's radar. He agreed to keep my little personal quest a secret and I managed, after much niggling, to even get him to promise to conceal my location unless an emergency should arise.

And so there I was, walking in the front door of my apartment after a few days' worth of pounding the pavement on the next cluster over, where I had discovered one of the old Saint Michael's parishioners had moved.

I had interviewed the aging woman under the ruse of being a young government official in charge of researching L2's relationship with previous regimes so that the Earth Sphere United Nations could put together a strategy to improve Earth to colony interactions. It was all a bunch of jargon but, as expected, I got to hear a little about the massacre when she really got going. Unfortunately, it was nothing more than I had heard before, nothing much more than any contemporary L2 resident knew about it. But, it had been nice to hear someone else mourn the loss with a clear understanding of what the church had been, inside and out, clergy and children.

I dropped my duffle bag onto the floor, but carefully removed the card and its color coordinated envelope first, placing them on the kitchen counter, to be signed and mailed at a later time. It was card for the old Earth holiday, Labor Day.

After our talk on L3, I had found myself unwilling to resume my former practice of silence between encounters with Heero, partly because of my own loneliness and partly because of what that discussion had revealed -- namely that Heero was confused and off-balance by the end to what had seemed an interminable conflict of politics and personalities. But Heero had gone to ground somewhere and, apart from occasional sightings here and there, had seemingly disappeared into the fog. This behavior told me all I needed to know about chasing him down to pursue a friendship born of our comradeship in a horrible war. So I had done the only other thing I knew of to maintain contact: I sent him greeting cards.

It had seemed stupid to me too when I started, but I remembered how all those silly little cards Sister Helen had given us for various holidays had made me feel and I reasoned that it was a simple enough gesture that Heero wouldn't feel obligated to respond and could even ignore them if he wanted. But, dumb as it sounds, sending those cards made me feel connected and happy; as if I had something important I was keeping up with.

To try and keep Heero from feeling like I was stalking him, I only picked out funny cards or cards with short, sincere messages to send along. Nobody needs all that sentimental, flowery tripe anyway. Plus, instead of just sticking to the odd scattering of official and traditional holidays, I looked up obscure or absurd celebrations of one variety or another, so much so that I was sending a card almost every two weeks.

I had hoped that at the very worst he would just think that I was bored or lonely and had taken up this particular habit as a means of relieving my symptoms. Or that he didn't receive the cards at all and they were just piling up somewhere. Of course, I really wanted him to get and even appreciate the cards, find them funny and encouraging, but I had resigned myself to the understanding that I would probably never know and that the answer would probably be disappointing anyway.

Leaving that dog to sleep where he may, I staggered to my bedroom and fell face-first into the sheets. I summoned up just enough energy to roll to the side, dragging most of the comforter up over me.

I didn't move again for another twelve hours, when my bladder and my stomach were raucously vying for my attention. I decided that I should attend to the former and then feed myself, as I couldn't really be sure when I'd last taken care of either bodily function and figured I could last longer being hungry than having to take a leak. Besides, the bathroom was closer than the kitchen.

I checked the clock in the kitchen when I emerged from the bathroom, face washed and feeling a little less like the walking dead, and found that while it was mid-morning, the day wasn't too far gone to get something accomplished. Which was good, the old lady had proved helpful in one respect and I intended to follow up on the comment. Namely that, while a new church had been built over the ruins of Saint Michael's, some of the old structures that had survived that night had been left standing. I wasn't sure just how I felt about that, but I knew that I wouldn't be able to sit still again until I had gone to see.

I've never really been one for breakfast foods -- don't know why, just don't really like most of it -- so I went ahead and made myself a PB&J sandwich and devoured an apple that hadn't been really ready to eat when I'd left home last, but had ripened up nicely after a few days in the bowl on the counter. Got dressed, re-braided the hair that had come out of the braid after traveling and sleep, and headed down to the street to flag down a cab or catch a bus. It didn't dawn on me until after I got into the cab that I didn't know the street address to the church. I had always walked everywhere; I had never really needed to know the address.

Of course, the scenery had changed quite a bit since I'd last lived here, thanks both to the war and to intensive efforts to revive the slums of L2 so that they were more inhabitable. The poor cab driver was trying hard to help me figure out where I was trying to go, but he was obviously someone who'd wound up on this side of L2 after the massacre, because he had tried to convince me that Saint Michael's was in uptown. Luckily for both of us, I knew the church he was talking about; my church had been occasionally confused with theirs by the mail centers on L2 and Father would have to take the bus all the way uptown to return the stray mail because they would never come down to retrieve it.

Finally, I spotted something that looked familiar and asked to be let out, intent on walking the land to see if I couldn't figure it out faster on my own and on foot. I paid the cab driver handsomely for his patience and repeated efforts to help me and then I slid out of the car. I found myself turning my feet back in the direction of a place that had long haunted my memory and my dreams. I had not planned on revisiting it until I had spoken to the old parishioner; I had known that some other church had been built atop the site, though it was not a Catholic one. To be honest, I was shaking with fear inside, terrified that instead of the closure I so desperately sought, I would only be giving my nightmares further ammunition to throw at me.

And, before I quite knew it, my feet had brought me to the place I'd once called home. It was not until later that I realized that I had made the cabbie let me off in front of where the old primary school had been and had in fact walked the same route that I'd taken back to Saint Michael's every day for over two years.

Most of the remains of the former structures on the lot had been torn down, though the surviving front archway and stone steps of the main sanctuary had been preserved and incorporated into the new building.

I couldn't make myself think of the replacement edifice as a church -- it didn't seem anything like what I thought of as a church and its streamlined corporate architecture made my heart ache for Father Maxwell's cherished stained glass and Sister's cool, gray stones. The whole place was too...active to be a church, too busy. Saint Michael's was no longer a haven of peaceful strength. Saint Michael's, it seemed, was no longer there at all. It was now "The Church of Divine Providence," after all.

It hadn't bothered me as much as I had thought it would to revisit the place and see it built over. I was actually finding myself a little relieved that ghosts no longer haunted the landscape. I knew my relief was because, on some level, my mind refused to believe that this really was the location of my old home. My psyche had a much easier time accepting that the archway had been moved here from the actual site and, not really needing to have a desperate psychological breakdown in the middle of the sidewalk, I allowed myself to accept that answer.

So it was more like meeting an old friend in an unexpected place than the dreadful homecoming I had been anticipating. I think Sister would have been proud of me for looking at it in that way.

After a moment of taking "Divine Providence" in, I moved slowly up to the old, blackened stone of Saint Michael's archway, placing my palm against the cool rock reverently, as though I was afraid it would crumble away at the slightest hint of pressure. A small golden plaque was bolted into place on one of the arch's columns -- a historical or commemorative marker -- but I found that I had no interest in reading what it had to say. I do remember that the header of the plaque read, "Saint Michael's Catholic Church: AC049-AC189."

As a child, I had never been aware that Saint Michael's had been over a hundred years old, let alone that the church was edging towards a century and a half and had quite probably been one of the very first churches constructed on the L2 cluster. It gives me a little swelling of pride to think of it, and I still sometimes find myself laughing as I remember Father's little obsessions with upkeep and cleanliness that I had never understood as a child and thought a waste of time. I wondered, staring past the little plaque, how old those silver candlesticks had been, the ones that I knew so intimately from all the times I had had to polish them. I do hope to someday find a pair like them, though I have no idea what in the holy hell I would do with silver candlesticks.

I milled about for quite a while until the groundskeeper came around and asked me what I was up to, politely of course. I told him merely that I had attended Saint Michael's in my childhood and was coming to visit the old archway. He immediately spun into what must have been a scripted speech about "the old Saint Michael's parish," until I interjected and reminded him that I was a former parishioner and that I remembered the church fairly well.

He then spun off into a different speech about how the new church had decided to preserve the arches and sanctuary steps and that all other artifacts were being "held captive" by the Catholic diocese, despite "Divine Providence's" offers to erect a miniature museum on the grounds to house them. I just let him go and made a mental note to try and visit the Catholic diocesan office sometime soon.

After a good hour of being talked at, I found myself turning down his invitations to the staff's coffee pot and tours of the new facilities and heading back up the block to the old bus stop. As the bus pulled away with me in it, I smiled a fond goodbye to the structural remnants of Saint Michael's, wishing the archway luck dealing with that chatty groundskeeper. I chuckled to myself a little for imposing a personality onto the poor inanimate object, but stifled it when I noticed a woman eyeing me warily.

I got off at the stop before the one closest to my apartment building, itching to walk and get the weird lady's eyes off of me. As I approached the building, it occurred to me that it had been a while since I'd last picked up my mail so, for lack of anything much better to do, I popped into the main lobby and starting pulling out mail, throwing away the junk immediately and flipping through the rest.

Now, when you grew up sleeping in what were basically piles of trash, spent your best teen years killing literally thousands of people, developed major hang-ups on a guy who just happens to be a distrustful pugilist with a martyr complex, have been tortured, blown up, and shot to shit a couple dozen times, you don't have what some may call "normal" social impulses. You don't want to get dressed to the nines and go out dancing. You actually prefer cooking to eating out. You avoid the herded and penned cow feeling of stadium seating at some college football game or a live concert.

This is mostly because your paranoia kicks in and you leave the event feeling this close to a total psychotic breakdown after spending the entire time on an adrenaline overload, not because the game was exciting or the band played a great set (you didn't notice the game or the band), but rather because you spent the last four hours in an extremely vulnerable location while your mind relayed to you every possible threat to your person it could come up with. And after training with G, that's a hell of a lot. Plenty of seemingly "normal" things become like that after intensive black ops training and years on the run from just about anybody with even a single working eyeball.

After you've been through the kind of out-and-out harrowing shit that I'd spent the first however many years of my life on, you mostly just want to keep things relatively tame and relaxed. So, you go see a movie, pig out on all the junk food you've never had for one reason or another and shoot some hoops. I read a lot too, now that I had books readily available for the first time in my life.

For me, control became an enormous issue and "hanging out" meant indulging in a lifetime's worth of simple leisure. I screw around like a little kid and pull the occasional good-natured prank, mostly because I like making my friends laugh. And really, it's a damn therapeutic change from what I used to do to people. I was determined to make the downshift from high-strung terrorist extraordinaire to laid-back everyman.

So, I suppose the last thing I expected to turn up in my mailbox when I got around to checking it after two weeks was an extremely elegant -- and probably damn expensive -- invitation to the opening night performance of Handel's Messiah for some fancy pants symphony orchestra down earth-side. It took me a moment of dumbfounded gawping at the gold embossing and delicate calligraphy penmanship to put together the pieces of this somewhat jarring puzzle.

It ever so slowly came back to me from a conversation over half a year ago that Quatre had proudly joined an orchestra of mostly local volunteers to exercise his inner musician. I say "proudly joined" because he had managed to get an actual audition with the stern -- but apparently fair -- conductor, who had signed him on for his skill, not his checkbook, like the orchestra's board had been more than willing to do. From there, the rest wasn't exactly brain surgery.

I'll admit it; I didn't want to go. I knew that if I had received an invitation from the orchestra and not just an email, that Quatre had written my name up at some point to receive the invite, and that I was most assuredly not alone in that honor. After almost a year of zero direct contact with anyone but Quatre, I wasn't sure I was ready to be nestled in assigned seating next to god-knows-who. And I was pretty sure I wouldn't be returning to open and understanding arms save those of Quatre himself, and possibly Trowa, who I'd figured had pretty much been in on the little Duo's-on-a-mission-from-a-woman-of-God secret.

Hell, Trowa'd probably read almost every email Quatre and I sent each other. One older sister of Quatre's who was a psychiatrist had counseled the two of them when they'd first started hanging out and being friends again -- long distance, as he was still touring with the circus through the spring season -- that the most important thing for the two of them, considering their history, was to keep everything on the table. They'd had a really rocky start of it, but after a few months, it'd paid off for them, their code of sharing concerns and always being ridiculously honest with one another. I fully expected that by those nine months later, they must have long since returned to the tenderness they had shared during the war, before Trowa's Quatre-induced bout of amnesia. Thus, I was dead certain Trowa was aware of all the communication between Quatre and I, if not actually helping Q compose some of those emails.

But really, if anyone would respect my privacy and desire to make a new start, it would be Trowa. We didn't know each other too well and had very different attitudes on women who routinely throw knives at you, but we did hit it off fairly well otherwise -- enough to secure an odd sort of understanding and camaraderie between the two of us. So, Trowa wasn't too much of a concern as far as abruptly meeting again.

Neither was Wufei, mostly because I didn't at all expect to see him if I went to Q's big performance. Nobody had heard from him in a while, though Q was valiantly trying to hunt him up to talk about that whole "let's destroy our tried-and-true war sidekicks" thing.

Quatre would probably invite Noin, since the two of them had really hit it off while working together there at the end of the war. He'd also have invited Catherine, Trowa's surrogate sister, out of courtesy. I wouldn't be surprised if the woman still hated me for finding Trowa and putting into motion his return to the battlefield. I just hoped she wouldn't bring any of those aforementioned knives with her to the performance.

Dorothy (otherwise known as Quatre's pet project) would be there. From what Q said, she was making great strides in accepting the peace in place of her former bellicose idealism and had joined up with Une's fledging peace protection organization, the Preventers, as a combat training instructor. Apparently, channeling those Amazon tendencies into something everyone could approve of was "making great strides." Still didn't mean she wasn't a raving lunatic in my book, but Quatre always was a little weird about his attachment to people. You couldn't keep him from getting involved in your life if his interest was piqued; even running him through with a fencing foil couldn't shake the guy's determination to help.

Hilde would also probably be on the list and she'd probably give me hell for worrying her, if she didn't give me the silent treatment instead. We'd really become close there near the end of the war in the way people do when they go through traumatic experiences together. We definitely weren't making any babies in elevators -- courtesy of mutual disinterest -- but I had felt responsible for her and she had looked up to me like I was a freakin' yardstick of integrity or something. When she'd pulled that whole data retrieval stunt, I'd gone into ultra-protective mode and I think it gave some of the guys the wrong idea. I'd come down from my white horse pretty fast once I knew she would be okay and had only spent just enough time after the official end of the war to make sure she was set up back at her family's home and comfortable before I took off on my own adventures. Hilde and I were the kind of people who would always remain very close despite lack of contact. Nevertheless, I knew that there would be shit to eat for not keeping in touch.

And then there was Relena. Jesu Christe, that one person in and of herself was enough to make me a no show. She's not unpleasant to me or anything, we just...didn't click. I guess it started with the whole slap in my face that was my non-rescue when I first met her and Heero both on that boat. And it all sort of disintegrated from there. She was always nice enough when our paths chanced to cross, and while I found her naïveté scoff-worthy and her attitude a touch immature, she was just a normal 15-year-old girl with a crush and she had had a hell of a lot of responsibility just drop out of the sky into her lap. She'd gradually risen to the occasion, eventually putting aside her whimsical ideals and fantasies and accepting a slightly more mature and rational outlook on the political scene. So really there was only one thing between us, her continued pursuit -- and what seemed to be becoming a true conquest -- of the man I loved. Therein lays enough awkwardness to knock an elephant flat on its ass, let alone little old me.

Now that I think about it, most of the people on my list of reasons not to go were women. And people wonder why I don't swing that way...

Speaking of which, there was the whole Heero question. Would he be there? I'd heard that while he had sort of gone off into the sunset after the war, he had visited Relena a couple of times, the first occasion being a sort of surprise gift on her birthday sometime in January, which had been a major indicator that all attempts of the romantic on my end would be unsuccessful. The thought crossed my mind that if he had visited her recently, he might come with Relena. Hell, it might just be a date for them.

That fear of being forced to watch them bring their as yet unformed relationship to fruition had been the last big push I needed to go through with my college plans, besides my carefully thought out goals and aspirations. The only thing that had kept me clinging to the idea of foregoing my own personal quest into my past for the Preventers was the possibility of being near Heero, but without the hope of any success, I turned wholeheartedly to L2 instead. Heero I left behind to pursue his chosen lady, if that was his plan.

Instead of dwelling on that happy thought any more than I had already allowed myself to, I climbed the stairs back up to my apartment while mentally closing the door on the outside world of Gundams and archways and friends and rivals and heartbreak. Once in my little domestic sanctuary, I tossed the invitation onto the counter over the kitchen sink and walked away from it, through the living room, down the little hallway into the bedroom, then through to the bathroom, where I found myself looking into my mirror, which is one of those that take up the whole damn wall. I was surprised to find myself on the verge of crying in frustration.

It's always a mistake to look at yourself when you're trying not to cry, because you can see that lost look in your own damn eyes and that just sort of compounds the shitty ass feeling. I saw my stupid chin start to wrinkle up as I tried to keep my bottom lip from trembling and I had to turn away from it before I could start bawling like a little kid.

I felt heat begin to rise to my face and a few drops of salty water escaped my tightly closed eyes. I scrubbed them away with my balled knuckles, pressing the heels of my hands into my eye sockets until green and yellow shapes danced across the backs of my eyelids. The knot in my throat clung tightly to my Adam's apple and I knew I wouldn't be completely rid of it for a few days, longer if I actually broke down and cried.

I would go. I knew I would. It was just the small matter of how much dignity I would have in tact afterwards that made me almost believe that I wouldn't.

I didn't bother asking the question of the cosmos as to why the invitation had had to come today of all days. I'm a great believer in the attitude that when it rains, it pours and if that makes me a cynic, then so be it. I resolved to shower, eat, and then fill out the little return card with my acceptance of the invitation and seal it up in the enclosed envelope. After that, I'd call Quatre and let him know I would be in need of a place to stay when I came to see this concert of his. I accomplished two of those four things before deciding I had had enough and crashed to watch TV and then went to bed, foregoing the shower and the call to Quatre. But, conscience be damned, I dutifully brought myself to check the "accept" box and even stamp the damn envelope to be mailed the following morning.

And then I went to bed, not able to really bring myself to be interested in any of the programming on that night. I wondered, before I fell into the strangeness of my own dreamscape, what I would tell the Catholic diocese when I paid them a visit. Unlike little old ladies, they would check to see if my researcher story was valid and, since I was trying to fly under the damn radar, I was loathe to come forward as "the orphan survivor," as the papers had called me. Luckily for me, the fire chief hadn't let anybody take a picture of me at the time, or I would've never been able to pull off anonymity on L2 again.

I ended up putting off and putting off the trip down to the Catholic diocesan office for another few months, taking a few odd Sweeper gigs here and there in between my bouts of hysterical detective work. I just couldn't convince myself on a good cover; that and I wasn't sure I wanted to see what bits and pieces of my home remained, and in what condition.

Before I quite knew it, it was only a few days out from my scheduled departure for Earth and Quatre's little performance. Once he had known that I was definitely coming, Quatre had been breathless with excitement, falling all over himself to offer to put me up at his estate and even to pick me up from the shuttleport. When I had also agreed to hand over my Gundam to be dismantled, he had arranged for Deathscythe to be picked up by a few trusted members of the Maguanac Corp and delivered to Earth separately, to arrive a few days after me.

I had to admit that his offering to handle the security and transportation of my big metal buddy under complete secrecy was a huge weight off of my mind. I didn't really want to have to wheedle anybody into lending me a transport unit without asking any questions and then being forced to manage all the forward and backward motion of covering my tracks and concealing my cargo. Word to the wise: the time and energy expended to store, maintain, and protect a Gundam from the foolhardy of the world will never be compensated, so never rush into the deal without a realistic idea of how much of your life the machine will consume and how much of your sanity. Not that I don't love my big hunk of gundanium, he's just a little bit of a drain on my physical and emotional resources, is all.

Quatre had mentioned that he had already secured Heavyarms -- not that that was too surprising -- and that the same crew picking up Deathscythe would be swinging by some pre-determined rendezvous point to retrieve Wing Zero as well. Almost made me want to accompany Deathscythe after all. Not that I didn't realize that Zero would be arriving at the rendezvous all by its lonesome.

Packing my few changes of clothes and assorted bathroom articles took only a few minutes of my time; it was locking up my few earthly treasures that took considerably longer, as I had to find a suitably out of the way loose floorboard to pull up. I then had to build in extra structural support to prevent my things from falling through the roof of the apartment below me. Finally, I placed the journals as well as the other few odds and ends into a lockbox and place it into the little niche I had carved out to house it in. The lockbox was an impressive thing: fire-proof, water-proof and -- with a few personal modifications to the lock -- virtually impenetrable by other human beings. I then carefully replaced the floorboards and, just to be doubly sure, went out and bought a suitably décor-matching area rug. It would be a huge waste of my time if some garish carpeting threw off the whole deception.

Despite all the precautions I had taken, I still worried over the safety of my little bundle of worldly possessions, but I really couldn't take the chance of my bags being searched at the shuttleport and then being pressed into a lengthy explanation of how a stack of clericals, a few large shards of colored glass, and seven large journals obviously penned by a woman had found their way into my things. So, on L2 they had to stay, despite my fears.

Before I quite knew it, I was standing in the queue to board the commercial shuttle, boarding pass in one hand and my much-abused duffle in the other. Couldn't very well turn back then, now could I have?

The flight was long and uneventful, though I have to say that the captain was a touch jerky on the controls. But that might just have been the haughtiness in my own piloting skills rearing its ugly head. Very few people can fly, drive or sail things to my satisfaction, but then again, I have high standards.

I tried to doze off once or twice, since the second half of the flight took place during the night cycle, but my mind wouldn't settle down long enough to allow it, so I ended up spending the whole trip flipping through the movie selections on the little TV in the back of the seat in front of me. Nothing really caught my eye, but I sat through a few of the shows simply because I had heard from some of the Sweepers that they were pretty good.

I felt a little of the nervous tension return as we made our approach and re-entry sent flutters through my stomach for the first time in my life. I told myself it was because I was uneasy about seeing Quatre and the others again and not because I thought the pilot was taking us in too shallow. Nothing I could do about it if he was, so might as well blame my jitters on my blonde friend.

I did the standard 'wait 'till the shuttle has come to a full and complete stop' thing, collected my bags, shuffled back up the aisle to the exit where the bubbly stewardess bid me farewell and a nice stay on Earth, got spat out into the airport's massive carpeted hallways and moved with the exodus to the baggage claim until I spotted my favorite rich Arab.

I have to admit that I was a little surprised when it was only Quatre who appeared to greet me at the arrival gate. I had expected Trowa to be at his elbow, but instead Quatre was flanked by Rashid and another random Maguanac, one I didn't recognize from the war. I wondered again at Quatre's overly-enthusiastic response to my RSVP. Perhaps things weren't as ducky in Quatre's love life as I had thought.

I was greeted with an excited hug and I ably resisted my impulse to shirk away, though I did pull back after a very short time, covering my discomfort by asking Quatre how he was and whether he'd already eaten breakfast because, I hammed, I was starving. He bought the white lie hook, line and sinker, and laughingly assured me that he was game for a little breakfast before heading back to his estates.

I think I surprised him a little when I asked that we go to one of those open-all-night kind of diners and then ordered something off of the dinner menu to eat, but he didn't comment, merely ordering a stack of pancakes for himself. Like I said, I'm not much of a breakfast food person.

I waited until we were pulling away from the restaurant and Rashid had authorized the use of the sound-proof divider in Quatre's limo while he and the driver rode up front to ask about Trowa's conspicuous absence. Quatre's reaction made me wish I hadn't.

"He's with the circus on tour at the moment. I didn't tell you at the time, but he thought it best that we take a break from each other back in June. It was after...he remembered."

Watching Quatre scramble for words was painful and I briefly placed my hand on top of his trembling shoulder to offer what little comfort I could.

"Okay," I said, telling him that I understood what he meant, that he didn't need to dig around in the past anymore for a proper explanation.

"We still talk," he told me determinedly, "on the vidphone or through email. We're...working on our friendship. It's good....It's good."

He nodded emphatically, more to himself than to me, trying to convince himself -- probably not for the first time -- that having Trowa's friendship, despite their intimacy during the war, was enough to be happy. Poor little optimistic bastard. At least I didn't have that pain of knowing but not having, just a frivolous crush that wither away sooner or later when I came across someone else. Thank God for small miracles, I guess.

"Will he be here for the performance?" I asked before I could quite shut myself up. I braced for the tears that would doubtlessly well in Quatre's eyes. The boy had told me himself that Trowa was with the circus for the season! But Quatre only smiled to himself and I felt a sudden wash of relief. Whatever Trowa had said on that topic must have been pretty smooth, because Quatre calmed down considerably.

