This story was written... back around the time Gundam Wing first went to Cartoon Network. It's fifteen parts plus an epilogue, and will be posted every Monday and Thursday until it's complete. It is Duo/Wufei, non-graphic yaoi. This is the only story I've written in this fandom, but it's one of my favorites. I hope you like it as well. I love getting reviews, so don't hesitate to tell me what you think!

This is the disclaimer... read well, it's the only time I'm really going to put one up here... and it's going to be bad. I do not own the characters or setting of Gundam Wing and am using them without the permission of the owners... whoever they might be. I don't even really own the title, since it's the title of a poem/song by Mercedes Lackey. I do however, own the plot. Personally, I've never seen anything like it, but I stopped reading in this fandom soon after I finished writing this ^_^.

Enjoy!

The Shadow Lover

by Jendra

An invisible presence watched avidly as the Gundam in front of him danced through the opposing mobile suits, leaving behind a swath of destruction. Hidden dark eyes gleamed as they observed the number of dead rise. Deep in the shadows, Shinigami watched.

It had been many years, centuries, millennia even, since the God of Death had last felt an interest in the living. So many years that he had lately been trying to convince his cousin that a total global nuclear war would be a good thing. At least then, after a last flurry of work, his job would finally be done. Now however, he was glad that he had failed. The Gundam pilots had renewed his interest in fleeting mortal life and his own duty.

All of the pilots were worshipers of his, whether they knew it or not. It was a good thing too. If Heero hadn't had Shinigami on his side, one of those self-destructs might actually have worked. The God of Death snorted quietly at the thought. Sometimes he thought the Perfect Soldier would be better off with his death wish answered, but his death would have devastated the others. Especially the one he was watching now.

This one... This one was his favorite. Not only out of all the pilots, but of all mortals, everywhere. This one was not just a worshiper, this was his high priest. This mortal child who not only dealt death, but loved it. Loved *him*.

Duo Maxwell.

The beautiful, violet eyed, braided boy who had raised his worship out of the darkness. The youth who made every death a sacrifice to him, every battle a paean of praise sung to him. The teen whose Gundam was patterned after old tales of himself, scythe and all. The man who proclaimed himself Shinigami. Or, as the true God of Death preferred to think of it...

Shinigami's.

His.

Duo Maxwell had already given his heart and soul to his God. All that was left was his body.

And he would have that too.

Soon.

Duo returned to the safe house in a somber mood. He had felt it again. He knew he had been watched during the battle, but he couldn't find anyone or anything that was doing it. It was driving him nuts! He'd first noticed it during a battle over three months ago. At the time he'd just written it off as overactive imagination, but it kept happening. What really freaked him was that he had noticed the scrutiny on a couple of missions he'd run without his Gundam. The idea that someone was watching him that closely... and that knew his movements that well...

He hadn't mentioned it to any of the other pilots. There was simply no proof besides his intuition. The last thing he wanted was to be thought to be paranoid. Especially by the pilot of Shenlong. He could hear him now... "You are weak, Maxwell! You should not allow your imagination to override your sense like this." Duo sighed. Even worse was imagining the look of disgust that would be on his beautiful face.

"Just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get me," Duo muttered to himself. He shook his head, stood up straight and grinned. "And it's not my imagination. I was a street rat for years and I always knew if someone was keeping an eye on me, whether it was a store owner who didn't trust me, a dirty old man who was trying to pick me up or just Solo looking out for me. I *always* knew. And my training as a Gundam pilot just made that intuition stronger. I am *not* imagining things. Someone or something has been watching me. Something that doesn't show up on my scopes, but that just means that their cloaking or disguise is extremely good. It doesn't mean they're not there. And if there is someone around that can keep away from my sensors that well, then the others need to know."

He looked down on himself. "After DownTime."

DownTime was a routine that had started soon after they had started living at safe houses together. There was an unspoken rule that as long as the pilot was unharmed, the hours after he got back from a mission were his alone. No one would bother him as he relaxed and unwound in whatever way he considered best. If he wanted company, he had to go seek it out himself. Even Quatre and Trowa followed the guidelines, and while there were many times that one would walk into the safe house, head straight for the other and drag him upstairs, if that didn't happen they wouldn't see each other during those hours.

However, if a pilot came in and hid himself away for too long, one of the others, usually Quatre or Duo, would go drag them out of their lair. No one was allowed to sit and brood over a mission for more than a couple hours at a time. They all agreed on this, and even Heero had been known to leave his laptop long enough to go drag Trowa out of his room while Quatre and Duo were busy.

In fact, one of Duo's most precious memories was the time when Wufei had come to get him after a mission that went wrong. Although he'd come through alive, and managed to complete the primary mission, more people had died than expected or wanted and while part of the reason was faulty intelligence, part of it was simply his error. Wufei had come and actually talked to him, the conversation going on for what seemed like hours. By the time they left the room to go eat dinner with the others, Duo was feeling a lot better, and even Wufei's eyes didn't seem as haunted.

Duo shook himself free of the memories. He had his own routine for DownTime and didn't want to get too far behind. He turned on the water in the shower, allowing it to get hot as he undressed and unbraided his hair. After scrubbing his body completely, he started on his hair.

