Til the Clouds Roll By

Part 5 – Makes Right From Wrong.

"You're awake," a voice announces from far above me and despite the haze, I note relief in its tones.

The voice continues to speak now but I choose to ignore it, instead concentrating on the calming blackness that has become my world. To my consternation, the voice doesn't want to let me rest and it speaks to me directly now, asking questions that demand answers.

"Duo?" That sounds a lot like Quatre. "Can you hear me?"

"I hear ya, Quat," I reply slowly through a scratchy throat that stings as I speak. "What happened to me?" I want to know because quite frankly, I feel like shit.

Quatre's presence moves alongside me and he gently touches my arm to let me know where he is.

"Sally contacted us to say she'd had information that suggested Oz were operating near our safe house. She wasn't sure whether it was coincidence or whether they'd found us, but knew we had to leave. As we were discussing what to do you went to sit outside. The next thing we knew there was shouting and you'd been caught by an Oz soldier. Fortunately he must have been the scout as he was alone so Heero disarmed him easily."

'Disarmed him' is Quatre's euphemism for Heero blowing the soldier's brains out. Despite everything he's seen and experienced, Quatre still feels he needs to be polite about death. I know I should be shocked that my lover has committed cold-blooded murder on our doorstep, but death is just another occupational hazard of participating in this war. 'Kill or be killed' is the unfortunate axiom we have learnt to live by.

"Where is Heero?" I ask, suddenly anxious to speak to him.

There's an awkward silence, punctuated by Quatre shifting slightly in the chair next to my bed. "He's not here," he says almost apologetically. "He found it hard to stay around after…"

My friend trails off and I sense that he is struggling to find the right words. I'd like to make it easy on him by letting him leave it at that, but I need to know what happened.

"After what, Quatre?" I ask, although I'm dreading the answer as several hazy images begin to perforate the fog that is my waking memory.

There's that awkward pause again. "You practically attempted suicide," he says quietly. "The soldier was threatening to shoot you and you were begging him to do it." Suddenly Quatre grips my hand. "Tell me you were bluffing, Duo, please."

I squeeze my eyes shut and fight back tears. I want to lie to my gentle friend, but I just can't. "I wasn't bluffing," I say and I am ashamed to have those words pass my lips knowing how much they will hurt him.

"Oh, Duo," he cries as he hugs my prone form as best he can. The weight of even Quatre's small frame causes me to gasp in pain and he is off me like a shot. "I'm sorry, Duo," he says contritely as I realise that my right arm has been firmly bandaged across my chest so my fingers are resting on the opposite shoulder. "You twisted your shoulder quite badly so we had to strap it up. Wufei thinks you might have broken your collarbone too but we can't go anywhere to get it x-rayed just yet."

I can only sigh at the damage to my already battered body. "So have we moved safe houses?" I ask, thinking about what Quatre has told me as I wince at the pain in my mutilated vocal cords. I think I remember screaming…

"Yes, we left straight after the attack on you," he says, holding a glass of water to my lips and allowing me to drink greedily, "We've been here three days now."

"Three days? I've been asleep for three days?"

"You needed rest," he replies, for all the world sounding like Heero.

With my one good arm I reach up and touch my hair, realising it is no longer caked in mud, which is how I remember it. Quatre sees me doing this and explains the transformation. "We cleaned you up as soon as we arrived here," he says before he suddenly sounds sheepish. "I had a go at re-braiding your hair but I'm afraid I didn't make a very good job of it."

"You should have got Heero to do it," I say with a smile but Quatre doesn't respond. My smile fades as his silence tells me that that's exactly what he tried to do. "He wouldn't do it would he?" I say quietly.

"He's upset," Quatre replies, avoiding the question with this statement. "He thought he was going to lose you. We all did."

I suddenly feel like a naughty schoolboy who is causing my friends untold grief. In the Heero versus Howard contest, it is I that's scored the next point in Howard's favour, as plainly my fellow pilots would be better off without me.

"So where are the others?" I ask, no longer wanting to be occupied by my thoughts.

Quatre stands and begins to arrange my bed covers. "Trowa and Heero went back to Howard's to fetch Wing and Heavyarms now they're ready. Wufei is out getting supplies and checking out the local area."

"So you get the job of nurse, huh?"

"I don't mind, Duo," Quatre replies, although he sounds a little defensive as he straightens the pillows under my head. "We all care about you so you don't have to make it sound like a chore."

There I go again, upsetting the people closest to me. "I'm sorry, Quatre," I say, wishing I could convey my feelings through eye contact and gesture, but realising I have use of neither. "For everything I mean."

"I know," he replies softly, forgiveness an action that comes easy to my gentle friend. "And I'm sorry too."

"What for?" I ask, surprised.

"For leaving you out of important discussions and talking about you rather than to you."

