Chapter 6 – The Things We Do

I know that no matter what the outcome is of this war that I’m living in now, this hell of a mess of conflicting politics and vulgar egos and old crybabies with six ton fancy mechanical toys to smash whomever and whatever and whenever they please, Heero won’t ever be considered good enough by society. There will be no angelic choirs to proclaim his good deeds, no one in white robes to greet him with smiles and exalting words, even if he were to walk out onto a battlefield and simply tell them to stop and instantaneously fill the world with an everlasting peace. Nuh-uh. Not a lucky break like that. Until the end of his days, until the last stubborn drop of blood and sweat drains from his body, until every last iota of sanity is wholly singed from the insanity of a war like this one, he will always have two major forces frowning upon him. The first, of course, is those who will hate him no matter what. There will always be those people, blaming him for deaths of friends and loved ones, sneering on whatever decent name he can scrounge up for himself instead of just some dirty teenage terrorist, and I guess I can’t do much about it. But the second is a thousand times worse.

There is hardly an ounce in those haunting, almost deadly blue eyes that honestly cares what ignorant, oblivious snarl-toothed people say about him, but there is a bitter critic inside his stoic, unaffected outward show that he knows isn’t ignorant. Heero is more than intelligent enough to know a difference between killing in defense, and slaughtering innocents in the process. And he’s also dumb enough to keep on killing his own self, his own mind, over it. …I know it’s wrong to kill… I know how wrong it is to take life from another person. … I can feel the painful throb of guilt deeply ingrained in my chest, so deep it’ll probably never leave me, but I also understand how to live with it and try to live a better life for it. I can feel the way the bleeding-heart guilt radiates and oozes out of Heero’s skin when he thinks I’m asleep across the room beneath my disheveled bed covers. Hell, who couldn’t, really? I mean, if you only know him, then you can feel the rifts in his practically flawless stoicism like red-hot shockwaves of an earthquake. I don’t think I’ve ever been as hurt as that night when he sat down on the edge of his bed as noiselessly as Death itself, and let out a single choked sob that could have mistaken as an irrelevant sigh to anybody else. Well, maybe I have hurt like that before,

[[…Come on, Du-chan…]]

but this was a whole new stainless steel butcher knife through my heart.

I can just see it, like a horrific record scratching back and forth on the fuzzy television screen of my imagination, a nightmare on loop: My arm reaches out to comfort him, to just …just let him know I don’t want him to be in pain anymore… And then, my palm is on his shoulder, and his tensed, bronzed skin is icy cold from sitting up working all night. His face whirls around with the expression of a limping, bleeding frightened deer, with the most stunning blue eyes ever to haunt a single soul, and then the soldier clicks back into place and there’s now a bloody stump sadly replacing my left arm.

= this is the end
beautiful friend =

Pain and apology would flash like holy diamond light in his eyes, but I would be beaten to a pulp nonetheless. Emotionally, verbally, physically—take your sorry pick from his delightful grab bag of assorted violence. Because he can’t afford to let any one in. Never. This is a war. The grinding wheels of the unforgiving, foaming-red war machine will chew up anyone senseless enough to look back for even a split second. Heero knows this. I can see in his pretty blue eyes, the horror of knowing that fact like a thousand-year-old priest lives and breathes the Bible.

He would refuse to look back for anyone if it meant restoring some fucking futile peace to this senseless fucking planet that probably deserves a good apocalyptic slap in the face!

= this is the end
my only friend, the end =

And especially not for such a dirty worthless thief with mortally bad luck like me.

= lost in a roman
wilderness of pain =

On the outside, a bitter smile surfaces on my mouth and I roll over with a dull, acidic throb from the bullet holes pocked up and down my calves. Bullets from my own gun, with a trigger snapped by my own comrade, the walking ghost of my dreams. The killer in my dreams.

= no safety or surprise
the end =

Staring like some passive corpse into the depths my pitch-black room, I feel the claws of depression and those sad-eyed nightmares creep around my legs from underneath my bed. Fucking pathetic revistiation of my childhood, having to cringe beneath the covers, the bloodstained covers, and hide from a pair of glowing eyes in my bone-filled closet. A pair of fiercesome, absolutely pained blue eyes.

= I’ll never look
into your eyes again =

That’s when the bolts unlock with a deadly metallic ping and Heero finally comes in.

= and all the children
are insane =

Ghosts and killers are, by design, very quiet in nature. Feet don’t exist for them; they glide through layers and layers of darkness without a sound because that is what they are meant to do. Slip in between the insignificant cracks and disappear on any malicious whim. Efficient. There is nothing unconfident about the way a true killer goes about his blasphemous deeds with any of his various weapons; to hesitate would be a blasphemy upon itself. And naturally, because the profession of a soldier takes a page from the aforementioned killer, that is how my comrade just has to enter the room and scare the living hell out of me. I lift silently from bed I’m lying on as I hear the last of the muted rusty squeals of the door shutting that have become the last signs of the imminent apocalypse for me and sit up to face my end quietly. Like a man.

