[fic] Lost Days (Part 3 of 3)
The thrilling conclusion XD
The hall outside the cabin had transformed completely into the abandoned building where Duo had said he’d once lived. The damp dark wood of the walls and floor creaked and popped, buckling in protest against the nails that strained to keep them from warping. That there was wood at all spoke to how old the building must have been when Duo had lived there; wood was used heavily in the oldest buildings on the colonies, when the world economy supported them and trade between space and Earth had been free and cheap. Political tensions had dried up the flow of natural resources from Earth quickly, long before either of them had been born; all the buildings Heero could remember from his youth were concrete. But this ancient apartment, with its wood-finished interior, still spoke of L-2’s once rich and luxuriant past, now left to destitution and decay.
They walked vaguely in the direction of the main control room, though what state it was in now was anyone’s guess. And what would be waiting for them there? Did Duo have any idea? If he did, he wasn’t sharing. He wasn’t speaking at all, walking several steps ahead, not looking around, hands deep in pockets. Heero fought back the urge to reach for him, hold him, do something for him.
And what the hell could he do? He asked himself bitterly. Not a damn thing. They were at the mercy of the ship now, wandering deeper into its maze, two little mice scurrying blindly toward a certain trap. Anxiety hummed along his skin, the groans of the floorboards making him flinch, senses frayed by the sheer wrongness of the place.
There was another hallway ahead, splitting off two ways, and Heero pulled out the floor map that he had taken from the glass case earlier. If they were still standing in the Persephone’s halls, there would be a laboratory down on the right, and more offices, with the control room at the opposite end. He glared down one shadowed hallway, straining to see, but could make out no doors that corresponded with the floor plan. Damn. He had almost been hoping the map had changed with the rest of the ship. Now, it was just useless. With a frustrated grunt, he pocketed the paper.
Duo paused at the intersection, peering down both corridors. “This way,” he said, turning to the left. Heero followed, though he couldn’t guess how Duo had chosen. Perhaps it was something he remembered from his past.
There was no light anymore. Heero thought he could see light bulbs hanging from the ceiling, but a building this decrepit surely had no electricity running to power them. The hall sank into heavy blackness ahead, the faded outlines of flowers on the remaining scraps of wallpaper only visible when standing directly beside them-- no, not flowers, he realized with a start. Faces. They were little faces, mouths open and wailing. Heero wrenched his gaze away and refused to look again.
He followed Duo around another corner, barely able to make him out in the darkness, and when he stopped abruptly short in the hall, Heero almost barrelled right into him.
“What?” He hissed, his whispered voice as loud as a shout in the empty hallway.
“There’s something written here,” Duo muttered, peering up at the wall on their right.
Heero followed his gaze, and could see that between the horrible faces of the wallpaper, the tendrils of black mold staining the wood, someone had scratched a message in the wall with a knife or some other sharp object, the long, jagged edges of the letters gaping like open wounds.
Do you remember yet? Oh you will you will
Duo cursed under his breath. Heero turned to him, but before he could speak, Duo just shook his head.
“I don’t know.”
“Duo...”
“I’m telling you, Heero, I don’t know what it’s talking about.”
“I believe you.”
Neither of them sounded very convincing. Heero did believe him-- he had to. That didn’t change the fact that the Persephone wanted to show them something, something that Duo had apparently forgotten. Heero thought again of the look in Duo’s eyes when he’d heard that voice in the hall, that boy who had called himself Solo. Heero himself had held a gun to Duo’s head once, and even then, he had never seen him look so terrified.
He couldn’t tell Duo, but that more than anything had convinced him that maybe the ship knew something Duo didn’t, had pulled something out of his memory that Duo had stowed far from his own conscious mind. There was more to that story than Duo could recall, more than just an illness. That nightmare on the ship, before they had even arrived at this god-forsaken place, that refusal to talk about it at all, suggested as much.
What had happened to him?
They continued down the dark corridor until they came to another intersection, and, lost, Heero waited for Duo to decide their next move. He peered down one way, then the other, his eyes shadowed. For a moment, it seemed he couldn’t decide.
“Duo?”
Duo whirled to look at him, but Heero shook his head. He hadn’t spoken.
“Duo!”
They turned in the direction of the voice, a frail, echoing rasp, ringing from the pitch blackness at one end of the hallway.
“Come on, I wanna show you something.”
“Solo?” Heero whispered. At his side, Duo gave one curt nod, his mouth tight.
“What are you doin’ up? You’re sick!” A second voice rang down the hallway, this one younger, brighter. Heero’s breath caught. It was a child’s voice, but one he recognized instantly.
“I’m feelin’ better today.” There was a ghost of a cough that belied the bravado of the words. “Come on, kid.”
“Only if you promise to get back in bed!” The child Duo once was scolded.
An echoing laugh followed. “I promise, all right? Sheesh.”
Something like a moan escaped Duo beside him. Heero turned and saw that Duo’s arms were wrapped around himself, that he was hunched over strangely, as if hearing the exchange had hurt him. Heero’s hand reached for that bowed shoulder before he could stop himself.
“Duo?”
At the contact, Duo flinched and straightened. “I’m fine. Let’s go.”
“We don’t have to do this.”
“Yeah, we do,” Duo muttered. “Come on.”
He set off in the direction of the voices and Heero followed before he lost him in the darkness. This was wrong. It was all wrong. They were blindly walking toward something terrible, he knew somehow. He felt it with every fiber of his being. Couldn’t Duo feel it too? Or was he already resigned to his fate? Solo was calling to him, from the depths of his memory. And Duo was going to him, getting farther and farther from Heero, slipping away. The thought clawed at his heart, made his breath catch. He feared he would lose him here.
The halls were dark as midnight now, even the moaning faces on the walls impossible to make out. Their footsteps sounded louder in his ears in the absence of vision, the sogging wood on the floor seemed wetter, fleshier. His shoes stuck, like trudging through something viscous and heavy, and he pulled each step away with a thick sucking slurp. The smell, too, seemed to take shape around them, mildew mixing with sweat and phlegm and the heady stink of disease. Sickness hovered in the air.
A door slammed ahead of them, and they both inhaled sharply with surprise. Heero found his gun at his side and closed his fingers around the grip, but it was almost useless, blind as he was in this enveloping darkness. They continued to walk, silent as death, straining to hear the sound of someone else’s breathing join theirs, the squelch of another’s footsteps in the stinking corridor, each second of each endless minute pounded out by Heero’s shuddering heartbeat. Finally, they came to the wall, a dead end.
“I found the door handle,” Duo said.
Heero put his hands out to feel the wall himself, finding it wet and warm, and his fingers traced over dripping, fleshy curvature-- was this wood anymore?-- until he felt Duo’s hand beneath his, smooth and familiar, and beneath that, a cold, rounded doorknob. He felt Duo’s fingers turn under his, felt the knob turn partway and abruptly stop as the lock halted its motion. It wouldn’t open. He wasn’t sure if he was panicked or relieved.
Duo exhaled with frustration. “How the hell do we open this?”
“I don’t know.” Maybe we shouldn’t, he added in his mind. Hell, we definitely shouldn’t.
“Solo said he wanted to show me something.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t know,” Duo whispered. “I don’t remember that conversation at all.”
“Then maybe it didn’t happen.”
“I... I don’t know anymore. Maybe I forgot it. I don’t remember Solo ever getting better. Just sicker.”
“Then it wasn’t real, right?”
Duo took a shuddering, shaking breath.
“I don’t know what’s real and what’s not anymore. I think... I think I need to know what he wanted to show me.”
“Duo...”
“Stay with me, okay?” Duo said suddenly. “As long as you’re here... it can’t hurt me.”
It’s already hurting you, Heero wanted to respond. Instead, he tightened his hand around Duo’s on the doorknob and said, “of course.”
“Uh, listen, Heero... in case I don’t get another chance to say it... I... I lo--”
“Stop,” Heero interrupted, and heard Duo’s breath catch. He turned to where he knew his partner to be standing, though he could see nothing in the darkness.
“Not here. Not in this place. Save it for when we’re home.”
“Heero--”
“Just... just make sure you have another chance to say it, okay?”
Duo was silent for a long time. When he spoke again, his voice was tellingly hoarse. “Okay.”
“Me too,” Heero blurted. “So... give me another chance to say it, too.”
He heard another sharp inhale of breath, covered up badly by a cough. A minute passed before Duo composed himself again to speak.
“I will.”
“Okay.”
Duo pulled his hand gently out from under Heero’s, sliding it off the doorknob. Heero gave the door another experimental turn, but it was still locked, and he, too, let go. They stood, together in the darkness, surrounded by moist, diseased air and the vaguest movement of the pulsing walls. Finally, Duo spoke.
“Solo?”
If he was waiting for a response, it didn’t come.
“Solo,” he repeated, “it’s Duo. You said you had somethin’ to show me. Well, lemme in.”
With a low, sucking hum, the door swung outward and open, the knob turning under its own power, the lock disengaging itself with a minute click. Before them was a staircase, and at the end of the stairs was another door, heavy and rusted, meekly lit overhead with a pale, red light. A basement? The Persephone had no rooms pertaining to this, but he supposed he shouldn’t be surprised about that anymore.
They followed the stairs down, neither of them reacting when the door behind them inevitably slammed shut. The one in front of them opened easily, and they walked through without hesitation.
What Heero had been expecting to see, he wasn’t sure, but he was greeted with a nondescript hallway, lowly lit, doors evenly spaced on either side, a threadbare carpet that had once been patterned but now was mostly dirt laid on the floor. The walls were not wood here, but concrete, plastered over and painted a dingy yellow, though its original off-white coloring showed through cracks and holes in the finish. It was a colony apartment building of the style more familiar to Heero, cold and stark and empty. There was more white visible on the walls than yellow, and more graffiti than even that. Spread across the right wall, spanning across several doors, was Ella Doesn’t Know. A few illegible scrawls were sprayed on top of that, or penned on, or scratched in, maybe names, maybe epithets.
