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"Heero's Hands"Written By: Jo Disclaimer: I don’t own Gundam Wing and I
have nothing valuable. I write for the fun of it. Warnings: Hint of shounen-ai…that’s
about it. Oh wait…the usual sap warning applies here. Duo POV.
One-shot. Summary: Duo has been observing Heero and finds some intriguing things. Many many many thanks to the awesome Andie, Lucid
Nightmare, and Ryouga for superb beta-ing! If you find any mistakes,
they are all mine since I can't resist playing with it after I got
back from the betas.
"Heero's Hands"
It was during the war, the first war, that I first discovered Heero’s hands. He was a skinny kid then, able to perch on the windowsill like a cat, staring out into the world outside of ours. The night was cold and the room was warm, the glass fogged up, sweating just slightly. I watched him draw random circles with his index finger and then wipe it all away with a quick sweep of the same hand. And when the glass fogged up again, he drew more circles. Years after that night, after I’ve forgotten about the color of the carpet in that house, forgotten about the dark brown rings in the toilet, I couldn’t forget the circles on the window pane and the way faint moonlight seeped through and illuminated them. They looked like tiny little halos, fleeting fast, never lingering. But most of all, I couldn’t forget the fingers that drew them. Heero’s hands were, and still are a gateway to Heero the person, a secret not many people know. A secret I don’t freely share. Heero’s hands are not large but just the right size for his lean frame. They are not soft but rough and callused from his days of doing Gundam maintenance. The scars on his knuckles are constant reminders of a few good days spent in an OZ cell. The nail on his left thumb has turned black from a recent run-in with a hammer while he was fixing the steps on his front porch. There’s a one-week old, one-inch long cut across his right palm severing love-line and life-line into halves, from a run-in with an unsuspecting mirror sitting at the bottom of the basement stairs. His hands are always clean and never a hint of dirt under his short, trimmed to the flesh nails. He doesn’t know it but I watch him all the time, counting under quiet breath the number of times he washes his hands in a day. I’m quite convinced it is an obsessive-compulsive behavior, having absolutely nothing to do with dirt or that grimy, sticky feeling on your skin after a few hours of finger mambo on the keyboard. The faint scent of antibacterial soap follows him like a misty shadow. Heero’s hands are like an extension of him, his personality and his emotion. They express him in ways his words and facial expression could not. It may be surprising to some that Heero is always relaxed during mission briefings. He habitually sits at the back row in a room full of agents with his arms folded across his chest and his hands resting in the crooks of his elbows. His fingers tap gently on his arm to a tune only he could hear. I could almost see the little gears in his mind calculating and formulating. Whenever Heero runs into Une, or Zechs for that matter, in the hallway, his hands would ball up into fists of tension and distrust. Some times he shoves them deep into his pockets but I could still see the outlines of two tightly clenched fists under the stiff fabric of his uniform. It makes my stomach turn and my chest constrict. Heero moves his hands around a lot when Relena is around. Sweeping nervously over the nearest flat surface, cleaning, straightening things, deliberately moving away from the reach of her hands. Two pairs of hands doing a comical dance of hide and seek. That’s when I shove my hands in my pockets. I am convinced that Heero has a sense of humor no body knows, he finds my jokes…..amusing. He doesn’t laugh out loud, clenching his midsection in exaggerated motion. Instead, he shoves me in the shoulder. Of course I always shove him right back, just in case he was really telling me to shut up. There are other things I noticed about Heero’s hands. They are strong and firm when he’s holding me back from decking a suspect senseless, he’s the good Preventer and I’m the other Preventer. Heero’s hands are playful when he’s folding paper napkins into odd animal shapes while we wait for lunch in the diner across the street from the office. And, Heero’s hands are sensuous when he reaches over and wipes salad dressing off the corner of my mouth. I thought I knew everything about Heero’s hands after all these years of Heero hand-watching, but I realized I really didn’t know much. I never knew how warm Heero’s hands were until
one wrapped itself around mine.
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