The air in the tent Heero had pitched beside where they’d hidden their gundams was a trifle too warm — in large part thanks to the brush he’d arranged against the canvas siding for optimal concealment — but still he was sitting just within the open flaps where he could see and hear both inside and out, since he didn’t believe it wise to leave Duo alone at the moment. After having gone to the trouble of resuscitating him and hauling him back here (and the latter, at least, had been some considerable trouble), he wasn’t going to abandon him possibly to his death and waste all prior effort.

It wasn’t merely that. True, he was never pleased by wasted effort, but here he thought there was also some actual desire on his part for Duo not to die. Duo was often a useful ally, and allies of any type were rare enough in the current climate that Heero didn’t want to waste one of them either. And though the agitation he’d felt during the process of resuscitating this one had struck him as inexplicably excessive for the situation, mirroring the oddly heightened hope of this very moment for some sign that Duo had not suffered permanent damage, Heero wasn’t dwelling on it. He merely waited.

Slight indications of Duo’s change in consciousness sounded faintly before the crinkling of the emergency blanket signaled it more loudly and Heero looked back around to see the prone figure shifting. He reached over to put a hand on Duo’s shoulder. “Don’t move too much,” he admonished. “I assessed your condition the best I could, but you need to confirm your status.”

“You know, some people, when their injured friend wakes up, say things like, ‘Hey, how are you feeling?’ or ‘You’re going to be all right.’ But not Heero. Heero’s like, ‘Make sure your bones aren’t secretly broken before you move!'”

There was no reproof in Duo’s tone, no hint of bitterness. In fact he was smiling faintly, and simultaneously fixing Heero with an odd expression. It was a look such as Duo had never given him before, and suggested, in its turn, that it was seeing things about him Duo had never noticed before. An expression like that as the first to cross Duo’s face upon his regaining consciousness seemed a little illogical, and perhaps an indication of more injury to the brain than Heero had originally diagnosed.

“‘How are you feeling?’ isn’t specific enough. And I can’t know yet whether you’re going to be all right.”

“I know.” Duo’s smile widened, and he raised a hand to clasp the one of Heero’s that urged him to stay down. Though the movement was slow, the squeeze he gave was relatively strong and definitely warm. Heero withdrew his hand quickly.

“All right,” Duo grunted. “Checking now.” He started working his muscles, making the blanket shudder on top of him but not sitting up. Though the occasional grimace crossed his face as he felt out all the damage that had been done to his body back in the base, still he was giving Heero that unusual and unusually happy look. Though perhaps ‘happy’ wasn’t quite the right word. Heero sometimes had difficulties with emotions and how to describe them, and wasn’t entirely sure how to define what Duo appeared to be feeling at the moment. Normally he wouldn’t consider it a matter of any concern, as long as it didn’t interfere with Duo’s recovery and subsequent mission performance, but he found in himself now an unprecedented curiosity about Duo’s mental state.

“All right,” Duo repeated at last. “My muscles are all burning, and I’m completely exhausted, and I have a headache, and I’m dizzy, and I feel like I can’t catch my breath. Oh, and the backs of my arms and thighs feel like they were actually burned.” This list of complaints was delivered with such incongruous cheer that it might have been a list of reasons he was having a wonderful day. “What…” And the frown that followed his smile was no more than puzzled, seemed to hold no real unhappiness. “What actually happened?”

“It appeared one of your charges went off prematurely,” Heero replied, “and you were thrown against a wall. It must have been a serious shock to your body. Your heartrate was so erratic and weak that I could barely detect it, and you had no significant respiration.”

“Wow!” Duo looked surprised and impressed, and still sounded perfectly sanguine. “Who knew I sucked so bad at setting charges?”

“It may have been faulty.” Heero experienced a touch of surprise of his own as he said this, for he wasn’t usually given to seeking extenuating circumstance to justify past failure. What was done was done. But somehow it seemed undesirable to hear Duo claim that he ‘sucked so bad’ at something, especially something at which he had demonstrated sufficient expertise in the past.

