Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Wing, nor am I in any way associated with the company or people who were involved with Gundam Wing. I’m just a mere fan, writing a little story for my own amusement, and am not making any monetary profit from this endeavor. That being said, original characters contained within this fic do belong to me. Thank you.

AN: For those of you who have read this before, I have not written new chapters, just simply did some reformatting (so make it a little easier to read) and fixed some typos.

Hands

Part One

My brother is a Gundam pilot. I know, I know, what I should say is that my brother was a Gundam pilot, but once you ever saw the way he prowls into a room, upright and with his shoulders thrust so far back that you thought his back curved the wrong way, you’d see what I mean. Even if he never fought another war again, he’d still be a Gundam pilot, present tense, as though he could at any moment go down into the basement and come up again with Wing Zero. Save the world again.

I vowed that I was to write this, the night that I was going to watch him get murdered.

He came to us in the year 197 AC, in February. He had been saving the world again, but we didn’t know it yet. We didn’t know anything about him except what the agent told us (which wasn’t much). He had been lost to us for such a long time that we had long lost any hope that we’d ever find him again. But then one day the phone rang, and Dad answered it, and he stood still a long time, not speaking. When he was done, he turned to us and told us that they had found him, our lost brother. They were going to be flying him in, and we could pick him up at the Preventer offices in town.

Of us all, Mama was the happiest. On the anniversary of his disappearance, she’d go to the mantle and would move his picture ahead of all the other, current ones of us. She had to do that every anniversary because his picture always somehow got shuffled to the back during the year. He’s only three in it. Calli looks a lot like him, but not as grim. He’s serious in it, more serious than most children his age. Dark hair, falling into his blue blue eyes, and mouth straight. A sad picture.

I always thought that…I mean, when you look through a camera the correct way you are glimpsing a record of the past. I always thought that if you looked in a camera the wrong way you’d see the future. I wonder if, in that picture, he hadn’t looked in backwards through the camera and had caught a vision of his future. Maybe that was what had given him that serious expression.

Dad was oddly silent about the whole thing. Normally, he’s very vocal, but he didn’t speak much about it at all. But when we were driving to the Preventer offices to pick him up, Dad fiddled with the radio. That’s Dad’s way of showing that he’s nervous. Mama sat next to him, untying and retying the stringy bow off her neckline. She spoke to us in a tone that lifted the words higher and higher, and became all the more tremulous the higher they went, like they were so excited that they couldn’t hold themselves together.

“Everything’s going to be right, now,” she said. “I’m so happy…to have him back. Don’t…don’t overwhelm him, though.” She turned in her seat, to stare pleadingly at us. “He isn’t going to be immediately comfortable with us, so—don’t overwhelm him.”

I sat behind her, so I could safely roll my eyes, because the only one likely to overwhelm him was Mama. She’s kinda high-strung. I wasn’t going to overwhelm him; the last thing I wanted was another older brother telling me what to do. Calli is friendly, but I couldn’t see how a two-year old that never talks would overwhelm a seventeen-year-old. Alex is twenty, and he thinks he’s a refined grown-up; sometimes, he actually acts like one. No, I didn’t see any of us overwhelming him. Besides, the thought of suddenly ending up with a brother you thought was dead was way too weird to get excited about.

“Hajime,” Mama murmured softly. I knew what she was thinking. She was thinking that when he walked out he’d still be three years old. Dad looked at her.

All threats of anyone overwhelming him disappeared the second he walked out of the offices, carrying a dark-blue duffel bag in one hand, and a laptop in the other. This was not little Hajime Mama was thinking of. He looked Japanese, like Mama, and he also had some of Dad’s white-guy features—the eyes—to show that he once belonged to us, but he didn’t anymore. He was slim, but you could tell that if he wanted to snap you like a twig, he could. Whenever he moved, whatever was under his skin pulsated. His mouth didn’t know how to smile. His eyes were frigid and hard. His hands looked really rough, like he had worked them to death. When he looked at me, the acids in my stomach boiled up and over, and a warm sensation spread throughout my body, making everything weak and shaky.

When he came out, he was glaring at a Preventer agent like she had run over his puppy, and glaring even harder when she introduced him to Mama and Dad. Like he probably didn’t know who they were already. He didn’t pat us on the back or shake our hands or did anything like that; he just nodded his head. It was like he had a big, invisible, neon sign on him: “Approach to at your own risk!” Alex says that it’s more like, “Touch and DIE!” but he can be so dramatic.

