No real warnings for this one, it's an interim piece, so it's pretty tame. =^_~= Mostly intrigue...but then intrigue leads to the things in life that are FAR from tame, so it can only benefit us in the long run.

Disclaimer: I need one of those memorabilia stores that sells life-size cardboard cutouts of famous celebrities and movie characters. Why? Because I don't have any real Gundam pilots of my own, and I have to make them from scratch, that's why! *cries* I wonder how much paint it would take to turn a Han Solo cutout into a Trowa cutout...

~~~~~~~~~~

Episode Twenty-Seven: The Whisper Walls

"It is wise to disclose what cannot be concealed." ~Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

November 22nd, 1901

Relying on the hope that the rest of the household would be too engrossed in lunch to notice that they were gone, a cat, a mouse, and a caged tiger crept around places they probably shouldn't have been. While Wufei was out antique shopping for his latest decorating project, Duo and Heero went nosing around the drawing room, looking for what the blueprints of the house said must be there; the little charcoal grey kitten had started following them around the house and decided to join them in a purely supervisory capacity.

Duo kept watch for intruders approaching from down the hall, and Heero walked up and down the length of the wall on either side of the fireplace, knocking on the wood panelling. "Hollow," he remarked to no one in particular. They knew it would be.

"It still bugs me," Duo muttered bitterly from the doorway. "That guy still won't eat anything I cook in this house, like I'm gonna poison him or something. I just wanna get even for what almost happened at the trial, that's all! I've levelled everyone else, but I can't get near this guy..."

Heero was only half listening, concentrating instead on searching for the hidden locking mechanism that would likely crack open the secret chamber within the wall. They had known for several weeks that Wufei had kept the drawing room to himself and made many alterations to it, but as yet, the theory that he had discovered the gap between the wall of that room and the wall of the next hadn't been proven. Heero's thin fingers played deftly over the surface of the wood panels until he felt a tiny seam that only appeared on one board. "...switch..."

"If he was really a man of honour, he'd stay and let me take a few swings at him with some soggy spaghetti, at least, because I won! I'm entitled to my spoils of war, which include wiping that smirk off his face!" Unwilling to admit defeat and yet totally unable to do anything about it, the frustrated chef leaned against the doorframe and sighed. "What's he got against me, anyway?"

It was a reasonable question, and Heero would have answered it on the spot, except that he managed to unlock the hinged wooden panel and swing it out towards him, and the subject was promptly dropped. Duo dashed from the doorway to stand next to Heero, and the boys gazed into the gaping hole in the wall, delicately framed by newly-spun spiderwebs and a few herds of dust bunnies. Heero picked up a gaslamp and lit it with a high flame. "Shut the door and turn out the lights."

Duo did as he was bidden, closing the drawing room doors firmly after taking one last look down the hall in either direction. As he turned out the electric chandeliers, a novelty that hadn't worn off on anyone yet, Heero stepped into the secret passage and pulled the wooden panel shut with a handle located on the inside.

"Duo?" came the muffled call.

"Yeah! Right here!" the chef answered with a sharp knock on the wall.

"Can you see any light leaking out?"

Duo stepped back and thoroughly examined the wall before him. Since the room was on the interior of the house and had no windows, it was plunged completely into darkness, and not a speck of light escaped from Heero's gaslamp. Duo shook his head uselessly. "No. Can't see anything."

"Good," the disembodied voice said without emotion. "Now go out into the hall, turn right, go into the games room and repeat the procedure."

Simple enough, Duo thought. He turned around and wound his way to the games room, which was also without windows. The door was then shut and the lights turned out, and again he couldn't detect any brightness from the pertinent wall. "Heero?"

A ghostly knock sounded, and Duo actually jumped. "Anything?"

"There's no leaks on this side either," Duo said.

There was a click and a creak, and then a slim section of the games room wall swung out, bathing the room in a soft golden light. Heero beckoned to him from the secret passage. "Come and take a look at this." Duo took a few steps towards the opened panel, but Heero quickly put a hand out for pause. "Watch your step, the floor in here is raised by about eight inches."

