Acherontia Atropos Chapter 3
The next several days were a blur. I suppose that I must've been
more badly hurt than Heero had said, because normally injuries
won't keep me down that long. It was all fevered flashes of pain
followed by dreamy, floaty periods that meant someone had taken
pity on me and given me one of the pills out of those happy little
medicine bottles Wufei had been kind enough to steal.
I didn't know if it was the happy pills, the head injury, or the
fact that my first vampire had attacked me, but I had some majorly
weird dreams. Memories of the attack were the most prominent, but
that was to be expected. Older memories of fights weren't all that
abnormal either. What got me, though, were the other dreams, the
ones I'd never had before; Trowa and Quatre in each other's arms,
both of them looking through me. Wufei caught in the coils of a
five-clawed dragon.
The one that got me the most, though, was the dream that I had of
Heero. He was sitting at one of the table in the school cafeteria
all by himself, eating a bowl of rice. He looked up at me for a
long moment without saying anything, and the rice started smoking,
then burst into flame. Not cheerful orange log-fire flame, but
deceptively cold looking blue flame, the sort that's so hot you
almost get burned just by looking. And Heero kept eating the rice
with no expression on his face.
Because I had a concussion, the guys had to wake me up every hour
for the first day, which wasn't fun for any of us. I didn't wake
up happily on a good day, and when I was injured, I was even worse.
I yelled, I shouted, I threw things, I whined, and was unpleasant
in general. Heero bore the brunt of it, but he didn't seem to care.
The other guys took their turns, though, I guess when Heero was in
class, and I know for a fact that I managed to hit Trowa in the
head with a paper cup once. I was a sucky patient. So sue me.
I knew one of the guys was always with me. I thought I felt
Heero's hand lightly touching my forehead a couple of times,
though I could have been imagining it. Once, I half woke to the
aromatic smell of tea with lemon, and a gentle voice telling me to
sleep. Another time, it was someone reading to me in Chinese -
Wufei.
When I finally woke up for good it was late afternoon and I felt
surprisingly peppy considering how crappy I'd been doing right
before things got incoherent. I sat up, and even though my head
hurt, it was just the kind of dull ache that bruises get after
you've had them for a couple of days. My stomach also stayed
firmly in place. All in all a major improvement.
"How are you feeling?"
I looked over. The room stayed level. Hot damn. Wufei was sitting
on Heero's bed with a book open in his lap, his tie loosened, and
his jacket off. For Wufei, that was a sloppy as it got. "I'm
feeling pretty good," I said. My mouth was kind of dry, but there
was a glass of water on the chair next to my bed. How convenient.
"How long have I been out?"
"Three days. I decided that we should keep you out that long so
you could have some down time," the corner of Wufei's mouth
quirked. "I remember how difficult it is to make you rest. Besides,
that way we didn't have to you whine as much."
I stuck my tongue out at him. My face felt stiff, so I reached up
and felt around. The roughness of scabs covered my cheeks and
forehead. I grimaced, fascinated by how weird it felt. "Oh man, my
face?" I moaned.
"You look like you got hit by a car," Wufei said, helpful guy that
he is, "It shouldn't scar, though."
"Well, there's some food news," I sighed, "Three days, huh? What
am I going to do about class?"
Wufei shrugged. "Heero covered for you, don't ask me how. I think
the story is that you went off to visit some relatives. How you're
going to explain why you look like you were on the losing end of a
fight is your own problem."
"Not a problem at all," I grinned. "I'm good at that kind of
stuff." Me, bend the truth? Just a little. I preferred to call it
an exercise in creativity. It sounded better that way.
"I noticed."
"You're so nice," I crossed my arms. Someone had been kind enough
to put me in a pair of pajamas. They were soft and so big that I'd
had to roll up the legs and the sleeves. Constant washing had
turned them from black to a kind of fuzzy grey. The thought of
anyone undressing me while I was unconscious, even if it was for
the benign purpose of changing me out of my ripped, bloody clothes
made me kind of nervous, though. Scratch that, very nervous. I
eyed Wufei for a moment, wondering if he was the one who'd done
the deed. He was probably the best friend I had and everything,
but still?
