The Horrors of the Past

by KatiKat


Une paced back and forth in her office, her face strained with worry, in her hand was clutched a small disc in its plastic sheath. If she could just turn back time. If she had never seen what was on the small disc they found during their raid. If she could just...

There was a knock on the door. Une stopped her pacing and faced the door. With a whispered "come in", she invited the person in. The sun disappeared behind the horizon already and her room was getting dark quickly. But she didn´t turn on the light. She didn´t know if she would be able to do what she intended should she look the boy in the eye.

"You wanted to see me?" Heero asked as he closed the door behind him.

He frowned in the darkness of the room. Her call came unexpectedly. The raid went down fine, they caught the goons and no one was injured. There was no obvious reason for this late meeting. Sudden changes of routine always made him nervous.

"Yes, I did, Heero," she answered quietly. She breathed deeply, rubbing her sweaty hand against her skirt to dry it. Seeing Heero look at her with expectation, she coughed nervously and taking a deep breath, she decided she couldn´t put it off any longer. She extended her hand holding the disc to Heero. "We found this in the warehouse. It was among all the other discs there but... I decided to keep it out of the evidence."

Heero took the disc from her and his frown deepened. He looked down at the small piece of plastic wondering about the contents of the innocent looking thing. He had never seen Une withhold evidence. She went strictly by the book in everything. So her decision to hide the disc was... shocking at least.

"Why?" he asked, raising his eyes to the figure that was almost invisible in the dimness of the room.

Une tugged at her skirt nervously. God, she hadn´t been that nervous since she had been a young girl. "Heero, I think you should look at it. If you then decide to put it back, I´ll respect your decision. But I just thought that there was no reason for anybody else to see it."

Heero blinked. He didn´t know what he should think about it. He had never seen Une nervous or fidgeting. But she was doing both now and that worried him. Maybe looking at the disc will give him some answers.

"Okay," he said. "Is that all?"

"Yes, you can go now," she answered, watching Heero´s silhouette bow respectfully and leave the room with a light click of the door. She sagged down in her armchair, laying her head back and closing her eyes tightly. Now it was out of her hands. For once she was relieved about not being the one to make a decision.

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

Heero shut the recorder off with a shaking hand. He leaned back in his chair, but his posture was anything but relaxed. He gripped the handles of his chair tightly, his knuckles going white with the strain. Oh god, oh god, oh god... the two words repeated themselves in his mind like a mantra. He could feel the sweat run down his forehead. Oh god, he was going to be sick.

With that thought he jumped out of the chair, and tearing the door of his small office open, he flew down the corridor to where the restroom was. Then, in one of the stalls he threw up everything he ate that day. He retched for quite a while even though there wasn´t anything left in his stomach. His throat was burning and there were tears running down his cheeks. And before he realized it he sat there in stall on the floor and sobbed like a little child.

Oh god, oh god, oh god... But obviously there was no God out there. If there was one, none of what he had seen would have happened. Nothing...

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

Heero arrived at home an hour later, his steps on the stairs just as heavy as his heart. He unlocked the door and stepped in locking it again behind him. The smell of a delicious dinner bid him welcome in the hall. He slipped out of his shoes, pulling on the fluffy slippers Duo had given him last Christmas.

Duo peeked out of the kitchen, greeting him with a broad grin before he disappeared again. "Hey, babe. Dinner will be in five. You have just enough time to wash. I started to worry when you didn´t call. It´s pretty late already."

Heero took off his coat and hung it up. He chided himself for forgetting to call his husband. He knew that Duo worried a lot about him since the violet eyed young man wasn´t an active agent anymore. He now had a nine to five job at the Academy, showing the future agents how to blow things up or disarm a bomb with a hair pin. With a shattered knee cap, there was no way for him to remain in active duty. The limp was still there even after all those months and on bad days he even had to use a cane to prevent the injured limb from overstraining itself.

Getting no response from his husband, Duo walked out of the kitchen with two plates in his hand. He looked at Heero with worry etched on his face. The worry deepened when he saw the slumped shoulders, the pale complexion and red rimmed eyes.

