((One shot fic. Just love the song and wanted to see where it would take me. No death, but no real hope either. Don't stick if you like happy endings. This ain't one! [sob]

Song; "Hurricane" by the gloriously musically talented Mindy Smith! Wow. Go find her stuff. It's a shot to the arm, that's for sure.

OOC more than likely and I don't own them, so don't hurt me. Oh, yeah, and I don't own them either, or them... you know what I mean.))

Seeking Rain

Sitting there, as he was, he wasn't sure exactly what could have moved him. Surely not the rain spattering the roof, running down the sides of the house or making itself known in his mind, in his bones, rattling him free of the ground and shifting his body into the air. Surely he would have said something. Surely he would have done something. Anything.

But he didn't. He sat upon that rooftop, his eyes dull bruises, the lack of vibrancy frightening to us all. And he stared, like death on the top of a mausoleum, staring out at the grey afternoon sky. Around us all the world hazy with rain, mist rising off of the ground and then being beaten back down by the rumbles of thunder pressing oppressively back down.

It hurt. Hurt to see him like that. I think not one of us knew what to do. We hadn't even noticed him gone really. Most of us, that is.

"Where's Trowa?" Duo's voice cut into my ear. I wasn't sure I could answer just yet. So I hunched over my computer and continued.

"Heero," he began again and his hand touched my back. It was too much and I leaped up, the clatter of the chair turning all the other eyes on me as I lashed out but missed Duo's face. I hadn't wanted to hit him. He was fast, but he wasn't fast enough and had I truly wanted to, I would have caught him.

He stood there, panting, his face darker than I've ever seen it before. "Where. Is. Tro, Heero?" each word punctuated and left to writhe on the floor between us.

"Out," I finally growled, my jaw hurt and I could sense the sickening lurch in my gut. If Duo didn't know and Trowa was going to see Duo because Trowa always did go to see Duo when things went wrong. Even if it was to sit by the long haired baka and get some quiet into his tortured soul. A soul I could not free. Damn them all. I struggled against the mighty grip of jealousy. Turning back to the desk, I stooped and plucked the fallen chair from it's place, righting it and sitting in it again.

I could feel Duo's eyes boring into my back and the unspoken questions as well as the incriminations rolling onto my back, but I was steel, such things could not do a thing to me. Not really.

Finally, with a huff of frustration out of his nose, I could hear the whine of air passing out and knew the expression on his face, Duo turned with a push of toes on the wooden floor. "C'mon. Let's go find him.." and the door opened, they left me to my silence.

An hour later, the wind kicked up and less than twenty minutes after, the first crash of thunder broke into the wood paneling around me. I leaned into my work, then clicked the off on my laptop, watching it power down until it gave a soft mechanical whine and shut off. Closing the cover, I chewed on the inside of my lower lip, a hidden view of my own nervousness, and stopping to pick up my gun, I walked out to go on the search myself.

Wing was hidden from view, not even a goodly storm would move it. As were the other suits. I didn't worry about them and I figured that perhaps Trowa had simply gone to his suit, holed up. He'd be back after the storm. He had sense enough to get out of the rain, which obviously none of us did.

Catching up with them as they had come in on a third circle, doing the rescue work of circling back and then going further out each time, I fell into step without a word. Quatre was murmuring something about being all wrong and I could sense Wufei looking at the smaller pilot in confusion. I knew what he was talking about. I didn't have one iota of confusion in my head. No. It was all wrong. Everything had been wrong and it still was. I knew that, Trowa knew it, and now Quatre knew it. Damn his heart anyway.

On the fifth circle we ended up on a small ridge, staring down at the farmstead we had been using as a safe house. Here the clouds rolled overhead and the lightening seemed like the hand of God, flashing brilliant across the sky and bursting sound bubbles so large that an ocean of sound rushed down, covering us in motes of audible color. I couldn't tell for sure. It scared me, but I thought that perhaps with it all wrong, that maybe Trowa hadn't gone someplace safe at all.

Quatre's hand grasped mine. It was so childish, I looked down at him in surprise. His blue eyes caught mine and there was something like sympathy and something like a reflection of fear that I'd seen before. Fear of loneliness, fear of the night hours, fear of the quiet in our souls that was nothing more than a vacuum for the screams of our dead to rise up into. His hair flew into his eyes and across his cheek and I could not pull away, bound by that look he was giving me. It wasn't blue I was seeing though. It was green. And the sadness deafened me like no thunder could have.

