Chapter 4
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The next week, on the same day and at the same time, he caught up with her again. And once more he carried half her groceries home and they sat and talked in her kitchen over a bowl of cereal. Over the past week he had thought up many questions he wanted to ask her about the long life she had lived but one was the most pressing of all. "Do you have no computers here?"
In response, she snapped her fingers and a mini computer fell out of the air into her hand. "Does that answer your question?
"How . . . ."
Ami sighed. "Space pocket. Crossing dimensions is a latent senshi power we each had, used only as temporary storage for our transformation pens, or for the MDC, the Mercury Data Computer. I open a miniature portal into a side dimension in which I can store basically whatever I want. It hangs suspended until I come back for it." She set it on the table in front of him. "I bet you tried to hack it from your house, but that's impossible. It's not hooked into any systems so you could only crack into it if you had it open in front of you. Which, unless you're me, is just as impossible."
Refusing to admit that, Heero wrestled with the tiny thing, about to resort to using a gun. "What makes you say that?"
With a deep breath, she took it from him and keyed in a combination from a hidden button pad on the bottom. In a mechanical voice it asked for a retinal scan and she leaned down to look into a small lens. She then put her thumb against a sensor that not only scanned her fingerprint, but did a quick DNA and blood sample. "It can tell real skin versus fake, so it's no use pulling a Gataca."1
"'Gataca?'"
"Twentieth century movie, I doubt you would understand. It wasn't that good anyway." He was obviously not getting what she was talking about so she went back to the original subject. "But you can't open it unless you're me. You can't turn it on without a password," she left out the part about needing a scan from the opposite fingerprint, "It needs a password to access the main programs. Each file has a separate password unless you know the one that overrides them all in the beginning. I put all the coding in myself not long ago. But you can't even attempt any of those unless you get it out of the space pocket, which only Pluto-chan and I can do. So good luck hacking it." She shut it once again and dropped it away.
Heero's jaw almost hit the floor and he uttered the one word he never had before. "Wow."
He came by the next week, and the week after that, until groceries and cereal became a regular occurrence for them both. One day, however, sitting across the table and chatting aimlessly, Ami noticed something different about her guest. "Is everything all right?" she asked flippantly, "You look grumpier than usual."
There was a long pause in the conversation. Heero kept his gaze on the cereal he continued to shovel into his mouth, not knowing how to phrase what he wanted to say. Had to say, really, it wasn't something he wanted to admit because that would make it real. Then, finally, he spoke. "I got a transmission from one of my ex-teammates the other day," he told her, "He told me the people responsible had been caught, but there had been a terrorist bombing in China. An old friend of mine was killed. Chang Wufei." He surprised himself, letting himself know that he had any friends at all, let alone the Chinese pilot.
"Oh," was Ami's response and for a moment he had stunned her speechless. Her having nothing to say was about as frequent as the same thing happening to Duo. Now that he really thought about it, Heero realized, she was a lot like Duo. Same smart aleck attitude, same joking defense, same mischievous eyes . . . no, scratch that. Her eyes were almost a carbon copy of his own. Hard and unfeeling, but she carried it off differently. So caught up in his thoughts he almost missed what she said next. "I think I know how you feel."
Somehow that hit something off inside of him. "How could you know," he said coldly, forgetting momentarily that she had lost seven of the people closest to her, "How could you know how it feels to lose someone who was there for you, who stood by you and kept you anchored to sanity through a war? Wufei was the Dragon! He was unbeatable, invincible, he wasn't supposed to die. Not like that."
Her eyes went wide at his words. "So I don't know how it feels to have a friend killed in a random act of violence? Makoto was our dragon. No matter how hard the battle was she was strong, she was invulnerable. Guess what happened to her? She fell in with a different crowd and got gunned down in a fly-by shooting on the wrong side of town! And you tell me I don't know how it feels. Fuck you."
It completely caught him by surprise. As little as he had expected his outburst, he had expected hers even less. Feelings in the two previously emotionless creatures had flared up and come to a head, and neither of them knew what to do. Ami was still glaring at him, eyes narrowed in rage but behind them he saw an agony he recognized all to well. She was replaying the death of her friend, just as he always replayed the death of that little girl and her dog. But he wasn't going to back down and neither was she. The first time she had told him to leave her home her voice had been level, never wavering. Now it shook with every word. "Get. Out. Of. My. House."
"Look, Mizuno-san . . . "
"Out."
Heero looked at her for the last time that night and saw the real reason why Sailor Mercury had been made the leader after the death of Venus. Her eyes seemed to ice over, their cerulean hues freezing solid with pure rage. Everything in the kitchen ground to a halt as the temperature plummeted and froze it all. Raw power cackled like lightening in the air around her and chill winds whipped through the room, returning to its source only to be churned back out again. Facing the true wrath of a goddess, he did the one thing he could do. He left.
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sorry but that was pathetic. reviews anyways? and thanks to all my readers, i think i'm forming a following!
and fuzzy pink bouncy bunny, i gotta love creativity when it comes to pen names.
1) 'pulling a Gataca': it's a phrase I coined myself. In the movie he uses a false fingertip filled with the appropriate blood to get into work. She's saying that someone couldn't pull the same trick.