He always could read me like a book. "Not me. Heero."
Great. That made me feel a whole lot better. Sure. The man of my
dreams finally undressed me, and I wasn't even awake to enjoy it.
Life sucked.
Wufei coughed, and I realized that I'd been glaring at him like it
was his fault. I stopped and shrugged. "Anything else interesting
happen?"
"What, since the Vampire Hunter pulled her disappearing act?"
Wufei raised one eloquent eyebrow. I had to admit, I was with him
on that one. I didn't think anything could beat that. "Another
student has disappeared. That brings the body count up to five, if
he and the others we've discovered were indeed taken by them."
"Damn," I rubbed my face with my hands, carefully. "Anyone seen
anything?"
"No."
"Great. How the hell are we supposed to kill something when we
have no idea how to find it, when it's going to attack, or who
it's going to kill?" I sighed.
Wufei shrugged. He knew a rhetorical question when he heard one.
"Heero's going to be back soon," he commented. "He'll be happy to
know that you're awake now."
"Really?" Shit, I was starting to sound like a love-struck
schoolgirl. Well, except for the girl part?
"I believe so. The only time he let one of us take over watching
you was when he had class."
I couldn't help myself. I grinned. "Is he going to be back soon?"
Wufei glanced over at the cheap little clock radio that I'd put on
the desk. "Yes."
I bounced out of bed and stood a little too fast. The room spun
for a moment, and only clutching at the chair saved me from
falling on my nose. Wufei was suddenly on his feet, and he grabbed
my arms. As soon as everything was stabilized, I flashed him a
little grin. "No worries. Just stood up too fast."
"Fine," he let go of my arm, a small smile quirking his lips.
"I'm going to take a shower now, before Heero gets back," I said,
then bounded off toward the bathroom.
Wufei sat back down and picked up his book. "Just don't fall down
when you're in the shower."
* * *
It felt good to be up and about, but it felt even better to get
clean. Someone had done a half-assed job of cleaning me up when I
was unconscious, but really, for as much of a mess as I'd been an
actual shower was the only way to go.
Especially for my poor hair. I almost wailed when I saw how bad it
looked in the mirror. My braid was crusty with dried blood, and my
bangs stuck out in weird angles.
I've always liked showers, which was a good thing considering how
long this one took. I used up the last little bit in the bottom of
my shampoo bottle, which was nice red stuff I'd stolen. It smelled
of raspberries. My hair still wasn't clean, so I moved on to
Heero's bottle. I didn't know where he got it, but it was even
nicer than mine. It smelled kind of like Oreo centers and a little
bit like strawberries, but not in a girly way.
Or maybe I just liked it because it smelled like Heero. I closed
my eyes and basked in the scent and warm water for a moment. Sappy?
Me? Naw.
After I got my hair clean, I worked on the rest of me. I still had
little flecks of dried blood on my shoulders, and my back too, the
way the skin was pulling. The one nice thing about dried blood,
though, was that you didn't even really have to scrub at it. A
couple minutes under the hot, pounding spray of the water and it
came right off. Even after I was clean, I just stood in the spray
and let it beat my sore muscles into a semblance of normalcy,
luxuriating in the nice, warm feeling of being clean.
I got out only when the hot water ran out and my skin was starting
to prune anyway. The pajamas I'd been wearing were dirty, so I
wrapped a towel around myself instead. It was one of the towels
that I'd acquired from a hotel. Hey, they hadn't locked their
doors, and one of the maids had left her little cart sitting out
in the middle of the hall. It was like an invitation. That
particular expedition had kept me supplied with soap and shampoo
for quite some time, as well as providing all my towels.
The one thing about hotel towels, though, was that they're plenty
thick, but always too small. Towels for midgets. The towel barely
wrapped around my waist, and whenever I walked, one of my legs
flashed. The hula girl look. Yeah.
So I wandered out into my room, with my damp hair handing around
my face. The room was filled with the familiar, swift clacking of
that damn laptop keyboard. Wufei wasn't on Heero's bed any more,
and the covers had been straightened so there wasn't even an
indentation where he'd been sitting. Heero himself was at the desk
with perfect posture.