Perhaps he was frightened. He was, after all, only fifteen years old. And emotionally I wonder that he wasn't younger in many ways from the rest of us. Ancient and yet so innocent. He amazed me time and time again by his lack of knowledge, his depth of trust, and his failing to judge. Even now, standing there, holding my hand as one might hold a bird, feeling it's pulse in one's hand, feeling my pulse in his palm, he did not look at me in any other way than what he always has. Because he's known and knows and he won't force me, but he can see as I can see, how I'm losing everything. And how I'm not just losing it, but I'm opening my fingers and letting what precious water is left, to drizzle out of my fingers until I'm as dry as a desert, cracked and open, thirsting for what can never quench, never heal me, but only cover me for a time until I let it all go once again.

I'm not sure how long we stood there, a minute? Ten seconds? It felt like years, staring into those eyes, feeling the heat of his hand on mine, noticing the minute differences between him and Trowa, the silence in him that could come from no one else, Quatre did not have quiet eyes, his shone. But these, this blue deep before me had stillness of deep forests, forgotten and left to fend for themselves until they were so feral no man dared walk into them.

What passed was gone as quickly as the shout broke out, fifteen feet ahead of us, Duo stood, pointing toward the homestead, his call cut back and tossed to us on the wind. "I see him! I see him down there! On the roof!"

I missed the heat of a hand in mine, the recognition that I was human and not some monster that a scrape of fingers along the back of my hand had afforded. And I stared down the hill, toward the homestead.

Ah, I could see him now. He was sitting there, crosslegged, atop dovecote, the windcock against his back and his face indiscernible from the distance. Not that it had been anything but indiscernible ever before. Except for the night before. That night... when Trowa had come into my room, his eyes wide and pain crossing his face, turning his mouth into something ugly and plain.

He'd always been beautiful, my perfect statue. He'd been so beautiful. Emotion was not meant for his face, nor for mine. Much of our perfection came from not inserting lines of pain or pleasure upon our skin. We walked with a stolid mask covering everything within until what was within died, withered into dry husks that were easily blown apart by a puff of breath on their surfaces. And with that look on his face, I recoiled.

"Heero.." his voice wracked through his body before it found its way out of the red blemish which was his mouth. "Heero, please..." and I found to my horror that tears were filling his eyes.

How in hell had we come to this? I pulled back as he hit the floor, fell to his knees and then toppled slowly, like a long forgotten tree in some dank undergrowth, falling to it's side, a giant broken apart at the ankles. His shoulder stopped with a shudder against the bed and his fingers scrabbled with the edge of the blanket, pulling it off of my bed and onto his body. He fumbled with it and tore it some, trying to get around his shoulders. Then, weeping, he rocked back and forth, holding it close to his chest, the heels of his hands pressed into his breast bone, wanting to pour pain out through his cupped thumbs, his palms, his wrists. Like blood, maybe or tears.

He did not look at me yet and I stood, my hand compulsively covering the keyboard beside me, as if I might save it from the spectacle on the floor. My silence crushed him and I did not try to stop it. He withered before him, his tears wringing him out until he was no longer an equal. He was blamefully human. I hated him. He brought chaos into my world, tore up my bed, broke my silence. How dare he?

It was the anger that broke through finally and without a show of it upon my face, I reached out, grasping the edge of my blanket and wrenching it from his grasp. He fell face forward and I tumbled his body some in my attempt to free it of his weight. Then curling it around my arm, I stepped around him and began to remake my bed, to make certain there were no wrinkles, no signs of it having been ravaged by a failure and his tears.

"I ... I didn't mean to kiss you.." his voice kicked my breath from my lungs and I froze, staring at the blanket, watching as something silver and globelike, sunk, slowly, darkening the wool of my blanket. "I.. I didn't meant to. But I don't feel badly about it. I'm glad I did it. I... I love you, you know," and his voice sounded so damn defeated.

Ha! Defeated by an emotion! How weak. How pathetic. I traced the dark spot left behind with my thumb.

"I just hoped that maybe... maybe you might..."

"Trowa.." I turned sharply, the dampness on my palm too slight to register, though I knew it was there.

His eyes turned toward mine and I glared at him. How dare he enter with that look, that hope in his eyes? It was ridiculous to expect anything from me. He knew that. He's always known that. His words, his wisdom, had convinced Duo to give up on me, to begin to seek out Quatre and Wufei instead and to find in both of them, a friend and a lover. But to give me that look, after everything we had been through! A sense of deep betrayal filled me and I snarled at him. "Don't! Don't even think about it. You knew! You knew better. And now you're going to tell me that you've done the very thing you knew better than to do! You're a fool, Trowa Barton, a stupid fool!"