Mindful of the warning, Duo stepped up to the hidden chamber, then stepped aside so Heero could secure the panel door. There they stood, under a slightly lowered ceiling, sandwiched between the drawing room and the games room, with just enough space to stand single-file without touching the walls; it seemed to be custom-made for people of their height and build. Duo wriggled his shoulders. "Cozy."

Heero flattened himself against the wall and lifted the lantern above their heads. "It gets cozier."

Puzzled by his tone of voice, Duo's eyebrows crinkled until he saw the scene to which Heero was referring. The space between the walls was less than three feet wide and a scant fifteen feet long, but it was far more than a hole in the wall. The floor of the far end was taken up by a thin six-foot pallet for sleeping, and several shelves had been installed above it on all sides, on which were perched very simple everyday items. There was a clock, a lantern, a box of matches and canisters of extra oil, a waterglass turned upside-down, and dozens of metal tins no larger than Duo's fist. He crept forward and knelt down on the pallet as Heero watched, then opened one of the tins and sniffed the contents. He examined four more tins, then sat back on his heels and looked up at Heero.

"Food. It's all food. Dried fruit, nuts, berries, crackers, cured sticks of beef...Wufei could hide in here for days if he wanted to, and nobody would ever notice him. All he has to do is sneak out at night for water, and he's got himself a permanent apartment!"

Heero nodded his agreement and carefully sat the lantern down in the center of the passage. Stepping carefully around it, he walked to the opposite end where the gaslight was creating some interesting...almost metallic reflections. He picked up a long, slender object leaning in the corner and turned around, displaying it for Duo's perusal. It was the gleaming katana Wufei had used against his meagre fireplace poker during their parlour swordfight. "I don't suppose he brought this to butter his bread with," Heero said flatly.

Duo snorted, half in concordance and half in surprise that Heero actually said something remotely funny. Upon further investigation, the butler also discovered four oriental daggers of varying sizes, a length of rope, an iron prybar, and of all things, a crossbow with a dozen arrows beside it. Suddenly it seemed clear that Wufei had come to do some serious damage, not just serious decorating.

"All that, and no guns?" Duo asked quizzically.

"Guns make noise," Heero reminded him, putting the katana back down exactly where he had found it. "Everything in here was chosen for stealth, so that he could eliminate his target and escape before anyone outside this room realized what was going on."

Even in the low orange light, Duo paled. "And who is his target?"

"I wouldn't count either of us out," Heero admitted, stooping to pick up the lantern. "He's a rival agent, and has somehow convinced himself that I stole this assignment from him. It's very easy to see how he might benefit from my sudden disappearance."

Duo leapt up off the pallet, as well as he could in such a narrow space, and gave Heero a desperate look while he brushed himself off. "Then why did he do his damndest to bite my head off in court? What would that've done to get you out of the way? If I've got the bare minimum amount of faith in our friendship, I'd hope that you'd've stuck to him like glue and made sure he got what was coming to him!"

Heero squinted and held his free hand up just in front of Duo's lips; the chef leaned back an inch, wide-eyed, remembering that anyone could have crept up to the outside wall and might be listening to them. It gave Heero a moment to think, however, and for that he was grateful. He never did tell Duo about the bargain Treize offered him, and if Duo worked out that Wufei and the Count were in cahoots, the conversation would just unravel backwards from there. Better to stay off the topic altogether. "We should leave before he comes back."

Duo nodded slowly, not the least bit fooled that there wasn't more to the story. "Yeah...yeah, let's get out of here." They left everything in the passage just as they found it, and no one appeared to be in or around the drawing room when they exited. They were just about to leave altogether when Heero made a brief visual sweep of the room and saw something was missing.

"Where's the cat?"

The boys froze and stared at each other. With a simultaneous gasp, they ran back to the wood panelling and searched frantically for the secret trigger. "Hold on, kitty!" Duo yelled at the wall. "Take shallow breaths and don't chase anything!"

"Did you see her before you left the room?" Heero asked tersely while feeling for the switch.

"Geez, I don't know! I thought she was sitting right over there the whole time! She wouldn't have followed me into the wall, would she? Oh man, what if that sword falls on her or something!? Hey, cat!!" He started banging on the panels, which only made Heero pause and glare at him.

"That's not the way to open anything."