Mirroring Heero’s at this statement, Duo’s surprise evidently grew a trifle. It seemed he too was unaccustomed to having Heero make such a deviation from his usual unrelenting practicality. And was he pleased by it as well? Why should that be? In any case, all he said was, “I’m lucky as hell the stupid thing went off when I was far enough away from it for it not to just kill me.” At Heero’s nod of agreement he went on, “The whole thing was really lucky, I guess. Lucky everything turned out the way it did… lucky you were there…”

Again Heero nodded, less certainly this time. He didn’t know that he believed in luck. Things had worked out better than they could have, though.

Slowly, as if continuing to test his muscles and find them smarting from that brief period of poor circulation, Duo raised his arms in a cautious motion to put hands behind his head in a pose that would normally appear casual and unconcerned. He yet seemed inordinately satisfied, as if things had worked out more than merely ‘better than they could have’ — which still didn’t entirely make sense, which still worried Heero a trifle. Why were Duo’s eyes fixed on him with such apparent pleasure? At least they were focused and unclouded eyes. What was the meaning of that faint smile on Duo’s lips, which looked so out of place beneath the discomfort evinced by his contracted brows? At least his facial muscles all seemed to be functioning properly.

Only after approximately one hundred and eighty seconds of the two young men staring wordlessly — Heero attempting to dissect Duo’s emotional state and determine whether it indicated cerebral damage, Duo conducting whatever mysterious thoughts were contributing to his bright eyes and inscrutable smile — did Duo ask, “So what’s next?” They each seemed to have fallen into a sort of reverie focused on the other, and from this Heero now shook himself.

He had no way to assess definitively the current state of Duo’s brain. He could only work from symptoms — and as yet there were none of neurological disorder, however contradictory it might be that Duo appeared so generally happy after coming so close to death. He glanced at the time. “Response to calls for help from the base could arrive as early as ninety minutes from now. That’s based on the location of their closest allies and the assumption that none of them were already en route for any reason. I would prefer to leave the area in forty-five minutes.” Actually he would have preferred to leave the area as soon as the mission was complete, but was providing Duo with the estimated maximum period he had to lie here and recover.

“Got it.” Now Duo removed his arms from where they’d been pillowing his head, still with the same gingerly motion as before. He rolled his shoulders slowly, extending his arms first upward, then out to the sides, flexing his hands as he did so. Since piloting a gundam, though it was taxing to the entire body, required the most from these particular organs, it was no surprise to see Duo trying to prepare them, in the time he had, for getting out of here in forty-five minutes. What might have been a surprise was that he still looked so cheerfully pensive as he did it.

Finally Duo broke the silence again with the perfectly conversational remark, “You know I’m not afraid of dying… not even a little bit.”

Heero believed it with certainty. The same held true for him, though he felt that the lack of fear each of them had was of a different composition, had different origins, said something different about the character of each. Deeper into this he did not have the capacity to probe, so he merely nodded.

“Actually it’ll probably be pretty cool,” Duo went on, continuing his stretching motions. “The next really big mission, you know?”

“That seems possible,” Heero allowed.

“But I’m still glad I didn’t die.”

It took no significant restraint for Heero not to reply that he, too, was glad — but the impulse to say it was distinctly present. He wondered whether mere pleasure at not having died was the explanation for Duo’s current mood.

“I feel like I’ve got lots of stuff to do.”

“There’s a lot for all of us to do.” In this Heero was both agreeing with Duo and echoing a sentiment he’d heard J express. “Probably more than any of us have time for.”

“Yep.” Duo seemed unperturbed by the grim idea. “Lots to do for probably a hopeless cause.” White teeth flashed in an open grin. “Good thing the work’s fun, huh?”