"He can't because of the performance schedule, but he ordered me to record the performance and send it to him so that he could still get a chance to see it." Quatre blushed and looked away as he continued, "I hired a professional video crew and sound technician. And then it'll be professionally edited so that he isn't just staring at the same picture all the time."

I had to laugh then. I mean, c'mon, how classically Quatre. Most people would just set up a video camera backstage or something. He flushed a darker shade of red and I burst into a new round of laughter.

"You really know how to spoil him, Quatre. Anything at all for the one you love."

Quatre paled and began to look nervous, edgy.

"He won't think it's weird, will he? Allah, I don't want him thinking I'm advertising myself!"

I snorted, but held the rest of the laughter in.

"Don't worry; he'll love it Quatre. He doesn't really have any other choice."

Quatre looked at me strangely and opened his mouth to protest, but we had reached his home by then and I deliberately changed the topic as we pulled up to the main entranceway.

"I see that the rose bushes have finally recovered from their run-in with Auda."

Quatre chuckled and retorted, "His car, you mean. And yes; after the 'incident,' the gardener browbeat Auda into tending the roses himself. He's developed quite the green thumb since you were last here."

"Oh ho! I'd love to see that!" I crowed, ducking out of the limo and walking over to the aforementioned rose bushes. They did indeed seem quite happily recovered from being run over by a slightly tipsy Auda and I could see a small metal marker poking out of the ground in between two of the bushes that gave their specific scientific type and, in neat lettering beneath, declared them to be victors in "The Great Vehicular Wars of 195 and 196."

After admiring the flora a little longer, I turned back to claim my bag from Rashid and follow Quatre into the house. I succeeded in only one of those two ventures, as Rashid is a damn scary man when he insists on carrying your baggage. Quatre led me up to the room I had inhabited when I had last stayed in his home a few months before, letting me drop my bag in the room before insisting that I come down to the "stables" to see the "horses." This piqued my interest because, though Quatre loved the animals and did indeed own a few, those were stabled at another estate where they were bred and raised for racing and shows.

As expected, Quatre meant nothing of the kind when he had referred to horses and his stable only appeared to be such on the outside, inside it was the first level of a subterranean mobile suit hangar. You may imagine the breed of horses I found in the stable's basement.

The Maguanac Corp was, evidently, still ready for action, but the suits that really drew the eye were those in the furthest depths of the hangar: Sandrock and Heavyarms. Empty spaces were there waiting for Deathscythe, Wing and Shenlong as well. But what Quatre had wanted to show me were his plans for disposing of the Gundams and the craft he wished to use to do so.

We spent several hours pouring over the plans, trying to determine a prime launch site and a suitable day of launch. We decided, after some debate, that we would try to ship the Gundams first class to the sun around the anniversary of the end of the wars, as that would be a time of much inter-colonial travel and it would be far easier to fly under the radar with the air so full of space buses and shuttles. It was hard to agree to a date so close in the future, to limit my remaining time with Deathscythe to such a short span, but I understood Quatre's urgency. Closure may be a bitch, but it's a necessary evil all the same.

Without the daylight to direct our internal clocks, Quatre and I were a little stunned to resurface to the sight of a setting sun. Dinner was had, complete with the usual cast of Maguanac companions and I spent the rest of the evening catching up, even getting to hear about Auda's newfound love for gardening. When I found myself in my room again, padding about in my mostly darkened suite, I let the peace of the day seep into my soul. When I finally fell asleep, I found myself thankful I had come, no matter what the next few days held for me.

The next day had held the revelation that I had nothing to wear to this thrice-damned concert. The day after held me stalking around Quatre's house while he was in final rehearsals. And then it was the day of the performance and I was just about ready to fidget out of my new suit as Quatre and I pulled up to the backstage door and were ushered inside by the burly doorman.

When Quatre pressed my tickets into my hand and left me in the care of Rashid in the left wing before he hustled to meet up with the orchestra in the changing rooms, I felt a cold wash of fear run through my entire being. Screw peace for the soul, I knew that this would be a hellish nightmare. Quatre had refused to tell me who else had RSVPed for the damn thing, or even who else he had invited. Scenarios of public embarrassment and persisting awkwardness had their hands firmly on the steering wheel of my mind and, even as I followed Rashid out to the main lobby to get our tickets torn and to be directed to our seats, I couldn't focus on any but the potentially bad outcomes of the evening.

Turns out Quatre had gotten his party a box, so not only would I be seated next to his other guests; I'd be isolated from the rest of the audience as well. As we followed the usher down the little hallway to our box, I could hear the very familiar laughter of a few particular women ringing down the way to greet us. I felt myself shrink back a step, but Rashid literally laid a hand on my back and pushed me forward again, the bastard. Death by women. I wondered suddenly if this would be as unappealing if I weren't gay, but the little niggling voice in my head assured me that no, I'd still be scared shitless to walk into that room.

And then we were there, the usher announcing that this was our box in a distracted, bored voice. Three heads turned to look and I found myself caught in the collective headlights of Relena, Hilde, and Dorothy. Jesu Christe, have mercy on my poor wretched soul. I'd be joining you soon.

"Uh...hello, ladies."

And then hell froze over. Hilde got up to up me, babbling happily about how good it was to see me while Dorothy nodded in recognition.

"Hello, Duo," Relena smiled kindly, extending her hand to shake when I managed to pry Hilde off long enough to greet the other two.

"We were just wondering if anyone else was going to show up. We're glad you could make it."

"So am I," I found myself saying and meaning it.

I settled into a chair and before too long I was conversing easily with the girls and Rashid, right up until the concert began, quite the opposite of my expectations for the evening. I guess I really am overly-dramatic in nature.

The Messiah was fantastic, though I discovered later that the orchestra and choir had performed only selected numbers from the whole of the piece, concentrating more on the songs about the Nativity and Christmas and limited the selection of Easter songs.

It had been a long time since I'd last heard a choral performance, not to mention an orchestral recital, so the whole thing was a little magical for me. Quatre looked so happy buried down in the string section, lost in the music and the flow of the performers around him. I imagine the magic of the whole thing must have been more potent for him, seeing as how he so immersed in it. I fiercely wished Trowa could have been there for him, but I remembered the whole video production team Quatre had called in to capture it and the urgency abated somewhat. At least Trowa would be able to see what he had missed, though I couldn't figure how the enchanted nature of the performance could bleed through the lens of the camera over hundreds of thousands of miles.

I couldn't quite believe it was over when the last chord died away and the audience leapt to its feet to applaud the musicians' feat. Hilde whistled shrilly next to my ear and I saw a few of the patrons in the boxes nearby look our way sternly, but it made no difference to me. I felt like yelling, shouting out loud just to burn off the energy the concert had left in me. I couldn't wait to get back to Quatre and congratulate him.

As the conductor bowed for the last time and made his exit, and the orchestra began to shuffle off the stage, I collected the suit jacket I had slung over the back of my chair and turned to head out of the box to go find Quatre. And there, sitting silently in a chair by the door to the box, was Heero Yuy.

He must have slipped in after the concert had started, because otherwise we would have all noticed his entrance. There were a long few moments where we just took each other in, eyes locked, before Relena made the same discovery I had and exclaimed, "Heero!" The moment was lost as Heero turned to face Relena, standing and moving towards her to properly greet her.

Jesu, some goddamn warning would have been nice! I suddenly had more than one reason to hunt up Quatre Reberba Winner. Every emotion that I had ever felt where Heero was concerned crashed into me and I found I just couldn't handle it right there in front of the Princess and the other girls, not in public. Excusing myself, I fled under the pretext of wanting to find Quatre and assured the ladies -- with one foot already out the door -- that I would bring the man of the hour back to the box, if they would just wait there.

The breathless daze the concert had left me in was receding and I lamented the return to my ordinary state of mind. I cursed Heero six ways to Sunday for having materialized, even as a small part of me waved a little pom-pom of excitement.

I had barely made it out of the hallway into the main stairwell before I heard an all too familiar step behind me. Heaving a great internal sigh of resignation, I stopped and waited for the bane of my affection to catch up.

"Duo," he said as he came abreast of me, brushing an uncharacteristically timid hand over the back of my shoulder in greeting. "How are you?"

"I'm fine," I managed, "and yourself?"

"Well." He paused for a long moment, thoughts scurrying around behind his eyes. "It's good to see you. I've missed our talks."

The frustration that had been steadily building up inside just leaked out of me and I was suddenly more tired than I had been in a long damn time.

"It's good to see you too, buddy. It's been a while. Come to help me find Q? His biggest fans will want a word with him."

He smiled, just a few teeth poking out from behind his lips before he nodded shortly. And so we went.

It was far more difficult to navigate the lobby and various hallways this time around, what with everyone moving the opposite direction, and I found myself oddly thankful that Heero had come along, if just for the other set of shoulders to knock people out of our path. I mean really, did the big, foofy ladies have to clog up the surrounding area with absolutely everything at their disposal? It was all a jumble of purses, furs, shawls, scarves, hats, canes, and trailing skirts, punctuated by the overwhelming pong of horrendously overused perfumes and colognes. This is not to mention their determination to converse with all the "dears," "darlings," and "dolls" they hadn't seen in a day or two right in the middle of the damn walkway. Biddies give me a headache.

We finally made it up to the backstage door only to encounter the same bouncer as before, only this time, without my blonde VIP pass, he refused to let us through. Heero was all set to get pissy with him when a girl I recognized as also being from the string section passed us on the way back in. I tapped her shoulder and solicited her help in informing Quatre to show himself out of doors. With a wink and a grin, she slipped past the mammoth bouncer, promising to produce Quatre in a few moments.

As promised, Quatre emerged a few minutes later, looking flushed with pride and lingering excitement. He immediately greeted Heero with a beaming smile and thanked him profusely for coming. We ushered him up -- with considerably better success now that the concentration of biddies was thinning out -- to see Relena, Hilde and Dorothy.

The evening progressed pretty much as anticipated from there. A trip was made to a nearby trendy dive where drinks were had and the performance was praised by the attendant audience and criticized by the musician of the party, even though it was plain to see that he was still reveling in the experience.

The ladies eventually parted ways with us guys and the three of us headed back to Quatre's home for the evening. I give Heero credit for waiting until we were in the relative safety of Quatre's estate before springing it on us.

As we pulled into the drive, he spoke for the first time in some time, asking Quatre if there was a secure room in the house to use for a discussion of an important nature. Quatre looked instantly concerned and offered the immediate use of his private study for said talk. Ditching Rashid and the other Maguanacs at the door and ordering the staff not to disturb us, Quatre lead us up to his personal study, which he assured Heero was routinely inspected by Rashid himself for bugs. After settling in and locking all the entrances and exits, Quatre prompted Heero to spill his guts. And that was when we first caught wind of the Mariemaia insurrection, though we had no knowledge of the girl's existence at that time.

Turned out that Heero had been checking over J's logs -- and deleting them to prevent the wrong people from gaining access to them in the future -- when he had discovered some disturbing information, namely that we Gundam pilots may not have been the only people to be assigned to Operation Meteor. Some of the other possibilities ran the gamut from assembling a few more independent one-man teams without ties to OZ's Moble Suit development group to building an entire army devoted to that single purpose. The possibilities were terrifying.

We talked and debated long into the night, but in the end, we came away with not very much. Heero had no conclusive evidence to prove that any or all of these organizations existed and he agreed that we should go ahead with our plans to destroy the Gundams and not "just live our lives according to our own paranoia," as Q had put it. Heero agreed to go back to J's lab and continue his inquiries into the matter and, in a move that shocked Quatre and me, he revealed the location of the lab to us in case we should ever need to find him or the research for ourselves. He then insisted on getting contact numbers for the both of us to reach either of us in case of emergency. It was pretty morbid, depressing stuff.

He departed back to L1 before midday, promising to keep us updated if he could find a secure way to do so. Quatre and I were left in a melancholy mood until the arrival of Deathscythe and Wing, although I don't think Q was quite as happy to see Wing as I was.

I met with Hilde a few times more when Quatre was otherwise engaged and I found myself promising to visit her after the first of the year to help her re-work and overhaul her family's scrap yard. Hey, I didn't have anything better to do and it gave me something good to look forward to after shipping my faithful companion in war off to meet the sun.

A few weeks passed and before I knew it, I was out-bound on my little trip with Quatre to blow up our Gundams. It was a sort of peaceful thing, if melancholic and it reminded me in an odd sort of way of my last trip to Saint Michael's. Quatre deposited me again on L4 afterwards, where he needed to check on some of his company's satellites to approve maintenance and upgrades. I caught my flight back to L2 with hardly a hitch and spent the whole flight going over specs and plans for bringing the Schbeiker's salvage yard into the post-war trading world.

I had barely made it halfway through the baggage claim area when a girl from one of the ticket counters came my way looking a little confused but mostly timid and uncomfortable. I caught her eye half way across the room and she perked up a little bit, body language telling me that I was the quarry here. I shifted the duffle a little higher on my shoulder and greeted her as she came closer, feeling definitely sure that neither of us were comfortable with the call waiting on the cordless phone she was holding.

The girl -- Becky, according to her name tag -- extended the phone out to me with a few words about how the gentleman on the phone had described someone matching my description as being the person he was looking to speak with. I have to admit, I wasn't really listening; I had a pretty good idea who was calling me in the damn shuttleport while I was standing in the fucking line at the baggage claim.

"Yes?"

The voice took a few seconds to respond, but when he did, it was like a rush of air being sucked out of me.

"02. Code Sigma Nine. Rendezvous at my position."

"Roger."

And we both hung up. It didn't strike me until a moment later that I should have tried for a more normal conversation, because Becky was looking at me like I was going to whip out some black shades and stalk off in a swirl of badass-ness. I smiled at her warmly and something about prank calls and younger brothers came out of my mouth. I don't know; it was all bullshit to cover Heero's ass.

How he had known that I was on L2 again, I've never really found out. He had probably tagged me with some tracking device or hacked surveillance systems in shuttleports to hunt me up, knowing that I would be traveling in space after the big send-off Q and I had given the Gundams. I wasn't sure I liked having someone who could track me so well, but as long as it was Heero or one of the other pilots and not some psycho ex-OZie stalker looking for revenge, I'd be able to keep my dignity intact as far as my stealth abilities were concerned.

I made my way out of the commercial shuttle docks and down to the transport docks, aiming to call in a favor or two. It didn't take too long to hunt up Howard and coerce him into lending me a shuttle and before the day cycle was over, I was launched and heading for the L1 cluster coordinates Heero had given me mere weeks before.

After a few hours, a computerized voice made contact with my shuttle and eventually guided me in to dock in J's old hangar. From there, I made my way through the empty hallways to what Heero had called "the main computer room." Upon reaching said room, I was beckoned to his side without so much as a "hello" to read the little girl's info, and he related to me some other personal information he had hunted up and the estimated size of the fighting force as well as their expected capabilities, as if acknowledging the reason for my presence was more worth mentioning than my actual arrival.

Once he had closed out of the window where he'd had Mariemaia's stats pulled up and finished loading a security program, he stood and brushed past me on his way out of the door, as if no further conversation was required between us. But of course he'd be in a hurry to get this show on the road; he had put it so bluntly, after all, that Relena was on the line. And so it seemed that only the fair princess in trouble could stir Heero out of his self-imposed solitude for any length of time. What I had said to Quatre only a few weeks prior came back to me and I couldn't quite resist saying it to the room at large.

"Anything at all for the one you love."

I followed after Heero before the hollow echo of the room revealed the pain behind the amusement in my voice.

Heero didn't relax out of his mission-mode tunnel vision until we had completed shuttle preparations and were on our way to X18999. I worried at his tense behavior like a dog at a bone. I could feel he was holding something back from the run down he had given me earlier in the computer room and I am a very skilled mad libber. You give me a blank that needs filling and I'll find some damn creative ways to fill it. The fact that we were traveling in complete silence other than those sounds made by the ship didn't help either. Finally, at about the point that I had convinced myself that the fuckers had already killed Relena or, at the very least, scheduled an execution date, Heero offered up a few of his concerns.

It turned out that Relena was merely being held hostage, which proved mildly disappointing to my wild imagination. What was bothering him was that he had caught on to this group a little over a week before and had notified Une immediately, but she had told him that the President would not let her move in on them in a major way. So, I guess he was pissed that he had taken the government-approved route with this and it had failed. Oh, and that no one had seen fit to tell Relena, one of the most important politicians in the ESUN, that there was an anti-government organization running the colony that she would be paying a diplomatic visit to. That really had to have pissed Heero off.

After he had told me what he chose to, I pointed out that we might want to contact Quatre, given that he had a whole miniature army of his own at his disposal. He agreed a little distractedly, but when he didn't budge from his position -- sitting leaned back in the co-pilot's seat, arms firmly crossed over his chest -- I took the subtle hint to carry out my idea on my own. It took me a little more time than I am proud of to patch through all the damn, clogged communications networks to put a request out for radio contact with Quatre's ship, but I consoled myself with the fact that Heero had since fallen asleep and thus I had no witnesses to my slowed efficiency at the computer.

Once I finally did get in contact with Quatre, the desperate situation we were in kind of came home to me. He insisted on attempting retrieval of the suits and I didn't put up a particularly hard battle to keep him from going, though I ordered him to keep me posted through mail. Shortly thereafter, Noin and Sally checked in and I was kind of pleased that they were surprised to see us already on the case. Maybe I hadn't lost my edge too much. Or maybe it was just that I was an old battle buddy of a guy who probably never would lose his.

To pass the time, now that he was awake again, I ribbed him a little, just for old times sake, but I found the effects weren't as appealing as they used to be. I subsided into discussion of the little girl's speech before too long, unsure about Heero's overall mood.

It was both flattering and a little disappointing when Heero admitted that he had brought me along for my piloting skills. I'm damn proud of my abilities in the cockpit of anything from a puddle-jumper to a Gundam and having Heero acknowledge them was a huge compliment, but being the driver of the getaway car has never been a very glamorous job. And that comment about using my head still stung a little.

Seriously, what the hell was that supposed to have meant anyway? Sure, maybe my ribbing him about his hurtling himself headlong into a self-imposed suicide mission at the drop of a hat had been a little pointed, and yes, maybe I hadn't asked any questions and thrown myself right in there with him, but -- unless I didn't know any better -- I would have to believe that he had been delivering a comeback, that he had risen to my joking him with a jibe of his own. But he was being all serious, wasn't he? I mean, Heero has a sense of humor -- and a damn warped one at that -- but shouldn't he be all strung out about Relena's situation? Clearly, I had missed something.

Barging into the damn colony was probably one of the most reckless displays of piloting I had ever attempted but -- superior firepower be damned -- I was not going to disappoint Heero's expectations. Once inside the damn facility, shit was hitting the fan all over the place and as I stared down Trowa in the docking bay, I really wondered if it wasn't all going to be over before we even got started saving the world this time around. Luckily, Trowa's mercenary skills don't compromise his feelings of friendship and, though the bastard cut it a little closer than I could really appreciate, he still deliberately let me walk away.

I eventually found Heero again and we traded stories about our encounters with our former comrades. Apparently, Wufei was not another Trowa. My heart sank at the news; I'd really gotten to know and respect the crazy Chinese bastard there at the end of the wars and it hurt to hear that he had allowed himself to be collared by such a ridiculous lot of high-born wackos as the Bartons seemed to be.

Heero finally revealed his suspicions about Operation Meteor and I couldn't say I was shocked, just sort of overwhelmed. I didn't want to admit it, but these guys had us out-gunned and out-classed. Of course, that wasn't going to stop us from throwing our full weight into protecting the peace of Earth.

We eventually located and made our way up to the main systems room on the colony to encounter our dear little drop-of-the-hat schizophrenic, Trowa Barton. It was just like the old days for a minute there, working together to stop the baddies and even the remaining guards pounding on the door to the room didn't kill the twisted adrenaline rush I was on as I got the confirmation message from Quatre that he had the Gundams in his possession and was coming back our way. Of course, what happened next sort of killed the whole camaraderie buzz I had going.

Punching Heero was not on top of my "things to accomplish before I die" list. Hell, it was on the bottom of my "ways to commit inadvertent suicide" list. But, the man himself had issued the order and I figured he meant to play knocked-out and look the part while he was at it. Once I'd gotten that idea into my head, I promised him a doozy and, as I settled myself to really level one at him, I found that little niggling anger from the whole "use your head" comment rise up again as well as a neat little bundle of irritation over his as-yet unsettled relationship with Relena and I really got into it. I mean, the guy rocked back a good foot and he was braced for it. Of course, I didn't know that hitting him would trigger a spontaneous retaliatory fist in the gut. Talk about intensive muscle training.

Clearly he had known what would happen, though why he felt he needed to trigger a reflex rather than just punch me out right, I don't know. I managed, as he caught my crumbling form, to gasp a "Why?" into his ear and he pulled back his head just enough to look me in the eye.

"One for one. It's for your own good," he told me and I felt him hand me off to Trowa with some parting comment about looking after me. I slipped away while still chewing on the "Fuck you."

I wasn't out for that long, but I can imitate sleep like nobody's business, so I gathered that Heero had taken off right after our little exchange in the control room. I was, rather predictably, tossed into a little cell that had probably been a closet at one time. I waited until the activity outside my door diminished and then set to work getting myself the hell out of that room and down to the shuttleport to meet up with Trowa so we could make tracks for the coordinates Quatre had given us to rendezvous with the Gundams.

There wasn't a whole lot to tell after that except that the three of us made it down to Earth in time to get ourselves caught up in another losing battle. But this time, it was the civilians who saved us, and not the other way around.

Of course, everybody had a little bit of a heart attack -- to put it mildly -- when Heero showed up and got Wing torn to absolute shreds in his ultimately successful attempts to break into Barton's underground fortress. But it still sends a stab of that fear through my gut to remember seeing the stretcher they hauled him away on, seeing him so...dead to everything.

Quatre, Trowa and I were treated on-site for minor injuries and then were ordered to hole up for a couple of days in the Preventers' facilities in order to avoid the press and other unwanted attention. It was two full weeks after our last attempt that Quatre, Trowa and I finally destroyed our Gundams, away from others just like Trowa had advised in the heat of the moment. Our casualties were our own, not to be born by anyone else, after all. That was the choice we had all made when first presented with Meteor and there was some measure of relief to be found in finally closing that chapter of my life.

It was surprising when Trowa shared his own sense of loss with us right there while we stared at the smoking remains of our Gundams. It struck me that while I may have finally lost my little niche of purpose, it was too harsh a loss for Trowa to suddenly be deprived of an identity.

"Names are given to you by others. No point wasting time worrying about it. What's important is having a place to call home."

Unfortunately, nearly two years later, I still wasn't sure I had that. After the Barton coup, we had all parted ways again, although Trowa and Quatre agreed to begin seeing each other on a trial basis between circus seasons.

Une had wanted me to cash my wandering chips in and settle into the Preventers position she had been holding for me -- just as she had been holding one for all of us -- since the organization's establishment, but I begged off for a while longer. She'd agreed to let me postpone my acceptance of the position for another twenty-four months, but no longer or she'd have to train someone else for the slot.

Une and I both knew I had no other skills except those that lent themselves to the work of Sweepers and, without a high school diploma, she had informed me in a roundabout fashion that I might never be able to obtain a loan large enough to secure my own ship, which was where all the real money in the trade lay. She knew, of course, that I could easily hit Quatre up for the cash, but she was gambling on my pride being too strong to allow myself to ask that of him. And she was right. So, I had until January of AC199 to live the life of a free man, and then Une had me for the rest of my working life. I tried hard not to think of it as a sort of death. Not that my directionless life of the next twenty months ended up being much greater than a slower, more tedious death.

I had returned to the L2 cluster and made good on my promise to visit Hilde and help her work her way through the Sweepers' flea markets to get her parents' yard back into the scrapping game. I ended up having to help her go through and sort her inventory and create a database to keep financial and stock logs as well. It took me a little more than a month and by the end, though I like the girl a lot, I was more than ready to get back to my little apartment a few colonies over in the cluster.

