A/N: Rated T for minor swearing. Again, this is Heero, showing up in my head and taking over.

Edited 11/29/08 - minor typo, no major changes

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It had been like this for weeks now. Every time I looked up from my laptop, there was Duo, directly in my line of sight. I wouldn't be able to help looking. He wouldn't be able to help feeling my gaze. Then he would glance up and I would try my damnedest to meet his eyes, but I would fail. It was what I was doing right now, in fact. People don't think of deep violet as a harsh color but I couldn't keep looking at it without going mad. I snapped my gaze sideways and let out a silent sigh of relief. The non-descript painter's white on the office walls was so much easier on the eyes.

Duo made a non-committal grunting noise and swung around in his office chair, throwing his feet up on the two-drawer file cabinet that sat behind his desk. His computer he propped up on his lap and after a second the typing resumed. I guess, in a way this was all my fault. If we had been able to get out of this damn office once in a while the whole thing could have been ignored. If only we hadn't been slacking on our reports Une would never have found out and we never would have been confined to our desks for the duration.

Well, not the duration. We would be free as soon as we finished all the reports that had gone late or unfiled, but that was the problem with the Preventers. Why we never seemed to get much done no matter how hard we worked or who got hired. The entire company was awash with military geniuses and natural born fighters. If we could have just be left alone to work we could have accomplished so much more.

We live in a Post-OZ world though, and no one trusted paramilitary "peacekeeping" forces anymore. Every move, every thought and every breath accomplished on company time had to be reported on. In triplicate. Awash in geniuses, yes, but inundated with bureaucracy even more so. I know Wufei was surprised when he heard that I, the Perfect Soldier, had gotten put on administrative restriction for failing to turn in mere paperwork. Duo was, apparently, understandable. I was not. I don't understand that. Sure I knew how to play any part, take any shot, get out alive no matter the odds. Yes, I can hack anything around and build myself an entire, airtight fake identity from scratch in twenty minutes. Filling out a two-page form because I replaced a screw in the damn door handle has nothing to do with any of that.

But that bullshit has nothing to do with this, except that it is the reason we've been trapped in this office together for weeks. To be honest I haven't been able to talk to my partner properly in months. I don't think anyone ever noticed. I don't exactly have a reputation for being the most verbose person on the planet and surrounding colonies. In fact, I pretty sure no one else has noticed… but Duo noticed. He would. Aside from Trowa Duo was always the one I could talk to. I know a lot of people would be surprised to hear that, but it's true. There was just something about the guy, like he had been there and done that already. Like he had seen it all, heard it all and there was no way to shock and horrify him. Even when I stole parts from his Gundam he didn't get all upset about it. He did track down a whole bunch of broken down batteries to my laptop and manage to switch the bad one in for the good one right before I finished a given school assignment so I lost all my work. I could not understand, at the time, why he was so damn happy whenever I took a bathroom break.

But beyond that, he was always talking. About himself, about sports, the weather, politics, alcohol, dancing, animals, his hair, my hair, the war, the color of the sky. It didn't seem like there was a topic off limits to Duo Maxwell and somehow that type of attitude was catching. Again, I was never exactly verbose, but I got the job done. We talked. Now we don't. He doesn't know why or, if he thinks he does he isn't saying. He would be wrong anyway. There's no way he's figured it out. If he had he wouldn't still be sitting there. He would have brought it up. Duo Maxwell is many things, but he is no coward.

I, however, am. No one would believe me if I said that out loud. Take a few bullets for people and they start believing things about you. They don't understand how easy it is. Just take half a second and picture what life would be like without, say, Wufei. Think of how easy it would be to beat anyone else at basketball, how his cat would starve, think of the look on Sally's face when you had to tell her. Think about the huge, gaping hole in the middle of everything, then consider what would change if you died. My landlord would have to find a new tenant. Someone would have to be found to be Duo's new partner. I'd left him my car in my will, so maybe Duo would stop taking the damn bus. That's about it. Weigh the options, look at the pros and cons and then take the bullets. End of story. It doesn't take courage. Courage is for people who do things even when they're afraid. I've never done anything I was really afraid of.

Even the war. Even self-destructing. I was never scared. I was trained. When you train for that kind of thing for years you start feeling ready for it. If you feel ready, you don't feel scared. Thus, it isn't courage. Stupidity maybe, but not courage.

I am not brave. If I was I would have talked to Duo the day after that damn, damn, bloody damn nightmare. Yes, I do have them. All the time in fact, but most of them are ambiguous. Blood and heat and black and I'm just so stressed or guilty or whatever. I don't really care about those. They don't affect me that much. But every once in a while the war comes crawling out of the box I locked it away in. Every once in a while it creeps up on me and digs its acid claws into my chest and squeezes.

Those are the nights I see actual events and places and people. Those are the nights I scream myself sick and wake up puking over the edge of the bed. It was one of those nightmares I had, about three months ago and when I stopped depositing my dinner all over the hardwood (No I do not have carpet in my bedroom. I'm not stupid.) I went to grab my alarm clock, to see if it was worth trying to get back to sleep or not. Instead I hit my phone, almost knocking the cordless to the floor and activating the answering machine. I only had one message, from a couple of days ago that I had forgotten to delete and it started to play.

Duo's voice, cheerful, calm and amused filled the air. It was a long message, Duo's generally are, and he went right on chattering about a dozen different things before getting to the point and telling me he was going to be late for the two-on-two basketball game. I knew the content, but at that exact moment it hadn't mattered. All it took was hearing his voice and the dry heaves stopped. I sat back up and I wasn't shaking so badly.