Yeah. Right.

I don’t want to die.

The darkness drapes around the room in layers, like dark sashes of fabric flowing constantly about the air, saturating it like a thick invisible poison. Normally, my eyes could have picked him out from the indiscriminate darkness within a few seconds. But, you have to keep in mind, normally I’m not stressed out of my mind with five bloody bullet holes in my legs and a beautiful killer seemingly ready to rip me from limb to limb at the slightest show of emotion. If you can call screaming my lungs out at him and declaring him a ‘fucking liar’ a slight show of emotion. My heart is doing a thousand miles an hour, like a crazed ecstasy junkie spasming beneath my ribs with the intent to claw its way out and flop about the floor in a bloody, tangled mess of apology and anger and almost painful infatuation. A direct reflection of the glory that is Duo Maxwell right about now I think as my eyes sharply focus on the nothingness. There is one last rusty complaint of the door before I fall back into that dangerous silence Heero is so famous for. [the killing one]

Again, the memories and various muted sensations of my infatuation with the Japanese pilot seem to take hold of my brain and mold it into a bowl of watery, optimistic jelly. Something about the way his blue eyes had flashed with anger before still only makes the little snare drum pound harder in my ribs while he is undoubtedly getting closer; like some stupid teenager waiting for the sweet blade of a killer to quench his or her strange sexual frustration with a friendly slash and a kinky death. But then again, I’m reminded. I call myself Death; I can’t ever call myself completely homegrown sane anymore.

Of course Death is in love with the Killer! What ironic angst… so depressing… unaffirming… It’ll be a big fucking blockbuster.

Of course I recognize the small, discriminatory metallic clink slowly approaching me that I’ve heard a billions times before. Of course I know it’s my gun; he shot me with it, didn’t he? Suddenly, my eyes seem to adjust to the blackness laced only by the distant, dull glow of the slight crescent moon that sifts in through the small basement window as if hovering at the end of a mile long tunnel. And I see my killer moving like a surreal phantom through those layers of darkness with the Colt clenched in his right hand like a lethal version of the Ten Commandments being brought down from Mount Sinai. Moving with a purpose, soldier firmly in control. Something cold drops into the pit of my belly at that instant.

It must be my infaution. Is replaced by fear.

Heero’s angular yet still round and young face is gorgeous and feral in the near lack of lighting. Why wouldn’t it be? It always is. I can’t physically make out his eyes with my own gaze, but there is no doubt in my mind that he’s staring forcefully at me, like some mecha to be reduced to individual protons or stubborn computer system begging to be thrown into submission, or the colorful wires ripped out and disposed of in favor of a few newer, more updated, more secure ones. Why wouldn’t he be? He always is. The slim brunette, not much more than a defined shadow dusted with dim dark-gray light, pauses in his ghostly quiet walk toward my sleeping place and turns silently toward the bedside table beside it. As if it has more to contribute to the conversation or something. My Colt glints for a second as he lays it down.

** Ch-chink. **

When he speaks, I’m shocked at how wonderful and unique his voice is and how I was unaware of missing it so much until that moment.

"You still have one left."

I don’t even have to say "What?" before his eyes turn to me at their exotic and dangerous angle and he continues in a gravelly-sure tone.

"There’s still one bullet left. I have an extra magazine for you if you would like it." The dark blue eyes that have obsessed me enough to somewhat overlook the downsides of falling in love with a violence-prone soldier turn away again and I look down to the beside table where my gun lies gleaming. I hear some more clinks and muted rattles as he produces the promised magazine from the pocket of his jeans. Wait—He’s wearing his jeans?

{I suppose. His other clothes probably aren’t washed yet. They’ve still got bits of you on them, Duo.}

He doesn’t bother looking up to my face when he asks me again, that asshole. That beautiful, intelligent, violent asshole. His eyes maintain their statue-like rapport with the grainy brick walls while long fingers twitch half-impatiently around the smooth metal gun insert. It amazes me as I sit there like some hospital-ridden maiden, silent and reserved in my fear of my abusive husband, fussing over my black eye, and refusing to speak with him. Grace him, even, with words he’ll probably only find insignificant and insufficient to his standards anyway.

"Do you want it?" The textbook tone of his voice seems to remember nothing that happened only a night or two before, discard it as easily as a bad poker card. I don’t remember exactly either, but I had been pocked full of holes and unconscious at the moment. It infuriates me, and the thundering snare drum heart barrels on into an intense militant drum roll to accommodate the mood. Anger and frustration spiced on top.

But I won’t make the same mistake twice.

"Do you want it?" Heero repeats.

I stare up into his general direction for a moment, more fascinated with the darkness of my own room than the flat, robotic expressional expert offering me more bullets. No thanks, the ones from my legs will suffice, thank you, I think smarmily and expect poor Heero to hear inside my head and know to back off. Despite the fact that pain still shoots up from my wounds whenever I move significantly, I still lift the red-stained quilt up and roll over onto my side so I can face the dirt wall there.