I have to admit that my exhaustion with Hilde might have been because of my predisposition to being really miserable right about then. I had had a hard time leaving Earth at the end of the Barton coup without any closure from either Wufei or Heero. Wufei had taken off to scrap his Gundam elsewhere, under the supervision of Sally Po who, upon the rather sudden -- but not entirely unexpected -- disappearance of her previous partner, Miss Noin, took Wufei into the Preventers under her wing as her new partner. Even though I hadn't had my own conversation with Wufei before heading back into space, I took some comfort from the fact that he seemed to be straightening himself out and at last letting go of the ghost of Treize Kushrenada.

Heero, his little present to my mid-section, and his parting comment to me, however, remained a disquieting memory in my mind. Did he really think that I was that much of a handicap to him that I should just be removed from the equation? Or had he had some other reason, as yet hidden from my understanding, to impair me "for my own good?" I had not received any explanation before returning to space and concern over the matter, now merited unimportant by anyone aside from myself, continued to haunt me. Now, to be fair, I had made an effort to figure it all out and get my friendship with Heero squared away again. I certainly couldn't be at fault that he had been unconscious for the whole thing.

I had felt like the biggest coward on the face of the planet, slipping into his hospital room when I knew he would be asleep. But I couldn't just not visit at all could I? And this way, just slipping in and leaving him his New Year's card and then getting out of the way of the herd of charging rhino that was Relena's bedside manner, I could keep things simple for myself.

I don't like goodbyes; I'm not really used to them, thus the whole running aspect of my dorky little motto. I find slipping away is a far better way to end things for everyone involved than the finality of send-offs. Besides, I was still a little pissed off about that whole "one for one" thing.

If he had wanted me to play dead, all that the fucking bastard needed to do was tell me. I take particular offense to being duped into getting my clock cleaned by Heero "I-can-bend-steel-bars-with-my-bare-hands" Yuy. If I was in a room with him incapacitated for too long, I might have been tempted to pay him back and then run like hell. As it was, I was just going to run like hell, especially given the rumors I'd been hearing about Relena's plans for Heero's future.

I knew I'd get an earful from Quatre about it later, but not until much later; he and Trowa were off somewhere talking, and that promised to consume a great deal of Q's attention for some time into the foreseeable future.

Jesu, he had looked fragile on that bed. He'd looked so tired, like the whole weight of the world had come down onto his shoulders, though I suppose in a way it had. I wanted, in that moment, to be able to stay and wait until he opened his eyes, until he could speak with me, but I knew that that wasn't my right, wasn't my place.

"Shit, Heero. Did you have to do this to me? Couldn't you just have told me to fuck off or something?"

I pulled the slightly bent card from my jacket pocket, trying in vain to smooth the edges back down to the way it had looked when I had bought it a few weeks earlier.

"I know it's a little early for New Year's, but I lost your Christmas card somewhere and it's already too late for that anyway, so..."

I stood the card up on the table next to the bed and looked in dismay as the flower arrangement there dwarfed my crumpled little card.

"I guess I'll be seeing you around then, buddy. Take care of yourself for me, since it's about the only thing I can really ask of you anymore."

I lingered a few minutes longer, hoping that he would wake up, but growing self-conscious, I eventually backed out the door quietly and headed down to the street to hail a taxi for the shuttleport. I really had only one place to go, what with Quatre and Trowa getting themselves figured out, so I booked myself on standby for the first flight back to L2.

It was something of a strange coincidence that I found myself thinking of that tail-between-the-legs departure from Earth over a year and a half later in some dinky little chain restaurant place a couple of blocks from my apartment. Maybe it was because of what the TV over the bar was playing.

I found myself watching the newscast with rapt attention, partly because of the subject matter and partly because it was the only thing to do in the little restaurant. The day workers were winding down their shift, hunched together by the kitchen doors in case they were needed by either the scant few customers or the kitchen staff. I was one of only two people sitting at one the bar's tables and the female bartender/waitress working the area was immersed in conversation with the other, who was obviously a friend of hers come to visit. Every once in a while, she'd glance over to see if I needed anything, but I'd pointedly not make eye contact and kept my sips on my drink to a minimum. Poor kid probably had hell on lunch shift, no point making her fuss over me.

The announcer on the news was cutting back and forth between his lists of particulars about the ESUN news conference and actual clips of those who spoke. I had to break off a chuckle when it crossed my mind that I found the latter more interesting than the former simply because I knew the ESUN presenters, in some capacity or another. I imagined that most people watching this broadcast felt that they knew the news anchor more personally than anyone on the ESUN panel of representatives. I guess you could take the boy out of the limelight, but you couldn't change who he knew from his time there or how he viewed it all from the outside.

I was conscious of another person coming through the door, being helped by the door girl to a place in the bar, and of his perusing the menu, but I really gave it no mind until he stood up. People who come into restaurants by themselves don't just sit down and then leave. My subconscious asked me if he was going to the bathroom, but that would have been back in the other corner, near the kitchen door, not over in my direction. Then I turned my head nonchalantly, to gauge his intention so I could get back to what very little I was doing.

My eyes caught his for a moment, but he looked away as he slowly loped up to the bar, sitting down a few chairs away from me. He was a tallish guy, but he had a pronounced slouch and a little bit of a gut. His hair was precisely parted and quaffed, but it was a bland mousy brown and a little bit too thick and coarse to be a real asset to his looks. His nose was a thin, boney thing, jutting far out from the rest of his face and leaving his eyes looking hollowed out and squinty. The glasses helped to bring his face into proportion, but even then, he was a pretty average looking guy. And, judging from the lingering baby fat and the school books poking out of his bag, I think I was safe in guessing that he was around my age; certainly not significantly older than me, anyway.

The guy wanted to talk to me, that much was clear. He was pretending to watch the news, but he was also stealing not-so subtle glances at me every once and again. There was an excited nervousness there and I faked a yawn to peek a closer look at those books in his satchel. "Practical Engineering" and "Mechanical Components" were a few of the available titles. And I was wearing my jacket with the Sweepers insignia stitched on the sleeve. Ah. He had wide eyes for the trade but no experience and he'd happened to stumble across a bonafide Sweeper. No wonder he was thrumming with excitement.

I turned to him to start the conversation since he was damn near fidgeting out of his seat in nervous anxiety. Seriously, I thought he was gonna hurt himself.

"You go to school around here?"

Not the greatest conversation starter ever, but it got the job done. About three minutes later, he was ensconced in the chair next to mine and talking a mile a minute, asking questions one on top of the other, like he thought I'd disappear in the next second without having revealed the mysteries of the universe.

His name was Henry -- "but call me Hank" -- Berven and he was a senior at the newly renamed "Heero Yuy Intercolonial University of Applied Science and Mathematics," otherwise known as "Yuy U." Gotta love the big hoidy-toidy name, though. It'd just been the "Advanced Academic Learning Center, L2 Branch" when I was growing up here. "Yuy U" had somewhat a different ring to it than the formerly popular acronym, "AALC."

Hank was, as I had already observed, studying mechanical engineering and picked my brain for a full half hour about anything and everything he could think of: Sweepers' equipment, utility claws, unmanned submersible design modifications for deep sea cave exploration, local employment opportunities, space bus reliability and fares as opposed to roundtrip space planes, L2 dives, Sweeper pickup lines, and an extremely censored version of my recruitment into Sweepers years before. Like I said, anything the kid could think of.

He wanted to go on to grad school, but he didn't think the funding would be available and it was a circumstance he seemed to harbor very thinly veiled animosity over. Eventually, to my utter relief, a dimple-faced girl came in and drug Hank away. After reveling a few moments in profound relief at seeing him entrenched at a table on the other side of the restaurant with what appeared to be a study group, I found the forgotten waitress at my elbow, refilling my drink. Her friend appeared to have moved on a while ago.

"He sure knows how to talk, don't he? Sorry about that. That kid salivates over all the Sweepers that come in here. I think you're the only one who's ever put up with him for this long, though."

I smiled up at her, noticing the light lines of early crow's feet branching out from her eyes and realized that she was older than I had first taken her for. I stayed a little longer, chatting with her, before pulling out, determined to get away before Hank could find his way back to me at the bar. I tipped the waitress with all the extra credits I had on me since I noticed she'd taken all my drink refills off the tab. She beamed at me and invited me back in that familiar waitress sing song tone, only with a genuine ring to it, when I waved back at her from the front door.

And then I was back on the street, a little surprised at my sociability of the last few hours. I was even more startled at the realization that followed on the heels of the former: that I had been lonely.

I had never really thought of myself as lonely before. Not in the "I need to be around people" sort of way. I'd always thought my loneliness was comprised mostly of guilt and longing for those I had once had with me, not that I was just generally desperate for human contact. I shook my head to clear away that thought. If I wasn't careful, I was going to convince myself that what I really wanted to do was go back into that bar and make small talk with a bored and tired waitress or talk shop with the wide-eyed greenie, Hank. My self-induced reality check produced the desired effect: I started walking for home.

I came up upon a bus stop, but couldn't bring myself to stop and wait for the thing to arrive. I just kept walking, listening to the vague scuffling noise of my boots over the pavement and remembering the way Sister had always scolded me for wearing out the treads of my shoes too quickly by dragging my feet. Thoughts of Sister drug up the memories of Saint Michael's and her diaries and, though I tried to distract myself, I was soon sunk in the memories of those old times, in the longing for that home.

I had known, on some level, when I returned to L2 after the Barton coup that I was running back to a past that was in all ways irretrievable, that I was deliberately picking open my injuries because at the heart of them lay a beautiful thing I did not want to let go of yet. I had long since finished reading through the journals, long since discovered the innocuous opening lines of an entry that was never finished, long since called a halt to my little investigations. And yet, I could not leave L2. I could not yet finish that chapter of my life because my conscience held two pieces of the whole bloody thing aloft even while I looked away, covering my eyes from the sight of them.

One was the collection of recovered items from Saint Michael's that the Catholic diocese supposedly had in their possession. Despite my fear of what I would see amongst those articles, I knew I had to see them. My personality always was a little on the morbid and masochistic side. I had to see that they were being kept safe, that those last vestiges and artifacts of Saint Michael's were being taken care of and that due respect was given to the victims. I had to make sure that my history wasn't just shoved into some utility closet, boxed away for God knows how long because nobody knew what to do with them, or even cared. I couldn't leave L2 without knowing if that night was no longer a wound but a fading scar.

The second thing keeping me on L2 was also tied up in my past, but I knew nothing about it, and that was why it held me there. In amongst Sister's retellings of day-to-day life, there had been a cryptic little passage, a momentary aside that had stunned me.

It was no secret that many colonial rebel uprisings occurred during the days of the Alliance, particularly before and after Heero Yuy's death. Very few had gotten anything accomplished before fizzling out under the military's thumb, and even fewer were notable influences on the general attitude of the colonies towards the Alliance. Sister wrote very little down about the outside world's politics after the arrival of "Father's children," but she deviated from form briefly in one entry written several months after the Plague had subsided and the accompanying hysteria had evolved into volatile anger.

"There is a storm of rebellion brewing on L2-X324, which is not as wholly unexpected in these trying days as the newspapers would have us believe," she wrote. "There are so many who lost their loved ones to the Plague and who cannot forgive the erroneous nature of the ACGA's actions, that it makes these saddening displays of violence and grief all too common, all too natural to be mistaken for anything else."

She did not comment on the uprising for many more entries. But there, huddled amidst her longer recitations of our lives, was a short bundle of paragraphs, jotted down hastily and perhaps even nervously.

"There were photographs of the leaders of the uprising on L2-X324 on the media networks and in the papers this morning. I hardly glanced at or thought of them twice until I took the children in from the yard for their afternoon study sessions. I happened across young David (or Duo, as he has taken to calling himself after the recent passing of his dear friend, Solo) in Father's office, doing chores as penance for a recent infraction at the primary school. Father had left his morning paper upon the desk and I called to him from the doorway to hurry along to the dining hall to study. David turned and faced me, standing not far from the newspaper on Father's desk and -- I do not know how to say it except plainly -- I saw a resemblance between the boy and one of the pictured rebel leaders, so striking that it was hardly mistakable for a trick of the eye.

"I told Father of it later in the evening, while the children prepared for bed, and he agreed that the resemblance is indeed uncanny, but he urged me to make no mention of the thing to the boy himself. He cautioned me that the subject of parents was a tender thing for these children and to tread with a heavy foot would do more harm than good. He also reminded me that, even if this man is our David's biological father or some other relative, he is to be executed in a few weeks on charges of treason, so would it be right to give our young ward a father only to have him snatched away again?

"I agree with Father's judgment, but I think it is a hard thing to keep from the boy. Perhaps when he is older there will be a proper occasion to enlighten him to my suspicions, but he is too young now for the knowledge to do him much good. I will keep these things in my prayers as I go forward, that there may a proper resolution to this matter, whether David knows of it or not."

The entry had stunned me so thoroughly at the time that I had shut the journal and not returned to it for a good number of days. I had considered calling Quatre and asking him what he made of it, but I held back at the last moment, unable to ask the question, though it continued to bother me. Was I the son of a disgruntled colonial militant? And if that man was my father, why had I been an orphan three colonies away in the L2 cluster?

I eventually tried researching the event, tried to find the newspaper clippings that Sister had spoken of, but the archives on L2-X502 had been destroyed in the war by flaming mobile suit debris. It was then that I called on Quatre, this time for advice about whether I should continue searching for clues or just accept it as a possibility and move on with my life. Quatre had encouraged me to do what I felt was right, and I had restrained myself from telling him in no uncertain terms exactly how helpful that advice was to me.

In the end, I hadn't pursued the investigation further, convincing myself that it didn't matter. After all, if I look to anybody as a parental figure, it would be Father Maxwell and Sister Helen -- hell, even Professor G. But I certainly wasn't going to change my whole fucking philosophy on life because of some obscure concept of a man Sister had thought resembled me. But I still lingered on L2, wondering what the story there had been. Wondering what my story was, even if it didn't include some mutinous man in a nameless revolution from nine years before.

But now my time as a free man was growing short. Every day drew me closer to my Preventers career and my pre-ordained conclusion to my journey into my past, for I had resolved that once I joined Preventers, I would put everything else behind me. The government resource shelter. The Plague. Solo. Father Maxwell. Saint Michael's. Sister. The war. The Barton coup. My crush on Heero. Everything. After all, they were all out of my reach anymore.

As I came back to my apartment building and punched in the door code, I pushed all those thoughts to the back of my mind and determinedly began pondering over which Sweepers job I wanted to accept next, since I currently had several contract job offers awaiting answers. Almost in a haze, I picked up my mail from my box and ascended the stairs in lieu of waiting for the demon-possessed elevator.

Once in my apartment, I dropped the mail on the kitchen counter without really going through it and made a pit stop at the fridge to grab a coke. Then I made a somewhat unconscious beeline for my computer, which was set up on the second or third-hand desk in what should have been the dining room but, since I ate my formal meals in the living room on the steamer trunk that stood in for a coffee table, I'd converted it into a little work area. I had barely sat down at the computer and entered my passwords to access the OS when my phone rang. With a weary groan, I stood again and made my way over to it, slapping at the button to accept the call two or three times before the call connected.

It was one of my Sweeper buddies, asking for help with a job the day after next and, in a little internal fit of defiance, I accepted. Couldn't hurt to get some distance from the problems while out on the job and doing something entirely different. And, if I really was so damn lonely, it gave me a perfectly good excuse to hang out with a whole ship's crew for a couple of days. Besides, a little spending money couldn't hurt.

A week and a half later I was back in my apartment, feeling a little less like I needed a hug and more determined to get something accomplished. And, with a good heaping pile of trepidation, I resolved that that accomplishment would be to approach the Catholic diocese about the Saint Michael's artifacts.

I waited another three days before I admitted to myself that I was just putting it off and forced myself to take the bus uptown to the diocesan building, just so my frugality would bitch at me for wasting money -- no matter how little of it -- on a pointless trip if I started to chicken out.

It was easier than I thought to get into the place, just walk in the damn front door and talk to the secretary. I was directed to the office of the treasurer, who seemed to be the one in charge when the Bishop was away. After giving her my "I used to be a parishioner" speech, she led me down the hallway into what appeared to be a library connected to the Bishop's office. I had been expecting her to lead me to a storage room, after the description the groundskeeper had given me of the objects being "held hostage," but what I found took my breath away.

Each and every bit of those retrieved articles had been framed and put on display in one manner or another, all designated with little markers that gave a description of the object and a location in which the object had been found. And, wouldn't you know it; those damn silver candlesticks were there, along with the cross from the altar and the tabernacle in a case that stood in the middle of the room. Along one wall, a few of the stained glass windows had been reconstructed and one had apparently had survived the destruction completely in tact and had been moved here lock, stock and barrel.

Along the walls and placed artfully along the rows of bookshelves were smaller things, books and papers, knick knacks and such, all surrounded by shards of stained glass. One panel held several of our communal toys. Another, some of the old altar linens. Yet another, ledgers and hand-written records. In one corner was one of our dining hall chairs and in another was the old cornerstone of the church, blackened with ash. But there amongst all the stained glass and shattered memories was the hardest thing of all: a picture of us all, every single resident orphan and nun, with Father Maxwell standing proudly in amongst us lot, smiling widely that last Easter morning.

I lingered in that room for what seemed an age, but when I emerged it had only been an hour and a half. I thanked the ladies of the office and stole out the door, somehow finding my way back to my apartment, though I could not tell you exactly how.

I didn't know whether to smile or cry. Their memory had been preserved so carefully, so conscientiously that it warmed me to think of it, but the stark reality of what I had seen left the sensation of tears standing in my dry eyes. I lay down on my couch and closed my eyes, falling asleep quite unintentionally and dreaming of that Easter Sunday so long ago. I woke up and called Quatre, making the first step towards moving away from L2 for my future on Earth.

I kept my promises to my Sweeper friends, filling my remaining three months with job orders and little else. Upon informing Une of my intention to return and accept the field agent position beginning in January, she pulled the paperwork together for me and even went so far as to assign me a partner: Heero Yuy.

To say that that particular development was detrimental to my new determination to move forward with my life would be an understatement. If there was one thing I didn't want to give up on, it was Heero Yuy. But I had to if I was going to go live on Earth and work with him and I found myself in full on denial about the move, even as I was shipping boxes of stuff down to Quatre, who had offered to let me stay with him while I looked for an apartment of my own.

I booked my shuttle flight to Earth for the twentieth of December and only later discovered that Quatre had some sort of party on for that evening, but he wouldn't let me change the date of the arrival to accommodate his already busy schedule so I found myself descending upon the Winner estate while packed to the gills with festive party-goers celebrating all manner of winter holidays as well as the anniversary of the end of both the war of 195 and the Barton coup.

I was more than a little hesitant to step into the throng of slightly familiar faces after two years of absence. Quatre had certainly spared no expense on this party of his and I was hard pressed to believe that there was anybody on the guest list who hadn't shown up. The rooms and hallways of the first floor were filled to the rafters with people, chatting, laughing, and catching up.

I suddenly wished very strongly that I had not allowed Quatre to insist on this being my moment of return, but there was hardly any taking it back now that I was here, was there? Besides, even if I'd had the nerve to ditch Quatre, my bags had already been confiscated by a looming Maguanac and the blonde brainchild of the party would be sure to know in mere moments that I had arrived, if he somehow didn't know already. Perhaps I could say a quick hello to him and then camp out in my appointed guest room for the duration of this party?

The temptation had me inching away from the bustling end of the front hallway and towards the elegantly roped off staircase that led to the second and third floors.

"Duo? Is that you?"

It had to be some supremely tasteless joke on Quatre's part that the voice that called out to stop me from retreating upstairs was the single person I was most afraid of running into first thing upon my return: Heero.

It struck me as odd that he still went by that vaguely creepy code name -- that he didn't just tell us his real name to use now that the wars were over. Or maybe he had told the others and I was just out of the loop. Only two ways to find out...

"Hi, Heero. How's it going?"

I was still turning around as I posed the question, but the answer was pretty self-evident once I'd really laid eyes on him. He was a fucking fantastic sight for my sore eyes. He'd put on a little height and his hair had been chopped back a little, most likely at the behest of Preventers HQ. But just generally, the guy looked almost exactly the same, only...leaner, more angled and, if it was at all possible, he radiated even more power and intensity than before. It was the smile, small though it was, that really blew me away. His thin lips were pulled gently across his face in a genuinely pleased and muted smile of what I could only call delight. I suddenly felt like the most important person in the whole damn place, despite whatever dignitaries there might be lurking around.

He came towards me quickly, telling me that he was well and how good it was to see me, and for a moment, I was worried he was going to hug me. But he caught my hand up in his instead, shaking it firmly and allowing some of that little smile to trickle into his voice as he inquired about how I was. I gave a quick answer in the positive, and then swiftly changed the topic to the first thing I could think of. I did not want Heero asking questions about where I'd been or what I'd been doing since he'd last seen me, not in the middle of the damn entranceway amongst all the commotion of one of Quatre's shindigs.

"So," I hedged, "how's it being in the Preventers? Any hot tips on surviving the place?"

As hoped, that launched him into a long explanation of the organization, headquarters, and of his own particular job within the ranks, decidedly off the topic of how I was.

Before too long, the Maguanac appointed with the task of carrying my luggage came back down the stairs to return to his station at the front door and, I little surprised to find me still in the entrance hallway, came over briefly to inform me in which room he had left my bags. Apparently Quatre had just decided that the fourth room on the left in the second turn of the hallway, between the generic bowl-of-fruit painting and the bust of Athena, was my room, because he seemed to put me there every time I visited his home. Either that or it was the only guest room that matched my specifications of being "un-foofy." The Maguanac also informed me that all the packages I had sent ahead of my arrival had arrived and were being stored in my guest room for the time being, unless I preferred them to be placed elsewhere?

"No, thanks...I'd rather I had it all together."

"Very good, Master Maxwell," he answered with a curt little bow and began to head outside again.

"Duo," I called to his retreating form, but he didn't turn to respond. I sighed in irritation; I had succeeded in getting all the old war-time Maguanacs off of using formalities with me, but the newer ones were proving to be completely unaffected by my repeated requests.

Of course, the fact that I was arriving with all of my earthly possessions in tow begged the question of my intentions and I went ahead and explained to Heero about my moving back earth-side and finally joining up with Preventers.

"Are you staying here while you look for a place?" Heero asked. "If I had known you would be returning so soon, I would have held out and offered to share with you, but I can't get out of my lease now."

Wait, wait, wait. What? Heero was living in an apartment? What had happened to the whole Relena arrangement? I found myself asking as much, without toning back the phrasing. Before I could get around to backpedaling and softening the question to accommodate for a possible breakup of the political power couple, Heero managed to make his light snort of response sound somewhat chagrined.

"I guess it really did look like that. Even you thought we were dating."

His eyes became intensely focused then, and it was hard to miss the weight of what his next words meant to him, though I didn't understand why he was so intent on letting me know this.

"I wasn't romantically involved with Relena. She was boarding me in her home while I found my footing after the war."

I suppose the emotion I should have felt then was relief or jubilation, but instead I found myself choked with panic. Sheer terror might even have been closer to the truth. I desperately wanted to flee for the hills, captive luggage be damned. And I had absolutely no idea why.

"Uh, okay. Good to know."

And that was all I had. Duo Maxwell's conversational magic hat trick had fizzled out of pixie dust and evidently the next batch was lost in shipping. So, we stared at each other for several of what could easily qualify as the longest few seconds of my life. At the time, I could have sworn whole minutes were limping away in the vast wasteland of conversation we had created. When another late arriving couple shuffled past us, Heero broke our reverie, albeit hesitantly.

"Could we...Would you mind if we went somewhere and...talked for a little while? I'm not comfortable talking about this right here."

"Sure, buddy. Lead away."

I followed him into the house, through the clusters of chittering people, looking over his shoulder once and again to make sure I was still behind him and not caught up somewhere amongst the shifting masses of conversation.

We finally reached the library Quatre loved so well, which he had had roped off, I suppose, to preserve the intimacy and peace of the room. Quatre had once told me that places echoed feelings or moods and I doubted that later tonight he would want to come to one of his favorite places to read and meditate when it had been busting its seams with party-goers only a few hours before. It seemed the perfect place to be alone and Heero slipped us past the velvet rope barricade and into the room.

We made ourselves comfortable in a few of the high-backed leather armchairs scattered about the room, pulling them closer together so we could talk without having to be overheard by the hoard just beyond the doorway. Nothing was said for several minutes as Heero fell into his usual pre-discussion thought process and I found myself gazing out the familiar windows down onto the torch-lit landscaping at the back of the house.

