‘Hey Maxwell…kick it up; we’re an event.’

‘What?’ I said and looked up to see pilots moving out of their hangers all down the line. ‘Shit,’ I murmured.

‘Come on, Duo…we can do better than ‘Trip Across the Mountain’…’ he said and I could hear the grin in his voice.

‘I…I…’ I blinked up at the screen as spacers began to line the strip and I had to swallow the lump in my throat. ‘Got any suggestions, man?’ I almost whispered.

‘Hey…how about ‘Rocket Ride’?’

He could have suggested ‘The Coachman’ and I probably would have agreed. Later I would look back and approve the choice. At that moment, my fingers just moved of their own accord.

‘Nowhere to run…nowhere to hide, nothin’ worth doin’ that I haven’t tried, there ain’t no livin’ on planet-side, come on with me baby on a rocket ride….’

The change in music served to let the scattered pilots know that they had been noticed and they began to wave and applaud. My God damn eyes misted over. My face was so hot I wanted to fan it with my hand. I wished longingly for a stiff drink. Damn.

I jerked when Heero reached across and touched my hand. I turned toward him, tearing my eyes off the view screen and judging by the grin on his face I must have looked damn stupid with my eyes bugged out, my mouth hanging open and my face God only knew what color.

‘Did I fail to mention that you were…missed?’ Dusty chuckled at me.

‘It…doesn’t seem to have come up,’ I muttered and he laughed outright at my obvious consternation.

‘Well, you were kid.’

I felt a little bit like we were running a gauntlet. Heero squeezed my fingers after a minute and when it got him my attention again he murmured softly, ‘You planning on belting down?’

It served to bring me back to reality and I shook myself out of my shock. ‘I suppose that might not be a bad idea.’

He let go of my hand with a chuckle and I settled down to get my head out of my ass. I strapped down and took a deep breath trying to calm scattered nerves; it had been damn touching but that little display had only managed to tip me a little further off my balance. I licked dry lips as we made the turn out to the field. At least we were away from the hangers. I couldn’t believe the butterflies I had in my stomach; I had to keep wiping sweaty palms on my thighs.

It seemed to come to Heero all at once that this was my first time at the yoke since the accident and his voice came to me low and full of concern, ‘Duo; are you all right? Do you need me to…’

I flashed him a smile that I hoped wasn’t as wan as it felt. ‘I’m fine, love,’ I whispered back and began to bring my ship to life.

Dusty maneuvered us with practiced ease onto the slingshot launch track and I initiated the latching process.

‘See ya on the return, Maxwell!’ Dusty yelled as he hauled his truck out of the way at top speed. We were running a little behind schedule.

‘Apologize to your wife, you asshole!’ I hollered back. We never said goodbye; it was part of the ritual.

Then it was just me and my Demon. I let the music play; the hell with Relena. I let it fill me and wash over me and I found that while my stomach was turning somersaults, my hands and my head knew what they were doing. I synched with the tower and we commenced the countdown. I brought the engines on-line and checked the temperature gauges for any fluctuations.

‘Ok, Demon-girl…’ I murmured, ‘you remember how this is done, right?’

The tower called the final all clear on the minute mark and I scanned through the seal report one last time, getting green lights all around. I felt the thrum as the drive chain locked in at thirty seconds.

‘Please put your drink trays in the docked position and refrain from leaving your seats; ladies and gentlemen we are about to leave the atmosphere,’ I said without really hearing myself.

The chain engaged at fifteen seconds and we were moving. There was a tiny sound from behind me but I couldn’t really spare the attention to feel bad for Chezarina, I was too busy wishing I could wipe the sweat off the palms of my hands again. Slingshot launches are…damn fast. We hit the end of the vertical ramp and I hit the thrusters. There was the familiar roar of the engines and crush of the invisible hand of God on my chest, Tom Smith was still belting out ‘Rocket Ride; ‘…I want a bubble helmet matting down my hair, the ground giving way to the open air, the joy and wonder as I head out there and I know I can have it if I only dare…’

The yoke vibrated like a thing alive in my hands and I held her tight as we fought our way clear of those clinging bonds of gravity. ‘Come on, Demon-girl…the stars are callin’,’ I whispered to my lady, as much to calm my own hammering heart as hers. I had not taken into consideration the strain on still-weak muscles that the gee forces of launch would have; I had a horrified minute when I thought I was going to have to have Heero take over from the co-pilot’s seat, then we were out and free, the flash glare gone from the view screens and I cut the thrusters back. The pressure eased from my chest and I heard an audible sigh of relief behind me. ‘Everybody all right back there?’ I called out and Chezarina actually chuckled lightly.

‘I believe that we survived, Mr. Maxwell.’ Her voice was fairly steady and I spared a moment to turn and grin at her.

‘Make you a deal,’ I told her. ‘You call me Duo instead of Mr. Maxwell and I won’t call you Ma’am.’

She managed a laugh. ‘A…all right; it’s a deal.’

‘Can you turn that incessant song off now?’ Relena interjected.

‘Sure thing, Miss Peacecraft.’ I grinned at her as well and reached to kill the music. The sudden quiet hit me like a blow and I sighed; it really was going to be a long fucking week.

I had the course programmed in already but had to call it up and initiate it, I busied myself with that while my passengers unbelted and began to move around. ‘There’re drinks in the galley if anyone would like anything,’ I called absently as my hands and most of my attention worked over my boards. As twisted up as my gut was over this flight…I had still missed this.

I let the programming and the minor adjustments consume me. The familiar activities took me over and for a small space I almost forgot that this flight was any different than any other of my thousands of flights. When I became aware again some time later, I glanced across at the co-pilots chair and only found Fuzzy-butt staring back at me. For the space of a heartbeat, fear welled up in my chest that I had dreamed the whole damn thing…that it was just me and Fuzzy-butt and my ghosts aboard my Demon again.

‘Hey,’ Heero’s voice came softly from behind me, letting me know he was there and he walked over to stand beside me when he saw he had my attention. ‘How are you doing, love?’ he asked softly.

I snorted up at him, feeling suddenly how tense my shoulders were, how tremulous my muscles felt. ‘I launched a space shuttle, Heero…I didn’t have brain surgery.’

He chuckled lightly but still reached to gently brush his fingers through my bangs. ‘You had me a little scared,’ he admitted gently. ‘You seemed to have trouble…finding your focus.’

I let my head fall back against the headrest and my eyes fall shut. ‘Well…maybe a little bit.’

‘Are you done here?’ he asked.

‘Yep,’ I confirmed without opening my eyes. ‘On course and on our way. Auto-pilot takes care of things for the next couple of days.’

I opened my eyes when I felt his hands take mine and tug gently. I let him pull me to my feet and into his arms. ‘You feel…shaky,’ he frowned at me.

‘Shaky.’ I grinned. ‘Yeah…that kind of sums it up.’

‘Duo love,’ he whispered against my hair, trying to keep this private I think, ‘I’m sorry…I was so wrapped up in the whys and the wherefores that I didn’t think about this being…your first time in space since…’ He trailed off.

I straightened away from him a little bit and smiled. ‘What’s with the word mincing? I thought we talked about this speaking plainly thing?’

He snorted and pulled me closer. ‘How are you doing mentally?’ Then he quirked a grin, ‘And the plain speaking works both ways.’

He surprised a laugh from me and I shook my head. ‘Shaky…describes it pretty well. A little off balance, a little nervous. It’s makin’ me…reflect a little bit…but I’m all right.’

His hands slid up and down my back. ‘You’re tense.’

I chuckled. ‘That’s about half launch jitters and half…Relena-itis.’

He pulled me close again and I just let myself lean on his strength for a minute. Let his arms dispel the last of the heart wrenching terror that he hadn’t been real…that I had dreamed him. Dreamed us.

‘I’m here for you,’ he breathed next to my ear and I shivered.

‘That means…everything,’ I murmured back.

We shared a final tight hug, then separated.

‘Where are they?’ I asked with a sardonic grin, which he returned with a roll of his eyes.

‘In the galley.’ He sighed and we moved to head that way. ‘What made you think this was a good idea, again?’

I snorted and took a playful swing at him. ‘I believe you were the one who insisted.’

‘That’s not how I remember it,’ he teased and we were close enough to the galley that all I could do was glare at him.