“I know this place,” Duo said, taking a step forward into the hall. “We moved buildings because the old one started to fall apart. Solo said it wasn’t safe, and we came here. Then the plague came and Solo got sick.”
“Is this where he--?”
“Yeah.”
A knot tightened in Heero’s stomach at the misery laid bare on Duo’s face.
“I’ve had so many dreams about this fucking place,” Duo continued. “I can’t believe I’m here again. It looks exactly the same.” He turned to Heero with a grim smile. “Must be because this is all out of my head, huh?”
He turned back to peer down the hall. “Looks like the fun is starting again.”
Heero followed his gaze up the far wall, where writing was forming, curling over the old epithets and scrawls, the faded, peeling paint. He felt a strange sense of powerlessness as he watched the letters construct themselves into words, unable to stop them, and aware of the damage they would do.
Guilty guilty guilty
Little murdering rat criminal filth
You know what you did
GUILTY
Duo began to walk, staring resolutely down the hallway as he hurried past the writing, the words continuing to form, tumbling down the wall as he turned and racing past him, eager to be seen. Heero was close behind, rushing to keep step beside Duo, whose dark eyes burned bright with anger.
“Duo!” That hoarse rasp of a voice echoed from the hall behind them, and was ignored. They turned another corner and here the hall stretched out impossibly long ahead of them. Blood-red writing rushed past them on both walls.
“Hey kid, I’m talking to you!”
The writing turned dark, sinking deep into the faded plaster, bubbling and hissing as it corroded the paint. The words tumbled over each other, and the hissing rose in the air and drowned out the sound of Heero’s heart thundering in his chest, the angry voice echoing in the hall behind them, everything, and now the hissing was a scream in his mind, the words refusing not to be read, not to be acknowledged:
Guilty little Duo don’t you know what you did
You say he was sick you say but that isn’t true it isn’t true you lied
You lied and lied YOU lied to YOURSELF
HE WASN’T SICK WHEN HE DIED WAS HE DUO WAS HE DUO WAS HE
TELL US WHAT YOU DID
“I don’t know!” Duo shouted, and now the screaming was a whine, a drone of a siren sounding, thundering around them. No, not again, not here. The carpet began to pull up from the floor, Heero could feel it move under him. It was blackening, charring, the concrete starting to crumble beneath it, eroding to scaffolding, rusty and bloodied. The words on the walls melted into vicious red slashes, then burned away as the walls themselves receded, leaving uneven, gaping holes, and red, so much red, filth and grime and disease and blood.
Something roared down the hall behind them and with it came a shout in that hoarse, rough voice:
“DUO!”
They began to run toward the end of the long, long hallway, even as the place crumbled around them and the siren screamed over their heads. The ship had become the memory, and now it was becoming the nightmare, and whether whatever was chasing them was Solo or Duo’s very subconscious itself... they couldn’t let it catch them. It couldn’t catch Duo. Heero just knew, in the deepest emotional core of his brain, that something terrible would happen if it did. They ran as fast as they could, Duo sprinting with the assistance of pure panic, Heero one step after him, a moment behind.
“DUO!” The howl came around the corner, and now it was in the hallway with them, bearing down. Heero didn’t turn to look, unwilling to slow down for even that long, but he could feel it just behind them, reaching for them. He felt the horror of its presence, the terror of its power, its desire to harm them. They ran.
There was a door at the end of the corridor. In ten seconds they would reach it. But the thing behind them was faster than that. If he gave an extra burst of speed now, he could grab Duo and haul them in together, escape the thing and the sirens’ wail and the hell that was forming in the hall around them. He jutted forward, feeling the tendons in his legs tighten, his enhanced muscles preparing for the exertion. Duo was two steps ahead of him, he would reach him, and they--
In the space Duo had stepped over an instant before, a hole opened, a black, empty void, stretching wide with impossible speed, and Heero realized he was going to fall into it, that the ship had conjured it for just that purpose. No...
Duo was at the door, throwing it open, and as he turned to shut it, he realized Heero was no longer there, and their eyes made contact for a single, terrible moment.
No! Duo! No!
The thing rushed past him, through the door, and then he was falling, away from Duo and deep, deep into the darkness below the floor.
He landed seconds later on hard, flat ground, and he was up in an instant, staring up at the hole above him through burning, wet eyes. One word, the one he despised the most, came to him: failure.
He had failed, failed to protect Duo, failed him utterly. He was alone up there, with that thing! Christ!
Something rustled behind him and Heero whirled, gun drawn. He was in a large laboratory room, a medical cot in front of him, like those he used to lie on when the doctors had augmented his strength and purged his emotions.
This must be his hell. Not blood and metal and fire, but cold, hostile sterility.
Another noise, a stirring from the far end of the room, and he realized he was not alone, not at all. There were monsters here with him. His own.
They resembled the awful thing from the mess hall, charred and irreparably damaged, yet somehow standing under their own power, or the power of his memory. Their limbs had melted together, forming profane lumps of flesh and bone, skin blistered and black, their faces shapeless masses of wet gleaming tissue without features to distinguish them anymore. And the smell, the choking stench of them, the acrid stinging clog in his nostrils, he finally recognized it to be that of human flesh burned to a crisp.
He understood now that he had done this, these were his victims just like the little girl, killed in combat or merely as contingencies, the accidental tragedies of war, deaths and injuries he no longer even remembered inflicting, the monster that he was. There were many here, in the room with him, mouths gaping without tongues or teeth to disturb the expanses of black, but there were surely many more than even this. He had killed hundreds, maybe thousands. He had been very good at it. Once, it had even given him pride, to be able to cause this kind of damage to a human body, to snuff life out so efficiently. They were here because they wanted to exact judgment, just like the little girl. And he certainly deserved it. He bore all the guilt for these deaths, these mangled corpses shambling toward him...
But Duo was up there, somewhere, and he was in danger, trapped in his own torment. And Heero had promised to protect him.
If he sacrificed himself here, in absolution for his guilt, then he was sacrificing Duo as well.
That price was too high to pay. He would damn himself to hell a thousand times over, damn himself to bear this crushing guilt for a lifetime, if it meant Duo was safe. He would die for him-- nothing else.
Knowing what he had to do, Heero trained his gun on the first of his victims and fired. It gurgled, stumbling, and fell lifelessly to the ground, a smoking hole burned into the oozing flesh of its forehead.
He shot the next and the splat of its ruined body to the floor didn’t even make him flinch.
With practiced ease, he executed every last one, like he had done to each before, until they lay in a gruesome arc around him, gleaming and putrid, blood and ooze and bile pooling around their corpses in a stinking miasma of death.
He loaded another clip into his gun and turned back to the hole in the ceiling. The laboratory was stark and white and its walls were smooth plasticine material, but the sides of the void overhead were the rusting scaffold of Duo’s nightmare world. He pulled the medical cot under the hole and climbed on top of it, stretching to scrape his fingers across the rough metal of the hole’s interior. He found purchase, and pulled himself bodily up into the dark, musty space.
Without even turning to look behind him at his own conjured torment, Heero began to climb, toward Duo, toward the only thing that mattered.
* * * *
Duo crashed into the room and managed only to slam the door shut behind him before crumpling in a heap to the floor. Despair shook him, choked his throat, made him swallow back bile. His breath was ragged and sharp, his heart a shuddering pain in his chest. He curled his fingers into the filthy carpet beneath him and shut his eyes against the hot wet sorrow threatening to blind his vision.
Heero was gone. The nightmare had swallowed him up and he was gone, fallen through the floor, lost to him. He had failed him. He had sworn on his life that he would keep Heero safe, and instead he had let the ship get him, he had let terror overcome him and Heero had paid the price. God, no. No! How could he have let this happen? How could he have failed to protect Heero, his partner, the only goddamn person he cared about in his miserable life?
He was gone. Heero was gone.
A hot tear rolled down his cheek and he wiped it hastily away, and rubbed at his eyes until he no longer felt the sting of unshed tears. There was no time for that right now. If he began to cry, he feared he would never stop. There just... wasn’t time.
“It’s better this way.”
Duo scrambled up from the floor, drawing a hitching breath. Something had said that, whispered it in his ear. He’d felt the hot breath on his skin. Whirling around, he peered into the low-lit space of the room. Nothing was there, nothing that he could see, anyway. But what he could see made his reddened eyes go wide and his heart pound helplessly. He knew where he was.
Countless nightmares had invoked this place, this dark, cold apartment with its fetid, damp carpet, boarded-over windows, broken furniture, its bare, infested mattress abandoned on the floor, but even those could not reproduce the image of this room with the clarity Duo now saw it with. This was no mere memory.
He was in the room where Solo died.
Christ. It even smelled the same, that sick-sweet plague smell. He could feel his skin go clammy as it hit his nostrils, invaded his senses. It made emotions he had thought long forgotten come rushing back to him.
This was Solo’s room, because he was the boss, and older than all of them to boot, so he got first pick. Duo and the other kids slept in the room next door, huddled together for warmth, under blankets swarming with fleas and lice; they were always itchy with bites, but at least they weren’t cold. A bunch of them didn’t have names, street-rat orphans the lot of them. Solo gave them names, short ones, so they could spell them better, save them time when tagging walls and buildings. Ace. Dan. Rose. Mia. Duo.
Solo taught him everything, how to steal without getting caught, how to pick any lock he came across, where to hide when he wasn’t quite sneaky enough, how to write both of their names, the alphabet, numbers, anything he wanted to learn. And, in return, Duo had loved him, loved Solo in the all-encompassing way of a child. He was mature and wise and could do no wrong in his eyes. Though they were wretches, they were okay as long as Solo was looking after them.
Then the plague had come. It took Mia first, she was small and weak and always catching colds, and that’s what they thought it was at first, a cold. Duo and Rose had stolen medicine for her, to make the coughing stop, but it wouldn’t, she wouldn’t stop, not even when blood came up instead of phlegm. Then, the fever had come, and she had slipped away so fast, until she seemed barely there at all, just a tiny, pale body breathing weakly under the blankets. Solo had realized she was contagious and had moved her away from the others when she had gotten really bad, and so Duo hadn’t seen her in her last moments. Solo had told him. And then, because he had been around Mia so much, Solo got sick too, though he pretended he was fine for as long as he could.
