Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ The One-Eared Neko ❯ STAR ME KITTEN ( Chapter 16 )

Part 16 STAR ME KITTEN

Not a word. Nothing had passed between them but occasional glances, absolutely nothing. No anxious, false smile and a sarcastic wit or joke on Duo's behalf and no silent glare or half-grunted observation on his criminal's behavior from Heero. Silence ruled devastatingly. Even the radio remained deathly quiet and the bohemian dully stared toward the blurring yellow lines.

After escaping, the traveler had sighed and pressed the dull metallic chill of the pistol to his forehead, leaning, silently consumed, against the window as his head roared with a dull ache. Distant rumbles of engines passively traveling beside them sifted through the glass and growled along with the traveler's muddled thoughts. Thought of world-eating eyes and words exchanged what seemed so long ago slowly ground at his waking consciousness, his face grimacing as it thought. The notebook, which held all those estranged and intrigued thoughts on the time spent with the bohemian, lay idle on the no-man's ground that was between them, between the driver and passenger side.

He seemingly had forgotten it was there and all that he hadn't written down now milled behind his eyes instead. Heero limply folded his arms, cradling the pistol against his stomach without really noticing it was there. He didn't notice anything, staring out the window, not even the single, carefully placed look he received from Duo. It was the first in the painful stretch of a few hours, and brief; he turned his head away again, his expression uncertain. They remained that way, all wrapped up in their thoughts, completely separated in a space of three and a half-feet, until night began to creep toward them again.

The microscopic city lights inched away behind them, being swallowed by night. A long, lonely stretch of forest and meadow now separated them from the city of Cinq and not just from each other. Duo seemed to inexplicably wake from a dream state of driving in absolute silence and pulled to the side of an empty road. He shifted it to park and the engine quieted a second later. His eyes adjusted from staring out at the light of the headlight as he looked over at the traveler, who where he'd been sleeping against the window for the last few hours.

His mouth was half-opened as his cheek was pressed against the glass-a place he normally would never find sleep. All the stressed lines bowled beneath his eyes had loosened and shifted to a state of semi-peace, though the lines in his brow still remained. Duo saw it perfectly, with reflective retinas that drunk in the moonlight, and the empty expression filled a little with something. He watched the traveler sleep in innocence and in grief all at the same time, and if anyone else had been awake, they would have seen him smile wearily. The bohemian reached over and took the pistol from the traveler's limp hands and tucked it away in his own pocket, knowing that he never should have held it in the first place.

Heero mumbled in his sleep as his fingers relaxed around nothing, shifted, and curled his shoulder tighter up against the window. He was completely oblivious to the softened look that he received, as Duo moved toward the traveler.

And the moon was a full, glowing orange globe hovering just over the horizon.

---

Sometime creeping toward the devil's hour, the traveler registered the action of waking from restless and faded dreams of thieves and hunters and sitting up on the cramped cot. Beside him, the distant scent of cigarette smoke clung to the bohemian's luggage, pressed against the wall in an indiscriminate pile with his own. After a second of adjusting his eyes to the large amount of moonlight pouring in, his brain groggily wondered how he had ended up in the sleeper compartment when he distinctly remembered staring out the window for hours until he saw no more. The discomfort in not knowing ached dully.

The discomfort in not knowing was painful, knowing that it was impossible break that curse. Heero remembered the bitterness and jaded anger that Duo had always had brewing somewhere in him, and it confirmed it without a doubt.

Duo had been hiding something from him from the beginning, and the hateful stares in the park only proved that he never was going to be allowed to know. They proved that Duo had never truly placed a solid trust in him, and for whatever reason, that struck him the most.

There was an impulse, after coming to the comfortless realization, to roll over and fall back asleep and relieve him of all the twisted thoughts and information coursing his brain, but he didn't. He shifted quietly so that he kneeled on the cot, rested his arms on the back of the seat, and soaked in the image of one Duo Maxwell sleeping with his back against the window, practically glowing in moonlight. The discomfort and ache in his chest choked him twice as hard.

The bohemian was laid out silently across the passenger's side, in his criminal black, and seemingly dead asleep. The jagged brown bangs he wore so messily long were disheveled beneath his perpetual black baseball cap and his face pale in contrast and beneath a sea of light from the full moon haunting overhead. A graveyard of a moon. Draped cautiously over him was a reserve cotton rag dubbed a blanket, covering him from heel to waist as he slept, his head on the armrest on the door and his lean body curled up against the back of the seat. It estranged Heero for an instant, the traveler severely distrusting it. It confused him, how such a lethal predator of a con man could seethe of such death and grievousness in daylight, and then could be so beautiful and simple when he slept. It twisted that discomfort in his chest viciously and the traveler settled onto his heels, disposed to watching silently.