I offer him a smile but I'm not going to deny that it hurt. "That's okay."

"No it's not," Quatre says more firmly this time and I sense his need to unburden this guilt. "Please understand we never did it maliciously, we just thought talking about missions in front of you might be too painful."

"More painful than feeling ostracised by my friends?" I said, more harshly than I'd intended. Quatre doesn't respond and I instantly feel bad. "I'm sorry, that was unfair of me," I say remorsefully.

I realise that I am in danger of alienating myself from the one person that would never intentionally hurt me and instantly know that I need to make it right. "Can we call it quits?" I ask hopefully and am relieved as Quatre takes up my one free hand and squeezes it between his delicate digits.

"Definitely," he says, his smile evident in his voice. "You're as much a part of us now as you were before and I promise I won't ever forget that again."

I almost tell Quatre about Howard's offer but I decide to stay silent. He has this habit of taking the blame for everything and I don't want him to think I might be going to live with Howard because of something he'd done. I hate it when things get deep like this so I endeavour to lighten the moment. "So you don't mind looking after me?" I ask, a hint of mischief in my voice.

"No," Quatre says slowly sensing that he's about to be had.

"Great!" I say with a laugh, "Then I'll have a huge bowl of ice cream please. With chocolate sprinkles," I add as an afterthought.

Quatre giggles. "I'd love to oblige, Duo, but we've hardly got any food in the house until Wufei returns."

I pout appropriately; an expression I have perfected for when I want to get my own way. That quickly changes to a look of horror when Quatre offers me some muesli by way of consolation.

"Okay, since food's off the menu," I say, winking at my unintentional pun, "I think I'll get dressed instead."

I can tell Quatre wants to dispute my plans but he remains silent, evidently feeling our friendship is too tenuous at the moment to risk the argument. Instead he says, "well okay, but if anyone says anything I'm gonna tell them I tried to stop you but you overpowered me."

"Deal," I say, laughing as I swing my legs out of bed.

I keep the mood light-hearted by jabbering like an idiot to keep embarrassment away as Quatre helps me into some clean boxers and a pair of jogging pants. Insane isn't it? We're both in homosexual relationships and yet we can't do something like this without turning as pink as newborn babies. Quatre then offers me a choice of jumpers and I choose a navy blue hooded top, which he pulls over my head, turning the redundant sleeve inside out. I feel strangely vulnerable with one arm strapped tightly to my body; perhaps even moreso than when I discovered I was blind. I know that might seem very weird but to be honest, nothing surprises me anymore. Before we head downstairs, Quatre gives me a couple of pain killers, which I hope will start working soon since all my ailments are competing with each other to cause me the most grief.

As Quatre leads me out of the room I insist on feeling my way around the whole of the upper floor. Maybe it's the thought of coming so close to death and being denied it, but I think that if I'm not going to meet my maker just yet then I'd better start making the most of life, namely snatching back a little of my independence. The Arabian is wonderfully patient as I grope about, questioning him on which doors lead where. When I think I have an adequate mental map formed, I allow him to point me in the direction of the stairs. I let him lead as the thought of falling on the steps with a possible broken collarbone and a twisted shoulder does not bode well. The air would turn blue and Quatre may well combust under the pressure of hearing so many words that he wouldn't dare think let alone say.

At the bottom of the stairs, I go through the same process; feeling my way around as Quatre provides a running commentary of everything I lay my one good hand on. As sad as it may seem, by the time I've done that I'm worn out and in need of a sit down. Quatre joins me on the threadbare couch and hands me a can of cola, which I accept gratefully, glad there's something in the cupboard for me, a child of the junk food generation. Since we're alone in the house, I decided to ask as much as possible about Heero to see if I can gauge how much damage the incident at the last safe house has done.

"Where would you put him on a scale of one to ten?" I ask Quatre when we're both settled, "If one is calm and ten is hide all firearms."

There's a pause. "Eleven." Quatre says reluctantly.

I shake my head. "Why's he so worried?" I wonder out loud until I settle on a memory, which locks it all into place.

Way back when, when Heero Yuy was nothing more than a name in a history book and Deathscythe still had that 'new gundam' smell and zero mileage on the clock, I spent some time in a home for troubled adolescents on L-2. I was sent there after probably my hundredth arrest for stealing, when the law were sick of seeing my face in court, but I was still too young to be sent to 'proper' adult prison. To be honest, despite the fact that the home was supposed to be secure, I could have left any time I liked (sub-standard window locks you know) but I stayed, purely because the food wasn't bad and the beds weren't lumpy. The Maxwell Church had been razed to the ground twelve months previously and I'd grown tired of begging and stealing to survive so I let them commit me. The downside to having a full stomach and a well-rested body was I had to sit through endless therapy sessions with shrinks that tried to understand me. Everything had meaning, from my clothes to how I grew my hair and it took a while to get used to going about my daily business with several people following me around writing things on clipboards. Paranoid? You would be.