Most of the gardens skirted the house closely so that the majority of the lawn at the back was a long, gentle green slope down to the glassy lake at the foot of the hill, threaded through with a few footpaths and dotted with one or two majestic trees which had their trunks wrapped in antique benches. It was a peaceful sort of place, one that I had appreciated in my time there at the estate between wars and conflicts. Quatre took great pride in it and I think he might not have found the library half so appealing if its view wasn't directly overlooking the best feature of the house.

Heero cleared his throat at some length, bringing my attention back to his form seated across from me and his earnest expression. With a small, barely perceptible nod, I urged him to continue. I have to admit that his first words were not particularly encouraging to the pom-pom waving side of me.

"I like Relena. I admire her. She is not ugly. Her appearances are what I believe many people think are appealing and pleasing. But I am not....physically attracted to her. I do not think I ever could be.

"I realized a little later than I am proud of that there were people with expectations. Not Relena herself, but...friends of her family, politicians, acquaintances. A comment made as a joke gave away to me what I should have noticed on my own; that is, how odd it looked for Relena to be boarding a young man her age of no relation to her without some sort of romantic relationship. I realized that my staying there allowed speculation to be raised that was not beneficial to Relena's reputation or political standing. I then resolved to stop exploiting her generosity and to find a permanent residence of my own. After talking to her about the idea, I realized that many things I wanted...that I needed could come of my independence from her."

"Like what?" I found myself asking.

"Happiness," he replied softly, looking me dead in the eye. The intensity there was too much and I found myself looking back out on the scenery.

This was perhaps the strangest conversation I could have ever anticipated having with the reserved young man. I've had plenty of strange conversations with Heero before, but nothing even remotely close to such an intimate one.

During the war we had tossed around the occasional subdued joke, frequently ragged on each other and had compared notes on missions. Not anything to write home about, but it had established "an efficient familiarity and a valuable camaraderie." Nowadays, we discussed politics and societal reform on the oh-so-rare times that I actually wanted took part in one of those polite telecom tête-à-têtes Quatre and Relena wrangled together every three months like clockwork.

We spoke of literature, technology, engineering, and any other momentary hobbies or interests we followed up on in our new lives through the relatively frequent group emails that Quatre and Relena encouraged all of us to exchange, and even conversed privately in the much less frequent personal emails Heero sent which were meant to disclose some particular aspect of civilian life that he found difficult or to vent a frustration with his own inadequacy as a keeper of the peace, though I'd always pointedly ignored any questions about my whereabouts and activities. And because they couldn't physically reach me, no one could force me to spill my guts on that subject. Well, nobody but Quatre.

I knew from those rare personal emails that Heero seemed to trust me just a whisper more than the other pilots and I assumed it had something to do with that awkward moment way back on Peacmillion when the guys had shut up real fast at my observation that Heero could make mistakes just as easily as the rest of us. I know that nobody really believed that Heero was perfect or flawless, but they had wanted to believe it and I think that Heero was hurt by that estimation of his strength. After all, such a belief isolated him and set people up to be disappointed in him, both of which are harsh for the human psyche.

Heero wanted nothing so much as to be a part of the rest of humanity, to be normal and have regular relationships with people, but instead he gets slapped with these labels of "Perfect Soldier," "Savior of Earth," and other such tacky, superhuman nicknames and...well, you get the idea. I always took it as a supreme compliment that Heero trusted me to take him seriously and to give him a fair shot at just being whoever he was. That didn't make this conversation any less awkward, however.

"After the first war was over...after we spoke, I realized how confused I was...how I felt so strongly about...everything after I thought the fighting was over, and I didn't know what was actually important to me anymore. So, I went back to J's base...or, what was left anyway. I missed everyone...Relena too. When I heard that she was taken hostage, I was afraid -- of what was expected of me mostly and of how ill-equipped Une was to handle that sort of threat. So, I came and got you. I thought that it would be alright to return to being a soldier if you were there with me...all of you. The Gundams. I was best when I knew you were all there, as allies.

"At the end of the Barton coup, Relena told me that she wanted me to stay with her, that it wasn't good for me to be on my own. I thought that maybe, if I was so unbalanced when she was kidnapped, maybe I wasn't handling the peace as I should have been. I wanted to ask you what you thought about it, but by the time I tracked where you went, Hilde told me you'd come and gone from her home already. And when I asked Quatre, he told me that you had gone home, but when I tried to reach you, you weren't available.

"Eventually I accepted the offer and asked for Une's help in destroying the rest of J's lab before moving into the Darlian estates. Relena worked hard to help me settle into living there. I spent the first few months just getting used to the lifestyle, talking and spending leisure time with Relena...that wasn't bad. I was calm, even happy at times. Relena was very supportive and went to every effort to open her home to my presence," I nearly let out a bark of laughter at his obliviousness to Relena's advances, but his somber and earnest expression limited the outburst to a sticky feeling at the back of my throat.

"But I wasn't always happy with things. I thought that that might have been my fault -- for being too much of a fighter to adequately enjoy the peacetime. But I began to realize that I wasn't yearning for battle; I found that I could no longer stand the thought of being alone. I always wanted to be around...people. I wanted to experience other things, too."

I fully looked at him then, "Other things?" He looked slightly to the side of me and I could see him regretting his decision to say that. Rather than press the point, I moved on to what he had said about being lonely prior to his strange admission.

"So was it just that you needed to be around people, or was it more of a co-dependent thing? Like, you needed someone to need you?"

He seemed uncomfortable, even more so than before, but he hesitantly answered, most likely holding himself to some sort of personal promise to tell me everything.

"Sort of. I've always been someone's protégée; I've never really been on my own, never really been independent. I wanted to try, but I was scared...that I'd mess it up...that I'd hurt someone. It was what you and the others were doing; finding your own places in the peace, but I couldn't make myself try. I felt like I was hiding, and it made me sick. I told myself how much I owed Relena and that she always seemed to enjoy having me there. I'd remind myself how she always used to say how much of a comfort it was to come home to a friend. I used her friendship to keep from having to be on my own again.

"So, yes. I suppose it was what you could call co-dependency. I worried at times that my staying there was strenuous for her, since it meant she had a visitor constantly in her home, but she always told me it was no trouble. I felt so...cowardly. I began paying for my room and board, but I still felt like I was living a lie. Compared to the others. Compared to you. But I still hung on Relena's charity like a leech."

He spoke about these conflicting emotions like he was reading a grocery list, but he couldn't meet my eye and his hands were wrung so tight around each other I thought he might break a few fingers. His eyes, always full of strength and determination, looked hurt and lost as his doubts resurfaced.

I couldn't help but bite my lip in distress. Relena loved him, and he had loved her in his own way. But like a medieval knight to his patron lady, Heero's affection for Relena was a pure thing. He had never expected to find his respect and precious devotion for Relena and her fond regard for him to be something potentially crippling for him. His unfaltering loyalty and dedication to her coupled with his hesitance to leave had fed off of her own openly expressed affection, leaving Heero feeling guilty for mooching off her generosity or possibly overstaying his welcome. He went quiet, the troubled look hanging on his face.

I could only hope he hadn't tried to articulate these problems to the girl herself out of some twisted sense of duty or obligation. I also prayed fervently that Relena hadn't pushed him too hard, that he wasn't leading into telling me about some attempted romantic encounter, for both of their sakes. If she had let Heero talk himself into dating her or, heaven forbid, sleeping with her because she wanted it or because it would justify his dependence, it would essentially be a form of blackmail or rape. And had that come to pass, if Relena ever realized the circumstances of the encounter, it would be a heavy blow. Relena really did love him; she was just impatient with the parts of Heero she didn't understand. Nothing would hurt her more, I think, than realizing she had bullied Heero into letting her have her pleasure, regardless of his own hesitations. Such a thing could break anyone who truly loved.

I knew better than to touch him without permission when he was feeling so vulnerable, so instead I offered my hand, palm up, in his line of sight just in case Heero wanted some physical comfort. We had discovered this safe alternative back during the war after he once blackened half my face with a neat right hook when I had tried to pat his shoulder one evening when he was visibly upset. Usually it would take him a few minutes to accept the extended offer -- if he did at all -- but the night seemed to be full of surprises.

He immediately grabbed at my hand and pulled me forward into what was not so much a hug as an impulsive clutching of my frame, his face tucked into the crook of my shoulder as he lay his head down on it in a gesture of intense fatigue.

"I tried to ignore it at first," he continued, "We went on as normal, and for a little while I could forget that I sometimes had doubts about how long I'd be welcome there, how long she would put up with me. But then, when we were at that dinner -- I was escorting her that night to an official dinner -- I overheard someone asking when the wedding was and she was laughing in that worn-out way, like she'd been asked the question many times before.

"I didn't ask her about it until later, and when she asked me if it really had bothered me, I told her it had been sort of weird; that it had made me feel awkward at the thought of going back around those people. I asked her what people thought was going on between us and she said that rumors were circulating, and had been for some time, that we were dating, since I lived in her house. She said that she had tried to tell people the truth, but no one would believe her. She said she didn't mind, that it didn't matter what other people thought, as long as I was happy staying there. And I wasn't comfortable with the idea of being on my own; I enjoyed living there and having her company, but...dating? Marrying Relena? Someone even asked her how I was...in the bedroom!"

In the strained pause that followed, I asked quietly, "Is that how you put it to her? Not the best way in the world to tell a girl you don't like her, buddy."

I wasn't sure he had even heard my light reprimand around his own thoughts, because he picked up where he had left off.

"We talked for so long about it...long into the night." His voice began to even out, losing its rough edge; his arms remained firm around my frame, his forearms pushing against my back, pulling me into the hunched roll of his body as it curled clumsily against mine. "I wasn't really ready to move out on my own, but I didn't want to be a burden to Relena anymore, monetarily or politically. She encouraged me when I talked about moving out; told me some independence would do me good.

"I went to my office at headquarters and I made a call to Une. She put me on leave for as long as I wanted, as long as it took me to figure out what I was going to do. I told her that I wanted to...find you, but she didn't know where you were. Nobody knew where you were -- except for Quatre, but he wouldn't tell me anything. I...needed to talk to you, but...not in an email or in one of those group phone calls. I needed to see you...face to face."

Heero drew back and looked up at me almost sternly from beneath a veil of mahogany locks. "You said we were best friends, and that I could count on you to help me."

Jesu, he remembered that? I had said it that same evening he'd belted me, about five minutes later when he was looking stricken as he morbidly marked the rising red lump on my face underneath the bag of melting ice. I had been trying to reaffirm that we were friends, that it had been a mistake on both of our parts and that what I had been trying to offer hadn't been retracted. I hadn't thought any of it had registered past the horror he was trying to repress, but apparently I was wrong. That was becoming an increasingly frequent occurrence with Heero, being wrong.

"Yeah," a non-committal response erupted from me and his face fell a little. Not liking that look on top of his already haggard complexion, I continued after a brief pause to collect whatever thoughts I still had at my disposal. "I needed some space after the wars, and back home on L2 they don't know who I was, just who I am now. They think I'm just the nice, eccentric Sweeper who lives down the hall. It made...adjusting easier.

"Quatre insisted on helping me pay for the apartment fees, since I had just been planning on hotel hopping or staying on a Sweeper barge. He had a point though about passing up the community bunkrooms; I might've hurt someone without thinking about it." Heero nodded at that, understanding and approving of the decision to live alone. I continued quickly, encouraged by his reaction.

"So Quatre knew where I lived because he mailed me checks and sent me the occasional care package -- to make it look like I had a family somewhere. I didn't need anybody...official...poking their head in the door at odd intervals to see if I was 'coping,' so I didn't give out my address or contact number to anybody else. I wanted to work for awhile -- prove I could do something productive -- on my own. I didn't want to be a PR story about soldier rehabilitation. I just wanted a little time to be normal, that's all. And if it makes you feel any better, normal's kinda boring."

He let out a small laugh, mostly because I wanted him to.

"I just thought, the way you spoke with Noin during the Mariemaia incident, that you were already working undercover or something for Lady Une," he said. There was just enough of a lift in his voice at the end, though, that I knew it for the question it was.

"Une's holding a W-4 over my head from back at the end of 195; I just nagged her for a delay in active duty. As soon as I get a mailing address here Earth-side, I'm 100% Preventer property." He let out a slightly gustier laugh, proof that he was calming down from the stress of confessing the intimate details of his recent past to me. I waited a moment before I continued in a more solemn manner.

"I'm always here for you, buddy. No matter where I am, I'll always be on the next plane if you need me. I'm just not sure what to tell you, now that it's all in the past. I guess congratulations are in order on the slightly used apartment?"

He knew just as well as I did that that was my way of hedging around what I really meant, which was, "I'm not sure you want to hear what I have to say."

Heero glared mildly, irritated at my hesitance. He's a straightforward guy, Heero, and he prefers other people be straightforward as well, which makes conversation with me frustrating for him because I've literally spent decades now skimming the truth and fine-tuning the meaning of my words. Old habits die hard and all that jazz.

After a minute or two pretending I hadn't noticed his pointed look, he voiced his irritation. "You're not helping me when you don't say what you think about it." I gaped at him for a moment, and then pulled away completely, standing and moving to the other side of the room to study the landscape beyond the window as I contemplated my answer.

I have a bona fide school boy crush on Heero Yuy, let there be no denying the cold hard facts...well, at least not to myself. I've been following the guy with my eyes since some point earlier on in the war, couldn't really tell you when exactly. All I know is one day I'm fine thinking we're about to blow each other away, the next I think he's dead and wind up a mess of quivering nerves and overwhelmingly melancholy on the floor of my cockpit while I'm hiding from patrols after the railroad fiasco. After activating the proximity alarms, thank god.

But back to Heero wanting me to help him figure out how to get around his insecurities about independence so he could run back to living with Relena, when I really was ecstatic to hear that the two were no longer living together, as it might prolong what I considered the inevitable, despite Heero's protests. This is about the point in the conversation that I wanted to hop the first flight back to L2 and curl up in the fetal position under my old bed until the cosmos stop picking on me.

Brave, stalwart men and women throughout history have helped the people they cherish hook up with someone else -- my personal favorite example being Cyrano of the voluptuous nose -- but examples of people helping their object of affection realize they were in love with another person were coming up a little short in my memory, as in none.

About the bravest I had been able to manage when I'd heard Relena was going to ask Heero to come live at her estate after the Mariemaia debacle was tucking my tail between my legs and running like hell all the way back to L2, dutifully responding to the emails and telecom meetings and sending the now traditional greeting cards through Quatre.

Even that little show of my support was nearly terminated when I had discovered that everyone's favorite Queen of the World^TM found my taste in cards a little "crass." Hearing that piece of news, I'd stopped sending them right after mailing the already-purchased card for the old American holiday of Thanksgiving, which depicted a comically decapitated settler and an axe-wielding turkey.

A few days after Christmas (my first non-card sending holiday in two years), I had received a heated email from Quatre that reported that one Heero Yuy had had a neat collection of my cards going and had become convinced that my expected Christmas card had gone astray in the mail. He had apparently been so sure of this that he had called each of the post office sorting plants within a 300 kilometer radius of his home. He had expressed his concern to them frequently enough to be on a first name basis with all the floor managers.

By the time Quatre's annual Christmas Eve party had rolled around, Heero had been beside himself with worry that the card was gone for good or -- in his more panicked moments -- that I was. I had made sure to pick up a card from the discount rack the next day and go to the great lengths of getting it "lost" in my own foray with the floor managers of the Sanc Kingdom's postal service. Putting both of their names on the address line had been about as supportive of the inevitable union as I could manage on a regular basis, if you understand what I'm trying to say.

My point is this: if Heero wanted me to dig into my bag of encouraging one-liners and magical tricks this time, he's not going to be very happy with me. What I had to say was a combination of, "Poor Relena, that's gotta hurt," and, "There is a God!" These were things I didn't think Heero would take very well, especially once he figured out why I was thanking God that he couldn't see himself dating a beautiful, enthusiastic woman that the whole world -- except him, eveidently -- knew that he was in love with; once he figured out that I had been dreading the day they would have children and some blue eyed, blonde child would refer to me as "Mr. Duo" or "Uncle Duo," per Heero's design.

Luckily, I didn't have to answer. Trowa, who had been silently hiding in the frame of the doorway, apparently to deter other houseguests, advanced into the room and gathered all Heero's attention to himself. I don't think Heero was anymore shocked than I was at what came out of tall, dark and silent's mouth.

"Forgive me for intruding, but maybe you were just misplacing your need for companionship with Relena, Heero. Have you considered that maybe being around someone more familiar with your circumstances -- Duo, for instance -- you would have been more comfortable adjusting to the peacetime? Maybe that's why you sought him out both before and after your time with Relena? Because you were more comfortable relying on the person closest to you, both in heart and mind?"

I stared, gaping as though someone had deposited an anvil on my lower jaw. Trowa just seemed pleased as hell with himself and maybe slightly irritated with me for not jumping in there, while Heero's face twisted into a small frown as he looked beyond Trowa's shoulder to where I stood by the window.

Well, Heero may have been confused, but I sure as hell wasn't. Trowa was a sneakier bastard that Quatre! The two of them were in cahoots with each other! (Well, they were in a lot more than "cahoots" with each other, but that needn't be pointed out.) So now the only thing left for me to do -- other than confess to Heero that I was harboring a monumental crush on him and had spent the past three years wishing he were with me and not Relena, which I was not about to do -- was to make a hasty retreat from all involvement with this problem of Heero's possible co-dependency issues and the eventual verdict where they were concerned until Quatre released me back into my life.

"I don't agree with you in anything except that Heero should probably think about how he feels about Relena. He may have a few doubts about their relationship that could affect his...feelings about whether he deserves her help. Beyond that, what you said was all you, Trowa buddy."

And with that, I gave in to instinct and turned tail on the questioning expression on Heero's face and the smile of triumphant confidence on Trowa's and fled out of the room, out of the house and as far out on the grounds as my little feet could walk me.

Heero was the one that found me, staring out down across the lake from my place beneath a giant oak tree.

"Duo? Are you okay?"

I sighed heavily, but invited him to join me.

"Just needed to cool my head, is all."

"Did Trowa say something that bothered you?" he queried, all innocent concern.

"I would have thought he said something that bothered you," I replied, holding the question in just enough to make it seem like I was just saying what I thought.

"No, he's right. I have wondered for a while why my friendship with you and the others seems so easy to accept but the friendly offerings Relena made for me wounded my pride. It is a fundamental problem at the heart of my relationships with almost everyone except the four of you. And it is also true what he said about you being closest to me; I always find myself turning to you in the hardest moments."

"I don't know why," I laughed. "I certainly don't have much to offer."

"That is unfair to yourself. You can offer many things that I would never accept from anyone else."

There was an edge to his voice that I couldn't place and dismissed as nervousness about being so open with me.

"I was...worried that you'd take what he said the wrong way..." I fumbled with myself over whether to continue what I had begun, but bulled forward at the last moment out of some sense of duty. "He was making a poor joke, Heero, mostly on me. I'm...I'm attracted to men, buddy, and Trowa was poking fun at how weird it must look for you to be best friends with a gay guy."

I'm not entirely sure what I expected his reaction to be, but I don't think it was for him to become instantly inquisitive and a little disappointed.

"Okay," he paused, "Why haven't you told me before?"

"I didn't want it to affect our friendship or make you uncomfortable around me."

He looked hurt for a moment, but recovered himself for one more question.

"Does Trowa think that we would be a good couple?"

"What?!" I sputtered, looking at him wild eyed.

"I mean," he corrected himself without looking my way, "Was that part of his joke? That I wasn't dating Relena because I was in love with you?"

When we had missed that left turn at Albuquerque, I do not know, but we had somehow wandered into very treacherous territory for me.

"I suppose...that he might think it would be funny if we were a couple like he and Quatre are a couple, but I don't think he was seriously considering it."

"Oh," he said, and was it just me or was there a ring of disappointment in his voice. It had to have been my imagination. Heero would only be feeling relief that Trowa wasn't seriously considering us trying a relationship, even if he did turn out to like men. I am not grade-A quality materiel and I am well aware of that. Heero could, and would, do so much better. I suppose that was why I never made a pass at him, besides my own life-preserving tendencies.

We eventually wandered back to the house as I still hadn't said hello to the host and, evidently, neither had Heero. He eventually forgot the conversation and when we parted ways for the evening, he told me he looked forward to seeing me at work the following week. I needed no further proof that Trowa's comments had been dismissed out of hand and that I had safely guarded my only other real secret from discovery, at least my Heero.

My partnership with Heero lasted about three months. In a way, it was doomed to failure from the very start. He was uncomfortable around me for some reason and I often looked up from my work to see him hovering in front of my desk looking anxious and ill at ease, like he wanted to ask me something, but was too embarrassed by the subject. Or, he couldn't decide whether it was a good idea or not. Whenever I asked, he would look surprised, then somewhat mortified, stuttering out some incomprehensible answer before moving quickly back to his own desk and pointedly immersing himself in work there until the first opportunity to exit the confines of our office presented itself. And -- given our workload -- that was rarely too long a wait.

In the field, there were times when he was almost clumsy, times when he lost his footing on stairs or miscalculated trajectory. There were times when it took him too long to respond to a question or instruction, times when he missed what I said all together and had to ask me to repeat myself. These occasions were particularly bad when we were alone undercover. It became clear after a little asking around that I was the only person he'd ever been teamed with that had had him...trip up like this with anything even bordering on regularity. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the partnership was not to Heero's liking or benefit.

Not that I was a perfect fucking example of Preventer efficiency and aptitude. I hate to admit it, but I was a little rusty in some areas. Of course, most of the skills in question came back to me quickly -- "Like riding a bike," as Quatre would say -- but the little insecurities and wounds to my ego were further aggravated by having to adjust my tried-and-true habits to fit Preventer values and procedures. I can't tell you how many times I almost quit out of my sheer frustration. And, I have to confess that bumbling round in front of Heero of all people stung worst of all the little insults, and that I sometimes took a little of that slow-boiling dissatisfaction with myself out on him.

Compounding our evident awkwardness around each other was the fact that our...styles, I guess...were completely different. He preferred to charge in, flashing his badge, both barrels blazing, fully intent on intimidating what he needed out of people. I preferred to hang back a little, taking a little time to schmooze the info out of witnesses, swooping down on the baddies without so much notice as a tap on the shoulder. Trying to reach a compromise just aggravated the hell out of both of us, particularly when it came to who was on point during missions.

Basically, he always wanted a monopoly on all the difficult or risky positions during a raid, and my pride -- or maybe my practicality -- would never let me give into him when I didn't feel it was necessary, which was almost always. I tried to convince myself that he was just an adrenaline junkie and that his obstinacy where point position was concerned wasn't indicative of a lack of trust or respect for me and my abilities. Wanna know a secret? I didn't usually buy it.

So it really shouldn't have been much of a surprise to anyone when one of our cases went sour in a big way.

It should have been simple, but isn't that always the way it is? The biggest screwups always seem to come out of the little bits that should have run like a well-oiled machine. Devil's in the details and all that jazz.

I guess the first problem was that our target shouldn't have been armed. All intel had pointed to him being unlikely to pack heat and even more unlikely to actually use a weapon against us. And wouldn't you know it; the little fucker had gone to see an illegal arms dealer just that afternoon. In fact, that's where we attempted to make the arrest. Go us.

Of course, we didn't know it was anything more than an adult video store and -- trust me -- that was bad enough. I was raised in a freakin' church and, while I am certainly not of an innocent mind or mouth, I do not like porn .

Father had impressed upon us, in his own way, that our bodies were temples of God and also of ourselves. I know that he was trying to combat the habits of the street, trying to keep the boys from engaging in irresponsible sex and to keep the girls from being stranded with an abusive boyfriend or with a baby to feed, but a lot of that had rung true to me. Promiscuity has its turn-ons, but I prefer the concept of intimacy, of safety. There's a reason why strippers are guarded by those big bouncers; they're vulnerable, even if it doesn't seem like it. And they're vulnerable in public. No worse fate on the streets and that may be part of why I clung to Father's instructions to wait until you had some promise of commitment. I needed that security, I needed a safety net. Hey, I may be a guy, but I go after other guys, remember? I know better than to believe the words mean something on a first date.