Dusty white moonlight streamed through the entire cabin of the Isuzu, and Heero breathed sleepily, simply staring down at the bohemian who'd bewitched and damned him with his inhuman violet eyes and gold bracelets looped around his wrists. Now, his clipped, chestnut hair hung at his shoulders, and Heero mused what it must have looked like, draped down to his shoulder and braided. Strange but beautiful. Beneath the lowered rim of the black cap, Duo's face looked pale and lifeless, if not for the noiseless pattern of breathing of his chest swelling and falling. Heero had an instinct to remove the baseball cap, and leaned down silently to indulge it. It would only muss that exotic bohemian hair.

The traveler cautiously leaned forward until his stomach pressed tightly against the fabric of the seat, soundlessly reaching forward. He had no idea how greatly that one movement would shift his path in life into another direction.

Once a thief, always a thief. Once you learn to sleep with one eye open, that's the way it stays. When Heero came into any close vicinity, inhuman senses jolted the bohemian awake and dulled violet eyes flared at him in their unaware, half-seeing state.

Instinctually recoiling, Heero tried to escape whatever had spooked him in the con man's expression, but his fingers had already wrapped around the brim of the baseball cap and two things happened very quickly: the perpetual hat fell away and there was an abrupt grip around his wrist, sending pain in lines up his forearm. The bohemian looked terrified as the traveler half-winced, and then realized that the black baseball cap had fallen into his lap.

Duo cringed as the most dreadful thought crossed his mind and poisoned his face with a grimace. He looked horrified, and it only worsened when Heero sudden realized what was wrong with the beautiful image of Duo, shoulders defensively pressed against the window and moonlight streaming in. He realized then what had been trying to hide from him so fiercely.

He wasn't human-he was Neko.

Stationed on a head of bohemian hair that he'd never seen without a hat was a singular ear out of place, and it was completely covered with a fur shade darker than the chestnut hair currently down to his neck. It was as if it were cut off an innocent housetabby with scissors and sewn to Duo's humanoid head. Delicate white hairs crisscrossed inside, probably hyper sensitive. Large enough to just cup in the palm of his hand. Scuffs and fading souvenirs of fights nicked the outer rim, like one of some tomcat that would sneak out at night to fight. He still had his obligatory human ears on each side of his face, and the singular cat feature was doubly strange in comparison.

Aside from all the semi-scientific observations, it threw Heero's stomach into a violent and nervous loss of breath. He couldn't breath, watching the single feline ear, ruffled from remaining hiding beneath a baseball cap for so long, nervously twitch back and forth to every inane radiation of sound. A predator's ear. But still a tabbycat's ear. He realized he couldn't breath and vaguely registered gasping once for air. Duo's ear flickered and broadened toward him, over bright, frightened violet eyes, and still Heero was still fighting to get a decent breath. Finally, those immeasurably sad eyes shifted away and the feline ear pursed gently against his skull, giving Heero a little time to accept the shock that ran through him.

Duo wasn't human. He never had been.

All the news reports-the reporters' eyes darkening slightly just before finishing the sentence proclaiming him to be a renegade Neko-the sinful, hateful slurs of the bounty hunters-the sharp teeth that had mangled the pen-the unusually sharp nails-the insanely speedy recovery-the glowing retinas in the dark of night-the hat-the accidental bite-the inhuman strength and agility-and the rejection in the gypsy tent, because he had found the ear without even knowing what he'd found. Blind to all of it. How the hell had he not pieced together? Not even suspected it?

Well, he knew that answer. He'd been too wrapped up in that deceiving, trademark con man grin, too worried about his wellbeing to take notice of anything else. Too absorbed in Duo to see him clearly.

He hadn't known anything about him, had he? Duo had been right to scream at him, to accuse him of knowing nothing.

Heero was dull with thoughts. The silent war of tension held between them as they stared at each other lasted for too long, until Duo frowned and finally looked away.

Defeated, the criminal sighed, but the tension was still simmering in the air. Snatching up the traitorous black cap, he angrily tossed it to the dashboard. And then, the pale, bone-white moonlight streaming on either side of his face, he glanced ever so cautiously to the traveler, as if he were trekking into mine-ridden territory. He considered the blank expression on Heero's face and his own darkened in a depressing grimace.

