Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Wearing Down ❯ Chapter 1

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

Wearing Down (contest entry)
Pairing: 1=2
Category: post-EW, drama
Warnings: Language, slight shonen ai
Gundam Wing copyright Bandai, Sunrise, and Sotsu Agency.

The first thing Heero did every morning, while the coffee was brewing, was go to the door of his apartment and get the newspaper. After about four to five years, it'd become more of a reflexive movement, like blinking when one clapped suddenly in front of another's face.

Today was different, because when he opened the door, the newspaper was there, but so was a bleary-eyed Duo Maxwell, who started as the door swung outwards.

“I was just about to knock,” Duo said, handing over the newspaper.
“Long time no see, Yuy. You're a bitch to track down, you know that?”

Heero shrugged, taking the offered newspaper. “There's enough coffee for two if you want to come in,” he said, moving aside.

“Sounds good,” Duo said, hitching his duffle bag on his shoulder and coming in. “I could use a cup. I've got questions for you, too.”

A glance at the microwave's clock told Heero it was a quarter to eight. “Those will need to wait,” he said, turning around and heading towards the kitchen. “I've got classes in half an hour and work afterwards.”

He heard Duo snort. “When you gonna get back?”

“Around five thirty or so, assuming traffic isn't too bad.” Heero glanced over his shoulder at Duo, who was still standing just inside the apartment. “You can sleep on the couch while I'm out.”

Duo bent down, untying his shoes before toeing them off. “Think I'll do that right now,” he said. “Don't worry about coffee for me, in that case.” He went off towards the living room, his sneakers still where he'd left them. One of them lay on its side, and for some unknown reason, Heero felt like it was scolding him from how the hole for the foot gaped like an angry mouth.

Staring at the shoe, Heero realized that while Duo probably had many questions to ask, there was one main question more important than all of them combined. Answering that one, though, would take a lot of time, in both coming up with the answer and telling it to Duo, and even then, he wasn't sure Duo would get it.

It'd be better, Heero thought, if Duo figured the answer out himself. That way, it would be easier to understand and accept. Now there was only the matter of finding a good enough hint. Duo wouldn't be able to figure it out for a few days, which was the point; the answer was not simple, and it required time to sink in.

He also didn't mind seeing Duo again. In fact, he wasn't sure he wanted him to leave so soon.

* * * * *

It was afternoon when Duo finally woke up, hungry and wanting a shower. The first thing he spotted was a note Heero had left on the coffee table addressing those exact concerns: food was in the fridge, extra towels were in the bathroom closet, and another reminder that he'd be home before six at the latest.

Sitting up, Duo sniffed his armpits. The shower could wait, and a sandwich sounded really good since it was around one or so, and he hadn't eaten breakfast.

He reached into his jeans pocket to get out the cell phone, and realized he'd been covered with a blanket decorated with bunches of purple flowers and bright red hearts. Duo stared at it for a few seconds before muttering, “What in the hell...?”

Of all the things Duo had expected to see while he visited Heero, finding a blanket belonging in a little girl's bedroom was not one of them. It looked relatively new, which, to Duo, probably meant Heero had bought it voluntarily.

As he got off the couch, Duo mentally added the question, “What's up with the damn blanket?” to his list. The rest of the apartment looked normal enough, though now he wasn't sure whether to expect the same thing with the towels or plates.

Changes happened. None of them were fifteen anymore, and this year, they'd all turn twenty. Duo and the other guys had kept tabs on each other, at first every month, but as time had gone by, it'd become less and less frequent; Quatre had been the one to send most of the emails and phone calls, followed by Wufei, and then Trowa. Relena was busy, as was expected for being Vice Foreign Minister, but every now and then she'd call Duo to see how things were.

Contrary to what most thought, Duo had been pretty quiet, preferring to send a message or call every winter as an indication he was still alive. Other than that, there hadn't been much to talk about on his side of the fence.

Duo's stomach growled, reminding him he needed to eat, and sometime soon, preferably. A short walk to the kitchen later, he'd discovered more than enough for what he needed in the fridge, though it'd taken him a while to find the bread until he'd rooted around in the freezer. Somehow, that seemed just like Heero to put it in there, and Duo didn't know why he hadn't thought of the freezer in the first place.

As he put two slices in the toaster, Duo considered making dinner for both of them tonight. A job took enough out of you at the end of the day; he couldn't imagine what a schedule with that and additional classes did. Hell, there'd been enough times where he and Hilde had both gone, “aw, fuck it,” and gone out for pizza or Chinese instead. While the bread cooked, he picked up a book lying on the counter, snorting in amusement as he read the title.

“Well, I'll be damned,” he said, opening it and riffling through the pages.

He'd never pegged Heero as someone who liked history, especially concerning events they'd all been in. The physics textbooks he saw on the coffee table across the couch were understandable—there was no way any of them would have had any trouble with that. It couldn't have been for a required class. Duo had very little understanding of how college curricula worked, but when he thought of historians, he thought of them working with things from the beginning of time to ten years ago.

Duo sighed, closing the book. In a few years, this would fit his concept of history, wouldn't it? This is where they'd all end up: in books, documentaries, in conversations starting out with the words, “way back before you were born...”

Come to think of it, not even them, only the machines they'd used. Everyone probably knew about the Gundams, but not the people inside. Duo hadn't realized that until the war was over; except for a handful of people, nobody knew about his role or bothered to ask. That had been weird; Duo had expected some sort of repercussion to come down the line for what he'd done, but by now, he figured they weren't interested. After all, Wufei had gotten a job in Preventers without any trouble. Still, he couldn't help thinking about how it seemed all too easy sometimes for them, finding things to do afterwards, as if the war hadn't happened at all.

A ping from the toaster told Duo the bread was ready, and he put his train of thought aside. He didn't want to think too much right now; otherwise, he'd start brooding, and then there'd only be time to shower. The least he could do was cook dinner, since he'd dropped in on Heero without any warning, and he hadn't a clue on how long he was staying around. There had to be a motel nearby that wasn't too expensive.

Eh, Duo thought, going to the fridge, that could wait for later. Now it was time to eat, and then a shower before figuring out what to cook. As long as he focused on what had to be done, he wouldn't brood.

* * * * * *

“Duo, you really didn't have to do this.”

“Aw, don't worry about it.” Despite that, Duo looked genuinely pleased as he watched Heero add more stew to his bowl.

He hadn't expected dinner to be waiting when he'd gotten home; instead, he'd thought about taking Duo to the nearby Korean place as soon as work was over, but when he called, Duo had told him not to bother. Now that he was at the table, Heero realized how hungry he was. Usually he ate less during lunch, but work today had involved lots of heavy lifting and rearranging, and the stir-fry at the cafeteria hadn't been enough.

“Where did you learn to cook like this?” Heero asked, taking another bite. “Mmmm.”

Duo shrugged. “Ah, here and there. Hilde and I shared cooking duty, so I got stuff from cookbooks, or recipes the neighbors gave us to start out, and then I did some experimentation later.” He took a sip of water. “That's something from Valerie—she lives next door to us, but I added my own spin on it. You like?”

Heero nodded. “It's really good. Thanks for making it.”

“I bet you could do better, though. Probably had to learn fast, since you didn't have a roommate or anything like that,” Duo said. “What, no?” he asked, as Heero shook his head. “Okay, why don't you swallow first?”

After he finished, Heero put down his spoon. “When you live alone, the temptation to go out and eat can be overwhelming. I ate in the cafeteria for a while, but the food there isn't too healthy. Or good,” he added as an afterthought. “There's a nice Korean place nearby that's pretty cheap. We'll have to go while you're here.”

“Whatever floats your boat,” Duo said, stirring the contents in his bowl. “I dunno how long I'll be sticking around.”

“Duo, you should eat. Your food's probably cold already.”

“Huh? Ah!” Duo raised the spoon to his mouth, tasting the stew experimentally. “Oh, it's not that bad,” he said, but he began to eat hurriedly.

Heero raised an eyebrow. “Is there something bothering you?” he asked, leaning back in his chair. Duo hadn't been like this when he'd shown up this morning, but he'd been more tired than anything. “You know,” he added, seeing Duo nearly finished, “you said you had questions to ask me.”

He watched Duo scrape his bowl. “Uh, to start, I guess,” Duo said, “about that blanket you covered me with. Where'd you get it?”

“Oh, that. It was a final markdown item. What?” Heero asked, seeing Duo roll his eyes.

“I'm...just not surprised. I thought it was something else, like you deliberately picked it out for the design or whatever,” Duo said, putting his bowl down. “Doesn't seem like you to own anything looking like that.”

Heero nodded. “Yeah, I know. It's in case people need to stay the night.” He paused, looking Duo in the eye. “That's not what you really wanted to ask, is it?”

Duo smirked, but there was no humor in it. “You got me there. All right, then. It's not much, but what have you been doing since you disappeared on us? You know, you up and left, and it was like, whoa. I thought you'd eventually turn up somewhere weird, like on some colony out in the boondocks.”

He was quiet for a few moments before speaking up again. “When you didn't, it was like saying you wanted nothing to do with us. I figure Quatre would have said something if you were in trouble, so obviously nothing was wrong. That hurt. No goodbyes, no nothin'. I couldn't understand it. So, well, why? That's the bigger question.”

Closing his eyes, Heero exhaled, gathering his thoughts. Yes, that was what he knew Duo would ask, though the raw hurt in his voice, while not entirely unexpected, stung like a scraped knee.

“I didn't mean to hurt you-”

“Well,” Duo snapped, “you did.”

“Then telling you outright wouldn't make you feel better,” Heero replied, his voice calmer than what he was currently feeling. He reached into his pocket, fishing out the piece of sea glass that was always there, and handed it to Duo.

“Here. That's your answer,” he said.

* * * * * *

It was all so fucking ridiculous, if not outright bizarre. Duo had expected Heero to be straightforward, at the very least, but instead, he'd handed over a piece of washed-up glass.

If an explanation had followed, that would have been fine, but Heero only said the glass was just like him, and Duo would have to figure the rest out from there. Duo shot back the first thing that came into his head, that Heero didn't have to go away to have his edges smoothed out.

And Heero had shook his head, saying all very calmly, like he was discussing the newscasts, no, Duo was wrong, that he needed to look closer, because to Heero, it was different from the other pieces of glass he'd found on the beach that day, that he hadn't seen many like it. Then, in that same breath, he told Duo he could stay here in the apartment until he'd solved the puzzle, and that he could have the bed.

After many protests, Duo finally gave up, took his stuff, and headed towards Heero's bedroom. If he wound up staying longer than a week, he'd take the couch again. He didn't know why, but Heero was really against having him find a motel right away.