He stood in front of us, and we stood in front of him, clustering together the way a herd of elk surrounds the calves whenever the wolf comes near. The Preventer agent stood back with a grin plastered to her face and eyes blinking widely.

Dad cleared his throat and slapped a hand around Alex’s back. “This is Alex—he’s in college.” He nodded. “This is Yoko.” I smiled grimly, and he nodded. “And this is Calli.” He even nodded at her too.

Mama’s arms had this way of jumping up, and then fluttering back down to her sides again, before doing it all over again. She wanted to hug him, but she settled for wringing her hands instead. Calli hid her face in Mama’s skirt, holding her stuffed bear out at him: Sir Bear Knight, Protector, I guess. The Preventer put her hand on his shoulder, and he shrugged it off, and then we left.

In the car, he sat next to the door, behind Mama, glaring doggedly out the window. He kept his laptop and duffel bag in his lap, and his hand wrapped securely around the door-latch. I was glad that Alex sat in between us.

I had the window open and put my hand out, letting the cool, rushing wind lift it up, up. Dad was driving and playing with the radio again, glancing back over his shoulder every now and again. But he looked mostly at Mama, because she sat with Calli in her lap. Mama and Dad are real big on safety, so they just about died when they realized that the car wasn’t big enough for all of us and Calli’s seat. It didn’t stop them though. And Mama…Mama had her neck craned around, staring at him as though he was the greatest thing to walk the earth since Jesus Christ. Every time she looked at him, her eyes shone like sunlight breaking through a pool.

She broke the silence, and asked, hopefully, “Do…do you remember us at all? Do you remember anything at all?”

“No,” he answered, savage because of its monotone. His voice lacks inflection, and makes everything sound so much harsher than what it is. Like the fate of the world has rested on his shoulders.

“Oh,” she replied, voice sinking. Her eyes lost some of their translucency.

“What were the Preventers doing there?” Alex asked.

“Butting in,” he muttered. His hand tightened on the door-latch.

Alex and I looked at each other, raising our eyebrows. “Okay,” Alex said, drawing it out so it sounded long: o-k-a-y. “But there was some reason why they were there and not social services.”

“It’s classified.”

We all laughed, because we thought he had told a joke. He didn’t laugh though. He just stared at us like we were all certified.

Mama started getting choked up. She stretched her hand around to the back, as though to touch him, but she couldn’t go very far. He was just out of her reach, and then he pushed himself further back into his seat. “I’m just so happy….”

He just stopped—I’ve never seen anyone stop like that before. Like the clock needs winding. Except, straining tendons ran like spider webs down his hand—the hand that held the door-latch.

“I’m just so happy that you’re back,” Mama continued. Water glimmered in her eyes. She smiled, and murmured, “Hajime—”

He came to life. He lifted his head, and said, “Don’t call me that. And don’t be expecting that we’re all going to be one, big, happy family. I’ve lived on my own for the past year, without anybody telling me what to do, and I don’t need or want to be here. When I turn eighteen, I’ll leave. I’m sure they already told you what to call me. It’s been Heero Yuy for a few years now, and you call me that.”

I guess he told us. The car was in silence—what do you say to a person who says something like that? We all sat there, stunned, and he just turned his face to the window like nothing happened. The sun fell on his face, but there was nothing in that blankness that it could reveal. I put my hand back inside the car and rolled the window up, because it had gotten cold suddenly.

Mama spoke. “Okay…Heero.” She choked on the words, like they had gotten stuck in her throat. And in that moment, I knew that Heero Yuy was no brother of mine.

Heero Yuy is really Japanese. Not even Mama is that Japanese. I’m certainly not. Mama isn’t the most Japanese person you ever saw—her name is Peggy, for cripes’ sake—but her kid shouldn’t be more Japanese than she is. But Heero is.

We live by the tradition of taking our shoes off whenever we enter the house. We don’t make guests do it, because Dad says it makes non-Japanese people uncomfortable, so we allow them to tromp all over the place with their shoes on, and Mama spends the entire time worrying about her white carpets. But Heero didn’t even blink when he saw us taking our shoes off. He took his off too. He even did it with style: he did this foot flip thing, and the shoes tumbled up, and came back down, landing perfectly flat and next to each other like he had done it with invisible hands. A perfect ten. Calli went, “Oh!”

