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"Lasting Impressions"Written By: Dragonmistress_7 Disclaimer: I don't own the Gundam Wing Boys.
Lasting Impressions Lasting Impression 19 It seemed to be taking a long time. They were bored, or in Duo's case, sick, which made every hour seem to drag on forever. The appearance was that nothing at all was going on. The appearance was deceiving. In the relative silence that accompanied the last leg of their journey, several very subtle things happened on Heero's ship. For one thing, Heero split his time between sitting with Duo, shutting himself up alone in his bunk or the cabin, and holding brief, serious conversations with Wufei that nobody else was privy to. He was short-tempered and anxious, though he struggled to hide it, and the others never knew when a question or comment would cause him to abruptly leave the room, pretending that he had forgotten something he had to do elsewhere. Quatre sat with Duo when Heero wasn't around, but spend the rest of his waking hours with Trowa, speculating about Duo. Sometimes Hilde was in on the conversation, sometimes not. She was mildly interested in learning Duo's story, but she had not seen his eyes glowing like sunshine. It didn't carry the weight with her that it did with them. Heero had kept mum on the subject and grew angry if he was pressed. Duo was unavailable for comment. Attempting to talk to Duo at all had become an exercise in idiocy. Mostly, Hilde talked with Wufei. They had shared a cabin on the shuttle and a hotel room on Ansirii and gotten to be good friends. They amused themselves by arguing about anything they could think of: art, politics, custom, literature, and technology. No subject was safe once one of them took a stand on it. It was the liveliest thing going on and everyone aboard except Duo listened and contributed at one point or anther. Duo, for his part, remained in a haze of illness. He lost all sense of time. When someone brought him food, he attempted to eat it. When it disagreed with his stomach, he went to the bathroom and purged it. When he was too tired to be sick anymore, he crawled back to his bed and fell into an exhausted but restless sleep. Then the cycle began again. In addition to his stomach's determined efforts to wrench itself from his body, Duo began to manifest a fever and his body ached all the time. His head pounded with pain. His mind came and went, though it mostly went. His talk ranged all over the place, rarely making any sort of sense. Only his control never wavered. All of his shipmates were privately of the opinion that he was going to kill himself. It was just a matter of whether it would be accidentally or on purpose. They were three days outside of Ameth when the lies of appearances began to be revealed. From one end of the shuttle to the other, everyone could hear Hilde and Wufei doing battle. This was not their calm argument on the merits of human literature. This was Hilde screaming, calling Wufei names that were so vile she was proud she'd thought of them. He had responded calmly at first, but grown more and more agitated in the face of her continued anger until he finally snapped and suggested she do something anatomically inadvisable. It had escalated from there. In the mean time, Heero had been helping Duo recover
from his stomach's continued bid for freedom. This mostly consisted
of holding Duo's loose, sweat-soaked hair out of the way. The scene
in itself had become all too familiar. The difference came when Duo
stood at the sink, brushing his teeth after his latest failure to
retain his dinner. He finished and turned to thank Heero when the
words died on his lips. Staring directly into Heero's eyes, his own
began to change. Heero watched in panic as Duo's eyes went blue. Then
they turned black. ~ * ~ |