Duo looked at the piece of glass sitting on his palm. Heero was right; unlike most sea glass, this one had an entire side still smooth and icy slick to the touch. It didn't lie flat either, Duo thought, putting the glass experimentally on his forearm and sliding it around, enjoying its coolness; it had a relaxed curve to it, like the missing part of a circle. He definitely could see it'd been part of /something/. Well, that wasn't true—everything washed up on the beach from the ocean was orignally part of something, obviously—but Duo could hazard a guess as to /what/ it'd once been part of, and you really couldn't do that with most pieces of sea glass.

The piece probably been part of a vase or large bottle. Definitely not from the top, since all of the edges looked like they'd been broken off. It hadn't been in the ocean for as long as others, either; besides the still-smooth underside, Duo saw a thin line gleaming on the front, and small glimmers on the rough edges.

Heero told him that he'd picked this particular piece for a reason, and Duo had to consider a lot more than just the edges and the smoothness.

Okay, he could live with that, Duo thought, taking the piece off his arm and rubbing the underside thoughtfully with his thumb. It felt warmer now, and he had to admit, had a soothing quality to it—the color was a light bluish-green, reminding him of the shallow end of a swimming pool. As he examined it more closely, noticing a new line running down one side, he still thought the whole thing was bizarre, fucked up and still more than a little ridiculous. Heero usually told him things outright, and that's what he'd expected: find Heero, ask him questions, get answers, act accordingly, go home and get on with his life.

You didn't expect Heero to walk off without telling you either, he grumbled mentally, flopping down on the bed. After all they'd been through, the least Heero could have done was give them a heads-up, or, at least, resurfaced to let Duo know how he was doing. Duo didn't know whether the others were too upset about Heero leaving; it'd never occurred to him to ask Quatre, and he was a bit afraid Trowa or Wufei would find that dumb. He'd asked Relena once if Heero had ever contacted her, but she hadn't heard anything either.

That'd been weird. Heero saw Relena as, well, a little sister, or if not that, someone to protect, and Duo couldn't imagine him not at least dropping by every once in a while to make sure she was doing okay.

“Shit,” he muttered out loud. That'd reminded him; he'd forgotten to call Hilde and let her know he'd gotten here without anything happening. Even though there were no reports of a shuttle crash to freak her out, he could have at least gotten in touch.

The clock on the nightstand read 10:54 P.M. No, he'd have to call Hilde tomorrow. It was in the wee hours over there on the L2 cluster, and she'd probably kill him for waking her up in the middle of the night. Some girls liked chocolate; Hilde loved sleep, and given how hard she worked, Duo couldn't blame her.

Yawning, he thought he could do with some himself. It'd been a long day, and even with that nap in the morning, he still felt worn out. The bed was comfortable, though he thought Heero could stand to fluff his pillow every now and then. Duo was going to have to do something about that sooner or later during his stay here, or Heero would suffocate him to stop the inevitable snoring.

But that could wait, Duo thought, putting the glass on the nightstand and getting under the covers. The blankets smelled unfamiliar, foreign—a different brand of laundry detergent, the soap Heero used—but it was comfortable and felt well slept-in, which was good enough for him.

* * * * * *

The next morning, Heero decided to let Duo follow him around during classes. He really hadn't any idea what else to do for the time being, and keeping Duo in the apartment seemed cruel; after all, sooner or later he would want to explore, and Heero thought it'd be a good idea to show Duo around so that at least he knew where things were on his own. Luckily, he didn't have to work today; not that Duo was helpless or clingy, but Heero didn't feel like depositing him somewhere while he was the university archives.

“So how are the physics classes here?” Duo asked. “I guess you're doing fine.”

Heero snorted, staring at the traffic light. “You'd be bored to death.” Seeing Duo's raised eyebrow in the rearview mirror, he said, “I've got a lecture in gravitational physics today at two. You'll see what I mean after that.”

“Doesn't sound like anything new for you.”

“It's for seniors. They wouldn't let me into the graduate courses.” The light turned green, and Heero made a right turn. He could see the campus parking lot a block away. “It's nothing new. There's a physics of music class being offered next term. I think I'll take that one.”

As Heero pulled into the parking lot, Duo looked out the car window. “Shit, this place is huge.”

“Yeah. It's not too hard to find your way around after a while, though. The physics classes are only in three buildings, history's usually in Thomas Hall or MacInnis Auditorium. So really, I only have to remember those, along with the libraries and the archives.”

Duo whistled. “And you say there's /another/ campus nearby your place just for the engin kids. I can't believe it. Fuckin' blows my mind,” he said, getting out of the car and looking around. “This one alone could be a town by itself.”

Heero shrugged; it'd been so long since he'd started attending that he took the size for granted. “You get used to it. Anyway, we need to go. Class starts in fifteen minutes.” Duo started to shiver a bit as he followed along; he hadn't reacquainted himself yet to Earth climates, though this autumn was unsually cool. If he was staying for a week, Heero thought, Duo would need warmer clothing. That was fine; there were extra sweatshirts around, and they were about the same size, but sooner or later a heavier coat would be necessary.

Well, only if Duo was staying for more than a week. But it was better to be prepared. He hadn't brought much with him from L2, anyway, so maybe he was staying for a few days only, depending on whether or not he solved the puzzle that quickly.

* * * * *

“You were right about that class,” Duo grumbled. As Heero had said, it'd bored him out of his skull, and he wasn't entirely sure, but the professor could have been wrong on a few points. Sitting in on Heero's math classes probably wasn't a good idea for tomorrow. “If it's so boring, why're you taking it?”

Heero zipped up his jacket. “To fulfil a requirement,” he said. “At least I'm guaranteed to pass this one.”

“Ha!” Duo blew on his hands and rubbed them together as they walked out of the building. “I bet you don't study for that class at all. We could do that stuff in our sleep.” He'd considered disputing some of what the professor had said, just for the hell of it. She seemed arrogant, as if what she said was law.

“Oh, I study. Not as much as the others, but I study.”

Duo arched an eyebrow. “Sounds like you're busy.” Maybe coming here wasn't such a good idea, he thought. For one thing, Heero was probably busy, and if Duo had known that beforehand, he wouldn't have barged in.

But after today, following Heero around and seeing what he did every day in his classes, and the other students, he felt out of place. It was different from when he was undercover at high schools during missions; he was able to fit in perfectly then, while Heero sort of stuck out.

Here, the tables were turned. On the way to and from classes, quite a few people had waved towards Heero and yelled out “hey”, and in one of the seminars, there was a girl called Terry who'd come up and started chatting away for a good five minutes until the TA started class. What was weird was that Heero didn't ignore the passers-by or Terry; he'd waved back with a nod as they were walking, and had responding in kind to Terry. He'd introduced Duo briefly, and Terry shook hands with him before rushing back to her seat.

“Yeah, you could say that.” Heero swept his bangs upwards as he looked at Duo. “The workload's manageable, though. There's always midterms and finals, and it's a lot, but I get through. You cold?”

“A little,” Duo said. He'd been shivering on and off all day. He should have known, since it was early November, that it'd be chilly over here, but he hadn't thought the weather had gotten cold just /yet/. The trees around here looked half naked, and the leaves that still stuck on the branches were bright red or yellow. Piles of dead leaves were on the streets, knee-high things that crunched if you tried to step in them.

Heero started walking faster. “Let's get to the car and get home,” he said. “It's not that far off. I can make tea when we're back, and we can go to that Korean place I was talking about afterwards.”

“Aw, man, I dunno. You're busy, right? That history reading assignment looked heavy right there.”

“It's fine,” Heero said, waving a hand dismissively. “I can do some of it while we're there. The cafe's quiet enough. And,” he added, looking at Duo, “they've got some things that'll warm you up.”

Duo pulled his jacket tighter around him, really wishing for a scarf so his face didn't feel so numb. “Sure, if you want.”

“I do,” Heero said, and the two of them walked in silence afterwards until they reached the car.

* * * * * *

As Heero had expected, Duo had dug into his meal with gusto. He'd ordered the kalbi, saying he'd been dying for some beef, while Heero had his usual bibimbap, reading while he waited. The cafe was only halfway full at this hour, so he'd only gotten about a third through the reading assignment before the waitress appeared with their orders.

“You're pretty popular,” Duo said, tearing off a piece of meat with his teeth. “Remember when you'd only give /me/ the time of day?”

Heero nodded, swallowing, as Duo started to chew. It'd happened with time, he thought. Before, he'd had to change schools so often that to him, there was no time for putting down roots and socializing. For him, it took a while to solidify relationships. Or maybe not even that; he'd only met Terry at the start of this year and already he considered her at least a good acquaintance, if not a friend.

Which was not to say he hadn't made friends. Anna, the girl who lived down the hall, he'd met his freshman year, when they lived in the same dormitory. She'd shown up looking for someone to share her apple pie with, and Heero had just happened to be there when she knocked on his door. Besides Relena, Anna was now one of his closest female friends.

Kurt had been in his lab group for a physics class, and sooner or later, Heero had found himself coming to his dorm, and having dinner along with Kurt, his roommate, and however many people who happened to be there at the moment. A lot of them had been the people who'd waved to him while on their way to class today. Now that Kurt was going out with Carolyn, Heero didn't see much of him outside class.

In the end, he supposed, things had just happened, and he'd found friends, and the number had gradually expanded as time went on. If it hadn't been for Duo, Trowa, Quatre and Wufei, Heero probably wouldn't have had too much experience with having friends in the first place. But he'd learned, and found himself more sociable than he'd thought he would have been.

Duo's voice brought him out of his reverie. “So, I guess you're pretty well-known around here, huh?”

“No.” Heero shook his head. “I have a handful of friends, and then the rest are acquaintances, really. Classmates or friends of friends.”

He heard Duo chuckle. “You gonna introduce me to them sometime? I know there's more than Terry,” he said, taking a sip of water.

“I think you'll meet Anna soon enough. She usually comes around my place to share whatever she's baked recently. Actually, she's overdue for bringing her apple pie around.”
Duo swallowed the last bit of meat and set the bone on the plate with a soft clack. “Damn. You're not the same guy I knew during the war, Heero. It's not like you've changed completely, I guess, but it ain't the same.” Reaching into his pocket, he drew out the sea glass, putting it on the table between them.

“Kinda like this, I guess,” he continued, in that familiar colonial drawl of his. “It's frosted where it used to be clear.” He tapped the glass with his index finger.

“And?”

