. Chapter Three . Names

"I can't believe I'm actually doing this," Duo muttered to himself as he sat down on his bed, cradling his laptop computer on his folded legs. He hadn't hacked so much as a cell phone in years—much less an information mainframe. Granted, he had no difficulties in doing so, but still. Certain terrorist tendencies lingered longer than others.

For a moment, the idea of Michelle's reaction haunted him, but it was simply immoral, not illegal to surf obituary records without prior permission. He found it somewhat relaxing to let his mind focus on the expression the sister would bare should she ever find out Duo still regressed to some of his terrorist ways—that he still drank and occasionally had a smoke when the day called for it. It was better than addressing the anxiety that had driven him to his home in the middle of the day, behind his locked bedroom door, pulling up L-1's obituary database. He adjusted the screen as a long white page appeared, punctuated by nothing more than a long list of names and dates.

Though he was skeptical the child's father could have died only yesterday, he began at the very top of the list with the newest additions. He didn't want to make a mistake in this. Beginning with the day's date, Duo began picking through time and intently reading each account of death before moving onto the next ones. It wasn't until he had exhausted his eyes on the glowing screen and was currently in the middle of the Earth Sphere War, AC 196, did he finally put the anxious name chase to rest.

Nothing.

That was neither good nor bad. In truth, he had no possible way of knowing if Heero Yuy was irrefutably dead from nothing more than a database of names. He was rarely "himself" and very rarely ever really dead.

Duo grimaced to himself, feeling his anxiety and waiting terror push through in a nervous laugh. "Well, I am Death—I should know."

But there was always that possibility.

A few more terrible thoughts were waiting to be uncovered and cowered before, but Duo jumped at the sound of a knock on his bedroom door before they could seize their chance. He slammed the laptop shut out of automatic response and turned to stare at the door. Hilde's voice peeped out from the other side, colored with an ambiguous tone. "Duo?"

"Yeah? Come in," he said.

She opened the door and her innocent face poked inside, leaning against the door. "Hey, you," she said. "How come you're home so early?"

"I—" He began, meaning to explain that he'd come down with something, but knew that was a lie. And Hilde didn't deserve even the slightest dishonesty. "I didn't feel up to it today," he amended, smiling apologetically. "You know. Just one of those days. So I left a little early. That's all."

"Oh." She straightened up with concern and stepped completely across the threshold into his rather cluttered room. "You're not feeling sick or anything, are you?"

"Not exactly," Duo muttered. He turned back and looked down at his laptop, which had suddenly seemed to grow a pair of prying eyes, chiding at his evasion of the truth.

"What, troublesome kids today?"

"Especially today." That he could say with complete and utter conviction.

Hilde glanced down at the green display of his clock lying in a strewn pile of Time Magazines and old notebooks on the bed stand, then back at him, her arms sitting akimbo on her hips. She was wearing her favorite raspberry-colored beret. That meant only one thing these days. "Well, if you're feeling up to it," she asked, "maybe you'd want to come and help me with a odd job I picked up, fixing the neighbor's motor. They've been having trouble starting it, and it rasps and bangs when they finally do."

Duo paused and let the smile blossom slowly over his face.

"What?"

"You had a date today, didn't you?" he drawled slyly, dipping into a more youthful corner of his heart that seemed much further a reach than it had this morning.

"No, I didn't," she lied. "And even in the event that I had, I wouldn't tell you." The smile through her statement betrayed every word, and she knew that Duo saw through it like cellophane. "And you're just avoiding answering my question. Would you like to help fix the Rathburns' car, or do you need to stay in here all day to cope with the terrors of your day?"

"I'm not as delicate as that," he drawled at her, sliding the laptop off his knees and leaving it on the rumpled mass of sheets and blankets. An automatic and flawless cut of laughter and flash of a grin put away whatever concern Hilde might have truly had about him, and put any conjecture of real distress even further from her mind as he followed her out of the door. She fell for the classic Maxwell Demon smile, hook, line, and sinker, and was no wiser to the fall. She couldn't see what he wouldn't let her.

He was honestly afraid of something he couldn't prove or disprove—and that drove him to the ends of his mind.

Time seemed to take leaps and bounds whenever Duo found himself covered in greasy Dalmatian spots and elbow deep into an engine, watching the complicated lines of machinery and prying answers from him. And having Hilde next to him, in her ratty work coveralls, simultaneously switching the conversation from the ailing car of which they were weaving in and out like snakes to the next movie they should catch on a Saturday night to what she'd managed to overhear in the grocery store. It comforted him with its familiarity and safety.

The car had a number of minor problems, but the engine had just seen too many rush hours and traveled too much blacktop on too little oil to be reasonably salvageable. The Rathburn couple, both retired in the past few years, wandered in and out with lemonade and friendly conversation. Duo had to apologize when he'd left grease prints all over Mrs. Rathburn's cute little glasses decorated with apples and peaches, but for the moment it was the only worry. He also felt a little guilty, having received such hospitable treatment and then being forced to admit it was not an issue of fixing—it was an old car, and the engine had been spent.

The Rathburns had protested and told him it was no big deal in that sweet and unobtrusive way Duo almost couldn't stand. It made him feel even guiltier to have failed them. But, as did almost all-gracious people in such a situation, they enthusiastically waved it off and tried to dismiss his guilt. Hilde made some comment about Duo and being so unselfish that made the sweet couple laugh, but Duo couldn't remember what it had been when he was later lying on his bed. In fact, he had barely remembered leaving, offering to spring for a new engine, or help finance a new automobile in futility, or going back and washing up. It became a blur, then simply a benign gap in his memory.

Duo sighed, feeling the emotions of that morning ghosting just below his thoughts and threatening to push out, and rolled onto his side to try and postpone them. It was temporary, but it gave him enough time to turn on the television and vanquish them for at least another half-hour situation comedy.

