***

    The whole five minutes it takes to get home disappear in the wake of that kiss. Wow, my hand keeps straying up to my lips. That was… unexpected, welcome, but unexpected.

    So I get home and Jimmie’s sitting in the window watching me. We got Jimmie when I was in the second grade, and I’ve seen him sit there on blizzard days and watch for hours while I was waiting for the bus, this forlorn look in his mind like ‘now I have to put up with your mother?’ or something along those lines. Just seeing his lopsided grin makes me smile even more. I open the door and don’t even bother to announce my presence. His scrambling feet tell everyone I’ve arrived.

    “Dinner’s going to be a little later tonight, your father called in and had to stay a little longer at the office.” That’s no big surprise. They figure since it’s the weekend they can pound his nose to the grindstone so that stuff can be sent off while he’s not there. Either that or Mark’s right and he’s got a mistress we just haven’t found out about.

    Could be Cecilia, when we hosted the office mixer she seemed to be giving dad ye olde predatory leer… but I wasn’t supposed to see any of that, just that they invited Trish and so me to come and chit chat with everybody while the caterers were setting up dinner.

    So Mark’s got a point, but I still think it’s because his boss is the biggest ass in the entire world. But what can I say, it makes him happy to do his job, even if the punching bag they got me gets almost as much use from him as it does from me, and it keeps the house and stuff around us, etc. I suppose mom does quite a bit of it herself… but then mom’s the art person a lot more. She’s gotten to be a better cook since Dad’s never here… but she is most at home with a tool belt and scaffolding.

    It’s great that she’s making good money, I just wish I didn’t have this image of the one time the catwalk she was on had been put together badly and she was hanging by her own muscle for a few minutes stuck in the back of my mind.

    Jimmie’s all over me, so I set the books in my bag and put them down to play with him a bit.

    “Jeremy when you’ve got a minute will you take this up to your brother?” mom’s voice is melodic and I can hear some of her music going in the kitchen. She’s cooking all right.

    “What is it?” I ask as I enter that area of the house.

    “His medication.”

    “Mom, what happened?”

    “The doctors think it might be something more serious than just the flu. We’ve got to take Jimmie to the vet tomorrow and see if he’s carrying it or picked it up or whatever.”

    I look down at Jimmie and notice how thin he’s gotten, shabby looking.

    “I’ll do it tomorrow, ok?”

    “Oh? Doesn’t Trish have a meet?”

    “I’ll tell her about it tonight. I don’t want either you or dad to have to worry about it. He’s really my dog anyway, and if I’d been paying more attention…”

    Now my mom’s never been a very demonstrative person towards the two of us kids. She’s usually rather reserved and dislikes being touched, so the fact that she opens her arms for me to hug her is weird, but comforting at the same time.

    “Oh, Jeremy, honey, don’t think that way. Jimmie is almost nine years old and a majority outside dog, he could’ve picked this up anywhere and the doctors think his case is unrelated to Mark’s. Don’t blame yourself.”

    I lean into the hug, pull in the scent of her hair, the feel of her shoulder under my chin, I’m a giant next to her, dwarf her by at least half a foot, and the safety brought on by her arms, which, annoyingly, are still strong enough to knock me down and I outweigh and mass her. It must be all that karate I refused to take… mom is a careful person… she’s got a baseball bat under her chair in the car and I bet she knows how to use a gun, though I’d never ask her how or why.

    “Thanks mom.”

    I take the medicine, and with Jimmie on my heels I grab my bag and head upstairs.

    I open Mark’s door carefully, he’s lying there looking pretty pale and very weak. He smiles as I enter as though he couldn’t sleep or something, almost like he was expecting me. Again, probably thanks to Jimmie.

    “Hey kid, how’re you feeling?”

    “Tired. Mom said she went to get my medicine, is that it?”

    I nod, opening the bottle. “Two of these and lots of water… you’ve got water, don’t you?”

    He holds up a glass. “That and the seventy percent inside,” he says with a smile.

    “You’ll be fine, kid,” I say as he takes the pills.

    That’s another great thing about mom. She knows how far to trust us. With dad everything’s gotta be one way, his, and woe be to a child to try and tell him he’s wrong. I’ll still never quite understand how the two of them got together. Mom works in theater and dad’s a businessman… never quite sure what exactly he does, but he does some pretty important stuff.

    There’s almost this missing link in there that I’d rather not know about. Hell, they keep each other happy, at the very least, so I’m not going to complain if he acts less like a father than a rival to me.

    “You try to get some sleep now, I’m going to go to my room.”

    “Calling your girlfriend again?”

    “No, she’s helping Sara or somebody study tonight. I’ve got some homework to do.”

    “If the Eve Wars stuff is good, you’ll tell me a story about it, won’t you?”

    “Sure thing kid, now get some rest.”

    I close his door carefully behind me and set the medicine on the table outside of his room, making a little note on the calendar about the time and dosage, helps mom keep track I’ve found, and head down the hall with Jimmie dutifully on my heels. I chose the larger room, with less closet space. The windows make up for all that though. Mom’s not much of a landscape artist, but she’s got the coolest looking garden I can see out of the south windows, and she planted some shrubs… or trees, I can’t tell yet, on the west side of the house that look really cool.

    It’s hell trying to arrange furniture, but it works. I yank the covers up and throw my bag on the bed, Jimmie follows and curls around it protectively, and then boot up my laptop.

    Most guys my age want a car so they can… well I respect Trish too much, and I don’t like to drive so I figure why waste the time and effort? I asked for a laptop for my sixteenth, and I got it. I’ve got a tower model that runs my scanner and my printer and a bunch of other neat hardware dish, but the laptop…

    Ah, the laptop is my baby.

