Roberta had finished her coffee and left Heero to a breakfast of cold cereal. As he crunched his way through a bowl of wheat flakes, he took stock of his physical condition. No broken bones…for once. A large lump on his forehead from where his head had connected with the girl's shoulder during the crash but, luckily, no concussion. His hair would be sufficient to hide the inevitable bruise. Muscles—well, they all ached but that was easy enough to ignore. He had a few miscellaneous cuts and scrapes from who knows where, but none of them were currently bleeding. There was other pain, but it was pain that haunted him ghost-like, and he pushed it to the back of his mind. His body had not handled his last battle in Wing ZERO well. The doctors had not been able to identify just what exactly he had done to himself though. All in all, he felt pretty good for someone who had come within a hair's breadth of dying the night before.

When he finished, he rinsed out his bowl and set it in the sink. Then, he padded into the church to find Roberta. His feet, in their borrowed socks, whispered on the stone floor as he made his way down a gloomy hallway. The church was a replica of a medieval cathedral—slightly scaled down—but with plenty of ornate, gothic details. He stepped into the shadow of a pillar as a small group of nuns in full habit bustled by via a cross corridor up ahead. Despite his light-colored clothing, they didn't notice him. After they passed, he ducked through the door behind him and into the sanctuary.

The door opened up into a side aisle, next to a pew. The choir loft overhead cast dark shadows, and he wondered how anyone could read from the hymnals interspersed among the pews since there were no electric lights. Then, he saw a spill of candle wax running down the back of the bench and realized mass must be conducted by candlelight. Odd, but not unheard of. Prague had been one of the cities the Romefeller Foundation had strove to restore to its former glory. Heero had seen several archaic customs put back into practice in the handful of days since his arrival.

Slipping between the pews, he stepped out into the nave. Here, the ceiling arched high overhead, supported by stone columns so big around that it would take at least five people holding hands to encircle just one. Sunlight came in through small stained glass windows that ran the length of the galleries above the side aisles depicting various saints but could not quite disperse the shadows that lurked at the highest points of the roof. Looking up, Heero wondered idly if God was perhaps lurking up there, admiring the house man had built for Him. The thought made him snort, and he turned his attention to the altar area. Like the old basilicas of Rome (which had originally been designed as courts of law before Christianity came, he knew), the altar sat in the center of a rounded bulge at the end of the nave. Steps led up to the altar itself, which looked to be composed of a single block of solid granite. A tabletop with similar dimensions could have easily sat ten. An elaborately illustrated copy of the Bible sat open at the center of it, flanked by two heavy gold candlesticks. Both would make good bludgeoning weapons, he decided, the thought coming to his mind and being processed automatically. Almost subconsciously.

What really drew his eye, however, was the rose window above the altar. It did not portray the Virgin Mary or Jesus Christ or any of the usual subject matter but rather an angel in black armor like that of a samurai. The angel—beautifully androgynous—had removed its helmet and held it under one arm. The other hand reached out imploringly towards the viewer as if it were reaching for something just beyond its grasp. Its black hair flowed wild and unbound. The artisan…no, the artist, had worked tiny pieces of clear glass into the hair so that, with the sunlight streaming through, it gave the effect of luminous stars. Behind the hair, behind the armor, great purply-black bats sprouted from the angel's back, extended in flight.

The red-haired girl was slumped down in the front pew with her legs stretched out in front of her. She too was looking up, studying the angel. He sat down beside her and glanced over at her. She was about four inches shorter and much thinner than their hostess, so the clothes Roberta had loaned her—an orange t-shirt and a pair of blue jeans—hung loose and baggy around her slender frame. Her flame-colored hair was pulled back from her face in a nub of a ponytail…already pieces of it were falling free. A bandage was wrapped around and around her head, hiding the cuts on her forehead behind a big white strip. Surgical tape held another bandage to a wound on the inside of her lower right arm, and a Band-Aid was plastered over her left cheek, right under the eye. She looked wan and tired, he decided, but alive.

"I suppose I should thank you for saving me," she said after a moment. "Roberta said the Aries ended up in the lake." She looked away from the window and met his eyes. Hers were blue, he realized, a vivid, almost electric, blue. "Dacia Arkush."

"Heero Yuy—but you already know that. You work for Dr. J.?"

"As you did." Those were three words positively loaded with implications, and she knew it as well as he did. They regarded each other in silence for a moment, then both turned their attention back to the window. It was easier to look at the angel than at each other.