Duo could still remember that racking cough, the way it made Solo double over, made him shudder when he finally pulled himself up again. He remembered the night Solo came down with the fever, sitting at his bedside on the bare, stained mattress, praying to God that he would be saved.
Wait, they had prayed for Mia, he and Solo, as she was laid out on his bed, praying for her to wake up, to get better. But he had prayed for Solo, too, right? Solo had come down with a fever, hadn’t he? They all did, that’s what the plague did to you. You felt dizzy and you coughed a lot and then you slipped into a fever for good, for ever. And Solo had begun to get dizzy and then he was coughing, coughing all the time, and then...
And then...
And then?
But that was all he could remember. There was nothing beyond that memory, nothing save for the image of Solo from his nightmares, lying lifeless on the ground before reaching up to grab him, to bring him down to hell too. Why couldn’t he remember anything else? Had the trauma of watching his best friend die been too great? Or was it... something else?
What had he forgotten?
In the din of his pounding heart and the rushing of blood in his ears, he almost missed the whisper.
“It’s just us now, Duo. Just you and me.”
He wasn’t alone in the room. That voice, made hoarse by a throat raw from coughing... it belonged to Solo. It was the voice from the hall, that had chased him here. Solo was here with him.
He whirled, trying to spot him, but all he saw were shadows, creeping in the corners of the room, swirling up to the ceiling. He was here though, he could feel his presence all around him, and the thought filled him with inexplicable terror.
A cough echoed around the room, and then Duo saw him in the corner, a shadow much darker than the rest, a black smudge against the grey wall.
Duo swallowed and spoke. “What did you want to show me?”
And saying it then, he realized that he had said it before, as a child, standing in this very room. He had been worried because Solo wasn’t supposed to be walking around, he was supposed to be in bed. He hadn’t been looking good, haggard and pale, but still smiling, trying to look strong so Duo wouldn’t worry about him. The others had been out, but he had stayed behind... he had been worried about Solo and he wanted to stay by him in case he needed anything. Come on kid, I wanna show you something. And he had followed Solo back to his room, watching carefully for signs of fever, signs he was getting worse...
The black swirling cloud at the far end of the room began to peel off the wall and coalesce into a physical shape, with a booming rush of air around him, until it was no longer just a shadow. Eyes as blue as the ocean opened from within the frothing mass. Solo.
“I can’t believe you didn’t remember,” Solo said, though no mouth had yet formed out of the cloud. “You didn’t remember the gift I tried to give you?”
A lamp, its bulb long broken, skated across the floor and absorbed into the shadow of Solo’s form, disappearing entirely. The carpet under his feet, too, rolled away into the roiling mass. The lines of a narrow jaw and hollow cheeks began to take shape in the black void.
They had stood in this room, Duo still small, wearing filthy clothes too large for his meager frame, and Solo had been by the boarded up window with his back turned, beside the set of dresser drawers with the broken leg. Solo was coughing, but he didn’t have a fever yet...
No. Not ‘yet’. Never.
He never had a fever. Duo couldn’t remember the fever because it had never happened. Instead...
“I asked you to be my right hand man,” Solo said, “I asked you if you knew what it meant. And what did you say?”
Blue eyes glowed with supernatural intensity, fixed on him. He was too scared to move, held in place by a terror he’d only ever experienced once before. Here.
“I said I would follow you wherever you went.” His mouth was so dry, the words were a whisper.
“Wherever I went!” Solo bellowed, and now he was huge, huge in the darkness, no longer a shadow but made of flesh, brown hair and deep blue eyes and that crooked smile Duo had practiced so hard to emulate. But he was much larger than any person could ever be, here in his nightmare, he was as large as if Duo was a small child again, and loomed over him, taking a step away from the corner of the room, a step towards him.
“Wherever I went, right?” He’d repeated, that day, and he’d turned to him and Duo could see the blood speckling his lips and the glint of something in his hands. Was that what he wanted to give him? “You said that you would follow me... wherever I went.”
The thing in his hands was small and narrow, glinting in the meager light... with a small, smooth handle where Solo held it, the blade away from his body... the blade of a knife.
Duo’s mind reeled and he staggered backward, and Solo walked grimly forward. There was no knife in his hand here, no hand at all-- a bloody mangled mess forming a serrated point, a dangerously sharp edge. The space around his eyes were hollow sockets, but their piercing blue gaze remained on him.
Duo had frozen at the sight of the knife, and hadn’t heard what Solo had said next, his mind had gone utterly blank with terror. He’d understood it all with horrific clarity. He wanted him to follow him wherever he went.
Solo had been dying of the plague... and he’d wanted Duo to follow him into oblivion.
Duo hit the wall, and Solo bore down on him, his blue eyes sharp, sharp as the weapon the ship had twisted his body into.
“...me alone...” Solo had said, his voice coming in and out of focus as Duo had tried with all his might to make sense of the terrible thing Solo wanted to do. All he could see was the knife in his hands, the vicious gleam of it. “You can’t leave me alone, Duo. You’re all I’ve got.”
“No, Solo, don’t, please...”
And then Solo had attacked.
Solo had always been the better fighter, and Duo had been young and too scared to think straight. When Solo had grabbed him and taken him to the ground, Duo had only barely managed to twist out of his hands, aided by his small frame. But Solo had strength and experience on his side, and had gotten a grip on his leg and pulled him reeling back even as he had scrambled desperately for purchase on the bare floor. Everything after that had been instinct, the blind fight of a cornered prey animal. Solo had stabbed at him with the knife and the hiss of it slicing through the air had rang in his ears, the low, muffled thump of it hitting concrete where his body had been moments before. Then, Duo had kicked upwards, into Solo’s stomach, and sent him flying backwards, hitting the dresser with a hard smack. The plague really had made him weak; Duo would have never been able to do that had Solo been well.
The first moment after Solo had gone flying, Duo had instinctively wanted to run and see if he was okay. It was only a second or too later that the horrible reality of the situation had dawned again on him: his best friend was trying to kill him. The realization had spurred him to stand and stagger in short-breathed panic to the door, but Solo had recovered by then and had attacked again, and they had tumbled and tumbled on the floor, Solo’s free hand locked horrifically tight on Duo’s arm, and all Duo could think was that the knife was so close, so very close to him...
And somewhere in the confusion and the terror Duo had done the only thing he could think of, he had grabbed for the knife in Solo’s broad hand and pushed it toward his best friend’s gut, pushed and pushed until the only thing he felt was the meager resistance of skin to sharp metal and then a hot wet gush rush over both of their hands.
And the painful grip on his shoulder eased, and Solo had slumped to the floor, Duo holding the knife, it and them and the floor covered in red. It had pooled around his friend’s body, expanding around the both of them, and it had grown and grown, like it would never stop.
Duo had run, run far from the apartment, from the Wasteland itself, and by the time he had returned, the horror and the blood and the reality of what Solo had tried to do, and what he had done to him, all of it had been placed somewhere very far down and dark inside of him. He had had to forget.
He would have gone insane otherwise.
Well, he had forgotten, but not forgiven. Seeing Solo standing in front of him now, his hand twisted into a grotesque blade of flesh and blood, seething at him through that long brown hair, those blue eyes, made that clear. He had never forgiven himself, and now Solo could not forgive him. Solo was still trying to bring them together again, in death. And stopping him meant...
Stopping him meant plunging that knife into his heart again. Killing the first thing he had ever loved, the first person to give a damn about him. To give him a name. To call him a friend. A brother.
Solo took another heavy step toward him and Duo found himself speaking.
“I remember now, Solo,” he said. “I remember everything. I’m sorry I forgot what I did. I’m so sorry.”
Something passed through him at the words, a rush like relief through his veins, like he had been waiting to say that without knowing it for years. But it was fleeting. As it drained from his system, he was left with the grim knowledge of what he had to do.
Killing Solo once had damned him, sent him on a path to the destruction of countless more lives, and led him inexorably here to this nightmare, this hell borne of his damaged mind. God only knew what killing him twice would do. Maybe it would be that final atrocity, that last little push into total psychotic insanity. He didn’t doubt it.
But he knew what his decision was, what it would always be. Solo was no longer the most important person in his world. Neither, even, was he.
The person with whom his decision lay was somewhere in the ship below them, and even not knowing whether he was hurt or alive or dead could change the fact that he was what Duo lived for, died for, would damn himself to hell for, a thousand more times, with a goddamn smile on his face. Anything or anyone that stood in his way to getting back to Heero would be taken down.
Even if doing so destroyed him.
“I’m sorry, Solo,” Duo said now, taking a step off the wall, and towards the memory of the boy who had once been his greatest and closest friend. “But I can’t go with you.”
There was a grating, horrible yell, and Solo came at him, monstrous and huge, terrible arm out, its dangerous edge slashing at him in wide arcs. Instinct overwhelmed fear and Duo dove for another wall, scrambling to stand again. Solo whirled to face him, blue eyes flashing. He lunged again, low, aiming for his heels, scrapping like the street-rats they were.
But Duo’s fighting had finessed, improved immeasurably since he was a kid on the streets, and that ruthless, take-no-prisoners style of combat Solo had taught him so well was now augmented by skill and practice. He deftly avoided the lunge, somersaulting to a safer part of the room. Still, Solo was huge and towering over him, his movements hastened, strengthened by anger, and Duo barely had time to stand up before Solo was on him again, reaching for him with terrible speed.
He dodged another attempt at a grab, leaping artlessly out of the way of the broad hand straining for his arm, but realized too late it was a feint, a bluff-- Solo’s macabre blade sliced at him too quickly to avoid. He rolled, but heard the slash of it cutting the air above him an instant before his leg exploded in pain. He scrambled out of the way of a second attempt with the blade, feeling the hot rush of blood down his pant leg as he moved. The cut was deep. He could only hope the blood wasn’t arterial.
