Heero shook his head as he passed Duo on the stairs, box in hand. It was marked Fragile!! in a looping, messy scrawl -- Duo's handwriting, and maybe only legible to him. It contained the remaining contents of Heero's refrigerator: beer, some condiments, a couple of jars of pickles. The man loved his pickles. That had certainly been a surprise for him to find out, a well kept secret all these years.

Despite Heero's response, Duo trudged back up the last couple of flights to the empty apartment. No harm in just looking, right? Besides, he wanted to look around the bedroom closets one more time. He was pretty sure he'd left some clothes in there back when they were hopping back and forth between apartments all the time. Now that Heero was moving in with him, it was his last chance to try to locate his missing things.

Duo had found that he couldn't keep the grin off his face whenever he thought about it. Moving in together! He still almost couldn't believe it. Six months ago, it had only been a fleeting thought in the back of his mind that Heero would ever feel that way about him. He could never have imagined that a single timid kiss -- the result of way too much booze and loneliness -- would have led to this. Some masochistic part of him made him joke to Heero that he was expecting to wake up any minute now. For his part, Heero told him he was an idiot. That much, at least, hadn't changed.

Duo strode into the bedroom, the wooden floorboards creaking beneath his boots. The place looked ransacked. Everything but the mattress and bed frame were gone, the nightstand, floor lamp, and the set of drawers all packed into a rented van idling double-parked outside on the street. It made him sad, in a strange way, to see it like this. After all, quite a few things had happened in this room for the first time. Duo's eyes darted to the naked bed automatically. As well as the corner of the room beside the bed. Ah yes, couldn't forget the time over by the closet either...

That snapped Duo out of his little trip down memory lane. Checking the closets, right, that was what he had come to do. He opened the doors, wincing a little as they squeaked. Wouldn't miss that, at least. Try as they might, neither of them had ever been able to repair that squeaky hinge. Part of him was a little disappointed that now they would never get the chance.

The closet appeared utterly empty. Heero didn't have a lot of clothes to begin with; most of them were already hanging up in Duo's apartment next to his stuff. The gun and ammo, too, were packed away and ready to be moved. Was there anything else he'd forgotten to grab? Duo scanned the deeper corners of the closet, though he couldn't remember if he'd ever put something away in there. The closet lacked its own light source, and it was in a strange position that left it out of the scope of the overhead light, which made it dark and difficult to see into. Duo had never really bothered putting stuff in there, afraid that he would immediately forget he had. This was probably the first time he'd actually searched it.

To his surprise, he discovered a small shoe box stowed flush against the back corner of the closet. Pulling it out, he found that it was covered in a small layer of dust, like it hadn't been touched in a couple of years. Must have been something Heero had put in there and totally forgotten about himself. He cleaned off some of the dust with the corner of his t-shirt. Turning it in his hands, he found a neat, straight line of handwriting on the bottom:

"AC 195," Duo read. Without even pausing, he opened the top and set it aside, eager to see the box's contents.

Duo hadn't even known Heero had kept anything from the wars. He himself had long since lost the priest's habit that he had worn incessantly. Besides his gun, the only souvenir that remained was the small gold cross that he wore around his neck, a reminder that had kept him focused during the war, that he had somehow managed to hold on to through all the near escapes and brushes with death. The man who had given it to him was dead. And, in some ways, so was the boy who had first worn it. But, despite his own predilection for keepsakes, that was the only thing that had survived until now. Somehow, he had never even imagined Heero had things to remember that fateful year by.

Despite the condition of the box itself, the inside was relatively pristine and mostly free of dust. There were several things inside, and Duo pulled one out at random and held it in his hands.

"A bullet? Weird." Duo set it gently on the floor.

The next item was a small, folded envelope with Heero Yuy written on it in very feminine handwriting that Duo couldn't imagine belonged to any of the pilots. He opened it up but it was empty.

"You'd think he'd keep the note and chuck the envelope," Duo mused, but he had no clue what the message could have been or who could have given it to Heero. He set it down beside the bullet.

One by one, he took out and examined the things Heero had stowed in the box. An ID card from a private school with Heero's scowling face on it but Duo's name. A piece of paper with an address and the name Sylvia Noventa written above it. A wilted yellow flower that looked even older than everything else in the box. Save for that ID card -- Duo had remembered his surprise when Heero had told him he'd registered at the school under his name -- he had never seen any of it before. He had no idea what any of it could mean to Heero.

"Duo? What are you doing?"

Duo flipped his head around to stare at Heero, one hand still in the shoe box, like a kid caught with the cookie jar. Heero was standing in the doorway, arms crossed, looking down at him kneeling on the floor with a vaguely amused expression. Heero's eyes glanced at the box in Duo's hands and his eyebrows shot up in surprise.

"Is that...?" He began, suddenly joining Duo on the floor. He took in the items set down side-by-side in front of Duo.

"I forgot I had this," he said finally, shaking his head.

"What is all this?" Duo said, his voice coming out strangely hushed in the big, empty bedroom. There was a strange air of reverence between them, huddled over the shoe box and its mysterious contents.

Heero picked up the bullet on the floor and held it gently between his index finger and thumb, turning it slightly to inspect it. The corner of his mouth turned up in a small smile. "You don't remember?" He said.

