Between Love and Hate
Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam wing and am therefore not making any profit from this fanfiction. I am writing it mainly because I love both Gundam wing and writing!
A/N – I'm BA-ACK! Yay. Florida was fun, but I am so glad to be back and able to write on my beautifulicious little computer here lol. I am so sorry about the delay!
Chapter ten – Unwanted distractions
There was a brilliant blue flash and then the room plunged into impenetrable darkness. Although, even in the darkness, Heero's sharp eyes picked up certain things around the room. For example, the glassy cerulean blue eyes that gazed up at him in distinguished fear.
"Are you okay?" He asked Relena instinctively, running a hand through his chaotic dark locks.
"Yeah," she replied unsteadily, "I guess the storm must have cut out the power."
Another bolt of intense white light followed by a roar of thunder echoed throughout the mansion, causing Relena to shudder involuntarily.
"We should probably go and find the others," she added quickly, searching for Heero's Prussian blue eyes in the midst of the darkness.
"Oh no," Heero replied quickly, a small smirk twitching the corners of his lips, "We'll be just fine here. Don't forget, we have to have this little talk."
'She doesn't really think that she can escape me that easily, does she?' He mused silently to himself.
"Not now Heero, we're not having this 'little talk' right now. We really do have to go and find the others. They'll be searching for us." Relena told him, nervously heading for the door.
"Why," Heero asked, stepping in front of the door and blocking her exit, "would they be doing that?"
'This seems a little déjà vu.' Relena thought, as she struggled to get past her ex-bodyguard, "Because they're our friends, that's why."
"Relena, we are not kids, they know that we are perfectly capable of taking care of ourselves."
"But they don't know that we are together, so they will try to find us, after all, its pitch black and Quatre will want everyone to group together." She had a point, and unfortunately, for Heero, he had to give in to her.
"Fine, but I want to talk to you later," He told her, sighing heavily and stepping out of her way.
"Fine," Relena answered, avoiding his scrutinizing and callous glares as she passed him on her way out of her room.
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"Uh… What was that?" Duo asked, scanning around in search of his friends who had been right in front of him two seconds ago, well, until the whole room had suddenly dived into obscurity.
"I think that the power just cut out, idiot," Wufei answered mockingly. He had arrived earlier that day, just arriving back on Earth after a specially assigned task from Une. His insult, however, fell upon deaf ears, as no one had actually noticed the sarcasm that under toned his voice.
"But that's impossible," Quatre exclaimed, from one corner of the dark room, his voice laced with confusion, "This building's electricity vault was made to withstand storms and power cuts et cetera. It has its own energy store situated below, in the cellar, there's no way that we could have run out, or that the storm could have caused this sudden shortage of electricity."
A clicking noise could be heard from the far end of the room as Quatre flicked the light switches.
"I don't understand." He said, mainly to himself, Dorothy tightened her grasp on his arm, and he pulled her into his arms.
"Are you sure it's not possible that the storm cut it?" Wufei asked, his sarcasm now replaced with curiosity.
"Positive," Quatre answered him, without hesitation, showing that he was confident with his answer.
"Then what could have caused this?" Dorothy asked from beside him.
"Honestly? I'm not sure. I guess someone should go and check out the supply vault in the cellar."
"Shouldn't we wait until Heero, Nikki and Lena are with us before we split up?" Hilde asked.
"Yes, but we should go in search of them now, they don't – well Relena doesn't know her way around the mansion too well," Quatre answered her, looking in the direction he had guessed her voice had come from. The darkness that had engulfed them a few minutes ago had rendered him almost blind and it was somewhat irritating.
"I don't like this," Hilde whispered, stumbling on her own too feet as she crossed the room in the dark, clutching tightly to her husbands muscular arm for support. "I have a bad feeling… a feeling that something really bad is going to happen-"
Duo grabbed her small form, and pulled her to the right, closer to him, preventing her from walking into the doorframe. As his well-trained eyes were able to see more than hers could, he took it upon himself to guide his wife to safety.
"This feels like a scene from a horror movie," Hilde continued after recomposing herself.