It felt like, okay this is going to sound bad, but it felt like that one time Relena hugged me. Honestly, I think that's the only hug I've ever been given, but that was what Duo's voice made me feel. Like he was there. Like he was holding me.

Like I was safe.

I had fallen right back to sleep, with a smile on my face. I had woken up in a panic. As I cleaned up my mess I came to realization, completely against my will, that if it had been anyone else, Relena, Trowa, Wufei, Quatre, anyone on that answering machine it wouldn't have allowed me to go back to sleep. It was just Duo. Only Duo. I could talk to Wufei, but I could dare to make stupid comments with Duo. I could make Trowa laugh at my jokes, but Duo could make me laugh at his. I had helped care for all of the guys when they had been injured, but I never remembered any of it fondly. Not like I did the memory of helping Duo braid his hair.

We were all freakishly close friends, us Gundam Pilots. I knew that. I had always known that. Too many shared traumas will do that to people, but somehow I had never noticed that I was close to Duo differently than I was close to the other guys.

I had never actively decided to take a bullet for Duo. Knowing what I know now, that was simply because I cannot picture a world without Duo without having a screaming, crying mental fit. There is nothing, and no one for that matter, I wouldn't throw to the dogs to save Duo. He would beat me senseless if he ever knew I felt that way. After he finished laughing himself sick that is. I can see it all in my head. I've spent a lot of time picturing it lately.

And that, in a nutshell, is why we sit here in our awkward silence and try to get some work done. I can't talk to him, because if I do I know it will slip out. The words have been repeating themselves in my head for three months now.

I love you, Duo Maxwell. I love you more than anything. I love you, love you, love you.

But I can't say it. If he rejects me, then what? If he mocks me I won't be able to take it. If he leaves me… I'm scared, more scared than I have ever been and, as I said, I don't do things that scare me. I am not brave.

I finished the report about that one weapons sale sting from last summer and hit Send, my gaze automatically slipping up beyond my laptop to Duo. His head twisted around and I was looking at dark violet again. I held it this time. I would damn well hold my ground and I did… for a few extra seconds. Just long enough to notice something besides the beautiful color.

Pain.

There it was, lodged in my brain, in my memory for all time, like twisted metal shrapnel. He was in pain. I had stopped talking to him, wasn't talking to him and he didn't know why. It was like a bullet in the gut. Painful as hell and toxic unless you fixed it. I couldn't just leave him like that. I had protected him from so many other things, why couldn't I protect him from myself.

My fingers darted over the keyboard, bringing up a new email and I grimly typed in Duo's email address before hesitating over the subject line. I finally typed in 'Old Habits' and left it at that. But now the cursor was in the message box, the empty message box, blinking at me in slow mockery. I should have titled this 'I am not brave'.

Slowly, hesitantly, I started to type. It felt weird, not just because of what I was typing but how I was typing it. I don't type slowly. I never get on a computer without a specific reason, and then it was almost a race to see how fast I could get it done. I don't hesitate on the computer. It's my turf and I rule here. I actually mistyped the first few words because of the speed thing.

Duo,

When I was a child, I was trained how to 'Take Out a Target'. I learned how to use a computer and how to bend it to my will. I learned to live by my emotions. What I wanted, I did. What I hated, I stayed away from. If something scared me… well, I hated it so I stayed away. When J took me in, he trained me. I learned how to kill, how to fight and how to die. I learned that emotion has no place in war.

That last is what I want you to know. I was never brave during the war. I never ignored my fear and dove into the impossible fight. There was no emotion. There was no fear. J gave me that, but in a way he took that from me to. I never learned how to not run from my fears.

I stopped talking to you three months ago. It was the 27th of August. I am afraid to talk to you. I thought you were my friend, like Wufei, Quatre and Trowa. You are not. You are closer to me, more important to me than anything or anyone has ever been. If I could trade you to get Wing and J and Odin back, I wouldn't. I… god, don't hate me, I love you, Duo Maxwell. And I think I always will.

There it was, the blood out of my very heart, the ragged remains of my soul. In print and on the screen for all to see. I tried to type my name. Tried to hit Send. Tried to stop staring at it. My hands, I found, were shaking.

It was too much, too obvious, too open. Even for Duo. I couldn't do it. I couldn't be this pathetic, splattered across the floor. With trembling fingers I added a paragraph, ripped out my own guts and gave him an out. Gave us all an out.

If you don't what to know, just delete this and don't bring it up. My copy is already permanently erased from the hard drive. None of my emails get automatically stored by the company server. Don't worry, neither do yours. Delete this and tonight this will all go into the Box with the war. Tomorrow I will talk to you. I swear it.

Heero Yuy

There. A brick wall between me and the gamma radiation. A way to scrape away from this with something left at the end. Because, even as the pressed Send, I knew it was a stupid idea. If he needed to know why I wasn't talking to him then I could have given him some kind of story to explain it. I had never, ever lied to Duo. Not even the day I stole the parts from Deathscythe.

Before I could prompt my cold fingers over the keyboard, to retrieve the email before it arrived in his inbox, I heard the faint ding that meant Duo had new mail. I started to hold my breath. There was a painfully long moment of silence and I tried to look up from my screen, but I couldn't. Duo's chair squeaked and I heard his laptop hit the tile floor with the sound of cracking plastic. A large part of my brain heaved a sigh. Replacing it would mean more paperwork… but then his hands were in my hair and his lips were pressed against mine and I just didn't care anymore.