"Come here." The command seemed loud enough to shatter his skull in the intense silence, even though Duo was speaking under his breath.

Seemingly woken from a daze, the traveler flinched ever so slightly and hesitated. The fear in every tiny move he now made wasn't hard to pinpoint. After all, Duo could smell fear.

"Come here," Duo repeated wearily. "I'm not going to hurt you." The one-eared Neko leaned so his shoulder blades pressed against the cold glass and hands fell lifelessly to his lap. When once again, the traveler deliberated silently without movement, he added, "Heero, I'm not asking for the world."

And finally, the young Japanese man soothed the nervousness in his stomach enough to gain the composure to crawl into the front seat. He was still visibly shaken as he sat facing the bohemian, uncertainty in the highest written across his face. A tense distance separated them and the already solemn glow in Duo's eyes darkened.

"Come here." A bitter smile tainted his face and the feline ear flattened. "You don't have to sit there like some spooked hounddog. I swear, Heero, I'm not going to do anything to hurt you. I'm still the same person from before. Don't look at me like I'm some kind of beast. Please."

The traveler was still running through the stages of shock; he was still reviewing all the hints scattered throughout their journey and pondering how it was possible to miss something like that. "Duo-You..." was all he managed before the train of thought wasted away in his very mouth.

That semi-refusal seemed to pain the bohemian further as the corner of his lips sank abruptly in an awkward frown that somehow still looked like a grin. "Oh, come on. Haven't I told you that I never lie?"

The traveler paused and sat up, being stared in the face by one stunning one-eared Neko and a blazing white moon, pursing his lips ever so slightly as he finally relented. Heero warily crawled forward until the distance between them disappeared and he sat at Duo's feet, which were still bare and scathed red from the bounty hunters unfriendly ministrations. Once positioned, he once again momentarily forgot that he could breathe. The feline extremity twitched in hypersensitive hearing, flattening carefully against his skull as he continued to remain silent, just watching the blue-eyed traveler.

Heero licked his lips nervously and felt his shoulders tighten reflexively as he finally spoke.

"So… you're a Neko."

There was soft, morbid laughter in the cabin. "You've only just noticed?"

The traveler sulked slightly, not pleased in the least to have the sensation of being laughed at, after being seduced and deceived simultaneously by one brash bohemian with gold hoop bracelets. "You never told me. Mostly I assume anything that speaks English and looks human would be human enough."

"You never asked," Duo responded with more humor than he expected. It was straining to cover all the falseness in his toothy grin. It barely disguised the sharp glint of his pronounced canine teeth, which now leapt out the traveler in light of the latest revelation. "Therefore, it wasn't lying to you."

Heero opened his mouth to respond but was beaten neatly to the punch.

"Or deceiving you. I never pretended to be anything but what I am-A con artist." The darkened gleam in the one-eared Neko's eyes reminded him that the casual conversational tone was fabricated out of necessity and discomfort. Heero's mind momentarily drifted to the diplomatic battle of a conversation in the gypsy tent, ruled by grins and verbal pageantry, and wondered how drastically it could have developed into this.

After the last comment, the tension hanging over them intensified now that they sat opposite each other, watching each other so guardedly that they might shatter if they spoke. Duo stared silently, almost twitching as his dark and solemn eyes locked onto the traveler's equally unwavering ones. Heero watched in return like stone, a stone with a morbid curiosity overcoming him. Without warning, he reached up toward the bohemian. More precisely, he reached for the ear, which swiveled quietly toward him.

It was exactly like petting the ear of a tabbycat, one that could be lying on a couch or languishing in the sun. The shade-darker chestnut fur covering it-Duo's fur, he told himself-was velvety to the touch. Startled, the one-eared Neko fawned backward sensitively. His large violet eyes soaked in the moonlight as they carefully watched the traveler's movements. They were reflective, deep purple, and thinning out to nearly diamond-tapered pupil. Cat-slits.

Heero realized that it was only in the dark did they shifted from an average round pupil; he realized just how inhuman Duo could be if one looked close enough, but that was if they were allowed close enough to get even a passing glance. Eventually, Duo recoiled from Heero's tentative petting-yes, he was petting him, in a weird sense-and the feline ear flattened. A hand even gently pushed his own away.

"Please, don't," Duo half-pleaded. "Just understand. I don't like my ikkunnoi to be touched."