Eventually, after several months of analysis, they decided on a diagnosis. Mania, possibly as a component of manic depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, suicide risk but best of all, the tendency towards psychotic behaviour. That last part raised the game several notches and I realised that I had to leave before they assigned me to quarters that really were secure. Personally, I found the whole episode rather funny but Heero begged to differ when he came across those little gems of information. It happened when we were barely acquainted; I'd shot him, we'd jumped thirty storeys from a skyscraper together; you know, the usual stuff. The instant bond we shared obviously unnerved Heero enough for him to do a little checking about me but since I'd lived most of my life in the shadows on L-2, there wasn't much on file. Other than a brief stay at 'Sunnyview', the home for 'behaviourally challenged and mentally unsettled adolescents' of course.

Anyway, I can see how Heero would be concerned about my mental stability since that's all he really knows about me. He's never actually told me that he hacked my file to find that stuff out but I'm not stupid. Besides, the rather nifty alert I'd installed to tell me if my file had been accessed confirmed my suspicions about why Heero had started to watch me very closely whenever we were together. Maybe I am mental; maybe the fact that I find the diagnosis so amusing is because I lack the insight to understand that I am disturbed. Phew, that train of thought is a bit of a head-trip!

I'm glad, therefore that Quatre is there occupy my mind with conversation and he does so, by telling me a bit about what has been happening over the last three days. He and Wufei had had a couple missions during which Trowa was left behind to watch me until Howard had sent word that Heavyarms and Wing were ready. Heero it seems, had stayed away from our newest safe house until it was time to collect the gundams. I ask where my lover had stayed during that time, but Quatre explains that Heero never made contact, other than a brief phone call to say he was safe.

"Did he ask about me?" I say, not sure I really want to know the answer.

"I don't know, Wufei took the call."

"I see," I reply, worried that this is heralding the return of the old, disassociated Heero Yuy. My fault, of course. "So is he coming back with Trowa?"

"I don't know. I hope so," Quatre adds quickly, "Maybe Trowa can talk some sense into him."

I hope so too, but I pray that Trowa doesn't tell Heero about Howard's offer. I want to see if we can rescue this relationship without that added complication hanging over us. As we talk a little about new developments in the war, Wufei returns from his part shopping, part reconnaissance expedition. Quatre goes to help him unpack the shopping bags but I follow too, utilising the mental map I have made of the lower floor. Wufei is surprised to see me up and about but I don't spend too long dwelling on which parts of my anatomy are giving me the most pain. Instead I come straight to the point and ask him to do me a favour. Wufei asks what I want him to do and I tell him. I want him to train me.

Let me explain a little. What I've asked Wufei to do involved a considerable climb down on my part. Not long after we first got together as a group Wufei offered to train us both spiritually and physically, claiming that harmony between mind and body would allow us to surpass our own abilities. He claimed (to snorts of derision from me I'm ashamed to say) that we could train ourselves to fight without having to rely on mere mortal sentience. Translated from 'Wufei-speak' that meant we could engage in stealth missions and hand-to-hand combat with instincts that would outstrip even our finely-tuned senses. Hearing and most importantly of all, sight would be practically redundant with our new found skills.

I was sceptical as you are probably now, only I was less polite about it. I openly laughed at his ideas, my street fighting style of combat knowing no other way than to attack what you saw in front of you. How could you manage without sight? That was just crazy, a sure-fire recipe for a date with death!

Anyway, if Wufei was hurt by my 'doubting Thomas' attitude then he didn't show it but needless to say he never offered again. But now I am asking him to repeat that offer to me, the fool that didn't take up the chance to learn such skills until they became a necessity rather than option. I wouldn't blame him for refusing, but instead he warns me of the hard work that's involved.

"You need motivation," he says with the deadly seriousness that is my Chinese friend's trademark.

I point to my eyes. "I have motivation," I reply, with no trace of humour.

"Very well," he says. "As soon as your shoulder's healed we'll begin but I promise you it's not an easy art to master."

The slight edge of doubt in his voice makes me all the more determined. I don't blame him for thinking ill of me; after all he's lived with me and my negligible attention span for long enough, but I am determined to prove him wrong this time. "Thank you, Wufei," I say with all sincerity.

Our moment of unity is interrupted by the sound of the front door opening and closing. Quatre goes out first and I hear him greet Trowa with a hug and a polite yet affectionate kiss. Just as I think Trowa must have returned alone, I hear Quatre offer a more restrained welcome to someone whose name causes my heart to want to leap from my chest and high-tail it out of the open kitchen window.

Heero is back.

TBC…