In the doorway, Mama stood in front of us, lecturing. She jibber-jabbered in a consistent tone, relating to him his origins, and gesticulating with her hands in the air. I don’t think he was really listening to her. “I’m a musician: a pianist. I got your names—yours and your sister’s—from my two favorite composers: Yoko and Hajime. Your father named Calli and Alex.”

“They both like to assert their heritage,” Alex explained. It’s true. The house smells like teriyaki and soy sauce, as if to say, “This is a Japanese house!” But it also smells of lasagna and cheese.

Dad told me to show Heero his room, so we slipped past Mama and went on down the hallway towards the bedrooms. She followed us, probably panting down the back of Heero’s neck the entire way. Heero kept glancing at her over his shoulder. She must have concluded that she was making him uncomfortable—overwhelming him—because she left.

“I have to get dinner ready. I left it getting cold on the stove, ” she said, with a little laugh. I love Mama’s laugh. She sounds like an imitation of one of her upbeat sonatas.

We went into the room and found Calli inside, in front of the birdcage that I hadn’t taken out yet. It was on a short table, where she could reach, and she had her hands wrapped within the bars and was shaking it.

“Beercup, sing! Beercup, sing sing!” she screamed, laughing. She threw her hands into the air and twirled around on her tiptoes. My poor little canary darted from bar to bar, silently.

“This is Buttercup,” I explained, shooing Calli away. “He doesn’t sing for some reason, so you have to watch Calli, because she is determined to make him sing. I guess she thinks that if she traumatizes him enough, he will. She doesn’t know anything about anything.” I smiled at my little, silent bird. “He’s named Buttercup because he’s yellow. I was going to call him Wandering Dreamer, but that seemed so girly….”

I looked at Heero, and Heero looked at me, with a flat face. I don’t mean that it was 2-dimensional or anything, that it looked like you had a piece of paper with eyes and mouth drawn on, but it felt that way, like knowing that the expression will never change makes it less real. Lifeless. Emotionless. Flat. Like no expression at all.

I sat on the bed, my face getting hot. I giggled. “This used to be my room.”

Again, Heero looked at me, as if to say, “No friggin’ kidding.” Besides the birdcage, the bed comforter was pink. On the desk, there were a couple of girly books, like The Last Unicorn and Nancy Drew. I blushed at him, because I felt so dumb.

I waited for him to ask where I had been displaced to, but he didn’t say anything. He just put his laptop on the desk, and the duffel bag on the dresser. I wanted to know what was in the duffel bag, but he stood against the dresser, glaring at me, his hands hanging down by his sides. I looked at his hands. He had cricks in his thumbs, so that they bent slightly at an odd angle. But when he moved his fingers—they were flattened at the tips—they moved smoothly, creating and destroying the creases in his palms, and moving tendons that ran underneath the purple veins that marked his wrists. They looked really rough.

I lay down on the bed, and put my hands on my stomach, twiddling my fingers. I wanted to show him I wasn’t scared of him. “Yep, I have to sleep in the same room as Calli now. She’s got these Disney characters on the wall. Dumbo and Bambi and stuff. Makes me feel right at home.”

I raised my head. He still didn’t say anything. He just gave me this look like I was the scum of the universe.

I leapt up and grabbed the birdcage, so that I could put it out in the hallway. “You’re welcome,” I said as I walked out.

Mama called that it was time for dinner, and Heero followed me to the table. I tried to get Alex to sit in between Heero and me, but it didn’t happen. “I made your favorite,” Mama told Heero, beaming. Heero looked at Mama like she had lost her marbles, and we all sat down.

While we were waiting for Dad to serve us, Alex asked, “So…Heero, where’ve you been? I mean before you were all big and bad on your own. The Preventers were fuzzy on that.”

Heero shrugged, taking his plate with a nod.

“Well, you must have been somewhere,” Dad said, sitting down. Mama looked at Heero, her eyes glowing.

Heero picked up some chopsticks and didn’t answer, like he hadn’t heard. His eyes were glassy. Then he began pouring rice into his mouth, and that was when I realized how Japanese he is because he’s an expert with the chopsticks. He could win chopstick championships, if they had them. Mama slipped her fork down surreptitiously, and took up her own chopsticks. Then she bent her head, and concentrated on getting her food into her mouth without dropping it a hundred times, because she’s not very good. She mostly uses chopsticks for a fashion statement. Calli watched Heero, going, “Oh!” Then Heero thought he’d be a real wise guy and caught a fly with them, like he was Mr. Miyagi or something. We all laughed, but he didn’t.

