Backstory, Thread Zero, Heero

One

By Nix Winter

Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Wing, nor Heero

Notes: The Heero in this story is the Angelic Heero in Duo 21. This is when he is very young, before he met Duo, maybe up into the time when he meets Duo and begins his recovery. This Heero and Duo are probably more AU than I'd intended, and much closer to the Heero and Duo in 'Soul'. If this set of stories has a more canon Heero and Duo, it might be those in thread 1

Warning: Child abuse, a history that leads to when Heero works towards his recovery.

The darkness was everything. It soaked into his skin until he didn't know where he began and the darkness ended. He wasn't sure when he'd come to be in the darkness, but he was sure there had been something before the darkness.

The pain had started before the darkness. He held his arm close to his chest, very careful not to move his fingers. Smooth, cool floor under him, a corner behind him, he imagined that the floor went on forever and ever, and if he could just get up and walk, he'd find his way to someone. A man. A bigger person. He couldn't find the name of the bigger person. He remembered guns. He wanted a gun. He knew how to use those. He couldn't remember what he wanted to use it on. Someone.

He leaned his head forward, blew warm breath on his arm, on the nasty throbbing deep inside it. He had a name. All things had names. He was a thing. He had name. Logic. He couldn't remember his name. He wanted to cry. Tears are warm. Something worse, much worse than dark would happen if he cried though.

There were monsters in the dark. There would always be monsters in the dark.

"Attention."

His small form rose, lightening fast, both arms hanging at his side, finger tips lightly brushing over bare skin, left arm limp and screaming. In his head, the pain funneled away into side room, leaving his main focus unclouded and responsive.

"Complete exercise D." The monster's voice commanded and the child ran blind.

An internal clock told him how far forward, up the stairs, disassemble a type 9 riffle, even with one hand, and he knew he had only forty-five seconds to complete the rest of the exercise. There was a rail walk, and then twenty feet through a passage roughly the size and shape of an air duct. He slipped free with five seconds to spare, crouched down, not even feeling the pain in his broken arm. "Exercise D complete."

A flash of endorphins released inside his brain, triggered by hardware implanted into his head.

"Mission status."

"Fractured radius. I am afraid. I am in pain. I want to use a gun."

"What are you?"

The child shifted from one foot to the other, bare feet sensitive to the cold metal floor. He didn't remember his name. He didn't know what they wanted to hear. He desperately wanted to give them what they wanted. He needed to. His survival depended on it. "I'm seven."

"Incorrect." The flash of despair that clawed through his young brain was just as induced as the endorphins a moment before. As he lay sobbing on the metal floor, unable to control himself at all, the right answer came like a gift from the monsters in the dark, "You are a perfect solider."

"I am a perfect solider," the boy sobbed. "I m a perfect solider."

Heero took a slow hissing breath. Older, a warrior in the middle of a battle stretching the length of human reach, he knelt perfectly still next to another. There was just the two of them, in complete darkness, within the catacomb system under Paris. The catacombs had been used by the French resistance and the Nazis a like in a previous war. They were the ideal hiding place. The place they hid, him and the braided, unpredictable creature who was his partner, was reinforced in ways that neither of them had had time to explore, but whatever it was cut them off from all manner of signal from outside.

They couldn't signal the other pilots or their support teams. No one could signal them, but Duo had pointed out that the people they'd just hit really hard wouldn't be able to find them with any kind of scans either. Their raid on the Oz Paris base had been one of the biggest successes of their war time careers, up until that point. Really they were just getting started, and they didn't have any way to get directly back to their gundams, but somehow, they'd both wanted this mission.

"'Ro?" Duo whispered, shifting a little closer, warm uniformed knee pressing against Heero's bare one. "You okay?"

"Of course," he said, but being completely out of signal range, completely away from where he'd be asked for report or information. In the dark, that door he'd closed so long ago opened slowly. Pain and fear so long suppressed swirled under the surface of his control, along with an instinct to reach out to the other person with him in the darkness.

Duo wasn't like any of the monsters in the dark that Heero told himself with complete firmness had not existed. He'd simply had extensive and comprehensive military training. Duo smiled though, in the sunlight sometimes, and he laughed. Duo got drunk and danced in the rain. Duo had that ridiculous braid, and it almost seemed to Heero as if Duo were keeping his name hidden in the braid. Duo smiled right at him sometimes, and Heero was sure that Duo was smiling just for him.

"Heero," Duo said softly, apology in his voice.

"Yes?"

"I think my leg's bleeding again. Think you could maybe put some pressure on it?"

"I will attend your medical needs," Heero said, and in his mind he completed the sentence with 'I'm the perfect solider'. He did not feel fear for this person he completed missions with.

"What are you, Heero?" Duo shifted, stretching out his leg, which a bullet had the nerve to take bit of skin off of during their mission, "You don't need to sleep. You fucking eat rations that look like rat food, and you know everything like you got a built in net link in your head."

"I am the perfect solider," Heero said, voice haughty.

"Bullshit," Duo said. "I hate the dark."

Duo shifted a little more, leaning back, moaning as Heero went to work on his leg.

"Me too," a smaller voice said, "I hate the dark too."

That was the beginning, the door, and Duo never let go. He seemed to understand that there was a bruised self hidden deep within Heero. On the surface, Heero was perfect, smooth, strong, a warrior of such power that it was hard to measure. In moments alone with Duo, those blue eyes came to life, full of curiosity and an appetite for life that lived completely up to someone who could be the perfect solider.