And there Duo had locked himself up in a sanctuary Heero could not enter, and one that, at the moment, he had no energy to assault. Already struggling with puzzlement regarding Duo’s inexplicable cheer, Heero didn’t need the added agitation of the old ‘trying to figure out what fun is’ problem. And though there was at the moment a strange combination of drive to know and indifference — he wanted to understand what Duo considered ‘fun’ about the work they did, how he felt in circumstances like this and why, but at the same time found the entire thing irrelevant enough to himself as to be almost tiresome to consider — neither desire nor disinterest motivated him at the moment: it was merely that he already had enough to think about.

This attitude was, he found, practical, for clues to neither Duo’s current frame of mind nor his concept of fun were forthcoming during the next half hour, which was all the time Heero had to spend in his company right now and certainly not enough to give him answers. And perhaps he did believe in luck after all, since he considered it lucky or something like it that answers were not what he needed or sought. It was a little odd that he even wanted them.

As they broke camp and prepared to go their separate ways, to report their success to and receive further instructions from their disparate commands, Heero watched Duo’s movements carefully. He should have been convinced by them that there would be no danger in leaving the other pilot unsupervised, but there was some last little percentage of conviction that seemed impossible for him to obtain. Perhaps it was because he knew how easily the fragile human body could suffer invisible damage, and how foolish it would be for Duo to die or suffer other permanent ill consequences after the successful conclusion of a mission due to a simple lack of proper medical care.

So as Duo headed for the cockpit of Deathscythe high above and separation from Heero for a length of time neither of them could guess, his movements still apparently a bit uncomfortable, Heero held him back for a moment with the serious admonition, “Be sure to have some scans run. We don’t know what kind of internal damage that shock may have done.”

Duo, hand still on the cable that would draw him upward and away as soon as he initiated its retraction, turned toward Heero, this time with an expression that looked somewhat annoyed or frustrated. “You know I was planning to make you go out to lunch with me after we were done?” He grunted in irritation. “Nothing like a near-death experience to mess up your hopes of marinara sauce, huh?”

Taken aback by what seemed an almost completely irrelevant response, and not as ready as he might have been with a statement that this proposal wouldn’t have been practicable even without the near-death experience, Heero said nothing.

“The point is,” Duo explained, leveling one finger at Heero almost accusingly, “I already said I had lots of stuff to get done.”

Thinking he understood and therefore giving a nod of acknowledgment, Heero replied, “Just remember we can’t go out to lunch if you die of a skull fracture you could have caught with one radiograph.”

Duo’s thwarted expression turned into a grin. “Roger that.” And he ascended.

As Heero followed suit, he wondered just how seriously Duo had taken his advice. Adding this to his curiosity about Duo’s frame of mind and the strange looks he’d been giving Heero, Duo’s state of health and the possible results of today’s injury, why Heero was so unexpectedly interested in all of this, and whether or not he’d just agreed to go out to lunch at some point, he came up with a package of unusual inquisitiveness that was probably better not opened today, if ever at all. It was easier to enter his own gundam, fire it up, exchange a brief confirmation of departure/goodbye with his fellow pilot, and flee the area without wondering any more about any of it right now.

*

Duo didn’t much like these underground bases with their claustrophobic little corridors. There wasn’t room for a gundam’s foot, let alone to swing a twelve-meter scythe. To destroy a place like this he had to run in on his own legs, usually shooting a number of people on the way, and set a bunch of charges.

Of course, when Heero had the same mission, there was the option of having him blast at the place from outside with his beam cannon while Duo guarded his back against a horde of defenders… but Heero didn’t seem to think that sounded nearly as fun as Duo did, and there was always the possibility that the result would be a field of melty slag atop a series of untouched inner rooms and hallways too deep for the cannon to reach. So running and shooting and charges it was.

Not that there wasn’t a huge rush associated with meeting Heero again outside the base after a heart-pounding, gunfire-punctuated twenty minutes apart, taking cover in the brush, and counting down to a simultaneous activation of detonators. But heated gundam battles were always exciting. Heero was all about strategy and proportional expenditure of energy, though.