So why the problem with porn? I don't really know...it just rankles, I guess. I did grow up in a shelter, but I'd be lying if I didn't tell you I'd seen and heard more by the age of six than any child should have to. Kids are too young for that kind of thing; they feel their body react, but it's a scary thing because they don't have the emotional maturity yet to understand it or why it's appealing. So when I hovered in the shelter's bathroom stalls for twenty minutes at a time waiting for the hooker to finish plying her trade and for the two or three of them to leave again, it kind of left a bad taste in my mouth. And I suppose porn just brings all that back to me, all that hiding and feeling sick and strange and scared. But there we were, Heero and I, standing in front of a damn porn flick store, ready to tail our guy inside and make the arrest. I was about to walk into a place that sold sex with the only man I wanted to have sex with...and he was marked territory, not to mention too good for me. Jesu, if I believed in luck, I would have to say I really got on the bad side of the lady at some point. So, I guess I wasn't thinking too clearly already that afternoon, already a little one edge.

We decided to split up; I'd go around and up through the back, since I'd probably be able to finagle my way past any lock there might be on the back door, and he'd wait for three minutes and then proceed in through the front. Like I said, we had no clue we were walking into the cover for an arms dealer; we were just trying to make sure the guy didn't get past us and escape, just trying to make the arrest so the both us could go home at a decent hour that night.

I made my way around the back and in very little time at all, I was opening the staff door and making my way inside. And that was when I came across the transaction taking place in the stock room. There were four of them, including my mark, and they had guns. Lots of them.

I reeled back before the first guy could recover enough to pull one of the guns strapped to his torso, and plunged in what must have been the manager's office just as the first bullet embedded itself in the wall opposite the stock room's doorway. I slammed the heavy door to the office shut and pushed the dinky lock button in, hoping to sweet Jesu that it would buy me some time. I could hear them yelling outside and then the pounding on the door began. I had moved out of the way of the door after locking it, but the bullets they were firing at it weren't coming all the way through, though I could hear the cheap door cracking as the bullets wedged themselves into the wood.

I shoved the filing cabinets in front of the door, toppling them in the way in case someone decided to try and break their way through. Then I upended the desk so that the better wood of the desktop would serve as a shield and ducked behind it, pulling out my handgun and flipping on my radio headset.

"01. Come in, 01."

"This is 01. Situation?"

"Compromised. Four hostiles, heavily armed," I dropped out of the military jargon as I heard them starting to kick at the door, "Shit! It's an arms deal, Heero! I'm holed up back here in the office. Call for backup!"

"Stay put, Duo. I'm coming."

"No, you asshole! Call for backup!"

Nothing but the crackle of radio responded. Oh, that and the sound of gunfire and yelling moving more towards the front of the store.

"Fuck!"

I threw the radio headset off and distantly heard it hit the wall and snap in half. I was pulling the filing cabinets away, flinging crap behind me like a dog digging a hole in one of those old cartoons. I pulled at the door when I'd cleared something like a space for it to open, but the retards had apparently tried to shoot the lock off and now the handle was useless. Now I was the one kicking at the door, hearing the cheap plywood splinter and crack under the whole force of my body. It took me close to a minute and a half, but the door gave way and I tore my way past it, ignoring the harsh scrapes the thick wood splinters and shards inflicted on my hands and arms as I pulled it apart.

Once in the hall, I could see that one man had already been shot in the jugular and was dying slowly in a miserable quiver of desperate gurgling and clawing. I ignored him as best as I could and leveled my gun up at one of the men who had turned towards me upon my emergence from my hidey hole. I had the shot off before I could process the look on his face and was moving past him before he really hit the floor.

Out in the customer area, I could see Heero had incapacitated our primary quarry with three shots in as many limbs. I could not see the fourth man, however, and I called out to Heero to confirm his location. His voice emerged from behind the register counter and I began to move towards him even as I called out, "4?"

"Here," he confirmed, standing and idly wiping at blood on his face, smearing it further. As I came a little bit closer, I saw the body stretched out on the floor and began to holster my weapon, looking down to secure the little fastener over the stock.

"Duo!" Heero shouted and I looked up to see his eyes widening and his handgun flying up to sight over my shoulder. I intentionally crumpled to the ground, dropping like a stone and pushing off the floor with my hands and knees to roll over and away from Heero, hand fumbling to retrieve my firearm from its holster. Before I had finished this maneuver, two shots were fired and I heard the fifth man cry out shortly. I watched him hit the floor when I got around to facing him and when I saw blood slipping out from under his prone form and over the tile floor, I tore my eyes away and back to Heero.

He was leaning against the countertop, one hand held to his side where blood was soaking through his uniform shirt. His gun hung limp in his other hand and his eyes were fixed on the man he had just killed, as if not sure that he was truly dead.

"Shit, Heero!"

He looked to me, eyes a little wide and I could see the adrenaline rush fading out.

"Duo," he sighed, his voice a mixture of panic and relief, "You're not injured, are you?"

"No, but you sure as hell are," I retorted as I pulled myself up, re-holstering the gun and moving towards him, "Lemme see."

I hissed in through my teeth as I saw it and then checked for an exit wound, immensely relieved to find one. With his help, I worked off his shirt, careful of pulling on the open edges of the wound. Then I pulled off my own outer uniform shirt, shucking all pins and clips off of it before rolling it tightly into one long strip of cloth and cinching it tightly about the wound, letting him dig his fingers into my shoulder as I did so. I cleared the countertop next, shoving everything else onto the floor and helping Heero up onto the surface to lie as flat as he could, though his head was propped against the cash register and his feet dangled off the edge a ways.

"Did you call for backup?"

"You needed help immediately."

"Dammit, Heero...I could have handled it."

Well, that was up to debate, but in that moment, I felt confident that I could take on a herd of charging rhino with my bare hands.

"You could have been killed," he argued.

"So could you, asshole!"

"I took the four without any trouble. Where did the fifth one come from?"

I slammed my fist into the counter, shaking unsteadily from anger both at myself and just the universe in general.

"I don't fucking know! Now shut up while I get somebody in here!"

He subsided then, but his eyes tracked me as I pulled his radio off of him and began the laborious process of calling in for backup and an ambulance. I nearly choked on the words, "Officer down," but I managed to hold it together just enough to explain to the dispatch girl just what in the hell had happened. I then went and handcuffed our guy, just for the hell of it since he was way out in shock-land by then.

I spent the rest of that time waiting for the support crew and the ambulance binding our injured captive's wound as best as I could manage and running police tape around the doorways to deter customers and neighbors. I studiously ignored the posters on the walls and the merchandise on the shelves, but I still felt the noxious weight of the place pushing in on me. I lashed out against it once or twice, kicking things over, swiping at them with loosely balled fists. I felt like a caged animal that'd been poked one too many times and could be enraged by the mere sight of the offending stick. Disk cases when flying, posters were torn down, and one display in particular got ripped apart in the sudden fit of rage that overcame me.

Why hadn't I checked the back for another man? Why had I come up front without securing the back? Why hadn't Heero followed procedure and barged right in? Had he been lying when he told me he trusted my abilities? A lot of damage was done to the store during my little...hissy fit, and not once during that whole time did Heero ever take his eyes off of me or let go of his weapon.

I eventually pulled myself back together a little bit and, kicking the victims of my loss of control into a corner away from where all the action had taken place, I started checking our baddies for pulses and doing basic tasks to keep myself busy until backup arrived. When I started to move to the back to make sure we didn't have any more surprises waiting for us, Heero began to lever himself up off the counter in an attempt to stand and nearly fell the good three feet to the floor when his strength gave out before he was in a full sitting position.

"What in the fucking hell are you doing?" I barked, rushing back to his side.

"Covering...you..." he gasped around the pain of pulling the wound. Fresh blood began to stain the shirt binding the injury more insistently than before.

"You can't even cover your own ass, much less mine! Stay the hell put!"

He looked at me defiantly, that steely resolve from the war burning in his eyes.

"I'm not letting you go in by yourself again."

"What you aren't doing is getting up again. Worry about your own damn self!"

"I will when you will," he challenged and the tension skyrocketed. After a long moment of staring each other down, I growled and spun away.

"Fuck you, Yuy."

The Preventers "cleanup crew" and the EMT arrived only a short while later and, after Wufei and Sally descended, I was ushered away to their squad car where I sat watching the medics remove first the injured and then the dead. Crime scene photographers and investigators were crawling all over the place and it was only thanks to the intervention of Wufei that they didn't try and question me then and there.

I was eventually summoned from the vehicle when Heero got unruly in the ambulance they had placed him in. Apparently he was showing signs of shock because he was struggling against the EMTs as they tried to strap him down for the ride to the hospital. That and he still hadn't let go of the gun. Sally pulled some kind of red tape bypass trick and ordered that I travel with Heero until we reached the hospital. He did calm himself with me there and I eventually coaxed him into letting go of the gun, which proved an immense relief to the entire medical team. In return for the gun, however, it was my hand that he took hostage and held onto like a vise the whole trip.

The rest was a blur of movement. One minute I was holding Heero's hand, staring out the front windshield and wondering why we'd handled that scenario like a couple of rookies, and the next he was being whisked away to surgery, leaving me standing in the crowded hospital hallway. I sat down in one of those plastic chairs that lined the walls and I think I just stayed that way for a long while. Long enough that someone had called Quatre and he had come down to the hospital and found me there, gazing at the linoleum flooring like I could see straight through it to the ground beneath.

"Duo? Duo, are you alright?"

Quatre's voice broke me out of the reverie and I looked up at him, feeling a little confused and lost, like a puppet with its strings cut.

"Oh Duo," he breathed, his expression wide open and radiating affectionate concern. His hand reached up to my face and, though I flinched back at first, he smoothed his fingertips across my cheekbone. His hands felt ice cold on my face and his fingers were wet when he drew them away.

"What happened, Duo?" he crooned softly, taking the seat next to me and, though I hardly noticed him, Trowa stood over us and shielded us from prying eyes.

"I told him to call for backup," I started, but shook my head. It had gone wrong long before that. "We should have scoped the place, Quatre. We just wanted to call it a day...It was an arms deal...we had no idea."

Quatre, God love him, didn't say anything, just lightly ran a hand up and down my back.

"I got him shot, Quatre. I walked in like it was all clear. I didn't check the back for anyone else and he dropped his guard. I got him shot...Oh god..."

Quatre laid his hand firmly on my back then; he tentatively brought his other arm around to embrace me in a loose hug.

"He'll be fine, Duo. He'll be fine."

"I know, but...," I choked, then brought myself to say it, "I put him before the job, Quatre. I can't do it...not in this business. It's been like this for months. He hates working with me...I mess him up all the time. He doesn't trust me to not screw things up, so he runs in like he's invincible and trips up on the small stuff. And I couldn't stop him today. I couldn't help him. I was holding him back by trying to prove I could keep up. Oh god, Quatre; why didn't I check the back?"

"I know that you support him in the best way you can, Duo. You always have. But he...needs to protect you. You mean...so much to him. He needs you, Duo. He doesn't think you'll screw up, he thinks he'll let you down. He..."

"Quatre," Trowa said quietly and the blonde young man subsided, looking forlorn and more than a little frustrated.

We sat in silence for a while, Trowa joining us on my other side as I grew less hysterical. I finally pieced together what I had to say in my mind and threw it out in front of us to see it for the truth it was.

"I can't hold him back anymore, Quatre. I've thought about it for a while, but today just proved it. I'm...going to put in for a change of partner. He only clams up and overcompensates when he works with me, so it'll be safer for the both of us if we get new partners -- start fresh. I'm sure he'll be happier to be with someone else, anyway."

Quatre opened his mouth and then shut it again.

"At least...talk to him about it before you do, Duo. Tell him your concerns?"

"Yeah," I agreed, not really relishing the thought. I didn't want to hear Heero confirm any of my suspicions.

Some time later, a doctor came forward and informed us that Heero's surgery had been a success and that, while the bullet had severely damaged muscle tissue and had chipped Heero's lowest rib, it had completely missed all vital organs and that a full recovery was expected. When we asked to see him, the doctor told us in no uncertain terms that, since we were not family members, we would have to abide by hospital policy and observe visiting hours, which would begin at nine the next morning.

Quatre and Trowa encouraged me to let them take me home and it ended up being impossible to refuse, so that evening I found myself under Quatre's roof once again. I did not sleep. It was like I had forgotten how. The next morning, the two lovebirds found me in the library, ready to go back to the hospital.

He was not awake when we arrived and I had an odd sort of flashback to the time two years ago, after the Barton coup, when I had last visited him in a hospital. We stayed for the duration of visiting hours and left again. He did not wake up fully on the second or the third day either, mostly because the pain medication kept him under. It was on the fourth day that he finally came around.

I was at work at the time, filling out paperwork on the mission-gone-awry for internal affairs to peruse when Relena, of all people, called me to let me know Heero was awake and asking after me. I told her I could be there in an hour, but it turned out to be a little over two hours. Once I turned the first round of paperwork in, they decided to go ahead and interview me, which ate up a good thirty minutes and thoroughly freaked me out. I didn't get the sense from anyone in IA that they suspected us of foul play or excessive force, but I don't deal with authority well. I took off the rest of the afternoon and made my way over to the hospital to see the now cognizant Heero.

By the time I got there, he'd actually fallen asleep again and Quatre urged me to go get something to drink from the cafeteria. "To soothe your nerves," he said. Relena stood up with me and announced that she was interested in some tea herself. And so I found myself on a quest to find beverages with the only person with as much power to hurt me as Heero himself. She claimed she knew a shortcut to the cafeteria and I followed after her disinterestedly.

It was only after I found myself alone in the family waiting room with Relena that I figured out that I had been had. I was cornered by the greatest diplomat of our age, and she had had a hospital-issue tea set ordered up her that she could restrain me with. I groaned somewhere in the back of my throat and tried to mentally prepare myself for the coming onslaught of accusations.

"I hope you don't mind that I had this set up a little earlier, Mr. Maxwell, but I thought it might be nice if we had a little talk, to catch up with each other."

She moved towards the little teacart and began serving two cups of tea, asking me how I would like mine. I told her I just liked it plain, but she stuck a little wedge of lemon on the saucer, "just in case I found the taste too strong." Then she seated herself in one of the armchairs, upholstered in that supremely busy kind of fabric that people seem to think covers up stains, and was sipping at her drink quietly, waiting for me to do likewise, I suppose.

I remained standing, braced for whatever she would sling my way and after a few long moments she sighed, looking slightly pained and setting the teacup down on the saucer with a decisive little click.

"Mr. Winner told me that you have intentions of asking to terminate your partnership with Heero, Mr. Maxwell. That's why I am here. I understand very well that the recent mission went poorly because of honest mistakes made in the heat of the moment. I have no intention of taking out my worry for Heero on you, Mr. Maxwell. I would simply like to speak to you about our mutual friend in hopes of helping you make the best decision you can about your partnership with him."

Her eyes were earnest as she spoke to me and while I kept my guard up, it was certainly comforting to know that Relena wasn't going to go for my throat about this whole debacle. Of course, that comfort was displaced by the knowledge that this "little talk" had been Quatre's idea as well as the princess'. It certainly explained part of why he had been so...skittish the few days previous, starting sentences without finishing them and looking at me with those deeply wounded eyes of his.

"I don't really see why it bothers all of you so much. It's for the best, for the both of us. He hates working with me and goes overboard to try and compensate for some perceived weakness of mine and I can't seem to focus on the task at hand. I'm always trying to prove myself and my own way of doing things to him and it just further aggravates the problem."

"You want his respect and that's perfectly natural, Mr. Maxwell. But I will advise you that giving up on the partnership will hurt him more than you think. He values his relationship with you above all others and that may be why he tries so much harder and seems to fumble his way through so often, because he is trying to protect you instead of work alongside you. But that is something that can be worked through; you should try and come through this problem, not run from it. I daresay that you will both suffer greatly if you simply run away from this setback."

I sneered a little bit and replied, "I honestly thought that you would be the last person who would want Heero to improve his relationship with me, Miss Relena. I recall a time when you were sure that you were his best friend, that you could be more than that. You took him into your home to prove that, didn't you? You're the one that he wants to protect, so I wish you'd all stop trying to paint him as some sort of champion of the weak. I drag him and down and he compensates. I've been a soldier; I've worked alongside him for a long time. Heero protects the innocent, not the weak."

She changed tracks on me then, brought us around to the delicate topic I was trying to avoid getting into. I was surprised she took us there and I wondered at how much Quatre had told her exactly.

"Perhaps it was not what you thought, Mr. Maxwell. Perhaps it was. I can hardly say what it is you might have believed about my relationship with Heero. Certainly, what has happened in the past two years was not what was expected -- except, possibly, by Heero himself."

"That's a bunch of evasive bullshit you've got there, if you don't mind me saying so..."

If I had expected shock or indignation at my little barb, I would have been grossly disappointed by the reaction I did receive. As it was, she didn't straighten or fidget, only remained elegantly poised, legs crossed before her in a primly casual fashion, sipping her tea in a decidedly unflustered and leisurely manner. The coy little smile she gave me while peering up from her lowered face, all the while sampling the contents of her teacup, belied the aura of calm repose. Only the knowledge that she was not being deliberately cagey out of spite towards me kept me from throttling an explanation out of her. She was a politician, after all, and no politician worth their spit just comes right out and says anything.

I think maybe some of my desperate frustration showed through then, as I tried to hold myself in check, because her face softened with a concerned mixture of guilt and sorrow. She gently set the heavy teacup down on its matching saucer, folding her hands in her lap and turning more towards an armchair that stood near my elbow. I took my cue to be seated, though my whole body shook with nervous tension. She smiled warmly across the small distance between us, startling me into a little bit of a stupor, and began somewhat tentatively to tell me of her two years with Heero.

"I could tell right away that he wasn't really interested in the reasons I might have had for inviting him to live with me, so I thought 'Take it slow, win him over.' It was hard -- but not as hard as I thought it would be -- to reign myself in. I took on a few extra projects here and there to keep myself busy during the work week, and I tried to leave him to his own devices outside of meals and a few weekend activities.

"He didn't come and go normally at first; he asked for permission or snuck out in the middle of the night sometimes. Eventually, he did become accustomed to thinking of the estate as his own place and he likewise began to be more comfortable taking the car I had provided for him down to town. However, he did become very difficult about taking gifts from me and insisted on a payment plan for both his room and board and the car.

"It became evident after a short time that he needed employment, both for his own comfort and expenses and in order to maintain a sense of usefulness. Une courted him for two months before he actually signed the Preventers contract. Wufei would come over sometimes and talk with him, when he wasn't on mission somewhere. He made a few friends at work -- no one very close that he felt comfortable bringing back to the house, but he seemed to like a few of them fairly well. It was you, however, that he would always talk about.

"Every email, every phone call became a topic of discussion for days and days afterwards. He spent hours composing his own emails in return and would sometimes go out of his way to accomplish some task or another just to be able to tell you about it. In between the arrivals of emails, he would always find some little anecdote, some comparison to draw, that was about you. 'Duo used to say this...' or 'Duo and I were once...' became very familiar words in our house. He measured his days and his worth by you, Duo, and he hardly even realized it.

"You started sending your cards again around that time, early in that first year, and from then on I would see the calendar in his room covered with red circles, one around each holiday he thought you might mail him a card for. And the cards all went into a box he bought specifically to hold them. He found it in a shop somewhere in Central America; it was made out of dried and woven banana leaves or some such thing. I remember asking him why he didn't just buy a storage container -- one that would keep out water and such -- and he said it had to be special, that you had told him that special things were meant to be treated like they mattered. I think I knew it then, but I didn't want to hear it.

"It was after about ten months that I began trying to get him to notice me as more than just a friend again. I thought that if he had adjusted in all those other ways -- friends, job, and relative peace of mind -- that he might be ready to accept me. Looking back on it now, I was trying to evade the inevitable -- that he would leave my home and go after his own life, go after you."

If I was one to blush, I would have done it then. But I'm not a blusher, I'm a smiler. If I'm uncomfortable or embarrassed, I smile. Really widely too. And I can't stop. So I ducked my head instead, and moved to lean my elbow against the arm rest, hiding my mouth with my hand as I rested my head. I didn't respond to the pointed look Relena was sending my way. I didn't know how to. Finally, she continued.

"Of course, he never came to notice my overtures and I eventually gave up on him, moved on with my life. I ran straight for what I thought I wanted and I didn't get it. To be candid, Heero never even gave me a second thought. But, I did get closure. I did get peace. I did get the chance to move on. How can anyone describe what you're doing, Duo Maxwell, except as running away? And you have received nothing but pain for your efforts. Luckily for you, what you want is running right after you, trying desperately to catch up. Not many people are that fortunate and it begs the question, 'Why are you so desperate to escape what you desire, Mr. Maxwell?'"

I felt myself grow cold in panic and it was a physically strenuous thing to keep myself stationary and not bolt from the room. Only the vague notion that it would appear to passersby that I was fleeing in sheer terror from Relena Darlian of all people kept me in my seat. With a stillness and calm that sort of terrified me, I posed my next question, knowing full well I was picking at more than one person's scabs, but I felt that turnabout was going to have to be fair play.

"And did you move on, Relena? Heero told me that you allowed people to continue the rumor that the two of you were a couple. That sounds like self-indulgence and not self-sacrifice, Princess. Maybe you had given up on him by then, but it might have been awful tempting to let other people tell you it could happen."

Even I knew that I had taken a lance to the girl, my bitterness choking out all my sympathy for her position in this whole mess. But she smiled gently instead, and I was baffled at her poise. For the first time, I wondered if Heero's absolute confidence in her wasn't the slightest bit vindicated.

Her smile was kind, but could have easily been a slight pout which, set beneath quirked brows and softly shining eyes, gave her features a hint of the chagrin I had not expected her to feel on the subject. What I had expected was an upwelling of pride and a recounting of sacrifices made in the name of love, but all I received was the whimsical smile of a young woman looking back on a love affair that never was from the distance of time and mellowed feelings.

"I...I'm sorry, Relena. I just...assumed a lot of things when Heero told me why he moved out, and I guess I just can't accept that that's all there was to it."

I found myself standing up suddenly, needing to escape before I said more than I meant to.

"If you'll excuse me," I muttered and then quickly scurried to the door. I heard Relena rise as I moved, but I deliberately kept my eyes averted, too embarrassed at my own behavior to meet her eyes. As my hand turned the knob and pulled the door open, she called out. I stopped -- compelled by some deep-seated impulse to exercise good manners -- but I did not turn to face her.

"Duo, I know that you're scared." A violent shudder threatened to run through me, but I held it in check. "Just...so is he. He's scared to see exactly what it is he's chasing after; scared that he might never catch it for more than an instant."

"If he's too scared to look at what he wants, then why are all of you so certain it's me?"

I could hear the smile in her voice as she replied quietly, "I know that it is. Don't let your fears validate his, Duo. Let him catch you."

I felt a flood of frustration, panic and anger wash through me and instead of responding, I fled the room and all Relena's self-deprecating smiles for the dubious safety of the hospital's stark white hallways.

I eventually wandered myself back in Heero's hospital room, which was empty save for the patient in question. And he was awake.

"How you feeling, buddy? Besides the obvious..."

"I would be a lot happier if I weren't in here," he admitted, a little grudgingly.

"I know the feeling."

We chatted like that for a good hour or so before I really dared broach the subject of splitting up our partnership. And, to my surprise, he didn't seem to take it very well. We didn't fight, but he seemed hurt and though I tried to reason the thing out to him, he only retreated further into what seemed to be full-on rejection. He closed the subject with the parting shot of, "Whatever makes you happiest." I left the hospital shortly afterward, as pleasant conversation no longer seemed to be an option for us.

Unfortunately, I found myself being whisked off to the Winner estate as opposed to my apartment after encountering Rashid in the hallway outside Heero's room. I went along with it -- Rashid is not a man that I would ever want to really argue with -- but I was certainly in no mood for what Quatre had waiting for me.

I was ushered into the library upon arrival and subjected to yet another innocuous teaset before Quatre really got going. Didn't I care about Heero's feelings, how this would seem like a rejection of him as a person? Didn't I grasp how deeply the other young man felt for me? Hadn't his actions on the mission been proof enough that Heero cared about me and wouldn't it be better if I accepted his feelings and worked with him to figure out how to keep them from overrunning our work?

I sighed heavily, struggling against the urge to push the heels of my hands roughly against my eyes, to play peek-a-boo with the conversation -- only without the peeking. The booing sounded highly tempting.

