Author's Note: This story is an AU, so please don't be offended if Heero and Duo seem out of character. I'll be explaining why as the story progresses.

Note #2: Modified Tam did me a wonderful favor and looked over my story after I posted it. This is the edited version, and I must thank her for making it less choppy and sloppy. I never realised I thought Duo's eyes could 'crunch'...

Oh, and please comment and critique! C&C is love!

Desperate
A Love Story

That night we met was rather dark, India ink with the smell of roasted nuts and the sharpness of a wet blanket. I was wrapped in his arms, dying from life, and he, a stranger, guided me into something warm and intoxicating.

His body, his scent was something that burned me like a slow, steady fire as he carried me to somewhere beyond me. His hands were hot, sweetly tempting, as he wiped away the cold rainwater and wrapped my body with something dry, something filled with his scent.

When I came to, I remember so little, awakening to the way the sun danced against his warm skin.

It was awkward, sitting in his kitchen, the world cluttered and filled with papers of unknown knowledge. The small space in front of me was cleared for a plate of breakfast and a glass of something. My eyes couldn't focus.

The young man that had brought me home last night was quiet, roughly cutting through his food with a bit of an impatient rush. He lifted his eyes from his breakfast and made a face. "It isn't poisoned, you know," he said, his tenor voice scratched with some sort of wrong.

"Ha," I said softly, uncertain of what else to say, before lifting my fork and begining to pick at the food in front of me. I did not feel hungry at all.

"Hn, typical," he said under his breath as he ate another bite of his helpless meal. His chiding made me swallow a few dry bites, but I couldn't force myself to eat more, no matter how delicious it must have been. I drank some of the orange liquid he had served me to wet my mouth, but the tang of the flavor was more distracting than refreshing.

"Um," I started with some hesitation, afraid that the young man would look at me with contempt. The food in front of me blurred in and out of focus. "How did I end up here?"

The young man did not answer. When I finally looked up, he had an expression of confused anger; the way his eyes narrowed and the curve of his frown spoke both of incomprehension and irritation. "You're serious, right?"

I looked at my barely touched breakfast once more. "I'm sorry," I apologized without thinking. "I just can't remember anything."

I felt the young man frown at me, felt the way his mind tried to grasp the situation in the silence that passed between the two of us and our various states of fed. "I brought you here because you were sleeping in the rain, idiot. You could have gotten a cold," he spat, angrily grabbing his dirty plates and placing them in the sink. "Or died, but then, you were probably hoping to do just that, huh?"

His words stung me, but I couldn't even fathom why. Whatever I was trying to achieve out in that rain, I couldn't remember, but part of me refused to believe that I had wanted to die last night.

"Are you going to finish that, Heero?" the young man said, cutting through my thoughts perfectly, his hand out for my very full plate of food. I stared at him, at his impatient stance, and the hard line his lips formed.

"How… do you know me?" I asked him, completely perplexed as to how this stranger knows my name, but this only caused a bitter laugh to grumble its way out of the young man.

"Oh, what a great joke," he said harshly as he grabbed my plate and tapped all that I have left on it into the trash. "Even Heero Yuy can change." He scraped off what lingered into the trash and dumped that plate into the sink as well. "Can even tell evil, vindictive jokes every now and then."

I felt my ears burn red in embarrassment. "I'm not joking," I insisted, feeling my blood rush. "Who are you?"

The young man did not respond, but instead he allowed the bitterness he felt, washing those few dishes in silence, make me feel unease.

I was afraid of what he would say when he finally decided to respond once more.

He dried his hands when he was finished and disappeared into what I assumed was his bedroom. He returned with a framed photograph that he dropped in front of me with no gusto and even less friendliness. "Look at that, buster, and tell me again about how you don't know me."

I stared at the picture, a perfect capture of a moment in the past. Two boys, just teenagers, caught in a moment by an intruding camera. One, a boy with a long hair braided away from his face, was staring to the side, a pleasant, youthful, wistful look in his eyes as he smiled at someone off-camera. His companion, a surly-looking boy with short hair, was looking at the boy beside him with some sort of contempt in his eyes, but it was tempered with something much more interesting.