“Well, one could say you're putting up a front. But not like you're pretending to be something you're not, more like letting others see what you want 'em to see,” Duo began, running his finger along the surface. “'course, I remembered that when broken glass is in the water at first, it's clear, it's sharp, it could cut you if you're not careful with it. And I hate to say it, but you were like that when we first met. But now it's frosted, and the edges wouldn't be able to cut you now.”

“So I think,” he said, pushing the glass across the table towards Heero, “you've managed to integrate yourself a bit more into normal civilian life, easier to get along with and all that, unlike before.”

Heero was silent for a long time, staring at the glass between them, chin propped on his hands. No, he hadn't expected Duo to come up with /that/ about the front. Not at all. He couldn't help but feel a little warm when Duo mentioned the edges as no longer harmful. This was certainly unexpected, he thought.

“So,” Duo said, “how'd I do? Did I get it?” He leaned back in his chair expectantly, and Heero could see him trying to hold back a triumphant grin. “Oh, man, I'm so good.”

Holding Duo's gaze, Heero slowly reached out, turned the glass over, smooth side up, and pushed it back.

“Not quite,” he replied, smirking.

* * * * * *

There had to be a term, Duo thought, for the intellectual or philosophical version of a cockblock. Because finding out he didn't get the answer felt a lot like an actual cockblock, except he didn't want to have sex with it in any way.

On the other hand, Heero told him that he'd gotten one of the clues right, but that he needed to think about it more. The next clue probably had to do with the smooth side of the glass, just because of the way Heero pointedly turned it over before sliding it back across the table.

If that wasn't getting smacked upside the head with a clue by four, Duo didn't know what was. The problem was, he didn't know why the clue should have been so obvious. He understood the first one; after a few minutes, he realized he'd basically restated what he'd originally said yesterday, with some more frills tacked on.

So the next clue to figure out was the smooth side of the glass. The first thing coming to Duo's mind was how it'd still stayed the same. In fact, other than the few barely noticeable lines across the frosted side, it was the only surface of the glass that had remained unchanged.

Well, of course Heero was probably the same guy Duo had known somewhere, but he had a feeling if he said just that, that wouldn't be all of what he was supposed to say.

Three knocks on the door startled him, followed by a girl shouting, “Hey, I know you're in there!”

Who could that be, Duo thought, and then he remembered: Anna. The knocking started up again, harder this time.

“Could you answer that for me?” Heero called out from the bathroom.

“Sure thing.” Duo left the kitchen counter where he'd been standing, and went to the door. When he opened it, sure enough, there was a short, chubby girl in jeans standing before him in the hallway, mouth hanging open in shock. Apparently Heero hadn't told her he'd come to visit.

She gaped at him for a few seconds before squeaking, “You're...not Heero.”

Duo offered a hand. “No, I'm not. I'm a friend. Duo,” he said.

“Anna,” the girl replied, hastily rearranging her hold on the foil-wrapped platter she now carried to give him a limp handshake. “Nice to meet you. I made some apple pie, so I thought I'd come over and drop half of it off. I'm on a diet, y'know, and I /love/ apple pie so much, but if I have a whole one lying around my place, I'm gonna eat it all and--”

“Why don't you come inside?” Duo said, stepping out of the way. “Heero's in the bathroom right now, and I'm pretty sure he'll be out in a bit.”

As Anna followed him in, she asked, “How do you know Heero?”

Duo shrugged. “We're old friends. Met up a few years ago on a boat trip we happened to be on at the same time.” Not a lie, just not telling everything. Besides, Anna didn't need to know that he'd shot Heero.

Anna set the pie down on the counter and started rooting around the cupboard for plates. “Huh. He never talks about people he met before coming here, you know. I asked him about it once, and he told me it was all pretty boring stuff.” She stretched her arms, trying to reach something on the cupboard's top shelf.

Duo crossed over to the kitchen and motioned for Anna to move aside. “I'll get it for you,” he said. “Heero told me a little bit about you when I got here. He was expecting you to drop by just now.”

She laughed, opening a drawer and taking out some forks. “Damn, I didn't realize I'd be famous. I'm gonna have to yell at him for not telling me about someone like you, though.” She pushed a strand of dark hair behind her ear as she started to unwrap the pie. “Seriously, if I had a friend like you, he'd be all I ever talked about.”

Duo gave Anna a bemused look as he stacked three plates into his arms. “We've only just met and you're already sayin' that?”

“Why not?” Anna asked, not looking up. “That braid of yours would be a good starter. You know, I could go, 'oh, I know this guy and he's got this unbelievably long braid that goes all the way past his butt...'”

“Huh.” Duo never really thought about his braid, but listening to Anna, he realized it probably was a rare sight to begin with. Even other guys with long hair didn't have it reach down their legs when it was down. “Yeah, I guess you're right, that does stand out, doesn't it?”

Anna opened her mouth to answer just when Heero entered the kitchen, rubbing at his damp hair with a towel. “I was expecting you,” he said to her. “Are you still trying to lose weight?” At Anna's determined nod, Duo saw him give her a small but indulgent smile. He felt something like wistfulness turn over in his chest, and it pained him a little.

“I try to diet, you know, and it never works. So you're getting half the pie instead of like, a quarter. That should work out, since you've got Duo here.” Anna's ponytail moved with the slight jerk of her head in his direction. “He looks like he could eat a lot.”

Duo snorted, setting the plates down on the counter. “I suppose you could tell that by just lookin' at me right now, too.” Anna nodded. If she'd heard the sarcasm in Duo's voice, she didn't acknowledge it.

“You're kinda scrawny. My older bro's like that too, and he eats more than I do,” she said.

“Well,” Duo said, clapping a hand on Heero's shoulder, “don't you worry. He'll make sure I don't hog the entire thing. Right?”

Anna chuckled. “Whatever you say,” she said, lifting a slice onto one of the plate. “Okay. Who wants the first piece?”

“He gets it.” Heero gestured towards Duo from across the counter. At Anna's nod, Duo took the plate, taking a tentative puppy nip of the pie from his fork. It wasn't bad—in fact, it was pretty damned good, he thought, with the flaky crust melting in his mouth and the apples not too sweet, and still firm.

“I'll be damned,” he told Anna. “I think Heero's gonna have to keep me from eating the pie out of the pan, it's so good.” He took a bigger bite this time, closing his eyes, vowing to get the recipe before he left.
“Glad you like it,” Anna said, pleased. “At least /someone/ appreciates my hard work.” She looked pointedly at Heero, who rolled his eyes.

“Just because I don't constantly praise your food doesn't mean I don't like it,” he said.

Anna pouted. “Fine, be that way,” she said, cutting another slice.
“See if I ever bring you pie again.”

* * * * * *

A few days later, Duo still wasn't any closer to guessing anything else about the piece of glass. Actually, it wasn't so much a few days later as it was nearing the end of one week, and it bothered him a lot.

Heero worked three days a week for about three hours each. While he was at work, Duo would hang out and people watch at the campus' open courtyard, or spend time at the library, wandering among the stacks of old books. There was a section on the fifth floor for the mathematics books, and that was where most of Duo's library time went, if not to the stacks at the south end of the seventh floor, where the history books were.

He'd probably spend more time outside if it wasn't for the cold weather. In fact, most of the kids he'd seen while people-watching weren't really lingering outside, unless they were handing out flyers and pamphlets or talking to each other, huddled inside their coats. Otherwise they were walking briskly to classes or to lunch.

When it was warmer, Heero had told Duo, people would usually study outside, sprawled on the grass in bare feet reading books, throwing frisbees or having classes outside. Some just sat out there and enjoyed the sunshine. That was usually around May, and then September. Naturally, he said, everyone usually went home for the summer.

“Do you go anywhere?” Duo had asked. Heero had shrugged, and then mentioned a road trip he'd taken by himself one year, but that had been all.

“It's peaceful here when everyone's gone home,” he'd said. “Different, you know, but peaceful.”

Maybe, Duo thought, after he solved the puzzle, he'd come back to visit Heero around summertime and see what this town was like. He didn't think college towns would usually have an off season like tourist areas, but he'd never really been in one for long.

“Yo,” a deep male voice from behind him said. Duo looked over his shoulder, and saw one of Heero's friends from a physics seminar yesterday.

“Oh, hey, um...what was it again, Ken?” he asked.

“Kurt.”

“Whoops. Sorry about that,” Duo said. Kurt shrugged it off.
“What're you doing here?” he asked. “Heero just leave you to fend for yourself while he's at work?”

Duo shook his head, shutting the book in his hands. “Nah. I come here a lot. It'd be a pain in the ass for him if I followed him everywhere, anyway.”

Kurt nodded in agreement. “He doesn't seem like the guy who'd take someone tagging along pretty well, I gotta say,” he said, rubbing his knuckles against his goatee. “That is, if anyone would get the balls to try and annoy him.”

Duo snorted, putting his book back on the shelf and pulling out another one. “Yeah, you wouldn't want to piss him off like that. You'd have to be pretty damn brave,” he said, thinking of Relena. There weren't many girls with her gumption or, he'd thought in those days, her obsessiveness. Then again, he hadn't seen many girls like Relena, especially not since he'd come here.

“It's odd, you know,” Kurt said. “Heero's not even all that big—shit, he only reaches my chin—but there's this /thing/ about him that says, 'don't fuck with me.' I guess it's the way he walks. Come to think of it, you kinda have it too. Like you've had some sort of training, or whatever. Most of us kinda slouch, but not Heero.”

Raising an eyebrow, Duo said, “I thought we were all taught to have good posture to begin with.”

“Yeah, but you're gonna slouch anyway, either because you think it looks cool, or because of the heavy backpacks you carry in school, right? I know a lot of tall girls slouched because they didn't want to look taller than their boyfriends.” At Duo's unwavering stare, Kurt sighed. “Dude, Heero doesn't slouch. He doesn't walk like a normal college student. Hell, he doesn't walk like your average guy.”

Even as Duo was chewing his lip in impatience, Kurt went on. “I mean, my friend Shaun's dad was in the army. He always walked straighter than everyone else. You and Heero are the same way. Shoulders thrown back, the whole nine yards. So, uh...were you two in military school or something over in the colonies?” he asked.

Duo was quiet for a few moments. “I guess you could say that,” he replied. He hadn't any idea exactly how much Heero told Kurt and the others about his role in the war, but it had to be little to none. While the Gundams weren't exactly viewed as terrorists to people on Earth, it wasn't something wise to broadcast out in the open due to the heavy controversy.

He saw Kurt's eyes widen in understand. “No wonder he wanted that job at the archives! That makes a ton of sense.”

“What does?”

“Didn't Heero ever tell you what his job was?” Kurt asked.