"Look Quatre, I don't want to hurt anyone, especially Heero, but I'm not playing second fiddle to the girl who owns the whole damn orchestra." I deliberately ignored the look he shot me, attempting to squash the guilt his kicked-puppy eyes provoked. I was pretty convinced of my being in the right, but Quatre has the pronounced gift of being able to guilt a person into just about anything.

"Is that what you think he would be doing? Substituting you for Relena?"

Despite all my valiant efforts, a rolling of the eyes made itself known to Quatre, though the accompanying "uh, yeah?" was bitten off and replaced with something slightly more mature.

"If you can't get your head figured out so you can get it up for the girl you love, maybe your smitten best friend can help you? Pretty much." I said "slightly more mature," not "diplomatic."

"Duo!" Quatre's outburst was caught somewhere between protest and dismay. And yeah, a little shock at my crass write-off of Heero's prevailing romantic setback.

"Jesu, Quatre. We're talking about a guy who spent the entire war trying to figure out why he couldn't kill her. If he can't figure out the next logical step in dating a girl -- hell, he lived in her house! -- is to sleep with her, then I can't say I'm so damn surprised!"

"Have you even considered that maybe you're wrong, Duo?! Have you even entertained the notion that maybe the reason why he hasn't slept with Relena, why he hasn't dated Relena, is because he's had his eye on you? What would be so wrong with it if he were telling the truth?"

I looked at him skeptically, working up into true frustration over his determination to meddle in my love life, and Heero's for that matter.

"You honestly expect me to believe that he isn't in love with Relena? All evidence would lead to that conclusion, Quatre."

He seemed to calm a little bit when I gave him an opening for logical argument. I could almost see the ruffled feathers starting to lay flat again.

"What evidence, Duo? What the tabloids say? I'm disappointed in you if those tasteless papers are the source of your information on Heero's heart. I know what I know, and I think someone who's been around might be a little better qualified to make judgments about whether or not Heero's entertained any notion of romance with Relena, which he hasn't. I swear, Duo, sometimes I think you're just determined to be a martyr for everything; your childhood, the colonies, and now love."

I stopped up short in my frustrated pacing, shooting him a look, but I couldn't have told you if it was one of horror or contempt. My voice was dripping acid when I responded and even as the words fell from my mouth, I could feel a cold part of myself starting to slide into place over the comfort I had felt just moments before in this place.

"Then why did you give me the money, Quatre? Why let me go gallivanting all over the damn colonies when you were so sure you knew what was best for me?"

He looked stunned, and then his face softened into a mix of sorrow and regret. All the harsh reproof drained out of his tone and his eyes -- those damn puppy-dog eyes -- shoved a crowbar in the door of that coldness and pried my affection for him back out into the light.

"I didn't mean that. I'm sorry." His voice was a rough whisper and I could tell he was fighting with tears. I instantaneously felt like the biggest heel in the universe.

"Jesu...No, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to fly off the handle like that. It's just...you know what it meant to me...I can't stand it if you just did that out of charity or pity."

He came to my side, laying a cool hand on my arm, blue eyes looking up into mine imploringly.

"I believed in what you felt you had to do, Duo. Don't doubt that. I just...I just wish I hadn't had to watch Heero suffer without you to tease him along. Without you to make him smile."

I snorted softly and shook my head, looking back at Quatre and trying to make my appreciation shine forth without entering into a round of apologies with him.

"Heero didn't need me. He had you guys."

"He did, and he always will. But he needed you as well, as much if not more so than the rest of us." I started to protest, but he pressed forward. "Just...think about it, okay? Think about what it might mean to have your love reciprocated."

I felt my eyes widen. I had never used the word "love," even in my mind. I think Quatre knew what I was going to say next; that I certainly did not know if what I felt for Heero was love. He stopped me with a heavy sigh.

"Your heart is nearly as complicated to keep up with as your mind, Duo Maxwell, but...if you were ever in love with anyone, it was with Heero."

I had no response for him and, after several long moments of silence, he left me there in his big lavish library, closing the door softly behind him. He left me staring into the fire, standing alone in the middle of that huge room, wondering what that had meant, if I had ever loved anyone?

A few weeks later, just before Heero came back from medical leave, the termination of our partnership went through. I had been worried that he would come back to work before then and we would be stuck together in an uncomfortable situation but, for the first time I could ever remember, all reports seemed to indicate that Heero was in no rush to return to action, that he wasn't pushing his limits to recover faster.

After our talk, things were very strained between us and I eventually stopped going to visit him. We were both partner-less for a month or two and were pulled from field work until we were assigned new ones. I heard many stories about Heero spending hours at the firing range or in the training halls, many of them illustrating his behavior as depression because of the loss of his partner. I knew better than to think that that was the case and chalked it up to frustration about being unable to work the field, the part of the job he enjoyed best.

And then, sort of out of the blue, Trowa retired permanently from the circus and took up full-time work with Preventers, almost at the same time that Wufei and Sally began seriously dating and, by the rulebook, had to be reassigned to avoid the fraternization policies. Sally was promoted to become general director of the crime scene investigations units and Wufei requested and was eventually partnered with Heero.

And so it ended up that I was partnered with Quatre's better half. And it was working out damn well as a professional partnership goes. Trowa is steady, reliable and shrewd. Trowa has years of tactical experience in the fine arts of infiltration and assassination. And while we aren't allowed to just off the baddies anymore, the whole "outmaneuver and detain" thing comes naturally out of Trowa's earlier...skill set. We're the team you send in when you wanna catch the bad guy totally unawares, perhaps even on the can, as has happened on one fine occasion. You send in the newly-partnered Wufei and Heero when you wanna break down the front door, guns blazing; Trowa and I are far more subtle before the shit goes down, making in-field recon and evidence gathering a higher possibility. Sometimes, that's all we do; find the dirty laundry, then leave the back door unlocked for Wufei and Heero's team.

Twenty months had passed uneventfully since my failed mission with Heero and I had gotten used to my new arrangement, though I still had trouble with the tension that lingered between Heero and I. We got along well enough and socializing was getting easier, but we hardly spent any time around each other alone and the intimate confidences I had once shared with the other young man were a thing of the past. And, as if to further complicate matters, I couldn't help but notice Heero as he finished filling out, finished growing into his build. We were rounding the corner from nineteen into our twenties at that point, and my long harbored crush was taking a turn from puppy-love attraction into a distinctly different kind of beast.

Quatre and Relena's suggestions worked themselves into my head, despite my best efforts to dismiss them. I began to wonder at every show of kindness and every gently spoken word, though I knew better than to hope for the unattainable. My eyes studied him now to construct fantastical dreams and desires that before I had thought so wholly unlikely that I had never seen his body as anything more than a vessel. I frightened myself with the new depths of my fascination and longing. And nothing abated it; nothing soothed the craving for his singular attention and returned affections. Dreams drove me to sleeplessness, interaction drove me to hermitage, my insistent desire to confess drove me to silence. I was a wreck. My only solace, the only relief I allowed myself, was the continued offering of those damn cards, left on his desk before he ever arrived at work and never spoken of. People spoke of them, talked about how he displayed them on his desk, and that was enough. Just barely enough.

I threw myself into my work, seeking the mental relief of statistics, strategies and missions rather than face myself and the drab state of my existence. Trowa became the strong, steady presence at my side, the only one who could reason with me to sleep and eat and take care of myself. But it was only a matter of time before my obstinacy, my refusal to ask for help or accept it when offered caught up with me. When my break-neck speeding away from everything and everyone else encountered a turn I couldn't compensate for.

I will never allow anyone to say that my plans are watertight, idiot-proof stratagems worthy of imitation and study. My plans are crude -- but generally successful, due to my happy knack for improvisation -- studies in preparing a rough sketch of how one will fly by the seat of their pants. This is why Une partnered me up with Trowa after the first debacle with Heero. Heero and I had never really worked as a pair in the wars unless the fists were already flying and we were backed up against each other. We were in more of an unannounced competition to see who could be more successful as an operative. In the war, that competitive edge to our joint ventures was an advantage. As government-backed officers of peace and relative harmony, the whole let's-see-whose-mission-style-pays-off-better attitude wasn't such a success.

The mission we were wrapping up was initially just a routine investigation of a pro-mobile suit technology interest group after some of its members had been involved in a bust we had made a few months before. The Preventers' early detection units were doing the compulsory backtrack research to make sure we were just dealing with a couple of black sheep or if we had a whole hive of militant insurgents on our hands. More often than not, these things just turn out to be coincidence, but this time it was the real deal and the investigation department handed us a case file loaded with bad news. Preventers deployed Trowa and me when the case became a top priority and we were just supposed to be wrapping up our few weeks' worth of infiltration and evidence collection. We had found more than a few reasons for immediate action, not the least of which were the two dozen suits in various states of completion sitting in a hangar adjacent to the complex, which housed the heart of the government interest group's unofficial agenda.

In a normal situation, Preventers would storm the place, arrest everybody in sight and use the hangar's contents for trial material before destroying it all. In other words, I wasn't normally holding a detonator for anything more than a little flash bomb anymore. But Trowa and I had reason to believe at least one of those suits could be operable, so it was necessary to take pictures prior to the sting, ship 'em to Une, then blow the whole hangar when we stormed the place. Always err on the side of caution, especially where Lady Une and other people's lives were involved.

So, what went wrong? I'll tell you. I had estimated that setting all the necessary charges and getting clear would take me 55 minutes, just under an hour, but I had given myself too much time before the cavalry arrived. I was on explosives -- my word was law. Nobody was going to break position as much as an inch until 19:24, and radio silence was in effect until thirty seconds before the charges would blow so that hidden operatives would remain that way. Breaking the silence could mean the death of an agent or the loss of the element of surprise should a baddie be standing near enough to hear the noise. I was fucked because the naughty ex-Ozie psychos had quadrupled the guard around the C-4 riddled hangar since I'd left my hot little Christmas presents and trapped me in my hiding place not 80 feet from the main detonation site. The only way past these guys was to gun 'em down and make a dash for the motorcycle I'd stashed about 250 yards off in some dense brush, but my gun had no silencer and that whole running thing wouldn't work out too well with my back as a nice big target. Also, there were still Preventers moving into position and air support was en route for the original schedule. I'll say it again, I was fucked.

Now, I said that I'd given myself too much time, but it was more like I had given the enemy too much time. Standard wartime procedure is to get in place, set fire to the shit that needs to be blown up, and then shoot the remaining people. I'd not quite gotten it yet that peace-time operations could work a little differently. Of course, Heero had suggested what we should have done, but I'd nixed it because I was still too cocky to trust in more than my own one-man-show fighting style.

So there I was, hunkered down in a cluster of industrial sized crates which had "FRAGILE" and "THIS SIDE UP" stamped across them in a few languages, hearing Heero's voice in my head telling me that the operation should start with the fire-fight -- that the explosion mid-roundup would add to the general confusion of the enemy and make them more reluctant to fight than if I let the charges go at the same time as the sting got underway. I had argued that if I didn't detonate before anybody even thought of fighting back, then they still might succeed in using their half-completed mobile suits against us. Heero had insistently argued to allow the operatives to break cover at least five minutes prior to the explosion, but in the end, I won. As I said, I was on explosives -- not to mention I had actually seen the suits in question -- my word was law. If I'd gone with Heero's idea, then I would have been able to use those four minutes or so to break through the line of guards and run like hell for the nearest Preventer position.

As it was, when the hangar went, I'd go too. These crates, while a blessing at that moment, would offer me no help when C-4 destroyed a building large enough to house a football field. Oh well, at least I'd have enough time to tell somebody to water my plants. No sense in letting a perfectly good jade plant die just because its owner decided to make like a firecracker and blow himself up.

I was down to those thrice-damned five minutes when my headset flared to life. "Duo? We might need you on the north end here. Can you swing around without being noticed?"

Wufei. I was supposed to be just south of his position by now, with the armored trucks we'd use to haul off the prisoners. They probably weren't alarmed at my non-arrival, knowing that I was supposed to be picking my way across enemy territory without being noticed by possible lurking guards. Moreover, Wufei, blissfully unaware I was currently very south of his position and unable to swing around anywhere, was calling on me for backup. Making sure that none of the guards was within much of an earshot, I replied, careful only to breathe the words into the mic -- male voices tend to carry when speaking in a low tone, one of those things you figure out when you work surveillance and recon.

"Chang, I'm a little bit off mark." Putting it mildly.

"Hostiles?" His voice got even more hushed over the com.

"I'm pinned down at the hangar site." Wufei is one of those guys that you shouldn't beat around the bush with too much. He's an up-front kind of guy, so subtlety and delicate phrasing don't translate too well. I mean, he gets it, it's just better to be frank if you wanna get something accomplished in your conversation. And I definitely wanted to get something accomplished.

"Maxwell, it's going to blow in four minutes!"

"I'm aware of that, Wufei. They're guarding the place like it's the fucking crown jewels they got in there. I can't break cover without firing."

My radio signal is set to a frequency that rattles itself off to all people on the same frequency; in this case, I was being broadcast to all the team leaders. The actual teams operate on their own frequencies so they can keep track of themselves in fire fights and position changes. As I was my own damn team all by myself, I was on the same frequency as Wufei, Heero and a few other of the team leaders. Unfortunately, today my partner was not one those people; he was currently operating in cooperation with another team, which was being headed up by a fantastic old fogie by the name of Clay. Anyway, I wasn't too surprised to hear Heero and Clay break radio silence with me after my little announcement.

"How close are you to the actual detonation site?" Clay was an eternal optimist despite all his history as an officer in the Alliance military and then as part of Sally's rag-tag anti-OZ force. God bless him for it; hadn't been able to hold onto the belief in silver linings myself.

"Less than 80 feet and I'm holed up."

"I'm close to your position. Open fire and I'll be there to back you up in a minute." You get three guesses whose bright suggestion that was...and the first two don't count.

"Like hell, Yuy! We're not all in position and that'll just make two of us barbeque. I'll figure something out on my own." Well...not really, but it made the first part sound better. Except that he wasn't listening to me anymore. Neither were Clay and Wufei.

"Give the signal and begin attack operations. Agent Clay, inform Barton that I relinquish command of my unit to him for the time being. He knows the specs."

Before I could hiss anything to them to the contrary, I heard the dropped crackle of static telling me the others had switched frequencies to communicate with their men. It was just Heero and me.

"Dammit Heero, this is fucking insane!" By this point, I had given up on my clever tactic of breathing my words into the mic and just let him have it in a full on whisper. Luckily, no one except the intended party heard me.

"Shut up and get the hell out of there." There was a tremor in his voice that told me he was running, changing positions. It was out of my hands now.

"Fuck you, Yuy." And I sighted the closest guard to my position and put a bullet into the back of his head. No point wounding him just to let him die in the blast when it came. While his pals were figuring out he had abruptly given up the ghost, I made a mad dash and dove behind a smallish shed about thirty feet away. Bullets were rapidly imbedding themselves in my footprints for the last ten feet. Now I was sure they weren't really ex-OZies; they were skittish of hitting anything too vital, not that they weren't coming damn close anyway. Lucky me, it was nighttime, I had the element of surprise on my side and they were poor shots in the daytime at the firing range.

I had thirty seconds left before the hangar blew and now the fuckers were blowing the shit out of the little shed, which proved to be made of nothing more sturdy than reinforced aluminum, as the bullets ripped through it like a hot knife through butter. I figured out pretty quick I wasn't getting any further from the hangar, so I pressed myself flat as I could get in the dirt behind the shed and covered my head and neck with my arms. I could only hope the guards didn't come tearing after me before the explosives went off. I could hear Heero calling to me in my earpiece, his voice becoming frantic as I chose not to respond.

I suddenly wished I had something...nicer to say in what was to be our last conversation. I tried desperately to think of the right -- the complete -- thing to tell him before my time ran out; something to keep him from faltering over the sense of failure my death on mission might cause. But, 'I'm sorry,' was all my heart had time to feel out to him before the world stopped.

Now, perhaps thinking I would actually blow up with the hangar was whimsical of me, but I hadn't wanted to consider what would really be the cause of my demise, namely thousands of pounds of jagged, white-hot shrapnel and reinforced steel walls bludgeoning whatever part of me wasn't impaled. Thinking of a big kablooie is a whole lot more comforting than picturing your body becoming a human dartboard for pieces of metal hurtling along at several dozen miles per hour. Therefore, I had let myself indulge in the fantasy of a quick death via exploding balls of fire and kinetic force.

I'm sure I screamed or at least yelled out some unintelligible curse, but I honestly don't remember anything but that feeling of heat rolling from one side of my body to the other and a sudden blinding light that sent everything white in the backs of my eyes. There was a collision and white succumbed to black before my nerve endings could even begin to relay to my brain just what it was that was in pain. For that, I am immensely thankful. The strangled screams of the dying guards followed me into the darkness as well as a cracking voice that seemed closer than the rest, telling me, "No!"

You said it, pal.

I really hate unscheduled naps of any kind, particularly when I wake up with a dried blood flaking off my hair and a knot on the back of my head that promised to linger for several days' time. Oh, and don't forget the fucking pounding headache. The kind that made me wish my brain would just explode already and be done with it.

I think I groaned, because I'm not sure how they would have known I was awake otherwise, seeing as how I was face down on a stretcher being hauled away, presumably to an ambulance.

"Duo?" came a voice and, though it took me a moment, I processed it as Trowa's.

"Wha' in the hell 'm I doin' alive?" I muttered past the rough cloth I was lying on.

He chuckled lightly and I felt a steady hand brush down my back.

"Lucky for you, that little shed you were behind collapsed on top of you, which protected you from the smaller debris. And, of course, the larger bits ended up not traveling as far as you might have feared. So, you got a bump on the head and scared the crap out of the rest of us."

"S'rry," I slurred.

"Don't apologize to me; I had a feeling you'd come out alright. You're a lot like a cat in that way. But you gave Wufei a heart attack and Heero...well, he was the one who dug you out. I've never seen large pieces of metal fly show that little resistance to human strength before. Clay had to reason with him so that he'd relinquish you to the medical team."

"Hmm. Tha's my best buddy for ya," I quipped, feeling a little less crappy all of a sudden.

"Quite."

Once they had me at the ambulance, Trowa moved off to check on something and the EMTs let me try sitting up on the bumper under my own power as they probed around the back of my head for injuries. While they were checking me out, I saw Heero come striding across the field towards me, eyes locked on target and everyone else be damned. If the guy examining my skull hadn't discovered the nice little gash right then, I don't think I would have noticed any of my pain under the influence of Heero's concern.

"Hey, buddy," I called to him as he got close enough, "I guess I made it out okay."

"Yeah," he answered quietly even as his body radiated the anxiety he was feeling.

"I should have listened to you, Heero. I'm sorry I put you through that just because I had to be right."

He gingerly sat down next to me on the bumper, his hand laying palm up on his knee in open invitation as he dismissed my apology.

"It's not your fault. You thought that this way would work best and, apart from putting yourself in danger, the raid was a complete success. I am glad you are safe. I...you scared me."

"I know, buddy. I scared myself, too."

For some reason, he wasn't calming down very much, though his voice was evening out. I took his hand then, and his grip was almost painful, though I didn't comment. The EMT declared, after a little while longer of poking around at the gash in the back of my head, that I would need a few stitches, but that otherwise I seemed to be in the clear and that he suspected I had passed out merely from the shock of the blow and not from receiving a full-blown concussion. He offered to let me go ahead and take the ambulance back to the Preventers staff hospital and I took him up on it, asking Trowa to see about my motorcycle. My partner held out one of his uniform shirts to me before leaving me, whispering in my ear that my own was spattered with blood and singed here and there, which might have been adding to Heero's vexation. I swapped out the shirts, though I felt dwarfed in Trowa's hand-me-down.

It surprised me to no end when Heero insisted upon riding with me and giving me a ride home afterwards, but I wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I really didn't want to spend the night in the hospital or in the bunk rooms at HQ just because I couldn't get a lift home.

It was closing in on midnight by the time I was cleared to leave the hospital and go home and Heero still hadn't seemed to relax very much, but I chalked it up to frazzled nerves and let it go. I was too tired to argue with him when he told me that he was going to stay over on my couch that night, just in case I needed anything, I just led him up to the room and fumbled through my keys before I got the door open. And suddenly, Heero was moving like a flash, pushing me into the apartment and slamming the door behind us.

He pushed me back, into the cool wall behind the door. I had only a moment to realize that the room was dark, the shades were tightly closed, and that the resolute click the door had made when closing was the lock snicking into place before there was nothing but Heero. His hands kept me pinned to the wall even as they plundered my over-sized button-down shirt, pulling it out of place as he ran possessive hands over my chest and roughly awakened every nerve ending in my body with the near-bruising pressure of his squared fingertips. I was on my toes, barely, as his hands and hips pinioned me to the unforgiving flatness of the wall. His insistent mouth found my neck and forced my head back as he seized the tender flesh there.

My hands were clambering for a hold on his shoulders and forearms. My toes were brushing the floor, seeking balance and solid footing. My mind was scrabbling for a sane thought. I couldn't stop the heaviness of my breath, the immediate rise of some primal urge to entice and be overwhelmed. My hips rolled forward as my body arched into his solid frame, desperate for his heat and intensity, needing it if I was going to allow this to happen after so long and with a man who should be in love with someone else.

One of his hands found its way into my hair, petting through the feathery strands of my long bangs and over the top of my head before roughly grasping the base of my braid and roughly pulling my face back down from its apathetic observation of the ceiling so that his mouth could seek out the contents of mine.

"Duo," his voice was harsh, rough from whatever emotion he was feeling. I couldn't tell you what it might have been. Anger? Desire? A little of both perhaps. But that voice growled my name over and over as Heero pinned me against the wall with teeth, hips and scrambling hands. He kept up the mantra as we slid down to the floor, and when we eventually found our way to my bed.

I don't remember half of it, to be perfectly honest. I was so lost I don't think I even really knew what was going on, except that Heero was there and I felt hot and tense and slightly sick. He never said anything but my name while he despoiled little innocent me, I do remember that, because every time he said it in that indefinable growl, I cried out and jerked up into him. He loved it, or at least he enjoyed the obvious power, because he called my name more and more frequently as we went along.

As he collapsed over me on the bed, he dragged me half under him, one arm cradling my head, fingers softly stroking my sweaty, flat and tangled hair. He finally growled something new, clasping me to him almost harshly to emphasize the point.

"You're alive."

I don't think I responded.

For the first time in maybe years, my sleep was accompanied by only the deep black of nothingness; dreams and visions were held at bay by my utter exhaustion. It might be safe to say that I had given my head enough to worry about for this evening without calling up my nightly visitors. I was sorry to leave the calm of my unforeseen peace of mind, but my body's aches and pains were tired of being ignored.

Jesu Christe, but did everything hurt in the middle of the night when I woke up again. It felt like the truck had not only hit me, but had backed up and driven over me once more just for the hell of it. I groaned as I attempted to straighten out on my back, hoping to find a more comfortable position to be miserable in. And then, three things happened.

First, I felt an unbelievable lance of pain from the back of my thighs up to the base of my ribcage that shattered into a ragged exhale out of my lungs, bringing to light a rough, raw heat that was attempting to burn the flesh off the least attractive of my body's orifices. Two seconds later it occurred to me that I had not in fact been sitting on a barb wire fence buck-ass naked anytime recently, but had "sat" on something else entirely.

Almost as soon as that epiphany came home to roost, a deep voice behind me rumbled out a concerned rendition of my name, a warm hand that was decidedly not my own appearing on my hip, "Duo? Are you alright?"

Heero. In my bed. Naked. Post-coital, even. Holy crap.

To say I sprang from my bed would be perhaps the most generous portrayal of the truth imaginable. I did more of a gasping, fumbling crab-walk right onto the floor, where I buckled over in pain from the rough landing my ass had valiantly attempted to cushion. I heard the bed creak and I resumed my frenzied scramble backwards on all fours, staring wide-eyed at the lean creature that was rising out of the white sheets of my otherwise unremarkable bed.

"Duo?" he called again, the previous concern laced with a shade of nervousness. "Duo, what's wrong?"

I am very proud of myself for not breaking out into hysterical laughter at his sincere confusion. What was wrong? I had slept with him; that was what was wrong. I had been coming down from a bad adrenaline rush, been jumped by the only person I'd ever wanted to be jumped by, and woken up next to him, finally taking into consideration the effects the collapse of my moral decency could have on his lingering attachment to one very lovely young lady, too late to undo what had been done. What had I been thinking? Had I been thinking? God help me, I was going to fix this.

