Coming Through the Rye

by Link Worshiper

A lonely and depressed Heero has found his way back to school, unsure of what point life has for him anymore now that Duo has vanished into thin air. But then an odd Preventers agent who knows way more than she should about Duo crashes into his life. 1x2

7. For Your Eyes Only

Coming Through the Rye

By Shannon the Twisted Link Worshiper

~ Part VII ~

For Your Eyes Only

A loud cracking noise roused Sora from her sleep. Groggily sitting up, she felt around for her glasses and glanced around her dorm room, looking for the disturbance. All that her roaming eyes found was her roommate curled up on her bed on the other side of the room. A dim glow spread out from the partially opened bathroom door, mutedly illuminating the dormitory in fair order, her belongings right where she had left them the night before, untouched.

Crack!

The sound rang through the room again. This time the fiery haired girl was able to trace it to the grounds just outside their open window. She pulled herself across the room to the window and peered out over the baseball diamond that stretched out before her. She could barely make out the dark silhouette of a figure standing on home plate, a small pile of baseballs sitting at his feet. He was alone, tossing balls up in the air for himself, quick enough to respond to the pitch by whipping the bat around and smacking the balls as the fell back to Earth deep into deep left field.

Snap!

This time the bat shattered with the force with which he swung as the ball connected with the wood. She watched him curse himself before throwing the useless bat away, not even bothering to see where it landed. Then he disappeared into the dugout and came back out carrying another wooden bat and was soon back at striking the balls forcibly into the faint orangey sunrise ahead.

Crack! Crack, crack, crack!

She did not even have to think about who the identity of the person was. She could tell by his build and the shadowy wisps of his short hair billowing about in the crisp morning air, fresh sunlight highlighting his brown locks ever so often as his body twisted with each swing that it was none other than the infamous Heero Yuy. Checking to make sure her roommate was still dormant, she slid into a pair of heavy woolen pajama pants and threw on her jacket, slinking out the door as quietly as she could as she hurried to the baseball diamond, padding down the hall and quickly sneaking down the back stairs. It was against the school's policy to be out after curfew and before the morning wakeup bell; being caught probably would have resulted in at least a suspension to say the least. Not that such a threat mattered to anyone since many of the students seemed to find the nighttime hours most convenient for whatever agendas they had.

"What the hell are you doing up so bright and early, Yuy!" she called as she stepped out of the building and made her way over to the field. He looked up briefly, noticed her presence and then immediately went back to his batting practice without a word. She made her way into the rows of empty bleachers and sat down to just watch him. Now that she had come closer and was able to make out the expression on her friend's face, she was able to tell that there was something wrong; that there was a reason he was up so early sending balls flying into the outfield with such fervor. But even minutes of silence were beginning to kill her curiosity slowly, and she found that her voice was speaking again without her even realizing it. "Hey Heero, you're pretty good at that! You should join the baseball team this spring! Tryouts are soon, you know."

He stopped, dropping the bat to his side as he watched his last hit sail out over the fence, probably never to be seen again. Realizing that he had run out of baseballs, he tossed the bat aside and started to walk off, thought better of it and made his way up to the bleachers to sit a few rows ahead of Sora. He acted like he was doing so just because he had nothing better to do, his body language slack and distant, though the tone in his voice when he spoke most certainly dictated otherwise. "They say I'm good at most things."

"Huh, it sure must be nice being so good at everything." She paused and let out a small sigh. "Oh I wish I could be good at a few things here and there. You can play baseball, and you're the best in school, the top of all your classes. What can't you do?"

"You'd be really surprised," Heero mumbled to himself, reclining back on the bleacher behind him. "That was just a bit of good old fashioned stress relief, though I really don't think it did much for me anyway."

"Well, you don't have very good people skills, if that's what you mean," Sora said thoughtfully, her finger caressing her lower lip as she spoke. Heero peeked over his shoulder, and the saddened look Sora caught flying her way caused her to stutter over a quick amendment. "I mean, you're getting better and all. Me and Hoshi and D.B. all like you just fine the way you are. That's not to say there isn't room for improvement." She tried to laugh at the attempt to cheer the atmosphere, but it fell flat.

"If you say so," he turned back around, his eyes back on the gradually rising sun painting the morning cerulean blue horizon with oranges, pinks and reds.

"Well it's true!" Sora exclaimed, sliding down a few benches so she was sitting next to Heero. He slid down the bleacher, trying to get out of the reach of Sora's hand as she tried to lay a warming hand on his shoulder. "Heero! You're not going to get anywhere if you keep running away!"

"Running away?" Heero was suddenly hooked. He had never looked at it that way. All these years he had been so busy pitying himself and mourning for Duo that he had never really stopped to think about what he could possibly do about his problems. He had let himself slip into depression, frustration and an inability to live beginning to nibble away at him slowly.

"It's funny though, because you really don't strike me as someone who would run away. You seem very strong and brave to me," Sora assured him, clenching her fists tightly together. "Heero, what do you have to be afraid of?"

