Title: Ghosts
Warnings: 1x2, bad language, possible grammar mistakes -_-;;, lemon in later
chapters – maybe.
S/I:*Coughs*
Duo: *Grabs microphone and nods importantly…sort of*
Exploding pain being the first thing when you wake up, isn't exactly pleasant. Neither is it pleasant when you're too exhausted to realize that this pain is coming from your eye, and you just HAPPEN to bash your face against a nightstand some smartass idiot put in the way.
"Goddamnit! Who the fuck put this table in the way!?" I yelled, pressing my hand to my sore swollen eye. It took me a few seconds to remember who'd give it to me to begin with. Of course. Heero. I was staring to have second thoughts about forgiving him for it, until I remembered I already had, in my own 'strange' way.
I looked out through my other moderately well functioning eye, noting that it looked more like night, and from there I realized that we were in Scandinavia. In winter. That meant you only had a few precious daylight hours to count on. THAT sure helped the whole 'spooky image' I had firmly implanted into my visual image of…the weird place we were at.
School, that's it, it was a school. Not Draculas castle, or some freaky dungeons. It. Was. A. School.
"Hmph…" Had there been a mirror there, or a very informative Quatre, I'd have been told I looked like I'd been to hell and back in one night. I hadn't quite gone to that length yet. But gutted children and fist-a-la-Heero made a good substitute.
"You have history as your first class," came a cold voice from the bathroom, muffled slightly by the sound of water. Adjusting my already impaired sight, I could dimly make out Heero's…well…anatomy, so to speak, behind the shower curtain. Too bad there wasn't enough light source to make it transparent.
"Huh?" Oh what a smart thing to say. Makes you sound so intelligent. I sleepily rubbed my eyes…yelped pathetically in pain once more and removed one hand, grumbling angrily. I'd been shot, tortured…what was up with the eye thing?
"History class," he repeated monotonously, and reached up to rinse his hair…or at least that was what it looked like, from the tiny audience I was given through a crack in the door. If I hadn't been so tired, I might have taken the risk to tiptoe up to it and open it a bit more, giving the excuse that I was going to brush my teeth or…something.
"Oh…right…yay," I groaned and buried my head – cautiously – back into the soft pillow. It was still pitch black outside, and waking up didn't seem as if it was appropriate just yet. Not to mention, it was freakin' cold as usual.
A warm wash of air woke me up a bit, simply because it felt more…comfortable to open my eye – note the refrain from using the plural. Heero had wrapped a towel around his waist, and obviously stepped out of the shower from what I could barely glance. Not that I was looking…or…well…not really.
"Duo."
I wasn't really listening to his voice, though I must admit that however little he uses it, and however cruel it sounds, he does have a wonderful voice. It's not one of those horribly deep voices, which sound like old trolls. It has a soft edge to it, sharp would probably describe it better. And it still doesn't sound anywhere near that of a girl.
"Maxwell."
The Maxwell thing, always gets me. Always. And he seems to have figured that out, since the only time he actually talks to me is when he's giving an order. I glared in the general direction of the door and managed to sit up, refraining from making contact with my eye.
"Heero…WHY exactly do we have to attend classes when we're…well…saving the world from destruction!?" I retorted, shuffling over to the bathroom. I noticed I was still wearing what I had yesterday, the punch I'd received as a 'good-night kiss' being enough to make me forget about changing. Casting a tired look around I saw our bags put in a corner of the room. I had absolutely no clue in hell as to how they'd gotten there.
"Uhh…Heero? The bags came from…where?" I reached up and scratched my had in bewilderment. It was a stupid thing to note in the first place. As long as the bags were here, who really gave two craps?
"I went to get them. When you were asleep," came a reply, in a slightly more bitter voice than normal as the clatter of a toothbrush was heard, and later the scraping of plastic bristle against teeth. He didn't seem to like the idea of 'outside' very much, as I could expertly detect through an almost non-existent hinting at it in his voice. Ha. I could decode the Yuy monosyllabic language. I must be very good.