And when I’m not faced with the image of Heero Yuy’s face, my nerves seem to scurry back tentatively and bark at him from underneath their protective blankie like a nervy child mocking his closet monsters. "Take the bowl up to Quatre, please. Tell him I enjoyed it and I appreciate the thought," I reply in an equally emotionally devoid tone. "Thank you."

There is another silent bomb between us that lasts and lasts and lasts for an eternal 2.5 seconds, like a firecracker exploding and making no sound, but leaving unmistakable heat laden in the air and choking each other with tension. Heero seems not to be overly affected by this statement in either direction, positively or negatively, but continues on anyway. Stubborn blue-eyed machine.

"I’m not supposed to be down here. I don’t think Quatre would be pleased with discovering I’ve been down here…" A pause in his voice. And just when I think he can get even less human, there’s a glitch in the system and two little words pop out of his mouth that I know a machine could never say with such quiet, almost shy hesitation. "…With you."

But no… he wouldn’t mean that. Don’t let him get to you with his contrived act he’s leeched off from watching you in the reflection of his laptop, Duo, you know it’s for his own good anyway. He won’t die this way.

So… I continue on, my joker’s mask traded for something a little more abrasive. A Heero idiom.

"Quatre isn’t pleased in the first place with you, I would suspect," I say matter-of-factly while trying to hold back a snarl waiting, clawing, pining in the pit of my throat. "And you’ve never been one to exactly change yourself for the feelings of others, so by all means, don’t start now… I’m finished with the soup; you can take it now, thank you."

Heero hesitates again, as if presented with a chess piece that had snappily come to life and chewed him out for a poor play, complete with wooden and painted face contorting angrily. Or perhaps there really is no emotion left in him and it’s just the computer computing frantically for a humane response. If it’s the latter, it comes up with a poor attempt to make better with me.

"You could do it yourself, you know."

And instantly, my eyebrows furrow like a dog and I’m slowly returning to the room with the slamming doors and dead orphan ashes, the blue light and the frenzy that eventually wanes off into black in my memory. I find no reason that Heero shouldn’t be apologizing with every atom of his being right now and definitely no reason to preach at me like some fucking detached schoolteacher while I lie in bed with five large crimson-doused bullet holes currently decorating my body.

"No thank you," I manage to grit back in reasonable time so my anger doesn’t lash out once again. God, my teeth ache from how hard I’m biting down, probably imagining a familiar Asian face ground into a hamburger patty and ready to be torn apart and devoured angrily. "You can take it… Heero. It’s the least you can do for me now, while I’m still recovering."

My voice is grated like gravelly human pulp through a cheese grater at that last part. If tone could kill, there would be thousands of salad forks plunged firmly between the beautiful Japanese pilot’s eyes. It becomes quiet, save for the distant, ignored *tink* of the magazine being set down. I sit and grit my teeth broodingly while lying on my side for a few more moments, and slowly realize that Heero’s computer has either idled desperately, or…

He’s facing me.

My eyes fly completely open and the little snare drummer boy in my chest accidentally impales himself with his drumstick and my heart subsequently skips a beat. Or maybe a few. But anyway, all I know at that moment is that Heero has somehow moved without making so much as a shoe-scuff against the grungy floor and circled around my bed to crouch beside my head, dark blue eyes gleaming at me ambiguously and deliciously beneath slightly furrowed brows. My shocked senses intercept the image of a pale blur moving directly toward me—his hand—and all alarms begin to blare in my body, terror cemented in place by lacing hot memories of being shot like a slab of meat is tenderized. I jerk backwards violently so that the empty bowl rattles behind me on the table.

"Hey!"

And as the fingers wrap tightly around the edge of the quilt, at first, I’m completely confused, but as soon as they begin to pull back, the understanding clicks dreadfully in my brain. All hell breaks loose in my mind and it squeals like a schoolgirl flaunting a hipbone-length skirt being pinched. However, the ice to the fiery chaos in my mind is the haunting way those Prussian eyes never waver in their gravestone intensity. And it scares me.

"Hey—HEY!"

I screech in an anger-gilded terror as Heero peels the quilt back.

The intricate splatter masterpieces of dried blood seeping through the fabric twist and distort as it yields just as easily as if it were five-inch thick steel to the incomparable Heero Yuy.

No!

Little fissures of pain and heat lace upward from each puncture and flesh wound on my legs just as quickly as the pinwheel of fear begins to spin furiously in my brain and distort my vision to a new version of the rage I’d displayed before. A more dangerous one. Because this time, I’m scared, and I’m armed, and Heero isn’t. And that’s the fucking truth as the dim, dark world turns another corrupted shade darker into an insane blood red and my arm whips backwards, fingers outstretched and gripping around cold Colt metal. As soon as I turn again, my hands snapping that safety back harder than God could smite the Morning Star given half the chance, there is cold air sweeping across my injured body.

