28-Apr-2002
See Part 1 for all disclaimers, warnings, and whatnot
I figured the Preventers would probably have a car on this guy at the very least, but it looked like they had simply dropped him off after his medical check and then left.
I wanted to rage at them, at my friends, for letting Heero down. For letting me down.
Settling in to wait was always the most difficult part of any mission. It was the part I was terrible at, even when I knew there would be a payoff on the other side of the waiting. I always said it was because I was anxious to get the guy, and Heero would always say that this was getting the guy. The different ways our minds worked, I guess.
So I waited and I thought about Heero: about his hands and his non-smile and the way he let me lay with my head in his lap and watch cartoons the day he told me to move in with him. I thought about listening to the water run as he washed his face at night while I lay in the dark on the couch, listening to him check the locks and hang up his clothes and the rustle of his sheets moving over him as he got into bed.
A noise from the fire-escape. I half-crawled, half-slid through the brush to get a better view of the side of the house.
It was Wagner. His lean body moved quickly, with efficient grace, down the fire escape and then dropping noiselessly to the ground. I watched him until he disappeared around the back corner of the building and then I followed.
My heart beat strong and steady and the taste of blood was in my mouth. I had bitten my lip without knowing it but the taste fueled me. I sucked on the split in my lower lip and moved without a sound. Knife in my hand.
It should have scared me that I wanted his blood on me. It should have scared me that it was so easy to fall back into this life of violence, not war now, just killing, like back on L2.
I never wanted to be like this again, but Heero was the only thing that kept me sane and now he--
I stopped, back flat to the alley wall. Looked at the knife in my hand. Shaking. I slid the knife back into my boot.
Heero is not dead, I said to myself. Heero would not want this.
I rounded the corner and it was a dead end. Empty.
It took me a minute to realize where I was standing: Preventers crime scene tape, evidence laser markings, and a stain of dried blood.
I ran a hand though my bangs. Do not freak out, I almost said out loud. Not now, okay. Later, when you're alone, you can throw up or cry or do whatever the hell it is you need to do, but not. Not. Now.
I backtracked, turning from the sunburst of Heero's blood on the concrete, thinking I had missed a turn.
I hadn't. It seemed that Wagner had just disappeared into thin air.
"Fuck." I couldn't stop the word from slipping out and now I had to hold in my anger and I told myself, Okay, okay, change of plans, so later, when you're alone, you can smash things or cut yourself or whatever the hell it is you need to do but you're not done here yet.
I crept back out to the bushes to continue my waiting. Fucking waiting.
I tried to think of Heero, of why I was doing this, but all I could see was his blood and his pale, skinny body and Jesus...
There was a prick on my arm and I used a branch to dig deeper into my flesh, the burn bleeding out the hurt that was trapped in me. Just a little longer.
Wagner came back in an hour, shirt bloodied, shit-eating grin on his face. God, I wanted to kill him right there but I waited. Because something was obviously not right.
He came back from the dead end. There was nowhere else for him to have gone. But there was no one there, nothing there, but he came from there and so had someone else before he killed them.
I looked down at the branch I was still clutching, the gouges on my arm, streaks of raised pink flesh split down the middle with a thin line of blood. No, no, not crazy, I told myself. It's something else. All of this must mean something else.
Even so, I flung the branch away from myself in disgust.
He climbed back up the fire escape, slipped through the window to what I was assuming was his apartment.
I waiting a few more heartbeats and then slid out of the bushes, heading for the alley again. I am not crazy.
A few steps away and a throat was delicately cleared. I spun around and there was Trowa, leaning against a tree with his arms crossed like he was waiting for a slow date.
I closed my eyes, clamping a hand over my still-burning forearm. "Ah, fuck."
"Duo," Trowa said in that maddeningly light way of his.
I sighed loudly and grinned widely and tried to hide the fear and anger I knew were written all over my face. I was slipping.
"Duo," Trowa said again.
Fluent in monosyllabacy from all my time mooning over Heero, I knew what he meant: Cut the bullshit.
"For Christ's sake, Trowa, you guys didn't even have a car on the guy!"
He was silent.
"You couldn't possibly have expected me to sit and home and wait, could you?"
"Obviously not," he replied dryly.
There was a pause, and I fully expected him to ask me to come back to headquarters with him. Instead, he reached out, pried my hand away from my arm and ran his fingers over the fresh scrapes.
Tired, I let him look. He knew the other scars were there; they all did. They just probably thought I had stopped.
"Why?" he asked.
"Because Heero's in the hospital and I don't even know how he got there. Because he should have been with me, he was with me, and I don't know what's going on anymore." I laughed and jerked my arm away.
Trowa nodded towards his car.
"You think I'm crazy," I said as we got in.
"No," he said and he brushed his temple with two long fingers, a small break in the hair that I don't think I'd ever noticed before. I squinted at it in the overhead light just before it turned off when I slammed my door shut, a thick straight scar that cut across the hair at his temple and stood out stark white against his tanned skin.
"Trowa."
"Hm." He sat without turning the car on, staring at some middle distance out the windshield.
"You don't think I'm crazy."
He turned to look at me. "No."
"Heero, he--" Don't ask, was what I was sternly telling myself, but all the promises of broken personal items and being able to scream everything out couldn't have stopped me. "Trowa."
He nodded a little.
"Heero. Do you love him?"
He hesitated. But not like he didn't know the answer. Like he didn't know what to tell me that answer was. "Yes."
I nodded slowly.
"It's not what you think," he said, still looking at me with those almost sleepy eyes.
"What do I think." Trowa opened his mouth to answer and I cut him off, turning to look out the window. "No. Drop it."
I used to pull this thing with Sister Helen where I would absolutely refuse to do something she had asked, and I mean dig my heels in dead weight sort of refuse, and she would wheedle and stroke my hair and clasp my dirty hands in hers and eventually I would cave, because all I really wanted was for her to really need me.
One time she was going into town for supplies and she asked me to come. There was some sick kid and she had been spending all of her time tending to him. Stupid child, I said no, angry at her and she, not having the time to argue with me, sighed and left. I ran out after her when I realized she really had left, but she was too far away and I had been told not to go too far alone.
And Trowa wouldn't pursue it. He let it drop, let that awful "yes" hang in the air between us and didn't make an attempt to set me straight.
No, tell me you love him like a brother! I wanted to say. Tell me what you meant by not what I think, because what I think is so devastating.
But I didn't say it. And he didn't continue.
Trowa's phone chirped in his breast pocket, and he pulled it out. "Quatre?" He listened for a moment, his eyes locking with mine. "He's with me." He listened again and I saw surprise register in his gaze -- it looked out of place on his almost feline features. "That's wonderful. I'll tell him and we'll head there now." And then everything softened and he still didn't look away and the look on his face was almost as odd as the surprise. "Yes. I know." And his one hand raised and pressed over his heart before he hung up the phone.
I was trying to process everything at once -- the look on his face and the slight smile on his lips and what Quatre might have told him. I was just catching up to what it all might mean when Trowa said softly, "Heero's awake."
End Part 5
(:./sparcck/tracing5)