"Ikkunnoi?" Heero repeated awkwardly.

He resisted the urge to inwardly blush, forgetting once to translate a word he so closely associated with Neko culture and letting his tongue slip for the first time in years. It was a sign of weakness to him. "It's Hunter's Nekonese. The universal word for 'ear' in our old archaic language," the bohemian said shyly. "It's something all our tribes understand."

"Yeah. I remember hearing about it." Heero paused as he considered. "So, you really aren't human?"

The false sense of humor muddled the response. "Well, I'm actually something like one-fourth Neko. My mother was an Irish Catholic girl from Oklahoma, and my father-the best damn Warrior our tribe had ever seen-was half-human. Our tribe was kind of progressive, so there were many other mixed ones like me. But other than that one quarter, I'm just as human as you are. Sorry if I've disappointed you with the truth, but I guess I do show more catlike features than most half-breeds do." He gave a self-effacing laugh. "I did never fit in in that sense, either."

"Half-breed," Heero repeated flatly.

He really didn't like the term. It cheapened Duo's genuine charm. He frowned slightly in the glowing silver-gray light as he shifted his eyes carefully over the bohemian's face and across his skull, searching for the matching ikkunnoi and knowing full well that he and Duo both knew the question was coming. And the impatient silver in those reflective retinas only confirmed it. So, he asked.

"What happened to the other one?"

Those inhuman violet eyes shied off momentarily, staring silently at the upturned palms lying in his lap, and Heero feared that he wouldn't answer; he feared mostly that he'd asked an overly sensitive question and had intruded upon raw territory. But a bitter bohemian growl interrupted that thought. Glaring balefully past his hands balling into fists and straight into an embittered memory, Duo spoke abruptly.

"When they torched my family's home and slaughtered my littermates one by one, they plucked me from my mother's arms and kicked her into the dirt. That was before they decided to kill her anyway, just because they'd had a taste of killing helpless children and decided they wanted more. So, as I'm barely weaned and watching my mother lie there, they whip out their lighters"-Duo made the sinister gesture of a cigarette lighter being flicked open and being drawn across something agonizingly slow-"and burn me. All the fur on my arms and neck and shoulders. Burned my left ear bare before they"-the bohemian mimicked a small blade being snapped at the ready-"sawed it off with a pocket knife."

At that, the horrible presentation continued as the one-eared Neko gently curled away a lock of his hair to reveal the cauterized stump where it once had been. Still, the hateful look soured his face and he refused to look Heero in the eyes as he continued, baring a canine distastefully and bristling.

"And then they tossed me off to bleed to death somewhere. Like they really cared where. Of course they couldn't have just hurt me-No, they had to do over the whole tribe." The venom in his voice struck even harder as he snarled scornfully at some invisible memory. "In like manner."

Heero tried weakly to swallow the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. "Who?"

But Duo couldn't be distracted from his rage-filled trip down a Memory Lane that was less sweet than most, not even by the traveler's voice. "And if that wasn't enough to fuck with me and my murdered family, six years later I go past a public news broadcast in the city and I see the soldiers who did that glorified for 'their service to Americans everywhere.' The anniversary of their extermination service, meaning they fucking celebrated it year after year! And that fucking warmonger was there to pat his precious murdering bigots on the back himself!"`

There was an instantaneous connection in Heero's head. Memory consumed him as well, and he recalled a prim and proper dinner in the brightly-lit splendor of the Peacecraft estate, sitting opposite a sunny and warmly feminine Relena politely chewing her steamed vegetables. As he had dully gazed into the glittering of the glass chandelier, a smooth, benevolent voice announced the accolades of his soldier's brave work in a dangerous wilderness to the north. Their suppression of a rising rebellion of savages, he'd called it. Only later he smoothly slipped in the fact that it had been a dangerous Neko tribe, as interviews flooded his administration. Yet something twisted violently in his stomach and refused to accept something so drastic.

"Duo, Senator Peacecraft is a well-respected pacifist. He carries on a century's tradition of non-violence. He wouldn't do something like that-it violates all that he believes in."

The embittered grimace turned toward him. Duo glared through him, through to the memory of his adversity. "Just wiping off some scum isn't in violation of any peacecode, Heero. We're not even human. Just animals who have forgotten their place."