"Don’t fucking touch me. You have no right," I hiss raggedly as the lightweight barrel so deadly in its mechanical simplicity—hammer, trigger, ammunition, curt little ‘bang’, and viola: solution found—brushes against the Japanese pilot’s forehead in a tempting little cove between his eyes. Those beautiful things that have come to instill such a enraptured fear in me that it rivals my fear of hurting anyone, of hurting him, any more.

Those two Prussian stone basin eyes never even consider the munition of death that has found a cozy nest just above his brains with all intent to pin those aforementioned brains to the wall behind him if commanded so by my own finger. To enact an ageless right of an eye for an eye, bullet for bullet, permanently fractured security for a last breath.

][Here we are, once again…][

Half-dramatically, half-sloppily, I have lifted the Colt needlessly far out in front of me, arm straightened and shoulder high against my neck, ready to fire some not so harmless clicks off in rapid succession until the chambers cough dry over and over again and until I’ve finally just given into my Shinigami curse and given my damned object of affection a merciful end.

Would I really do it? Would I really not do it? Do I want to know? Don’t I really want to know? Thunder in my brain hisses this seductive, breathy tune of, ‘Of course,’ while a fiercely upset black hole somewhere in my chest thrashes against it, screaming as loud as it can to drown out my brain. And finally, there is a vulgar, earthy smell of death that lingers in my mouth somewhere between the two. And none seem to be able to win me over fully. As my finger twitches—

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"I did this?"

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From some far off somewhere beyond the fractured, manic-depressive bullfight cage filled with different conflicting forces that is my mind, each foaming at the mouth with anxiety, tension, suspense like demons waiting for fresh human meat to fall dead, I hear the faint sound of Heero’s voice. No louder than a single raindrop against the tin roof of a long dead household. But it’s like a little electric knife singing through every nerve in my brain, like a drugged bit thrust into the frothing mouth of an enraged, ensnared stallion, like a faint wake up call five floors below causing the long-slumbering voice of reason to jolt violently awake in the attic of my head. There is one last spark of fury that whirls in my head before it abruptly dies and winks out noiselessly. Like a TV contentedly signing off.

][…that’s all and good night, ladies and gentlemen…][

That’s when I blink twice and realize what Heero is doing.

And I have to blink at least twice, trust me.

All reservations of my half-dressed state aside, Heero has pulled back the quilt to unveil the bullet wounds of his doing and now seems entranced by them, like watching green blips of information flash across a screen continually in a small dark room. The shadows laid thick across the current small dark room only serve to enhance the already pained face that surfaces where the infatuating and infuriating human stone wall had stood before and where it had crumbled away like unusable fairy dust. Heero painfully, as if a razor were cutting paper-thin slits down the soles of his feet, seems to settle back an inch and stare down at my legs with muddled comprehension. A babyish look that doesn’t believe, doesn’t wanna. Doesn’t want to accept my war-pocked souvenirs of my ‘best’ friend. But they’re there, disinfected and forever betraying like the image a smoking gunshell in my mind.

There is still some faint, watery red coloring around the actual wounds themselves and a few half-forgotten streaks of pale crimson where the blood had dried before being ritually cleaned off. Mostly, my legs returned to their perpetual bony and sun-starved state. The entire length of my legs ache like thousand year old arthritis and kneecaps of ragged sawdust. The little lines of tension that freeze violently up whenever those blue eyes find something new to stir me up with burn like matches smoldering beneath my skin.

The first bullet, I’ve concluded was a direct hit, since it managed to lodge itself a fraction above my left thighbone and a precarious inch from my easily-shattered left kneecap. That is, if you must be prompted, is where I temporarily became a human drumstick, complete with tweezers stabbed into my leg after the bullet. Most of the damage is centered on my left side: probably the haphazard side I’d landed on after being dropped. There are two slivered graze wounds along my right calf that are still caked a tender, bloody red and are roughly half the diameter of a no. 2 pencil. Another bullet ripped through the flesh just above my right ankle, but luckily escaping damage to my hamstring.

1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Bingo, bingo, bingo, I think sourly in a misty corner of my mind. Every last lashing comment, every last bitter demon that dictates my mouth from the safe corners of my resentment, everything wrong I try to find with him comes rushing back like a manipulative schoolmarm, trying to turn me. Turn me against Heero. It almost succeeds; the red, sinister film flickering on the corner of my vision begins to creep back in. (( But you can’t, can you? )) because at that moment, the molasses-thick death tension in the air drops dead and the universe decides it’s time to stop this raging. Heero puts his hand on my right leg, an iron of foreign heat, and it sits there so profoundly that even my street-bred American temper stills for a moment.

"I did this?" he says again, more to himself than anything.

His soft voice is getting hard to hear above my stunned silence.

Riddle me this and riddle me that. Take away the soldier and what do you get? …I honestly don’t know any more.