"Myself! It's all me!" His sudden explosion of passion surprised Sora as he abruptly turned to face her, gliding back down the bench so he could grab her by the shoulders. He looked desperately at her, his face coloured with more emotion than Sora could ever remember seeing in her time knowing him. "I'm running from myself, Sora! I can't stop reminding myself of my own mistakes."

"Well if you've made mistakes, you can just unmake them," Sora told him determinedly. She gave him an encouraging punch on the shoulder. "You can't just go on moping about stuff you did once a long time ago. You've got a whole damn life to live and wishing that you had done this and that is not going to get you anywhere fast!"

"It's not that easy, Sora!" he cried. He let his heavy breaths calm before he said in a more controlled voice, "It's not that easy to say I'm sorry!"

"It's plenty easy to say sorry. What's hard is meaning you're sorry," she answered, folding her hands in her lap. "Like D.B and me, well, we're good friends. We've been really good friends for a long time but you know, we've always been fighting each other. He'll say one thing and I'll say another; next thing you know, we're arguing again. I mean, sometimes we get at each other really bad, but it's not like we never get over it. Sometimes we even forget what we're fighting over and we're all good again. He knows that I don't really mean anything I do."

"No, no it's not like that at all," Heero was shaking his head. "It's not that easy for me. The person I hurt is gone… gone and never coming back. All I have left is regret."

"What did you even do to Duo anyway, Heero?" Sora knew exactly what was at the heart of the issue, though the details still eluding her. After listening to Heero a few times, she was able to get a good handle on the things that usually floated around inside his head. Her interest in Heero's psyche was starting to kill her. She wanted to help him; she hated seeing that sad look on his face all the time. "You hurt him or something?"

"In a way," Heero shrugged. "It's like he thinks that I used him and lied to him."

"Well then the question is, did you?"

"I don't know!" Heero clutched his head and buried his face in his palms as if he were trying to force his tears back into his eyes. "But I feel like that's why he hasn't come to me in years. After the war, I told him he needed to find a real life away from me, because I couldn't give him what he needed. He was convinced that he wasn't good enough for me. It didn't help that I didn't think that I was worthy of him either."

"So what did you do? You didn't actually let him go, did you? How fucked could one person be?"

Heero shrugged, "His friend Hilde runs a good business and they're pretty close and all so I told him to stay with her."

"You…" Sora trailed off, raising her fist as she clenched it tightly and fell silent before she swiftly reeled it back and slapped him across the cheek, shouting; "You… idiot!"

"You don't have to remind me that I'm so stupid," Heero growled angrily at her. "They say you don't really know what you've got until you say goodbye. I'm beginning to think that's really true."

"Only beginning to think so?" Sora raised a skeptical eyebrow.

"Only beginning to know so. I always thought so," Heero snapped hastily. Either he was not a morning person or he was really having some emotional unrest. Honestly, Sora strongly suspected the latter as opposed to the former.

"So tell me about it. I mean, smacking baseballs over the fence at the crack of dawn only does so much," Sora tried to warm up to him. She wanted to coax him in to a sense of comfort, so he could just talk out his emotions instead of keeping them bottled up tight inside.

"It still kind of hurts to talk about it."

"So you did do something to him," Sora frowned. She was trying so hard not to, but there were times when she just could not help but be on the offensive. "It's no wonder he's not spoken to you in years!"

"He has every right not to and yet…." Heero tried to start again, but his words were becoming as confused and muddled as his thoughts were. "…. And yet…. It's kind of hard to explain it. I mean… afterwards, he… he forgave me. It was still quite some time until he went away. Do you think he held a grudge for all that time?"

"What makes you think that he would?" she asked. "Weren't you close?"

"Extremely," Heero barked, on guard once again. "But he had this way of pretending like it's all okay, smiling all the time, joking and laughing like he didn't have a care in the world when on the inside he was crying. He could even hide it from me."

"You wear a mask too, Heero," Sora said quietly. She knew he would probably get irritated again and snap at her, and her prediction was not wrong at all.

"I have good reason to! Everyone has their reasons! I'm sure he had his!" His shoulders heaved with each longwinded breath as he spoke with an obstinacy of his own. She could see him physically start to break down as his emotions flooded free of his heart's prison. "Maybe he was afraid I would hurt him… again…." There was no mistaking the sobs in his choked up voice. "…Maybe he lied again to save me."

"Oh, now you're crying. You're crying Heero!" Sora pulled her sleeve over her fingers and used the cloth-covered digits to wipe the tears from his eyes, the other arm embracing him in a friendly hug. "It's okay. Cry hard."

"These days it seems I'm always crying. Heh, you know I used to get mad at Duo for crying all the time," he whispered, trying to conceal an ironic chuckle, fighting hard to calm himself down. He could hear the morning bells tolling melodically from the far-off belfry, their deep baritones rolling over the campus from the high bell tower on the other side of the school. "But, you shouldn't see me like this. A girl shouldn't have to watch me be weak."