Relena and Chezarina were sitting at the table in the galley with bulbs of something in their hands. Relena was frowning and her companion was just looking uncomfortable.

‘Ladies!’ I beamed as we came into the room and I moved to fetch my own bulb. I briefly considered a soda but decided that a protein drink would probably be a better choice. ‘How are we doing?’

Chezarina fairly grinned back at me. ‘Oh, Mr.…. Duo…’ she hesitated over the name with a faint flush, ‘I can’t thank you enough for that patch! It made all the difference in the world! That’s the first launch I’ve been through where I didn’t think I was going to throw up!’

Relena looked at her sharply. ‘What patch, Chezarina?’ she asked suspiciously.

‘Just an anti-nausea patch,’ I informed her.

Chezarina seemed to have missed the look, busy pushing her sleeve up to look at the thing. ‘When should I take it off?’ she asked me.

‘They’re twelve hour patches,’ I told her, ‘but if you normally don’t have any trouble after launch, you can take it off whenever you want.’

Relena was frowning at me and I kept my innocent smile firmly in place. ‘Mr. Maxwell,’ she began rather coldly, ‘you are not a Doctor, I don’t know that…’

Heero cut her off rather smoothly before I had a chance to even think about it. ‘Relena, they’re standard issue on any flight. It’s an over-the-counter medication…they’re safe for use on children.’

She took it, because it came from him but I could see it rankled. It was killing her that he kept taking my side. I thought about that for a moment and realized that it wasn’t going to do my cause any good if Relena started feeling picked on.

‘I’m sorry, Miss Peacecraft,’ I murmured contritely. ‘I probably should have mentioned it to you first but they take several minutes to take affect…and we were a little short on time.’

Chezarina seemed to notice for the first time that something was going on here and she looked first at me and then at Relena. ‘Miss Relena, please don’t be angry with him…it was really rather sweet that he noticed my discomfort with everything else he had to take care of.’

I saw the annoyed look on Relena’s face falter and realized that this woman had some pull on the young Queen’s emotions. She couldn’t quite make herself look me in the eye but she quietly said, ‘I…understand. Thank you, Mr. Maxwell, for taking care of it.’

I gave her a mega-watt grin. ‘No problem. You ladies need anything at all…just let me know.’

I decided that I would make myself scarce for a little bit; that was the closest thing to a civil sentence that I had gotten out of the woman in…well, ever. I decided not to push my luck and excused myself. Behind me I heard Relena murmur softly, ‘Chezarina, why didn’t you ever tell me that space travel bothered you?’ She actually sounded a little hurt.

The older woman spoke warmly. ‘Don’t worry about it, Miss Relena…it isn’t that bad.’

I shook my head; what was it about that girl that won her such loyalty? She certainly didn’t inspire anything in me outside of irritation.

I passed most of the morning keeping busy with mundane things that really didn’t need to be done, mostly just avoiding Relena until she had a change to settle in a little bit. I was hoping that she wouldn’t be able to maintain that level of pissed for the whole five days. I wasn’t about to bet money on it…but I was hoping. I spent most of my time either in the cockpit or in my cabin, giving Heero a chance to maybe put them at ease. I was standing in the cockpit holding Fuzzy-butt, trying to figure out what to do with him now that there was somebody who’s place was going to be in the co-pilot’s seat, when Chezarina came looking for me.

‘Mr. Maxwell?’ she called from the doorway and I turned and grinned at her maliciously.

‘Yes…Ma’am?’

She laughed lightly. ‘I’m sorry…Duo. The ‘mister’ is hard to lose when you’re in my line of work.’

I plopped Fuzzy-butt back in his seat. ‘Well; in my line of work, you’re not a ‘mister’ until you’re too old to pilot and you have to take a dirt-side job.’

‘I came to tell you that lunch is ready,’ she told me then and I grinned appreciatively; I hadn’t been able to stomach breakfast and I was getting a little hungry.

‘Great!’ I smiled broadly. ‘Lead on!’

We stepped out into the corridor and she started to head back for the galley but then stopped. I caught her looking at the mural on the wall again.

‘Duo…’ she said after a moments hesitation, ‘why is this little girl crying? It gets to me every time I see it.’

I stopped and let my eye travel down the line of my dead. ‘That’s Becca,’ I told her softly. ‘She was one of the few of us orphans who knew what her given name was. She even knew her birthday…we all thought that was amazing.’ I gave Becca a melancholy smile. ‘She remembered her parents, so it was harder for her. She cried a lot.’ I shrugged. ‘I guess that was just how I remembered her.’

Her eyes were wide and she was trying to decide whether to look at me or at Becca. ‘Oh Heavens…that’s so sad. What…what happened to her?’

‘She died in the plague,’ I told her simply and tried to get her to move on toward the galley. But she wasn’t quite done with the questions.

‘You mean that Duo Maxwell isn’t your given name?’ She blinked up at me and I swear for a second I thought she was going to cry.

I flashed her a grin. ‘Nope. They called me Dodger before I was Duo and before that, for the longest time, I thought my name was ‘Heyyou’.’

I made it breezy and I made it funny and she laughed when I did, though it was fairly weak.

‘Come along, Milady,’ I urged, ‘I’m starving!’

She took the arm I offered and when we turned toward the galley, I saw Heero standing in the doorway with an unreadable expression on his face.

It was such a totally alien thing to walk into my galley…with my blue sky and green grass…and smell real food. The table was set with the real dishes and everything. I looked up at Heero and grinned. ‘Hey, oh grand chef…if you can cook, how come I get stuck doing it all the time?’

He chuckled with me as I handed Chezarina into a seat. ‘I had some help,’ he said and I looked to try to catch which one of the two of them he was looking at.

‘Heero,’ I reprimanded lightly, ‘these ladies are our guests…you can’t make them cook and clean.’

Chezarina laughed out loud and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she’d done most of the cooking. Relena was being very subdued and I wondered what they had spent the morning talking about.

The meal started out easily enough, we were able to do the ‘pass this’, ‘pass that’ thing for a bit and then there was the complimenting the cook part. It really was very good, a simple casserole with potatoes and diced chicken.

Then something seemed to pass between Heero and Chezarina and she turned to me with an odd smile. ‘So…all the portraits are of real people?’

I flushed and thought I was going to choke on my lunch. ‘Uhmmm…Yeah,’ I confirmed when I could swallow.

‘Who are the Priest and the Nun?’ she asked and I swear to God the look on her face was just a little too innocent to be real.

‘Father Maxwell and Sister Helen,’ I breathed and tried to catch Heero’s eye but he was studiously eyeing his plate. ‘They ran the orphanage where I…spent a couple of years.’ I stirred my potatoes around and just prayed that she didn’t ask what happened to them, I really didn’t want to get into it.

‘Maxwell?’ she asked brightly. ‘Is that where you took your name from?’

‘Y…yes,’ I confirmed, my stomach starting to knot as I waited for her to get around to asking the next question. I didn’t know that I could sit here and talk about the massacre.

‘He was a darn tall man,’ she commented and it was so not the comment I had been expecting that I laughed.

‘Well…I suspect he might not have been as tall as that,’ I grinned at her, ‘but when we were kids he seemed like a giant to us!’

‘He has a kindly face,’ she remarked and I suddenly realized she and Heero were trying to turn them in to real people for Relena.

‘He was damn scary looking when we got in trouble.’ I laughed and decided maybe I could play their game. ‘I’m afraid I had a penchant for getting into fights that usually ended with me polishing the brass railings.’ I didn’t mention that I was usually in those fights trying to defend the little ones from the whole wide world. Trying to fill Solo’s shoes.

Chezarina laughed with a twinkle in her eye. ‘I imagine they were the shiniest railings on L2.’

She won a true laugh from me and I looked up to finally find Heero’s eyes, he gave me a small, almost imperceptible nod of encouragement. ‘I imagine they were,’ I chuckled. ‘What Father didn’t understand was that I didn’t really mind polishing them because Sister Helen liked to see them all shiny and bright.’ My smile turned melancholy despite myself. ‘We all adored her…we’d do anything to make her happy.’ I snickered, ‘It was kind of bizarre when you got right down to it; we dreaded ‘the look’ we’d get from Father Maxwell…and the lecture, of course. But then after we were done with the punishment, we got the reward of hugs from Sister Helen.’ I shook my head in remembrance and continued to push potatoes around.