And when I see his eyebrows hitch together in the slightest, most revolutionizing look of anguish and arch upward, then I can’t honestly even remember my name. I’m breathing, but there is no air reaching the knot in my chest.

Holy Mary full of grace… It hurts to see him like that. I can’t stand any more of those tragic, disappointed looks; not in Solo’s green eyes, jaded and washed in half-hearted streetlamp lights, not Heero’s dark blue eyes doused with a raw, innocent hurt that cuts to the quick lightning fast. It makes me feel like a muddled pane of glass, lodged in a rotted, distant wall, unable to even make him acknowledge I’m here… that I can never help, and that I will never be able to help. A muddled window blocking out the few sunrays that come his way.

I feel so fucking guilty. And his hand is so warm and… unjudgemental? …on my leg just above my knee, thumb touching the edge of my wound ever so slightly.

And the gun barrel still as lethal as ever feels so cold, brittle, empty and potent all at the same time against Heero’s skull. All but ready to obligate him with an instantaneous death. One more lonely ** ch-chink **, I realize, with eyes widening slowly on the outside, that another Solo would have passed through this world. My hand jerks it away quicker than if it were poison and the gun rests in my lap, two hands still grasped in uncertainty around it. A flurry of little metallic clinks falling upon my ears only confirms that I have been successfully reduced to a bag of nerves and started shaking like a fool.

Still, his eyes never waver, running in a constant loop across every pocked and faintly stained plane of my legs in a saturated run of guilt until he finally seems to fill his cavernous guilt cup. Heero flickers a low and lifeless glance in my direction but tears it away before I barely have time to realize he’s even moved. His hand is gone. The slim brunette settles noiselessly onto his haunches and half way back into the indiscriminate darkness before finally speaking again. And the very essence of his voice is pain, so I have to flinch despite my unrelenting frustration and fear/anger with him.

"I didn’t realize you were hurt that badly," he says softly. "I didn’t know…"

An eyebrow sinks on my face just slightly when I hear the programmed mechanical tone again glazing it over. Damn it, I thought I was so close…I run the pad of my finger along the dark metal of my gun, quaking like an aspen leaf in a winter gale. It’s my last rope that binds me to sanity in this quiet storm of my brain but also slowly draws me closer to madness as well. My Colt. Like a hangman’s noose rope momentarily suspending me from the snapping war dogs below, but slowly choking the life from me. And Heero would stand beside my swinging corpse with those sad eyes. I can’t believe it…

"Heero…"

In the darkness, in the misty corner of my peripheral vision, I see Heero slightly flinch at the mewling sound of my sleep-ragged voice and his head shift upward in the vague direction of my face, shyly, stoically. Cloaked in shadow. To be honest, I was almost as surprised to realize I’d spoken out loud. Afraid. So I stumble across the fault of my own unruly tongue and lower my head to hopefully erase the fact that I’d said anything at all. But the damage has been done, of course; I’ve said it nonetheless.

I don’t have to look to see, to feel, the crushing cold weight of disappointment that radiates off Heero when I fall silent and seemingly ignore him clawing at my face in guilt. God …how his own self-destructive guilt clings to air so intensely and drips right off onto my skin, I’ll never understand. It itches and slithers down my spine, like the malicious breath of the reaper laughing on the back of my neck, the reaper with malcontent and wickedness in his sense of humor, the reaper who takes the people in my life away just for shits and giggles. He’s always there, I know he has to be.

Otherwise, none of it would have happened. If not for me, Solo would have stayed alive. Not sacrificing his life for a snot-nosed brat orphan. Not rotting. If not for me, Heero wouldn’t have those damned sad, guilty eyes.

While the quiet chokes in around me, I feel my hands begin to quiver and ache from holding the cold, metallic gun so intensely and I blink lifelessly down at it.

If not for me, Heero wouldn’t be in danger of being shot. Wouldn’t be in danger of becoming a rag doll sprawled across the floor, a cherry-colored hole neatly between his eyes. Rotting.

So I slowly move my fingers, trailing tensely along the boxy curves of the weapon, and decisively remove the all-but-empty magazine, letting it fall into my palm. I feel Heero’s eyes burning along my face and down toward the now unloaded weapon.

If not for me…

And I drop it, so it folds into the depths of the red-decorated quilt.

And Heero’s dark blue eyes return to their smoldering on the side of my face.

"Why did you shoot me?" I ask in a sudden, quiet, and emotionally stripped tone that I hadn’t even felt within in me. Spills out from my mouth, the subconscious searing question that just now has gnawed its way out into the light, into the stupid fucking light. There is a stab of lukewarm nervousness in my stomach, as it punctures through and seeming slashes through the last confused butterfly left in my belly. My eyes shift upward of their own accord, digging through the layers of black to find Heero’s face.

Two Prussian eyes uncertainly lock on my face; his lips remain stone tight, pressed together, half like a startled child being drilled for a frightening schoolroom answer, and half like an emotionally void stone. I can’t decide what half frustrates me more without an answer.