Solo bore down on him, the room seeming to shrink around his form, and Duo barely had time to stand before he had to leap again out of the way of that horrible weapon, the scrape of metal against concrete over his head telling him he had only barely managed to avoid its attack. He was going to die if he kept this up much longer-- the blinding throb of pain in his leg told him that. Shit, he needed an opening!
He reached a corner of the room, wobbling slightly on his injured leg. Solo lunged for him, and he rolled to the next corner, his breath coming in rough pants. Another lunge, another dodge, blood pounding in his ears and pouring steadily down his leg, coating the floor, making it slick. He rolled, trying to reach the far end of the room, but he wasn’t fast enough, slowed by his injury, and Solo grabbed him and they toppled to the floor.
It had been just like this before, they had struggled with the knife against each other, only the white-hot panic of pure terror driving Duo’s actions as he fought for his life against his friend. He ended up on his back, Solo’s enormous form looming above him, and the blue-eyed boy gave him a final, triumphant smile before raising his bladed arm to give the final, fatal strike.
But even huge as he was, and small as Duo had been, Solo had been gravely sick with the plague-- and was weaker than he looked. That’s right-- it had been mostly bluffing, mostly bravado, and even scrawny little Duo had been able to send him flying with just one well-placed kick to the gut. His arm raised high, ready to kill, Solo had inadvertently left himself wide open, and Duo saw his opportunity. Ignoring the searing pain in his injured leg, he reared back and kicked Solo hard, as hard as he could. And just like his size had belied his frailty before, Solo’s body felt lighter and weaker under his boots than he appeared, and he went tumbling backwards, slamming hard into the dresser at the wall.
There would be no second opportunity. Next time, Solo would not leave himself open. This was it.
Duo took a long, last look at his first true friend. Even after everything, he still loved him.
“Sorry, Solo.”
Then, he drew his gun, aimed it steadily between those deep blue eyes, and fired.
He only had time to see the hole form in the clammy skin of Solo’s forehead before his body began to convulse and seize, acrid smoke pouring obscenely from every orifice. His mangled arm twitched, the bloody end pulsing, throbbing. Duo grimaced, but stared in morbid, horrified fascination.
There came a booming roar of air that seemed to originate from within Solo’s body, and all at once he vaporized, disintegrated instantly as that black smoke filled the room, billowing over and around Duo until he couldn’t see anything but its roiling shadow. The rushing howl of air grew louder, louder, until it deafened him, rang in his ears like a bomb going off. The room began to rumble and quake around him, and he could feel the concrete of the floor cracking and shifting under his feet, sending him to a knee as his injured leg stumbled under the assault. He could only stay there as the hell around him began to crumble and collapse.
Then he felt a warm, strong hand close around his arm, lifting him bodily to his feet. Through the deafening roar all around, he heard a deep, familiar voice shout for him.
“Duo!”
Heero. For a moment, Duo thought his heart might just give out. He had never been so goddamn glad to hear his voice.
“Can you walk?” Heero shouted.
“Yeah!” Duo said, though his bleeding leg screamed otherwise. There was no time to worry about it. Nothing mattered save that Heero was safe.
“Then let’s get the hell out of here!”
And with that, they tore out of the room and into the hallway of what was once again the Persephone Four, the L-2 building gone, gone forever. They were outside the Captain’s Cabin, as if they’d never left it.
The ship was crumbling around them-- no, it was disintegrating. The howling roar was the sound of its layers peeling away into nothingness. The panels of the walls on either side of them appeared to be sinking inwards, the holes forming in their absence growing alarmingly fast.
“We don’t have any time!” Heero said, and they took off down the hallway, heading for the docking bay, passing laboratories quickly vaporizing into black holes and offices that had already dissolved into empty voids. Everything was melting away. Duo’s leg screamed in pain at every step he took, but he pushed it to the back of his mind and focused on his partner, on Heero, as they ran for their lives.
They turned the corner to the mess hall and Duo looked in to see the tables and chairs being pulled outward, stretching impossibly far, sucked into an emptiness that seemed to stretch beyond infinity. It was terrifying and beautiful; he felt strangely drawn toward it, toward that pulling, endless nothing--
Heero tugged him past the door, and his gaze into the abyss was mercifully broken.
They flew around the next corner and there was the docking bay, doors open, and they sprinted to their ship, intact and still humming in hibernation, and they threw themselves inside it, Heero reaching the cockpit first, flying to the computer and booting up the activation sequence, hands gripping the controls so tight it looked like he might rip them right off.
The Persephone Four was screaming and roaring in its death throes, the edges of the wide docking bay already succumbing to their oblivion, walls disintegrating into blackness, exposing the starry expanse of space beyond them.
Duo lifted shaking fingers to the console and entered the universal unlock sequence code for the doors, and, powerless now, the Persephone’s bay doors swung open under their command even as the void claimed them, ate them away.
Heero didn’t even wait for them to finish opening before he was throwing the Icelus forward with the force of all its thrusters, sending them careening out of the Persephone and into the safety of open space.
They were free.
Heero didn’t take a second look behind them as they rushed away from the doomed ship, but Duo turned and watched in strange silent fascination.
The Persephone’s form seemed to twist, curl itself into an impossible spiral, the doors they had come through now only a blurry hole against the backdrop of the mutated ship. Then, from its center, he saw a great void open, a vast nothingness, blacker than the universe itself, and the Persephone collapsed into it, pulled like water through a funnel, and then it vanished entirely, winking out to nothing, leaving only empty space in its wake.
It was gone.
* * * *
Duo turned at the sound of the bunk door sliding open. Heero entered, looking exhausted in every way that counted. Duo gave him a short, weak smile and imagined he must have looked even worse for wear.
“How’s your leg?”
“It’ll survive,” Duo said, running a hand over the thick gauze bandaged tightly around it. “Didn’t do a great job stitching it, though. Let me tell you, I can’t wait until people ask me how I got that scar.”
Heero sat down on the bed, on Duo’s uninjured side. After a moment, he leaned over and slid a hand into one of Duo’s, staring down at their intertwined fingers for a while in silence.
“Did you call in the casualties?” Duo asked softly.
Heero nodded, running a thumb over the back of Duo’s hand.
“Noin have anything to say about it?” He continued, though he knew the answer.
Forty-three people presumed dead, eight of them Preventers, plus one very expensive research space station lost to another dimension, or Hell itself. Noin would certainly have something to say about it.
Heero sighed, and pulled their hands into his lap. “Suffice to say there’s going to be a very thorough and fruitless investigation into the matter.”
They sat silent again for a few minutes before Heero spoke again.
“Duo, I was thinking... when we get back, maybe we should... take some time off. Get away from work for a while, go on a trip, something like that. I think... well, I think we could both use it.”
Duo let out a slow exhale of breath. “Yeah.”
“We’re... okay, right?”
Duo stared at him. Slowly, Heero lifted his eyes, turned to meet his gaze. He had never seen him look so uncertain, so unsure.
Duo’s battered heart twisted in his chest, and he pulled his hand from Heero’s grip to throw his arms around his partner’s neck and send them crashing gently into the mattress.
“Of course,” Duo said, his voice muffled against Heero’s jacket. Heero’s hands came up to sink almost painfully tightly in Duo’s hair, heart beating rapidly under Duo’s ear.
They had fallen into nightmares of their own creation, and while his leg was stitched up, there were scars far deeper and more dangerous laying wide open inside of him, and surely inside Heero, too. Separately, they were far from okay.
But together, they couldn’t be broken.
They lay together like that a long time, just gratefully absorbing the contact. Perhaps he would never really acknowledge just how close he had come to losing this. Maybe he would store that deep down, too, somewhere, and maybe with time it wouldn’t seem quite so frightening to confront. But not now, not while Heero’s heart was beating beneath him like this, still unsteady. It was all still too... close.
He knew they wouldn’t sleep anytime soon, there was no chance of that; he knew that they would make love before they returned to Earth, that they had to. And every inch of him wanted to stay there, wrapped around Heero on the bed, feeling his warm breath fan out against his forehead, feeling him there, feeling safe for the first time in a long time. But there was something he still had to do.
Duo reluctantly rose, catching the hand Heero reached for him with and taking it in one of his own.
“I’ll be right back,” he said softly, then leaned down and took Heero’s mouth in a kiss. “Then I’ll show you just how good we are.”
Heero let him go, and though his expression belied his concern, he didn’t say anything. Duo glanced at him one more time, then slipped out into the hallway, heading down the dim corridor toward the back of the ship, one hand curling into his jacket pocket, remaining there until he arrived at his destination. He came to the end of the hall, where the small, round cylinder chute of the waste disposal bin stood before him.
Here, he pulled out his hand from his pocket and opened it to reveal what had been concealed there: a tiny, gold cross, glittering weakly in the low light.
Duo stared at it for a long time, letting memories flow freely through him at the sight, one last time. He brought it to his lips and placed them to it, a final apology.
Then, before he could change his mind, he pulled open the hatch of the waste bin, slipped the gilded chain inside, and pressed the button that released the contents outside.
The cross shot out into open space, jetting away from the ship with the force of its ejection, glittering under the exterior lights, a little, beautiful thing. A precious thing, but one he had to let go. Duo watched it tumble weightlessly away, turning and turning, until its golden sparkle blended into the gleam of the stars beyond and he could no longer make it out.
He couldn’t apologize for all of the things he had done, couldn’t tell all the people that he wanted to that he was sorry. There were some things that couldn’t be forgiven, things he didn’t deserve forgiveness for. No, he couldn’t be absolved of all the guilt he carried with him.
But he could live with it. He could accept that it would somehow always be a part of him, instead of running away from it. Instead of destroying himself in a futile search for forgiveness.
There were more important things than forgiveness. A more important person.
And, turning from the window, Duo slipped back down the hall to return to him.