Duo shook his head. “He said he worked at the archives, and that was it. I guess it's just collecting and going through documents for the school here, right?”

“Nah,” Kurt said. “Not the school history. He's working for a prof whose history class he took last year. The guy's writing a book on the war, and Heero's his research assistant.”

“...oh,” was all Duo could say. That job had to be /interesting/, he thought. “No, he never told me about that.”

Kurt unzipped his coat, fanning the air. “Whoo, hot in here,” he muttered. “Yeah, he was pretty excited to get the job.”

“Guess I'll have to ask him about that tonight.”

“You do that,” Kurt said. “Oh, shit. Gotta go, I promised I'd meet my girlfriend for some coffee. I'll see ya around, man.” He grasped Duo's elbow briefly before giving a little wave and leaving.

Well, Duo thought, looks like Heero still stood out a little. He made a mental note to ask him about the archiving job later, and then went back to the book he was reading.

* * * * * *

“I ran into Kurt today at the library,” Duo said, once he'd gotten into the car.

“Uh-huh,” Heero said, pulling his car keys out of his pocket. He'd seen Kurt in class on Tuesday and introduced him to Duo. Whether or not they'd hit it off he didn't know. Duo hadn't been his usual gregarious self then. Come to think of it, Duo had been pretty quiet and brooding since he'd arrived here, Heero thought.

“You never really told me what you did in those archives,” Duo went on, buckling his seat belt. “I thought you were just gathering stuff on the school's history or something like that.”

As he started up the car, Heero replied, “You never asked, Duo.” That, and he hadn't thought Duo would have been particularly interested, anyway. He'd always seemed the type to try and move on. Duo shifted uneasily beside him in the passenger seat.

“Kurt told me what kind of work you did when I saw him today,” he said. “About the war and all.”

“I'm only gathering information and organizing it for my professor.” Heero glanced behind his seat before pulling out of his parking space. “News reports, articles, essays, that sort of thing. He said I seemed right for the job.”

“Dude,” Duo said, “why?”

“Why what?”

After a few minutes of Duo hemming and hawing, he finally said, “You've been here in this town trying to be the average joe for at least four years. I didn't think you'd be there trying to remember what happened in the war. Lord knows, if I were you, I'd want to have as little to do with the war as I possibly could.” He paused, and Heero could feel Duo's eyes on him.

“If you're doing research on the war, don't you think that's kinda rubbing it in a bit?” Duo finally asked. “Seems like it'll fester if you keep picking at the scab.”

Heero turned onto the street where his apartment building was. “Strange,” he said. “I thought understanding the war /was/ dealing with it. Like figuring out what kind of ointment to put on a wound.”

Duo snorted, his head hitting the passenger seat with a soft thump as he leaned back. “Is that what you call it?” he said, and Heero couldn't tell whether or not the question was meant to be rhetorical.

Before he could respond, Duo continued, “I mean, you know, I figured you to be the type to go do the next thing, all cut and dry; it's how we were supposed to deal, right? And here you are, not only going back into that, but it's all probably from an Earth-based perspective, isn't it?” He made a disgusted noise. “Jesus. I'd almost thought you got off on pain that time I saw you set your own goddamn leg, Heero, but this could pretty much prove it.”

“I fail to see how gathering information and organizing it could cause physical pain, Duo,” Heero said dryly.

“Shut /up/. You know what I'm talking about,” Duo growled.

Heero narrowed his eyes. “No, I don't think I know,” he said, pulling into the parking lot. What the others were currently doing, he didn't know too much about, but last he'd heard Wufei was in Preventers, working closely with people who'd fought /against/ them in the war, and Heero couldn't see how, for some reason, while Duo hadn't complained about Wufei at all, /he/ was the one coming under fire.

Simply archiving information on the war couldn't be that much of an insult in Duo's eyes, could it? No, Heero thought, as he parked the car, it couldn't be. He hadn't thought about it that way. It wasn't that he was apathetic about it—quite the opposite, in fact. But this was something he didn't want repeated again, and in order to at least try to see it didn't happen, one had to learn about it in all perspectives and angles. Whether or not he agreed with what he learned was one thing, the fact that he now knew was another.

“The hell you do,” Duo muttered. “I don't understand how you could go do something like that without wanting to strangle someone. How can you?”

Heero turned off the car's engine, pulling the keys out of the ignition in one sharp motion. “Because it's part of our past, whether we like it or not. I don't see why that bothers you so much, and to be honest, I don't think this is even about me at all.” Without waiting for Duo's response, Heero got out of the driver's seat and left him inside.

He was too tired today for this argument to go on any longer. Duo would be pissed, because he was being ignored, but fortunately, Heero couldn't really find it in himself to give a damn right at that moment.

* * * * * *

The next two days were awkward for both of them. Even though Duo decided to stay home, there wasn't any way he could keep to the bedroom the entire time without needing to eat, wash or go take a piss, even. Not that he wouldn't have wanted it that way.

He'd almost thought about just going back that night after Heero left him in the car. It'd been tempting to say, “Fine, I didn't want to play your stupid puzzle game anyway. See ya,” and catch the next shuttle headed towards the L2 cluster. But then he'd be back to where he started, and the trip here would have been a waste. Besides, it was just an argument. The whole thing would probably blow over by tomorrow. At least Duo hoped so.

While he was out in the kitchen making himself lunch, Duo spotted the book he'd seen on his first day here out on the counter again. As he finished assembling his sandwich, he picked up the book and took it with him to the table, and opened it up to the first page.

It wasn't a class textbook, as Duo had thought in the first place. That had been dumb of him. Of course the One Year War and the following events were too recent to have lectures about here. He had no idea what Heero was doing with it, once he'd found out it wasn't for school, but now figured it was for work. Still, Duo didn't know why he'd need it for sorting information, especially since he'd spotted more books on the subject lying around the apartment.

“To know the material better, probably,” he muttered to himself through a mouthful of food, and began to read. He remembered Father Maxwell saying something about not wanting to repeat history, and figured if he started now, he could be finished by tomorrow if he kept at it. And then he'd start on the next book, and so on until he'd read them all.

Either he'd see why Heero was so intent on this sort of masochistic pastime, or he'd have more artillery to prove him wrong by the time he was done.

Duo grimaced as he read the title of the first chapter, “Hatred of Peace: The Assassination of Marshall Noventa.” This was going to take a while. Hopefully he wouldn't wind up throwing the book out the window in disgust. He didn't want to shell out any cash to buy Heero a replacement copy, because by reading that chapter title alone, the book wasn't worth the money at all.

* * * * * *

On Tuesday night, Heero came home and found Duo sprawled on the couch dead asleep, with one of his history books open and facedown on his chest.

“Huh,” he muttered to himself, shrugging off his coat. So that's what Duo had been up to since the argument; reading about the war to see for himself. He noticed two stacks of books on the coffee table and realized Duo meant to read everything he had on the war. It sounded strange, after his vehement protests over Heero doing just that, that Duo would go and do the same thing. There was always morbid curiosity, though, Heero thought, and Duo had proven susceptible to that at one time or another.

Hanging his coat up, Heero went over to the couch and stood over Duo for a while, simply watching him sleep. One hand was on Duo's chest, over the spine of the book he'd been reading, while the other dangled limply over the edge of a cushion. He'd grown a lot over the years, Heero thought; during the war they'd been smaller than some girls in the high schools they'd done undercover work in, and now Duo's stockinged feet were propped up on the arm of the couch.

He spotted a thin line of drool slowly making its way down Duo's mouth to his jaw, and quietly pulled out a tissue from the box sitting on the coffee table to wipe it off. But as Heero crouched down, tissue in hand, Duo stirred and then opened his eyes.

“What the-?” Duo's head jerked up. “What're you doing over here?”

“This is where I live,” Heero said. “And you were drooling in your sleep.”

“Huh? Oh.” Duo wiped his mouth off with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. “What?” he asked, seeing Heero's glare.

Heero held up the tissue. “I was about to take care of that.”

“Whoops. It's fine,” Duo said. As Heero made a disgusted noise, he asked, “What now?”

“That's /dirty/.” Heero sighed, wadding the tissue up. “Anyway, what were you doing before I got back? Besides napping, that is.” He gazed meaningfully at the book still on Duo's chest.

“...Oh. Yeah.” Duo glanced at the book. “Well, after that little fight we had, I decided to see why you wanted to read about the war. I thought, 'well, he's gotta be getting something out of it besides money' so I found one of your books on the counter and started reading. I wanted to read all the books you had to see what you were so crazy about, but I'm only about halfway.”

“And?”

Duo gave him a baleful look. “Heero Yuy, you are a fucking masochist.”

Heero rolled his eyes, settling into a more comfortable position on his heels. He had a feeling he was going to need it. “Duo-”

“Seriously. How can you read this about yourself? Even at halfway what all these Earth writers are saying about you—about us—even with some of the Eve Wars is a big steaming pile of horseshit. Y'know, even if we were their enemy at one point, they didn't know a goddamned thing about us or who we were. Fuck. If it's not infuriatingly off target and stupid, it's almost hilarious.” He stopped to take a breath. “I mean, y'know, bad enough with the whole 'wasn't blowing up Deathscythe the best thing ever from the colonies,' look at what they did to you with the Marshall Noventa assassination. /Damn./”

“If it makes you feel any better,” Heero said, “while most people on Earth don't know the truth, the Noventa family does.”

Duo frowned. “How'd you manage to do that without blowing your cover? That's like a suicide mission.”

“Yeah, it sort of was.” Heero looked down at his hands. When Duo didn't say anything, he continued, “I went to Sylvia Noventa first, told her I was the one who killed her grandfather and the circumstances behind it.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, Heero,” Duo snorted, but he ignored him. “After that, I handed her a gun and asked her to shoot me,” he continued.

Duo laughed humorlessly. “She didn't,” he said.

“No, she didn't. She started to cry and called me a coward, though. So I went to Marshall Noventa's wife next, and then another, and another, until they all knew.”

He heard Duo sitting further up on the couch. “That was either really brave or really idiotic. It's probably both. We needed you, after all,” he said.

“I know.” Heero picked at a small hangnail on his finger. “But I screwed up, and that was the only way I thought I could make things right again. Whatever they say about the assassination is, well, I don't care about that. What's important is the Noventas know the truth.” He ripped the hangnail off, covering his finger with a tissue when it started to bleed.

“Takes care of that little mess for /you/, then.” Duo set the book on the coffee table. “So am I the only one who knows about you asking the Noventas, 'please kill me'?”

Heero shook his head. “Trowa knows.”