"Why did you shoot me?"

Hurt slivers through the color of his eyes in little black sparks and he flinches that way without making a movement. I can practically see the melody line for "Taps" dancing behind them. [1] But no answer.

I feel the last of my taut, threadbare lines of patience connecting my brain together begin to wear thin and pull uncomfortably tight. There is such a pale, blank and cluttered expression on Heero’s face that it begins to turn me into a blood-hungry law CEO, snarling at the back of my employees for a slow job. But… but, it’s not the same, another corner of my mind interjects in fear. He shot me… it’s a little bit different than a late Highland complaint.

The edges of red are returning.

I’ll say it again. "Why did you shoot me, Heero?" I say, feeling enough nerve to drown myself in the beauty of his face while saying those words with such a bold aggravation.

"Who’s Solo?" the Japanese boy asks in response, with traces of nothing in his flat, textbook voice. The hurt lingering like a fog in his pretty blue eyes does nothing to convince me that he is not again reverted to distrusting bastard state, the one who landed the punch that led to the shot heard around the world. Or at least my world.

The Colt twitches lethally in my grip as I flinch at the sound of Solo’s name and the sheer fact that Heero can even listen find the energy to stoop down low enough to listen to me for once, even if I’m screaming at the top of my lungs. All my anger begins to refill in the wrinkles of my brain and slowly come to a blood-red boil. Why doesn’t he listen to me, but yet still listen and infuriate me anyway? Why?! Why do his eyes look so damn sympathetic? He doesn’t know me, he doesn’t understand!

"That’s none of your business," I reply softly, the underlying growl of defense not at all inconspicuous. There is a pang somewhere deep down and twisted up within me, invoking the image of green eyes, and it fuels the fire. Another metallic twitch from the gun. "Why did you shoot me?" There is less courtesy that time around.

The blazing blue eyes never flinch from my face as he stands like a silent, calmed wraith beside my bed, still weak and watery with sympathy and that damned hurt expression. His voice is equally frustrating. That asshole. "Who’s Solo?" he repeats.

"What makes you think you can ask me that!" I snap back, my fists clenching around the textured handle and butt of the gun like a male silverback gorilla snapping tree trunks in half as he only begins to rage. My stomach makes a tight constriction, forcing all the searing hot stress further out into my body, fueling the flames even higher.

Heero’s prussian blue eyes soften a fraction. But 99½ of an emotionless asshole is still an emotionless asshole.

"If you’re not going to answer my question," the soldier says quietly with this unbelievable fucking tone of calm and equally depressed and depressing resignation, "then I should probably go."

And as if I may still have my doubts, the slim brunette shifts in the shadows away from me in a noiseless, ghostly manner that sends as many chills down my spine as hot sparks of anger into my head. He actually begins to walk away. Another sliver of the final patience string begins to wither and splinter off.

Hail Mary, full of grace… Hail Mary, full of grace

My voice raises defiantly in the thick black tension of the room soaking around me and it lashes after the turned shoulder of my infuriating beautiful killer. "Why did you shoot me? Tell me!" I snap. But, swallowed by unrelenting shadow, the chiseled form of my defector still keeps a steady pace, unhindered by my childish snapping. My fingers are ready to burst into bloody shrapnel I’m busting my hands around my Colt so viciously, and my teeth grind like machines.

"Answer me!" I shout after him. "…Baka!"

He pauses – miraculously – and doesn’t instantaneously kill me with the sharp gleaming edge of his deathglare. Instead, he turns and flatly seems to calculate the word I’ve just said like a cold slate computer.

Bastard, Asshole, Killer, Asshole.

Despite the darkness, from his infinitely distant and all-too-close position at the foot of my bed, I see his eyebrows hitch slightly together again as he runs his eyes all along my face. Smoldering, burning, considering, leaving that heartwrenching guilt in every little niche to ferment like poison. His arms hang loose at his sides, as drained and tired as his voice when he finally finds the heart or just the begrudged patience with my flaring tempers to answer.

"I had to." His prussian eyes turn liquid, exhausted but still stone-edged in the dim light. "I wanted you to stay and you wouldn’t listen to me; you kept trying to leave."

"That’s no reason to shoot me!" I snap back in haste and with unambiguous bitterness. "Come on Heero, I’m sick of playing this game. Just fucking tell me!"

Blue eyes have pierced straight through my drained supply of rage and discontented anger and it’s leaking fast. There’s just something so raw and innocent in those killing eyes that have seen rivers of blood and destruction with only a distant blink that are focused solely on me, waiting for my vinegar, snarling reaction, that rips every last abrasive nerve from my brain. Slowly, until my brain becomes frustrated mush and I want it to be good old days when I’d just storm off making some gnashing comments about how crazy he was. Not like now, when we’ve made it a ritual to shoot each other to end each conversation.