The End
So... a pretty happy ending, all things considered. This is because I am a big sap O_o Anyway, thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed it :3
The hall outside the cabin had transformed completely into the abandoned building where Duo had said he’d once lived. The damp dark wood of the walls and floor creaked and popped, buckling in protest against the nails that strained to keep them from warping. That there was wood at all spoke to how old the building must have been when Duo had lived there; wood was used heavily in the oldest buildings on the colonies, when the world economy supported them and trade between space and Earth had been free and cheap. Political tensions had dried up the flow of natural resources from Earth quickly, long before either of them had been born; all the buildings Heero could remember from his youth were concrete. But this ancient apartment, with its wood-finished interior, still spoke of L-2’s once rich and luxuriant past, now left to destitution and decay.
They walked vaguely in the direction of the main control room, though what state it was in now was anyone’s guess. And what would be waiting for them there? Did Duo have any idea? If he did, he wasn’t sharing. He wasn’t speaking at all, walking several steps ahead, not looking around, hands deep in pockets. Heero fought back the urge to reach for him, hold him, do something for him.
And what the hell could he do? He asked himself bitterly. Not a damn thing. They were at the mercy of the ship now, wandering deeper into its maze, two little mice scurrying blindly toward a certain trap. Anxiety hummed along his skin, the groans of the floorboards making him flinch, senses frayed by the sheer wrongness of the place.
There was another hallway ahead, splitting off two ways, and Heero pulled out the floor map that he had taken from the glass case earlier. If they were still standing in the Persephone’s halls, there would be a laboratory down on the right, and more offices, with the control room at the opposite end. He glared down one shadowed hallway, straining to see, but could make out no doors that corresponded with the floor plan. Damn. He had almost been hoping the map had changed with the rest of the ship. Now, it was just useless. With a frustrated grunt, he pocketed the paper.
Duo paused at the intersection, peering down both corridors. “This way,” he said, turning to the left. Heero followed, though he couldn’t guess how Duo had chosen. Perhaps it was something he remembered from his past.
There was no light anymore. Heero thought he could see light bulbs hanging from the ceiling, but a building this decrepit surely had no electricity running to power them. The hall sank into heavy blackness ahead, the faded outlines of flowers on the remaining scraps of wallpaper only visible when standing directly beside them-- no, not flowers, he realized with a start. Faces. They were little faces, mouths open and wailing. Heero wrenched his gaze away and refused to look again.
He followed Duo around another corner, barely able to make him out in the darkness, and when he stopped abruptly short in the hall, Heero almost barrelled right into him.
“What?” He hissed, his whispered voice as loud as a shout in the empty hallway.
“There’s something written here,” Duo muttered, peering up at the wall on their right.
Heero followed his gaze, and could see that between the horrible faces of the wallpaper, the tendrils of black mold staining the wood, someone had scratched a message in the wall with a knife or some other sharp object, the long, jagged edges of the letters gaping like open wounds.
Do you remember yet? Oh you will you will
Duo cursed under his breath. Heero turned to him, but before he could speak, Duo just shook his head.
“I don’t know.”
“Duo...”
“I’m telling you, Heero, I don’t know what it’s talking about.”
“I believe you.”
Neither of them sounded very convincing. Heero did believe him-- he had to. That didn’t change the fact that the Persephone wanted to show them something, something that Duo had apparently forgotten. Heero thought again of the look in Duo’s eyes when he’d heard that voice in the hall, that boy who had called himself Solo. Heero himself had held a gun to Duo’s head once, and even then, he had never seen him look so terrified.
He couldn’t tell Duo, but that more than anything had convinced him that maybe the ship knew something Duo didn’t, had pulled something out of his memory that Duo had stowed far from his own conscious mind. There was more to that story than Duo could recall, more than just an illness. That nightmare on the ship, before they had even arrived at this god-forsaken place, that refusal to talk about it at all, suggested as much.
What had happened to him?
They continued down the dark corridor until they came to another intersection, and, lost, Heero waited for Duo to decide their next move. He peered down one way, then the other, his eyes shadowed. For a moment, it seemed he couldn’t decide.
“Duo?”
Duo whirled to look at him, but Heero shook his head. He hadn’t spoken.
“Duo!”
They turned in the direction of the voice, a frail, echoing rasp, ringing from the pitch blackness at one end of the hallway.
“Come on, I wanna show you something.”
“Solo?” Heero whispered. At his side, Duo gave one curt nod, his mouth tight.
“What are you doin’ up? You’re sick!” A second voice rang down the hallway, this one younger, brighter. Heero’s breath caught. It was a child’s voice, but one he recognized instantly.
“I’m feelin’ better today.” There was a ghost of a cough that belied the bravado of the words. “Come on, kid.”
“Only if you promise to get back in bed!” The child Duo once was scolded.
An echoing laugh followed. “I promise, all right? Sheesh.”
Something like a moan escaped Duo beside him. Heero turned and saw that Duo’s arms were wrapped around himself, that he was hunched over strangely, as if hearing the exchange had hurt him. Heero’s hand reached for that bowed shoulder before he could stop himself.
“Duo?”
At the contact, Duo flinched and straightened. “I’m fine. Let’s go.”
“We don’t have to do this.”
“Yeah, we do,” Duo muttered. “Come on.”
He set off in the direction of the voices and Heero followed before he lost him in the darkness. This was wrong. It was all wrong. They were blindly walking toward something terrible, he knew somehow. He felt it with every fiber of his being. Couldn’t Duo feel it too? Or was he already resigned to his fate? Solo was calling to him, from the depths of his memory. And Duo was going to him, getting farther and farther from Heero, slipping away. The thought clawed at his heart, made his breath catch. He feared he would lose him here.
The halls were dark as midnight now, even the moaning faces on the walls impossible to make out. Their footsteps sounded louder in his ears in the absence of vision, the sogging wood on the floor seemed wetter, fleshier. His shoes stuck, like trudging through something viscous and heavy, and he pulled each step away with a thick sucking slurp. The smell, too, seemed to take shape around them, mildew mixing with sweat and phlegm and the heady stink of disease. Sickness hovered in the air.
A door slammed ahead of them, and they both inhaled sharply with surprise. Heero found his gun at his side and closed his fingers around the grip, but it was almost useless, blind as he was in this enveloping darkness. They continued to walk, silent as death, straining to hear the sound of someone else’s breathing join theirs, the squelch of another’s footsteps in the stinking corridor, each second of each endless minute pounded out by Heero’s shuddering heartbeat. Finally, they came to the wall, a dead end.
“I found the door handle,” Duo said.
Heero put his hands out to feel the wall himself, finding it wet and warm, and his fingers traced over dripping, fleshy curvature-- was this wood anymore?-- until he felt Duo’s hand beneath his, smooth and familiar, and beneath that, a cold, rounded doorknob. He felt Duo’s fingers turn under his, felt the knob turn partway and abruptly stop as the lock halted its motion. It wouldn’t open. He wasn’t sure if he was panicked or relieved.
Duo exhaled with frustration. “How the hell do we open this?”
“I don’t know.” Maybe we shouldn’t, he added in his mind. Hell, we definitely shouldn’t.
“Solo said he wanted to show me something.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t know,” Duo whispered. “I don’t remember that conversation at all.”
“Then maybe it didn’t happen.”
“I... I don’t know anymore. Maybe I forgot it. I don’t remember Solo ever getting better. Just sicker.”
“Then it wasn’t real, right?”
Duo took a shuddering, shaking breath.
“I don’t know what’s real and what’s not anymore. I think... I think I need to know what he wanted to show me.”
“Duo...”
“Stay with me, okay?” Duo said suddenly. “As long as you’re here... it can’t hurt me.”
It’s already hurting you, Heero wanted to respond. Instead, he tightened his hand around Duo’s on the doorknob and said, “of course.”
“Uh, listen, Heero... in case I don’t get another chance to say it... I... I lo--”
“Stop,” Heero interrupted, and heard Duo’s breath catch. He turned to where he knew his partner to be standing, though he could see nothing in the darkness.
“Not here. Not in this place. Save it for when we’re home.”
“Heero--”
“Just... just make sure you have another chance to say it, okay?”
Duo was silent for a long time. When he spoke again, his voice was tellingly hoarse. “Okay.”
“Me too,” Heero blurted. “So... give me another chance to say it, too.”
He heard another sharp inhale of breath, covered up badly by a cough. A minute passed before Duo composed himself again to speak.
“I will.”
“Okay.”
Duo pulled his hand gently out from under Heero’s, sliding it off the doorknob. Heero gave the door another experimental turn, but it was still locked, and he, too, let go. They stood, together in the darkness, surrounded by moist, diseased air and the vaguest movement of the pulsing walls. Finally, Duo spoke.
“Solo?”
If he was waiting for a response, it didn’t come.
“Solo,” he repeated, “it’s Duo. You said you had somethin’ to show me. Well, lemme in.”
With a low, sucking hum, the door swung outward and open, the knob turning under its own power, the lock disengaging itself with a minute click. Before them was a staircase, and at the end of the stairs was another door, heavy and rusted, meekly lit overhead with a pale, red light. A basement? The Persephone had no rooms pertaining to this, but he supposed he shouldn’t be surprised about that anymore.
They followed the stairs down, neither of them reacting when the door behind them inevitably slammed shut. The one in front of them opened easily, and they walked through without hesitation.
What Heero had been expecting to see, he wasn’t sure, but he was greeted with a nondescript hallway, lowly lit, doors evenly spaced on either side, a threadbare carpet that had once been patterned but now was mostly dirt laid on the floor. The walls were not wood here, but concrete, plastered over and painted a dingy yellow, though its original off-white coloring showed through cracks and holes in the finish. It was a colony apartment building of the style more familiar to Heero, cold and stark and empty. There was more white visible on the walls than yellow, and more graffiti than even that. Spread across the right wall, spanning across several doors, was Ella Doesn’t Know. A few illegible scrawls were sprayed on top of that, or penned on, or scratched in, maybe names, maybe epithets.