"Run in to any of the lil' gutted children?" I joked, reaching to grab my portion of the bags while pulling my older clothes off and dumping them at the foot of the bed. Damn that biting cold. Why did this place have to be so alive with freezing winds inside as well? Quoting Wu-man, it was an injustice.
A short pause followed. The brushing ceased for a moment, and I was aware of what looked like fidgeting on Heero's part, before the hygiene routine of the morning continued, without a reply. Having joined the pause, I too resumed my hunt for some decent clothing, finding some comfortable – obviously black – articles a few moments later.
I was starting to realize I couldn't force it out of him. It, being to tell me really how he feels. Not just now, but through the entire war. What it is he's scared of, what makes him angry, what makes him happy…heck, anything. Because right now, he isn't content. And the whole terror everyone's getting from the 'ghost' thing, is tipping the balance. He's lost that crucial component of humanity, letting go of your feelings. They're all worked into his mind, and can't be revealed to anyone, that being the flaw of a human robot. And in this cyborg, the human was suffering to an extent where it couldn't even recognize it's own torment.
What I REALLY wanted was for him to, at that moment, burst out of the bathroom and run to me, looking a wreck. I wanted him to come to me, hugging me like a child would, and tell me everything that was bothering him. Then I could comfort him, make him feel all better…I could be his support.
It was selfish, once again, to wish for Heero to become a nervous wreck just so I could comfort him. And he'd never do it. Not in a million years, would he hug me intentionally. But I still couldn't help wondering…the war had been hard on all of us. Heero especially. He didn't laugh and joke around like I did. And it really isn't a mask, on my part. I make the jokes and laugh the laughs because I feel it's necessary, and because I can't damn bloody well help myself. I wouldn't survive a day without grinning furiously at something, or laughing.
I suppose that's what the street teaches you. Make use of all the happiness you can muster, since that's what it's there for. Then there is that element in my 'excessive humour' that's there for them too, for Heero and the others. But still. I'm not a miserable person inside. If I were miserable, I'd be showing it. If I were angry, which I am on occasion, I'd let people know.
But once all of that's out, I'm happy again, and get on with life bearing the scars, but surviving. It's a different story for him, Heero. His scars never heal.
This is where I get classified as living in pretense. The worries. Truth is, I worry about everyone. I just never let that slip. One reason being, which people usually don't liked being worried about. Wufei would term it as making people feel weak, as if you don't trust them.
But depressed? That I be not.
Heero arrived from his trip to the shower, spandex – I was guessing another pair – on, and rubbing a towel over his face and hair. Once he withdrew the towel, I couldn't help but point and gape.
"Whoa! Did you get ANY sleep last night man?"
Dark blue rings framed his eyes, both of which were slightly red rimmed with exhaustion, and he looked paler than I'd remembered. His brows furrowed slightly to give me a halfassed frown, before he retreated to his portion of the luggage and laboriously pulled a customary green shirt over his head.
"You didn't sleep at all last night did you…" I murmured, beyond his hearing, despite how good it may be as a Gundam pilot. This was starting to get out of hand. Now all that was left was him not eating, and we'd have our very own wreck. But I doubted Heero had the capability to become a wreck, that's the kind of thing you see on those soap operas. Really fake stuff, I'm surprised they passed actor school at all. Heero, would become, and to my knowledge was already becoming…a ghost.
"…Heero! It's only 4 am!"
I had suddenly spotted the clock pinned up on the wall, and gawked at it for a few seconds at reading off the information it displayed.
"Early start," Heero excused himself, swiftly tidying his bed up with swiftness I could only dream to achieve.