"So where's the switch, hotshot?"

"It...was here..."

Duo made a face and turned around. "Forget this!" He grabbed one of the luxurious blue plush chairs that sat a few feet away and dashed at the wall, brandishing the chair like a battering ram. "I'm coming, kitty!"

Heero looked up at the last moment, saw blue velvet and very hard wood flying at his approximate location at a high rate of speed, and tackled both Duo and the chair to the floor. They landed with a crash, though the chair was the least harmed out of all three of them. While they groaned and gasped and counted their broken ribs, something small and grey padded up on tiny paws and mewed at them sweetly. The boys looked up. The kitten was perfectly unharmed and on the correct side of the wall, where she had been all along. Duo started laughing and couldn't stop for a long time. Heero simply glared.

Once they had recovered sufficiently to put the chair back and erase all evidence of their mishap, Duo picked up the kitten and cuddled her like a baby, speaking to her as such. "You gave us a real scare, didn't you? Yes, you did! Yes, you diiiid!" The chef grinned and tickled her under the chin affectionately, then turned and expressed something he had been pondering since the day began. "Hey, Heero...I can't help but wonder if the three of us, Wufei, and Treize are the only ones who know about these gaps in the walls. I mean, how long has Relena's family been living here? You'd think that in all those years, somebody would have noticed..."

Heero raised an eyebrow; it was a very worthy idea, and deserved looking into. "I think I should find out, don't you?"

**********

The morning mail had been rather late, due to a pounding rain and temperatures that danced around the freezing mark. Their friendly neighbourhood postman had a phobia about catching a chill, and wrapped himself in so many layers on such days that he could hardly move. It slowed his progress along the route and prolonged the amount of time he actually spent in the cold weather, but he never seemed to make the connection.

In any case, a late letter arrived with Quatre's name on it, and it fell into Trowa's hands first. He eyed it with great suspicion, especially after seeing the foreign postmark in the corner, but in spite of his reservations, he took it downstairs to deliver to its rightful owner.

When Trowa left the bottom of the stairs and walked into the bedroom, Quatre was seated cross-legged on his bed, reading quietly, as he had been for the last several days. Cradled in his lap was the usual leather-bound book written in scribblings Trowa couldn't understand, and as he had learned, Quatre wouldn't look up until the particular passage he was studying had been completed. He sat on his own bed and waited.

After a short while, Quatre leaned away from the book, looked up at Trowa, and smiled brightly. "What's up?"

"This came for you." The cinnamon-haired boy held out the letter, almost begging with his eyes for it to be refused.

Quatre felt his friend's fear and took the letter after some hesitation, marking his place in the leather book and setting it aside. He glanced at the postmark, easily identifiable to him as coming from the region of Persia, then glanced up at Trowa, who gave no reaction. He delicately tore open the weathered envelope and unfolded a three-page letter written in the same scribblings as the leather book. With trembling hands, Quatre began at the beginning.

"It's from Shareefa," he said softly. "She's twelve years older than me. She, uh...fled as soon as the fighting started." The boy was clearly struggling to hold back tears as he was reminded of the turmoil in his homeland. He detailed the contents of his sister's letter with a dull, blank stare, trying to distance himself from the unfortunate facts. "Malak and Aalia were killed first. Many others are missing...Salma, Rafa, Nawar...Khalida and Batool..." He read one more name and sank his head into his hand, stricken. "Nadia's gone."

Trowa swallowed. "Is she special?"

"She's the eldest," Quatre sniffed. "She has a husband and children, some older than me. I can only hope she took her family far away when father died. She never would have fought her own sisters, but that's not to say some of them wouldn't fight her. Money and power are too much of a temptation for some people."

"How did Shareefa know where to find you?" Trowa asked, gesturing towards the letter.

Quatre read a little further and frowned. "She says Intisaar left to find me after spying on my bodyguards..." He trailed off and looked away, turning the wheels in his mind until the reference made sense. "Intisaar is a knife-thrower, in secret...part of some street magic she learned as a hobby. It might have been her who threw that dagger at us in the pub, and if it was, she might easily have written home and told Shareefa where I live. The two of them are close."

