Coming down

The world turned over

Cos angels fall without you there

And I go on as you get colder

Or are you someone's prayer?

            -Black Balloons, Goo Goo Dolls

They faced off grimly, neither boy ready to give in. Cobalt eyes glared into violet, both sets unblinking and angry and unwilling to be the first to look away. The hallway around them was empty except for the two young Gundam pilots; the other three had left the safehouse they were currently in to check on their Gundams.

The words Duo had spoken hung in the air like edged weapons, ready to cut once you held them. Heero was the first to break the taut silence.

He said, very flatly, "Duo, there is nothing wrong with me."

"Don't give me that!" Duo snapped, worry making his normally-jovial voice sharp. "I've been watching you; there's no other reason you'd act the way you do…"

"Which is?"

"You go around with bloodshot eyes, as if you don't sleep. Your sortie rate in Wing went up, but you're doing just the same during sims, and you always look like you're about to black out after using your Gundam. And you're growing paler and thinner - not much, but enough to see…if you look for it…" Duo said, softly, looking Heero in the eye.

Heero returned his wary, challenging gaze, and asked, "How do you know how to look for it, then?" His voice was sarcastic, more to show his contempt of Duo's opinions then to get a reply, but Duo answered him anyway.

"I…I grew up on the streets, Heero, you know that. And I saw my friends start to act like you did…maybe because of a girl, or of a missing friend, or maybe it was just living on the edge of society that got to them…but then, after a while, they'd die. Always, they'd die. Because no human can stand up to that type of destruction for long…not even you, Mr Perfect Soldier. You're doing the same thing they did, and you'll die the same way too…because of what you're doing to yourself…"

"And what am I doing to myself?" This was said in a tone as if whatever Duo said would be far off the mark, but Duo forged on. He'd seen it too many times to be wrong.

"You're taking stimulants before you go out to fight in Wing Zero," he breathed, a cold feeling settling in his stomach as he did so. He'd thought about it, he was sure of it, but it wasn't until he actually said the words out loud that the grimness of the situation hit him…hit him like a blow to the head. What had happened to Heero, the coldest, strongest one of all the five - the pinnacle to whom the others looked for inspiration, however unconsciously - what had happened to him to make him turn to chemical courage to supplement his own? If he fell, they'd lose their pillar - their Heart of the Universe, as Quatre would have said - and if he fell, what was to keep the others from falling too? Duo held back a shudder as the implications of his accusation hit him.

Heero, however, did not seem very impressed. "For the last time, Duo - I AM NOT A JUNKIE. Get the idea out of your twisted little mind," he told Duo dismissively, an annoyingly superior expression on his face. He spun around sharply on his heel, every bit the soldier doing the about-face and putting the other boy out of mind.

Duo stared angrily at Heero's receding back as the Japanese pilot walked away.

***

Heero walked through the hallways of the safehouse, careful to keep his back straight and his steps unhurried. He could feel Duo's angry eyes on him. And after that accusation, he couldn't afford to let Duo see any signs of weakness, his usual need for concealment made even greater than usual.

He finally reached his room. Keying in the unlock code with only slightly shaking hands, he stepped inside. The door silently slid closed behind him. The room was dark, without even the dim illumination of moon or stars - it was a cloudy night. It fit Heero's frame of mind perfectly.

He stood very still for a long moment, his dark blue eyes flickering over the few objects in his room without actually seeing anything. Then, heaving a shuddery breath, Heero slumped against the steel door, sliding down to end up seated on the cold floor, hugging his knees to his chest. He rested his forehead on the top of his knees - finally, in the solitude of his room, allowing himself to give into his weariness.

He thought he'd hidden the strain he was under, but Duo proved he hadn't quite succeeded. He closed his eyes briefly. One more problem he didn't need. Now, on top of everything else, he had to keep Duo from becoming suspicious enough to tell anyone else.

The trouble was, Heero didn't quite know how he'd do that. He couldn't explain why these things were happening to him…explain why? Hell, he wasn't even sure what was happening to him.

There was his behavior with Wing Zero. It had, for the last two or three weeks, followed a very specific pattern: Take off. Fight. Black out. Wake up as Wing Zero lands in the hangar and the mechanics rush to help him out and tell him how well he'd fought.

The ferocity and accuracy of his attacks when he 'blanked' seemed to increase, rather his Gundam faltering in the air, so Heero thought it probably wasn't a real faint. More probably it was an extremely focused battle rage…a bit like how the ZERO system would have worked, if all traces of that program hadn't been purged from the face of Earth and Colonies. But this rationalization, though Heero tried hard to accept it, didn't ring quite true. If it was battle rage, why was his memory of it wiped out so completely? He would have thought he'd have, at least, a few snatches of memory. And further - why was it happening to him so often?