"What´s wrong, Heero?" he asked in a whisper. He was sure it was nothing good. "Did the raid go bad?"

Heero sighed and stuffed his right hand into his pocket where he fingered the cursed disc. He closed his eyes for just a second before looking Duo straight in the eye. "No, no... the raid went down just fine. We got the bad guys and nobody was hurt," he answered in the same hushed voice.

"But something is wrong. I can feel it. Something happened and it hit you really hard... Heero? Talk to me." Duo cocked his head to the side when he saw Heero´s body tense up. That was not good.

Heero swallowed painfully and gathering his courage he said, his voice hoarse: "We found something in the warehouse where we caught them. A disc." He pulled the little innocent looking thing out of his pocket and showed it to Duo.

The braided young man looked at the disc and then his eyes met Heero´s again. He could see that Heero was fighting with what he needed to say, but Duo didn´t rush him. He knew that some things couldn´t be rushed.

"There is child pornography on it." His voice was rough as he pushed the words through his constricted throat. He saw Duo pale visibly. In the light streaming from the kitchen Heero could see that his husband started to shake. His eyes grew huge and there was this deer caught in headlights expression in them. Heero was sure that Duo knew what would come now. "You are on it," he whispered.

The plates crashed to the ground, falling from suddenly limp fingers, shattering into tousand pieces. Duo was now white as a sheet and he was gasping for air as the claws of a full blown panic attack buried themselves in his lungs, allowing no air to get in. Heero cursed and pushing the disc back into his pocket he rushed over to Duo who was now bent at the waist, his hands propped on his knees as he desperately tried to pull some air into his lungs.

"Easy, easy, koi," he whispered as he rubbed his husband´s back in a soothing motion. When the worst of the attack was over he helped Duo to straighten, feeling the braided boy lean into him heavily as his knees gave up on him. "I´ve got you. Shhhh, I´ve got you." He took Duo in his arms, not wanting the American to hurt his sock clad feet on the sharp shards of the plates. Duo clutched the jacket of his Preventer uniform desperately, hiding his face in Heero´s shoulder.

Heero carried his lover to the living room, and depositing him carefully on the couch, he sat down next to him and pulled him into his lap. He hugged him tightly to his chest, kissing the top of his head as the boy curled up still hiding his face from his husband.

"It´s okay. It´s over. It´s over. It´s okay," Heero repeated soothingly, rocking back and forth just a little.

After what seemed like a small eternity he could feel Duo relax just a notch uncoiling his tight, almost fetal position on his lap. "How much did you see?" he asked in a hoarse voice, still not raising his head from where he laid it on Heero´s chest.

"Not much," Heero reassured him as he rubbed his arm. "The first five, maybe ten minutes. At first I didn´t realize it was you. You don´t have any pictures of yourself from that time. But when I realized who the boy actually was and turned it off. I couldn´t watch it anymore. I couldn´t watch them hurting you in such a terrible way."

Duo remained silent for a long while before speaking again. "How... how many people... saw it?"

Heero felt his heart break, hearing the broken desperate voice of his lover who was so cheerful just minutes ago. "Une and probably Noin. She was responsible for the evidence on site. No one else I think. Une had been able to snatch the disc from the evidence before they were able to file it."

Duo seemed to relax another notch hearing that. He took in a deep and shaky breath. "You want to know what happened, huh?"

Heero shook his head. "No. I just thought you had the right to know. But if you want to talk about it, I am here and will listen, koi." Duo had his unwavering support no matter what. Nothing had changed for Heero. He still loved Duo more than his life. Maybe even more now that he know just how difficult Duo´s life had been and that he had still grown up into a loving, happy person.

Duo fell silent again, but he was now totally relaxed in his husband´s loving embrace. "It was after the Church massacre," Duo said finally in a very quiet and far away voice. He kept tracing circles with his index finger on Heero´s chest. "After what happened I was totally numb. I was running on auto pilot. Eating, sleeping... nothing was important anymore. I had lost everything I loved in the world... It was easy to snatch me away. They did it on the street... in the light of the day... and nobody helped me. Things like that happened often on L2. Nobody was paying attention to it anymore. They put me in a big black car, a van I think. They must have drugged me because the next thing I remember was waking up in some warehouse. I was naked and tied to a bed. There were two men setting up the cameras and the lights and they laughed when I screamed for help, said that I was going to be a star."