"If it came down to just them at the end of the tontine, they'd probably get farther apart really fast," Trowa observed sadly. "But if she's such a good shot with a knife, why hasn't she come back for a second try?"

The blond boy gnawed lightly on his lip and looked down. "Some of my sisters were truly fond of me, and Intisaar was one of them. Those like her would rather not have to kill me, so if they want the money that badly, they'll wait for someone else to do it. As for Shareefa...I just don't know." He read the next few lines of the letter and looked up at Trowa with no small amount of terror. "She's coming to England."

For a split second, Trowa was aghast, but his shock was soon replaced with determination. "We should go ahead with our plan, keeping you in the house and hiding swords in as many rooms as we can."

"Even if she does come after me, I don't want to hurt her!" Quatre sighed. "And besides, she hasn't said anything threatening in her letter, so maybe she just wants to get away from the fighting. I can't turn her away."

Trowa sighed back and shook his head. "I wanted to be your friend from the moment I saw you, because you have the kindest heart I've ever known...but you have to put that kindness aside this time, or it could be the death of you." His emerald eyes glimmered dimly as he openly recognized the possibility of losing his soul mate so soon after finding him.

Quatre hesitated. "Well...she doesn't say she's coming to see me, just that she's coming to England. Maybe once she's here, she'll just vanish into the crowd to protect herself. That's what I'd do." He could tell Trowa wasn't convinced, but he also couldn't bear to think about it any longer. "Look, this letter was postmarked weeks ago, so she's well on her way to getting here anyway. There's nothing we can do about it."

"We can be ready," Trowa said. "We can do what we planned and prepare a few rooms around the house with weapons, just to defend yourself with if you happen to get caught alone." Reluctantly, the gardener agreed that this was the best and safest course of action for now, and they crept up into the main part of the house with their fencing foils, ready to take some passive action against fate.

**********

Heero waited until Dorothy left to find something else to do before he hunted down his target; Relena was alone at last, but not for long. He found her in the front parlour, curled up in a chair in front of the fire, with both feet tucked underneath her, and her hair draped over the back of the chair like a curtain of golden wheat.

He quietly shut the parlour doors and walked casually to her side. Relena looked up, neither pleased nor displeased, simply floating in a contented haze of tea and firelight. "I haven't summoned you," she observed.

"Am I required to be summoned before entering her Ladyship's presence?" Heero asked smoothly.

Relena smiled, shrugged slightly, and turned back to the roaring fire. "I've never restricted your movement in the house before, have I?" She pointed him to a chair on her right hand side. "Do sit down."

The butler availed himself of her generous offer, then reviewed the plan in his mind. The objective was to find out if Lord Peacecraft knew about the peculiarities of Bridlewood's architecture, or at least if he ever told his daughter about them. Based on prior successes with gently manipulating her Ladyship, Heero anticipated no difficulties. "What were you thinking about?" he asked.

"Oh, nothing in particular," the girl answered softly, still gazing into the brilliant flames, "but the manor's future is always prominent in my mind."

"Really?" Heero mused. "For some reason I imagined you were thinking of the past." He latched both azure eyes onto the side of her face in a smoky, passion-filled stare, or his best approximation of one, as he had been trained to create. Normally, she would have felt his steady vision bouncing off her petal-pink cheek and blushed immediately, but today she was slow to react. "Are you depressed about the thought of your first Christmas without your father?"

Relena's expression hardly changed, and she continued to study the hearth and its warming fire. "It won't be easy..."

"The entire house will feel his loss," the boy persisted in gentle, musical tones, "and I suppose he must have loved this house very much...he must have known absolutely everything about it." He propped his elbow on the armrest of the chair and leaned a little closer to Relena with his chin resting languidly in his palm. "Tell me...what was his favourite thing about Bridlewood? Not the room he spent the most time in or the most money on, but the special, secret places he only shared...with special people." On the last phrase, he lifted his head and reached out to gently brush a few golden strands of hair off the low-cut shoulder of Relena's dress, dangerously close to her skin.

Her Ladyship looked down at the hand, but still did not turn her head. "Heero...you must realize by now that I know that tone all too well. It's the tone you use when you want me to answer question after question about things that don't really matter any more. The past no longer interests me." Her own tone was all sweetness and light, and she spoke to him as if he were no more than a naughty child.