"Babe…" Duo said reassuringly, "Nothing's going to happen, you're overreacting, and besides I'm here with you, what could possibly happen?"
"Don't say that!" Hilde warned him sharply, "The person who says that in the movies is always the next to get killed!" She grabbed onto his arm tighter, as though if she let go, he would be lost from her forever.
"Killed, Hilde?" Duo asked, stifling a laugh.
"Yes. Killed, Duo!" Hilde answered him irately. She stumbled into something, and after groping the air around her, she identified the object as being a table. She felt around again, and found a phone on the table, gasping, she picked it up quickly and pressed the cold receiver close to her ear. "Great… now the phone's dead too!"
"That would be," Zechs told her, becoming aggravated by her behaviour, "because the power is off."
"Right guys," Quatre said, interrupting the tension that had been growing between his friends, "We need to find the others, does anybody know where they are or at least where they last were?"
"Lena said something about going for a shower," Hilde told him, "but I don't know about the other two."
"I'd reckon they're in their room," Duo said, amusedly grinning to himself.
"Okay, well then we'll make our way up to the second floor," Quatre told them, already beginning to climb up the - now dark - mahogany staircase, careful not to trip himself on the way up.
"Isn't this kind of pointless?" Wufei asked, tonelessly.
"What?" Quatre asked, stopping at the bottom of the first floor stairs.
"Searching for them in a house this large, in the dark, we'll most likely be running around in circles-" Wufei started, but he was soon interrupted by the startling screech belonging to a frightened Hilde.
"Ohmigod, ohmigod, Oh my God." Hilde screamed as a faint girlish laughter filled the air around them.
"RELENA! That was just plain cruel. You scared the living daylights out of me." Hilde scoffed, her voice nearly drowned out by the laughter of both Relena and Duo.
"What happened?" Quatre asked carefully.
"Relena…" Hilde started-
"…Scared the crap out of Hilde." A monotonous voice filled in the spaces for her.
"Oh," Quatre answered, not amused, "You," he said, referring to Heero, "and rRelena are here we can go back downstairs and check out the power supply in the cellar. Heero will you come with me?"
"Sure," Heero replied as the group started back down the stairs cautiously.
"Umm, what about Nikki?" Duo asked, enquiringly.
"Oh, dammit," Heero cursed before dashing back up the stairs, his tanned hands skimming along the banister as he ran towards his room.
Everybody stood, staring up the stairs at where the moon was shining, casting the staircase into eerie greys, and watched Heero disappear from sight. A muffled giggle turned their attention away from him and back towards Relena.
All eyes turned towards the chuckling, honey-blond girl with the grin plastered across her small mouth.
"What are you laughing about?" Zechs asked his sister, hoping that she hadn't hit her head and become delirious, because if she had… oh boy… was that pain-in-the-ass soldier going to get it from him.
"I can't believe he just forgot about his girlfriend," Relena muttered. In the dim light, she noticed the frown that passed across a few of her friend's faces.
"We'll wait for them downstairs," Quatre told them, realising that they were still standing stranded between the first and ground floors.
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Heero knocked loudly on his door before walking, swiftly, into the shadowy room. Through the darkness, the moon outside - although slightly covered by the dark rain clouds – cast an ethereal glow upon the form of a sleeping girl.
Heero walked steadily over to the small form, and sitting down on the edge of the bed, he pushed stray strands of dark brown hair away from Nikki's serene face.
"Nicola," he called out to her, "come on, you have to wake up and come downstairs."
The Spanish girl stirred from her peaceful bliss, and without opening her eyes, she lifted a hand from the sheets to swat Heero away.
"Shh, not yet," she hushed him, "just a few more minutes."
A somewhat slow grin traced the ex-soldier's lips as he stared down at the drowsy girl, "Nicola, seriously, come on now…" He told her, whilst tracing his thumb down the side of her face.
Nikki, irritated by his waking her, rolled over on the mattress and turned her body away from him so that she was facing in the opposite direction and attempted to drift back to sleep again.
However, Heero wasn't about to let her. He sighed deeply and pulled the sheets off his sleeping girlfriend.