Heero could feel Duo starting to shake again. With every word the tremor running through his body grew stronger and stronger. "I didn´t know what they meant. I was a kid!" Duo sobbed, his tears soaking Heero´s jacket, but Heero didn´t mind. "It hurt so much... I thought I was going to die... I wanted to die."

Hearing the last statement Heero´s hold tightened. Oh god, he could have lost the only good thing in his life before he even got to know him. That thought frightened him more than anything. He couldn´t even imagine how hollow and empty his life would be.

"After they were finished with me, they locked me in a small room in the back of the warehouse. I could hear them laugh, and talk about how much money I would bring them."

"How did you get out?" Heero asked desperately, not wanting for Duo to have to relive everything again. From what was written on the cover of the disc there were 10 "sessions" with the "violet eyed beauty" as they called him. He knew that it was too much to talk or think about at once. Even the little that Duo told him would cause nightmares for both of them for the next year.

"I picked the lock with my hair pin," answered Duo quietly. The shaking lessened a little now that Heero´s question allowed him to skip the really bad part. The part that he prayed to forget. "I found the men sleeping in the room next to mine."

Heero swallowed. Somehow he feared to hear about what happened next, but he needed to ask. "What did you do?"

Duo uncurled from his position and looked Heero straight in the eyes. Heere had never seen so much poisonous hate in the violet pools. "I locked them in and set the warehouse on fire," he said, his voice sharp with rage. "Then I stood there and watched as it burned. I could hear them scream, but I didn´t care. I stayed there until the whole building crashed in on itself. Then I ran away." The last words sounded hollow, cold and lonely. Duo´s shoulders slumped and he leaned against Heero once again. "Do you hate me now?" the braided boy asked in a small voice.

Heero was shocked. Hate him? "No, of course not, koi. I love you. I admire you."

"Admire?" Duo pulled away again and looked at Heero. His eyes were swimming in salty water and there was so much despair in them. "I killed them. In cold blood. I stood there and watched them die in the most painful of deaths!"

Heero nodded, his eyes cold. "Good. If you haven´t done it back then, I would have killed them now myself. Much more slowly and painfully. They would have begged me to kill them!" It was Heero who was shaking now - with cold rage.

Duo stared at him looking stunned. "You would really do that? For me?"

He sounded so surprised that it took Heero´s breath away once again. He hugged Duo tightly. "Of course I would, koi. I won´t allow anybody to hurt you like that. You are the most important thing in the world to me."

Tentatively Duo´s arms snaked around his waist and hugged him just as tightly. He finally understood. Heero won´t leave him. No matter what. The last bit of fear he carried in his heart disappeared. "Someone must have come for the tape they made," Duo whispered. "How many copies of... IT could be out there, Heero?" His question was reluctant, as if he actually didn´t want to know.

Heero sighed heavily. "I won´t lie to you, koi. There could be only this one disc. Or there could be thousands of copies. I really don´t know. And I don´t think in it´s in my or anyone´s power to find them all."

Duo nodded slowly. Heero´s words only confirmed what he already knew. "I understand..."

The disc digging into his tight reminded Heero of its existence. He needed to ask one last question. "What about this disc? What should I do with it?"

Duo´s breath hitched and he clung even more tightly to Heero. "I would like to get rid of it. To destroy at least this piece. But... it wouldn´t help anybody and I wouldn´t feel any better anyway..." He released Heero and pulled away, laying his hands on Heero´s chest. "I want you to take it back. Maybe it´ll help the Preventers to find out its origin."

"But maybe it won´t..." Heero hated the thought of other people watching... IT.

"You can´t know it if you don´t try. And it could... help..."

Heero nodded, clutching Duo against his chest. He knew that Duo was as reluctant as him to bring the piece of evidence back. But he was right. It could help them to find something, that would allow them rescue other children... There were so many of them...

Heero hugged his husband fiercely. But at least this child was safe now. He would take care of everything...


The End.