"Nope."

"It was the first time we met."

"Huh?" Duo said, but then comprehension dawned on him. "No way, Heero," he said, chuckling. "You kept the bullet?"

"First and last time I got shot," Heero explained. "That was good aim."

"Thanks," Duo replied, grinning. Strange to think he was still proud of that shot after all this time. "What's the story behind this?" He held up the envelope with the flowery writing on it.

Heero took one look at it and shook his head. "Relena wrote me a very generous invitation to her birthday party, which I tore up in her face."

"Wow... you were such an asshole back then."

"Well, at least I felt bad about it afterward."

"You ever apologize?"

Heero snorted. "I'd like to think that everything that followed was an apology."

Duo laughed. Heero picked up the ID card and inspected it, frowning at his own picture.

"I look ridiculous."

"You look exactly the same, Heero!" Duo ruffled Heero's messy bangs for emphasis. "Not much has changed on that front."

"I'm taller, at least."

"Both of us, thank God," Duo added. "We were a real couple of midgets back then. I could barely reach the overhead panels in the mobile suits."

Heero's eyes glanced over the paper with Sylvia Noventa on it and the wilted yellow flower, but didn't offer any explanations. Something in the set of his eyes, a strange quiet melancholy, kept Duo from prying further. There were parts of his own past that he wasn't quite ready to share, either. Someday, though, and he was willing to wait for Heero to be ready, too.

"What else is in here?" Duo charged ahead. Heero brought his attention back to the shoe box.

"Not sure," he replied, reaching for the next object. He pulled out something long, metallic, and black and held it in his palm, and they both stared at it with wide eyes.

"Heero..."

It was the joystick to Wing Zero. God knows Duo had tried to pry something off of Deathscythe before it was destroyed, but he didn't have Heero's augmented strength to help him. In the end, he'd fatalistically decided that it was better if he didn't have anything to hold on to. But looking at the piece Heero held in his hands, he felt a sting of jealousy. If he could have kept anything from the war, he would have wanted something to remember his gundam by.

Heero sat quietly with the joystick in his palm for a long while, closing his fingers reflexively around the ergonomic grooves. When he placed it on the ground beside his other memories, it was with a gentle sort of reverence.

"Anything left?" He said finally, voice low and thoughtful.

Duo peered into the shoe box. It seemed they had cleared it of its contents.

"Looks like we took everything out... wait a minute," Duo said suddenly, running his fingers along the inside. There was something flat against the white bottom of the box -- a face-down photograph? The white background blended almost completely against the bottom and was easy to miss.

Duo suddenly wanted to see the picture very badly. Hidden at the bottom of the box, he got the feeling it was the most important keepsake of all. A small part of him hoped it was a picture of the gundams, or at least one of them, but he had no memory of anyone bringing a camera along on Peacemillion, and he couldn't remember another time all the gundams had been collected in one place. Still, he imagined that the most important memory in Heero's box couldn't have been about anything else but Wing.

Duo managed to get the photo off of the bottom, and turned it around in his hands. His eyes went wide.

"Hey..."

It was a picture of the two of them. Clad in basketball outfits (he remembered those tiny shorts with dismay), Heero stood, scowling, while Duo had an arm slung around his shoulders, one hand waving to a crowd of fellow students, a wide grin of victory on his face. Their eyes were locked in some conspiratorial understanding. Duo stared at the picture, hazy memories floating through his mind.

He turned to the man beside him, who was gazing at the picture with an expression that Duo couldn't place. Heero reached an arm out and brought it to rest around Duo's shoulders, mimicking the photograph in a way that 15 year old Duo down there probably could have never imagined.

"That's when it started," he said finally.

"What started?" Duo asked, and Heero fixed him with a flash of his deep blue eyes in response. "No way..."

"I don't think I fully understood it then," Heero explained, frowning. His expression was so close to that of the young Heero in the photograph that Duo might have laughed if he could even remember to breathe. "But I felt something that only later did I realize didn't feel like friendship at all."

Duo found himself shaking his head. "I can't believe it," he whispered.

"What?" Heero's frown deepened.

"I was crazy about you from the moment I shot you on that pier," Duo confessed.

"I doubt that," Heero said seriously, but the lines on his forehead smoothed slightly.

"Scout's honor." Duo shook his head, still somewhat in disbelief, eyes fixed on the photo of them together. Somehow connected, though barely even friends yet. So much lay in store for those two young boys.

"Considering how oblivious we both were, it's a miracle we've even made it this far."

"Agreed," Heero said, chuckling, and then he was bringing up a hand to guide Duo's lips to his. With the searching intensity of his kiss, suddenly it seemed very possible to Duo that Heero might have also felt this way a long, long time.

"We should get out to the van before we get a ticket," Duo said, finally pulling back. Heero nodded.

They gently placed the objects back in the shoe box in silence. When it was time to put the photo back inside as well, Duo paused.

"Don't you think this would look good on the nightstand?" He said quietly.

Heero gave him a soft smile. Long, slender fingers brushed the bangs out of Duo's eyes. "Yeah."

They stood up, Heero holding the box tightly, securely, and stepped out of the bedroom together. It was time to go.