I looked at the picture for the longest time, absorbing the emotions the camera was able to catch in that brief moment, the faces of the two boys wavering in and out of my vision, before I realized something rather important.

I looked up at the man and stared at him as intently. His hair wasn't amazingly long, but long enough to make for an unruly ponytail that scraped past his shoulders, a ponytail pulled slightly away from the layers of hair that framed his face. He wasn't smiling, nor wistful, but his was the face of the boy in the picture.

I looked at the picture once more. Yes, despite the age, the changes, the boy in the picture was the same person as the man that brought me to his home. And as for the other boy…

My hair is much longer than his severe hair cut; it wasn't long enough for a ponytail, but it was rather shaggy. However, part of me knew that if I looked at my reflection in the mirror, the face that would stare back at me would be this boy's face.

"This is me," I whispered to myself, almost in awe at the revelation.

"Open it up and look at what's written on the back," the man said, with a flat, bitter voice that the pleasant-faced, longhaired boy in the picture, I felt, would never use so often.

I did as he advised and saw scribbled on the backside of the photo a phrase: Heero and Duo, 197. I said the inscription to myself softly, almost savoring the words, tasting the way 'Duo' sounded and feeling tinges of nostalgia and faint, very forgotten memories stir within me at the simple word.

This stranger has a name, I realized that morning, a name that I think I should have been treasuring all along.

Duo… Duo, with the eyes the color of something that I cannot remember the name of, with hair that shimmered with the borrowed amazements of nature… Duo, whose bitter, tight lips hide something I should already know.

I know this by the way he has been glaring at me all morning. All day. The food he served me in the middle of the day was as unappealing to me as breakfast had been. They could have been legendary dishes, known to captivate the eater with the deepest, most heartfelt emotions. He could have been a masterful chef, peerless in the kitchen, capable of sparking within the most ordinary of dishes a flare of the unearthly and beautiful.

I, however, just didn't feel like eating. I was not hungry, at least I don't think I was.

Perhaps after finally taking my unchanging attitude for a clue, he only made dinner for one that night. I didn't begrudge him his decision, however much it had hurt me to think that I was being ignored, for what was the use of making food for me when it will only go to waste.

He must have changed his mind sometime during the night, for he served me breakfast the next day. Likewise, my body must have come to some sort of conclusion, and I was able to eat more than a few, obligatory bites.

The rest of the day didn't have so many marked improvements. He had gone to work soon after breakfast, advising me to make myself at home in that bitter, tenor voice of his, which only made me more apprehensive about being in that place alone. I ended up half-asleep on his couch, his television set tuned to some mindless daytime drivel for the most of the day.

When he came home again, he cooked and I ate, the silence between us charged with his bitterness. He, perhaps still upset that I don't remember him, would ignore me unless when he wanted to glare at me. I, as nervous around him as I have been the day before, didn't do anything that could irritate him more than he was.

It was an awkward night.

I think a week passed before he suggested the 'walk'. It was hard for me to gauge the time with only idleness as a compass, his working hours as the sun, and my infrequent eating habits as the stars.

He was looking around his apartment, looking for 'something suitable', as he explained in an exasperated, bitter tone, "Of course a week has passed by. Just because you're slumming in here doesn't mean that the world has stopped turning."

"Of course not," I responded, a bit bothered by his connotation, looking at the baggy sleeping clothes that I have only taken off this past week for showers, as infrequent as the times when I actually ate something. Perhaps, to him, I wasn't someone that wouldn't have stayed home all day, half-asleep while watching talk shows and daytime soap operas.

"Of course not," he repeated, as bitter as the strongest, blackest coffee, as he pulled out something vaguely familiar: the clothes I was wearing when I came under his care.

"Nothing of mine fits you," he says as he throws the clothes in my direction. I catch them without a second thought.

It was his idea, to search the area where he found me for clues of some sort. He wanted to know why he found me in that shape, almost poisoned by all the liquor I had drunk, catching my very death of cold in the rain, sleeping on a pile of trash waiting to be picked up the next morning, forgetting everything about myself, everything about him.