I was starting to think that maybe Heero wasn’t such a bad guy after all, but then Dad mentioned the word “school.” Heero’s head shot up like a supersonic Jack-in-the-Box. “I’m not going to any highschool,” he said, firmly. I gaped; I couldn’t believe the tone of voice he was using with Dad.

Mama clasped her hands together, and stuck her chin in her hand, looking up at the ceiling. Alex scratched the back of his neck. Dad raised his eyebrows, and gave Heero a pointed look. “I don’t understand. Why not?”

“I’m not going to highschool. Do you understand me now?”

Alex laughed, lightly, turning his eyes up into happy slits. “It’s true. If you don’t want his brains leaking out from his ears, you shouldn’t make him go to highschool. I mean, look at Yoko!” It was a good thing that Heero was sitting in between us.

Dad ignored Alex. “No, I don’t believe I do understand you. I presume you mean to say that you’ve graduated. Do we need to enroll you for college classes?” Heero’s brow cleared. Dad grimaced. “You got your highschool diploma in that bag of yours?”

“Your food is getting cold,” Mama muttered, sighing.

They ignored her.

“It’s stupid for me to go,” Heero said.

“You’re going.” Dad’s lips paled. He wasn’t used to the kids defying him like this, and I didn’t blame him. Heero was making meangry. Dad stuck his white lips together and turned back to his plate.

“No, I’m not.”

Mama bit her lips. Dad turned back to Heero impatiently and pulled out the big guns. He pointed his fork at Heero, in absence of a finger. “That Preventer agent said that you were to go—”

Heero’s face went blank. His tone became even more unrelenting than ever. “I told her…I am not going, and I am not going to discuss it any longer.”

I sat in blind shock. Somebody talking to Dad like that—! I couldn’t see how anyone could fight with Dad. He was so smart, he was a doctor, he was really easy-to-get-along-with. Nobody ever fought with Dad. My fingers tightened around my fork. The food in my stomach felt heavy.

Then Heero gave Dad this look like he wanted to kill the man, and I realized that I had had enough. So I jumped up and poured my entire glass of water right over his head. I don’t like my glasses half-full or half-empty; I just like them full, so I gave him a real baptism. Heero leapt out of his seat, shedding water in buckets. He was hot. The water rose in steam off him. He should have looked ridiculous, standing there, dripping water that dashed pink by the light of the sunset, but somehow he didn’t.

“Yoko!” Mama screamed, appalled. “What are you doing?” Her head turned red.

Calli and Alex were laughing their heads off. Heero just stood, quiet and angry, like he didn’t know what to do, or he was afraid of what he could do. Dad opened and closed his mouth at me several times, before speaking.

“Yoko, go to your room!” he yelled.

“Go to my room?” I asked, numbly. I turned and went, Alex and Calli’s howls following me down, but I thought that it was a crappy thing to do. Sending me to my room, like any common three-year old, just for sticking up for Dad like that? I stomped the entire way, shaking Buttercup’s cage as I passed him in the hallway. I went past what used to be my room, went into Calli’s room, and slammed the door shut. A moment later, I heard movement in his room, and I kicked the wall. The shuffling stopped for a second, and then his door shut again. It was all so very unfair.

I lay on my bed, twirling my hair around my finger until the tip became red and bloated with blood. Mama came in, looking reproachful.

I bolted up. “Why did you send me to my room like I’m Calli?” Then, I screamed as loud as I could, so everyone would hear, “That guy is a jerk!”

“Yoko, stop yelling,” said Mama. She sat on the bed next to me. When Mama tells you to do something you do it, so I closed my mouth, but I gave her a real good glare. She put her hands in her lap. “Why did you do that, Yoko?”

I smiled, and answered her in a high-toned, saccharine voice. “Oh, I was just welcoming him, Mama. In some cultures, you’re supposed to wash the feet of your guest, but I thought I’d do it one step better. I would have dried him with my hair, but you didn’t give me a chance.”

“Yoko….”

“Oh, it’s real long Mama,” I said, bringing my hair forward so she could see, “so it would have been real feasible.”

“I don’t appreciate that tone of voice, Yoko. You’re in here, like a child, because you are acting like one. By your age…what were you thinking?”

I fell back onto the bed, throwing my hands behind my head. I dangled my legs over the side and giggled. “He has a pink comforter.”

“Yoko, he’s your brother,” Mama replied, quietly.