Duo made a bemused noise. “Figures. Seems like the last person to go off telling secrets or something like that, that guy,” he said. “If it were me, I'd have tried to stop you, but then again, the rest of us didn't know you were still alive after blowing up your own Gundam.”

Feeling Duo's eyes on him, Heero replied, “Being in a coma for a month usually keeps you from letting others know you're not dead.” He looked up at Duo. “The war is still part of me, anyway. It's true it was finished a while ago, but it's a fundamental part of who I am now.”

“Okay, but the same could be said for almost any guy who wound up participating,” Duo said. He picked up the book. “What's reading this shite got to do with that? These people think the Gundams were some super malevolent power that turned good later. Heck, they probably didn't know the pilots were always us. The way this guy wrote it,” he pointed to the author's name written on the cover, “he'd never think the guy who killed the Alliance doves and the one who ended the Eve Wars were one and the same.”

Heero raised his eyebrows, surprised. “I never thought about it that way.”

“Exactly. Because /you/ know better. /I/ know better. The others know better. /They/ don't. Anything this guy writes about the Gundams is nothing but speculation and media circuses. I'll say it again: horseshit. There should be a warning on this book saying, 'read with the strongest booze you can find,' 'cause it's the only way any of it makes sense.” Duo set the book down on the pile with a thump.

Peering over at the stacked books on the coffee table, Heero asked, “Which is the half you've read?”

Duo slid the nearest stack over. Reading the titles written on the spines, Heero nodded in understanding. “Mmmmm.”

“What? What?”

Heero gestured toward the other stack with both hands. “You might want to read the other half. It's about what the war was like on Earth. Some of it is propaganda, I'll warn you, but it really helps you understand things.”

Duo snorted. “All about understanding the war, isn't it? Even if it hurts? Are you learning anything from this at all?”

Heero nodded. “I guess it's the only way to make up for the people who were affected. Killed, injured, had their lives changed, that sort of thing. Sort of like what I did with the Noventas. And if I understand the war better, I'll probably understand myself better and see how to go from there.” At that, Duo exhaled loudly, not in an exasperated manner.

“I think I get it, sorta,” he said, after a minute or two. “Like your way of making up for what you did, even if it's not much, huh?”

“Mmm.”

“In that case,” Duo said, reaching into his pocket, “I think I might have figured out another thing or two about this piece of glass you gave me.”

* * * * * *

This time, Duo felt extremely smug, and with good reason. He'd gotten a more concrete idea about one feature and a hunch about another, and wound up getting them both.

The reason the glass was curved had him stumped for a while, but it'd slowly grown on him as he was reading the books about the war, and had thought about what Kurt had told him in the library. Something about how he could tell Heero and Duo had probably had some sort of military background, but /what/ exactly, he couldn't tell. While he was thinking about that, he'd rubbed the glass with his fingers like a worry stone, and then it'd clicked when he'd run his thumb along one of the curved edges.

The piece of glass had once been part of something, but what that something was, Duo didn't know, and would most likely never find out. The same with Heero and his college friends; while there was something about him that set him apart from the rest of the students at his school, nobody would ever really be able to figure out what role it was outside military school or maybe even participation in the war itself. Considering how tightly they'd kept their covers, he doubted anybody really knew who they were.

After figuring /that/ out, the reason why one side was smooth followed quickly. The smooth side curved inward, with the frosted outside showing. People like Kurt only saw the outside, and even if they were peering through, whatever they saw was unclear. For Duo and the other pilots, that would never be the case. Aside from any of them possibly getting amnesia, they couldn't unlearn what they knew about each other. That, and while seeing things from the shiny side wasn't exactly crystal clear, the view was much less obscured than looking from out. Sort of like an exclusive inside joke.

He'd nearly burst out laughing at the dumbfounded look on Heero's face when he'd finished telling him that part. But, as Duo had told him, “You kept saying the war was a part of you, so after drumming that in, I /had/ to come up with it sooner or later.”

“Does that mean you won't be reading the other half of the books, then?” Heero had then asked.

He'd shrugged, and then said, “I dunno. I guess I can understand it a /bit/. Some of me thinks you're still crazy for this. At least you're not trying to punish yourself.”

At least, Duo thought, Heero was acting and /doing/ things like the others. He wasn't, and while he still felt happy for figuring it all out, there was a small part of him that felt worse for not doing the same.

On the other hand, he realized while watching the TV, at least he wasn't so bad off as other people their age.

“Holy shit, I can't believe someone would do that,” he muttered.

Heero looked up from his physics textbook. “What?”

Duo pointed at the screen, where a pretty girl in a camisole and pajama bottoms was holding a soggy package, complaining loudly about how it stank.

“That girl says she loves ice cream. So her boyfriend decided to send her some. In the /mail/. You know, to show that he loves her and all that.”

Right on cue, the girl shrieked, “Oh my God, Maggie, it's so /gross/!”

Heero quietly chuckled. “Well-meaning, but not that bright.”

“Fuck yeah,” Duo said. “Oh, God. No. No, /don't/ try to stick the ice cream into the freezer. That's not edible anymore. You can't save it. Don't—oh, man, you're just as dumb as your boyfriend. Rob's gonna come down and kick your sorry ass for that.” He groaned, watching the girl shove the soggy, sticky boxes into the freezer. “You /idiot/.”

He felt Heero pat him on the arm. “I don't think she can hear you,” he said.

“It was worth a shot,” Duo grumbled. “I can't believe these people /exist/. Just you wait, later on they'll show her throwing up or on the toilet with diarrhea from food poisoning. Serves her right, too. Who the hell eats ice cream when it's been melted for God knows how long?”

Heero patted him on the arm again. “Mmmm. What time is it?”

Without saying anything, Duo raised his other arm, turning his wrist so the face of his watch was toward Heero. “A little after eleven,” he said.

“I'll have to kick you off the couch soon,” Heero said. “Need to get up early tomorrow. I'll shower first, though.”

“That's cool, I understand.” Duo reached over for the remote control, and then paused. “You know, why don't you take the bed? I've been here for more than a week, so you should have it back.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Heero shake his head. “No, you should have the bed.”

“Heero, I don't know when I'm gonna leave your place. It's not fair to you to not sleep on your own bed for a long time.” Duo switched the TV off. “Seriously, if you don't want me to find a motel, let me sleep on the couch. It's the least I can do for you letting me crash here.”

“You're almost too big for sleeping on the couch, Duo.”

“And you're not?”

“I /fit/. There's a little bit of space. More than you can say.”

“Goddammit, Heero. You're sleeping in your own bed tonight, okay?” Duo sighed irritably. “The couch might be cramped, but it's soft. I couldn't say that for some of the places I've slept in before.”

Heero said nothing, thinking hard for a long time. Just as Duo was getting nervous, he said, “Let's do this; both of us sleep in the bed. That way, we both get what we want.”

“What the /hell/?”

“It's either that, or I sleep on the couch,” Heero said, getting up.

Duo growled in frustration, grabbing his head. “Fine,” he said. “We both sleep in the bed tonight. But one of us sleeps on top of the sheets and the other one underneath.”

Heero shrugged, pulling his sweater over his head. “I'll sleep on top. That's no problem,” he said, smirking when Duo growled again.

How, Duo thought, did he ever get himself into these situations?

* * * * * *

“I don't think that was such a good idea, both of us sleeping in the same bed.” Duo said the next morning. He still sounded a little groggy despite sleeping like a rock, if last night had been any indication.

Heero grunted noncommitally in reply. He was busy with preparing coffee. After Duo's snoring, he'd barely gotten any sleep.

“Hate to say this, buddy, but sleeping with someone who farts in bed gets me a bit skeeved out.”

“Duo, everybody farts in bed. The gas has to come out somehow. By the way, you need to learn how to share the blankets,” Heero said, getting out two mugs from the cupboard.

That shut Duo up for a while. And then, “...so that's why I woke up and you were all over me,” he said.

Feeling his face getting warm, Heero managed a short nod, and then realized his back was to Duo. “Uh...yeah. You were the warmest thing on the bed. What else was I supposed to do?” There'd been that, he thought, and the bed wasn't really meant to hold two people. It probably /could/ hold two people, but rather two girls than two guys.

The laughter from behind him was surprising. “You, cold? Compared to me, you're a furnace, man,” Duo said, shuffling that morning's newspaper. “Oh, hell no.”

Looking over his shoulder, Heero saw Duo grimacing at one of the sections. “What?”

As he poked at the bottom half of the paper, Duo said, “It's supposed to snow later on in the week.” He clucked his tongue in dismay and set the paper down. “What am I gonna do?”

“Are you afraid of getting sick?” Heero asked. He heard the sound of coffee trickling into the coffee pot on his left.

Duo leaned back in his chair, pushing his bangs back from his forehead. “Wouldn't want you having to deal with me having a cold or something. You think my snoring's bad? Hilde and I sleep in different bedrooms and I kept her up with the coughing last time.”

The coffee maker beeped, and Heero removed the pot and started to fill the mugs he'd taken out. “I've got an extra hat you can borrow. It'll keep the heat in.”

“Thanks.”

Once both mugs were filled, Heero took them over to the table and sat down. “How's Hilde doing?” he asked, watching Duo take his mug.

“She's great,” Duo said, raising his coffee to his lips and taking a long drink. “Had to work long hours at her job for a while, but that won't be for long. She's getting married and all. I don't think they've set an /exact/ wedding date yet, but oh...sometime next fall, probably.”

He raised an eyebrow when Heero remained silent, and then continued, shuffling the newspaper in front of him. “Met the guy a few times, did the once-over to make sure he wasn't an asshole, the whole nine yards. You know, standing in for Hilde's old man. She was a little pissed off at me about that.” He laughed, but to Heero, it sounded forced, and there wasn't any spark of humor or joy in his eyes; instead, they'd turned a faded grayish blue.

“So how is he?” Heero asked, never taking his gaze off Duo as he shuffled the paper around more.

As Duo pulled open the Earth/Colonies section in front of him, he said, “Name's Bill, does construction work when he's not in grad school. I thought he'd be the pretentious snotty kind—'cause that's what came up while Hilde was talking about him—but yeah, after seeing how he treated her and hanging out with him in the local bar for a night or two, he's a good guy.”

He reached around the paper for the coffee mug, feeling around blindly until Heero took his hand and brought it against the handle. Duo grunted a thanks and the mug disappeared behind the newspaper.

They had about nine minutes before they needed to leave, Heero thought, looking at the clock. Well, /he/ had nine minutes. He didn't know whether or not Duo wanted to follow him today, or, given how cold his hands and feet were last night, whether he /should/.

“Are you going to stay here today?” he asked.