Today’s expenditure of energy went quite smoothly. These folks were pretty well trained, but they weren’t ready for a couple of gundam pilots. Quite a few of them were even smart enough to run, and Duo mostly let them go; the focus here was the facilities, the equipment, more than the personnel. Some heavy explosions would take care of that, and, though that probably wouldn’t be as fun as a mobile suits battle, maybe he could then convince Heero to go get some lunch with him somewhere afterwards.

With that happy thought, he dealt with obstructions, set his charges, checked with Heero (who was also just leaving), and headed out. Noodles, he thought, sounded good. Something with marinara sauce.

Only then something (something without marinara sauce) exploded. It wasn’t time yet, and he could swear he’d set them up correctly, but something exploded anyway. As was not infrequently the case when explosions were involved, he wasn’t entirely certain what happened next. There was heat and whooshing and pain, and he thought abrupt full-body contact with a wall might have been involved; but then everything went black.

Fortunately, the confusion didn’t last long. At least, it seemed like only a moment or two later that Duo was climbing to his feet with no difficulty. The explosion didn’t appear to have progressed considerably… in fact, the whole world seemed to have slowed down, which was a little strange. So was the realization that, although he had stood up, he was also still lying at the base of the wall, looking rather the worse for wear. Why did there seem to be two of him all of a sudden?

Listening to Heero’s voice over his communicator demanding to know what had happened and whether he was injured, the sound even smaller and more distant than it should have been from where Duo was (for lack of a better word) standing, he stared down at himself in some puzzlement. Not a great deal of puzzlement, though; it didn’t seem to matter all that much why his body and his primary area of consciousness suddenly weren’t occupying the same space the way they normally did.

Even when the explosion had passed and left only small lingering fires in its wake, and the sound of feet in the nearby corridor heralded the advent of Heero; even when Heero, completely ignoring Duo and, in fact, apparently running directly through him and out the other side so that Duo had to spin around to continue watching him… even then, all Duo had to say was a mildly interested, “Huh.” And he might have been surprised at the serenity of his tone if he hadn’t suddenly felt so very calm. “Weird.”

INDEED, came a voice from beside him. It was an odd and interesting voice; in fact, it was more interesting than the events in front of him, and Duo rather liked it. And when he turned to find its source, he liked what he saw even more.

The figure that now stood next to him where none had been a moment before was unnaturally tall, but somehow it didn’t really look unnatural — especially since the excessive height was compensated for by an excessive narrowness: despite the great length of the deep black robe, hood drawn low over the face, that shrouded the entire shape, it was clear there wasn’t a lot of room inside. And then there was the totally fleshless hand that emerged from one black sleeve to clutch the smooth haft of a great scythe even taller than the figure itself.

Duo couldn’t decide whether he liked the bony hand or the bright edge of the weapon best… or maybe it was the figure as a whole. Perhaps it was a little odd, especially in the apparent context, but he was definitely reacting positively to what he saw. He might even go so far as to say he was delighted… except that nothing he felt at the moment was quite strong enough for such a word.

“So you do exist,” he said. There was a touch of admiration to his tone, but even this seemed to have faded into placidity.

TODAY I DO, replied the figure. TOMORROW I MAY NOT.

Trying to reconcile the uncanny voice he didn’t quite seem to be hearing, as he understood the action, Duo shook his head, found the motion similarly uncanny for its lack of physical sensation, and gave up. “Tomorrow I may not,” he pointed out instead.

OH, YOU WILL CONTINUE TO EXIST, the voice from beneath the hood assured him. A bony hand — the one not holding the scythe — flicked toward where Heero was assessing the level of injury to Duo’s limp figure. BUT POSSIBLY NOT IN THIS FORM. Then the fleshless fingers gestured back in the direction of the swaying cloak that presumably enveloped an even more extensive set of bones. I, HOWEVER, MAY NO LONGER EXIST IN THIS WORLD BY THE TIME YOUR PERCEPTION OF TIME HAS ADVANCED TO WHAT YOU CONSIDER “TOMORROW.”