Nikki, feeling the wrath of the cold air around her, sat up slowly, wrapping her thin arms around her frame to insulate herself from the bitter chill.
Heero, having walked over to her temporary wardrobe, pulled out a pair of jeans and a shirt and threw them over to her.
The clothes fell lightly onto the bed and Nikki stared at them, momentarily dumbfounded, before pulling the clothes on quickly and staring up into Heero's glistening blue eyes sleepily.
"Come on, we have to go," he told her, his face emotionless. Nikki stood, and walked past him slowly.
"Where were you?" She asked, gliding towards the door.
Heero watched, entranced, as her long legs led her across the room, "What?"
Nikki paused and turned around to look at him again, a disconcerted look upon her pretty face. "When I was up here, sleeping, you were gone for quite a while. Where were you?"
Heero felt a strange pang of guilt surge through him, although he couldn't understand why. He hid his guilt behind his mask and stared at her, thinking of what to say. He knew that he couldn't tell her that he had been looking for Relena, or even that he had been with Relena. It might have raised a few suspicions on her behalf.
"Just wandering around," he answered. Nikki gazed at him curiously, her chocolate eyes roaming over his face as if trying to search him for the truth, but as Heero tended to 'wander around' frequently, she nodded her head and left the room, Heero following soon behind her.
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As soon as Heero and Nikki had reached the bottom of the stairs, Heero was immediately persuaded to go with Quatre to check out the cellar.
Quatre pulled open the stiff wooden and unvarnished door to the cellar with a strong tug. As the door swung open, a large cloud of musty dust filled the air around them and both ex-gundam pilots choked whilst pushing the dust out of the way with their hands.
Once the dust had disappeared and was no longer obscuring their – already limited – sight, they continued down the steps to the cellar, Quatre taking the lead with his flashlight.
As Heero stepped into the dark mouldy room, he grimaced at the air he was now inhaling into his lungs. It was as stale and dry as a thousand year old vault. He cleared his throat and gasped for new air, having held his breath for too long now.
"Right, where is this thing? I want to get out of here as soon as possible," He told the platinum haired man beside him.
"Just over here," Quatre shone the flashlight in his hand over to the corner of the room. The light beamed brightly upon what looked to be a large box, situated on the side of the wall, "the controls are in the box,"
Heero walked over to it, Quatre by his side, and pulled open the two symmetrical, white doors that were blocking the control panel from their view. The doors swung open noisily on their hinges to expose a smoking box and a few stray wires.
"Quatre, hold the flashlight closer to the box so that I can get a better view, would you?" Heero asked whilst pushing his messy dark hair away from his eyes, in order to gain a better view.
Quatre moved the flashlight a few inches closer to the control panel. For a few seconds, Heero examined the stray wires on the control panel and then he held them up in the air for Quatre to examine.
"Here's your problem," Heero told him, standing up from his crouched position on the ground, and shaking the severed wires, "And that's definitely not accidental."
"So I can see. Nevertheless, I don't understand. How could this have happened?" Quatre asked, staring intently at the perfectly cut cables that had been cut off from their supplies.
"I think we've had some visitors," Heero said, observing Quatre, who was now studying the wires with a questioning look adorning his face.
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"So?" Duo asked as Heero and Quatre walked back into the room. The room they were now in was another sitting room, but it also happened to be the brightest room in the house, on account of the fact that most of the outer walls were made of glass, "What's up?"
"It seems as though someone has cut the wires, so well, in fact, that it will be impossible for any of us to fix it within the next few days," Quatre answered the braided man.
"What?" Noin asked, surprise evident in the tone of her voice, "Somebody cut it?"
"That is what he said, isn't it?" Wufei asked, her, glaring at her in the dark. 'Women and their stupid questions.'
"I reckon that it was one of the same people who attacked Trowa," Heero told them. A silence settled between the friends as they each pondered their own thoughts on the issue at hand.
"I feel," Quatre started, "that for now, we should stay at a hotel. There's one about ten miles east of here, I'm sure I could call in and arrange a few rooms for us all. Well at least until we can sort out what we are going to do, I mean, if someone is plotting attacks against us, it would be foolish of us all to stay here and await their next move. We would be sitting ducks!"