‘What…what happened to them?’ The question was like a blow to the gut. More so, because I had let my guard down, trusting that Heero had warned Chezarina not to ask it. I couldn’t remember that I had told Heero the story but somehow with the other things that I had spilled to him in my fever dream, I had little doubt that he knew at least the gist of it. They had apparently not taken Relena into account when they had hatched this little plot to un-bastardize me. I saw Heero’s face go still and he opened his mouth but I stopped him with a raised hand.

‘It’s all right, Heero,’ I told him softly but I could tell from the look in his eyes that he could see in my face that it wasn’t. Well, it wasn’t her fault; they had started this. No one had told Relena that the question wasn’t askable.

I looked up at her and only saw guarded curiosity on her face. ‘There were…skirmishes all over L2 at the time.’ I took a sip from my juice bulb because my throat was suddenly dry. ‘Rebels broke into the church and it was…destroyed when the Federation came after them. They…were killed during the fighting.’

I saw a flicker of what seemed to be true sympathy in her eyes and I was moved to reach and pat her hand. She flinched and I drew back without touching; I had forgotten my scars.

‘I’m…sorry,’ she murmured and now she was pushing potatoes around on her plate. This wasn’t going at all as planned, I suspected.

Chezarina looked just freaking miserable and Heero had a rather stricken expression on his face. I really couldn’t read Relena. Something was clenching tight in my chest.

‘You know…’ I said after an uncomfortable moment, ‘Fuzzy-butt is a decent enough co-pilot but you have to watch him like a hawk or he veers off course. He’s been looking for Ursa Major for the last year.’ It was ridiculously lame. On a better day I would have handled things just fine but after the last dozen hours, it was just a little too much. Too much raw edged emotion. Too many memories, some old and some not so damn old. I excused myself and headed for the cockpit to ‘relieve’ Fuzzy-butt. I trailed my hand down the wall as I went, letting my fingers brush over the images of my ghosts. As I reached the cockpit door and passed Solo, I heard the echo of his voice, ‘Get yer shit together rat-boy.’

‘I’m tryin’ rat-king,’ I muttered and went in to the relative privacy of the cockpit to do just that.

‘Minding your manners, Fuzzy-butt?’ I murmured and picked the stupid thing up to hug to my chest. Damn, that had totally blindsided me. I should have realized that all these paintings and pictures were going to generate questions. I guess I had just become so focused on the incriminating new one in the cargo bay that I had kind of forgotten about all the others. I rubbed my cheek against the well-worn, familiar fur and had to sigh. Fuzzy-butt and I were old comfort buddies. He wasn’t a much better conversationalist than ‘Demon’ was but he listened pretty damn good.

There were suddenly warm hands on my shoulders and Heero’s tender voice near my ear. ‘I believe that’s my job he’s doing, there.’

He plucked the thing out of my arms and tossed it back in its seat, turning me around and tugging me into a fierce embrace. ‘I’m so sorry love…it never dawned on us that Relena would actually enter the conversation.’

I muffled my laugh against his shoulder. ‘Well now; doesn’t that just say a whole hell of a lot about our present situation?’

He wrapped me close, molding us together until it felt like he was all that was holding me up. I closed my eyes and let myself cling. ‘You hug way better than Fuzzy ever did,’ I murmured and pulled a chuckle out of him.

‘I’m so very sorry,’ he told me for the second time. ‘I knew they were dead but I didn’t know it was…like that.’

I chuckled but there was no humor in it. ‘It’s worse than that, love,’ I whispered and felt the familiar pain welling up. ‘It was my fault.’

He didn’t speak, just stroked a hand over my hair and held me close.

‘One of these days,’ I sighed, ‘when we have some time alone…maybe I’ll get drunk enough to tell you about it.’

Oh God, Duo,’ he said then, his voice thick, ‘I’m so damn bad at this.’

I squeezed him hard where my arms were wrapped around his waist. ‘You are not,’ I told him firmly. ‘Holding good. Touching good.’ I lifted my head from his shoulder to smile at him. ‘And stop apologizing.’

‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he said softly and I knew what a splinter that was under his skin.

I stopped him with a gentle kiss. ‘Now is not the time for this, love.’

He sighed but nodded his agreement.

I slid reluctantly from his embrace. ‘I should probably go speak with Chezarina. She looked…a little upset.’

Heero smiled ruefully. ‘I really feel sorry for the poor woman; I’ve had a couple of opportunities to talk with her. She really likes you and I think she would like to turn Relena across her knee. She really feels caught in the middle.’

I had to stifle a laugh at the mental picture that comment dredged up and I related to him a little of what Paragon had said to me in the cargo bay.

He snorted and shook his head. ‘No pressure here.’ Then he glanced at his watch and sighed. ‘Do you mind if I use the radio? I need to check with Wufei about a few things I left hanging.’

I mock glared at him. ‘Heero, you know damn well you don’t have to ask my permission to use the stupid radio.’ I turned to leave the cockpit and glanced back at the last minute to see him settling into the pilot’s seat, ‘And tell Wufei I said hi.’

He grinned over his shoulder at me.

I found Chezarina in the galley cleaning up the dishes and I cursed myself under my breath.

‘Hey, Milady,’ I grinned as I came into the room, ‘you are a guest aboard my ship; it’s bad enough you did the cooking…I won’t have you doing the dishes as well.’

She flashed me a wan smile. ‘I don’t mind, it gives me something to do,’ she murmured, looking at me as though she wanted to say something else.

I moved in and bodily shifted her away from the sanitizer and ushered her to sit at the table. ‘I am not such a cad that I would kidnap you and then use you as forced labor!’ I intoned loftily and continued with the cleanup.

‘Duo…’ she ventured after a moment of watching me work, ‘I am so sorry…We were only…’

I cut her off with a grin. ‘I figured out what you two connivers were up to; you have nothing to apologize for.’

‘We should have talked to you first, so that it wasn’t such a surprise.’ She frowned, thinking over the conversation again, I’m sure.

‘No.’ I sighed, just wishing we didn’t have to talk about this any more. ‘If I’d had time to think about what I was going to say…it probably would have come out sounding rehearsed and stilted. I’m the one who should be apologizing; I’m not normally so touchy about it. It’s just been a kind of rough couple of days…’

I put the last of the plates away in the cabinet, locking them into their restraints; she was quiet until I was done. I turned and leaned against the counter to face her, giving her a chance to get whatever else she had on her mind out in the open. Might as well get this the hell over with.

‘Rough?’ she asked gently.

I sighed and scrubbed a hand over tired eyes. ‘Look, Chezarina…I’m not really sure how in the hell I got us all into this. I never intended to do that stupid interview.’ I had no doubt that the woman knew all the juicy details to this whole sordid affair. ‘Heero just kept pushing me…before I knew what my big mouth was doing, I had agreed under the condition that Relena said it was ok to publish pictures of that thrice-damned mural.’ I dropped my hand from my face and stared down at my scarred palms for a minute. ‘But…when Relena came onboard and saw the thing…she attacked it. Said that I had made the children up…’ I stopped and looked up at her. ‘I just got so damn mad…’

She stood up and came to lay a hand on my arm, ‘I’m so sorry, Duo.’

I snorted softly and flashed her the ghost of a grin. ‘Have I ever mentioned that my big mouth tends to get me hip deep more often than not?’

She chuckled. ‘I’ll bet it gets you out of trouble as often as it gets you in,’ she observed dryly and I had to shake my head.

‘She truly is not normally like this,’ she told me softly then. ‘She is a kind and compassionate woman. Her father sheltered her too much…there are just so many things that she’s never known.’

‘I know that.’ I sighed, looking back down at my hands. ‘Heero cares for her. I trust his judgment…if he believes in her, then I believe in her.’ I grinned at her, trying to lighten the mood. ‘She just sure as hell doesn’t make it easy.’

She chuckled, mostly I think, because I wanted her to and very deliberately reached out to take one of my hands. One of my poor scarred hands. I looked up into her eyes, startled. She opened her mouth to speak but then there was a sound in the corridor that told us that we were no longer alone and she only smiled.

‘I think I’m going to go back to our cabin,’ she said, a little too cheerfully. ‘I packed some books and I think I would just like to sit quietly for awhile and read.’

‘That sounds damn nice right about now,’ I agreed and she gave my hand a last pat before turning and heading toward the door.