Duo had been planning on asking in what form he would exist tomorrow, if not this one, but was distracted by what seemed a greater issue. “How can you not exist?” he wondered. “Aren’t you sorta… universal? You know you’ve kinda been my hobby for half my life… I’ve more or less named myself after you…” He finished up where he’d started: “How can you not exist?”

With a clattering noise, off-white phalanges and metacarpals drummed pensively against the black haft of the scythe as their owner seemed to consider, in the darkness of his hood, how to answer this question. Finally the strange voice said, DEATH IS UNIVERSAL, YES, BUT THE PRESENCE OF AN ANTHROPOMORPHIZED REPRESENTATION OF THE PROCESS MAY BE AFFECTED BY THE SKEPTICISM LEVELS IN A GIVEN UNIVERSE. THIS WORLD HAS LACKED A DISTINCT ANTHROPOMORPHIZATION FOR SEVERAL OF YOUR CENTURIES.

Duo wasn’t quite sure he got it, but one fact stood out. “So you come from another world.”

The upper portion of the hooded form moved forward slightly in what Duo read as a nod. MY PRIMARY PERSONIFICATION TOOK PLACE IN A DIFFERENT CONTINUUM. BUT BECAUSE MY VISUAL MANIFESTATION CORRESPONDS SO CLOSELY WITH CERTAIN TRADITIONAL IMAGERY ASSOCIATED WITH DEATH IN A SUFFICIENT PERCENTAGE OF YOUR POPULATION, I HAVE BEEN TEMPORARILY ENGAGED TO TEST THE RECEPTIVENESS OF THIS WORLD TO THE REINSTATEMENT OF A PERSONIFICATION.

Duo raised a hand to scratch at the back of his head, unsatisfying as the gesture was. “So… you’re doing a sort of… working interview?”

The tall figure was perfectly still for a moment, as if considering — perhaps searching an impossibly long memory for the phrase in question and deciding whether it fit. Finally, YOU COULD SAY THAT, the sepulchral voice allowed. BUT I BELIEVE “ANTIGEN” MIGHT BE A BETTER TERM. THE RESULT OF A POSITIVE ASSESSMENT IS LIKELY TO BE THAT THIS WORLD REACTS TO MY DEPARTURE BY REGENERATING ITS OWN PERSONIFICATION OF DEATH.

“And where would that come from?” Duo wondered, extremely interested; intellectual processes, though largely divorced from emotion, seemed still intact. “Just out of nowhere? Or could it be, maybe, a person who already existed who happened to have died? Maybe someone who always believed in Death even more than he believed in God?”

The hooded head turned specifically toward him for the first time, and Duo definitely made out the gleam of blue eyes in the darkness. He met the gaze without fear, and not merely because fear seemed irrelevant here and now; his interest facilitated his confidence. He met the gaze that seemed to be reading him — looking, perhaps, into his past, seeking out the truth of his words and the qualifications he’d been hinting at — and in his turn he read.

He saw a spirit that wanted to understand humanity, perhaps even wanted to join it, but thought — even feared — it never could. He saw a mind that believed itself entirely separate from emotion — not in disdainful aloofness, considering itself exalted into logic and above emotion, but in something much more like naiveté. The Order Of Things was all this being knew… or, at least, The Order Of Things was all that had ever been taught, which had led to an understanding at once supernaturally deep and pitifully shallow.

And yet this was a being that desired, that believed, that feared. Duo thought it was a being that knew joy and sorrow and love… but probably did not begin to understand them, or perhaps even to recognize their presence. It was captivatingly pathetic… instantly endearing… or would have been if pity and fondness hadn’t been so muffled and distant at the moment.

