Title: Vignettes [3/?]- Alone Together
Rating: G
Author: Darkwood

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    Duo walks carefully across the chipped and cracked gravel towards the one silent place, it seems, on the entire party. He had originally been looking for Heero, to see whether or not Relena had managed to fulfill her boast of getting him to lighten up and dance with her. What with it being a victory celebration and all, Duo didn’t doubt that Heero might act a little differently towards her.

    But then he realized he had enough of celebrating victory, and that the loud music and revelry was starting to annoy him. It hadn’t happened so quickly after the last war, most of the parties had wound down before he got sick of the noise and went into seclusion at the scrapyard. This time, however, only two days had passed and already he wanted nothing more than some peace and quiet. As he reaches the blown up old buildings, he glances back at the party and shakes his head, lowering it. He continues into the silent area, remembering when Oz mobile suits had been stored there, and then he stops in his tracks.

    “It figures I’d find you here,” Duo says. Even after so much time, the area hadn’t been fixed. He guesses that with all the to-do about colony improvement, it will soon.

    Heero, seated atop the crumbling brick wall, doesn’t look up at first. “How did you know?” he asks, glancing up.

    Duo involuntarily takes a step back. “Of all the places you would go on L1 during a party, I guess this just seems like the most likely.” He pauses, taking in a breath of the fresher air farther from the party. “I’m kind of sorry I ran into you though.”

    Heero blinks at that, “Why is that?”

    “I wanted to be alone too.”

    The slightly forlorn tone in Duo’s voice makes Heero pause, evaluating the words. Heero half expected Duo to be looking for him, trying to attach himself to Heero, as he sometimes felt the braided American tried to. But something about the tone suggests otherwise. “We should get back, before we’re missed.”

    Duo ignores that statement, “Relena’s looking everywhere for you,” he scuffs his shoe in the dirt. “But you go, I’m going to stay out here for a while.”

    Sending me off to her? Is he feeling all right? The two of them remain still and silent for a moment. “Looks like we have a problem then,” Heero finally announces.

    “Oh?” Duo responds, glancing up with an arched eyebrow at his comrade.

    “Both of us want to be alone, but neither of us is willing to leave.”

    “Well,” Duo replies, looking solemnly down for a moment before flashing Heero one of his trademark grins and continuing, “looks like we get to be alone together then.”

    “Omae o-”

    “Hai, hai, ‘omae o korosu’,” Duo does a very good impression of Heero’s voice, and then snorts, “whatever. I’ll go over here, you stay over there, and we’ll both be silent, ok?”

    “Hn.”

    Duo backs up and hops onto the crumbled wall opposite Heero. For a long moment Heero regards his braided companion, a bit surprised to hear no chatter from him, and contemplates pulling his gun and forcing him to leave. Then he shrugs, glad to have silence, if not complete solitude, once more.

    Time passes in reasonably pleasant silence, until the echoes of upraised voices of the partygoers breaks the tranquility of the deserted area.

    “Heeeeero!”

    The now former Wing Zero pilot winces and glances up to Duo, but the braided Shinigami is nowhere to be seen.

    “Where’s Duo?” Heero says the second he reaches the L2 scrap yard. The chatty American had disappeared the second evening of the victory celebrations, and none of the other pilots had seen him since. Even Heero hadn’t been able to find Duo anywhere on the colonies, and the scrayard Hilde owned was his last stop before going to search on Earth.

    “Heya Hilde, one ah them pilots’s here ta see Duo!” the workman carrying the clipboard calls up to the legal owner of the salvage yard. Duo was the one to buy it, and everyone working there knew it, but nothing could be put under his name, since it was sometimes criminal and might be seized to try and pressure him into the open.

    After a moment of impatient waiting, the young woman herself appears. “Hello Heero, long time no see.”

    “Where’s Duo?” he repeats.

    “You were the last person to see him,” Hilde replies, signing something on the clipboard and sending the workman off about his business.

    “He lives here.”

    Hilde shrugs. “Maybe.”

    “What do you mean by maybe?”

    “When you called him up he put everything he owned in his dufflebag and left. I didn’t see him at the celebration here, and he only called me once, from L1.”

    “Why?”

    Hilde is unsure exactly what Heero means by that question. Why did he call? Why didn’t he come home? Or maybe, why can’t I find him? So she shrugs, and answers the most probable question, “To say goodbye, and to ask me to keep up shop.”

    Frustrated, Heero turns to go.

    “So you don’t know where he is?” she asks his retreating back. “He might not have told me, but even I can guess at it.”

    Heero pauses. “Where?”

    “To be alone,” Hilde replies simply. “Something I’m sure you can understand better than I can.”

    Heero leaves the salvage yard, and Hilde, who stands puzzled, wondering if Heero can decipher the words Duo left her with at the end of the festivities a year before, and the ones he had left unspoken when he called her. If anyone can find him…Heero will.