Le Fantôme De la Beauté

:female:

Duo stood just left of the doctor, staring at the screen while her friend went through the long, drawn out process of getting his brain scanned. "

"I don't get it," the girl frowned, tugging on her braid in concern and setting her hip on the edge of the console.

"Duo, get off," Sally snapped and shook her head. "I don't understand either. Will you get off please? I knew I should have left you with Officer Chang, only he wouldn't have been able to keep still with you prattling at him the entire time."

Duo leaned in again and tapped the screen, still half sitting on the console. "See this… you've got different areas of activity. Its almost as if things are different, as if his very brain is changed? How can that be?"

Sally shook her head again, lost. "It's not that different. Just in the area of the damage. He has damage where he shouldn't have. And last year's incident on his brain is not there. I mean, there is no sign of the damage and I'm thinking if I went down and checked his skull, he'd have no sign of the stitches. I'm going to have to report this to Une." Standing up, she sighed, looking through the observation window. "Okay, Officer Chang. You may rise. Please get dressed." Then letting off the intercom button, she stared pointedly at Duo. "Get. Off. My. Equipment. Officer. Maxwell."

Duo stood and walked around Sally's chair to press herself to the glass and gaze down at the man who stood in his usual grace. "Sally, don't tell Une yet? Could you give me a chance? I think… there might be something here."

Sally scoffed, "Duo, my dear Duo… if I don't tell Une and then I do tell her and she finds out I've not told her for a few days, do you realize where my ass will be?" she smiled beatifically upon the other girl.

Pressing her palm on the glass, Duo sighed. "Okay.. okay.. but let me be with you. I want to talk to her. See… Heero said something to me earlier. And I'm starting to think maybe he's right."

- - - - - - - - - -

Wufei sat on the edge of the scanning device and stared at the great hole he'd just stuck his head in for the last hour and a half. Closing his eyes, he sighed. Somehow, this wasn't going to work.

Pushing off of the edge, he stood, walked to the door and passed through it. Meaning to go to Une's office, he was stopped by Heero's sudden rising from where the man had been in the outside hall.

"Chang," Heero's eyes glanced across him in careful measure of who he was. He couldn't help but wonder if his Heero, Duo's Heero would notice the differences in his replacement. It seemed this one had.

Wufei raised a hand for silence. "I can't explain it to you, Yuy. I don't know how. But I am going to do my best to keep it from hurting anyone."

"Just you're being here is hurting everyone." Heero's voice is cold, cold as it had been when they were young boys and piloting. Wufei could look up and see those azure depths regarding him, deciding if he were a liability or not.

"Then I will leave," Wufei sighed, sensing that there was something here that Heero had not the skill to divulge, to say. This Heero was as stunted as he'd been in the war, maybe a little better, but with neither of them knowing how to truly make a connection, they were left to try and give their words in the pressure of their stares.

"You will not. That will hurt Duo even more." Heero straightened, his face one of alabaster, still and unchanging. It was a matter of Duo then, was it? But Wufei knew, that was what it was for himself as well. Anything for Duo. They owed so much to him.. her… was that the same?

Suddenly desperate to know, Wufei reached out and grabbed Heero's arm, ignoring the way the other man flinched away. "We have to talk. Please."

Raising a brow impassivly, Heero looked down at where Wufei's hand still held his forearm and waited until the chinese pilot pulled back, then nodded. "Come."

They walked through the Preventer's offices, arriving finally at a supply closet which opened to Heero's access card. Upon the door opening, however, Wufei found that he wasn't in a closet so much as a miniature warehouse for electronic gadgets and hardware and software. As Heero was in the technological and hacking division as well as planning, it made sense he'd have a means to be here.

The door closed behind them, Heero touched a switch on the wall and a florescent light flickered, darkened, flickered again and then came on with a soft distant buzz Wufei didn't even notice. The light, pale and ghostlike, turned the two men into phantoms. But maybe, in a way, they both were, Wufei thought. Neither of them truly alive, neither of them yet aware of what they were still missing. He had seen glimpses in the other Wufei's journal. That other one had found something that he wasn't sure he would know what to do with had he ever discovered it.

Wufei sat upon a large plastic barrel and glanced up at Heero. With a wave, he smirked. "Might want to sit. This could take a while."

But in the end, the story was surprisingly short because Heero did not interject like Duo might have. Or even like the other Heero might have. This one merely listened, asking a clarifying question here and there of facts alone, but otherwise not interested in the human aspect of it all. Wufei finished and then sat in the silence that stretched, not sure what was bound to follow.

"Do you believe me?" he asked finally.

Silence… more silence, then Heero took a breath and nodded with, Wufei noted, only the slightest show of hesitation.

"Some of it," Heero finally stated, and Wufei wondered what the man would have thought if he'd described the things that had effected this change. Now that would have been a hard one to explain and not seem crazy. He already was crazy enough, apparently.