“I know this place,” Duo said, taking a step forward into the hall. “We moved buildings because the old one started to fall apart. Solo said it wasn’t safe, and we came here. Then the plague came and Solo got sick.”
“Is this where he--?”
“Yeah.”
A knot tightened in Heero’s stomach at the misery laid bare on Duo’s face.
“I’ve had so many dreams about this fucking place,” Duo continued. “I can’t believe I’m here again. It looks exactly the same.” He turned to Heero with a grim smile. “Must be because this is all out of my head, huh?”
He turned back to peer down the hall. “Looks like the fun is starting again.”
Heero followed his gaze up the far wall, where writing was forming, curling over the old epithets and scrawls, the faded, peeling paint. He felt a strange sense of powerlessness as he watched the letters construct themselves into words, unable to stop them, and aware of the damage they would do.
Guilty guilty guilty
Little murdering rat criminal filth
You know what you did
GUILTY
Duo began to walk, staring resolutely down the hallway as he hurried past the writing, the words continuing to form, tumbling down the wall as he turned and racing past him, eager to be seen. Heero was close behind, rushing to keep step beside Duo, whose dark eyes burned bright with anger.
“Duo!” That hoarse rasp of a voice echoed from the hall behind them, and was ignored. They turned another corner and here the hall stretched out impossibly long ahead of them. Blood-red writing rushed past them on both walls.
“Hey kid, I’m talking to you!”
The writing turned dark, sinking deep into the faded plaster, bubbling and hissing as it corroded the paint. The words tumbled over each other, and the hissing rose in the air and drowned out the sound of Heero’s heart thundering in his chest, the angry voice echoing in the hall behind them, everything, and now the hissing was a scream in his mind, the words refusing not to be read, not to be acknowledged:
Guilty little Duo don’t you know what you did
You say he was sick you say but that isn’t true it isn’t true you lied
You lied and lied YOU lied to YOURSELF
HE WASN’T SICK WHEN HE DIED WAS HE DUO WAS HE DUO WAS HE
TELL US WHAT YOU DID
“I don’t know!” Duo shouted, and now the screaming was a whine, a drone of a siren sounding, thundering around them. No, not again, not here. The carpet began to pull up from the floor, Heero could feel it move under him. It was blackening, charring, the concrete starting to crumble beneath it, eroding to scaffolding, rusty and bloodied. The words on the walls melted into vicious red slashes, then burned away as the walls themselves receded, leaving uneven, gaping holes, and red, so much red, filth and grime and disease and blood.
Something roared down the hall behind them and with it came a shout in that hoarse, rough voice:
“DUO!”
They began to run toward the end of the long, long hallway, even as the place crumbled around them and the siren screamed over their heads. The ship had become the memory, and now it was becoming the nightmare, and whether whatever was chasing them was Solo or Duo’s very subconscious itself... they couldn’t let it catch them. It couldn’t catch Duo. Heero just knew, in the deepest emotional core of his brain, that something terrible would happen if it did. They ran as fast as they could, Duo sprinting with the assistance of pure panic, Heero one step after him, a moment behind.
“DUO!” The howl came around the corner, and now it was in the hallway with them, bearing down. Heero didn’t turn to look, unwilling to slow down for even that long, but he could feel it just behind them, reaching for them. He felt the horror of its presence, the terror of its power, its desire to harm them. They ran.
There was a door at the end of the corridor. In ten seconds they would reach it. But the thing behind them was faster than that. If he gave an extra burst of speed now, he could grab Duo and haul them in together, escape the thing and the sirens’ wail and the hell that was forming in the hall around them. He jutted forward, feeling the tendons in his legs tighten, his enhanced muscles preparing for the exertion. Duo was two steps ahead of him, he would reach him, and they--
In the space Duo had stepped over an instant before, a hole opened, a black, empty void, stretching wide with impossible speed, and Heero realized he was going to fall into it, that the ship had conjured it for just that purpose. No...
Duo was at the door, throwing it open, and as he turned to shut it, he realized Heero was no longer there, and their eyes made contact for a single, terrible moment.
No! Duo! No!
The thing rushed past him, through the door, and then he was falling, away from Duo and deep, deep into the darkness below the floor.
He landed seconds later on hard, flat ground, and he was up in an instant, staring up at the hole above him through burning, wet eyes. One word, the one he despised the most, came to him: failure.
He had failed, failed to protect Duo, failed him utterly. He was alone up there, with that thing! Christ!
Something rustled behind him and Heero whirled, gun drawn. He was in a large laboratory room, a medical cot in front of him, like those he used to lie on when the doctors had augmented his strength and purged his emotions.
This must be his hell. Not blood and metal and fire, but cold, hostile sterility.
Another noise, a stirring from the far end of the room, and he realized he was not alone, not at all. There were monsters here with him. His own.
They resembled the awful thing from the mess hall, charred and irreparably damaged, yet somehow standing under their own power, or the power of his memory. Their limbs had melted together, forming profane lumps of flesh and bone, skin blistered and black, their faces shapeless masses of wet gleaming tissue without features to distinguish them anymore. And the smell, the choking stench of them, the acrid stinging clog in his nostrils, he finally recognized it to be that of human flesh burned to a crisp.
He understood now that he had done this, these were his victims just like the little girl, killed in combat or merely as contingencies, the accidental tragedies of war, deaths and injuries he no longer even remembered inflicting, the monster that he was. There were many here, in the room with him, mouths gaping without tongues or teeth to disturb the expanses of black, but there were surely many more than even this. He had killed hundreds, maybe thousands. He had been very good at it. Once, it had even given him pride, to be able to cause this kind of damage to a human body, to snuff life out so efficiently. They were here because they wanted to exact judgment, just like the little girl. And he certainly deserved it. He bore all the guilt for these deaths, these mangled corpses shambling toward him...
But Duo was up there, somewhere, and he was in danger, trapped in his own torment. And Heero had promised to protect him.
If he sacrificed himself here, in absolution for his guilt, then he was sacrificing Duo as well.
That price was too high to pay. He would damn himself to hell a thousand times over, damn himself to bear this crushing guilt for a lifetime, if it meant Duo was safe. He would die for him-- nothing else.
Knowing what he had to do, Heero trained his gun on the first of his victims and fired. It gurgled, stumbling, and fell lifelessly to the ground, a smoking hole burned into the oozing flesh of its forehead.
He shot the next and the splat of its ruined body to the floor didn’t even make him flinch.
With practiced ease, he executed every last one, like he had done to each before, until they lay in a gruesome arc around him, gleaming and putrid, blood and ooze and bile pooling around their corpses in a stinking miasma of death.
He loaded another clip into his gun and turned back to the hole in the ceiling. The laboratory was stark and white and its walls were smooth plasticine material, but the sides of the void overhead were the rusting scaffold of Duo’s nightmare world. He pulled the medical cot under the hole and climbed on top of it, stretching to scrape his fingers across the rough metal of the hole’s interior. He found purchase, and pulled himself bodily up into the dark, musty space.
Without even turning to look behind him at his own conjured torment, Heero began to climb, toward Duo, toward the only thing that mattered.
* * * *
Duo crashed into the room and managed only to slam the door shut behind him before crumpling in a heap to the floor. Despair shook him, choked his throat, made him swallow back bile. His breath was ragged and sharp, his heart a shuddering pain in his chest. He curled his fingers into the filthy carpet beneath him and shut his eyes against the hot wet sorrow threatening to blind his vision.
Heero was gone. The nightmare had swallowed him up and he was gone, fallen through the floor, lost to him. He had failed him. He had sworn on his life that he would keep Heero safe, and instead he had let the ship get him, he had let terror overcome him and Heero had paid the price. God, no. No! How could he have let this happen? How could he have failed to protect Heero, his partner, the only goddamn person he cared about in his miserable life?
He was gone. Heero was gone.
A hot tear rolled down his cheek and he wiped it hastily away, and rubbed at his eyes until he no longer felt the sting of unshed tears. There was no time for that right now. If he began to cry, he feared he would never stop. There just... wasn’t time.
“It’s better this way.”
Duo scrambled up from the floor, drawing a hitching breath. Something had said that, whispered it in his ear. He’d felt the hot breath on his skin. Whirling around, he peered into the low-lit space of the room. Nothing was there, nothing that he could see, anyway. But what he could see made his reddened eyes go wide and his heart pound helplessly. He knew where he was.
Countless nightmares had invoked this place, this dark, cold apartment with its fetid, damp carpet, boarded-over windows, broken furniture, its bare, infested mattress abandoned on the floor, but even those could not reproduce the image of this room with the clarity Duo now saw it with. This was no mere memory.
He was in the room where Solo died.
Christ. It even smelled the same, that sick-sweet plague smell. He could feel his skin go clammy as it hit his nostrils, invaded his senses. It made emotions he had thought long forgotten come rushing back to him.
This was Solo’s room, because he was the boss, and older than all of them to boot, so he got first pick. Duo and the other kids slept in the room next door, huddled together for warmth, under blankets swarming with fleas and lice; they were always itchy with bites, but at least they weren’t cold. A bunch of them didn’t have names, street-rat orphans the lot of them. Solo gave them names, short ones, so they could spell them better, save them time when tagging walls and buildings. Ace. Dan. Rose. Mia. Duo.
Solo taught him everything, how to steal without getting caught, how to pick any lock he came across, where to hide when he wasn’t quite sneaky enough, how to write both of their names, the alphabet, numbers, anything he wanted to learn. And, in return, Duo had loved him, loved Solo in the all-encompassing way of a child. He was mature and wise and could do no wrong in his eyes. Though they were wretches, they were okay as long as Solo was looking after them.
Then the plague had come. It took Mia first, she was small and weak and always catching colds, and that’s what they thought it was at first, a cold. Duo and Rose had stolen medicine for her, to make the coughing stop, but it wouldn’t, she wouldn’t stop, not even when blood came up instead of phlegm. Then, the fever had come, and she had slipped away so fast, until she seemed barely there at all, just a tiny, pale body breathing weakly under the blankets. Solo had realized she was contagious and had moved her away from the others when she had gotten really bad, and so Duo hadn’t seen her in her last moments. Solo had told him. And then, because he had been around Mia so much, Solo got sick too, though he pretended he was fine for as long as he could.