"You're not being weak, you're being human!" Sora protested. Heero stood and turned his back to her as he began to walk away, that dejected slump hanging in his shoulders. "You don't always have to be so strong for everyone, Heero!" she called out after him. "You don't have to always be the heartless bad ass!" Her calls fell futilely on deaf ears as he sped up his pace, desperate to be alone once more in a quiet corner where he could think more clearly before condemning himself in his usual way.

Sora watched him disappear back into the old school building, the door slamming behind him with a loud crash. As she was about to make her way back up to her room to get ready for classes that day, she noticed that Heero had left his coat lying on the bench. Lifting it up, she found beneath it Hoshi's technical sketchbook. "Now where did he get this I wonder? Hoshi probably let him borrow it or something." She picked it up, looking it over curiously, wondering what Heero could possibly want with a sketchbook full of mecha. She knew he had been a soldier, but these were suits like she had never seen before. They could have been the….

"Oh man, that's it!" The realization dawned upon her. She cracked the book open to get a better more thorough look at it. When Hoshi had first shown it to her, she had gotten naught but a brief glance at a few of the pages. "These are Gundams, the Gundams from the colonies during the war! Hoshi did maintenance on one of these!?" she exclaimed, both excited and a little frightened by the notion at the exact same time.

She returned to the bleacher and sat down again, now avidly leafing through it. "Huh, what's this?" she wondered aloud, reaching a page that was a little reluctant to turn. One side of the paper was adorned with a dark black suit with large bat's wings while the other was covered with pictures of a white suit mounted with great mechanical angel wings. "This page is thicker than the others," she observed keenly, testing the weight of the paper with her forefinger and thumb. She flipped a few pages over, holding her spot at the thick page, just to make sure that she wasn't hallucinating that it was different from the others.

Surprised as she finished flipping, the page landing on a few of those sketches of Heero. "Huh, now that is weird. Who would fill up almost half a sketchbook with drawings of Heero…? Was he… a Gundam pilot? Was that what he did during the war?" she pondered the idea, rolling the possibilities around in her head. "It's plausible, very plausible. I guess this is how Hoshi knew so much about him." Another realization emerged as she thought harder on it. "So worked on one of the Gundams then? So that's why she's so good with her hands and using tools and all. Wow, this is all sort of starting to make a creepy sort of sense."

Returning to the mysterious thick page, she ran her hands over it, trying to figure out just what it was about this paper that was so odd. Then she felt it. She let her hand glide over the creamy white paper again, her fingers running over the same lump in the surface that she had just encountered moments before. "Someone's hiding something in here," she hypothesized, holding the page up again to test its weight. Suddenly wanting to test out a theory that had just formulated in her head, she lifted the book and bent the cover around, holding the thick page out before the bright rising sun. The sunlight shone through, barely illuminating a packet of papers covered in messy scrawl and a few black rectangles that she assumed were photographs, all carefully hidden between the two pages with a bit of paste and ingenuity. "Very clever," she whistled, tucking the book under arm. She would have to make a mad dash if she hoped to make it to class remotely on time, the foremost thought on her mind being the enigmatic character who had stashed his notes or whatever those papers were between the pages of an innocent old sketchbook.

Heero's dormitory was left quiet and forgotten way up there on the attic floor. It was the most solitary room in the entire school, and no one ever really bothered to hike up there for anything, though as of late, the usually forlorn room seemed to be greeted all kinds of strange guests. One in particular always came when no one was looking, when classes were in session or the moon was sailing through the nighttime sky, flanked by the twinkling of the millions of stars. He was mysterious and unfamiliar to the room, and yet he seemed not to be a stranger at all.

"Maybe I should leave you forget-me-nots instead of lilacs," Duo murmured, sitting on the edge of Heero's unmade bed in his empty dormitory. He fingered the petals of a fresh bunch of the purple flowers he had stolen right out of the head master's private garden behind the school. He pulled the old dying bouquet he had left by Heero's bedside in the infirmary from the tall glass on the bedside table Heero had moved them to. "Heh, you do the cutest things sometimes, Hee-chan," Duo said affectionately as he pulled the yellow ribbon still knotted around the withering flowers' stems and retied it in a neat bow on the freshly picked lilacs.

Dropping them with a satisfying kerplunk into the glass, Duo stood up, surveying the room sadly. Heero seemed to have fallen into the terribly out of character habits of one who was seriously depressed. The room was not in the usual neat and organized manner with which Heero used to keep everything way back during the war. The sheets of the bed he used were strewn over the floor along with a mess of clothes and other items. The only things kept in good order were his laptop and the small half-open box filled with Duo's old belongings. He eyed it forlornly, reading the inscription carved on the underside of the lid over again. "Could you believe in heaven, if heaven was all you had?"

"Wish I could be staying here with you instead of hiding out like a fugitive. I don't like seeing you like this all the time… all because of me."