I stood for a second and listened to the sound of…nothing. I really wished I could play my music. When I was out in space on a job, the music never stopped. Day or night, there was always something playing. I used it to adjust my mood, I used it to bolster myself when the memories came hunting, I used it to cover the silence.

Maybe I would just go to my cabin for awhile as well; I still had the works of Kipling to go through after all.

I don’t know what made me glance to the right when I walked out that door. I really don’t. Later, I would not be able to say if I heard something or just what it was that made my eyes flick in that direction. What I saw made my blood turn to ice and I was running hard that way even as my brain engaged and I was yelling, ‘Relena! Don’t touch that!’

I saw her glance over her shoulder, the look on her face hardened and I knew in an instant that she thought I was just being pissy. She turned back to the controls to the cargo bay and reached defiantly for the button to open the door, punching at it savagely. I got to her just two seconds too damn late. All I could do was grab hold of her and hold on for dear life.

I don’t pressurize the cargo bay if I’m not carrying cargo.

Relena yelped indignantly and struggled against my arm, almost making me miss my lunge for the zero gravity handhold over our heads. Then the alarms started to blare and we were suddenly in a wind tunnel as the door slid open. She screamed and all of a sudden I wasn’t so damn repellent as the tornado winds ripped us from our feet.

I hadn’t gotten a good hold of the metal rung that was the only thing keeping us from being swept into the icy, airless cargo bay, the best I had managed was to wedge my fist in it. I threw back my head and bellowed as best I could over the sound of the alarms and the rush of the wind, ‘Zarina! Stay in your cabin!’

My hold on Relena was precarious and I was probably bruising the hell out of her ribs trying to maintain my grip. She got a good solid handful of my shirt and hung on for dear life, eyes squeezed shut and trying to scream in the thin air.

‘Heero!’ I shouted for all I was worth, ‘the cargo door overrides! The cargo…’ And the door was sliding shut. We dropped like puppets with the strings cut and I felt something pop in my wrist as we fell to the floor, and my arm twisted in the trap of the handgrip. I hissed in pain but it was lost in the sound of the alarms and Relena’s hysterical weeping.

We were sprawled across the deck, tangled together like a couple of discarded rag dolls. She was sobbing, I was panting, the bulkhead under us was ice cold and I was willing to bet that it would take the ship’s systems hours to adjust for the loss of air. The alarms had cut out when the door had slid home and my suddenly pounding head blessed the quiet for a change.

‘Duo!’ I heard the thunder of Heero’s running steps through the bulkhead under me. ‘Duo, what the hell happened?’

Relena was trying to lever herself off me and I reached with my good hand to steady her by an elbow. ‘Relena, are you all right?’ I managed but she only recoiled from my touch and almost fell on her ass beside me. I withdrew my hand and sighed. ‘Zarina! Are you all right?’ I called, even as Heero was throwing himself down beside me on the floor.

‘Can I come out now?’ I heard her voice, slightly muffled with distance.

‘Yes, please.’ I called again. ‘Rel…Miss Peacecraft needs you.’

‘Duo?’ Heero’s voice was damn near shaking, ‘Are you ok?’

‘I’m ok...’ I muttered, just trying to concentrate on getting my heartbeat back under control. ‘Is Relena hurt?’

He never even looked at her. ‘No.’ His fingers were stroking over my head, checking to see if I’d hit it. ‘You’re in pain. What’s wrong?’

Chezarina came down the corridor on the run then, gathering Relena up like a small child. ‘It’s all right now, my little poppet,’ she whispered gently and I swear to God Relena only started to cry harder. ‘Are you hurt?’

Relena shook her head and words tried to come out around the broken sobbing, ‘I didn’t know…I just wanted…’

‘What the hell did you think the damn red warning light was?’ Heero snapped at her and I saw her cringe. Guess he figured out what had happened. Chezarina looked up at Heero, shock clear on her face.

‘Heero!’ I warned and his eyes came back to find me, completely dismissing them. I saw the fire of his fierce protectiveness and it made me shiver. ‘It was my fault.’ I told him. ‘She’s never been aboard anything but the commercial shuttles before. I should have gone over the safety rules with her.’

His anger seemed to deflate a little and his eyes were searching me almost desperately. ‘You’re hurt,’ he reiterated. I caught Chezarina’s eye and nodded for her to take Relena back to their cabin. She drew her away and I waited until they were around the corner before letting myself relax back onto the floor with a sigh, cradling my throbbing arm to my chest. ‘I…think I broke my wrist,’ I finally told him and he hissed through clenched teeth.

‘Damn it.’

‘It has been something of a sucky day,’ I told him with a smile but he would have nothing to do with my joking. Before I quite knew what he was doing, he had me caught up in his arms, lifting me as though I were little more than the rag doll I had compared us too earlier.

‘Heero…’ I scolded, ‘I fail to see what a broken wrist has to do with walking.’

‘Just shut up,’ he growled and when I let myself, I could feel the trembling in his arms, could see the thunder of his pulse in his throat.

‘It’s all right, love,’ I told him gently. ‘Just calm down…it’s all over.’

He didn’t speak again until he had me in our cabin and stretched out on the bed. ‘Let me see,’ he told me and took my arm in his hands, running his fingers over the wrist until I winced and bit back a cry.

‘That…’ I hissed, ‘would be the place.’

He went to get the med-kit and when he came back, he seemed a little more under control. I kept my comments to myself while he worked; just let him fuss over me until he seemed to settle some.

‘I think it might be fractured,’ he told me after a bit. ‘We’re going to have to have it x-rayed as soon as we get to the colony.’

I watched him working over it, his hands moving deftly and it took me back to the war years with a start. We locked eyes for a moment, ‘Uhmmm…Nice field dressing,’ I mumbled and knew that he was in that same place.

‘Heero,’ I ventured when he had it wrapped and was setting a cold pack gently around it, ‘we need to go check on Relena.’

‘I will…go apologize when I am done with you,’ he murmured, not meeting my eyes.

‘I really am at fault, Heero,’ I told him firmly. ‘I should have gone over things with them…I let the fact that she doesn’t like me keep me from doing my damn job.’

He sighed, putting the finishing touches on my binding. ‘I should have handled it,’ he said. ‘I know how the two of you feel about each other.’ He managed to dredge up a rather sad little smile for my benefit. ‘You did task me with the care and feeding of our passengers, after all.’

I chuckled for him and raised my good arm. ‘I wouldn’t object overly much if you felt the need to, you know, hold me for a minute.’

I thought he would give me whiplash pulling me up and into his arms; the icepack fell away, forgotten for the moment.

‘Damn it, Duo,’ he murmured against my hair, ‘I could just shake her! What in the hell was she thinking?’

‘I imagine she was just going to look at that stupid painting again,’ I told him gently. ‘She really didn’t realize, Heero. She came as close to getting killed as I did.’

That might not have been the best thing to say right at that moment, because his arms tightened around me almost convulsively, until I found breath something of a struggle. I awkwardly stroked his hair with my good hand and let him ride through the fear.

‘I love you so much,’ he whispered against the top of my head when he could again and I gently kissed the side of his neck, the only thing his embrace would let me reach.

‘I’m all right, love. Everything is going to be ok,’ I whispered against his shoulder, suddenly just very damn tired.

He seemed to feel some change in me, maybe he felt the shakiness that was coming over me because he eased me out of his embrace and lay me back down on the bed.

‘Heero…we have to go check on our passengers,’ I told him sternly, even though all I really wanted in that moment was to lie down and go to sleep for a little while.

He was rummaging in the med-kit again and came up with the pain pills. I could tell there was just no arguing with him. I swear half his hovering was generated by the earlier fiasco over lunch; he was still feeling so guilty about setting me up to have the Maxwell church thing thrown in my face that it was about to kill him. I dutifully swallowed a couple of the pills, mostly just to make him feel better.

‘I will go check on them,’ he told me firmly. ‘You are going to rest for a bit.’

‘Heero…’ I complained, starting to get frustrated, ‘it’s a fractured wrist…not a sucking chest wound!’

He frowned down at me and moved to lay his hand on my forehead. ‘You’ve been pushing yourself too hard,’ he told me. ‘You’re still recovering your strength…this trip wasn’t supposed to be this stressful.’