“Funny, I don’t feel very sisterly towards him.” My ceiling is speckled, and I imagined I saw his face in it, like the face of Jesus in a tortilla. “I can’t believe you’re sticking up for him like that! After the way he was talking to Dad! After what he said to us in the car.”

Mama sighed, smoothing the creases in my blanket. “He’s very confused—overwhelmed—Yoko. Imagine if you were him.”

“I imagine I’d be a heck of a lot more grateful, that’s what! It’s not everyday your long-lost family lets you shack up with them, gives you their rooms!”

“Yoko, please understand. I want this to work. It isn’t going to be easy, but I want to make this work He’s been gone for fourteen years, so it’s natural that it’s going to be awkward at first. I want this to work. He says that he’ll leave once he’s eighteen, but I don’t want him to. I want him to stay, I want to get back the son that I have lost.”

I groaned. “But Mama…that guy is a creep!”

Mama didn’t say anything for a long time. We sat there in silence, Mama thinking about sad things, and I feeling like scum because I had made her sad. Then she got up and left. I tried to think about brighter things. I thought about how popular I was going to be at school now. How many girls can go to school saying, “What I do over the weekend? Oh, I got a brother.”

Heero did go to school after all, and I did get a lot more attention, but not because anybody was interested in me. All their interest was in him. These girls were always telling me, “I think your brother is hot!” My school is a real meat-market, so when he showed up, all dark and brooding and mysterious, things became excited. I was waiting for Heero to end up with twenty girlfriends, but he never even ended up with one. It put them all into a quandary.

“Don’t get too excited girls,” I told them at the lunch table, where these girls sat, giggling over the latest guys. “I’m not so sure he even likes girls. Did I tell you that he sleeps underneath a pink blanket? Pink! It used to be mine—my spare one, I mean—and Mama told him she’d buy him a new one, and he told her not to bother.” I might have accidentally left off the part where Heero had told Mama not to waste her money, because he was leaving in a few months anyway.

The girls winked their eyes, doubtfully, at me. “Why are the good ones always gay?” Lisa asked.

“There is no way that that guy is gay,” Susan replied. “And if he is, it’s just because he hasn’t found the right girl yet.” Susan had this determined gleam in her eye, like she believed that shewas the right girl.

“He moves so smoothly. Fluidly. Like liquid metal. Or a panther.”

I snorted, and suffered agonies of over-indulged sentimentalities. “He’s TROUBLED,” I said, but it didn’t matter to them.

“His eyes are like storm-tossed seas.”

I could appreciate where they were coming from, because Heero has the most intense, blue eyes you ever saw (I don’t know how he had gotten them that way; it wasn’t from us), but that didn’t mean I wanted to hear things like that about him.

Alex left for school the same day that Heero came to school. Alex had to take a flight out, because he got into a university that couldn’t have gotten any further away from us unless it was in outer space. Mama stood at the door, waiting to go drop him off at the airport, biting her fingernails. She had wanted Alex to blow school off, to get to know Heero better. “Bye Heero!” Alex said, smiling his charming smile, and slinging his bag over his shoulder. He walked out, passing Mama. Heero grunted. He sat on the floor in the living room, bent over his shoes, trying to untie this massive knot in his shoelaces. Everyone thought that Calli had done it, but it actually had been me.

“Hero, Hero!” Calli said, stretching herself over his back. He let her lie there.

“Heero, Heero,” Mama corrected, her voice hitching every time she said it. You could hear the unspoken, “Hajime, Hajime.”

“Hero, Hero.”

I rolled my eyes, because Calli doesn’t know anything about anything. Mama left to run Alex off, her steps terse and directional. Hurried. And that was when Heero and Dad got into their second fight.

The television was on, and we were watching the news. They had gotten into the boring political discussion part, and the Vice Foreign Minister must have been the topic, because they were showing a clip from her latest speech. We used to be real fans of hers, until a few weeks ago, when she started saying things like, “We must fight to maintain our ideals,” and “Total pacifism is not the way.” She did a 180 on us. Dad thought she was the worst traitor since Judas Iscariot, and turned the television off.

“I was watching that,” Heero snapped, finally untying the knot. He leaned back to put his shoes on, and Calli tumbled off his back, giggling.

Dad stood in front of the television, and lifted his eyes nobly towards the heavens, like he was Abraham Lincoln without the beard. “In this house, we are total pacifists. I don’t want to hear anything that little girl has to say.”

Heero narrowed his eyes into little lines, until all you could see were these two blue slits. “You misunderstand her. Total pacifism is just idealism.”