Japanese eyes look carefully to me across the sea of black and tension, the same small and sympathetic look a child would receive lying in bed injured, equal and synonymous with the pitiful look of the child itself. There’s a tiny, sad twitch at the corner of his mouth.

It says, ‘I’m sorry Duo, but I don’t think you can understand now,’ and then adds ever so sweetly {infuriating}, ‘Try again later.’

And I don’t want to know that as the fringes of my world and my bullet holes are soaking in blood red.

That red intensifies into this deadly but beautiful tint that swallows my vision up again, until I could swear I’m still staring into the strawberry red gash bleeding down Heero’s face on that now infamous post-mission night. Until I could swear there’s a flash and burn in my face as I remember knuckles slashing across my face. Until I see I see Heero’s shadowy figure again surge forward through the darkness, inevitably headed for the door. That single movement single-handedly pushes me over the edge in rage while a tiny fractured part of me is curled up into a rocking ball in my mind. My eyebrows furrow again, pain lacing upward into my forehead, and I snap my head toward the moving shadow, a Shinigami snarl rumbling out from my mouth.

"Heero!"

Nothing.

"Answer me, Heero!"

He’s still going for the door. Damned beautiful shadow killer.

And… they’re off! It’s the roan 3-year old Futility on the inside; neck and neck with blood bay Wrath. But what’s this? Recklessness is coming up fast on the outside!

From within the crazed red haze I dig my fingers into the boiling pot of anger and pull out an equally crazed solution and fearlessly shift my fingers back into position around the my Colt. I knock off the safety fiercely, making sure to make a loud enough metallic clink to reach the Perfect Soldiers more than capable ears with a very profound sound. My eyes, low and dangerous in my skull, never waver at the Japanese pilot’s back. In a very lethal tone, I lift the barrel toward my ear so the cold black metal burrows into my bushy, bed-gnarled hair and bark at him, "You want me to take that magazine offer up?"

And slowly, an Asian face turns to meet my gaze in the shadows. If didn’t see perfectly in darkness, I would have said there was a flicker of compassion and worry in those stony, dark blue eyes as he witnesses me put the barrel of my own gun to my own skull.

Now he’s listening.

"No, I don’t," Heero says quietly. "Put it down."

I morbidly grin toward him, with more brash nerve than I really feel, and demand, "Then answer me, okay?"

In the darkness, Heero nods just slight enough to be noticed, but not so the strange gleam in his intense expression of stoicism fades an ounce. Stiff lined and at least mildly displeased with this fickle situation, I can see. The morbid, faked smile aches a little wider, a little shallower as the night seconds tick by.

"Tell me," I ask firmly and simultaneously lower the black weapon so it rests, like a killing ice pack, against my leg. "Why did you freak out on me in the first place?"

Heero shifts fluidly to face me dead on, a strained light flittering behind his eyes. If it’s a sign of my imminent death by his hand, or just another spark of guilt coming to life, I’ll never know, because it’s gone again when he opens his mouth. As if I’m an ignorant, conceited teenager, the Japanese pilot narrows his dark blue eyes. "Can’t I want to protect you?" he asks.

"I don’t need you breathing down my neck!" I snap back, ready to withdraw my fangs and find a new fresh section of the Heero steak and dig my teeth into it and rip it to shreds. That bastard, he can’t look at me like that, he can’t treat me like I’m so much less than him when I’ve saved his life more than once, fought by his side as his equal, cried over his pathetic ass when he committed suicide in Siberia…

He has no right.

"I made a decision by myself that I wanted to risk my life to save yours and you turn on me and chew me out for it! What the hell is that for?!" The air clatters infinitely as I slam the butt of my gun against the mattress, my rage flowing through every corner of me like firewater again. My own breath begins to hiss out between my teeth; my chest winds up just as tightly as my brain.

Heero shifts almost uneasily towards the bed. "Duo—"

"No," I cut him off with a sharp flick of my tongue, "I want to know why Quatre and Trowa and Wufei were ten times more bruised and bloodied than I was and you turn on me and act like I just snitched us out to the enemy for freaking pocket change! Why aren’t I good enough?"

Across the tension-laden black, I sense a sharp pang of frustration slowly gaining momentum somewhere down in Heero’s stomach; the running signs gleam darkly in his eyes. But it’s the lack of anger in that frustration, a soft-toothed bite almost, that serves to infuriate *me.*. Heero furrows his eyebrows and adopts blaring slivers of guilt in his miraculously monotone voice.

"You are good enough. I didn’t want you to hurt yourself to try and rescue me, that’s all, Duo."

"Oh, and it wouldn’t hurt me if you had died, Heero?" I retort, my eyes burning into his face.

The brunette Japanese boy seems to glide over my remark without so much as a scraped knee and rolls on, his face growing taut in the shadowy dim light, his tongue wrapped securely around his robotic wave pattern of speech. "It would be stupid for you to sacrifice yourself needlessly, Duo. You don’t need to throw your life away." Every once and a while, I witness the flaw in his slate mantras of noble heroism as his eyes flicker quietly to the gun still held in a uncertainty in my lap. It’s only like dangling meat in front of a dog; it pushes me along on adrenaline and pent-up war frustrations relentlessly.