"It looks almost like a Gundam," he said, after thoroughly scrutinizing the helm under the angel's arm.

"It could be," she murmured. "This church is only thirteen years old…I read up on the area before coming here."

"Hn." His eyes moved from the helmet to the angel's face. "What was on the disk you had?"

"Blueprints for the five original Gundams. Treize Khushrenada tried to hunt all five of them down and restore them during the wars. He actually found and repaired Epyon."

Heero blinked. He of course knew that there had been Gundams running around the time the Alliance formed, but he hadn't thought Epyon one of them. Though that did explain some things like the similarities between Epyon and the modern Gundams (he had noticed several small things in the design that screamed "J."). "I piloted the Epyon for a while," he told her.

"Really?" She sounded genuinely surprised. So, Dr. J. hadn't told her everything. Though, Heero wondered if the scientist even knew about his brief stint as the Eypon's pilot.

"Treize gave it to me while he was in exile. I used it in the Luxembourg Massacre." It had been the reason Luxembourg had turned into a massacre, but he didn't say that.

"So that was you…" Apparently, she didn't need him to say it. Somehow, she knew and, maybe, understood. Dr. J. had probably told her about the ZERO system. "Why did you trade it for Wing ZERO?"

"It was Treize's 'Devil'. I figured it would fit Zechs better."

There was silence for a few minutes as they both pondered. "J. told me once that Epyon really is the Devil," she said quietly, "And like the Devil, it will never die. Not until the world ends."

"It was destroyed with Libra," he replied gruffly.

"Zechs wasn't, and it's easier to rebuild a mobile suit than to bring a man back to life. Somebody will reconstruct it."

"Like Dr. J."

She didn't argue. Above them, a cloud moved in front of the sun, making the stars in the rose window go dim. He looked back over at her. She's pretty, he thought. Not like Relena was pretty—vibrant and sunny and perfect—but still very attractive. The contrast between her hair, her eyes, and her translucent white skin was startling. And, she radiated a silent intensity that sent a tingle down his spine as he watched her.

Duo made occasional trips to Earth—usually under the pretense of junkyard or Sweeper business—and he invariably tried to take Heero out to "meet people". Ever since Duo and Hirde had started dating, Duo seemed determined to find someone for Heero. Duo Maxwell was in love, and he liked being there. And, being Duo—who was a very generous, giving person—he wanted everyone else to feel what he was feeling. Unfortunately, Heero had no social skills, and he knew he had none. It made him very self-conscious when Duo took him out to meet people. As for his sexuality…well, as Duo had put it, there was just "a big question mark". During the war, there hadn't been time to think about things like that. And now…well, sometimes he wondered if Dr. J. might have tinkered with his libido along with everything else. Women baffled him except for women like Noin or Sally, who he thought of as soldiers first and only rarely recalled their gender. With Relena, it was more a comfort thing. She had gotten into what Duo referred to once as his "bubble" and refused to get out. Now, he was just used to her. The men who approached him when he and Duo went on one of their outings made him uncomfortable, but, as Duo pointed out, those were not good representations of the gay population, seeing as how they tended to be men who hit on everything that moved (and some things that didn't) besides being completely toasted…

"You're staring," Dacia informed him.

Heero started to get embarrassed, but then blinked as she began to thoroughly scrutinize him. It was more than a little unnerving. She started with the socks and worked her way up slowly. It took about a minute, total, to complete her inspection. It was the same kind of scrutiny that he would use on a mobile suit during mission prep. Ensuring that every system from primary to secondary to back-up was fully functional. Threat analysis. She was acknowledging him as a weapon…a walking, talking, living, breathing weapon of mass destruction. People did that to him a lot—regarded him as if he were an inhuman machine designed only to kill. They, though, always had fear lurking behind their eyes. This girl only had something akin to sympathy. Because, she was a weapon too. He had known that since she had first helped him out from under the rubble at the palace.

"Good—you found each other." Roberta's voice echoed through the sanctuary. Both Dacia and Heero turned in the pew to watch as she came down the aisle. Her long hair was wind-whipped, and she wore a black trench coat that flapped behind her as she walked. "How do you like my window?" She nodded in the direction of the rose window.

He glanced from her to the window and back again. He now realized why the angel looked vaguely familiar—the artist had used Roberta for a model, taking her features and refining them into an unearthly beauty.

"You made that?" Dacia asked.