Damn if it didn't look like the setup for a porno movie or
something. I only wished.
"Glad to see you too, Heero," I muttered when he didn't even
glance back.
"Wufei said you were feeling better."
"Yeah," I dug around in the drawers under my bed until I found a
pair of black pants and one of my shirts.
"That's good."
I couldn't think of anything else to say, so I said, "Yeah," again.
Next thing I knew, Heero was out of his chair and standing behind
me. He grabbed me, his hands very cold on my water-warmed upper
arms. I wasn't think about that, though. What kept running around
my lobes was the fact that Heero was holding on pretty tight, and
I remembered how pissed he'd looked about three days ago. Maybe
the look had been directed my way after all, and he was going to
finally follow up on years worth of threats and kill me.
So I started babbling, "Heero, I'm sorry! Don't kill me, I'm
really sorry about whatever I did?" and on and on.
Heero let me go for a few minutes, and then he shook me sharply,
just once. "Quiet," he said.
I did the smart thing and shut up.
There was a long pause, and Heero abruptly let go, then walked
away. "I'm glad you're feeling better. I was?worried."
For once, I didn't know what to say. I just stood there with water
dripping out of my hair. The feeling of Heero's hands was still
burning into my arms, and my brain was running in an endless,
happy little circle that kept repeating, /Heero was worried Heero
was worried Heero was worried?/ over and over again.
Heero, of course, couldn't leave well enough alone. "We have a
mission tomorrow. We need Deathscythe," he said.
My thoughts ground to a screeching half. Shit. "I see," I said.
Shit, shit, shit, shit, and shit. I sighed quietly, anything to
keep from attempting to kill him, and got dressed.
* * *
"You bastard! You scratched my paint! You're going to DIE!" I
shrieked at the top of my lungs, right before I sliced the
offending Leo and one of its buddies in half with a single slash
of my thermal scythe.
Okay, so maybe I had a little hostility that still needed to be
worked out of my system.
What better to take it out on than some hapless Leos, though. They
were like the red shirts from the old show?Star Trek, I think it
was. Completely expendable, or else Oz would've come up with
something a little better to send against us. Their mediocrity
just begged to be destroyed, and I was more than happy to oblige.
Maniacal laughter bubbled up between my lips and I reversed the
course of the scythe, cutting a Leo that had been trying to shoot
me in the back off at the knees. It hit the ground and exploded in
a most satisfying manner. I could almost feel waves of disapproval
coming through my comlink to Heero.
Like I gave a rat's golden anus. After giving me the brush-off
that night before, Heero had proceeded to ignore me until it was
time to go to bed. I would have liked to stay up and pursue the
other problem, but missions took precedence over playing with
vampires. I really needed to find someone more helpful than Tamlin
anyway.
"Three behind you, Duo," Heero said.
"Gotcha!" I caroled, engaging my thrusters for a high jump, then
crashing down on the enemy. One of them was completely crushed
under me, and the other two fell quickly to the heat of my scythe.
It had been a VERY frustrating day.
I was trapped in a truck with Heero all the way to the staging
area. He ignored me the entire time, so I'd been forced to talk
non-stop to keep the absolute silence at bay. The one time I'd
turned the radio on, he'd turned it off and yanked the knob off.
We'd met with Quatre and Trowa, and I must have had that maniacal
gleam in my eye, because Quatre looked worried when he saw me. We,
or rather Heero, decided that the two of them would take the main
job, which was to blow up the military base, while we would run
interference and act as a diversion. Wufei was off on a mission of
his own; he'd left before us and said he wouldn't be back for a
few days.
A sudden blast rocked Deathscythe, and I started concentrating on
the fight again. I could save my resentment for a safer time.
There was a heavy cannon behind me, probably dropped in while I
was dwelling on what a jerk that bastard Heero was?
/Stop that,/ I told myself.
Abruptly, Wing was between the cannon and I, just as it fired
again. Heero's Gundam was enveloped in the blast, and for one
heart-stopping moment, I thought?but no. A glance at the comlink
showed that Heero was still there, if a bit staticky. Of course. I
wasn't sure he even knew how to die?though he had made a good
impression of it, once.