The characters moved in their syndicated dance back and forth from the couch. Their momentary crises unfolded and then swung back into resolution neatly between commercial breaks. He winced at the lips that met between the main character and his pretty girlfriend and changed the channel. It was over before Duo had properly escaped the world, but there was another to follow and keep him unaware of reality. Hilde strode into his room, navigated between the piles of clean and dirty clothes, of which only Duo knew the true state, and presented him with a little sundae. It was identical to hers, except for the pink sprinkles on her chocolate syrup.

She told him he looked kind of tired, in explanation of the ice cream. Those words came like a rousing bugle and Duo gave in to his defenses. He sat up with a bounce he didn't feel like doing, cracking a smile that was more reflexive than a knee-jerk, and let his outer exterior handle it. The inner mind was exhausted, and even a sundae with vanilla and chocolate and caramel and a cherry on top wasn't going to fix that.

---

He was on Peacemillion. Beneath the lights, he could see the black and white squares of war of the chess board, could see the lines of logic running through Trowa's visible eye, could see the ever subtle Quatre smiling gently at him if he glanced up to watch. The lean and silent figure of Wufei reclined against the wall somewhere in the distance, nothing more than an indistinguishable blur in the background. As much as he squinted, Duo found his eyes unable to focus on him properly. Seeming to sense some unwanted attention, his dark-haired form turned and faded.

Duo frowned, troubled by the knot such an action formed in his stomach, then glanced down to the black chess pieces scattered in front of him. All his captured knights, rooks, and bishops lay in a terrible chipped mess over the table, black marble scattered to the edges of Duo's filmy vision.

---

To make up for his uncharacteristic absenteeism the day before, Duo trudged into his office at the home at the unholy crack of dawn the next morning. Partly because the weekly supply checkup was due, bills would begin amassing on his desk in the next few days, and all the batteries in the fire alarms were scheduled for a change and partly because he refused to fall back asleep. There were always things to adjust, to watch, to repair. And when the amount of work exceeded the number of workers on staff, the brunt of the weight fell to him. Of course, he wouldn't have it any other way, but he sometimes wished he would anyway.

He turned on the lights and for a minute, surveyed the office. Old habit. He had to suppress a scoff as he noticed what Michelle had left on his desk. Throwing his jacket into the chair by the door, he shook his head with a half-smile as he picked up the book, lifting it over the frames on his desk. "Facing Your Fears," he read. Inside, she'd written the words 'Children' on a piece of paper and slipped it in. "Hilarious." He squared it away in the top drawer, on top of other unread materials still to be tended to, an endless chain of tasks, one to be seen to after another.

With a vigor towards menial tasks he'd never felt before, Duo set himself resolutely in his chair, pulled the entire pile of files needing of updates out of the drawer, and set them on the desk before him with a certain feeling of self-punishment.

An hour later, Duo found himself blankly staring the bottom tip of the pen as it moved independently of his mind, scribbling across the page. Honestly, he felt as though he hadn't written any of the last thirty appraisals, only numbly watched the writing utensil and his hand work ahead without him. It was a hazy feeling most often reserved for those days that never became nights, just bled into the morning, submerged in work that was done before he could realize he'd been doing it.

More than happy to submit to the impulse and bury his mind and hopefully silence it, he was only jarred out of his comfortable numbness when a blur of energy and giggles dashed by the door of his office, quickly pursued by an employee. Duo waited, his pen stilled, until the new employee Marcus walked back past his open door, holding Cinderblock squirming in his arms, probably the most energetic orphan of his age ever to live, and also the poorest choice of a name. Mark smiled sheepishly and greeted him as he passed. " 'Morning, Duo," he said over Cinderblock's frantic squeals.

"Don't let him get the best of you, Mark," he answered, and was rewarded with a tired laugh.

"I'll try," Mark said, his voice fading off with his figure. "Alright, let's eat some breakfast, Cind, okay…?"

Duo smiled halfway to himself as they disappeared and rubbed the side of his head absently, the other hand coming around to grip the pen once again. It took him a moment to readjust, sliding amusement aside to come to the task at hand. But before he could scratch out the end of another sentence, he was quickly plunged back into memory, remembering all the grungy, back alley names he'd considered himself before settling on Duo when Solo had died.

Thief, of course, had been wildly popular among the ragtag kids, but he'd never wanted to choose to be average and refused it. He'd considered Pick, short for Pickpocket, Wrench, Streetlamp, and Fox, as Solo sometimes like to declare him, though Duo had not really understood what it meant at the time. For so long, his most pressing worry had been the selection of a name. Under Solo's watch, food was frequent enough to lose sight of a few ribs to your skin. And though it was still discolored through malnutrition, for once in a great while Duo had enjoyed living in it.

But, the past was the past, and paperwork was the detestable but inevitable present. Duo regrouped around the pen, pushing all the memories into the sidelines of his mind, and prepared to finish the sentence he'd started nearly three minutes ago.

It was only by repetition that he thought to glance up and inspect his surroundings. Being birthed in the hot artillery fire and cold nights of war had installed it in him, and he glanced up momentarily to see Heero Yuy staring back at him from behind the glass of the door. The pen fell out of his fingers and his legs shot him out of his seat.

Unfortunately, by then, he had come to realize it was only his eyes, and the rest of the figure was the nameless orphan, his small hands spread as far as they would stretch against the glass, his fingertips white. His eyes grew wide and his body twitched. He seemed not to want Duo's attention, and as soon as he bolted out his chair, he bolted off himself into the corridors.

When his footsteps echoed out of range, he put his head back to the papers in front of him, and sighed deeply before collapsing into the circle of his folded arms.

"I am getting too old for this shit…"