That started another fight, about pacifism. They argued about it in the car, making the ride to school a joy. Calli put her hands over her ears, even though it wasn’t loud or particularly nasty, saying, “Oh oh oh,” with her eyes widening. I wished that I could have done that; instead, I just stared out the window, glowering. People didn’t use to fight with each other before Heero came. Hajime’s birthday was in October. I couldn’t wait until then.

Dad tried avoiding Heero like the plague. It was understandable, because the two did nothing with each other except to argue, and the more they argued, the angrier Dad got. The fights were never especially horrible, but Heero had this way of being so insistent it made your head want to explode. And you’d see Dad’s head turning red, and his fingers twitching, and then he’d walk out like he was afraid he was going to do something he was going to regret.

As much as Dad avoided Heero, Mama did the opposite. She couldn’t get enough of the guy; always, she was begging the question, “Where’s Heero?” and she just wasn’t happy until she knew where he was. She had this way of sitting at the piano, playing old songs and lullabies, and asking him, “Do you remember this one?” He always answered her “no,” but she’d keep on playing, convinced that some day she would find the song that triggered it all, and Heero would be three years old again. Whenever she looked at him, this hungry gleam came into her eye as though she knew he was going to spirit away again, and she, if by eating him up could stop it, would.

He suffered from nightmares, and would wallow in his bed silently, but Mama wasn’t too upset by it. She’d sneak into his room at night, after he’d fallen asleep—he was always sleeping, the bum—and she would stand over his bed, watching him. The nightmares gave her her excuse to stand over him like a stalker, I guess.

One night, I woke up late to use the bathroom—never drink three glasses of milk right before bed—and I had to pass by Heero’s door to get to the bathroom. It was cracked open, and inside, Mama was standing over his bed, clasping her hands. Dad stood beside her, looking uncomfortable and worried and angry all at once. I crept to the door and peeked in.

Dad whispered something to Mama, but she wasn’t paying him any mind. All she had eyes for was Heero. I was disgusted with her, because he’d been with us for two months already and you’d think she would have gotten over it by now. But no. Timidly, she put her hand down and touched his hair. Dad stuck his hand on her shoulder, and whispered to her more earnestly. I could hear him sptzing.

Then Mama put her fingers against Heero’s cheek, and he jerked up. He was a blur, and had Mama’s wrist in between his hand, twisting and pushing down. She cried out, and Dad darted forward, but Heero had already let go of her wrist and was on his knees, pressed against the wall, chest heaving. I flipped the light switch on and ran into the room, screaming, “Mama!”

Mama held her wrist, shaking. Her wrist was blue, turning into an angry welt of purple. Her face was pale. She stood looking at Heero, blinking, face scrunching in agony and confusion. Dad and I clustered around her, and Dad gently touched her wrist. She flinched it away from him. “No, don’t touch it,” she gasped. She couldn’t even bear to touch it herself: her fingers, trying to form a circle around it, trembled just above it.

“Let me see it,” a deep voice rumbled. Heero slipped from the bed, and Dad took Mama by her shoulders, moving her away.

“Get away from her!” I screamed. I rammed him with my shoulder, and might as well have been doing it to a brick wall. I bounced off him and slipped to the floor, squeaking. Heero stepped over me.

“I won’t hurt her—let me see it,” Heero insisted, holding his hands out. “I think it broke.”

“Yeah, it’s broken—” Dad snapped. Then he took Mama by her unhurt wrist, and me by my wrist, and pulled us out of the room. We practically ran out.

“I’m—” Heero started to say, but he stopped when we walked out. He didn’t follow us. I think he knew better.

“Yoko, go get Calli. We’re going to the hospital.”

“Don’t wake Calli up—” Mama pled, letting Dad pull a jacket around her shoulders.

“I’m not leaving them here alone with him.” Dad said “him” like it was a dirty word.

I ran down the hallway, sidestepping Heero’s door as though he was going to come charging out at me, swinging an axe. I looked in as I passed, and he was perched on the bed, real still, and his face quiet. He didn’t look at me as I went by. I got Calli out of bed—she cried, but I shushed her and grabbed her her teddy bear—and then we left. The really funny thing was that, when Mama wasn’t looking, Dad left money on the kitchen table. I didn’t understand what that was for.

AN: For those of you who have read this before, I have not written new chapters, just simply did some reformatting (so make it a little easier to read) and fixed some typos.