There was a second blast as the cannon blew up. Obviously,
getting show with depleted uranium rounds didn't agree with it.
I half turned and reduced the Leo that had been trying to shoot me
with its pathetic excuse for a gattling into a small pile of slag.
"Hey, Heero, how many left?"
"As many as there are until Trowa and Quatre blow the base."
Unhelpful jerk.
I went back to destroying the Leos and a few isolated Tauruses
until the entire eastern part of the sky lit up. It wasn't time
for dawn yet, so that was our signal. Heero took to the air and
grabbed Deathscythe as I continued to yell at the few remaining
mobile suits on the field.
It was immature, I know, but God it felt good.
* * *
When we got back to the room it was still nicely dark, promising
at least a few hours of sleep before I had to haul my sorry,
dragging ass out of bed for school. I couldn't wait to hear what
all the girls would have to say about the state of my face. The
hot shower and being slammed around in the cockpit hadn't helped
things. I had crusty scabs all over my face, and I was a mass of
bruises that were a nasty yellow-green.
Someone had picked the lock to our room, which upset Heero quite a
bit. He made me sit outside while he swept the room for bugs,
explosives, banana splits (okay, maybe not that) and the like. All
the work turned up nothing.
Well, almost. Whoever it was had left me a little present; a plain
white box like the sort you get long stemmed roses in. After
taking one look in the box, I got the feeling it was a present
from Tamlin. There was a sawed-off shotgun like the one she'd had,
and a smaller box with ammunition that appeared to be silver.
There were also three handguns, a Beretta 9mm and two Browning Hi-
Power Vs, with silver ammo to go with. Nice stuff. Heero
immediately took the guns apart and put them back together, just
to make sure they were ordinary guns. They were.
A couple of rather excited conversations later, we divided the
weapons up. One of the Brownings for me, the Beretta for Heero,
and the other Browning for Quatre. The shotgun we squirreled away
with the other guns we had cached around the dorm.
The Browning fit nicely between my bed and the wall, right at hand
even when I was asleep. I should've felt thrilled, I guess.
Christmas came early, right?
The mysterious shit was really starting to get on my nerves,
though.
The next several days were a blur. I suppose that I must've been
more badly hurt than Heero had said, because normally injuries
won't keep me down that long. It was all fevered flashes of pain
followed by dreamy, floaty periods that meant someone had taken
pity on me and given me one of the pills out of those happy little
medicine bottles Wufei had been kind enough to steal.
I didn't know if it was the happy pills, the head injury, or the
fact that my first vampire had attacked me, but I had some majorly
weird dreams. Memories of the attack were the most prominent, but
that was to be expected. Older memories of fights weren't all that
abnormal either. What got me, though, were the other dreams, the
ones I'd never had before; Trowa and Quatre in each other's arms,
both of them looking through me. Wufei caught in the coils of a
five-clawed dragon.
The one that got me the most, though, was the dream that I had of
Heero. He was sitting at one of the table in the school cafeteria
all by himself, eating a bowl of rice. He looked up at me for a
long moment without saying anything, and the rice started smoking,
then burst into flame. Not cheerful orange log-fire flame, but
deceptively cold looking blue flame, the sort that's so hot you
almost get burned just by looking. And Heero kept eating the rice
with no expression on his face.
Because I had a concussion, the guys had to wake me up every hour
for the first day, which wasn't fun for any of us. I didn't wake
up happily on a good day, and when I was injured, I was even worse.
I yelled, I shouted, I threw things, I whined, and was unpleasant
in general. Heero bore the brunt of it, but he didn't seem to care.
The other guys took their turns, though, I guess when Heero was in
class, and I know for a fact that I managed to hit Trowa in the
head with a paper cup once. I was a sucky patient. So sue me.
I knew one of the guys was always with me. I thought I felt
Heero's hand lightly touching my forehead a couple of times,
though I could have been imagining it. Once, I half woke to the
aromatic smell of tea with lemon, and a gentle voice telling me to
sleep. Another time, it was someone reading to me in Chinese -
Wufei.