"Fix what?"

Jesu, I had said that out loud!

"What's going on, Duo?"

I was up and moving to my dresser then, pulling out the first pair of boxers I could find and pulling them on as well as a well-worn t-shirt. I spotted a pair of my jeans balled up in one corner of my room and moved to retrieve them as well, put a hand on my shoulder stopped me.

"Duo, are you alright?"

"I need to get dressed," I said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

That didn't seem to be a good enough answer and he was turning me around, anxious concern flitting over his features as he looked down at me from his few inches of advantage.

"What's wrong?"

And I sort of lost it.

"What's wrong? What's wrong?! We fucked, Heero!"

"I know that, Duo. I'm asking you what you're flipping out over," he said, voice growing a little strained and fingers digging into my shoulders.

"I just popped my cherry on a one-night stand with my best friend, you asshole! What do you think I'm freaking out over!"

His eyes went wide for a moment with surprise, and then a sort of hunger welled up in the backs of his eyes. I pushed him off before he could do anything about it, though, once again in pursuit of the security of my clothing.

"Is that a problem? Do you regret it?"

"Of course it's a problem! It's not okay for you to just waltz in here and fuck me like you have some claim on me! What did you think all of that meant anyway?"

"I thought it meant that I was finally making headway! I thought it meant that you and I were on the same page!" He was gesturing wildly and emphatically with his hands now, frustration fueling this argument from both sides.

"The same page...!" I sputtered, trying to wrap my head around the phrase. "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?! Was there some great cosmic memo I missed out on where you driving me home after being released from the emergency room was considered adequate foreplay? Because I don't ever recall giving you permission to make a pass at me while I was incapacitated!"

The gasp should have tipped me off that I had said something I shouldn't have, said something that set off triggers in Heero's head, but I was in such all out panic trying to remember if I had said anything incriminating the night before that I wasn't really paying attention to his reactions anymore. I was in a full blown defensive lockdown and protecting myself by any means necessary was my only strategy.

"You didn't tell me to stop..."

"I didn't tell you to go either, but that certainly isn't a problem for you, now is it? But how about I tell you to go now? As in 'get out!'"

He looked stunned and more than a little wounded, but he obediently backed up towards the doorway, picking up his own articles of clothing on his way.

"I'm sorry, Duo. I only wanted...I needed to show you...Damn it. I'll go."

I heard him move out into the living room, rustling a little bit as I suppose he dressed himself. He called back to me once when he was leaving, but my voice caught in my throat and then he was gone, my apartment door shutting quietly. I think I just stood there for awhile, trying not to cry.

I didn't have to go in to work for the next few days as per the orders of Lady Une herself, and I took the time to thoroughly bury my head under the sand and try and pretend nothing had happened. I washed my bedding three times, just to be sure that no evidence could possibly be leftover from my little tryst. I still ended up sleeping on the couch in the living room.

I threw the spare shirt into the incinerator in the basement after realizing that a quiver of excitement passed through my gut every time I laid eyes on it. Better to tell Trowa I'd ruined it with blood and would buy him a new one than to sit around staring at it until I could return it to him. Better than to look at my partner and wonder every day if that was the shirt.

I ignored the phone calls from Quatre and Relena, ignored the emails too. I didn't want to talk to anyone and I certainly didn't feel like listening to any well-intentioned lectures. I wanted -- of all the dumb things in the world -- to talk to Heero. I wanted to apologize. I wanted to let him repeat his overtures and I wanted to accept them. I wanted to tell him how scared I was. I wanted to tell him to go pin his heart on someone else, someone who wouldn't fight him and wouldn't take so much work. I wanted him to tell me that he didn't mind winning my distrustful mind over if the end result was access to the more than willing heart. I wanted to believe in a fairy tale, but I was too afraid of the horror story.

Finally, after days sequestered away in my apartment, the call came from Une. It was still a few more days before I was supposed to report back in for work, but the Lady had an important briefing she needed Trowa and me to attend to and I think I agreed to go a little too eagerly, because she chuckled lightly and told me it sounded as if I had a case of cabin fever. I joked my way out of the conversation, hung up the phone and managed to get down to the office in almost half of the time it usually takes me. I don't really recall waiting at any red lights...but then, I don't recall seeing many stoplights at all on the way there and I know that there are at least nine on my regular route. The thought...scares me a little.

Somehow, I had known that that base hadn't been all of our mobile-suit-happy friends and it was gratifying to find out in that briefing that Une had tracked down the ringleader and found us an entry point for infiltration. They called themselves ANGRA MAINYU and their objective seemed to be re-armament of the colonies and liberation from ESUN. Very little was known about their leader except that he was a man in his mid to late fourties and that his followers were fiercely loyal, but grossly under-trained. Very few of them appeared to be former soldiers, though the organization had apparently been founded sometime shortly before the war of 195. Une wanted to nail these guys badly and she had assembled all of the teams who had worked the raid in the mission briefing to scope out volunteers and gather any additional information team members might have garnered from the bust.

Before I really knew what I was doing, my hand went up to volunteer to work primary infiltration and intelligence gathering and Une was asking me if I was sure I was ready for the field. I tuned out Trowa's hum of irritation at my side and the shift of Heero and Wufei in their chairs a few rows behind me, assuring the Lady that I was more than physically recovered and felt strongly about being the one to take this role in the mission, as I was already familiar with the lower levels of ANGRA MAINYU. She reluctantly agreed and told me to pick up a full report on my mission from Intel after the briefing.

I sort of tuned out after that and, as soon as the meeting let out, I tried to duck away without getting a mini-lecture from Trowa about overworking myself. But, as I slipped out into the hall via the door at the top of the room, a hand caught my elbow. I looked up in surprise at the person who had grabbed me, hardly believing he had been so bold.

"Heero?"

"Come with me," he ordered, looking up and down the hall, evidently for a quiet corner for us to talk in.

Apparently, the next briefing room over was adequate enough, because that where I found myself next, staring down the young man I had equally hoped to encounter and avoid.

"You didn't have to take that mission, Duo. You still have time to recover," he started, though I could tell that was hardly what was really on his mind.

"I'm fine and being cooped up in the apartment is making me a little loopy. Besides, Trowa and I are familiar with the territory already; it would have had to have been one of us anyway. And Trowa's had Quatre waiting up at home for weeks already, so it's only fair that he get a break this time around. I don't have anything like that to worry about."

The flash of pain on his face made me rethink my phrasing; I certainly didn't want to hurt him.

"I just mean that I don't have any lovers waiting around for me to show up; I'm not tied down like that. But it's not like I don't have anybody who will worry about me -- after all, I have you."

His pain turned to surprise and then intense confusion, his eyes studying me for a motive, for an explanation of what that meant.

"You're my best friend, Heero, and I don't want to lose that over this."

He looked a little resigned but seemed to suddenly rally himself, that stubbornness in him refusing to believe something I was saying.

"I know I forced you Duo, but didn't you enjoy yourself at all? Wasn't there anything there?"

An explosive sigh escaped me and I ran my hand through my bangs, looking away from him as I realized what havoc my words had wreaked.

"I did...enjoy it, Heero. But that's not the point. I...care for you a great deal, Heero; I always have. But I don't want you to screw up your life just because of that, just because we had a good roll in the hay. You were...your adrenaline rush confused your concern for me on that mission with a greater affection. I know how that is; when you're so full of the worry and panic for someone you care for that you act out in weird ways. It's not uncommon for men to seek release in a sexual way when under extreme pressure or stress."

"It wasn't...," he started before I cut him off.

"Don't try and make it out to be something bigger than it was, Heero. Don't hurt us like that."

And, for the second time in as many weeks, I felt myself pushed into a wall with Heero pressed against me from head to toe, hands holding me in place as he kissed all the sense out of my head. Drawing back, I stared into his steely blue eyes oozing with determination.

"Was that big enough for you, Duo? Don't tell me how I felt about that night. What I want to know is how you felt."

I was like a deer in the headlights of his overpowering confidence, the shaky veneer of control abandoning me.

"Scared," I choked out, awestruck and paralyzed in his grip.

His eyes widened in dawning horror but, before I could finish what I wanted to say, before I could tell him what I had meant, Trowa tapped his knuckles against the doorframe, discretely cracking the door and calling out to me without sticking his head in to look for me.

Heero and I stared at each other even as I answered back for Trowa to wait for me in the hall. And then, before I lost my nerve, I pulled Heero's head back down to me to drop one more, brief kiss on his lips.

"I'll tell you later, Heero. Wait until then."

And I left him there, alone and confused, but I couldn't help taking the escape once offered. I never was a very brave kind of guy.

Trowa walked me down to Intel and didn't ask a single question, something I was immensely grateful for. Turned out I was supposed to ship out ASAP, preferably the next day, so my partner and I spent the rest of the day pouring over spec sheets and assembling my kit so that I could go ahead and get this ball rolling. I shipped out to L1 the following morning.

I met my contact that same day and began the arduous process of joining up with ANGRA MAINYU. After a few weeks of dangling bait, I finally got a bite and an interview at the back of a seedy bar. It wasn't too long after that that I went through the little initiation dances and got formally recruited. Thus far, everything had seemed to be going exactly according to plan and I suppose I got a little overconfident, especially given that ANGRA MAINYU's foot soldiers were as wet behind their ears as they come. I moved up on the responsibility ladder rather quickly, much faster than any military organization should have ever dreamed of promoting someone who'd only signed on a few weeks earlier.

So I certainly wasn't expecting to be awakened in the middle of the night by a group of those self-same greenies, tied and bound, and dragged up to the restricted access areas to be tossed into what could only be described as a poor stand-in for a prison cell. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that this was just another level in the initiation process, but I knew a hell of a lot better than that.

A few hours later, at a time that must have been close to mid-morning, my cell's door opened and in came a procession of people, including several of my former greenie pals, who immediately came to hold me down and prevent my lashing out in any way. My head was jerked roughly by the braid so that I was staring up at a man I had never seen before.

He was five-eight, maybe five-nine and held himself like a former soldier, or at the very least a man who had once known his way into and out of fights. He still looked pretty solid, although not in peak shape, as evidenced by the completely gray hair and the bifocals. He was apparently in charge here, because he was the one who started in on me.

"It seems the Preventers organization becomes more brazen with each passing day, but I had not expected them to think so very little of me and my men."

"And who the fuck are you?" I demanded, trying to assert more control over my situation than any of us believed I had.

The punches landed in quick succession and I felt more than one boot come in contact with my ribs. Luckily, the guys weren't really into it, mostly trying to scare me into subsiding. Unfortunately for them, I'm not your garden variety foot soldier. But someone apparently knew that already.

"He can help us, even if he is in the Preventers! I know him; I want him down in research..."

What the fuck? The voice didn't sound familiar. Lolling my head up, I saw the kid who had spoken and, though it took me a moment, I finally recognized him, my heart sinking faster than the damn Titanic.

"Hank," Big, Bad, and In Charge said warningly and then he turned to me, speaking in a tone of complete finality, "Kudret."

"What?" I gaped, not having a fucking clue what that meant.

And, of course, they hit me again. Apparently, basic questions were frowned upon in this organization.

"And what may we call you?" Ah. Kudret was the bastard's name. Feeling a little snarky, I replied with the first thing that came to mind.

"Ranger Smith. Didn't Boo-Boo tell you already?"

As they were busy beating me for having a rather poor sense of humor, I heard Hank filling "Yogi" in on my legal name. I had a distinct feeling that nobody had really gotten the reference and I focused on the depression of a joke falling flat instead of the moderately painful impacts of the lackeys' fists.

My captivity for the next few days was something of a joke, but harrowing in its own way. I had three squares a day and was provided with a few toiletries once a day to wash my face and hands. I was left mostly to myself, though I knew that there was activity concerning me going on in the world. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that Kudret hadn't had pictures taken of me for his family album. None of my guards talked to me, told me anything about what was going on outside, no matter how much I goaded them.

But on what was either the fifth or sixth day, Kudret descended from on high again to inform me that the next day I would be taken to a neutral location to negotiate my release and such. My hopes finally rose as I realized that Kudret had some use for me other than public execution.

The next day, I was put in cuffs for both my hands and feet and led out to a parking area where a group of vans waited, into one of which I was loaded. I was held down to the floor by the guards in attendance, but I did catch the glimpse of an occasional landmark through the driver's window and I took them down in my mind to relate back in debriefing to help pinpoint the location of the main base, to which I had even initially been brought blindfolded.

We arrived and I was offloaded in the docking bay of what appeared to be a public stadium, where sporting events might have been held. Ushered inside, I was dragged through hallway after bending hallway before I was pushed through a set of double doors out onto the auditorium floor. My manacles were removed and I was told to march out to the line which divided the floor in half. And, lo and behold, who should be standing there to greet me but Vice Foreign Minister Darlian.

I found myself wondering, not for the first time, what I had done to get one Relena Peacecraft into my cheerleading section, because she was certainly not the normal person to send out during a hostage negotiation.

"Relena! What are you doing here?" I exclaimed softly as I came up to meet her.

"I'm here to rescue you, Mr. Maxwell," she teased.

"This is ridiculous! You shouldn't be anywhere near this!"

A determined look came over her face and her smile faded a little.

"I realized quite some time ago that it's really just the five of you in your little circle, but there was a time that I felt like I had been part of all of that. Like I was in on the secrets and was depended upon to support and protect where I could. I suppose they all felt like that, or maybe they always knew better than to assume inclusion."

I could only assume she meant the other girls, the other people who had, at one time or another, come to our aid or affected our work in battle. But, Relena was right. The only one who we'd ever really "let in" on the fighting and the lifestyle, the only one who'd really fit in, was Sally. But, she was a seasoned soldier already and her guerilla fighting after the fall of the Alliance military put her in our same position as a glorified terrorist. Even Noin had never really fallen that far.

"But, despite my awareness of the exclusivity of your friendships, I sometimes still get the urge to try and be the wingman, or woman, I should say. And, if you'll excuse my saying so, this does fall into my area of expertise."

She smiled a little smugly, but in a good-natured sort of way. It occurred to me again how much she had changed from those old days. A little piece of me brightened inside knowing that where I had once thought I received only cool regard, there was genuine affection and loyalty. Heero would always be first and foremost for Relena, despite the dulling of her passion for him, but it was nice to know that no bitterness existed there in her knowledge that Heero had, apparently, decided to take up chasing after me instead of her. And hey, I'll take all the friends I can get, even if they had been really exasperating when we first "met."

I wanted to ask her a million questions about what was going on, how the Preventers were responding to the threat and how the ESUN was handling Kudret's uprising. But I held myself in check; it was most definitely not the time or place for such a discussion.

Kudret had yet to emerge from the double doors I had been led through and the field agents were starting to get skittish of a trap. Relena herself was looking mildly anxious, but she hid it well, continuing to speak to me on totally innocuous subjects, like how her flight in had been. I could tell she had more she wanted to tell me too but, master politician that she was, she did not even pause to consider the thought, instead jumping eagerly into a lengthy digression about shuttle food.

Finally, one of the guards by the door announced Kudret's arrival and the man himself swept into the room, all evil dictator attitude and finesse. He stalked out across the auditorium floor like he had not a care in the world and came up right alongside Relena and myself.

"Miss Relena Darlian, I presume," he declared as he bowed and, taking her hand, kissed the back of it. I repressed the urge to fling him away on sheer principle. "And just as fetching as they all say. The delight is all mine, I assure you."

She was, thank the Lord, not flattered by any of this, but put up with it gracefully, maneuvering the conversation away from herself in a heartbeat.

"And you are Kudret Shyam, I believe? I am here under the authority of the Earth Sphere United Nations to negotiate the release of our son, Duo Maxwell, and to hear the demands your organization has for our government. I am sure that we are all here for the same reason, Mr. Shyam; to see to the good and happiness of our people? I am confident that we can meet the needs of your subordinates and followers without any further threats or violence."

Kudret rolled back a little bit, balancing on his heels and looking down on us from his height before leaning in towards Relena and me.

"Whether our objectives are the same is beside the point, Miss Darlian, as you can surely see. This is a movement about means, not ends. And from this position, we do not intend to deviate. That is why, with the very deepest of my condolences, I must send you on your way, Miss Darlian."

He gazed at us a moment longer, a satisfied look coming across his face, before turning away again and pacing back towards the way he had come. Relena looked confused and irritated, staring after him and called after him once. But as he reached the doors, he turned back again and smiled in a nasty sort of way, then looked up towards one of the balconies and nodded to the foot soldier that stood there. And then he left the room, doors swinging closed behind him. The soldier, in the meantime, barked an order and from somewhere to my left, a shot rang out.

Despite all the previous attempts on Relena's life, I had never really thought about the possibility of her really dying. I guess, just like the damn girl herself, I had always believed that Heero would stand in between her and every bullet headed her way. But there she was, gasping in pain, hands clutched to her chest where blood was gushing its way between her thin, delicate fingers and down her smart blouse and dress jacket.

I felt myself move forward and fall to the floor beside her, hands quickly pulling off my t-shirt and prying her hands away just long enough to press the cloth to the wound, pressing down hard and attempting to curb the flow of blood. I used as much of the rest of my body to hold her down and still, knowing where she didn't in the mania of her pain that the frantic movements would speed up the loss of blood as her heart tried to keep up. She was trying to scream, but couldn't take a breath deep enough to really attempt a full-on wail of distress. Some small part of my mind wondered if I wasn't supposed to have known something like this would happen and thrown myself in front of the bullet in Heero's stead.

I saw Preventers come running, pulling their weapons out and training them on the ANGRA MAINYU soldiers, yelling for them to drop their damn guns and step away from Relena and myself. But they were on me, violently pulling me away from Relena, smacking me around with the butts of their guns as I resisted. I know that I should have been able to throw them off, disarm one of them and just fucking started the firefight that was desperately waiting to begin. But I couldn't seem to come out of my field medic tunnel vision long enough to realize that they were going to leave Relena to her Preventers entourage and that, from the very beginning, Kudret had never planned to release me.

I tried to fight back when it dawned on me, but I was too far away by then, dragged halfway across the auditorium floor and surrounded by two dozen or more of Kudret's soldiers. I also knew that Relena was now first priority for my comrades, my extraction trailing as a distant second in their minds. They'd formed a human barrier of really pissed off, heavily armed field agents around her as a few of the others prepared to carry her out and back to their secured location in the area. They didn't really need me to go psycho about being taken captive again until she was out of the building, otherwise they would have to go to ground with her and she needed medical attention without any further delay.

I found I couldn't stop struggling, however; couldn't stop yelling, though I had no idea what was coming out of my mouth. There was a lot of yelling going on actually. Very little of it what could be called polite conversation. It was only the very fine thread of training and the priority of Relena's safety that was keeping those Preventers from just opening fire and Une's cease fire be damned.

They pulled me through the double doors of the auditorium before binding my hands and feet with mechanical tape. I gave one of the little bastards a nice, solid kick in the head for his trouble. I got clocked in return, but it had been worth it just to see the fucker fall back to the floor with a startled cry, clutching his head and sucking air between his teeth in that time-honored reactionary hiss of pain.

Then I was dragged down the hall, banging limbs all along the concrete floor, to the exit, where I was heaved like a sack of potatoes into the back of the van I had arrived in. I wondered at the gall of just driving away in the same, marked vehicle, but figured that it was Kudret's party and Preventers could crash it as they saw fit; I just wanted to go the hell home. Unfortunately, the host was holding me hostage.

Lolling my head around, I saw said host in the passenger seat, sitting as coolly as if he was out buying socks and had not given the order to ventilate Relena and ensured her of an exit wound that would scar horribly after surgery, preventing her from wearing those damn low-backed gowns ever again. Jesu was Heero going to be pissed at me for this.

Kudret looked back at me when I growled at him and wore an expression that was distinctly unremorseful, examining me with an apathetic eye. He turned back to observe the scenery or some fucking thing, but addressed me in a smooth tone of voice, totally unperturbed and infuriatingly smug.

"I am heartily sorry to have to hurt your friend, Mr. Maxwell, but I felt that it was best to send a clear message to our fellow colonists that pacifism is a quaint, but impractical pastime. It will protect you from no one except other idealists. Man was bred to scramble all over itself, Mr. Maxwell. Miss Peacecraft has sheltered the people from their own nature with her ideals and childish fantasies, but you will see for yourself how the pyramid, when it stands on its head, will fall away when the top stone is rattled."

"Go fuck yourself."

He chuckled, a dark thing caught somewhere between amusement and triumph.

"I shall refrain, Mr. Maxwell, but I thank you for your concern. My energies are quite well spent elsewhere."

He turned to face me again, regarding my flustered and deviant visage for a moment before meeting my eyes.

"In time, Mr. Maxwell, you too shall see that I do only what is best for the colonies. They will never know justice under the reign of a government that cannot meet their needs. But we shall show them the way, by taking power from the powerful and giving it back to those who so deserve."

"Who are you looking for revenge against?" I snarled, "Kill them and leave the rest of us the fuck out of it."

He clucked his tongue lightly, cocking his head to the side in a gesture of the bemusement he did not truly feel.

"Of all people on the colonies, Duo Maxwell, I would have thought you would understand the need to punish the wicked."

My body went deathly still and I felt my rage slip from destructive to truly homicidal in an instant. Had my arms and legs been free, Kudret would not have lived long enough to scream in pain.

"My past is my own affair. You stay the fuck out of it."

"Still touchy, I see. Well, well. I'm sure, given some time to recover from the shock, you will begin to see my point. No colonist will ever be safe from injustice so long as their government is too far away and too disinterested to provide the appropriate aid. You know that all too well, I think. Ask yourself this: She is your friend, but is Relena Darlian your leader? Your representative? I would wager the answer is no."

I remember spitting at him and then a sudden crack over the head. Kudret's voice sounded impatiently, and then a sharp sticking sensation pulled at my inner elbow. I remember trying to fight away, but whatever the hell they shot me up with took hold quickly and I was soon sucked under.

I woke in my cell, aching and bruised, but bindings removed and the broken skin from all the twisting and pulling of the mechanical tape cleaned and bandaged. A small tray of food and water sat in the corner by the door, as well as a comb and an unopened package of hair ties. Well, for all that he had held me captive; Kudret was certainly an attentive host. Or maybe it was Hank. The kid seemed to be able to throw some weight around here, surprisingly enough given his age and inexperience. Then again, everybody here seemed to be barely average at their jobs, except for Kudret himself. He was the real evil-genius deal.

And he would get what he wanted. There was no way that Une would let this pass away without a show of force after he had upped the ante and gone after the darling of the Earth Sphere. And I certainly don't mean myself. The question for me now was, why in the holy hell had Kudret held on to me? If he had wanted to show off by killing me, he would have gotten it over with by now. The answers my mind was presenting me were not pleasant or comforting, but I always have had what one could call an over-active imagination.

My answer came later that afternoon, when Kudret reappeared to collect me from my cell and take me on a "tour" of his facilities. To what end, I did not yet know. But I began to get the gist of it when Kudret and his armored guard led me into the main hangar. Hank Berven reappeared shortly thereafter, boasting the technical modifications he had lately made on the suits I saw there, gunning for not only Kudret's but my approval as well.

Honestly, if it had been only a few years earlier, the mobile suits I saw there would have been mere cannon fodder, but now there stood no ready force to counter them; all mobile suits had fallen prey to the disarmament mandates of 195 and 196, except maybe Quatre's Maguanacs, but he wouldn't come forward with them unless there was absolutely nothing else to be done. Stopping these tubs was possible, but would prove costly, and there was no way of knowing how many more plants they had spread across the Earth-Sphere. Well, that wasn't entirely true; there was one way to find out, but it was risky and -- a bigger problem than that -- it would require me to lie to the world, including my friends.

What I'm saying is that to get the information Preventers needed to accomplish a successful raid, I could turn traitor, or at least play the role of one. Kudret was certainly making it clear that he was open to the idea of winning me over and, after putting up a nominal resistance to the proposal, it wouldn't be too hard to play to Hank's desire for my technical knowledge. What brought me up short were the long-term implications.

I would get Preventers the info they needed by making it vulnerable to their professional hacking team, loosening the computer system's safeguards and leaving a trail of digital cookie crumbs to the digital records they would need. But, to maintain my cover, it would have to look -- to both ANGRA MAINYU and Preventers -- like the data had been genuinely hacked and decrypted, not leaked by a mole. My name could not touch those files and I certainly had no way of letting Une in on what I was planning. So, I would have to let Preventers and all my colleagues and friends believe I truly had defected, and by doing so I would be signing my own death sentence.