“Hmm,” Duo said, still hidden behind the newspaper. “I /could/ go and finish up reading those Earth view books on the war. On the other hand, I'm getting cabin fever. Decisions, decisions...”

“You've got—” Heero looked at the clock once more, “eight minutes.”

“Okay, then.” Duo closed the newspaper with a decisive snap. “I guess I'm shadowing you again today. The books'll still be here when we get home.”

* * * * * *

Later that night, while they were reading on the sofa, it occurred to Duo that while he'd solved a lot—all, really—of the aspects of the sea glass and how they related to Heero and his reasons for skipping out on the guys, he still hadn't gotten the entire thing yet. It was one of those unspoken things—obviously, Heero hadn't told him outright that he'd gotten it, and Duo didn't think it'd be right if he stood up, said, “I'm done here,” and gone off to pack and catch the next shuttle heading for the L2 cluster.

Honestly, though, what was the last thing? Not knowing frustrated him; it felt like looking for a tool he'd misplaced that he was absolutely sure was in this room, and coming up with nothing. Having had countless experiences like that, Duo was pretty sure this last thing was probably under his nose, where he'd somehow forgotten to look in his so-called 'thorough' search.

Duo glanced up from his book at Heero, who was sitting half an arm's length away. Currently he was immersed in whatever he was reading, and busily highlighting passages as he went. Duo dug in his pocket again for the piece of glass, and waited for Heero to finish writing notes on the page's margins.

“Hey,” he said. “I got all of the characteristics of this down, right?”

“Of what?” Heero didn't look up, instead turning the page, putting down the pencil for his highlighter.

Duo chose not to reply, but put the glass between two fingers and waved it in front of Heero's line of sight.

“Oh, I see.” Heero finished running his highlighter through two lines on the page he was on. “Yeah, you've got them.”

Duo made an affirmative noise. “But there's something else left. Like, some sort of hidden Easter egg. Otherwise you'd let me know if I got it, right?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“So can I have one of those obvious whacks upside the head? Please?”

“Duo, you should give yourself more credit.”

His response to that was to waggle the hand in front of Heero up and down. “C'mon, man! You said I got all of them!” In reply, Heero gripped the back of Duo's hand so it stopped moving.

Duo held up his free hand in surrender. “All right, I get it, I get it.” Freeing himself, he put the glass on his arm, fitting it against his wrist like some protective skin. “You want me to figure it out, I'll figure it out. It just means I'll be hanging around here longer, though.”

At that, Heero muttered something under his breath.

“Huh?”
“I said you've got all of them.” He moved the piece of glass up and down Duo's arm with his fingers. “That's all I'm going to tell you, and that's really all you need to know,” he said, tapping the surface for emphasis.

Duo shrugged, taking the glass off his arm. “Whatever.” He yawned, straightening up and stretching his arms over his head. “I'm going to head to the shower and turn in. How long are you going to be up?”

Heero flipped the pages of his textbook until he was at the end of his reading assignment. “There's this, and then a problem set I need to get started on. Maybe an hour or two?”

“Cool.” Duo got up, closing the book he'd been reading. “I'll just go on ahead. Come to bed whenever you want. Try to keep the farting to a minimum this time. Oh, and I'm sleeping on top of the sheets tonight.” He left the couch, ignoring Heero's exasperated snort.

* * * * * *

When Heero finally came to bed, he was surprised to find Duo still awake.

“Took you long enough,” Duo said blearily, moving over to let Heero slide in. “You said one or two hours, and this was two and a half.”

“Problem set took a little longer than I thought it would,” Heero said, drawing the blanket over himself. Hopefully in the morning Duo wouldn't have taken it all and leave him with only the sheets.

Heero felt Duo turn over onto his side. “What's it like, being with the normal kids our age?” he asked. He shifted around, trying to get comfortable, and Heero felt bare skin where Duo's shirt had ridden up his back.

After Heero thought for a long time, he finally said, “It's interesting.”

“Really. What else?”

He tentatively rubbed his knuckles up and down the exposed part of Duo's back. “I don't know. I guess I learn a lot by interacting with them. How much more we know, our experiences compared to theirs, how different they seem once I really get to know a few of them...” Heero drew lazy circles centering around Duo's spine. “Things like that.” It was strange, feeling how smooth Duo's skin was. But the only skin-to-skin contact had been with hands during the war, he thought. Naturally, they'd been rough and calloused, though by now, four to five years later, his hands had become softer as the calluses had gradually disappeared.

“It sounds nice, though,” Duo said, the edges of his voice getting heavy with sleep. “You're in college, you've got something to do, like the others. Makes me jealous.”

“Duo?”
“Eh, well, scratch that. Maybe envious? 'cause 'jealous' has a nastier connotation, don't it?” Duo said, straightening his legs.

Heero turned onto his side as well, his knees coming up against the backs of Duo's. “Why?” he asked, puzzled.

“Think about it. You have somewhere to go, something to do. Or at least something that fulfills you. Quatre's got his old man's company, Trowa's got the circus, Wufei's got Preventers, and Relena...well, damn, Relena's goin' around /saving/ us all by being Vice Foreign Minister. Me...” Duo made a /pffft/ sound. “I don't got much.”

Heero moved the backs of his fingers to rest on Duo's hip. “I thought you were working at a salvage yard.”

“Yeah...” Duo sounded gloomy. “I dunno. For the first two or three years, it was fine. After the war and all, it was all I really wanted. Seemed wonderful compared to piloting a Gundam and all, finally settling down into something normal and not having to worry about mission parameters or whether or not I'd be able to live the next day.” He paused. “Not that I was a pussy about the dyin' thing. If G told me to shoot myself in the head, I'd be pulling the trigger before he finished giving the order, y'know?”

Heero nodded, tapping his fingers in a slow ripple against Duo's side.

“Hey, that tickles,” Duo said.

“Sorry.”

“So, yeah.” Duo pushed his braid back, and it fell with a soft thump between them. “At first I thought it was great. You know, people who got to pick up where they left off before the war started, and people like us who managed to find something to do after the war and lead normal lives again. But...well, I dunno. Starting last year, I just got the idea things were passing me by. Books were beginning to come out about the war, documentaries, movies, you name it.”

“You felt stuck?” Heero asked, pulling the hem of Duo's shirt down over his hips.

There was a pause from Duo, as if he'd taken that phrase and was rolling it around in his head, or tasting it to see if he liked it or not.

“You could say that,” he finally replied. “I...I don't really feel like I'm doing much anymore. Business is getting slow, Hilde's getting hitched and moving out, and the history books aren't helping much either.”

Duo grew quiet again, moving his arm down from behind his head to across his chest. “I'm lost, I think. Not really in that horrible, despairing way like you see in movies or read about in books, and I don't think I'm going to /die/ from this anytime soon. But I'm just...here. Not really doing much. At this point, I'm only drifting.”

Heero reached up and gently touched the inside of Duo's elbow. “So you decided to come here,” he said.

He heard Duo grunt affirmatively. “Seemed like the right thing to do,” he said. “Out of everyone alive here, only the guys know me, and outta that, you're the one who knows me the best. I didn't know what else to do. Figured you'd at least have some insight, if not an answer.”

“You can't expect people to provide answers, though.” Heero could feel Duo's pulse as he pressed down against that part where the elbow creased. He'd have wanted Duo to face him if it wasn't already dark.

“I know.” Duo curled up halfway. “But y'see, I don't know what to do. Don't know where to start, nothing. Not like I'll kill myself or anything stupid like that, but, it's there, and I haven't found anything on my own.”

Saying that, Duo sounded extremely tired and weary. Not like he hadn't slept for days, but Heero had the sense of something that had chipped away at him, little by little, and his resolve, or whatever it was, had slowly drained out of him and would still trickle out if nothing was done to stop it.

He couldn't find the words to say to something like this, and didn't know if there were any. There were always the “It can't be that bad,” or “Everything works out,” but Heero didn't know whether or not that was true, and therefore those phrases would be hollow and useless. So instead, he squeezed Duo's arm reassuringly.

“Go to sleep,” he told him.

It was the best he could do.

* * * * * *

The next morning, Duo woke up and found himself alone in bed. From how the shadows were in the room, he knew at once it wasn't early in the day, but close to noon.

He rolled over to find Heero long gone, the space he'd occupied during the night no longer even warm, though a faint impression of his outline remained. Duo sighed. Even though there wasn't much space with two people in a double bed, Heero's body heat had been welcome. Kept Duo warm in a way the blanket didn't.

There was probably a note on the table outside, but that was okay. It probably was “decided to let you sleep in, food in the fridge, be back at 5-6” or something like that.

That whole sleeping in idea was probably a good thing. He'd been feeling pretty tired lately, though how Heero could tell when they were both sleeping at the same time, Duo didn't have a clue.

Duo tried to unbend his right leg, and frowned when it didn't move. He wiggled it to see what was going on, and found the sheets twisted around his ankle and the knee of his other leg, winding around his hips before they came to a stop at his chest.

Damn, what kind of tossing and turning was he doing last night? It had to have been pretty active if he'd managed to tangle himself up in the sheets this badly. And that meant he'd probably kept Heero awake. This wasn't good—while Heero would probably keep saying he didn't mind, that it was fine, Duo felt differently.

He needed to solve that damned glass puzzle and actually /concentrate/ on it, or he'd never figure it out and he'd be here—stuck and tangled up—for a long time.

Well, the first thing you could do is get out of bed and get dressed, he thought. Do the next thing, as Sister Helen used to say, back when everything hadn't been so complicated.

But for now, doing the next thing would be just fine.

* * * * * *

Given how awful he'd felt this morning, Heero had decided he would skip classes today, give Duo the bed, take the couch and call in sick at work. He wasn't, really, but he hadn't slept well last night, and since finals would be coming soon, it was better to stay healthy before one of the ever circulating viruses came and got him. His immune system was fine—terrific, actually, compared to others—but it didn't seem like a good idea to take any chances.

By the time he'd actually felt good enough to get up and eat something, it was a quarter to two. A trip to his room revealed an empty bed with the blankets and sheets spilling off the area where Duo had slept last night. Going to the kitchen, Heero found a note on the counter saying “Out, probably back for dinner” in Duo's trademark bold handwriting.

Out where? Heero thought. Did he take the car? Not that it mattered, since Duo said he'd be back. Then Heero saw the keys still resting in their usual place on the counter, and realized Duo had probably gone for an afternoon out somewhere other than campus.

He sighed, remembering the conversation in bed they'd had the night before, and how Duo had sounded. Granted, Duo was prone to brooding, and he had his share of troubles like the rest of them, but he'd always found a way out of whatever predicament he'd gotten into, or managed to bounce back from any setback thrown his way.