    Next to Trish of course.

    Nothing new for me on-line though, so I lie down on the bed next to Jimmie and my bag and then remember something. “Jimmie, hup!”

    He scrambles to his feet and hops onto the floor, knowing by my voice what I want. He grabs his leash and pulls it over to me, bringing the chair across the room with it, and I pull it the rest of the way, a little stereo on it.

    “Good dog!” I say and his eyes seem to light up. His whole rear starts wagging and I tell him to get back up on the bed and scratch his ears while I hit the play button on the stereo and start digging into my bag for the two autobiographies.

    I open Ninmu Kanryo and see that the first half of it is mission log like. Never one to be discouraged I start reading.

    It’s referential?

    I get through Kanryo pretty swiftly. It’s a concise, compact book, although it really gives you an in depth perspective on the demons in Heero’s soul from both the war years and, in the epilogue and eventually the afterword, the so-called ‘Perfect Soldier’s life.

    That’s part of the reason I never looked for his biography. I expected pristine history and preprogramming. And I suppose it would be that way, except that he and Duo banter within the pages of script on certain probably pointless things that give you a better sense of who he really was. I look over at the clock.

    “Dinner’s ready, Jeremy!”

    It’s almost nine.

    I stop to check in on Mark and he’s sound asleep. Good, maybe he’ll get some of his strength back. I head downstairs, Jimmie’s on my heels, but even he’s walking quietly. We’re so alike it’s funny.

    I get downstairs and mom’s sitting at the counter with design sheets spread out in front of her.

    “Mom, where’s dad?”

    “He just left the office,” her voice is tight, like she’s trying to convince herself of something she doesn’t really believe. “Cecilia’s car broke down so he helped her out.”

    I swear to god if he is not covered in axle grease or something when he gets home I will murder him. He’s never been this late before. You don’t do that to mom, no matter what the reason.

    There’s this eerie silence in the kitchen and so I pick up the phone and dial Trish. It’s a little early, but I’ll tell her what’s going on and she’ll understand.

    “Hey, Trish?”

    “Jeremy? What’s wrong?”

    “I’m going to have dinner with mom now, so I’m going to have to call you a little later than expected, ok?”

    “You need me to come over?”

    “No, I’ll be fine, but my dad’s not home yet.”

    “Oh, ok,” her voice sounds just as shocked as I feel. “Let me know how everything goes.”

    “I will.”

    “All right then, talk to you later Jeremy.”

    I hang up the phone and sit down across the counter from mom. She’s got her head in her hands with three different pieces of colored plastic before her. She looks really tired. “Mom?”

    “Yes, Jeremy?”

    “What are you working on?”

***

    Four hours later I’m back in my room. Mom’s acting like a smoker on the patio, pacing with her arms wrapped around herself wearing her clothes at one in the morning, I hung up with Trish just now, and I can just now hear the noise of dad getting out of his car. Mom either doesn’t hear it, which I doubt, or she is ignoring it.

    I go down the hallway quietly, Jimmie having fallen asleep an hour ago at my feet. He wakes and I motion him to stay. I stand at the top of the stairs and watch as he comes in. Dad’s looking pretty busted up.

    “Dad?”

    “Jeremy? How’s your mother? Is she all right? Where’s Mark?”

    “Mark’s asleep, it’s almost one a.m., dad where were you?”

    “How’s your mother?”

    “She wandering around on the patio like she wants a cigarette or something, dad what the hell happened to you?”

    “I… helped Cecilia out and… ended up driving her home but on the way back to the car I got mugged… didn’t the hospital call?”

    “No,” it’s mom’s voice coming from the darker end of the first floor. “Not while I was down here, did anyone call on either line upstairs?”

    “Not that I heard, mom.”

    “Jeremy go up to bed,” dad says.

    “Mom,” I try.

    “Jeremy, please, go to bed,” she says echoing dad’s statements. “You’ve got a long day tomorrow, and your brother is still sick, I don’t want you catching it as well.”

    “Sure thing, mom,” I head upstairs.

***

    Unable to sleep, even with Jimmie’s comforting presence, I find myself turning to the second autobiography. Foreword…

    I think I’m going to like Duo’s book. I settle a little more comfortably on the bed, Jimmie’s cold nose presses against my leg. I scratch his head absently as I continue to read.

    What the…? There wasn’t any mention of the two of them spending inordinate amounts of time together in any of the other books I’ve read.

    Ok, so Relena’s biography started to hint at it, but like I said before she was just a lovesick woman that never got over not being able to have Heero the way she wanted him. She thought, from what I got of the first hundred pages, that Heero spent too much time with the other ex-Gundam Pilots in general.

    I reach over to my bookshelf and flip through the pink book again, looking over several sections I had marked up in disgust when I first read the book, pointing out her intense inability to let go of the man.

    Sure enough, it’s all right here.

    I can’t believe it…

    I flip to another section.

    They really did spend a lot of time together.

    Glancing over the notes I wrote in the margins she makes reference to the association between the two pilots seven times in one hundred and twelve pages.

    But what is the big deal that the two of them spent so much time together? They were comrades, they were friends. I shrug and turn back to Duo’s autobiography.

    I hear shouting coming from downstairs and I set the book down, somewhat disturbed by that revelation. Heero Yuy… the Perfect Soldier, was gay?

    I never really thought that was possible.

    I mean it’s not that the thought is impossible or anything like that, it’s just…. Highly unexpected, war heroes…