Une couldn't afford a Gundam pilot Benedict Arnold to walk away from this. They would come for ANGRA MAINYU, to try them to the fullest extent of the law, and they would come for my head. But, it was either my head or the lives of others, innocent civilians and ESUN officials alike. I'd seen Kudret's respect for peaceful negotiation already. These several hundred men could easily ruin thousands of lives by rocking the fledgling peace and challenging the efforts of its makers, discrediting the image of the Preventers, and trampling the wishes of the masses under their feet.

It was no decision, really; just a damn bitter pill to swallow. I hoped, at least, that I wouldn't always be the traitor I was about to become, that the memories living in the minds of those I cared for would somehow rationalize my crimes for future generations. I prayed with all my soul that Heero in particular would understand my actions, although I knew that was a hopeless case. I had already been careless enough to let Relena get shot; this would merely ice the cake of his disappointment. I could only hope he wouldn't hate me, even if he was angry enough to lose whatever respect, whatever tender feelings he may have once held for me.

I began with complimenting Hank's design, but offering suggestions before pretending to catch myself and clamming up. Nominal resistance. Reel Hank in and wait for Kudret to allow it.

It took me barely two days before I was being brought down to the floor to work over designs and modifications with Hank, at first supposedly only caving because there was a guard standing nearby threatening me with a semi-automatic weapon. I slowly showed signs of warming to the project and I knew that it was all being reported back to Kudret. It didn't matter that Hank thought he was winning me over when I'd let little things slip about missing my own mobile suit from the war; what mattered was if Kudret would gamble on my supposed change of heart.

After another three weeks had passed, I was summoned to Kudret's office for an interview. I was surprised that I was left alone with the man, unshackled, in the room, but figured that there was some advantage they held over me that I couldn't yet perceive.

"I see that you're becoming quite comfortable down on the floor, Mr. Maxwell. I wonder that you are so willing to cooperate with our plans."

I didn't try and convince the man that I liked him or that I had bought into his world view; doing either of those things would unravel all my hard work. Kudret knew I didn't like him or trust him and there was really no need to pretend otherwise. Kudret was a shrewd enough man to realize the value of a worker, no matter their personal feelings towards him. I certainly toned down the hatred into mere bitterness, but I didn't go over the top. He had shot Relena in front of me, after all. The less willing it appeared I was to let that go, the better my odds of appearing loyal to something I tossed my cap in with.

"I need something to do and Hank's designs are rudimentary at best. It...rankles to see something done so haphazardly."

Kudret chuckled hollowly. "Yes, I suppose young Berven is not the most experienced engineer I could have employed, but his belief in the cause is great and I have no need of state of the art technology, just so long as it functions. I am surprised that you would amuse yourself at the expense of your former comrades, though."

"I never said I'd pilot anything. Not for you any way."

"Nor would you be allowed to, Mr. Maxwell. I merely wish to determine your allegiances."

"I play for the team I'm put in, just so long as it puts food in my stomach."

He had laughed then, a full throaty thing that spoke of triumph.

"A true L2 native. Well then...," he came around from behind his desk and it wasn't until too late that I had noticed the camera set up in the corner of the room and put two and two together about Kudret's angle in the whole conversation. "I'm sure you won't mind if I ask you to help me with a little public announcement, Mr. Maxwell? I know you are not very familiar with the art of public speaking, so I though that a recorded message might be best."

He had then motioned to the straight-backed chair set immediately before the camera lens, "If you will?"

I moved to the chair and sat, all the while trying to keep the stiffness of anger and irritation from controlling my body language and laboring to appear nervous and wary instead. As I had seated myself, Kudret pushed a button on the comm device on his desk, ordering that "the news crew" be sent in.

An anxious fluttering began in the pit of my stomach, even though I knew that I couldn't so much as blink at them funny, let alone slip them a note or message for Une. This was a test of my conviction and loyalty to ANGRA MAINYU's cause or, at the very least, an exercise to show how much power he held over me, to reinforce to me how very much I was being watched. Kudret's confidence lay not in how much I might profess to agree to his ideas, but in how powerless and cut off he could make me feel. He was not a reckless man, a fact that I cursed daily.

His voice floated over to me from the doorway he had opened, "If you would just read the speech that will be held up, then this will be quick and painless, Mr. Maxwell."

I held the growl in my throat, remembering at the last moment to play the part of an ex-Sweeper being won over by a potentially lucrative business deal, despite objections to the client. That was the game Kudret and I were playing and I was swiftly becoming less and less sure that I was the only one who knew it.

The "news crew" turned out to be a group of five: a cameraman and his lighting assistant, a sound guy and his own assistant carrying a boom mic, and one more person who seemed to be in charge of the cue cards. I kept my eyes on the cue card boy and the cameraman and studiously off of the sound technician and the boom operator. It wouldn't do anybody any good to give Trowa away. My agitation with this whole exercise skyrocketed though and Kudret, who came around to stand behind the cameraman, chided me mockingly.

"Now, now Mr. Maxwell, I promise it will be painless. This certainly won't take more than a few minutes of your time. Then you can get back to your toys."

And thus I made my announcement to the world of my defection and new devotion to the philosophy of ANGRA MAINYU and its leader, Kudret Shyam. It was taped four times because in the first two passes I moved my eyes too much while reading the cue cards. Of course, that had been deliberate on my part, but Kudret would have none of it and filming was halted as I was made to memorize the speech so that I could recite it while staring straight into the camera. The third cut was passed over because I was moving my hands and Kudret ordered the cameraman to zoom in so that the shot merely consisted of a steady shot of my face.

Once the fourth take was recorded, my escort of guards was summoned and I was escorted back to Hank's side. It was the last time I was ever accompanied by guards save to and from my cell in the mornings and evenings. Kudret had firmly asserted his control and I had become his puppet.

A few more weeks into my stay with ANGRA MAINYU and I discovered the true purpose of my prolonged captivity: mobile dolls. Kudret was fascinated by the development of mobile dolls in the war of 195 and was putting pressure on Hank to develop a similar system. Of course, I knew a shortcut: that particular capability could be spawned from the Zero system, but I would never have turned Kudret's attention down that twisted road. Instead, I aided, and occasionally hindered, Hank in developing a computerized system to control the movements of our several dozen mobile suits. And, at last with a computer under my fingertips, I left a few back doors open into the system and neglected to tell Hank of the crumb trails left by Preventers intelligence gatherers in the access logs.

Still, another few weeks dragged on and I began having to put gremlins in the mobile doll system so that Preventers could dismantle it from their location when they made their move as I could not keep Hank from ever advancing with the project. I heard some word that a few of the other facilities had fallen, but none were considered too near our location on the L1 cluster and so no general alarum was raised concerning the minimal security precautions taken. Well, that's not entirely true. I was occasionally pulled from my work with Hank to give some of the rookies instruction about firearm handling and maintenance, though I was never to touch a gun myself.

At night, confined to my bleak cell, I would pray for the raid to come swiftly and I would think of Heero. Three months of my life passed confined in that hangar by day and in my cell at night, and I was watched all the while by Kudret, long after Hank and many of the other men forgot to be suspicious of me. Long after when I thought I would still be trapped there, living an oppressive lie. I prayed for the end, even as I hoped for rescue, for Heero.

It was the fifth day of the first week in the fourth month of my capture when the emergency sirens went off. I felt an immense weight lift off of my shoulders and I barely contained the guttural groan of relief. At long last, the cavalry had arrived and my mission was complete. The lie was finally over.

Others scurried about the hangar, loading guns, frantically destroying data which -- unbeknownst to them -- the Preventers already possessed, and manning battle stations. I could distantly hear the yelling and hubbub up in the control room, but it sounded very far away, like a great gulf lay in between me and them, sucking up all but the loudest of their cries.

I remained as I was, letting the noise of the chaos below me fall away into that gulf as I tuned my hearing into the faraway miniature explosions and "prat-prats" of exchanged gunfire. I watched the readout screens in a fascinated daze as Preventers hacked the intentionally vulnerable mobile doll system and deactivated the entire fleet. I drew my fingers slowly and deliberately from the keypads, finally giving up my act and relinquishing all my systems to the Preventers' infiltration.

And so I stood, unsure of what I should do. My role had been fulfilled and now all that was left was to submit to my death. Should I wait for them to reach me, or should I go in search of my executioners? I was still in too much of an almost tranquil haze to stir from my place, even as I heard the sound of the expeditious Preventers' teams drawing still closer to my little control room. I soon saw the operatives spill into the main hangar below me, pushing the ANGRA MAINYU troops into the mostly exposed middle of the room, forcing their retreat and eventual surrender. I watched with a sort of detached fascination as the awesome prowess of Preventers' ex-soldiers mowed down the cock-sure, but poorly trained greenies of Kudret's ANGRA MAINYU forces. It was like watching a ballet of some kind; a highly choreographed dance of death.

The door swung in violently, reverberating off the wall as it struck. I turned, startled out of my reverie, expecting to see a line of field agents stretching out on the catwalk that led to the door, each with a weapon trained on me. But it was Hank, looking pale and panicked, instead. I think he may have been surprised to see me, because we wasted several moments just taking each other in.

He was twitchy and riding an unsteady adrenaline rush fueled by raw fear, a desperate gleam shining high in his dark eyes. His hair, which was normally carefully quaffed, was a rat's nest that glimmered with sweat and shards of what appeared to be glass. Hank had narrowly escaped from the attack on his lab, then.

He was breathing hard and fast, barely able to get one breath out before he was sucking the other in, face flushed from the exertion. He had immediately moved himself out of and away from the doorframe upon entering the room, so he was clearly terrified that someone was on his tail. His hands were somewhat unconsciously inching towards his gun holster, showing how badly frightened he was. I wondered why he was so scared; he had to know that they'd be trying to take him alive. No further proof was needed than the fact that he hadn't been shot in the back while running away.

"What are you doing, Duo? Get those suits on line! We have to get out of here!"

He'd been hastily advancing on me as he spoke, but came up short when I didn't mimic his panic, when I stared back at him a little too calmly or, perhaps, with a little too much frustration showing. I somehow hadn't planned on being confronted by Hank after the attack got underway and found myself a little upset that I would have to be found with another ANGRA MAINYU member.

It was oddly gratifying watching him put it together. At least Hank wouldn't go into custody telling stories about how easy it was to seduce me to the dark side. Maybe his testimony might convince Heero, where I couldn't, that I had never turned my back on the peace. That I had never turned my back on him.

Hank's hand found his gun unerringly then, eyes narrowing to slits of icy rage.

"You've been playing us all along! You fucking bastard, I should kill you right here!"

I knew he was serious, but I couldn't work up even so much as a nervous sweat. My silence only fueled Hank's fury and I quickly had the muzzle of a cocked IMI 13mm TacHammer in my immediate vision. My head reared back out of instinct but, though I clenched my hands tight to my sides and every nerve in me screamed for me to follow my basic self-defense training and disarm him, I held the rest of me deathly still. After all, I was going to end up dead; didn't really matter who did the deed now, did it?

That Hank didn't kill me immediately upon training his gun on me spoke volumes about his conviction and supposed soldier mentality. He was working himself up to shooting me, but he needed to get angry to do so. Really angry. So he started yelling. Obscenities, slurs, curses, pretty much anything he could think of. The hand that had steadied in his initial rage wobbled under the weight of the upright weapon and his increasing frenzy. It would be any moment now. Either he would get so pissed off at my silence that he would lash out in the way he had made available to himself, or his finger would slip. Either way, it would be over.

Movement and noise over Hank's shoulder -- out on the catwalk -- caught my attention. I looked towards the intruder, as did Hank. Only Hank, already jumpy and seething with rage, had a gun in his hand. A gun that went off when his hand instinctively clenched in surprise. Luckily or unluckily, depending on how you felt about it, his hand had moved with the rest of his body when he'd spun around -- basic aggressive gun handling lessons down the tube -- and the bullet whizzed by my head instead of into it. I automatically flinched, but held my ground otherwise.

Whoever the hell was out on the catwalk wasn't an ANGRA MAINYU member because, before I could really get over the initial reaction to almost being shot in the face, Hank went down with a bullet in his shoulder, clearly meant to incapacitate him. A distant part of my mind watched as Hank crashed to the floor, howling in pain, forgotten weapon skating across the floor. Funny that. Relena had taken being shot much better.

Reverie aside, I looked to the door again, still fixed in my place like some kind of bizarre scarecrow. I heard more voices on the catwalk, but I couldn't seem to focus on what they were saying. They were arguing over something; I knew that much from the tones of their voices. It occurred to me that I knew one of those voices and things abruptly snapped into harsh focus, actually causing me to physically lurch in place. I looked as hard as I could at the figures on the catwalk, like I was trying to pierce through a heavy fog that existed only in the weary corners of my mind.

And then the heat and pain blossomed in my chest. I was thrown back into the control panel by the inertia of the bullet and, as another struck my thigh, I collapsed to my knees. As my head hit the floor, I was wondering if I really had seen Heero, or if that was just a hallucination born of weeks of wishing. Then the black pulled me under.

I came conscious again in a hazy fog with a fucking ridiculous headache. Seriously people, no matter what anybody tells you about the sturdiness or density of the human skull, it is simply not meant for hitting things.

Someone was tapping me on the cheek insistently, trying to get me to wake up and pay attention. I was most decidedly not interested, so I tried out my pissiest, most intimidating groan of absolute agony on them. But instead of laying off, my tormenter only redoubled his efforts to bring me to the land of the living, the fucking bastard.

And as if that wasn't enough, as soon as I opened my eyes -- fully intent on death glaring them to the best of my barely-conscious abilities -- they were flashing a penlight around, mere centimeters from my eyes. Then, when I refused to keep my eyes open and lolled my head to the side, the bastard took hold of my chin and turned my face back into position, peeling one of my eyelids open with a thumb. That was it; whoever had decided that this kicking of Duo when he's down was a fun idea was gonna get a serious ass-kicking themselves. As soon as I could stand up, that is.

I started trying to pull away, making an effort to recover control of myself even as some part of my brain processed I had what the doctor-folk called a "concussion," but Fucking Bastard began crooning to me to lie still, to relax. Help was on the way, he said. And until they arrived, he apparently thought that his being there would provide some measure of relief.

I remember asking him why the hell help was coming when I was supposed to be killed by somebody. Did they need two people to carry my soon-to-be corpse to a better location for the execution, I asked? If he gave me a minute, I should be able to walk. Don't bother the other guy.

A long silence stretched out and I tried to ask Fucking Bastard if he didn't just want to get it over with here, make it look like self-defense and all. He made the strangest damn sound then. Then he just told me to rest, be quiet. Everything's okay now. He was sorry; the trajectory was off. A bunch of other things, most of which escape me now. I remember asking him, voice laced in utter confusion, if he wasn't going to kill me. He said no; he said that he was going to take me home.

Jesu, I said, that was rather pointless. Didn't he know that? He told me that he didn't.

And then I passed out again, wondering what in the bloody hell was going on.

The funny thing about concussions is, the more of them you have had, the more easily you will have them in the future. And I have had my absolute fill of goddamn concussions. I was drifting in and out and remember only bits and pieces of being lifted onto a gurney and carried out of the facility for the first time in literally months. I remember seeing a huge assortment of vehicles and hundreds of men in Preventers' uniforms organizing the arrested ANGRA MAINYU prisoners for transport and, for a few of them, medical attention.

I remember seeing Kudret loaded into the back of an armored car, shackled and bound, but screaming bloody murder at his captors, hair askew, snarling and spitting like a madman. I felt immense relief wash through me at the hazy knowledge that he had not and would not escape justice. "Thank God," I muttered weakly and heard someone call my name anxiously before I dropped under again, despite the attempts of the EMTs to keep me awake.

I woke next in a hospital room and couldn't help groaning in frustration. So they'd shot me and taken me to the hospital. Great guys, I would have preferred the whole heat-of-the-moment death thing to the long drawn out ordeal that would eventually lead me to a state execution. Fuck, but I hate red-tape and policy.

As a I started to bring my body back into the land of the living, a shape laying on the second bed in the room stirred and, before I could really compute there being a second person in my room, I was staring up at, of all the damn people, Heero Yuy. I braced myself for the coldness of his disapproval and anger, but he came to my side and kindly offered a glass of water instead. Thoughts of pod people leapt to mind, but I kept quiet, not knowing where I stood with the man I claimed was my best friend.

"How are you feeling?" he asked me gently, brushing my bangs out of my eyes.

"Like shit. Yourself?" I ventured, trying to see what kind of ground I was walking on here.

"Not spectacular, but definitely better than you. I'm sorry; I didn't mean for you to fall down like that."

All thoughts about walking on eggshells abandoned me for the more familiar pattern of banter.

"You were the one who shot me?!"

"Not anywhere vital. It seemed like the best thing to do at the time."

"And how in the seven hells do you figure that?"

"Wufei said that it would make people less jumpy about you being a defector that was simply taken into custody if you were injured on top of that."

"Fine," I pouted momentarily, "But still, it's the principle of the thing."

"You're the one who went masquerading around as a traitor and an enemy to the peace."

"Now you're just splitting hairs, Yuy."

"If I was 'splitting hairs,' I would mention the fact that you shot me first. One for one."

I tried not to wince at the phrase Heero favored when he felt like he'd only evened the playing field. I hated it when he said that and I was pretty sure I knew why too. Every time he rationalized something that way, it meant that I was in pain of one kind or another. Why did I have to fall for the asshole who had never heard of turning the other cheek? Somewhere in the back of my mind I heard Sister Helen laughing at me.

"That was different."

"Oh really? How so?"

"We both had guns then."

"Are you insinuating that you're a faster draw than I am?"

"Hey, I calls it likes I sees it."

He shook his head, looking away, a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth.

"So, you're a guy in the know...how bad are my chances? I mean, I'm guessing I'm going to stand trial what with the medical treatment and all, but do you think it'll just be a formality or should I try and get a hold of a lawyer?"

I certainly had his attention then and his expression was quickly plummeting into one of sheer horror.

"Guess I should just let it take its course then, huh? Okay. Can't say I'm not a little disappointed, but no use trying to fight the tide this time."

"Duo! Stop it! There's not going to be any trial!"

"Oh...but then, why are ya'll fixing me up? Could just let the blood loss take me un..."

I was suddenly talking into the flesh of his hand, which he had slapped over my mouth and I found him leaning over me, staring down intently.

"You're not under arrest, Duo. Relena will make a press statement in a few hours in which she'll announce the capture of the ANGRA MAINYU and also clear your name of blame. We never believed you turned your back on us and you proved that by not betraying Trowa and weakening their information networks to our access. We're not idiots, Duo. Relena will just tell the world that this was part of your plan all along, that the announcement was part of the ruse. She's been beside herself since the shooting, worrying about you. We've all worried about you."

He lifted his hand from my mouth and slipped it down to grip my hand loosely.

"If I had been Trowa in that office, I wouldn't have been able to restrain myself."

"You always were the straightforward type," I chuckled. "Battle-ready and raring to go."

"I just hope that you can forgive me for this in time. I don't know where to begin apologizing for your capture and forced actions," he told me somewhat meekly. It kinda freaked me out, to be honest.

"And how in the fucking hell do you figure that all of that was your fault?" I laughed, "I think I was the one who got me into that mess to begin with."

"If I...had not forced myself on you that night...you would not have volunteered for the infiltration. If it had been me or one of the others, you wouldn't have been captured; you wouldn't have been in that position for so long."

My frustration with his narrow thinking patterns threatened to boil over, but I managed to keep it reined in so that I could at least attempt laying the facts out for him.

"Yes, but then they would have shot you or Trowa or whoever the hell you have in mind on sight! It was a damn blessing in disguise that Hank recognized me. The only reason Kudret didn't have me killed immediately upon discovery was because stupid fucking Hank was on hand to tell him I was a Sweeper!"

He only looked more confused than ever. I sighed heavily before continuing, amazed that he was being so stubborn about whether or not he was to blame in some way. Did he want me to be pissed at him?

"Sweepers are rebels and privateers by long reputation, though the organization really cleaned up its act a while ago. Anyway, Kudret thought that since I was a member, there might be some potential in persuading me to join him, worth it enough to risk offering me more time for the knowledge and experience I could offer. For you or some other squeaky clean Preventer, he wouldn't have taken the same risk of being betrayed. I was the only option for this plan."

While he was chewing on that -- and looking somewhat ill in the process -- I realized what he had said before. I bulled forward with my response before I could think better of blurting it out.

"And will you stop letting yourself believe that you forced yourself on me? It was consensual. You didn't do anything I didn't let you do that night."

"You threw me out. You cried. You ran away from me. You told me that you were scared. Those are symptoms of a victim, Duo, not a willing partner. Please don't be in denial just to save me guilt."

He was so adamant, so consumed with this idea that I was letting him get away with something horrible, that my resolve to see this thing through, to keep him from being soiled by my now slandered name, crumbled.

"It's not denial, Heero. If anyone did anything to regret or feel sorry for, it was me. I had...wanted that for a long time and in your moment of stress and exhaustion, I took advantage of your weakness. I was scared that...it would hurt us. I didn't mean to leave you hanging like that for so long, buddy. I certainly don't want you thinking you did anything wrong. For that, Heero, I am truly sorry."

He was looking at me like a cow might look at an oncoming train. I wasn't sure what to make of his reaction, really. When his hands twitched and stilled a few times, I was sure he was going to hit me, but then he smiled in that silent, overjoyed way he has and pulled me up off my supporting pillows and collected me into his chest.

The pressure of his arms on my back pulled and twisted at my wounds, but I ignored them the best I could. There were more important things to be paying attention to. Like Heero holding me. Or of the way his left hand had my braid trapped in its clutches. Or the way he was shuddering and quaking all around me as he buried his face in my hair, murmuring little, incoherent sentences into my ear.

"I'm so glad that...you don't hate me."

"I could never hate you," I soothed, "No matter what."

"I might hurt you," he whispered, confiding something that I could not fathom the depth of.

"I could hurt you, but you don't hate me," I countered.

"I will never hate you," he swore, solemn as a funeral.

"Right, we're best friends and all...," I started, driving for the moral of the story, but he interrupted me before I got very far.

"No," he pulled back and searched my eyes, tightening his hold on my shoulders. "Because I love you."

And then everything around us just fell away and I could only hear our little panting breaths and the muted rustle of our clothes as they shifted on our bodies. I had never felt so alive and so claustrophobic at the same time before. I wanted to push away and run as far as I could. I wanted to tighten my fists in his shirt and just let him hold me. I had no idea what it was that I wanted anymore, just that it involved getting past this gargantuan confession of Heero's with as little notice as possible.

"Jesu," I breathed, unable to think of anything else to say, scrambling to find and piece together all the arguments against this scenario that had seemed so solid only a few months ago, when I had dismissed him from my apartment.

"Don't fight me, Duo. I'm not confused about how I feel for you; these past weeks have shown me how much I want you with me, how much I need you with me. If you feel anything like the same, don't run away from me again. I don't want to be chasing down one moment of pleasure at a time anymore."

"You don't have to force yourself...there are other fish in..."

He cut me off with a frustrated huff.

"I'm sure there are, but I'm not interested. You're it, Duo Maxwell. Get that through your thick head. I love you and it has nothing to do with how much or little you think you deserve me. I've wanted you for a long time, but all these little games and evasions are making it impossible to tell if I have a chance. Now tell me what you want, not what you seem to think I want. You promised me you'd tell me what you felt when you came back."

Something small and wondrous sprang up inside of me. Hope awakened inside of me -- real hope for the first time in years -- that, as incomplete as I was, I might actually be good enough to be loved again. I might actually have a shot at what I wanted. I stared at him for a good long time, languidly deciphering the layers of hope, desire and affection caught in the look on his face, before leaning up and pressing my lips to his chin briefly.

"It felt like my whole world was changing and I thought I might be in danger of getting my heart walked all over," I grinned at him mischievously before continuing, delight spilling through me in waves of barely contained laughter. "I want what I've always wanted, asshole. For you to love me."

The elation that spread across his face and filled up his gentle eyes was a beautiful thing to behold. "Well," he said, "I think we may be able to work something out."

And we did. It was hardly a fairy tale, but he kept chasing me down and, somewhere along the way, I finally learned to turn around and wait for him to catch up.