He shook his head, knowing that it was a wish that could not become reality, not for the time being anyway. Standing up, he dug around in his pocket, drawing out a slender bugging device, which he set to hooking up in the corner over Heero's bed. "Just so I can make sure you're not getting into too much trouble when I'm not looking," Duo amended to the empty room, as if to excuse himself for leaving such a prying device behind. He had been planting them all over the school, listening in and watching out for anything suspicious that Cawdor might have been doing behind the world's back. Duo had figured it would not hurt to apply the same technique to Heero.

"Just, just don't let him forget me until I come back to get him," he said to the flowers determinedly as he hopped off the bed, heading for his escape route. Then he quickly slid back out the way he had come, scaling the wall from the open window to the high roof above.

"I hate this class. Thank high heaven he's late," Sora mumbled as she dragged herself into the morning anatomy class. She dumped her books on her desk and slid into her chair beside D.B., who was lost amid the pages of his science text. "And you, I hate you, with all your extra science courses just because you think that"—she put on a mocking whinny voice—"Professor Cawdor is just soooo intelligent and well learned. Please, who fed you that bullshit? I should like anatomy by all accounts and I just can't deal with it because of that damn man!"

"Idiot," D.B. grumbled, inattentively reaching over to punch her in the arm.

"It's just a class. I don't know why you get so worked up about it," Heero commented over his shoulder, his arms crossed moodily over his chest as he waited for the professor to call the class to order. He had not had a very restful night, his mind being too preoccupied with thoughts that need not be said again. Sora had been right about his stress relief session that morning: it could only do so much. He was still tired and upset. And on top of all that, he had misplaced his sketchbook. Goddamn, now I'll not have a chance to figure out for sure who left it for me.

"You never seem to get worked up about anything!" D.B. commented offhandedly as he glanced up from his textbook to give the rest of the class a quick survey. A few paper airplanes were gliding through the air and someone was at the front chalkboard doodling crude drawings of the headmaster and the dean.

"He gets plenty worked up about plenty of things," Sora snapped at D.B. She was obviously not in the best of spirits. First period tended to have that effect of students. "It would be nice if you took the time to notice once in a while!"

"Hey, I notice stuff," D.B. thwacked Sora on the knee with his book before losing himself in his studies again. He made a low comment under his breath, not really intended for any ears other than his own. "You're just too hotheaded to notice."

"Shut up."

"Yes, do," Heero cut in. he had not even turned around as he spoke, but let the tone of his voice say more than his death glare ever could.

"See?" Sora said triumphantly. "You're being a twit."

"You too," Heero snapped in that same tone. Sora immediately quieted herself, realizing that Heero was still in no mood to be social, and spent the next couple minutes brooding and wondering about what could possibly be hidden inside the sketchbook. She sulked a little and then rummaged around in her pocket for the lock-picking kit that Hoshi had given her, pulling out the small blade tucked inside the black leather pouch and quickly used it to slit the two pages in the sketchbook apart. Carefully prying them apart, she fished out the papers and the photos and began to look them over with interest.

Suddenly the door flew open and in swept Professor Cawdor, textbook and briefcase under arm as he silently made his way towards his desk at the front of the room. Students who were not at their seats at this brusque and stony entrance quickly scuffled to their desks and shuffled through their bags to produces notes and books. Cawdor was one of those teachers who kids did not mess with, the sort with a nasty anti-juvenile temper, zero tolerance for anything and found children worth practically nil. He cared for very few of his students, and even then, appreciation of their talent was not all that remarkable. Granted, he was a very intelligent man who knew very much about a great many things, even outside his field of science, but if a child was on his bad side (and that most certainly accounted for nearly all of the student population), he never hesitated to demean and treat him or her as if their lives were trifling and unimportant. He quite frankly could have cared less if one of his students dropped dead right there in the middle of a lecture, so long as it did not cause and problems during the class. A man of his caliber who was obviously sour with his position as a teacher was most likely to act condescending towards most anyone, but it was frightening to have to spend a class period under his eyes, when even the slightest breath out of line would find a child with a week's detention and a flunking grade for discipline and pertinence.

"I would like you all to have last night's assignment ready for me to collect," he began the class in his haughty tone. Perhaps coming from a kinder person, the things he said were not particularly mean, but sometimes it was just the way he said them that made them insulting or hurtful. "I hope you had little trouble with the reading and the comprehension questions. It should not have been hard at all."

As the sound of unzipping bags and flipping notebooks filled the room, the door blasted open once again. This time it was Hoshi who stumbled into the room, her hair a mess and falling free of her hairclip and her face devoid of the usual makeup accents she usually wore, uniform in disarray with mismatched uneven socks, a dirty mud spot streaking the tail of her black blazer. She practically groped her way to the back of the room and fell into the empty chair beside Heero with a heavy sigh. He was watching her curiously, eyeing her with a very indifferent look on his face, masking his thoughts from the world. He could see she had been rushed that morning, probably from oversleeping or a scramble on undone homework. In any case, she looked a wreck and Heero was secretly a bit worried by it. "Sorry Sir," she huffed as she kicked her bag under the table, dropping her homework notebook on the desktop with a loud thwap.