"I suppose that would be a good idea," Relena commented, rather reluctantly, "Going to the hotel that is." She watched carefully as Heero left Quatre's side to stand beside his girlfriend, slip his hand into hers and plant a kiss on her tanned forehead. Relena turned away, feeling extremely annoyed for some strange reason. An emotion was tugging on her heartstrings, but she just couldn't pinpoint what it was, all she knew was that she wanted to go over to Nikki and hit her, right in the face. That would do justice. But for what exactly, she didn't know.
Instead, she walked over towards Hilde, who looked as though she was still recovering from the scare that she had received from her earlier.
"Okay, fair enough, I guess that we should all go and pack our things then?" Duo said enquiringly whilst Hilde wriggled away from his gasp to talk to Relena.
"Hey, what's up?" Hilde greeted Relena with a low whisper.
"Yes," Quatre answered Duo, "Everyone?" He raised his voice in order to get everyone's attention, "I would like you to meet me back down here in half an hour at the most." With that said, the group started to tear off in different directions.
"Um, well I need you to do me a big favour," Relena told her friend, who was trying to be dragged away by an agitated Duo.
"Yeah sure, so long as you buy me a HUGE chocolate bar, I'm feeling so damn ravenous, but only for chocolate. These stupid cravings are going to make me so fat!" Hilde muttered, giggling slightly.
"Yea sure, I'll buy you chocolate, but there is no way, that you are ever getting fat," Relena laughed, "Well as for my favour… I need you to keep me away from Heero."
"Huh?" Hilde asked, looking perplexed, "Why is that? Because every time that you see him, you just want to jump his bones?"
Duo, who had been listening into the conversation between the two girls, burst out laughing at this point. "I didn't know that you had the hots for Heero," He said, in between trying to stifle his laughter.
Relena's cheeks reddened dramatically and she scowled at Hilde. "I do not have the hots for Heero!"
"Sorry," Hilde said, biting her lip, "It's this damned pregnancy thing, it's making my hormones go crazy and I'm horny nearly all the time now."
"Tell me about it," Duo said, cuddling Hilde closely, "she's crazy in bed!" Hilde punched him playfully.
"Eww, guys, too much information!" Relena commented, grimacing at her friends, but laughing as well.
"Sorry Lena," Duo apologized before kissing his wife passionately.
Relena smiled at her friends, 'They're so happy together,' she couldn't help but feel slightly envious towards their happiness together, "I can't believe that my two favourite people, in the whole world, are having a baby!"
They broke off their kiss to turn their attention towards her again, Duo grinning sheepishly and Hilde smiling gently.
"Well, I'll leave you two here," Relena started, somewhat awkwardly, "I have to go and get packed anyways…"
"Hold on," Hilde broke away from Duo's embrace and made her way over to Relena, "what was the whole thing about keeping you away from Heero for?"
"Well… it's just that he wants to discuss something with me, I don't quite know what, but it's really awkward when I'm with him, so you know, just jump in whenever you see him coming towards me… please?" Relena begged her friend with a pleading look.
"Sure thing, well, I'll let you go and get packed now," Hilde told her friend before heading back to Duo again.
Relena started back up the stairs towards her room, feeling somewhat happier now that she knew that the conversation with Heero was no longer a problem.
'No more awkwardness, no more being entranced by his mesmerising eyes, or his perfectly structured face, or his immaculately pronounced abs-' Relena shook her head quickly, ridding herself of the thoughts… 'No more Heero' she concluded.
'Hatreds are the cinders of affection.' – Sir Walter Ralegh
Ooooohhh… Is Relena not telling us something… hmmm I wonder… Oh and all of you who are wondering about Trowa… well I'll tell you in the next chapter, which you will just have to read to find out! Hehehe!
God, I love you guys (in a totally platonic way of course lol) seriously though, your reviews are like sunshine on a rainy day. And it rains quite frequently here in the UK, so you guys are my little rays of hope. And you know, the more of you that there are out there, the brighter my life gets… haha, I'm so sad lol.
So, my little rays of happiness, please review for me!
Love y'all
Allura01