Heero's smouldering gaze quickly dissolved into a look of surprise. Relena should have melted by then, but she was perfectly intact and asserting her personal power to boot. Wondering if she was wise to his tricks, or if the same old routine of heated glances and velvet words had worn on her too long, Heero switched tactics. "In that case, would you like to know your future?"

That caught the girl off guard, and she looked at Heero directly for the first time. In the seconds that she spent wondering what the lad meant by that, he reached out again with his left hand, capturing her right hand and pulling it across the gap between the chairs. Disarmed by her own curiosity, she allowed him to do what he wished.

With a feather-light touch, he traced the lines in her palm, occasionally looking up at her, barely out from under his dark, spiky bangs. "I see splendid things in your future, m'lady. Fame...prosperity...distinction...and many friends." He followed his prediction with the kind of smile that would make any woman blessed with even rudimentary consciousness leap into his arms and volunteer to run away to Tahiti.

It didn't work. Relena smiled again and took her hand back in a very ladylike fashion. "But of course, I already knew that."

Heero leaned back in his chair and blinked away the fog that had suddenly rolled in around his ears. Something was seriously amiss. The test subject was not responding within previously established parameters. Heero was in trouble.

"Can I bring you another cup of tea, m'lady?" he asked, rising deferentially. He was out of ideas; time to retreat and regroup.

"No, thank you," Relena said to the fire. Her loyal servant turned to escape, but after a few steps she leaned over the back of the chair and called out to him. "Heero..." The boy paused and looked her in the eye. "We've had three butlers in two years, but I can honestly say that I've enjoyed your company the most."

Heero absorbed that for a moment, nodded, and left, feeling a little shell-shocked but thankfully still able to walk. Somehow, in a way that defied comprehension, Relena had grown immune to his verbal intoxication, and in less than two weeks. This required serious analysis, but discovering who else knew about the wall niches and what was in them came first, and apparently he would need to take a different route to get there.

**********

Trowa and Quatre made quick work of hiding a few fencing foils around the house, but soon they ran out of swords and were sifting through the attic storage room looking for more. There was a surprising number of weapons in the house already, and within half an hour of starting, they had strategically placed a sword on every floor.

"So, how many does that make, now?" Quatre thought out loud as they shuffled through boxes in the amber lamplight. "One in the pantry behind the sugar..."

"One in the ballroom over the fireplace..." Trowa added.

"One in the laundry cupboard..."

"One in the piano..."

"...and one under the sideboard." Quatre grinned. "Not bad for an afternoon's work."

"There are still a lot of vulnerable areas in the house, though," Trowa said, lifting the lid of a steamer trunk. "If there are any more swords to be found up here, I want them downstairs where they can be of use to you. I'll feel a lot better about letting you roam around the estate alone if I know you'll be able to defend yourself in a pinch."

Quatre agreed while poking through the trunk, but it was just filled with old clothes. They took their lantern to a far corner of the storage room where there were some long, thin crates, but just as they got there, they heard footsteps coming up the stairs. Quatre froze, reaching out with his mind to identify the approaching party, then grabbed the lantern with one hand and Trowa's arm with the other, and dropped to the ground behind some boxes.

As one set of footsteps became two, the boys quickly extinguished the light, and Trowa, deferring to his friend's judgement, crouched low to the floor and remained silent. Slowly, a second orange glow from a second lamp illuminated the room as the intruders walked slowly but confidently inside.

"Ugh! Look at this place!" a young woman's voice whined. "There's dust and filth everywhere! You can wade through this muck if you want, I'm going to see Anna Maria."

"No you're not," a stern male voice followed, "you're going to stay and help me, if you want your share of the takings. Now, get over there and search those boxes."

The boys knew without looking that it was Treize and Dorothy, and Quatre most of all felt that revealing themselves now would be a very bad thing. They looked at each other in puzzlement and slight fear as they heard the pair bickering and opening crates.

Dorothy lifted the lid off one that hadn't been moved in years, and a large, hairy spider crawled over the rim and down the side. The girl screeched, slapped the lid back down and stood on the crate itself, shivering and whimpering. "I hate it here! There's horrible things crawling all over everything! Why don't you just ask Otto where these silly blueprints are instead of dragging me up here to be eaten alive!?"