Part of me thought it was a good idea, at least, this walk. The rest, that cloistered self that I can't remember, was more worried than grateful.

We went from bar to bar, talking to the bartenders and staff in each place. In some, the bartender would immediately recognize me and would serve me my 'usual', something strong and without such obstacles such as ice, water, or little umbrellas. At these bartenders, Duo would frown, but, even as he asked the bartender to get the drink away from us, he would pull out his wallet and pay for the drink and then some. They were the people that could have some information for him.

It soon became stale information. Each of them said that I would already be drunk when I came by, looking as sad as the word allowed. I would drink there, and then move on, perhaps to another bar, perhaps home. They knew very little.

One, however, gave one more piece of information. She said that, once, I had mentioned the Club Lahaina, some hostess bar on another part of town. After a glare from him and a hefty tip for her, we were off again, to a hostess bar the former me had probably known very well.

The former me. After a week, I've started to think of myself as two people. One, was myself, this person with no past, floating about with little appetite and even less conviction. I'm barely living in the present, and the future could very well be on the other side of reality.

Then there was the former me, the person Duo had once known and is searching for so desperately that he's resolved to enter a hostess bar just to retrieve him. He was my past, the past I cannot remember; a past that, if I did try to remember, I would get this horrible ache within me, stopping me every time. It is as if he, myself, didn't want me to remember. As if there is nothing to remember other than much more of that horrible ache.

I think that perhaps I should be worried about this strange duplicity within myself, and in a way I was. Sitting in that apartment, night in and night out, with very little company besides the television set and Duo's bitter glares, caused my mind to run in lonely, self-obsessed loops around the gap of self within me. With each glance from Duo, I found myself apologizing to him, asking for forgiveness for not remembering him.

However, just as my appetite came and went, my apathy towards the former me waxed and waned. I couldn't help but feel that it was all right that I had forgotten who I was only a week before. If it were so important for me to remember him, then I would have never forgotten him at all.

We walked into the hostess bar with some trepidation, but Duo, with all his bitter swagger, was undeterred.

That bar, that Club Lahaina, wasn't a very popular place. It was gaudy and flashy, with its manager sitting by the sound system, looking for a catchy tune to play. A couple of customers were drinking and chatting with beautiful, though overly made-up hostesses. A few of the girls, gossiping by the bar, looked up from the conversation and began to squeal with joy and relief at the same time.

"Heero! Oh god, Heero!" they said in inharmonious union as all three of them flew from their stools and hugged me something fierce. "We were so worried about you," the smallest of the three women, the bright colors of a male peacock on her face, whimpered excitedly as she squeezed my body extra tight.

"Heero?" someone else said, beyond the artificial colors and stiflingly perfumes of the women. They parted away from me, and in their place stood a man. The sight of him stirred something within me, something connected to what I have forgotten, even as his warm embrace stirred a dry cough out of Duo.

His hug was brief, and I found his looking at me with calm, but very present and real, concern. "You haven't been to your place in days. What happened to you?" His warm hands upon my shoulders were a weighted warm, keeping me grounded in this moment with him.

"I…" I started with hesitation, founding my voice lost somewhere in the way his eyes looked at me, in the way his pale sunshine hair framed his face, when Duo spoke for me.

"Excuse me," Duo said, his bitter voice somehow at home within the confines of such a place, "but he almost died last weekend."

The man did not remove his hands as he straightened somewhat and eyed Duo coolly. "And you are?" There was a similarly calm chill in the words he spoke.

"The name's Duo," he growled out, grabbing my arm and yanking me away from him with such possessive force my arm tingled underneath his hand. Where the man's hands had been, there lingered a warmth I still felt, despite being shielded by Duo.

"Is that so," he replied, his cool anger becoming colder as he stared at Duo. The girls around us pulled back nervously. "Well, that still calls for a question." The two men and their companions looked up from their drinks with curiosity.

"And what question is that?" asked Duo. I could feel the heat they were generating roll against me, hitting me wave after wave. Duo gritted his teeth, the grinding noise unnerving.