When I finally woke up for good it was late afternoon and I felt
surprisingly peppy considering how crappy I'd been doing right
before things got incoherent. I sat up, and even though my head
hurt, it was just the kind of dull ache that bruises get after
you've had them for a couple of days. My stomach also stayed
firmly in place. All in all a major improvement.
"How are you feeling?"
I looked over. The room stayed level. Hot damn. Wufei was sitting
on Heero's bed with a book open in his lap, his tie loosened, and
his jacket off. For Wufei, that was a sloppy as it got. "I'm
feeling pretty good," I said. My mouth was kind of dry, but there
was a glass of water on the chair next to my bed. How convenient.
"How long have I been out?"
"Three days. I decided that we should keep you out that long so
you could have some down time," the corner of Wufei's mouth
quirked. "I remember how difficult it is to make you rest. Besides,
that way we didn't have to you whine as much."
I stuck my tongue out at him. My face felt stiff, so I reached up
and felt around. The roughness of scabs covered my cheeks and
forehead. I grimaced, fascinated by how weird it felt. "Oh man, my
face?" I moaned.
"You look like you got hit by a car," Wufei said, helpful guy that
he is, "It shouldn't scar, though."
"Well, there's some food news," I sighed, "Three days, huh? What
am I going to do about class?"
Wufei shrugged. "Heero covered for you, don't ask me how. I think
the story is that you went off to visit some relatives. How you're
going to explain why you look like you were on the losing end of a
fight is your own problem."
"Not a problem at all," I grinned. "I'm good at that kind of
stuff." Me, bend the truth? Just a little. I preferred to call it
an exercise in creativity. It sounded better that way.
"I noticed."
"You're so nice," I crossed my arms. Someone had been kind enough
to put me in a pair of pajamas. They were soft and so big that I'd
had to roll up the legs and the sleeves. Constant washing had
turned them from black to a kind of fuzzy grey. The thought of
anyone undressing me while I was unconscious, even if it was for
the benign purpose of changing me out of my ripped, bloody clothes
made me kind of nervous, though. Scratch that, very nervous. I
eyed Wufei for a moment, wondering if he was the one who'd done
the deed. He was probably the best friend I had and everything,
but still?
He always could read me like a book. "Not me. Heero."
Great. That made me feel a whole lot better. Sure. The man of my
dreams finally undressed me, and I wasn't even awake to enjoy it.
Life sucked.
Wufei coughed, and I realized that I'd been glaring at him like it
was his fault. I stopped and shrugged. "Anything else interesting
happen?"
"What, since the Vampire Hunter pulled her disappearing act?"
Wufei raised one eloquent eyebrow. I had to admit, I was with him
on that one. I didn't think anything could beat that. "Another
student has disappeared. That brings the body count up to five, if
he and the others we've discovered were indeed taken by them."
"Damn," I rubbed my face with my hands, carefully. "Anyone seen
anything?"
"No."
"Great. How the hell are we supposed to kill something when we
have no idea how to find it, when it's going to attack, or who
it's going to kill?" I sighed.
Wufei shrugged. He knew a rhetorical question when he heard one.
"Heero's going to be back soon," he commented. "He'll be happy to
know that you're awake now."
"Really?" Shit, I was starting to sound like a love-struck
schoolgirl. Well, except for the girl part?
"I believe so. The only time he let one of us take over watching
you was when he had class."
I couldn't help myself. I grinned. "Is he going to be back soon?"
Wufei glanced over at the cheap little clock radio that I'd put on
the desk. "Yes."
I bounced out of bed and stood a little too fast. The room spun
for a moment, and only clutching at the chair saved me from
falling on my nose. Wufei was suddenly on his feet, and he grabbed
my arms. As soon as everything was stabilized, I flashed him a
little grin. "No worries. Just stood up too fast."
"Fine," he let go of my arm, a small smile quirking his lips.
"I'm going to take a shower now, before Heero gets back," I said,
then bounded off toward the bathroom.
Wufei sat back down and picked up his book. "Just don't fall down
when you're in the shower."
* * *
It felt good to be up and about, but it felt even better to get
clean. Someone had done a half-assed job of cleaning me up when I
was unconscious, but really, for as much of a mess as I'd been an
actual shower was the only way to go.