Duo could still remember that racking cough, the way it made Solo double over, made him shudder when he finally pulled himself up again. He remembered the night Solo came down with the fever, sitting at his bedside on the bare, stained mattress, praying to God that he would be saved.
Wait, they had prayed for Mia, he and Solo, as she was laid out on his bed, praying for her to wake up, to get better. But he had prayed for Solo, too, right? Solo had come down with a fever, hadn’t he? They all did, that’s what the plague did to you. You felt dizzy and you coughed a lot and then you slipped into a fever for good, for ever. And Solo had begun to get dizzy and then he was coughing, coughing all the time, and then...
And then...
And then?
But that was all he could remember. There was nothing beyond that memory, nothing save for the image of Solo from his nightmares, lying lifeless on the ground before reaching up to grab him, to bring him down to hell too. Why couldn’t he remember anything else? Had the trauma of watching his best friend die been too great? Or was it... something else?
What had he forgotten?
In the din of his pounding heart and the rushing of blood in his ears, he almost missed the whisper.
“It’s just us now, Duo. Just you and me.”
He wasn’t alone in the room. That voice, made hoarse by a throat raw from coughing... it belonged to Solo. It was the voice from the hall, that had chased him here. Solo was here with him.
He whirled, trying to spot him, but all he saw were shadows, creeping in the corners of the room, swirling up to the ceiling. He was here though, he could feel his presence all around him, and the thought filled him with inexplicable terror.
A cough echoed around the room, and then Duo saw him in the corner, a shadow much darker than the rest, a black smudge against the grey wall.
Duo swallowed and spoke. “What did you want to show me?”
And saying it then, he realized that he had said it before, as a child, standing in this very room. He had been worried because Solo wasn’t supposed to be walking around, he was supposed to be in bed. He hadn’t been looking good, haggard and pale, but still smiling, trying to look strong so Duo wouldn’t worry about him. The others had been out, but he had stayed behind... he had been worried about Solo and he wanted to stay by him in case he needed anything. Come on kid, I wanna show you something. And he had followed Solo back to his room, watching carefully for signs of fever, signs he was getting worse...
The black swirling cloud at the far end of the room began to peel off the wall and coalesce into a physical shape, with a booming rush of air around him, until it was no longer just a shadow. Eyes as blue as the ocean opened from within the frothing mass. Solo.
“I can’t believe you didn’t remember,” Solo said, though no mouth had yet formed out of the cloud. “You didn’t remember the gift I tried to give you?”
A lamp, its bulb long broken, skated across the floor and absorbed into the shadow of Solo’s form, disappearing entirely. The carpet under his feet, too, rolled away into the roiling mass. The lines of a narrow jaw and hollow cheeks began to take shape in the black void.
They had stood in this room, Duo still small, wearing filthy clothes too large for his meager frame, and Solo had been by the boarded up window with his back turned, beside the set of dresser drawers with the broken leg. Solo was coughing, but he didn’t have a fever yet...
No. Not ‘yet’. Never.
He never had a fever. Duo couldn’t remember the fever because it had never happened. Instead...
“I asked you to be my right hand man,” Solo said, “I asked you if you knew what it meant. And what did you say?”
Blue eyes glowed with supernatural intensity, fixed on him. He was too scared to move, held in place by a terror he’d only ever experienced once before. Here.
“I said I would follow you wherever you went.” His mouth was so dry, the words were a whisper.
“Wherever I went!” Solo bellowed, and now he was huge, huge in the darkness, no longer a shadow but made of flesh, brown hair and deep blue eyes and that crooked smile Duo had practiced so hard to emulate. But he was much larger than any person could ever be, here in his nightmare, he was as large as if Duo was a small child again, and loomed over him, taking a step away from the corner of the room, a step towards him.
“Wherever I went, right?” He’d repeated, that day, and he’d turned to him and Duo could see the blood speckling his lips and the glint of something in his hands. Was that what he wanted to give him? “You said that you would follow me... wherever I went.”
The thing in his hands was small and narrow, glinting in the meager light... with a small, smooth handle where Solo held it, the blade away from his body... the blade of a knife.
Duo’s mind reeled and he staggered backward, and Solo walked grimly forward. There was no knife in his hand here, no hand at all-- a bloody mangled mess forming a serrated point, a dangerously sharp edge. The space around his eyes were hollow sockets, but their piercing blue gaze remained on him.
Duo had frozen at the sight of the knife, and hadn’t heard what Solo had said next, his mind had gone utterly blank with terror. He’d understood it all with horrific clarity. He wanted him to follow him wherever he went.
Solo had been dying of the plague... and he’d wanted Duo to follow him into oblivion.
Duo hit the wall, and Solo bore down on him, his blue eyes sharp, sharp as the weapon the ship had twisted his body into.
“...me alone...” Solo had said, his voice coming in and out of focus as Duo had tried with all his might to make sense of the terrible thing Solo wanted to do. All he could see was the knife in his hands, the vicious gleam of it. “You can’t leave me alone, Duo. You’re all I’ve got.”
“No, Solo, don’t, please...”
And then Solo had attacked.
Solo had always been the better fighter, and Duo had been young and too scared to think straight. When Solo had grabbed him and taken him to the ground, Duo had only barely managed to twist out of his hands, aided by his small frame. But Solo had strength and experience on his side, and had gotten a grip on his leg and pulled him reeling back even as he had scrambled desperately for purchase on the bare floor. Everything after that had been instinct, the blind fight of a cornered prey animal. Solo had stabbed at him with the knife and the hiss of it slicing through the air had rang in his ears, the low, muffled thump of it hitting concrete where his body had been moments before. Then, Duo had kicked upwards, into Solo’s stomach, and sent him flying backwards, hitting the dresser with a hard smack. The plague really had made him weak; Duo would have never been able to do that had Solo been well.
The first moment after Solo had gone flying, Duo had instinctively wanted to run and see if he was okay. It was only a second or too later that the horrible reality of the situation had dawned again on him: his best friend was trying to kill him. The realization had spurred him to stand and stagger in short-breathed panic to the door, but Solo had recovered by then and had attacked again, and they had tumbled and tumbled on the floor, Solo’s free hand locked horrifically tight on Duo’s arm, and all Duo could think was that the knife was so close, so very close to him...
And somewhere in the confusion and the terror Duo had done the only thing he could think of, he had grabbed for the knife in Solo’s broad hand and pushed it toward his best friend’s gut, pushed and pushed until the only thing he felt was the meager resistance of skin to sharp metal and then a hot wet gush rush over both of their hands.
And the painful grip on his shoulder eased, and Solo had slumped to the floor, Duo holding the knife, it and them and the floor covered in red. It had pooled around his friend’s body, expanding around the both of them, and it had grown and grown, like it would never stop.
Duo had run, run far from the apartment, from the Wasteland itself, and by the time he had returned, the horror and the blood and the reality of what Solo had tried to do, and what he had done to him, all of it had been placed somewhere very far down and dark inside of him. He had had to forget.
He would have gone insane otherwise.
Well, he had forgotten, but not forgiven. Seeing Solo standing in front of him now, his hand twisted into a grotesque blade of flesh and blood, seething at him through that long brown hair, those blue eyes, made that clear. He had never forgiven himself, and now Solo could not forgive him. Solo was still trying to bring them together again, in death. And stopping him meant...
Stopping him meant plunging that knife into his heart again. Killing the first thing he had ever loved, the first person to give a damn about him. To give him a name. To call him a friend. A brother.
Solo took another heavy step toward him and Duo found himself speaking.
“I remember now, Solo,” he said. “I remember everything. I’m sorry I forgot what I did. I’m so sorry.”
Something passed through him at the words, a rush like relief through his veins, like he had been waiting to say that without knowing it for years. But it was fleeting. As it drained from his system, he was left with the grim knowledge of what he had to do.
Killing Solo once had damned him, sent him on a path to the destruction of countless more lives, and led him inexorably here to this nightmare, this hell borne of his damaged mind. God only knew what killing him twice would do. Maybe it would be that final atrocity, that last little push into total psychotic insanity. He didn’t doubt it.
But he knew what his decision was, what it would always be. Solo was no longer the most important person in his world. Neither, even, was he.
The person with whom his decision lay was somewhere in the ship below them, and even not knowing whether he was hurt or alive or dead could change the fact that he was what Duo lived for, died for, would damn himself to hell for, a thousand more times, with a goddamn smile on his face. Anything or anyone that stood in his way to getting back to Heero would be taken down.
Even if doing so destroyed him.
“I’m sorry, Solo,” Duo said now, taking a step off the wall, and towards the memory of the boy who had once been his greatest and closest friend. “But I can’t go with you.”
There was a grating, horrible yell, and Solo came at him, monstrous and huge, terrible arm out, its dangerous edge slashing at him in wide arcs. Instinct overwhelmed fear and Duo dove for another wall, scrambling to stand again. Solo whirled to face him, blue eyes flashing. He lunged again, low, aiming for his heels, scrapping like the street-rats they were.
But Duo’s fighting had finessed, improved immeasurably since he was a kid on the streets, and that ruthless, take-no-prisoners style of combat Solo had taught him so well was now augmented by skill and practice. He deftly avoided the lunge, somersaulting to a safer part of the room. Still, Solo was huge and towering over him, his movements hastened, strengthened by anger, and Duo barely had time to stand up before Solo was on him again, reaching for him with terrible speed.
He dodged another attempt at a grab, leaping artlessly out of the way of the broad hand straining for his arm, but realized too late it was a feint, a bluff-- Solo’s macabre blade sliced at him too quickly to avoid. He rolled, but heard the slash of it cutting the air above him an instant before his leg exploded in pain. He scrambled out of the way of a second attempt with the blade, feeling the hot rush of blood down his pant leg as he moved. The cut was deep. He could only hope the blood wasn’t arterial.