I rolled my eyes and opened my mouth to ask him just how in the hell he thought a trip that involved locking me and the personable Miss Peacecraft in the same spaceship was going to not be stressful, when there came a quiet, ‘Excuse us?’ from the door to the cabin.

We both looked up, startled, and there were Chezarina and Relena in the doorway. Relena seemed to have gotten her shit together, though her face was a little puffy and red. Chezarina seemed totally nonplussed; as though she dealt with crap like this everyday. And who knew, maybe things were more exciting in the Sanc household than one would have thought.

‘Ladies?’ I greeted them and tried to lever myself up on one elbow. Unfortunately, my left side had the sprained/fractured/whateverthehell wrist and I couldn’t manage it. So I had to endure laying there flat on my back with the three of them hovering over them.

I caught Relena looking at her shoes and discreetly tucked my hands under the covers.

‘Relen…’ I grimaced, I was going to have to stop thinking of her as Relena to keep myself from making that slip, ‘Uhmm…Miss Peacecraft; are you all right?’

She nodded but still seemed to have trouble making herself look up at either one of us, Chezarina seemed to prod at her mentally somehow and she stepped a bit further into the room. ‘I…I am very sorry. I only meant to go look at the painting again.’ Her eyes flicked toward Chezarina for a moment. ‘Everyone else seems to see something in it that…’ Her voice faded before she got much further with that thought. ‘I honestly didn’t realize the danger.’ She turned her gaze on Heero then and I realized how much his yelling at her must have stung but he was still in full guardian mode and she got little more than a glare from him. I jabbed him lightly with my knee but only got the glare turned on me.

‘I’m the one who should be apologizing,’ I told her, since he didn’t seem about to unbend enough right now to do it. ‘I live with these things everyday and I forget that the whole world is not full of spacers. I should have gone over things with the both of you.’

‘Are you all right, Duo?’ Chezarina asked then and I quirked her a reassuring grin.

‘Depends on whether you ask me or Heero!’ I chuckled and got a glare from my significant other.

‘He may have broken his wrist,’ Heero said sullenly, as though I’d done it on purpose somehow.

‘Well it beat the hell out of the alternative!’ I laughed at him and suddenly realized that I was feeling almost no pain and felt oddly relaxed.

Chezarina looked a little shocked. ‘You broke your arm?’ she asked, eyes wide, ‘What are we going to do?’

I snickered. ‘Heero already took care of it,’ I told her, pulling that arm out from under the blanket to show her his handy-work. ‘The five of us got fairly good at patching each other up during the war.’ My voice sounded funny and I looked at Heero to find him smiling affectionately down at me. ‘You asshole.’ I blurted. ‘That wasn’t a God damn pain pill…what the hell did you give me?’

He reached to brush my hair from my face. ‘One of them was a pain pill; the second one was a sedative.’

‘I’m gonna kick your ass,’ I muttered.

‘But not for a couple of hours.’ And his soft smile was the last thing I was aware of.

I woke with my wrist throbbing dully, my mouth tasting like cotton and with an overwhelming desire to knock Heero and Relena’s heads together.

The first thing I did was drag my ass out of bed and go to find my old gloves. My left hand was pretty much swathed in bindings already but the least I could do was cover the right one as well. My scars were obviously more than Relena could handle. No point in making the poor girl any more uncomfortable than she already was. I made a quick trip to the head to use the facilities and splash a little water on my face, then went to see what the rest of the world had been up to while I was…sedated.

I had to repress a shiver as I made my way through the silent corridors. I really wished I dared turn my music on; the damn silence was eating at me like a cancer. I really hated it.

I went to the cockpit first and checked my course and heading, and found the message light blinking. I hit the play button and was greeted with Wufei’s highly agitated voice. ‘Yuy! You damn well better get back to me and tell me what the hell is going on out there!’ There was some incoherent Chinese cursing then and I had to chuckle. Heero had, apparently, been in the middle of his call when the alarms had gone off.

I trudged off toward the galley, about the only place left where he might be holed up, grinning from ear to ear. He was indeed there, working on dinner with Chezarina. Relena was nowhere in sight and I assumed she was in her cabin. Maybe Heero sedated her, too.

I cleared my throat as I came into the room and they both looked up in surprise. Heero frowned slightly. ‘What are you doing awake?’

‘I had to pee.’ I laughed at his look of consternation. ‘And a good thing I did too…or were you planning on letting Wufei swing in the breeze forever?’

His eyes went wide and he had the good grace to look somewhat horrified. ‘Shit,’ he muttered and ran for the cockpit.

‘Tell him I said hello!’ I called after him with an evil snicker and moved toward the fridge to get myself a soda. Best stuff in the world to cut the crap out of your throat. And the caffeine would help me fight off the last of the damn drugs. I took a swig and went on around the table to lean over Chezarina.

‘So, Mom;’ I teased, ‘what’s for dinner?’

She blushed and looked up at me with a grin, ‘Meatloaf and fried potatoes,’ she told me with a twinkle in her eye and I beamed at her.

‘How’d you know I like meatloaf?’

‘You said you did when you were talking to that nice man back at the shuttle field.’ She looked terribly pleased with herself.

I grunted and reached to steal a slice of the raw potatoes that they had sitting in a bowl of water on the counter. She chuckled and I think she would have smacked at my hand but she remembered my wrist at the last minute and didn’t. Her smile faded a little.

‘Please tell me Heero didn’t make you peel all these?’ I asked, eyeing the huge bowl.

‘Of course not!’ she scolded. ‘He peeled the potatoes while I mixed up the meatloaf.’

‘That’s good,’ I grinned. ‘I was starting to think he was getting lazy.’

She shooed me away from the counter so I perched myself on the corner of the galley table and propped my feet on the nearest chair, idly swinging it too and fro. ‘So…’I ventured after a minute, ‘where’s…Miss Peacecraft?’

She gave me a funny little frown. ‘Why do you keep calling her that? You’re even on a first name basis with me for crying out loud.’

I shrugged and took a swallow of soda. ‘The last time it came up, she made it clear that we were not on first name terms and since then…she hasn’t offered otherwise.’ I raised an eyebrow and she finally remembered the original question.

‘She’s…resting.’

I chuckled. ‘Heero didn’t drug her too, did he?’

She shook her head regretfully. ‘I’m afraid he didn’t have to. She was…very upset.’

I sighed and sat the soda bulb down long enough to rub at gritty feeling eyes. ‘After dinner we are going to go over some things, I promise.’

Heero came back in then, looking suspiciously like he had just been royally chewed out and I grinned at him. ‘Oh, I hope he ripped you a new one.’

He flushed darkly and tried to glare at me but it failed miserably since we both knew he’d screwed up.

Chezarina looked from one of us to the other with a confused expression. ‘What is going on?’ she finally asked.

‘He…’ I jerked my thumb at Heero and grinned evilly, ‘was on the radio with a friend of ours when all hell broke loose and he left him sit for…’ I glanced at my watch, ‘the last three hours thinking that we’d all died a horrible death out here.’

‘I apologized.’ Heero glowered at me.

‘Well that’s a fine thing!’ I laughed at him, ‘You don’t call Wufei back and he gets an apology! You slip me drugs without my knowledge and I don’t get squat!’

He finally unbent a little and quirked a small grin at me. ‘Maybe that’s because I’m not sorry.’

I turned toward Chezarina in mock irritation. ‘Do you see what I have to put up with?’

She was grinning at us rather openly and finally chuckled. ‘Poor baby; wish I had to put up with someone like him.’

That left me blushing rather furiously and somewhat at a loss for words. Chezarina took pity on me and called Heero over to drain the potatoes. I shifted to a chair at the other end of the table out of the way and just sat watching them work with my wrist cradled against my chest. I propped my feet up in the next chair over and settled my soda in my lap, listening to their quiet conversation and the totally unfamiliar but oddly comforting sounds of dinner cooking. The drugs were far from out of my system and the bit of caffeine I’d ingested wasn’t really doing the job of counteracting them. It didn’t take long before I found my eyes trying to slide shut and damned if I didn’t doze off sitting at the table.

I woke to Heero’s gentle touch and found him squatting beside me smiling tenderly. ‘Dinner’s ready.’

‘Wha?’ I muttered thickly, struggling against the siren call of sleep, blinking owlishly at him and feeling like I was only about half there.