I heaved an exasperated sigh and flung myself onto my messed up bed, too awake to go back to any remote of dormancy, but too tired to stay awake. Four am. Yeah, an early start. A four hour early start to be more precise, classes started at eight as far as I could recollect from the information given to me the night before in short snappy sentences as he typed away at his laptop. I stared up at the gentle light from the nightstand lamp and bathroom playing across the high ceiling, wondering if I could will myself to go back to sleep again.
And that's when the lights died.
Everything was pitch black, save the patch of dark blue and a few lone stars outside. I could see, nothing. Not even my hand in front of my face as I fumbled my way through the tangle of covers that had somehow build up around my feet.
"Urgh…NICE time to have a blackout…Heero? You there?" I called out into the darkness of the room, only to receive not reply.
"Heero?"
A small snatch of someone giggling echoed from outside. It seemed to fill the air, carried on the cold wind that constantly wound its way across the sky. It faded to silence again in a second.
"Heero?…eh…is that you?"
A soft voice floated through the breeze once more, and had voice been something solid I'd be sure it would've been translucent.
Mary…Come here Mary…Mary…I stumbled towards the window in a hurry, looking outside. Nothing. I could see nothing through the thick woodland beneath me; nothing in the sky…there was nothing.
Are you lost…lost…lost…Another snatch of young girls laughter echoed eerily, before fading. I strained my eyes, but still no image appeared to explain the odd sounds that I now knew wasn't coming from Heero.
Here…this is for you…
Another supernatural echo of laughter, the soft bark of a dog, all drawn out, stressing the floaty-ness surrounding the voices, and it stopped. The sounds that had so suddenly accompanied the darkness disappeared just as abruptly into it. There was only one word to describe it, and that word was, disturbing.
Very disturbing.
Standing there in a perplexed state, I stared outside the large window. The wind had died down again, and everything was peacefully quiet. With the actual 'peacefulness' suddenly ripped out of it to leave only the hush. I drew back from the window into the silence of the cavernous room, fumbling around in the bags for a flashlight. A few minutes of searching and I pulled the tool out, flicking it on.
"Heero? Where are ya?" I directed the small torch at all corners of the room, blinking slightly in the dazzling light issuing from it, adjusting my eyes to the change in luminosity. The room being large was quickly getting annoying as I searched for any sign of Heero. I couldn't find him.
Instead, the circle of bright torchlight fell on a withered little flower on the floor. A flower, here, of all places. The only reason I paused for a second to look at it was that it stuck out oddly on the dull floor. Its yellowish whiteness was fading quickly, being replaced by dark flecking of brown. The dying stem and leaves sagged onto the floor, having its life drained as I watched, unblinking.
A short drawing in of breath was heard from a few meters behind the flower. The yellowish radiance of my torch directed immediately to the source.
"I didn't mean to…"
"I didn't mean to kill her…"
"I didn't…"
Heero, sitting with his back flat against the wall, as if he wanted to disappear into it. His eyes were wide and dead, the kind of look that appears on ones face after a huge shock. And dry. Painfully dry. His hands were clawing anxiously the floor beneath them. The rings and etched lines of exhaustion and horror were etched clearer than ever on his face in the dim light.
"Heero…" was all I managed to say, staring incredulously, confused at a Heero who looked just as dead as the wilting flora still decaying rapidly a few meters from him. He slowly turned his head to direct that dead expression at me. His hands abruptly ceased their assault on the floor, and his breathing fell still. He stared at me, through that void appearance of mind, for a few seconds. If I hadn't known better, I could have sworn he'd died at thought, yet the flesh was still living. His lips parted and a quiet, deadly calm whisper escaped him.
"I didn't mean to…"
And the battery in the flashlight exhausted it's energy, and we were both bathed in darkness. I dropped it sharply to the floor, where the plastic shattered against the stone. Only one monotonous thought could run through my mind as the image of Heero, scared beyond his ability to comprehend as it appeared, sifted through.
This isn't real…A/N: O_o;;; Umm…Review? o.O That was an odd chapter…yes indeedy it was…^^;;