Solo bore down on him, the room seeming to shrink around his form, and Duo barely had time to stand before he had to leap again out of the way of that horrible weapon, the scrape of metal against concrete over his head telling him he had only barely managed to avoid its attack. He was going to die if he kept this up much longer-- the blinding throb of pain in his leg told him that. Shit, he needed an opening!
He reached a corner of the room, wobbling slightly on his injured leg. Solo lunged for him, and he rolled to the next corner, his breath coming in rough pants. Another lunge, another dodge, blood pounding in his ears and pouring steadily down his leg, coating the floor, making it slick. He rolled, trying to reach the far end of the room, but he wasn’t fast enough, slowed by his injury, and Solo grabbed him and they toppled to the floor.
It had been just like this before, they had struggled with the knife against each other, only the white-hot panic of pure terror driving Duo’s actions as he fought for his life against his friend. He ended up on his back, Solo’s enormous form looming above him, and the blue-eyed boy gave him a final, triumphant smile before raising his bladed arm to give the final, fatal strike.
But even huge as he was, and small as Duo had been, Solo had been gravely sick with the plague-- and was weaker than he looked. That’s right-- it had been mostly bluffing, mostly bravado, and even scrawny little Duo had been able to send him flying with just one well-placed kick to the gut. His arm raised high, ready to kill, Solo had inadvertently left himself wide open, and Duo saw his opportunity. Ignoring the searing pain in his injured leg, he reared back and kicked Solo hard, as hard as he could. And just like his size had belied his frailty before, Solo’s body felt lighter and weaker under his boots than he appeared, and he went tumbling backwards, slamming hard into the dresser at the wall.
There would be no second opportunity. Next time, Solo would not leave himself open. This was it.
Duo took a long, last look at his first true friend. Even after everything, he still loved him.
“Sorry, Solo.”
Then, he drew his gun, aimed it steadily between those deep blue eyes, and fired.
He only had time to see the hole form in the clammy skin of Solo’s forehead before his body began to convulse and seize, acrid smoke pouring obscenely from every orifice. His mangled arm twitched, the bloody end pulsing, throbbing. Duo grimaced, but stared in morbid, horrified fascination.
There came a booming roar of air that seemed to originate from within Solo’s body, and all at once he vaporized, disintegrated instantly as that black smoke filled the room, billowing over and around Duo until he couldn’t see anything but its roiling shadow. The rushing howl of air grew louder, louder, until it deafened him, rang in his ears like a bomb going off. The room began to rumble and quake around him, and he could feel the concrete of the floor cracking and shifting under his feet, sending him to a knee as his injured leg stumbled under the assault. He could only stay there as the hell around him began to crumble and collapse.
Then he felt a warm, strong hand close around his arm, lifting him bodily to his feet. Through the deafening roar all around, he heard a deep, familiar voice shout for him.
“Duo!”
Heero. For a moment, Duo thought his heart might just give out. He had never been so goddamn glad to hear his voice.
“Can you walk?” Heero shouted.
“Yeah!” Duo said, though his bleeding leg screamed otherwise. There was no time to worry about it. Nothing mattered save that Heero was safe.
“Then let’s get the hell out of here!”
And with that, they tore out of the room and into the hallway of what was once again the Persephone Four, the L-2 building gone, gone forever. They were outside the Captain’s Cabin, as if they’d never left it.
The ship was crumbling around them-- no, it was disintegrating. The howling roar was the sound of its layers peeling away into nothingness. The panels of the walls on either side of them appeared to be sinking inwards, the holes forming in their absence growing alarmingly fast.
“We don’t have any time!” Heero said, and they took off down the hallway, heading for the docking bay, passing laboratories quickly vaporizing into black holes and offices that had already dissolved into empty voids. Everything was melting away. Duo’s leg screamed in pain at every step he took, but he pushed it to the back of his mind and focused on his partner, on Heero, as they ran for their lives.
They turned the corner to the mess hall and Duo looked in to see the tables and chairs being pulled outward, stretching impossibly far, sucked into an emptiness that seemed to stretch beyond infinity. It was terrifying and beautiful; he felt strangely drawn toward it, toward that pulling, endless nothing--
Heero tugged him past the door, and his gaze into the abyss was mercifully broken.
They flew around the next corner and there was the docking bay, doors open, and they sprinted to their ship, intact and still humming in hibernation, and they threw themselves inside it, Heero reaching the cockpit first, flying to the computer and booting up the activation sequence, hands gripping the controls so tight it looked like he might rip them right off.
The Persephone Four was screaming and roaring in its death throes, the edges of the wide docking bay already succumbing to their oblivion, walls disintegrating into blackness, exposing the starry expanse of space beyond them.
Duo lifted shaking fingers to the console and entered the universal unlock sequence code for the doors, and, powerless now, the Persephone’s bay doors swung open under their command even as the void claimed them, ate them away.
Heero didn’t even wait for them to finish opening before he was throwing the Icelus forward with the force of all its thrusters, sending them careening out of the Persephone and into the safety of open space.
They were free.
Heero didn’t take a second look behind them as they rushed away from the doomed ship, but Duo turned and watched in strange silent fascination.
The Persephone’s form seemed to twist, curl itself into an impossible spiral, the doors they had come through now only a blurry hole against the backdrop of the mutated ship. Then, from its center, he saw a great void open, a vast nothingness, blacker than the universe itself, and the Persephone collapsed into it, pulled like water through a funnel, and then it vanished entirely, winking out to nothing, leaving only empty space in its wake.
It was gone.
* * * *
Duo turned at the sound of the bunk door sliding open. Heero entered, looking exhausted in every way that counted. Duo gave him a short, weak smile and imagined he must have looked even worse for wear.
“How’s your leg?”
“It’ll survive,” Duo said, running a hand over the thick gauze bandaged tightly around it. “Didn’t do a great job stitching it, though. Let me tell you, I can’t wait until people ask me how I got that scar.”
Heero sat down on the bed, on Duo’s uninjured side. After a moment, he leaned over and slid a hand into one of Duo’s, staring down at their intertwined fingers for a while in silence.
“Did you call in the casualties?” Duo asked softly.
Heero nodded, running a thumb over the back of Duo’s hand.
“Noin have anything to say about it?” He continued, though he knew the answer.
Forty-three people presumed dead, eight of them Preventers, plus one very expensive research space station lost to another dimension, or Hell itself. Noin would certainly have something to say about it.
Heero sighed, and pulled their hands into his lap. “Suffice to say there’s going to be a very thorough and fruitless investigation into the matter.”
They sat silent again for a few minutes before Heero spoke again.
“Duo, I was thinking... when we get back, maybe we should... take some time off. Get away from work for a while, go on a trip, something like that. I think... well, I think we could both use it.”
Duo let out a slow exhale of breath. “Yeah.”
“We’re... okay, right?”
Duo stared at him. Slowly, Heero lifted his eyes, turned to meet his gaze. He had never seen him look so uncertain, so unsure.
Duo’s battered heart twisted in his chest, and he pulled his hand from Heero’s grip to throw his arms around his partner’s neck and send them crashing gently into the mattress.
“Of course,” Duo said, his voice muffled against Heero’s jacket. Heero’s hands came up to sink almost painfully tightly in Duo’s hair, heart beating rapidly under Duo’s ear.
They had fallen into nightmares of their own creation, and while his leg was stitched up, there were scars far deeper and more dangerous laying wide open inside of him, and surely inside Heero, too. Separately, they were far from okay.
But together, they couldn’t be broken.
They lay together like that a long time, just gratefully absorbing the contact. Perhaps he would never really acknowledge just how close he had come to losing this. Maybe he would store that deep down, too, somewhere, and maybe with time it wouldn’t seem quite so frightening to confront. But not now, not while Heero’s heart was beating beneath him like this, still unsteady. It was all still too... close.
He knew they wouldn’t sleep anytime soon, there was no chance of that; he knew that they would make love before they returned to Earth, that they had to. And every inch of him wanted to stay there, wrapped around Heero on the bed, feeling his warm breath fan out against his forehead, feeling him there, feeling safe for the first time in a long time. But there was something he still had to do.
Duo reluctantly rose, catching the hand Heero reached for him with and taking it in one of his own.
“I’ll be right back,” he said softly, then leaned down and took Heero’s mouth in a kiss. “Then I’ll show you just how good we are.”
Heero let him go, and though his expression belied his concern, he didn’t say anything. Duo glanced at him one more time, then slipped out into the hallway, heading down the dim corridor toward the back of the ship, one hand curling into his jacket pocket, remaining there until he arrived at his destination. He came to the end of the hall, where the small, round cylinder chute of the waste disposal bin stood before him.
Here, he pulled out his hand from his pocket and opened it to reveal what had been concealed there: a tiny, gold cross, glittering weakly in the low light.
Duo stared at it for a long time, letting memories flow freely through him at the sight, one last time. He brought it to his lips and placed them to it, a final apology.
Then, before he could change his mind, he pulled open the hatch of the waste bin, slipped the gilded chain inside, and pressed the button that released the contents outside.
The cross shot out into open space, jetting away from the ship with the force of its ejection, glittering under the exterior lights, a little, beautiful thing. A precious thing, but one he had to let go. Duo watched it tumble weightlessly away, turning and turning, until its golden sparkle blended into the gleam of the stars beyond and he could no longer make it out.
He couldn’t apologize for all of the things he had done, couldn’t tell all the people that he wanted to that he was sorry. There were some things that couldn’t be forgiven, things he didn’t deserve forgiveness for. No, he couldn’t be absolved of all the guilt he carried with him.
But he could live with it. He could accept that it would somehow always be a part of him, instead of running away from it. Instead of destroying himself in a futile search for forgiveness.
There were more important things than forgiveness. A more important person.
And, turning from the window, Duo slipped back down the hall to return to him.
The End
So... a pretty happy ending, all things considered. This is because I am a big sap O_o Anyway, thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed it :3