"Miss, I do think you have come to terms with the expectations and regulations for this course," Cawdor glared angrily at the latecomer. "After your embarrassing late entrances into this classroom when you first arrived, well, I had liked to think that you had learned better than to barge in after the bell. It seems I was wrong."

"Wrong about a lot of things," Hoshi muttered under her breath. "You don't seem me complaining."

"What was that?" Cawdor asked, arching an eyebrow as a vicious and cruel grin crossed his face. "Hoshi, if you would care to share with the rest of the class."

"No Sir, I don't think I'd care to," she responded automatically, not even raising her eyes to meet his. She had that tone of biting sarcasm in her voice, not a wise choice when dealing with such a teacher. She even knew he resented such a brogue, all the more reason to speak in such a way.

"I rather think you would," he snapped. "Stand up and repeat what you just muttered under your breath."

"No thank you, Sir!" She did indeed stand, but not because she was asked, but rather because she was so infuriated by the way with which she was being treated. "I don't care to! I don't want to care to! I'll never care to! You've wasted enough time already! Now I'm here for an anatomy class, and I'd like to see that my time was well spent!"

"Insolence is not tolerated very well in this class, Hoshi. If you'll please leave," Cawdor indicated the door. "And then perhaps we'll see how many things I am indeed wrong about. And don't you dare ever show up for my class again looking like… that…." He spat out that last comment with a demeaning glance at her uniform and hair.

As Hoshi gathered her things and walked towards the door, so full of rage that she had not even bothered to look up at the rest of the room. So when she heard Cawdor speak up again, she was quite surprised by what she heard.

"Mister Yuy, I should like to know where you think you're going?" she heard him say. Her hand was on the doorknob as she turned around to see Heero standing right behind her, school bag shouldered and his face set with that stony look that crossed his face whenever he had no mind to change his course of action.

He did not even turn around as he answered, his face still frozen in that dark expression all the while. "I cannot sit through a class where the teacher targets students because he feels he is above them."

"A student should respect the teacher," Cawdor argued, the sound of ire in his voice peaking. The rest of the class was all but cowering beneath their desks. "As head of this classroom, you should obey me without question. I am better than you are."

"Respect should be mutual," Heero said darkly, his trademark icy stare falling over his shoulder as he turned his head ever so slightly. "A student cannot respect a teacher who does not respect him in return. Relationships between two people, whether they are student and teacher, friends or… lovers… cannot exist when there is no respect for one another. I learned that the hard way. What will it take for you to understand that, Professor?"

"If you weren't one of the brightest students to ever wander into this classroom, I would be much less lenient with you than I am being now," Cawdor snapped, tired of fighting a battle he could see he would clearly lose. "Get out, both of you. I shant want to see either of your faces until tomorrow."

The slamming of the door behind them signaled their abrupt exit from the room, and no one dared breath another word about the incident until they were well away from that dangerous class.

"Argh, that man makes me so crazy!" Hoshi ranted when she felt they were a safe distance away, flinging her arms irately over her head. Heero could hear the frustration in her voice as she walked quickly down the hall in short angry steps.

"He is very unkind," Heero commented simply in his drab monotone, watching as Hoshi started pacing around in circles, arms flailing with passion as she got worked up into an aggravated rage against the professor.

"You sure said it!" she cried, her voice rising in volume with passion. "I mean, he's been grilling my ass since the day I transferred in here! God, no other school I've ever been to has had such a nasty teacher! I swear, if he was not so damn erudite in science and all, they would have fired his stupid ass a long time ago! I mean, his methods are totally out of date and he takes a ridiculous unhealthy pleasure in making other people's lives hell. My god, I hope I can get his fucking carcass out of here soon, because if I have to deal with him a second more when there are much more important— "she cut herself off, covering her mouth with her hands, as if she had just said something she really regretted.

"Come again?" Heero asked politely, looking up at her for the first time since she had blundered into the science class late. In all honesty, he had not heard a word she had said, words flying in one ear and out the other, as he had been too busy fretting over his own personal dilemmas to listen to her annoyed outcry.

"I said," she looked flustered for a minute, as she tried to quickly come up with something to replace her slip-up with. She hastily ended up saying: "I said that I was sick and tired of that bastard treating everyone like they're the shit under his boots."

"I think I got that impression," Heero said. "No, I want to hear what you were saying before you just stopped. That bit about getting him out of here? How do you intend to do that?"

She stopped her circling to look at him intently, her face coloured, then pale, then frosted with a look of indifference. "Uh, that was nothing. Just a wish." She laughed so nervously, Heero could tell without a second thought that it was phony.