And then there were the dreams. Now, Heero's education had not included dreams. He did not make a point of analyzing his dreams, nor of talking to others about their own, so he hadn't any idea of what a 'normal' dream should be like. All he knew was that these dreams were different than any he'd ever had before. They were surprisingly clear and followed a linear sequence, rather than being disjointed and jumping around from one point to another. Unlike his other dreams, these did not fade away as he awoke, but remained sharp and distinct and unfragmented in his memory, appearing whole in his mind anytime he chose to call it up.

Heero was a great believer in the virtues of data analysis, and took advantage of this unusual clarity of dream to enter an account of each dream into a file in his computer. Slowly, couched in the brief, efficient phrases Heero wrote in, the overall story began to take shape.

It involved two young people, barely more than Heero's age - a dark-haired boy and a girl with short, light brown hair. Heero hardly ever saw their faces, but he remembered that, once, he'd seen the girl's green eyes…a green that haunted his thoughts for days after he had the dream. There were other people in his dreams too, ranging from a normal-seeming although unusually handsome blond swordsman to wolf-men and cat-girls.

They were in a world made restless by war and invasion. The land they'd been in had been burned to the ground by the enemy, and the two had escaped on a white dragon. The white dragon figured prominently in almost every dream, though sometimes the dragon was not a dragon but a large armored figure. The enemy was an empire, but was personified in a coldly calculating man, connected to the boy in some deep, unfathomable way; in a silver-haired youth who hunted the two…and in the burning of a city.

Having these dreams had their toll on Heero's body. On the nights he had them, he awoke the next morning feeling even more tired than before he had slept…as if his body was subject to the rigors the people in the dream experienced, as if he had lived the dream himself. And the dreams had been coming every night, now. Actually, it was surprising that Duo was the only one who had noticed.

Heero sighed, and got to his feet. Stripping off his tanktop and jeans, he collapsed onto his bedroll. There was a perfectly good - actually more than good, more like sinfully luxurious - four-poster bed in the room, but night after night Heero scorned it, preferring to use a simple futon. No matter how much Quatre pleaded and tried to insist that it would be better for his back, Heero never slept there. The only concession he would make was using a pillow. The others looked upon the matter with wry amusement at Heero's stubbornness. Wufei, seeming to feel as though Heero was challenging him, even though Heero had not said anything to the other Asian boy, had recently dragged in his own bedroll and now Quatre had two teammates to convince.

A small smile flickered over Heero's face at the memory of Quatre's earnest efforts, the first smile on his face for a long time. The smile was brief, a candle-flame flashing in the darkness only to be blown out almost immediately, and he slipped back into his dreams with a marble-cold face.

'We're going to report at Preventers HQ next week,' he thought. 'Sally will be there. Maybe she can give me something so I don't look so bad that Duo starts getting paranoid. Until then…' he shrugged. No need to worry. Tomorrow they'd have a mission, and this matter of the mysterious battle rage was a more pressing issue. He needed his rest. Not that he'd get any if the dreams came again…

***

Hitomi van Fanel clung tightly to her husband, tears leaking from her green eyes. Van could do little else but stroke his wife's shoulder-length hair, whispering into her ear. This inability to help his wife tore at him until he was quite ready to hit something. "I…I had a nightmare, Van," Hitomi told him, gulping in air. "There was a little boy there…and he had a gun. A gun, Van! No one that young should have to touch them!" Van hugged her tighter. According to Hitomi, guns were horrible killing machines from her world, little metal wands that shot out more death and destruction than the Guymelefs ever did. Her horror of them was very real. "And he…he…was killing people. Van, how could a child do that? What could have happened to him to make him like that? Oh Van…" She buried her face into his shoulder, hugging him tighter than he would have expected someone with such slender arms to be able to.

"Shh…shh…" Van soothed her. She got so worked up over things like these. Ever since Rian had disappeared, Hitomi could not bear to see a child maltreated in any way. Normally strong and firm, she broke down into tears at the sight of hungry or sad children. She had been known to break off meetings with foreign diplomats or visiting nobility to attend to little children who wandered into the palace with big tearful eyes. She could too easily see her baby boy in their place. Van pressed a gentle kiss onto Hitomi's temple, noting that her breathing had evened and her eyes were starting to droop closed into slumber.