"It does explain things," Heero leaned back against the wall and rubbed his hand briefly across his jawline. "I had noticed some great changes in you. But I am unsure if it is something as science fiction as dimensional travel. Yet your CAT scan showed some anomalies."

Why would Wufei be surprised to discover that Heero had seen the CAT scans even though they'd been just finished with them? He smirked, shaking his head and tucking his hands before his knees. "Yuy, you have to help me. I think the reason this was done.."

"For Duo," Heero finished for him. "I agree. But it is… highly unusual."

Wufei tightened his hands about one another and then slowly nodded in agreement. "Highly so."

"But you cannot leave. That would cause more pain than it would alleviate."

Wufei agreed silently and then, into their quiet that they're growing, "I'm going to resign from the Preventers. I don't understand the system well enough. And Duo can find herself another, better partner." His bitterness at finding himself so lacking tainted his words, making them sour upon his tongue.

Maybe he'd been hoping that Heero would say otherwise, encourage him, tell him he'd be given aid in his mockery of this new life. He was sorely disappointed, however. No such offer came from the other pilot and when they left the electronics closet and made their way to Une's office, he could not help but think this was all one big mistake, every moment of it.

Not to mention how… strange it was that Heero seemed to accept all of his story so easily.

- - - - - - - - - - -

Wufei remained bent over his journal. Or his other half's journal, his fingers tense in his hair as he read, trying to decipher the secrets that would lead him to make the right turn, the correct decision when it came to this female Duo.

Strange, but because Duo was still Duo in so many ways, he wasn't as beset with concerns of Duo not being good enough. Rather, because this Duo was that same Duo yet female, he found he had a failing in respects to how he saw women. They were either below him or highly unattainable. Unlike the other Wufei, he could not see them as equals in any way. And he did not dare even think of them as friends for fear of where that would lead.

Returning home had been a practice in silence. Une had accepted his resignation (effective immediately - what else could she do?) and Duo was not talking to him again. The braided woman had gone about making dinner that evening, shoving macaroni and cheese in front of them all and then leaving without touching her dinner. Her music was still loud despite the lateness of the hour. And here, there was no Hee-chan to calm her.

The page was beginning to look blurry so Wufei pushed it from himself and dropped his head into his crossed arms, quietly praying for some balance in this. Finding none in prayers, he stood, gathering his katanas and moving silently down the hall and to the living room, always silent - would this be his life? This silence would govern his actions?

The katanas, he kneels on the carpeted floor carefully unwrapping them and letting his mind roam over another side to an enemy he hadn't known to exist. That Treize could love. That Treize could put aside the war for the favor of stolen moments of tenderness. It made him wonder how different the two men were. That Treize had loved this Wufei was undeniable. Yet the thought pushed him to go back over his own memories, his own Treize, the one of his living, his past. Had there been silences there as well? Places where he had not gone yet the doors might have been there had he only been of the right persuasion?

In other words, was his Trieze, his enemy, also the same man capable of love and wishing to love the Dragon who had destroyed him? Was that… he realized with shock, the reason why Treize had lost that last battle? The battle that he should never have lost? Wufei had always thought it was due to Treize not wanting to be there for the destruction of his attempt at an empire. But maybe it had been something greater than that?

Strange, to find himself thinking that the love of a man for him, something he would not have desired nor did he desire still, would have been greater than simple honor.

With a calm in his spirit, Wufei pushed the katanas before him, further from his knees so that he might bow to them, to the man who had held them, to the memory of a man who might have caused much grief but was capable, Wufei could recognize finally, of great emotion and love as well as pride.

He did not do his katana ritual that night. Rather, he remained, prostate before a ghost and, he felt, learned a great deal about what he might have come to know had he simply stopped his own pride and grown to humble himself before a man far greater than he appeared on the outside.

And in doing so, Wufei wept the tears that the proper Wufei of this world, had promised the general in his journals.

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((Oh it is good to be back! School is out and I'm my own person again! Yay! My pardons for the stilted feelof this chapter. I'm having a bit more difficulty with this story line than the other, because things took a far more direct approach to Wufei's position in this side as opposed to the other side. Hoping to keep things light hearted for the most part though. I have the next chapter done and will post that as well, two chapter increments! Yay!

S.Maldiva: Thank you! Even with little to say, it's good that you're enjoying it!

C: Oh wow… and you got all of that from this little fic? Thank you so much for your comments! Yes, I think it's interesting how much of an impact the past has on them all, yet hopefully they keep something of the same personality, merely shifted a degree to the left or right. Eep! It's just for fun, so I can't be too anal about it. Yet it would be fun to really get deep into it one day.

Tsuchi: Hee hee! Everyone is coming back into this! I'm so glad you're enjoying it! And yes… I wasn't sure how to make that obvious.. it's hard to put in, grah! There's so much overlap and italics alone don't quite cut it… but then again… I'll maybe go over it again some day and figure out what I could do to make it more easily understood.

And thank you to all you who are hanging in there with me and still reading! You folks are amazing.))