He leaned in and kissed me softly. ‘Wake up, Sleeping Beauty,’ he chuckled.

‘Where’s Chezarina?’ I murmured, feeling the blood rise to my face.

He kissed me lightly again, completely unrepentant and then leaned back to pull my arm down from where it had lain across my chest while I slept. ‘She went to wake Relena.’

I winced as he checked my wrist. ‘I’m almost positive it’s fractured,’ I told him with a sigh.

‘It wouldn’t take much,’ he agreed. ‘The doctors said it would be months before your bone density came back to normal.’

Something seemed to settle over my shoulders of a sudden and I looked up at him, feeling utterly unable to muster up even the ghost of a grin. ‘God Heero…I’m so tired of being so…scattered.’

He reached to cup my face, looking me in the eyes with a bright intensity. ‘I know, love,’ he told me gently, ‘but you’re getting better…you have to see that. Just remember those early days when you couldn’t even walk. It’s getting better.’

I gave him a somewhat drawn smile and laid my good hand over his. ‘I know…I guess I’m just tired.’

His eyes flicked toward my hand and his face darkened in a frown. ‘Duo…why in the hell are you wearing…’

I cut him off. ‘It’s common courtesy,’ I told him as firmly as I could, ‘I used to wear them for Quatre’s sake…I can wear them for Relena’s.’

‘Damn it,’ He frowned even harder, though I wouldn’t have thought it was possible. ‘There is nothing wrong with…’

I sighed in exasperation. ‘Heero, don’t be an idiot. The scars obviously bother her…that’s all that matters.’ I made an effort to steady my voice. ‘She almost busted her ass in the corridor just trying to keep from touching them.’

‘I won’t have her making you feel…’ I could see that protective streak rearing its head again and I resisted the urge to reach out and smack him.

‘What? Disfigured?’ I snapped before I could quite stop myself. ‘Damn it, Heero…I am. My hands are…’ I glanced down at them, though I couldn’t see the scars on either one at the moment, ‘not…ugly, I guess…not since the surgeries. But they sure as hell aren’t normal! I don’t care…they’re my hands and I’ve lived with them for so damn long I barely remember what they were like before. But God damn, can you please face the fact that I make some people uncomfortable? It’s nobody’s fault…it’s just a fact.’

I thought he was going to choke to death on whatever the hell it was that was struggling to come out of his mouth but then his eyes told me that Chezarina was back with her charge. Without turning, I put the grin into my voice and said, ‘There you are! Come on…it’s going to get cold, let’s eat!’

Heero stood and went to help Chezarina dish things up. Relena sat down but she only sat staring at her plate. I stifled a heavy sigh and made the damn leap; I really was just getting too tired for this shit.

‘Miss Peacecraft…’ I ventured into the uncomfortable silence; ‘I can’t feasibly pressurize the cargo bay while we’re in transit…but if you are still interested when we get to L2 I’ll make sure to open it up.’

I didn’t think she would answer me for the longest moment but then I got a very quiet, ‘Thank you…I would appreciate it.’

Well, damn. Ok…almost civil. Should I pursue a conversation or quit while I was ahead? I could see her gnawing at something that she couldn’t quite seem to get spit out but couldn’t seem to completely forget either.

Supper came to the table then and I decided to just leave things go for a bit. We did the standard compliment the cook thing and it really was very good. I had an inkling why Dusty didn’t like his wife’s meatloaf by the time the meal was over. I’d never had fried potatoes before and found them oddly addictive; I had to force myself to stop eating before I made a total pig of myself.

‘God, ‘Zarina;’ I beamed at her at last, shoving my plate away, ‘it’s a good thing you aren’t going to be onboard very long or I’d end up so fat I wouldn’t be able to get in my damn vacuum suit!’

She laughed easily with me though I thought I saw Relena stiffen a little bit and wondered idly what in the hell I had said now.

I insisted when dinner was over that Heero and I clean up the mess and, with a little prompting, they took themselves off to their cabin. Heero did most of the cleanup, of course, though I did what I could one handed. I found I was able to dry the dishes if I laid them down on the counter and wiped one side, then turned them over to dry the other side. When Heero finished with the sanitizer, he dried his hands and informed me he was going to shower before bed and left me to finish putting things away.

I snugged the last of the plates down and latched the cabinet a few minutes after he left. I probably shouldn’t have, that close to sleep cycle, but I grabbed another soda out of the fridge and sat down at the table to sip at it.

It still kind of gave me a shiver up the spine when I thought about how close Relena and I had come. The cargo bay is not open to empty space; we would not have been sucked out of the ship. We would, however, have impacted rather heavily on the far wall. I might very well have survived that with my experience in zero-g maneuvering but that would have left me in a vast, airless room as cold as the depths of space. Suffocation, flash-frozen, or splattered all over the wall…take your pick. Yuck.

My wrist was starting to throb again and I raised it across my chest to get it above heart level. This was going to suck; though Heero hadn’t said it out loud, the bone density thing was going to mean I would heal slower than normal. Yep…an absolutely perfect start to this hair-brained trip.

‘Does it…hurt…a lot?’

I just about jumped out of my skin. I’d been so lost in thought I hadn’t heard her coming. I looked up to find Relena in the doorway, leaning against the doorjamb as though afraid to come all the way into the galley.

‘It’s…not so bad,’ I reassured her and subdued the urge to blurt out that if she were looking for Heero, he wasn’t around right now.

‘I never thanked you…for saving me,’ she said, not taking her eyes off some point behind me.

‘You don’t need to,’ I told her and found myself fiddling uncomfortably with my soda.

‘You could have stayed in the galley and not gotten hurt,’ she stated and it came out a little…odd. ‘You didn’t have to come after me.’

‘Yes,’ I told her evenly, ‘I did.’

She didn’t say anything right away but her eyes left the middle-distance and she really looked at me for a minute. But just for a minute and then she was looking passed me again.

‘I was…just a toddler when the Sanc kingdom fell and my real parents were killed.’ She hesitated but I didn’t speak. ‘They burned the manor…I don’t remember anything else, not even my parents…but I remember that. I remember seeing…a man…and the burns. I don’t even know who he was.’

I’m sure my eyes were wide as I listened, absolutely appalled and shocked as hell that she was telling me this. Her voice was as calm as anything I have ever heard but there was something in those eyes that wouldn’t look right at me.

‘I’m…so sorry,’ I breathed, inadequate words at best but all I could manage.

‘I am sorry that I react the way I do…to your scars. I just wanted to tell you that it wasn’t you.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘it doesn’t matter.’

She nodded and turned her back but then hesitated, ‘Thank you for…the gloves,’ she said softly. ‘Good night…Duo.’

‘Good night, Relena,’ I called after her and then she was gone.

Well fuck. She was making it real damn hard to hate her guts.

I finished the soda and made a final walk-through of my ship, making sure everything was battened down and nothing left lying out. I verified our course, checked for messages and took my tired ass off to my cabin. I touched Solo’s shoulder as I went by, ‘Night, king-rat.’ I murmured and let my mind hear his quiet reply.

I hesitated in the corridor, looking on toward Relena and Chezarina’s doorway, feeling like I should let them know we were going to bed or something. I was just standing in the doorway of our cabin gnawing on my lip, not sure what I should do when Heero wandered out of the shower. He smiled when he saw me and came toward me, toweling his hair dry.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked, seeming amused.

‘Think they’ll be all right?’ I couldn’t help but whisper. ‘Think we should check on them?’

He chuckled as he stepped up to me. ‘Good night ladies!’ he called down the corridor and Chezarina called cheerfully back. Then he took my arm and led me into the cabin, palming the door shut behind us.

I stripped to my shorts, then there was an awkward moment while we sorted out who slept where. ‘Heero…I’m the pilot, I need to be on the outside where I can get up in a hurry if I have to.’ He had slept on the outside when I had been so sick and when we had been docked. It hadn’t bothered me then but out here…it made me uncomfortable. He finally acquiesced and crawled in, sliding to the back edge and holding the blanket back for me with a soft smile. There was another strange moment while we tried to arrange ourselves; I tried lying with my head on his shoulder but then couldn’t find anyplace to put my arm that didn’t put pressure on my wrist. I ended up on my left side so that the wrist could lie flat and then Heero came to spoon against my back.

