FORGOTTEN SOUL

Chapter 6

Heero was calmly waiting in the hallway when Releena emerged from her meeting. Tired, drained, and slightly frustrated, the young foreign minister brightened immedetely when she saw the silent, familiar form leaning against the wall.

"Hey," she greeted, managing a weary smile for him as she walked up. "Sorry I'm late; the meeting took longer than I expected. Were you here a long time, Heero?"

"No." Actually, he'd just arrived. Restraining and sedating a furious Chinese pilot, who also happened to know martial arts, had taken longer than he had expected as well. And then the crazy baka had to go and pull his sword on him, howling about "betrayal" and "ultimate dishonor." Heero winced inwardly, then became angry with himself. Why should he let Wufei's self righteous insults get to him? It wasn't as if they had ever been friends....

"Heero? Are you okay?"

Heero's attention snapped back to Releena. She was giving him that look again; that puzzled, concerned look that seemed to be probing his defenses, stripping them away one by one. Her worried green eyes suddenly rested on his cheek, still freshly bruised from his fight with Duo.

"What happened here?" she asked, and gently brought her fingertips up to touch his face.

The touch of her soft skin on his was like an electrical shock through Heero's system. A memory, too fleeting to be seen, flashed through his mind an instant before a blast of pain almost knocked him down. He jerked violently and whirled away from her, hearing the soft gasp of surprise and hurt. For a moment, he was almost sorry for the abrupt gesture and felt like he should apologize. Then, the mission and his own commen sence caught up with him, and he became furious with himself.

It wasn't working, he realized. He couldn't continue to work around this girl without the danger of exposing the mission. She had become more than a distraction now, much more. Heero couldn't even look at her without being bombarded by a myriad of strange thoughtsn and feelings he couldn't grasp or understand. Fragments of memories taunted him at the very edge of his mind, fleeting and elusive, vanishing into a haze of pain before he could see them clearly. It was driving him insane. He couldn't work like this. A previous thought came back to him then, bringing with it another strong sense of dejavu.

'A soldier knows how to deal with unexpected difficulties. Break it off, or kill her, if she becomes a problem....'

He turned back, forcing himself to meet her worried gaze. 'You can do this,' his mind told him firmly. 'You have to. There's no way you can continue to have her around without endangering the mission.'

"Releena." He steeled himself and looked her right in the eye. "We need to talk....alone."

She looked at him a moment in silence, her green eyes not quite as bright as they were before, and slowly nodded.

"Of course, Heero." He wondered why her voice was suddenly hollow, empty. Did she know? Was that why her eyes looked so sad? "We can talk in my office. No one will bother us there."

Heero suddenly realized that he hated the sight of Releena unhappy. He didn't quite know which was worse, the knowledge that she was sad because of him, or that he actually cared about it.

'Stop it! This is a job and she is an obstacle, nothing more. Get on with it, soldier.'

His eyes hardened. Resigning himself to the task, ignoring the constant headache that continued to plague him when he thought of her, he followed the slender figure down the hall and into the office, locking the door behind them.

"Ms. Noin? You might wanna take a look at this."

Noin glanced at Hilde, who, at the moment, was busy fiddling with the advanced security system the Preventers headquarters was famous for. She was supposed to be repairing a burned out monitor, but her attention was currrently directed at the screen that showed the hall right outside the meeting room. It was empty, and Noin couldn't see what the problem was.

"What's the problem?" she asked, feeling slightly foolish and bewildered.

"Well, this is the camera that is supposedly veiwing the meeting hall, right?" Hilde began. Noin thought she was stating the obvious, but decided to play along.

"That's right. What about it? It's looks perfectly normal and empty to me."

"Yeah, exactly. I've been watching this monitor for fifteen minutes now, and that hall has been empty the whole time."

"I'm not sure I grasp the problem."

"Wasn't Releena supposed to be in a meeting this morning?"

"Yes," Noin replied, still not understanding where this was leading.

"Well, that meeting ended ten minutes ago. And, unless everyone is still in that room, not one person has been shown coming out. Don't you think that's a little weird? Especially since I saw three of the old goats walking down another hall not five minutes ago."

A cold stab of alarm hit Noin in the stomach. "Someone has been tampering with the security system?"

"Looks like it. And from what I can tell, he's damn good at it, too. This system ain't easy to break into."

"I have to inform Milliardo." Noin was already headed for the door. "We might have an intruder walking around right now. Hilde, find Heero and Releena. Tell them to be alert. I don't want any assassination attempts today. And where the hell is Wufei?" Noin rushed out the door, and Hilde stood up, taking one last look at the monitors. On a hunch, she quickly knelt and switched some wires. A monitor bleeped, went fuzzy, and then showed the hallway outside Releena's office.

Heero had just gone in and closed the door behind him.