I clench my fingers until the blood nearly chokes off from the sheer force I’m squeezing with. "I want to help you sometimes, okay? Is that fucking wrong?" I snap at him. At his haunting blue eyes that mock the green ones in my memory just with their ability to drive me to such extreme places in my rocky outcroppings of emotions.

"If you do that, you’re only going to hurt yourself because of me." Heero’s eyes darken one final time before the age-old cracks in the Soldier’s grip begin to surface. "I don’t want that!"

"And you think you won’t get hurt because of me, huh?" I half-shriek back. My Colt quivers as loudly a metallic rainstorm on a windowpane in my hands. "For once in your life Heero Yuy, stop looking at everything like it’s a mission printout and think! Think why I call myself fucking Shinigami! It’s not too hard to figure out!"

Those Prussian eyes never flinch, furrowed in guilt and a smoldering frustration, as the flaming train wreck Maxwell flies straight past the station of tactfulness and sanity. They only glow deeper with guilt.

"I kill everyone I ever love! You want to die, Heero?!"

And that’s when he flinches. Ever so slightly, but enough to be seen. "Duo…"

My teeth grind together as an uncontrollable, feral growl goes through my body and harshly out my mouth to silence him and I shake my head violently. "Do you?!"

The eyes I’ve adored from a distance, the ones that I’ve feared, looked away from when I was caught staring, the eyes that should, by all logical accounts and natural calculations, turn stony and as abrasive as sharpened porcupine quivers and became inhuman as stone, suddenly are as human as anything can ever be for him. There’s apology in his expression; a blatant bloody look of ‘I’m sorry’ far from an infuriating sense of pity. It never needs to reach his mouth. I can tell… he means it. Heero gives me a tiny fraction of an apologetic twitch of the lips and it slowly curves into a sad-looking tiny smile directed at me no less, across the layers of black.

"I’m not afraid of death."

That’s when the shadow of the killer, of the blue-eyed killer, slowly turns like a lukewarm beacon of light in the sea of black after nodding a quiet goodbye and moves toward the door.

He… He… He’s so stupid! I don’t want him to die! I yammer in my brain, as it instantaneously tangles into a throbbing swarm of twisted cables and overlaying emotion nerves flaring with an overload that the Maxwell ship has never before experienced and hell if it was ever prepared for. Little sprites in my brain are ripping little brown tufts of hair out, blowing gaskets as shrapnel through their ears at this situation. A cramped, adoring mess pounding just below my ribs. A mangled, baffled snarl that sears in my head. And on a spasm, on an inborn defense, on the whim of a confused nerve that has been crushed with a mallet, I find my arm whipping up again, finger rattling against the cold metal trigger. The smooth, clean barrel is leveled at Heero’s head like a frightening revelation.

Two prussian eyes turn toward me. "…Duo?" he inquires almost noiselessly, innocently.

I dig my eyebrows together as the pain in my heartstrings come to a sharp, fractured peak. "…B-bakayaro!" I manage to snarl out before there is a system malfunction deep in the confines of my chest and unfamiliar hot salt gathers behind my eyes, saturating my overflowing brain with one more thing. Boys don’t cry… boys don’t ever cry, Duo!

A pang of darkness I’ve come to label as ‘pain’ flickers through his distant, shadow-muddled face as he focuses on the barrel of the gun that has come to turn on him harmlessly. Just the fact that I would raise a gun, even an unloaded one, to him in my raging frustration, after his first goddamn genuine apology, seems to accentuate an unspoken fact. In biting bold black neon letters. That fact has no mental materialization in my brain, but I can feel it clawing like knives at the back of my throat all the miserable way down into my stomach. And it seethes there like a vinegar cocktail gone bad.

Heero’s beautiful eyes quiet and turn a weary, anguished blue-gray in the dark, dim lighting, before he slowly turns his gaze away and slips away in the black.

There is that routine metallic scraping and clank as the door finds itself again shut and alone with a bed-ridden Shinigami.

There is a few numb seconds… then…

** Ch-chink. **

My beloved colt clatters to the floor after I’ve found it appropriate to lunge it at the far wall like a disowned toy of death that I’ve found too boring and thrown a sullen tantrum over. Like a final pathetic happily-ever-after… and I find it all to appropriate at this time for a street-bred American soldier of my ambition to just curl up and slam my nose in between my knees with the grace of a sobbing two-year-old and ignore the screaming pain running up and down my legs in a sick little marathon on loop. The sick circling carousel of my brain nurses my own guilt like a dog lying in an alley licking its beating wounds and it’s official. I feel like shit.

I whimper out to no one in my dark death room, my fingers clutched helplessly at my temples. "…But I am afraid !"