In short, Duo hadn't sounded like the Duo he'd always known that night, and while Heero had had some small intuition that Duo probably wasn't okay, it was still surprising to hear that sadness in his voice.

At any rate, Duo would be back in a few hours. Heero wanted to do something, anything, to help him out, but he didn't know what he could do, and moreover, whether Duo would accept whatever it was he had to offer. It wasn't pity; pity felt different, and usually when Heero felt pity, the subject was at a safe enough distance. And Duo deserved better. They both knew that.

The one small comfort Heero could take was Duo telling him he wouldn't kill himself over this. That was a liability he didn't have to worry about, and for that, he was grateful.

* * * * * *

As soon as Duo had walked out of the apartment building, he'd taken out a coin and flipped it. Heads, he went east, and tails, he went west. The coin came up tails, so he headed in that direction. When he wanted to go back, he figured all he had to do was turn around and walk back the way he came.

After walking straight for about twenty minutes, Duo reached a small park. At the far end, there was a playground with an empty swingset, slide and monkey bars nearby the tennis courts, all covered with at least two inches of snow. He found a bench near the jogging path and sat down, taking the piece of glass out of his pocket.

It occurred to Duo that he hadn't asked Heero when and where he'd found this. While that probably wouldn't help him get any closer, it would, at least, be good to know. This town was currently inland—no beaches to be found here, he thought. Heero had probably gone pretty far to get this, though Duo hadn't bothered to ask Heero where he'd gone, when he bothered to go out of town.

Somehow, Heero didn't seem like the kind of guy to pick up random things lying on the beach, whether they were shells or other sorts of debris. Well, maybe he would, but then he'd probably look at it and then toss it aside after he was done. Duo was different—while he didn't pick up every single shell, sand dollar or piece of driftwood he saw, the few times he'd been on a beach, he had at least five different items in his pockets by the time he was ready to go back.

For Heero to actually find something worth picking up and /keeping/ meant whatever he'd picked up was special; it probably appeared very interesting in a way that set it apart from everything else.

If Duo figured out the final clue to this, he'd probably know why Heero picked it up in the first place. But what was it? He'd asked Heero for hints again, and simply gotten his own question parroted back in answer form.

Knowing what all the features stood for should have been enough, Duo thought. Like knowing eyes were for seeing, a mouth was for speaking and tasting, ears for hearing, and so on and so forth. Put them together and you made a face. That is, if they were in the arrangement that could be recognized that way.

Wait, Duo thought. Maybe it was like that—if you knew where to put the eyes, ears, and mouth, you'd get something recognizable: a face. So when Heero was saying he had all the features of this glass guessed right, it was only that, but Duo still needed to put it all together. It was like a radio that needed to be assembled, except the manual with the illustration of what the radio was supposed to look like was hidden.

It seemed a little better when he thought about it that way. Still challenging, of course, but in a way that was easier to handle and solve.

“Okay, let's put this puzzle together,” Duo muttered, and set himself to work.

* * * * * *

While Duo had returned for dinner like he said he would, in the days afterward, Heero noticed him muttering to himself every now and then, as if he was carrying on some sort of internal argument. Otherwise, he would grunt absentmindedly to Heero if spoken to directly.

He'd stopped following Heero to school, but instead of holing himself up, Duo was usually off in some other part of town—a park or a cafe, sometimes both—and wouldn't be back until late at night, when it was closing time.

Today, Duo had broken his self-nattering just as Heero was leaving for school.

“Hey, dude. Let me ask you a question before you go?” he'd asked.

“Sure. What is it?”

“When and where'd you get that piece of glass?” Duo had started to rub his hands together, blowing on his fingertips every few seconds, before Heero took both of his hands in between his own.

“A long time ago, before I came here,” he'd replied. “Three years before, maybe. I traveled for a year before decided to apply for college. I don't remember exactly where I was when I found that, but it was the first time I'd been on a beach just to be there, and that piece of glass had washed up near the rock I was sitting on.”

Duo had nodded slowly, absorbing the answer. “I see. Thanks.” He'd gone back off to bed before Heero could ask him why he'd wanted to know.

And this afternoon, Heero had come back, and once again Duo was gone, but now it was past closing time for the nearby cafe and he still hadn't returned. He'd thought about calling Duo and asking where he was, but when he'd dialed the number for Duo's cell, it'd turned out Duo had left it in the bedroom.

The most likely outcome of all this was if Heero went to bed right now, he'd wake up and find Duo in the morning. This was a relatively safe town, for one thing, and even if Duo got in trouble, he'd be able to get out of it without a scratch. Even though it was snowing outside, it wasn't hard enough to warrant anything dangerous, and Duo wouldn't freeze to death on purpose.

So go to bed already, he thought. Was there really any point in waiting for Duo if he wasn't in that much danger to begin with? There certainly wasn't, and he had no idea when Duo would be home, anyway. Tomorrow was Saturday, but he had a meeting with his lab group in the morning, since Al had plans in the afternoon, and they needed him there for the project they were currently working on. It'd be better if he'd stopped waiting for Duo, just showered already and went to sleep. Otherwise he'd be dead tired and near useless for the meeting.

He looked at the clock, and found that not only was it way past closing time for that cafe Duo had been going to, if he didn't go to bed right now, he'd only get five hours of rest instead of five hours and forty-five minutes.

But Heero was still worried, just because. Worried for the sake of being worried, as Anna often said when she was talking about her life. What if something /had/ happened to Duo?

All right, then. He'd wait a half hour—no, fifteen more minutes, and if Duo didn't show up, he'd go right to bed, and skip the shower. He could always take one in the morning, anyway.

In the meantime, that'd be enough time to make some tea with the hot thermos and the herbal teabags one of his neighbors had given him when he'd moved in.

He was filling up the mug with water from the electrical thermos when the door unlocked and then flew wide open as Duo rushed in, stopped a few inches from Heero to bend down and catch his breath, and finally straightened to his full height, holding up the piece of glass.

“Dude,” Duo said, “I think I've got it.”

* * * * * *

After he'd sat down and gotten a cup of tea from Heero, Duo finally told him what he /thought/ was the right answer.

“I didn't really get it at first, but then I realized it was a matter of putting what I'd guessed together to see what I got,” he said, wrapping his hands around the warm porcelain. “It took a lot more thinking about you and what I already had, but I think this is it.”

He put the piece of glass on the table between them. “The problem was the focus on the /parts/, and not considering the glass itself as a whole. So I looked at it for what it was, no looking at the slick side, or why it was curvy or anything. None of that shit.”

Heero sat down across from him, his mug making a clunk on the table. “So?”

“So,” Duo said, “it started off as a broken piece of glass. Something that was part of something else, shiny on both sides, with sharp edges. I mean, anyone who saw it would go, 'oh, it's broken off something'. It's a fragment, a part that's missing the rest of whatever it used to be.”

A silent nod from Heero prompted him to continue. “But after spending some time in the water, it changes. Its edges get smoothed out, it gets frosted, and it probably won't cut you if you hold it. After some time, maybe you can tell it /was/ part of something, but it's really its own thing now. The same, I guess, happened with you.”

Heero made an inquisitive noise, and Duo said, “Well, I'm not exactly sure. But I wouldn't think I was that far off the mark even if I don't get it completely right. We all had somewhere to go after the war, places to be part of. Except you, probably. I don't know, because you left right around that time without sayin' a word.”

Duo began spinning the piece of glass around on the table with his finger. “But you probably wandered around a bit until you came here, and then over time, you changed—not so much that I don't recognize you anymore, but enough to say you're not the same guy from when we first met. You didn't really have anywhere to go after the war, so you wound up starting somewhere else and taking it from there, and getting your own thing to belong to.”

“Mmm-hmm,” was all he got from Heero.

“I'm guessing that's why you went away and didn't join up Preventers or tried to see if you could do something with one of us. You had to do it by yourself, or you /wanted/ to.”

He stopped the glass' spinning movements. “And that's it. What's the verdict, Yuy?”

Heero put down his mug, staring thoughtfully at the piece of glass without saying a word. Duo could see the wheels and gears turning as Heero picked it up from the middle of the table, holding it up to his eyes and turning it this way and that.

He nodded, put the glass back on the table and sat back, arms crossed.

“Congratulations,” he said.

* * * * * *

They'd gone to bed as soon as they'd finished their tea. Duo had said something about booking a flight to the L2 cluster hopefully on Sunday, as soon as possible.

“I'm right on the outside of the cluster, but it's the end that's farthest from Earth. Just my goddamned luck, huh?” Duo laughed.

“Mmm-hmm.” Heero was trying to sleep. The sooner he could, the sooner he'd get his rest. He could hear Duo burrowing into the sheets behind him.

“Don't hog the blankets,” he muttered. Duo snorted in reply.

“Eh, give it a rest, Yuy. I'll be out of your hair in a few days.”

That was true, Heero thought glumly. It was for the best, because Duo needed to find his own answers after he'd come here and gotten what he'd wanted, but while he was glad Duo solved the puzzle he'd put out, there was a sad feeling threaded through he didn't like too much.
When Duo had come here, it'd been late October, and now here they were, a few days from the start of December and finals. How did time go so quickly? He'd gotten used to Duo being around, either following him around campus or being in the apartment to welcome him back.

What was going to happen now? They'd have to find some way to keep in touch, lest either one fade until they disappeared completely. It hadn't been until Duo showed up that Heero realized how great it was to be with him.

Now, even though Duo was sleeping a mere few inches away, to Heero, it was as if the bed was already empty.

“Don't think like that,” he muttered under his breath. The soonest Duo could fly out was Sunday, and even then, flight bookings could be full for that. He had a day left with him here, which was better than Duo leaving the next morning right away.

One more day was better than nothing, but one more week was better than a day, Heero thought grudgingly. It didn't help that Duo seemed more than happy to leave after he'd gotten the puzzle right. Still, he'd come to find Heero out of his own free will, after Heero had left them behind years ago. That meant something, or he hoped it did.

Duo began to snore contentedly, sound asleep. Heero sighed, and decided it was time for him to do the same if he wanted to wake up early tomorrow.

He turned over, closing his eyes, still feeling discontent as he dropped off.

* * * * * *

“Aw, dammit!” Duo said, dismayed. He glared at the computer screen in front of him; all shuttle flights for Sunday had been booked solid. The soonest wouldn't be until Tuesday morning, on the red-eye schedule.

He growled, pushing his bangs back in frustration. First off, Duo was not a morning person—he could do it, but he really didn't want to. Nights were far better for him. Second, that meant he needed to get ahold of a taxi, and he didn't know whether or not they'd be running at three in the morning, or whether he could reserve one at that time. He wasn't about to abuse Heero's hospitality by dragging him out of bed on a day he had to attend class.