Thanks to her efforts, Fanelia now had another name aside from the Mountain Kingdom. It was now also known as the Children's Haven, and since young ones were very precious to his people, this had made Van's subjects love their queen all the more. They loved her, and at the same time, they wept for her – for the loss of her little son…

…Riander…

Van gave the now-sleeping Hitomi a last kiss and rolled onto his back. For a long time after Rian had disappeared, he had devoted all his time to searching for his son. If it weren't for the fact that he had recently appointed several civil leaders who were competent, honest, and extremely loyal to him, the country might have fallen into chaos. But as the seasons passed and no sign of Riander ever showed, he reluctantly turned his attention to other matters.

Hitomi had tried to reawaken her dormant psychic powers to scry for him, but was never able to obtain so much as a glimpse. She never accepted his death, maintaining that since they hadn't found a body they couldn't say he was dead.

Caria, little blond Caria, had been destroyed at the loss of her playmate. She hadn't moved from her room for two weeks after she heard the news, worrying her mother and father immensely aside from the loss of Riander. She was sure that it was all her fault, as the Fanelian royals had been traveling to attend her birthday party, that Riander was lost. They were very careful never to mention Rian's name around the now-sixteen-year-old princess; the look of self-hatred that sprang up whenever they did so was too intense to bear.

Chid had also been distraught at the loss of one he called brother, but he had showed exceptional strength in the days following Riander's disappearance. More than anyone would have expected from someone of his young age, he served as a pillar of calm amidst the emotional storm after the tragedy, calming his 'uncles' Van and Allen down as they stalked around looking enraged or helping Dryden organize everything.

No one knew how he cried himself to sleep at night…no one except Hitomi, who had come in unexpectedly one night. He had hurriedly attempted to stop his tears, but Hitomi had merely smiled sadly at him and told him it was okay to cry…she knew how he felt. She hugged him and he sobbed into her shoulder. She had never spoken of it, but he noticed Allen hanging around close to him after, rather like an overprotective nanny - no doubt on Hitomi's orders.

As for Allen himself, he was now roaming around the world, traveling from place to place like dust blown on the wind, returning to Asturia only infrequently. And wherever he went, a few questions about new little boys appearing anywhere nearby were sure to be asked. Merle was doing the same thing, but had restricted her roaming to Fanelia, in order to be near her Van-sama.

Van sighed. Even now, ten years since he'd seen his little boy, he could call up the memory of his face as easily as if it had only been a day since he'd seen him, not one decade. The face so like his own…dark blue eyes gazing into his own with such love and trust…dark hair that fell over his forehead almost exactly like Van's did, much to Hitomi's delight - he could still see them, etched so clearly into his mind.

He could see them, real as life, as the trust in those blue eyes turned to disappointment and betrayal…could see Rian's face scrunch up in that way it always did when he cried, as he cried now…could hear that high, piping voice ask in a tone choked with tears, "Why, daddy? Why didn't you find me?"

He saw it in his dreams, the nightmares he didn't tell Hitomi about. It was the one secret he kept from her, and one he was determined she never find out.

***

AN: I'm done! I'm done! Yaaay! (grin)

A note on the current situation of the Gundam pilots: It's after EW, but I took the liberty of changing the plotline a bit, in that the Gundams weren't destroyed. Rather, they were pressed into service as the Mobile Suit corps of Preventers, and their pilots remained as such.

Because they were so much more powerful than anything else in the world, and their pilots so high in skill, Preventers retained their service in suppressing any problems dealing with Mobile Suits. They have also managed to get Zechs Peacecraft to join in. He will be returning from Mars, accompanied by Lucrezia Noin, to reclaim their Preventer titles of Wind and Fire. Tallgeese III has been rebuilt and is waiting for him.

The Gundams are equipped with remote self-destruction devices that could be triggered from Preventers HQ as a safeguard. Also, modifications that could have made the Gundams stronger have not been put into effect, as their current strength level is sufficient for Preventer purposes. Because so few rebel groups have access to Mobile Suits, there are few calls for the Gundams to intervene.

When unneeded to pilot the Gundams, Quatre oversees his company, using an office in Geneva, Earth, near Preventers HQ. Duo leaves to help Hilde with her scrapyard on L2. Trowa travels around with the circus, now a profitable outfit that is widely known. All three have access to 24-hour-prepped shuttles and flash-status clearances for all spaceports, so they can be at Preventers HQ within two hours of receiving any call.

Heero and Wufei are the only ones who are Preventers full-time, Wufei serving as Sally Po's partner and Heero being an operative of Preventers' newly formed (thanks to a budget increase from the President) Intelligence branch – being the equivalent of the CIA to Preventers' Interpol.

(looks up at paragraph and blinks) Jeez, I was just going to type a few short sentences-look what turned out. Oh well. Ja ne, minna, and please please please give feedback! Onegai? (puppy-dog eyes)