Duo was the first to blink. Of course he was pretty sure there weren’t eyelids in the shadow beneath the hood, and his own remembered need to periodically shutter his eyeballs did him a disservice. He wasn’t cowed, however; rather, he was wondering at the detail of his own assessment. Was he making things up? Or, if it was true, how did he think he knew all of that?

Then, with a jolt — or what might have been a jolt back on the other side — he realized abruptly that this wasn’t the first time he’d looked into blue eyes and seen that kind of spirit, that kind of mind.

It seemed ironic, somehow, that, when Duo was the one to claim for himself the title of God of Death, this actual specter of Death should remind him more of–

I CAN MENTION YOUR NAME, the figure said at last.

Letting go, for now, of his previous thoughts, Duo said in relative heartiness, “Thanks!”

DON’T MENTION IT. And the dark form turned back to its apparent scrutiny of Heero performing CPCR on Duo’s body.

Duo followed the line of focus and watched as his fellow pilot tried to bring him back. “But I’m already dead, right?” he wondered aloud. He really should have been experiencing a greater level of concern about this, but just couldn’t seem to muster it.

TECHNICALLY, said the hooded figure. FOR THE MOMENT. BUT THIS FRANTIC YOUNG MAN MAY BE ABLE TO RESUSCITATE YOU.

From somewhere in the currently hazy center of Duo’s mind where he cared about what went on in life, he was informed that, on that side of things, it would be very significant to him that the usually implacable Heero was so frantic in his attempts to revive Duo — that he appeared, as he compressed Duo’s chest, to be experiencing real desperation and terror… emotions he perhaps did not comprehend or even recognize. At the moment, ‘here,’ this only almost mattered, almost meant something. Some emotion on the life side wasn’t quite developed enough to reach into Duo’s placid state of death. He wondered whether that would change if he went back; he wondered how qualified he was to judge anyone’s emotionality when he was in such an uncertain condition himself.

The likelihood of going back seemed, he thought, fairly good. Anything Heero knew how to do he knew how to do perfectly, and first aid was no exception. And Duo’s body didn’t seem to have been too desperately damaged, only given a pretty hard shock.

He felt this theory confirmed when the figure at his side presently remarked, THERE ARE NO GUARANTEES, BUT CONSIDER YOURSELF UNDER OBSERVATION FROM NOW ON.

“Sweet,” said Duo.

The robed form turned toward him again, this time in a movement that seemed slightly puzzled. EVEN ALLOWING FOR A PSYCHOLOGICAL PERCEPTION OF FLAVOR, I SHOULD THINK THERE IS NOTHING TO TASTE AT THE MOMENT.

“Oh, sorry,” Duo grinned. “I mean, that’s good. I like that.”

AH, OF COURSE. A SLANG EXPRESSION. He said this in a tone that suggested he was filing the term away for future reference or perhaps use. Then he turned back toward the living scene — where, Duo noticed, Heero seemed to have calmed down a bit, though he hadn’t quite returned yet to his usual stoniness.

Simultaneously, Duo was aware of a sudden increase to a sensation that had previously been so sluggish as to go largely unnoticed. If he’d had to describe it (and for one pointless instant he was considering how to), he would have said it felt as if something in his chest, fluttering only feebly before, had abruptly resumed a stronger rhythmic movement by which it was forcing some kind of fluid to circulate throughout his entire body. And being currently disembodied made this very strange. Actually, the fact that he found it very strange was, compared with his previous lack of concern, rather strange. “Am I going back?”

IT WOULD APPEAR SO. YOU WON’T REMEMBER ANY OF THIS, NATURALLY.

“What?” The startled Duo began to turn. “But then how can I–” But at that moment, once again, everything went black.

So, yeah, surprise crossover here, in the form of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Death. Canon crossovers are not something in which I typically indulge (as a matter of fact, this’ll be the first one around this place), but I think it works well enough here. As a matter of fact, I kiiinda freaked out with joy when I thought of that Heero/Death comparison.