Treize sighed audibly. "I don't want the servants involved. It would be too easy for them to tell Relena, and she might tell Marlowe, and then where will you and I be?"

Trowa and Quatre looked at each other in the shadows. They had a severe inkling that the Count was up to no good, but whatever his purpose was, the boys were in no position to do anything about it. The more immediate problem was the fact that as the pair searched box after box, they were inching ever closer to where they were hiding; the boys made the unspoken agreement that unless they could sneak past them and escape, discovery was imminent.

Trowa looked to either side of him, peeked over the top of his shelter at Treize and Dorothy's position, and put together a mental map of the storage room based on what he had already seen of it. With a slow hand, he drew invisible lines on the floor to demonstrate to Quatre what route would get them out of the room quickest. The gardener seemed to understand, and nodded; Trowa let him go first, and they slowly began crawling behind boxes and trunks, hoping to slip out under their very noses.

"Oh, sick!! I'm not touching that! It's covered in.....stuff!"

"Be quiet."

An inch at a time, the boys crawled through a narrow gap in the crates, keeping just below their top surface and not risking another peek at the combatants. Somewhere past the halfway point to safety, Quatre's hand caught the edge of a large, heavily-framed painting; he didn't yell, even though it hurt like the dickens, but it made a little clunking noise that made both boys cringe.

Dorothy spun around and gasped. "What was that!?"

Treize put down the box he was searching with an even louder clunk and rolled his eyes. "Would you please try to concentrate on the task at hand?"

"Something moved over there!" the girl squealed. "By the painting! There's mice up here! Maybe even rats! What if they attack the kittens in the middle of the night!? I can't have them sleeping on the same floor as a colony of bloodthirsty rats!!"

Treize slammed something down that made the loudest noise yet, but the lads didn't dare surrender to their curiosity to peek and see what it was. "You are really trying my patience today," he snarled. Dorothy scowled back. What ensued was a nasty argument that fortunately provided enough background noise for Trowa and Quatre to shimmy across the floor a little faster. They made it almost to the door and risked a tiny glance over the top of a box to see if either of them were looking their way. They weren't, and so the boys slunk out.

They scurried straight into Duo and Heero's room, knowing that two frantic sets of footsteps flying down the stairs would arouse suspicion, and quietly shut the door. In the dim purple light of the setting sun, they heard the mewling of the kittens almost as clearly as the dispute a few yards from the other side of the door.

The boys looked at each other and finally exhaled. "I think we should tell Heero about this," Trowa whispered.

The argument subsided, but before long it was replaced with a very faint sound that grew nearer and nearer. Quatre knew what it was right away, and scrambled for the wedge-shaped block of wood that served as a doorstop. He slipped the narrow edge under the door quietly, then the two of them braced themselves up against Duo's bed, with Quatre's foot pressed against the doorstop, just as the doorknob turned.

Someone on the other side pushed on the doorknob, expecting the door to swing open; the boys pushed back steadily, straining without breathing to create the simple illusion of a stuck door without confirming that there was anyone inside. It lasted less than ten seconds, but those were the longest ten seconds either of them could remember. Finally, the person on the other side let go of the doorknob and walked away.

Quatre knew it was Treize. "We should definitely tell Heero about this," he whispered back.

**********

"No way," Duo breathed, "she just blew you off?"

Heero shook his head in wonderment, tapping the fingers of one hand on the kitchen table. "Something about her has changed drastically. I can't get any information out of her anymore." Maybe my abilities are failing...or maybe they're spiralling out of control without my knowing it, and having unexpected effects on the people around me. Maybe that's why Hilde--

"You don't suppose she knows something about the secret passages and she's just being coy about it?" Duo interrupted innocently.

The butler squinted. "I didn't even get near the topic of architecture. As soon as I mentioned her father, she shut me out." He glanced over at the charcoal grey kitten, who was having a small dish of mashed tuna for her tea, lovingly prepared by her violet-eyed pet mouse. "She did mention something else interesting...she brought up the subject of how many butlers have worked here. We knew about Henry Wagner, but we've ignored his predecessor. Whoever he is, he should know just as much about this house as Lord Peacecraft did. We should find him."