"And how do you intend to carry out such a wish?" Heero asked with a smug grin on his face, leaning against the wall as he pulled at the thin ribbon of silk tied around his throat. He had her cornered. "You don't seem like one to make idle threats."

"So I got friends I can talk to about it!" she burst out, her voice suddenly raspy and deeper than usual. A curious look crossed both their faces at this, Hoshi's one of embarresment, Heero's one of suspicious interest. She flushed a dark red colour again as she quickly amended. "My voice sometimes cracks like that when I get really mad. People tell me I shouldn't yell so much; it'll put a strain on my vocal cords."

"What, biker buddies?" he asked sardonically, which earned him a dirty glare.

"You have a very strange sense of humour," Hoshi said accusingly as she sunk down to the floor. Heero crossed the hallway and stooped down beside her, looking at her inquisitively. Seeing the concern written on his face, and unable to stay angry at such an adorable expression, she asked him a question that had been nagging her since the moment they had left the class. "Heero, why did you follow me? I mean, he wasn't mad at you or nothing. You're one of the few kids he actually likes."

"To a point," Heero corrected. "He still refers to me as his best and worst student."

"Well look at you!" she exclaimed, nearly nailing him in the face with a whirling fist. "You have great marks, you know everything about everything and yet, you never say a word during class. You just… stare out the window, like you're waiting for something… or someone who will never come."

"I am waiting!" It was Heero's turn to get a bit hostile. "You of all people should know that! You, who's always so quick to remind me how idiotic I am to have let Duo go. You who knows so much and yet… you refuse to tell me anything! I'm waiting for your help, Hoshi, and I'm not getting it! So all I can do is wait! Wait like I've been doing for years!"

"Wait a little more," she said. "I promise you, Heero, that you will have the one thing you want, one day." She stood up and walked away before Heero could even have a chance to comprehend what she had told him, afraid that he might say something they would both forever regret.

A soft knocking on Heero's door late that afternoon drew him from his usual upset thoughts. Lying on his bed, wired to his discman and smoking, as was typical of him as of late, he had to pull himself from a very hazy sense of loss and lethargy. He had blown off the rest of his classes after storming out of Cawdor's class that morning with Hoshi, leaving the rest of the day to just wither away alone in his dormitory with only a pack of cigarettes, his photographs and a strangely refreshed looking bunch of flowers to keep him company. He had been planning to look over the sketchbook more scrupulously the next time he had a free moment, but in a moment of anger, he had forgotten where he had left it and thus, misplaced the stupid thing.

The knocking on his door persisted, though now it was loud and more noticeable than before. Heero let out a heavy smoke laced breath as he called out in a lackadaisical voice, "It's open. Just come in."

The door handle turned and Sora slipped into the room, closing the door quietly behind her. She stood for a brief moment, just leaning on the door, a very familiar black book pressed in her folded arms, eyeing the very unexpected sight before her. She had never seen Heero in his own element, alone in his room. Her eyes followed the silver tendrils of smoke as they coiled up from the burning cigarette in Heero's hand, watching as they played over the photograph collage on the wall beside him, as they wrapped around the lamp in grayish wisps of cloud and rose up towards the sloping ceiling above.

She did not speak a word as she approached the bed. She paused over it, pushing her glasses up on her nose as she stared down at the boy lying there, ignoring her as he reveled in his cigarette and his music. Lowering her arms from her chest, she looked down at the stack of notebook paper that lay on top of the black sketchbook that had taken her the better part of the day to get through, reading during all her classes and foregoing lunch and her free periods just to finish the account scribbled down there. Paper-clipped to the pages was a small bundle of photographs, mostly of Heero. She looked down at the photo on top, a torn picture that portrayed a contentedly smiling Heero, the arm of a mysterious companion from the picture's other half around his shoulder. Raising her eyes, she compared the Heero in the photo to the Heero lying on the bed before her, and noted sadly to herself that they were almost two completely different people. The past Heero remembered in the photos she had flipped through countless times that day was contented with himself and his position in life, with the friends and everything he had won for himself during the war, even if he was a little callous and mentally unsure. But the Heero she knew was depressed and unhappy with the entire world, lost in the universe without the one person that had given him joy way back in a time that seemed long forgone, a person she had become quite well acquainted with since she had slit open those pages in the sketchbook. Then, letting her actions dictate the words she could not allow herself to say, she dropped the book and the papers, watching as they fell upon Heero's stomach. His eyes snapped open, glowering up at her as he registered what had happened. She saw those dark eyes narrow as they fell upon just what had been tossed to him and said in as neutral a voice as she could muster, "I read it all, Heero, and now I know everything that you're trying to hide."

"What did you hear?" he growled menacingly, pulling the earphones off and throwing them aside as he flew bolt right up in the bed, causing everything on his chest to tumble into his lap and Sora to jump with surprise.

Swallowing her fear of that startling deep voice, she told him bravely as she gathered herself, pushing her glasses up on her nose again, "If you want to know, look that over. Your friend did a very good job of hiding things from you, you know that, Heero? Almost as good at hiding as you are. After all, Duo Maxwell runs, hides, does everything, but never lies."