The way this man tilted his head back somewhat, the arrogance he leaked into his words, he knew that what he would say next was going to irritate Duo extremely. He knew that he was thrusting his chin out, tempting Duo to swing at it with all his might, in retaliation for the snide remark he would utter. He knew this, in spite of never meeting Duo before.

"Why would Heero bring a girl to a hostess bar?"

Duo must have known that the man was picking on him, daring him to fight. He must have known that he was being egged on, but still.

He swung with all his might, all his rage, all the frustration that was bottled up with him, frustration I have felt rolled up inside his bitterness since meeting him a week ago, and connected with the man's strong jaw. The man staggered back, supported somewhat by the girls and the bar, and gave Duo a smirk, even as he wiped away the trickle of blood.

"Nice arm, sister," he poked again, his voice more malicious than before as he regained his balance.

After what could have been mere moments or simple eternities of hostility between the two men, the manager pushed herself between them. "Ken!" she bellowed, her meaty hand clutching on the man's somewhat bony shoulder tightly. "What the hell are you doing fighting the customers? You!" She turned her small, blue-powdered eyes towards Duo and, with her red ruby lips, pointed to the door. "Get out, before I call the cops!"

"He deserved it for what he called me," Duo screamed back, his bitterness and frustration now rolled up with something more volatile: rage and humiliation.

"I don't care what he called you," the mom yelled back, standing between the man and Duo. Despite being just past five feet in height, and more than a foot shorter than Duo, she was a blue eyeshadowed version of a mountain giant from the legend, menacing and unmovable. "You can get the fuck out of my bar."

She turned and glared at me then, her wide mouth ready to yell out the same ultimatum to me, when she too must have recognized me. It seemed that, somewhere between the man's, Ken's, taunt and Duo's swing, everyone had forgotten all about me.

Would it be out of place for me to say that I had forgotten I was there as well? That, in all the excitement, I had forgotten who I was all over again? Perhaps it would be a bit too much, but it was true nonetheless.

"Heero," she said, looking less like a beast of fury and much more maternal. She took my face in her hands and pulled it close to hers; I bended over slightly to accommodate. "Heero, why haven't you been around. Ken was a wreck, thinking you died, or worse!"

"I'm sorry," I said, apologizing to her as well, as Duo fumed next to me. Being so close to her face made me feel slightly disoriented.

"And then your friend here starts a fight!" she continued, pushing away my bangs from my eyes and patting my head as if I was her long-lost child. "Heero, what has been going on?"

Ken scoffed. "That's no 'friend'. That's Heero's Duo." The bitterness in his words at that moment rivaled Duo's everyday mood.

The mom looked at Duo with eyes darker than the ones she displayed when threatening him. She, too, must have known about Duo before that night, if not actually met him, and I was afraid that their dark attitudes towards him were a result of what the former me had done.

"I'm sorry," I tried again, drawing everyone's attention back to myself, "but don't be mad at Duo. He's helping me."

The manager's face grew pale for a moment. "Helping you?"

Ken was more animated over the concept, as he appeared by manager's side and gently pulled me towards him. The soft, deep concern had returned to his eyes then, he led me away from everyone to whisper, "What do you mean, he's helping you? You've told me more than one that…"

"I'm sorry," I whispered back, cutting him off. The way his warm eyes looked at me was intoxicating. "I'm sorry, but I can't remember you. Up to a minute ago, I didn't even know your name."

Duo was forced to wait outside. The manager didn't want him anywhere near her, and Ken would have only prodded Duo into action again. Duo took the whole situation as badly as was possible, as he stormed out the Club Lahaina in a rash fury, without a backwards glance.

I was left behind with the manager and Ken, trying with my inadequate words to explain what has happened to me that past week, and they listened. The manager sat opposite to me, with her blue eyeshadow and red lips, and drank something fruity and drenched in tequila, accenting each silence in my explanation with a deep sip.

Ken hung in the shadows, as it were, his face growing cloudier with each word from my mouth.

to be continued...

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