We were quiet for a bit but I couldn’t get Relena’s little confession out of my head and found myself shifting this way and that, trying to force sleep to come.

Heero leaned in after enduring my fidgeting for a while and nuzzled my shoulder. ‘What’s wrong, love?’

So I ended up telling him about the strange conversation I’d had in the galley with the Queen of the world.

‘I never realized,’ he murmured softly when I was done.

‘I suppose it makes sense,’ I told him thoughtfully. ‘I’ve seen the old news reports on the fall of the Sanc kingdom…I just wouldn’t have thought she was old enough to remember anything at all.’

He snorted mirthlessly. ‘I think the two of us should certainly understand how the traumatic things are the ones eternally etched in memory.’

I couldn’t answer that, could only lie and repress a shiver. He pulled me closer against him. I knew he wanted to ask me about the massacre but I also knew he wouldn’t push it until I was ready. I was a long damn way from ready.

He stroked his hand up and down my arm and I could feel the soft warmth of his breath against my back as he spoke, ‘I swore to myself…when I took this ship across the system to find you…that I would never sit by while you were in pain again.’

I couldn’t see him, couldn’t read his expression but there was something in his voice that made me almost hold my breath in anticipation. ‘I…don’t understand,’ I whispered when he didn’t immediately continue.

His fingers slid down my arm and he caught my hand in his, his thumb stroking gently over my scars. I repressed a shiver at the odd, tingly almost-not-there feel of it.

‘On that mission…with Jensen and the suit factory…’ I squeezed his fingers to tell him there was no reason to elaborate more; I knew which mission he was talking about, ‘I…I used that listening device even…even when you weren’t…’

I blinked at that implication. ‘You spied on me?’ I murmured, not sure whether to feel amused, pissed or horrified. I found my mind trying to race back through the years; trying to dredge up conversations, trying to remember where that very listening device had been at just what times.

He pressed his forehead against my back. ‘Yeah…I did. I…I’m sorry. It was too much of a temptation, to be able to hear you. To hear your voice when you weren’t being so…defensive. To check on you and make sure you were all right…It was wrong and I’m sorry.’

I wanted to laugh at him, to have carried the guilt all these years for such a trivial thing amongst all the other things. But it had obviously been eating at him and I couldn’t bring myself to make light of it. ‘So that night, after I was jumped…when you came out to check my status?’

‘I was listening and could hear you tossing and turning…I couldn’t stand thinking that you were in pain and hiding it. You hide so many things. I had to know…’ His voice was very soft and almost timid. I knew he feared my getting angry with him.

‘I knew I wasn’t making that God damn much noise!’ I said with just a touch of triumph.

‘No,’ he agreed, ‘you were very quiet…so very damn quiet while you…cried yourself to sleep.’

I felt my face flame and was glad he couldn’t see it.

‘I ached to come out and comfort you,’ he whispered against my shoulder blade, ‘but…I couldn’t…I didn’t dare.’

The remembered pain of that night came rushing back to me, only slightly dispelled by the reality of his arms around me; his presence in my bed. ‘Oh Heero…you don’t know how bad I wanted you to.’

I felt his fingers tremble where they held mine. ‘I know…I’m so sorry. I couldn’t…I just couldn’t.’

‘Why?’ I blurted, asking the thing that had plagued me through all the years since the war.

‘I didn’t dare,’ he told me, his voice tight. ‘I wanted to…I was so twisted up. I almost…I would have done anything to protect you.’ I felt the tension in his arm, could feel his fingers clutching at mine as though he were afraid I might pull away. ‘I couldn’t even think straight when you were in the damn room. I would have compromised the whole stupid mission to keep you from having to do what you did. None of the decisions I made on that whole assignment were based on logic. I was dealing from my gut and making stupid choices…wanting to protect you, trying not to let myself…’

His voice was rising and I twisted in his arms. ‘Hush, love,’ I whispered, ‘it’s long over…’ I carefully wrapped my arms around him and he buried his face against me taking the reassurance that I wasn’t angry.

‘And when that son of a bitch was touching you…’ His voice twisted with remembered anger. ‘I wanted to kill him…I wanted to break cover and run over there and blow the bastard’s head off. But you wouldn’t give the signal…you wouldn’t call for help…’

‘I was all right,’ I told him, not wanting to have to think about Jensen after all this time. Not on top of everything else. ‘It all worked out.’

‘No thanks to me,’ he said; voice pained.

‘Heero…where is this coming from?’ I asked softly. ‘What’s making you think about this after all these years?’

He was quiet for a minute, mulling it over I guess and then he said, ‘I just can’t ever seem to protect you…I want to keep you safe. I don’t want to see you hurting…but somehow I can’t…’

‘I’m a big boy, Heero,’ I told him gently, ‘I don’t always need protecting. I’m not Relena, I can take care of myself…’

The mural came to me then…the one in the cargo bay; Heero in his world protecting Relena and me on the outside in mine, protecting the children.

Maybe he felt me go still as I thought it through but he was quiet, waiting for me to speak again. ‘I’m not…Relena,’ I repeated softly and stared off into the darkness over his head, ‘I don’t need you to protect me.’

He pulled back a little so that he could look at me in the dim, night-cycle light. I could see the hurt in his eyes and suddenly realized how that must of sounded; like I didn’t need him…maybe didn’t want him.

‘I need…other things from you,’ I assured him. ‘I need your love…your support…I need someone I can count on…I need…’

‘A partner?’ he said and his tone was wistful.

‘Yes,’ I smiled. ‘Exactly. A partner.’

‘That’s all I’ve ever wanted.’ He sighed and bent to kiss me.

His touch always goes through me like an electric shock, even after all this time. His kisses are warm and gentle, his lips soft, his breath sweet. His fingers stroked along my cheek, asking for more and I willingly gave it, letting my lips part and allowing him to deepen the kiss. It was slow and loving, a mutual exploration, a meeting of something more than just our mouths. I think, perhaps, something more might have happened that night if I hadn’t forgotten myself, lost in his touch, and reached for him with my bad hand.

Pain lanced up my arm and I pulled away with a gasp. ‘Damn!’ I growled, curling my arm almost automatically in against my chest.

He stroked his fingers across my forehead until the frown of pain eased some and then helped me turn back over where we could settle the damn arm out flat on the bed.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked softly and I had to chuckle at him.

‘Fine,’ I told him. ‘I just keep forgetting the damn thing…’

It was his turn to chuckle lightly. ‘I don’t see how you could forget it; as wrapped up as it is.

‘I was distracted,’ I said with a petulant air and he laughed at me.

‘Go to sleep, love,’ he murmured then and it didn’t take me near as long as I thought it would.

I slept somewhat fitfully, the wrist waking me more than once with stabs of pain whenever I shifted it in my sleep. I dreamed of fire.

I woke early and just stayed in the warmth of our bed, not really ready to face another day of this damn trip. Heero was a comforting presence at my back, it was still such a shock sometimes that he was here with me; that we were…together. Whatever the hell that meant. I had to smile to myself thinking about the unlikelihood of us ending up like this. Six months ago I would have laughed until I ruptured something if anybody would have suggested it to me.

The smile faded as I remembered the day before. Remembered Heero rushing down that corridor to my side after Relena had almost turned the two of us into flash-frozen corpses. He’d barely given Relena a second glance. Even though she had been sitting there sobbing hysterically, something that used to send him into macho, protective over-drive. It had been me he was concerned with. Me that he had come running to. I was the one he had hovered over and taken care of. He had put me first.

And there it was, the last piece of the puzzle of the mural. Even though Heero had been telling me for the last four months that he loved me…I had still expected to come in second or even third to the rest of his life. Relena…his job…his partner…and then somewhere after that was where I assumed I ranked. Maybe…maybe that wasn’t so?

That stupid mural has a lot of layers to it. It wasn’t all about Heero and me; it was about people like Relena and people like us street rats. It was about having and not having. It was about life and death. It was about what I am on my own and what Heero is on his. What are we together? I’m not sure yet.

‘You’re thinking so hard I can hear the gears going around,’ a sleepy voice told me.

I turned to look over my shoulder at him and had to smile at the tousled, drowsy beauty of him ‘You really do love me,’ I whispered, feeling almost awed, as that fact seemed to filter down farther than it ever had before, to some deep recess that had been refusing to believe.