Roberta nodded. She stepped up even with the end of their pew and regarded the masterpiece—her masterpiece—high above them. "After the…well, after, I apprenticed with an elderly gentleman who taught me how to work the glass. The church was being built at the time, so I contributed small pieces, like the windows over in the cloister, and helped with some of the bigger ones." She looked up at the windows in the galleries, "St. Michael's robe," she pointed, "The background of St. George. The original rose window was all my master's work—Christ in the center with four archangels around him. God, it was beautiful." She was quiet for a moment, her eyes not really seeing the altar in front of her or the window above it. "It was the finest piece of work he ever did. And the last—once the window was installed, he insisted I take all the commissions that were sent to him. He claimed he could never make a finer piece." She turned to them, "About two years ago, some OZ and Alliance troops decided to have it out with mobile suits not far from here. One of the concussions shattered the window."

"I'm sorry," Heero apologized. He didn't know why.

She shrugged as if to say that it didn't matter, but he could tell that the loss bothered her very much. "When my master was working on the design for it, he used me for the model for the archangels. Ironic. Anyway, he did five sketches. Four went to making Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, and Israfel. The fifth he gave to me. I think he knew his window wouldn't last long, because he told me to keep the sketch for the day when it needed to be replaced. 'Beauty's just transitory, Bertie, other things are forever'—that's what he told me. He made me swear I'd make a new window based on the sketch, instead of trying to duplicate his work. The old bastard. He called it my 'salvation'."

"Is it?" Dacia asked.

Roberta sighed. "Some days, I think so. Others…I'm not so sure."

Heero watched her eyes. She looked tired, weary. "What about today?"

She smiled, chasing away the weary look so easily that he knew she was faking. "Today's pay day—how could I not? That, and, strangely enough, I have two Gundam pilots sitting in my church."

"How'd…" Heero started.

"I'm not…" Dacia began.

Roberta held up a hand to silence them. "You," she said, pointing to Heero, "Are on the news all the time, even if you're hiding behind that Relena girl. Besides, I would know just from your code names." There was a twinkle in her eye, and a tiny, nostalgic smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. "I knew the people you were named after. I was one of the original Gundam pilots." She laughed at the look on his face. "Surprised? I bet whoever trained you told you we were all dead."

"He did," Dacia replied. Heero nodded in agreement. He had asked about the first Gundams—people still talked about them now and again when he was young—during his training with Dr. J. The old man had sort of flinched and muttered something about those Gundams being long gone. Then, Heero had been ordered to do wind sprints for an hour.

"Who was it? Gibson or Johanasen?"

"Who?"

"Who trained you? Professor Ronnie Gibson or Dr. Strom Johanasen?"

"Dr. J.," they answered in unintended unison.

"How's the old fart doing?"

Heero looked to Dacia—she had seen him last—and she just shrugged. He turned back to Roberta, "Why'd you figure it was either Dr. J. or Professor G.?"

She shrugged out of her trench and settled, cross-legged, on the floor in front of their pew. "You're not Asian, so it wasn't Oshua, and Sven and Hyglac are too squeamish to employ the kinds of methods that would have been used to achieve your kinds of skills." She nodded to Heero, "I've seen some of your exploits on the TV—I'm a news junkie, if you hadn't figured that out." Her face was grim again, "Gibson and Johanasen have always been ruthless." The last word was a hiss. "What do they have you doing now?"

"Nothing," Heero answered.

Roberta raised a dark eyebrow at him, "I wasn't talking to you."

He leaned back in the hard pew, chastised.

"Heero and I were trying to stop the shuttle that abducted Vice Foreign Minister Darlian," Dacia said coolly.

"That's not what I asked!" Roberta barked. The bellow echoed off the walls, the floors, the pillars, reverberating through the sanctuary. Both the young pilots looked at her, startled. She had changed, Heero decided, something not-quite-physical had come over her, and he knew he was now looking into the eyes of Roberta the warrior. The avenging angel who smote her foes with a fiery sword. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she was more intimidating than any person he had ever seen. It had been a long time since anything had scared Heero. Too long. But now he felt fear uncoil like a waking dragon in his gut. He dared a glance over at Dacia—her knuckles were white from where she clutched the edge of the pew.

He wasn't afraid that Roberta would kill him or torture him or even find a way to eat his soul, if he had one. No, he was more terrified of what she represented. Here was a Gundam pilot, in her thirties, and she still had the monster lurking inside of her. It boded no good for him, a year away from the war and still uneasy with life.