Especially for my poor hair. I almost wailed when I saw how bad it
looked in the mirror. My braid was crusty with dried blood, and my
bangs stuck out in weird angles.
I've always liked showers, which was a good thing considering how
long this one took. I used up the last little bit in the bottom of
my shampoo bottle, which was nice red stuff I'd stolen. It smelled
of raspberries. My hair still wasn't clean, so I moved on to
Heero's bottle. I didn't know where he got it, but it was even
nicer than mine. It smelled kind of like Oreo centers and a little
bit like strawberries, but not in a girly way.
Or maybe I just liked it because it smelled like Heero. I closed
my eyes and basked in the scent and warm water for a moment. Sappy?
Me? Naw.
After I got my hair clean, I worked on the rest of me. I still had
little flecks of dried blood on my shoulders, and my back too, the
way the skin was pulling. The one nice thing about dried blood,
though, was that you didn't even really have to scrub at it. A
couple minutes under the hot, pounding spray of the water and it
came right off. Even after I was clean, I just stood in the spray
and let it beat my sore muscles into a semblance of normalcy,
luxuriating in the nice, warm feeling of being clean.
I got out only when the hot water ran out and my skin was starting
to prune anyway. The pajamas I'd been wearing were dirty, so I
wrapped a towel around myself instead. It was one of the towels
that I'd acquired from a hotel. Hey, they hadn't locked their
doors, and one of the maids had left her little cart sitting out
in the middle of the hall. It was like an invitation. That
particular expedition had kept me supplied with soap and shampoo
for quite some time, as well as providing all my towels.
The one thing about hotel towels, though, was that they're plenty
thick, but always too small. Towels for midgets. The towel barely
wrapped around my waist, and whenever I walked, one of my legs
flashed. The hula girl look. Yeah.
So I wandered out into my room, with my damp hair handing around
my face. The room was filled with the familiar, swift clacking of
that damn laptop keyboard. Wufei wasn't on Heero's bed any more,
and the covers had been straightened so there wasn't even an
indentation where he'd been sitting. Heero himself was at the desk
with perfect posture.
Damn if it didn't look like the setup for a porno movie or
something. I only wished.
"Glad to see you too, Heero," I muttered when he didn't even
glance back.
"Wufei said you were feeling better."
"Yeah," I dug around in the drawers under my bed until I found a
pair of black pants and one of my shirts.
"That's good."
I couldn't think of anything else to say, so I said, "Yeah," again.
Next thing I knew, Heero was out of his chair and standing behind
me. He grabbed me, his hands very cold on my water-warmed upper
arms. I wasn't think about that, though. What kept running around
my lobes was the fact that Heero was holding on pretty tight, and
I remembered how pissed he'd looked about three days ago. Maybe
the look had been directed my way after all, and he was going to
finally follow up on years worth of threats and kill me.
So I started babbling, "Heero, I'm sorry! Don't kill me, I'm
really sorry about whatever I did?" and on and on.
Heero let me go for a few minutes, and then he shook me sharply,
just once. "Quiet," he said.
I did the smart thing and shut up.
There was a long pause, and Heero abruptly let go, then walked
away. "I'm glad you're feeling better. I was?worried."
For once, I didn't know what to say. I just stood there with water
dripping out of my hair. The feeling of Heero's hands was still
burning into my arms, and my brain was running in an endless,
happy little circle that kept repeating, /Heero was worried Heero
was worried Heero was worried?/ over and over again.
Heero, of course, couldn't leave well enough alone. "We have a
mission tomorrow. We need Deathscythe," he said.
My thoughts ground to a screeching half. Shit. "I see," I said.
Shit, shit, shit, shit, and shit. I sighed quietly, anything to
keep from attempting to kill him, and got dressed.
* * *
"You bastard! You scratched my paint! You're going to DIE!" I
shrieked at the top of my lungs, right before I sliced the
offending Leo and one of its buddies in half with a single slash
of my thermal scythe.
Okay, so maybe I had a little hostility that still needed to be
worked out of my system.
What better to take it out on than some hapless Leos, though. They
were like the red shirts from the old show?Star Trek, I think it
was. Completely expendable, or else Oz would've come up with
something a little better to send against us. Their mediocrity
just begged to be destroyed, and I was more than happy to oblige.