He blinked at me and something swept through his eyes just before he pushed himself up to look down at me intently, his expression serious as a funeral. ‘Yes. I do…more than anything.’

You put me first, I wanted to tell him but knew just how insecure that would have sounded and so didn’t.

‘I know you’ve been hurt…’ he ventured into the silence I had left, ‘but I want you to be able to count on me. I’m not going anywhere.’

A chill breath of air swept out of my past and ran across my skin, making me shiver. His arm around my waist drew tight and he whispered low against my ear. ‘I’m here.’

God…I’d talked about that whole…abandonment thing. I thought about the line of my dead out in the corridor and in my head I saw Heero’s portrait added to the end of the row. The shiver turned into something harder and I was suddenly wracked with a shudder I couldn’t seem to get stopped. He turned me in his arms and pulled me close, tucking my head under his chin and just holding on tight. ‘The war is over, love. We made it through…nothing is going to happen to me. I’m here to stay.’

I clung to him as best I could with my one good hand and fought against suddenly roiling emotions. ‘I’m scared…’ I blurted before I even knew I was going to and saw for the first time just what it was that had kept him at arms length from me. What had kept us from moving any farther forward in this strange relationship we were in.

It was all me…my own fears of losing yet another person who meant something to me. These last few years, out here between the stars with nothing but a battered stuffed bear and a ship full of ghosts…I’d been hiding. Hiding from the fear of remembered pain. Hiding from my inability to open up and believe that I was worth loving. Afraid that I didn’t have the strength to learn to trust again. Something inside my head unwound a little bit…and it hurt; like old scar tissue giving way.

I clutched him to me, forgetting the wrist, forgetting everything, ‘Heero…Oh God…Heero, it hurts …’

He seemed to understand I wasn’t talking physical pain, because he ignored my arm and held me tight, cradled in his arms. ‘Everything’s going to be all right,’ he told me in that soft comforting tone he can have, ‘I’m here…I’m right here with you…forever.’

I listened to the steady beat of his heart and found my own heart settling and evening out. The shivering eased and I was finally able to relax the death grip I had on him. ‘I’m…so messed up,’ I whispered to him.

‘No more than the rest of us,’ he soothed, his voice calm and his tone affectionate. He ghosted kisses across my brow and along my cheekbone until I turned to catch his lips with mine. ‘Don’t doubt me, my love,’ he said when the kiss broke, ‘you are the most important thing in the universe to me. Don’t ever doubt that.’

It was both the easiest and the hardest thing to believe in, lying there in my star painted night sky. He was leaning in for another kiss, his eyes heavy-lidded and glimmering intensely in the dim light when the emergency signal alarm began to chime.

I was out of the bunk, through the door and half way to the cockpit before Heero had a chance to do more than curse.

Incoming emergency signal. My heart was thudding in my ears and I wondered idly just who in the hell had put the voodoo curse on this trip even as I was throwing myself into the pilot’s seat and pulling up the message, killing the chime. Standard, canned mayday message, ship’s id number was attached but I didn’t immediately recognize it; I’m better with names. I pulled the coordinates and patched them into a vector map, displaying it on the main screen. It was very near our position.

I vaguely heard panicky, questioning voices behind me and then Heero’s reassuring reply. They were coming into the cockpit even as I was breaking out of autopilot and changing our course.

‘What is it, Duo?’ Heero asked me when he saw what I was doing. I grunted and glanced up at him, surprised that he hadn’t recognized the tone of the alarm. Then I shook my head and had to grin at my own foolishness…he wasn’t a spacer any more than the rest of them were. Just because he could pilot and knew how to handle himself in space did not mean that he knew the standards of those in the trade.

I turned to address the room in general as they were all going to need to know. ‘There’s a ship in distress out here, I’m changing course to intercept. We have…’ I checked our course and speed, ‘probably ten minutes before we get there. Everybody should be in the cockpit and belted down before we arrive.’

Heero was looking at my consoles, reading the message and looking over my maps but Relena was gaping at me like a carp.

‘Don’t…don’t they have…services for this kind of thing?’ she asked, her eyes wide. ‘Shouldn’t we be contacting someone…?’

I chuckled. ‘This isn’t like breaking down on the freeway,’ I grinned at her. ‘You can’t just call a tow truck.’

She wanted to say more but Chezarina took her by the arm and drew her back toward their cabin; they were still in their nightgowns. I glanced at Heero and saw that he had slipped on a pair of pants before following me. Making me the only one in the room who was only in their damned underwear.

‘Mind making sure everything’s latched down while I pull some clothes on?’ I asked and he gave me a quick nod. Our course was locked in and I had something like eight minutes left. We dashed off on our separate missions.

I only took the time to pee and throw on a ships jumpsuit, the lightweight, stretchy clothes designed to go on under a vacuum suit. It’s what I wore most of the time aboard ship, had only been dressing in a more ‘traditional’ manner to try to help put Relena at ease. Then I hastened my ass back to the cockpit and took my station. ‘Ok, Demon-girl,’ I muttered, ‘let’s see what we’ve got here.’

I pulled up the recorded message again and detached the ship’s id and ran it against the registry database; I about shit myself when the search finished and flashed the ship’s registered name on my screen; ‘The Ragged Gypsy’.

‘Damn it!’ I growled and pulled the vector map up to check my distance to the site of whatever the hell was going on with a pair of my best friends. I judged I was within sensor range and replaced the map on the main screen with an exterior view of space in front of me. I jacked the magnification a couple of times and was finally able to make out the Gypsy floating in space in front of us. ‘Tell me something I don’t know here, Demon,’ I told my lady and let my hands fly over the keyboard in front of me. I pulled up heat and radiation readings, looking for hot spots and hull breaches even as I keyed on the comm.

‘Gypsy this is Demon,’ I called into the open mike, ‘You guys awake over there?’

I was only vaguely aware of the sound of movement behind me and the murmur of hushed voices; I trusted Heero to get our passengers belted down. There was nothing from the ship I was rapidly closing on.

‘Hayden? Toria? Come on you guys; rise and shine!’ I called again and could tell my voice was a little bit high. I felt Heero moving to the co-pilot’s seat and he said something as he sat down but I didn’t catch it.

‘Ragged Gypsy this is Maxwell’s Demon…’ I hollered, ‘Do you fucking read me?’

The scan report in front of me chose that moment to divulge to me the problem that was plaguing that ship out there. Engine core overload. ‘Son of a bitch!’ I growled and looked back at the main screen.

‘Duo,’ Heero was warning me off and I glanced up at him briefly to see that he had mirrored my screen on his console.

‘What is going on?’ Relena demanded and I ignored her too.

‘Hayden?’ I called again, for lack of a better plan, slowing my ship as I did, ‘Toria? Can you…’

‘Duo!’ exploded at me over my speakers and I almost laughed out loud. They were still alive.

‘What the hell is going on over there?’ I demanded.

‘We had a breach!’ came Hayden’s familiar voice. ‘We’re trapped in mid-ship and the engines are going critical!’

‘Critical?’ I heard Relena saying. ‘What does that mean?’

‘What’s your status?’ I called to Hayden.

‘We’re both unhurt…but we can’t get to our suits.’ came Toria’s voice, sounding a little calmer than her husband.

‘Heero?’ Relena demanded behind me, ‘what does that mean?’

‘The ships engines are going to critical mass and are about to explode,’ Heero told her and he, at least, was making an effort to keep his voice down.

‘Duo,’ Toria was saying, ‘can you bring your ship in and mate with ours?’

They had an extendable pressure tube and a docking ring on their ship that we could ‘mate’ as it was called, between our two hatches. I opened my mouth to reply and there was a horrified gasp behind me.

‘You can’t go any closer if their ship is going to explode!’

‘Miss Relena,’ Chezarina whispered, ‘please…they know what they’re doing. They wouldn’t put us in any danger.’

‘Duo?’ Toria’s voice was rising, ‘Hurry up, buddy-boy…we’re running out of time!’

I could see Heero refreshing the scan reading on the co-pilot’s station. ‘There isn’t much time…’ he warned me.

‘Heero?’ Relena said again from her jump seat and I could hear panic in her voice.

I was just about ready to howl with frustration. ‘Shut the fuck up!’ I shouted and reached and hit my music. The sudden blare of ‘Battle Mountain Breakdown’ washed away all the bloody noise.