Heero was staring at her with a face that emanated something that smeared anger, surprise and hurt all together into one expression. He looked up at the solemn redhead standing above him and then back at the sketchbook, photographs and papers littered across his lap. When he saw the ripped photo, his jaw fell slack and he started to shake slightly as he absently reached to the box sitting beside his bed, accidentally knocking the lilacs from the table to the floor with a splintering crash and an explosion of water and glass. Heero seemed to not even notice as Sora dove to the floor to try and clean the mess up as best she could; nor did he heed the cuts that the glass had drawn upon his palm as he finally got his fingers upon the photograph he had been looking for. Still quivering with a myriad of emotions, he brought the two long separated halves of the photograph he and Duo had split between the two of them so long ago back together once more. "W-where did you get this?" he asked in a voice that matched his trembling body.

"It was with all of those other things, inside Hoshi's sketchbook. That's a question you might want to ask her," Sora answered plainly from the ground. He saw the top of her long red hair and watched as a pale freckled hand fluttered up over her head and tossed the bouquet of lilacs onto the bed with him. "You don't get flowers often, do you? You should know how to take care of them nicer."

"It was an accident," he said quietly, the accusative and punitive air in his voice melting away into that frightened tone he took on whenever the sad little boy in him crawled to the surface. "I didn't mean to do it."

"You don't seem to 'mean' to do a lot of things," Sora said sarcastically. "Did you not 'mean' for Duo's feelings to be as muddled as they were? Did you not 'mean' to be so callous and unfeeling towards him all the time? Did you not 'mean' for him to go away!?"

"I didn't, I swear it on my life!" Heero exclaimed, swinging his legs over the side of the bed as he looked up at her with imploring eyes, searching out some form of comfort in her unforgiving eyes and posture. "You… you can't say that you're angry at me for what I did…. Sora… you can't say you won't be my friend for those things. I… I really didn't mean to hurt him."

"Oh of course you didn't 'mean' to," she went on with that same cynicism. "Just as I'm sure you didn't 'mean' to hurt yourself." She reached out and grabbed his wrists, yanking them out and turning them over, running her thumbs lightly over the pale scars that adorned his skin. Dark brown lines were drawn in hasty slashes across the undersides of both pale white arms, crisscrossing up from his wrists to his elbows. "Why did you do this, Heero? Why do you hurt yourself? You're a mental and physical wreck. It doesn't take anyone who's particularly close to you to figure that out; I knew you had troubles even before I really met you. I mean, Heero, really, look at what you're doing to yourself?"

"I'm not happy!" he jerked his wrists away and curled back up on the bed defensively, his back now facing her. "It calms my nerves to think that I just might fall asleep one day and never have to wake up again! Do you know how badly I want that to happen?"

"Not badly enough," she said in a more soothing voice as she stooped down beside him, resting her arms and chin on the mattress as she looked up at him. She realized that what Heero needed right then was a friend, not a prosecutor. "If you really wanted to die, you would have done something drastic like… like throwing yourself out the window or shooting yourself or something…." She watched as Heero's hand absently started to snake towards his pillow, clamping down upon the soft cushion as if he were trying to hide something. "Don't think I'm blind, Heero. Move your hand. What do you have there?"

He just shook his head and said nothing, discarding the fading cigarette butt beneath the lamp, his other arm falling firmly atop the pillow.

"I said, move your hand, Heero," she said in a more firm voice. Her short patience rang through as she suddenly shouted, "Dammit, move your hand Heero Yuy, right now!" She unexpectedly ripped the pillow out from beneath his arms with a surprising amount of might, causing him to falter on top of the sleek black handgun he had kept concealed there. Her eyes grew wide at the sight of the weapon as she quickly made a grab for it, holding it as far from Heero's grasping hands as she could. "A gun? You still carry a gun, Heero? Even in a school? My God, Heero, you're paranoid!"

"It's mine and I'd like it back," he said simply, reaching out an expectant hand. He was used to being obeyed and did not like this ignorance of orders.

"Heero, I'm afraid I might have to keep this," she said, eyeing both he and the weapon doubtfully. "I mean, Heero, as a friend, I should want to protect you and it seems that your biggest threat is… well… you…. I would have to be a complete moron to let you keep this!"

"It's mine," Heero flexed his fingers as if to further his point.

She looked down at the gun again. Glancing quickly up at him, she let the magazine fall out of the gun and found it still had a few rounds left to go. "Nuh-uh, not while it's still loaded. You're crazy."

"I am not crazy," he rolled his eyes. "Give me the gun. You'll hurt yourself with it."

"You'll shoot yourself."

