Chapter 22
The pair walked in silence for a full fifteen minutes, before the woman spoke.
"Hiiro, you know what I have to say to you."
The man turned his head away from her, a soft sound from the back of his throat the only indication that he had heard her at all.
"Hiiro, look at me! I just want us to have some happiness finally. I want what every other woman wants. Why can't I have that?"
"No one's stopping you."
He intentionally looked away from her rather than at her. She was smart, determined, beautiful, but he could never give her what she wanted. And it was about time she looked somewhere else.
"How can you say that to me, Hiiro?"
They still walked steadily, and midstride, Hiiro felt something grab at his gut, and snap something intangible inside. He suddenly had the urge to look Relena Peacecraft in the eye and be completely straight with her.
"Relena, I never wanted you. I never wanted you to want me. Now there's something I want, and if you get in the way of that, I swear I will kill you. Here's the door, goodbye."
However, our dear Hiiro's wonderfully succinct farewell was tragically interrupted by the appearance of a rather large monster making its way through the front door. His instincts kicked in, calf muscles pulling then pushing to propel the perfect soldier into the air, while his arms grabbed Relena in an effort to carry them both out of the path of one large furry arm. They landed roughly, and Hiiro quickly disentangled himself and rose to his feet, shoving Relena into a corner with eyes that said 'don't move.' Without a word, the gleam of metal flashed in his hand, and he spun to face the inhuman intruder. Soldier's eyes scanned what stood just inside the open door, evaluating and analyzing, just as Hiiro imagined his opponent to be doing on some intellectual level at least.
The creature seemed to be a sort of human spider, over 7 feet in height, standing upright on two legs while brandishing the other six threateningly at Hiiro. Inintimidated. His results were not encouraging, but he lacked the time to be disheartened as dozens of gossamer strands suddenly emerged, flying towards Hiiro at such a speed, that even the perfect soldier was only able to avoid a few before he found himself completely incapacitated.
Pain wracked his body as the wire-like webbing slowly twisted his muscles and bones against themselves, and threads around his neck threatened to render him unconscious, briefly, and then dead. In fact, Hiiro's fate had never seemed gloomier than that moment, but almost predictably, a blaze of fire entered the scene, flying from the upper left of Hiiro's vision to bash her feet into the head of Hiiro's would-be-killer. At once, Hiiro could feel the strain on his limbs and neck weaken as the monster turned its attention to the newcomer. Thankfully for them both, Rei began more luckily than Hiiro had, pulling her legs away from the monster as she realized it wasn't going to topple, and flipping around to land in a crouch. Flicking her eyes to her left, she recognized the sword she had given to Hiiro, and scrambled towards it, just avoiding a second onslaught of the spider's deadly web. She hacked wildly at the threads that held Hiiro, having to use superhuman acrobatics to keep out of the same trap. Finally, he was free of the thing, with Rei pulling him out of the way as he tried to brush away the web fragments that clung to his clothing.
With Hiiro flung safely back into Relena's corner, Rei unleashed a steady stream of white hot flame, that caused the creature to writhe in apparent agony, while hopefully neutralizing anything that it might throw at her.
"Hiiro, get her out of here, now!"
Hiiro found it difficult to look away from the brightness in front of him, but turned to Relena anyway, placing a firm hand around her arm. The lady shrugged it off, fixing her eyes coldly on him.
"You made your point clear, Hiiro Yuy. I'll just be going."
As the door slammed in his face, Hiiro took a second to be impressed with her chilly calm, after being faced with one of these things for the first time. Turning around, Hiiro noted with relief that the spider-monster seemed to be wilting, then disintegrating under the heat of Rei's fire, but Hiiro himself couldn't tell whether he meant the weapon she wielded or the nature of her entrancing stare. And he realized that Quatre had been right.
Eventually, only ashes remained, and Rei sagged a little, the shadow of over-exertion plainly overhanging her face. Hiiro almost went to her side, but decided to keep his distance while voicing something that had been on his mind the entire time.
"You were following me."
"I was not!" Rei was braced for a screaming match, but realized that Hiiro had not put the issue up for argument. What he knew, there was no denying. And her secrets turned to dust at his touch.
"Don't get any ideas!" she continued, thinking only to preserve her carefully crafted image, "It doesn't mean anything. I. don't. need. you!"
"Stop that, Rei. Refusing to admit to something doesn't make it untrue, no matter how much you try. Believe me, I know from experience, and I know you. Stop."
It may have been credit to Mina's excellence in silent approach or Hiiro and Rei's absolute absorption in each other, but either way, both were stupefied enough by her sudden interruption that Mina caught a silent moment to continue her lecture.
"He loves you. You love him. Stop being imbeciles about the whole thing, or I will lock you in a very small space until you talk through this, or both die. Am I clear?"
The two of them simply stared at the ease with which the blonde spoke of all these things that neither of them could bear to hear or say, but Mina did not wish, evidently, to dwell on the subject, as she continued to move forward to the small scattering of ashes on the ground.
"I found you well after you had things in hand, Rei, but early enough to see something you might've missed," she said, carefully modulating her voice to avoid the danger zone of Rei's temper. Mina then knelt, sifting through the larger piles of ash, until she lifted up the chain of a necklace, revealing a circular locket. Rei's eyes went wide at the sight of it – something about it tickled her foggy memory. Both girls took a couple steps towards each other until they were close enough to observe it together.
Both the locket and chain were silver, and the locket was engraved with a stylized flame. It was Mina who flipped the catch, revealing a lock of blond hair coiled in one half, and a note folded into the other. She removed it slowly, but Rei snatched it from her before her fingers could get to unfolding it. Rei's, though, trembled as they pushed back the corners, and she read the message.
"I have returned for you."
The realization of who the message was from and what it meant combined with the significant fatigue from the fight, caused Rei Hino fainted dead away.
A/N: I'm a horrible horrible writer for not updating more often, but I had to scrap and postpone my original idea for what I was planning for later. I'm sure all of you can figure out who the secret admirer is, and yeah, it's kind of trite. But. It's stuff.