Heero frowned again, being overwhelmed with the instantaneous urge to soothe this cancerous rage and erase the absolute feral snarl from Duo's face and those bright violet eyes. Wanted to drain the tension that arched his shoulders tightly, that balled his fists until they shook. He was compelled to grab Duo by the shoulders, shake him into some sense, and stop his destructive insanity, to see a genuine smile instead of the harsh humorous one. But he couldn't bring himself to do it, though he could only think of convincing Duo and-and what? Then what could he really do? All he had was the safe distance of his words. It wasn't normal to be here, it didn't seem right, and that was what held him back. That was what always was holding him back from loving a criminal, but making it all the more undeniable that it was all he wanted anymore. Why hadn't he noticed everything getting so damned complicated?

"Senator Peacecraft would not order to kill a village of peaceable Nekos," Heero said, still trying to keep his head from overwhelming itself.

A savage smirk crossed the one-eared Neko's face. "Maybe you're right. He just must have accidentally forgotten a few important facts as he declared to the world that my family and my kind were a cold-blooded threat to American lives."

"He would not," Heero defended in a half-touchy retort.

Duo cocked his head complacently. "And how would you know this?"

Dark Prussian eyes gleamed at the con man, half-ready to show their teeth. "Because Senator Peacecraft is my adoptive father and I know that he would not commit something so deliberate as that."

The sudden defensiveness nature of the traveler seemed to amuse the darkly smiling and beautiful criminal sitting before him, dusted in silver-white as he leered regretfully. "I know. And that's why I have to leave you behind, traveler."

"Duo-" the Japanese man protested sharply, keeping his voice under control as the lingering fear returned in full fury and began clouding his brain.

The bohemian's bitterly sad smile widened and his matching eyes narrowed "No matter if you believe me or not, I'm going to go to Cinq and settle the bad blood between me and the rest of this world, I'm gonna try and end all this mess the only way I can. There's nothing else to it. I'm sorry to be the one to take away your father, but he took everything from me. I know you don't understand, and I can't ask you to. All I can really ask is that you maybe forgive me for it someday." His smile faded, though his mouth still was drawn in the horrible charade of one. "It'll be last crime of the infamous 'Maxwell's Demon.'"

"Wait, Duo-!'

"No," Duo growled back. Sudden warmth squeezed Heero's hand hard, and he flinched, realizing it was the bohemian's hand, clenching tightly around his. "You listen to me. You promised me your word that you would stay out of my way when I asked you to, traveler. So I'm asking you now. Stay out of my way."

Heero opened his mouth, closed it, and knew defeat. It tossed him around and pawed him like a cat and its prey, and he was helplessly helpless. He had promised him-Heaven knew what Duo would do if he were ever betrayed again by breaking that promise. He couldn't-he wouldn't break a promise.

With that familiar lethal feline grace, he was confronted with a falsely smiling bohemian face mere inches from his, defying him despite all regrets burning in his eyes. Duo smirked once, showing his sharp canine tooth, and slid his arm along the curve of the traveler's shoulder until his hand stroked the back of his neck, sending electricity down his spine. As he looked at him, the false smirk was slowly replaced with a momentary rueful smile, considering something sadly before he leaned forward and kissed the traveler's lips. Heero's body froze up instinctively, but he felt terrified tremors running through his sides and shoulders. The bohemian lips were split but warm, gentle but tentative, not at all like the hungry seducers they had acted in the tent, pillaging and romancing him like a thief. Duo paused noiselessly, just lightly brushing his lips against Heero's, then let out a deep, despondent breath out onto the traveler's skin and pressed his hand tighter against the back of his head. He dared only to deepen the kiss only a little, out of desperation, knowing he wouldn't be able to stop himself if he went any further. He held him tightly, like it was his last indulgence. The traveler was too overwhelmed to respond at all, only close his eyes and try in vain to stop shaking. When Heero couldn't hold his breath any longer, a tiny moan escaped him and Duo retreated a little only to place another careful, gentle kiss on his lips to silence him.

It worked well, and he had sufficiently lost his voice when the bohemian pulled away.

In a disturbing quiet tone, Duo sighed and put his hand on the side of the traveler's face and said in finality, "And that'll be all he wrote."

For a second, Heero couldn't register why his vision suddenly bleared and spun drunkenly on top of the drumming heart in his chest. But when he felt the needle sting and bite as it exited his neck, as Duo drew his other hand away, he knew that he'd been drugged. The potent tranquilizer dug its claws into him almost instantly, and the last thing in his sight before his eyes went black was Duo grimacing at him unhappily with his slit pupils dilated and his outline glowing white in the glaring moonlight.