Maniacal laughter bubbled up between my lips and I reversed the
course of the scythe, cutting a Leo that had been trying to shoot
me in the back off at the knees. It hit the ground and exploded in
a most satisfying manner. I could almost feel waves of disapproval
coming through my comlink to Heero.
Like I gave a rat's golden anus. After giving me the brush-off
that night before, Heero had proceeded to ignore me until it was
time to go to bed. I would have liked to stay up and pursue the
other problem, but missions took precedence over playing with
vampires. I really needed to find someone more helpful than Tamlin
anyway.
"Three behind you, Duo," Heero said.
"Gotcha!" I caroled, engaging my thrusters for a high jump, then
crashing down on the enemy. One of them was completely crushed
under me, and the other two fell quickly to the heat of my scythe.
It had been a VERY frustrating day.
I was trapped in a truck with Heero all the way to the staging
area. He ignored me the entire time, so I'd been forced to talk
non-stop to keep the absolute silence at bay. The one time I'd
turned the radio on, he'd turned it off and yanked the knob off.
We'd met with Quatre and Trowa, and I must have had that maniacal
gleam in my eye, because Quatre looked worried when he saw me. We,
or rather Heero, decided that the two of them would take the main
job, which was to blow up the military base, while we would run
interference and act as a diversion. Wufei was off on a mission of
his own; he'd left before us and said he wouldn't be back for a
few days.
A sudden blast rocked Deathscythe, and I started concentrating on
the fight again. I could save my resentment for a safer time.
There was a heavy cannon behind me, probably dropped in while I
was dwelling on what a jerk that bastard Heero was?
/Stop that,/ I told myself.
Abruptly, Wing was between the cannon and I, just as it fired
again. Heero's Gundam was enveloped in the blast, and for one
heart-stopping moment, I thought?but no. A glance at the comlink
showed that Heero was still there, if a bit staticky. Of course. I
wasn't sure he even knew how to die?though he had made a good
impression of it, once.
There was a second blast as the cannon blew up. Obviously,
getting show with depleted uranium rounds didn't agree with it.
I half turned and reduced the Leo that had been trying to shoot me
with its pathetic excuse for a gattling into a small pile of slag.
"Hey, Heero, how many left?"
"As many as there are until Trowa and Quatre blow the base."
Unhelpful jerk.
I went back to destroying the Leos and a few isolated Tauruses
until the entire eastern part of the sky lit up. It wasn't time
for dawn yet, so that was our signal. Heero took to the air and
grabbed Deathscythe as I continued to yell at the few remaining
mobile suits on the field.
It was immature, I know, but God it felt good.
* * *
When we got back to the room it was still nicely dark, promising
at least a few hours of sleep before I had to haul my sorry,
dragging ass out of bed for school. I couldn't wait to hear what
all the girls would have to say about the state of my face. The
hot shower and being slammed around in the cockpit hadn't helped
things. I had crusty scabs all over my face, and I was a mass of
bruises that were a nasty yellow-green.
Someone had picked the lock to our room, which upset Heero quite a
bit. He made me sit outside while he swept the room for bugs,
explosives, banana splits (okay, maybe not that) and the like. All
the work turned up nothing.
Well, almost. Whoever it was had left me a little present; a plain
white box like the sort you get long stemmed roses in. After
taking one look in the box, I got the feeling it was a present
from Tamlin. There was a sawed-off shotgun like the one she'd had,
and a smaller box with ammunition that appeared to be silver.
There were also three handguns, a Beretta 9mm and two Browning Hi-
Power Vs, with silver ammo to go with. Nice stuff. Heero
immediately took the guns apart and put them back together, just
to make sure they were ordinary guns. They were.
A couple of rather excited conversations later, we divided the
weapons up. One of the Brownings for me, the Beretta for Heero,
and the other Browning for Quatre. The shotgun we squirreled away
with the other guns we had cached around the dorm.
The Browning fit nicely between my bed and the wall, right at hand
even when I was asleep. I should've felt thrilled, I guess.
Christmas came early, right?
The mysterious shit was really starting to get on my nerves,
though.