"I know!" his wail broke into my litany and he reached for me but I stepped back. His heart broken then. I know enough of others to see when their heart breaks. You look for it in an adversary. You want to see the moment when everything falls to pieces around him. "I didn't want to! I hated myself for it! I've hated myself for it. But I can't help it. I've loved you all the time. I just didn't know it. I didn't know it until you almost died, until you tried to self-destruct. When Duo told me, I ... I realized... Heero please!" his broken cry cutting through my derision.

I could handle pleading. I took it easily. A man on his knees before me, I could pull the trigger. And here, I could do it just as easily. And I did. With a cold mask firmly in place, I looked down on him as if he were nothing more important than the floor which he was curled up on. "No, Barton. Never." And I left him.

The rain began as we came down the hill. Fat drops, like tears only colder, those of a dead man, those of the sea's ghosts, those of the silence, fell upon my skin and I brushed them off because they reminded me of how much I hated his weakness. First crying to me on my bedroom floor and then moving to sitting on top of a dovecote in the middle of a rain storm. But they came no matter how badly I tried to make them go away. And I brushed against them, and could not defeat them. There simply were too many. So instead I trudged onward, meaning to have a talk with him, to tell him how he had come close to giving away our position. Everyone knew the homestead was empty. And here he was, sitting atop the roof, like a beacon in his flight suit! Fool! Insane fool!

He was not inside when I got down, drenched to the bone. Stalking within I was stopped just past the foyer with another shout outside. Emerging, I looked up, following the direction of Duo's finger and found him, leg swinging over the side, he stared out into the thick foggish world just beyond the trees. And below, all of them.. all of us, staring up at him, an audience for his tomfoolery. And beyond, the wind moved, grew, and pushed hard against us all.

He stood then, with the wind so heavy and the rain too hard, coming down hard and heavy, stinging our skin, and I saw, through the blinding of the rain in my eyes, that his shirt was open, flapping behind him, and he arched his back, arms backwards. For a moment, when the shirt caught at his elbows while it was torn from his body, it seemed that he had wings. That he was about to take off, to simply fly away. And I know where he would have flown to, because it is where I would have loved to have flown away to myself. I too wanted to be where the mask was no longer needed, where the soldier died, where the war was lost and the cold could not touch the heart, though it might cut the skin. I too wanted to be where tears cleansed instead of simply adding to your burden and where love was something which did not destroy but freed the body, the mind... the human.

I turn from my computer and gaze behind me at the sleeping form at the edge of the apartment. My eyes burn and I know that I should have been asleep hours ago. But memories have come to visit with the thunder rumbling across the plains, rattling the windows. The clouds are heavy though and the night does not flash with lightening. Nor do the clouds relinquish the rain.

"Heero?" the soft voice calls to me and I stand, going to lay down and run a finger down that soft thigh. Fingers find mine in the darkness. "Are you still up?"

"I will sleep soon," I reassure and my heart does not follow the line my fingers take. I stand at her comforted sigh and leave her there, letting her rest.

But for me, there is no rain. And there is no flying away. And Trowa... has moved on. The war taking him from me as surely as the rain had torn his shirt from his body, flinging it into the darkness. And I'm begging the winds that they might reach past the boards of this grand country home, past the light blue of the screen of my computer, past the clothing that covers my skin and the richness of texture from Relena's entourage, and tear into me, break me free, and let me move on.

- Owari -

"I felt the faint trace of thunder
Rattle this old house
I saw the fire light the sky
But there's no sign of rain anywhere

(chorus) I need a hurricane to empty out this place
Seems its the only way
To salvage any sense I have left
To move on

I'm waiting to hear your voice again
And lighten up this heart
And I'm holding on to stupid memories
But I see you in every little thing

(chorus) I need a hurricane to straighten out this place
It may be the only way
To salvage any sense I have left
To move on

I need a hurricane to ravage through this place
I think its the only way
To salvage any sense I have left
To move on

I felt the faint trace of thunder
But there's no sign of rain anywhere
No there's no sign of you anywhere."

Mindy Smith, "Hurricane" off of her "One Moment More" album

(Forgive the sadness. I didn't want to doit, but Mindy made me do it! I actually thought Trowa and Heero might be a neat fic. Maybe I'll try them out, a sequel perhaps. But it'd be longer, so I'll wait until I've got the other stuff done before I do more than a one shot. Don't want to get too many fics going at once.)