Tuesday afternoon would have to do; he could call the taxi company to get him before Heero left for school, and then take it from there. Duo sighed, drumming his fingers on the table. That was okay, he guessed. Granted, he was hoping to get out of here soon and not wear out his welcome; December was coming up, and Hilde was probably worried. What had originally been planned as a week-long visit had turned into nearly a month.

Getting back home was the first step. What next, Duo had no idea. Well, he did. He needed to figure out what he wanted. Heero was right; he couldn't expect people to provide answers for him—some of those he needed to find for himself. Still, just from his time here, Duo had a pretty good idea of where to start and what to do about it.

He'd have to wait until the lease on the apartment was up and Hilde got married, and see about doing some traveling. Nothing too huge, but maybe going around L2, and then maybe onto Earth later if he had the money. He'd never really seen Earth in peacetime, and it was something he'd like to do while he had the chance. It'd probably help get his head together, the frequent change of scenery. Wander around a bit, and then see what he came up with. It didn't seem like a bad idea.

Duo smiled to himself, clicking on the hypertext link for the Tuesday afternoon slot. He wasn't that much different from Heero now, with the glass analogy. Heero had wound up drifting for a while until he'd come and put down roots here. Now Duo was about to go do the same—wander around and figure things out, and get his edges smoothed over along the way.

Yes, Duo thought, a vacation was in order. He didn't know exactly when, but he was having one. And once Heero was free, he could go ahead and join Duo for a little bit. Just the two of them, like the good old days. Well, not exactly—it'd be moving forward, in a situation without the war.

But he'd definitely like to see Heero again after this, even if he couldn't join Duo on his travels. And hopefully when they met up again, he'd be better for what had happened in between.

* * * * * *

When Duo said he'd try to find a taxi to take him to the spaceport the day after tomorrow, the first word Heero said was, “No.”

“Oh, come on. You've got /classes/,” Duo said. “Trust me, it'll be better this way—you can go to class, I'll make sure to leave the spare key with the guy next door and get out of your way.”

“No,” Heero said again. “I can drive you. It's no problem.”

“Heero-”

“I want to,” Heero said. “I don't know when I'll see you again, all right? It could be a long time, and I don't feel comfortable leaving the apartment without saying goodbye. It's not a problem, seriously,” he continued, seeing Duo open his mouth to protest. “I don't work Tuesdays, and I've got friends who can tell me what I missed.”

Duo's shoulders slumped as he sat down on the couch. “Look, I don't wanna be more of a bother to you than I've probably been.” He picked up the remote control, bouncing it up and down. “I mean, I just dropped in on you, and I thought I'd be out in a week, tops. And now it's practically December, so that means I've been crashing here for nearly a month.”

He pushed his bangs out of his eyes and looked at Heero. “Aren't you tired of me? I'm only someone from the old days, anyway. You've started up and gotten a new life here, with other people. I mean, we'll probably see each other again sooner or later now, but...”

“Duo, I'd never get sick of you.” Heero spoke quietly, but his voice was firm enough to stop his ranting. He watched as Duo played with the remote control for a while. “If I was,” he said, reaching over and taking it away, “I would have let you know, and you wouldn't be here.”

“Oh.” Duo blinked, and then chuckled humorlessly, shaking his head. “Shoulda figured that out, huh? You were always one for getting your point across when you needed to.”

Heero put down the remote control and then shifted on the couch to face Duo. “Why do you want to leave so badly? Are you that worried about bothering me? Because...you're not. I like having you here.” He laughed, seeing Duo's dumbfounded expression.

“I...” Duo growled, burying his head in his hands. “Man, it's just that you're doing stuff. You're out there interacting, accomplishing, and now that I've got some idea of things, I wanna do that too. I'm rarin' to go here, man, to start getting my shit together and actually do something that makes me happy. Find my own answers.”

“Don't push it,” Heero said. “That's the worst you can do. Trying to force the whole thing's going to frustrate you even more than you are now. You don't need that.”

Duo's voice was muffled, and he had that tired feeling in it again. “I'm sick of feeling stuck.”

Rubbing Duo's shoulder, Heero said, “You won't be stuck much longer.”

“Really,” Duo said.

“Yes,” Heero said, “really. Now, will you let me take you to the spaceport on Tuesday or not?”

Duo nodded from his huddled position. “Least I can do. I'm glad you're not sick of me,” he muttered. “You know,” he said, straightening up and leaning back onto the sofa, “we should really get together on L2 and do a little tour around the cluster. What do you say? Just you and me, nobody else. Whenever you've got time or somethin'.”

“That's a great idea. How long?”

Duo shrugged, rotating his neck, making satisfied grunts at the cracking sounds. “Eh, I was thinking two weeks or up to a month. Not set in stone, and then who knows after that? I might go back to Earth and travel around, see what the whole damn thing looks like now that I'm not going on missions. Tell you what,” he said, grabbing a piece of scrap paper on the coffee table. “I'll write down my contact info. Dunno about the address and phone number, but I can guarantee you can reach me via email and I'll get it, and if I don't, I'm dead.”

“I don't think I could join you right away, then.” Heero closed his eyes, counting how much time there was until the end of the year before opening them again. “The winter term here ends in May. Would you still be around?”

Duo looked up at him with a grin as he scrawled down his phone number. “Hell yeah. The lease isn't up until June, and that's when Hilde's leaving anyway to go live with Bill before they get married. If you want, you're more than welcome to drop by then. It'd be great timing, and we could go off and have a ball going here and there.”

“Sure,” Heero said. He waited for Duo to finish writing his email address before taking the sheet of paper and tearing it in half. “Here, I'll write down mine too. We have to keep in touch, right?”

Duo nodded emphatically, handing over the pen. “Hells yeah, we do,” he said.

* * * * * *

When Duo got up Tuesday morning, he spotted a white envelope that had been slid underneath the door when he went to get the newspaper. When he turned it over, he saw his name written in a girl's bubbly handwriting on the front.

“Hey, check this out,” he said, waving the envelope so Heero could see it from the kitchen. “I think someone sent me a love letter.”

Without bothering to look up, Heero nodded. “Anna,” he said. “But she's got a boyfriend. I think it's that apple pie recipe you asked about. I told her you were leaving the last time I saw her, so she probably wanted to give it to you.”

“Huh.” Duo tore open the envelope, and sure enough, there was the recipe, along with a note in Anna's handwriting telling him to come back and visit sometime. “That's real sweet of her. Tell her thanks, will you?”

“If I tell you her apartment number, you can thank her yourself,” Heero said dryly.

Duo snorted, folding up the note and putting it back in the envelope. “I don't suppose she's home, is she?”

“Classes. Anyway, let's eat, otherwise you'll miss the shuttle.” Heero set down the sandwiches he'd been making on the table, taking the newspaper from Duo. Looking at the clock on the kitchen wall, Duo realized he'd better eat that sandwich soon. He needed to be at the spaceport two hours before his flight took off, and it took an hour to get there.

Holding the sandwich in one hand, Duo took a huge bite, giving Heero a thumbs up as he chewed, signaling his approval. He hadn't eaten much last night. For some reason or another his appetite wasn't there then, but now he couldn't help but scarf down the entire thing. Amazing how not eating much for a few hours beforehand made anything taste like the best food he ever had.

Last night he'd packed everything back into his duffle bag, and then called Hilde to tell her he'd be moving out the same time she did. At first she was surprised—after all, Duo's workplace was nearby, and then Duo told her that he'd be quitting next spring.

Hilde was silent for a long time; for a second, Duo thought she was gathering enough air to scream at him, but then he heard her exhale and say, “And after that?”

“...Travel, I guess. See things I probably won't get to see if I don't go now.”

Duo had heard clinking in the background; Hilde was doing the dishes. “I worry about you, you know,” she said. Her voice was nonchalant, but Duo knew better.

“Yeah. But I gotta do this for me, babe. Trust me, okay?”

She hadn't answered, and for a while there was the sound of running water.

“Babe?”

“Just make sure you show up for the wedding,” Hilde mock-warned. “And at least settle down somewhere for a bit so I can pin you with an official invite.”

It'd gone well, Duo thought. And he wasn't being ironic; it really had gone well, given he and Hilde had gotten into enough fights about his funk. Maybe she was happy because he was doing something. That was good, because well, he was happy too, or at least feeling better than he had before.

He finished off the sandwich, wiping the crumbs off his mouth with the paper napkin by his plate, washing down the last bite with some water. “Ready when you are,” he said to Heero, getting up and taking the plate and glass to the sink.

“You didn't forget anything, right?” Heero asked.

Duo shook his head. “Not that I know of,” he said, mentally going through what he'd brought with him; clothes, toothbrush, soap, wallet, the cell phone was in his right pocket, and some money in the left, along with the piece of glass...

“Wait,” he said, taking it out of his pocket. “This is yours.” He held the glass out to Heero. “I've had it on me so long I almost forgot.”

Heero shook his head. “Keep it,” he said.

“Naw, I can't.” Duo beckoned to Heero. “C'mon, man. It's yours.”

“Keep it, Duo.” Heero stepped forward, wrapping Duo's fingers around the piece of glass with his own.

Duo opened his mouth, wanting to decline again, but he couldn't find any other reason not to. “Damn, I got nothin'. All right, then. Thank you.”

“I've got something for you, though.” Before Duo knew it, Heero pulled him closer, moving his hand down to grasp Duo's sleeve, and leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek.

He blinked, waiting for Heero to pull back before touching his face gingerly with his fingertips. “What was that for?” he asked.

A nonchalant shrug from Heero. “I had to let you know before you left. This was the easiest way.”

Duo felt blood rushing into his face. “So, you...”

“Yeah. Since you came here, I guess. I'm not too sure about it myself, but...” Heero looked away briefly. “It's better than not knowing at all.”

Duo smiled. “Does that mean you won't be backing out of the travel plans?” he asked. That got a half-smile from Heero.

“We'll keep in touch,” he said. “I'll definitely come as soon as the school year's out.”

“I'll be expecting you,” Duo replied, taking Heero's other hand in his own. “Can't bail out on this one, hear?”

“I won't.”

“Good,” Duo said. “Then that's that for now.”

Heero nodded. “Let's go.”

As he went to the table and took his duffle bag, Duo felt a slight pang at leaving this place. Sure, he'd see Heero again soon, but six months was still a long way to go.

May couldn't come fast enough. By then, Duo hoped to have his own answers.


End

May-September 2005