"If he's even still alive," Duo reminded him, scratching the kitten behind her ears. "Not only do we not know who he was, but we don't know why he left."

"Good point," Heero said with a nod. "I want to know why Treize wants this house so badly. I'm convinced that he does, but from what Otto's told me of the country estate, that house is much larger, with acres and acres of land around it. It could even be worth more than Bridlewood, and yet Treize is here. The secret passages must have something to do with it, and this former butler may be the only person who can tell us why."

The kitten licked her chops and looked up at Heero for a moment, then pricked up her sensitive ears and turned her head towards the west stairs. Sure enough, someone was clomping down the wooden steps, and the cat had been the first to hear it. Finally, from the narrow, rickety staircase, covered in dust from head to foot and looking terribly twitchy, came Quatre and Trowa.

"Whoa! What happened to you guys?" the chef crowed.

Quatre immediately took a chair next to Heero. "We need to talk."

"So talk," Heero said.

"Okay..." The blond boy clasped his hands in front of him on the table and took a deep breath. "Why would Count Khushrenada be looking for the blueprints to this house? And why wouldn't he want Miss Relena to know he wanted them?"

"And why would he try to force his way into your room?" Trowa asked in a stern voice. He stood directly behind Quatre with his arms folded, adopting a posture and glare that suggested if Treize wanted to sneak into Heero's room, there must be some unsavoury reason for it, something Heero wasn't telling them.

Heero betrayed no hint of surprise or guilt, and Duo shifted his attention to the kitten to avoid displaying any stray emotions of his own. "I don't know," Heero lied, "do you think we should tell her?"

Quatre studied his face, as well as his heart, and knew that he was lying. "We don't know either, that's why we came to see you. If anyone's going to tell her that her uncle is acting suspiciously, it should be the senior indoor staff." He paused to gauge Heero's reaction. "Do you think we should tell Otto instead?"

Duo looked up without moving his head and made brief eye contact with his partner. Still stone-faced and visually unreadable, Heero leaned back in a commanding manner. "No. Something like this needs to be handled with tact, and tact isn't Otto's best quality, but as yet, I don't believe that the Count has done anything wrong. Blueprints of the house one happens to be living in are hardly classified information, and until the kittens are adopted, our room has an open-door policy. If I see any merit in telling her Ladyship about this, I will do so, but I don't deem it necessary right now."

Quatre slowly leaned back, then rose. "Right...well...I'm glad we had this little chat." He turned around and tugged Trowa away by the sleeve. As soon as they were out of earshot, the recap began.

"Why didn't you tell him Dorothy was there?" Trowa asked in an energetic whisper. "Or that we had to crawl through inch-deep dust to get out of that storage room without getting caught?"

"Because he's lying," Quatre snapped with an uncharacteristic glare. "He's not telling me the whole truth, so I don't see why I should tell him the whole truth. Not until we know what's going on."

They retreated to their room to think things over, and figure out if this new development was in any way a threat to their own goals. I understand, Trowa thought along the way, I don't think I trust Heero either.

Back in the kitchen, the cat, the mouse, and the caged tiger looked at each other with a bit of worry. Deep down they knew the exchange with Quatre was only convincing on the surface, and they had no way of knowing how the boy would interpret Heero's misleading words. "What now?" Duo asked, cuddling the kitten for emotional security.

"Now," Heero said, running a hand through his hair in a rare show of anxiety, "we have a problem."


~~~~~~~~~~

Next, in Episode Twenty-Eight: It's adoption day for the kittens, but like anything else at Bridlewood, it's not guaranteed to be a smooth ride. The simple question of what's in the walls starts to explode into a fiendish plot that will take some time to unravel, and while Duo and Heero work to decode the mysterious clues left behind, the climate of the house is beginning to change.

=^_^= Happy (American) Thanksgiving! (I had my turkey last month, if you don't count the turkey I'm dating.) I'm in a bit of a rush to send this to my editor-in-chieftess, so I'll close simply by saying, next episode will arrive on November 30th! Cyaz!