"I haven't shot myself yet," he rejoined so quickly, it almost seemed to be an end to her last statement. There was a pause and a falter in his speech. "I-I'm to afraid to. Don't think like that gun's never been pressed against my head, because it has many a time, Sora. But every time, I find that I'm too weak to pull that trigger. Something always happens; I always find a reason to keep on living. I might have been a soldier, but shooting a gun is the hardest thing for me to do. Don't worry, Sora. I'm too cowardly to die."

"You won't die," she told him. Then with a little chuckle she added, "I'll kill you if you do. Now I'm going to put it just here," she said as she pulled the drawer of the bedside table open and laid the gun inside, but not before emptying the magazine of all its leftover bullets before replacing it back in the gun. "I'm going to leave it there, but you have to promise not to use that thing, okay? It scares me that you still have it, Heero. It scares me that you're so in love with your sadness."

He smiled a little bit at that and shook his head, unable to come up with words to explain how he felt. Sora cared for his well-being, like any good friend should, but he found himself frightened of having friends again. Having friends only meant that he could be let down and abandoned again, and that was something that he knew he could not bear.

"Won't you say something?" she asked him, terribly aware of his sudden and unexplained silence. Heero only shook his head in the negative. "Won't you talk to me? I'm sorry if I seemed too cold but I… I was just so…." He looked at her with arched eyebrows, his eyes widening the slightest bit as he did so. She gestured to the pages in his lap and said, "I never expected it to be like that. I know it's really not my business… but it was there and I just had to know…. I wanted to know why…."

He simply shrugged and looked away.

"…. I had to know why you were so sad…"

Heero still did not turn around to look at her as she finished her sentence, his eyes playing sadly from the photographs on the wall to those scattered in his lap. The sound of her retreating footsteps flooded his ears, fading away with the creaking of his door on its squeaky old hinges and the click of the door handle as it fell closed after her, her parting words fluttering delicately like soft wings in the still air. "…And now I know…."

He looked back down into his lap, pushing the collection of photographs onto the bed. I guess I wasn't the only one who kept these as a way to remember, he reflected fondly, remembering how much Duo had enjoyed collecting photographs. Though he kept those of his friends and his old lover very dear, Duo had liked to keep photographs of all kinds of people and things, and Heero found himself somewhat relieved to find that even those seemingly random pictures were still intact with all the rest. Heero remembered the quirky American had always carried four things with him wherever he went: a camera, his sketchbook, his Discman and a good book to read. He was always taking note of the world around him, watching, recording, listening. He photographed, sketched, jotted down notes and comments about any and everything. Sometimes it was hard for the other pilots and people who did not spend constant time with the boy to fathom how one who chattered on about nothing in particular could possibly be so acute. He was always aware of the people around him, what they said and did, even when it appeared that he had not even been paying attention. Wufei had always found Duo mindless and a klutz; sweet Quatre just saw his good qualities and his compassionate side, but then again, it was hard for the little Arabian blonde to think ill of anyone; and whatever Trowa felt was always a mystery, kept under lock and key behind silent green eyes and a mute tongue. But Heero had understood it. Since the very first occasion they had spent time together, he had always watched Duo watching. Sometimes it seemed he could almost even hear Duo as he listened. And after a while, his prattle seemed not so foolish, his actions not so senseless and his thoughts not so deluded.

"And here it is, everything he ever did. All his notes, his drawings, thoughts and pictures," Heero whispered softly as he gathered all the things Sora had found sealed up in that old sketchbook in his hands and brought it to the hardwood floor. Clearing space on the floorboards, he spent a few quiet minutes arranging everything in a methodical fashion around him. Notebook pages were laid out in chronological order, accentuated by a photograph or sketch here and there. "Everything he ever kept buried in the depths of his mind he wrote down when he had no one else to talk to. Everything right under my nose the entire time, hidden in all his stupid books, because he never had anyone to tell anything to. Some great friend I turned out to be when I can't even be confided in because I'm so damn arrogant and cold!"

His eyes roved around the pages arranged in an almost perfect circle all the way around him. Pictures of himself and perhaps one or two of the other pilots were scattered amongst drawings and photographs of natural beauty, the birds, the fields, little rivers and the many hands of countless unknown people. Everything there was serene and beautiful, not at all reminiscent of the deadly war that caused Duo to create them all. And at long last, having inspected each and every piece of artwork to a most high degree, he turned to the sheets dripping with the quick scribbles of his handwriting that would eventually come together to form the core of his emotions, whether they had been expressed to Heero or not. Now that Sora had read it and told him that she knew everything, he had to know just what that 'everything' was. It was finally time to unearth the truths of Duo Maxwell's heart.

Groping up on his bed, he dragged down his pillow and CD player, propping himself up on his elbows atop the soft cushion. Fitting the earphones back into place, he lazily flipped it on as he got comfortable, box of cigarettes within easy grabbing distance, gathered papers in a neat stack before him, waiting to be read after years of being sealed away. Perhaps if it would not divulge his whereabouts, it would at least help him to understand why Duo had gone.

{A/N} Am I evil or what? Stay tuned. You know the drill.