Even if it hadn't been for the memories inherent in the rope of hair that fell down his back, even if he'd never noticed that time he was *sure* he'd seen Wufei reach out to touch his braid as he was sitting next to him on the couch, even if he hadn't fought so hard for the right to keep it, even if none of that was true, *this* would be reason enough to keep his hair as long as it was. Washing it, conditioning it, drying it and especially brushing it put him into an almost meditative trance. His body caught up in the intricacies of dealing with his hair, his mind wandered where it would. He went over the mission just completed, the unseen watcher, and how good it would feel if it was Wufei's hands dealing with his hair, instead of his own. Not to mention, wasn't it amazing how his thoughts always turned to the other boy. Duo gently nudged his mind away from that thought. He was here to think about the mission, not his crush on the Chinese pilot.

After almost an hour of brushing, he finally started to wake up out of his trance and began to braid his hair. He laughed silently, wondering what Wufei would think of hair as a meditation tool. Then again, the other boy would probably be surprised to find out that Duo had any clue what meditation was, much less that he used it almost every night to order his mind. Even Heero, who he'd ended up sharing a room with in a number of different schools and safe houses didn't realize that he was doing anything more than wasting time he should be spending on more constructive pursuits. Sure, it wasn't exactly the traditional meditation tool, but hey, Duo wasn't exactly a traditional kid either.

With a grin, he threw on some clothes and turned to the next part of his routine, the mission report. Not for him the simple straightforward reports of the others. He liked to get as creative as possible while still telling the exact truth. It drove the doctors crazy.

Once that was done and sent off, he threw himself down on the bed to think about his crush. This last part of the routine was perhaps his favorite. It was a new part of the routine, having started only a couple of months ago, after the conversation in his room. It was that day that he started thinking of the pilot of Shenlong as a person instead of just another pilot. Not only a person, but a very beautiful, exotic, smart, honorable, sweet, sexy and kind person. Too bad the other's opinion of him didn't seem to change much. He was still more an annoyance to the Chinese youth than an object of affection. Oh well, he was working on it. Very slowly and carefully, but he *was* working on it. He just had to make sure that Wufei felt the same. Or at the very least, that he wouldn't kill him for feeling that way. Even worse was the possibility that the black haired youth would hate him for it. Never having him as a lover would be far better than losing the possibility of him as a friend. Oh well, until then he could always fantasize.

His hands had just started to ghost down his body when he glanced at the clock and cursed. It was time to get up if he wanted to make it to dinner on time. For a moment, he gave a thought to just staying in his room and seeing if Wufei would come to pull him downstairs, but he thought better of the idea. After all, he had something to talk to the other pilots about. Besides, if Wufei did come up and found there was nothing wrong with him, he would probably get lectured at, and that was the last thing he wanted at the moment. With a sigh, he pulled himself to his feet and let the mask he'd been without since the moment he stepped into the shower, settle once more over his being.

Duo skipped down the stairs and ran into the dining room. "Hey everybody! What's to eat? I'm starving!"

"You're always starving, Maxwell," Wufei grumbled.

"I'm a growing boy, Wu-man," Duo grinned at him. "Maybe if you ate more, you'd finally get around to growing too."

"Maxwell!" Wufei growled in return.

Quatre hid his giggles behind his hand as Trowa let a smile touch one side of his mouth. Heero seemed to be oblivious to the taunting, being more interested in other things.

"How did the mission go?" he asked.

"Mission completed successfully sir," Duo threw a playful salute.

During the dinner, he and Quatre chattered back and forth with Wufei occasionally throwing in a comment. It wasn't until Heero stood up to go back to his room that Duo brought up what else had happened. He allowed his grin to fall from his face. "Something did happen that we need to talk about," he said seriously.

One glance at his face convinced the others that this was not a joke. Duo never looked that grim unless it was serious. Without hesitation the others followed him into the living room.

"Over the last three months or so I've been noticing something. It only happens when I'm on a mission alone, and not always then. Someone's been watching me, I'm sure of it. I can't prove it, unfortunately, but I know it's true. I've gone over every bit of video Deathscythe's video cameras can pick up and never seen anything. I've run every test possible with my systems, and a couple that I had to specially install, before, during and after a battle. And come up with nothing." Duo started pacing. "If it had just happened once, I could chalk it up to an overactive imagination, but it's happened too many times. I spent too long as a thief not to know when I'm being watched, and I am not making this up!" He reached back and jerked on his braid in aggravation.

"Calm down, Duo," Quatre spoke up. "No one thinks you're making it up." He glared at Heero and Wufei who were sitting there with expressions of disbelief on their faces. "Do we?" The two pilots

blanked their faces and shook their heads. "We trust your instincts, Duo."

"Thanks Quatre, that means a lot." Duo's smile was real and Quatre found himself smiling back. Seeing that expression on the braided pilot's face was very rare, and Quatre treated it like the precious gift it was.

"I'm assuming from your expressions that no one else has noticed anything," Duo sighed.

The others nodded silently in agreement.

Duo threw himself down on the couch next to Wufei. "I thought for a while that it was OZ, trying to get information on myself and Deathscythe to use against me. However, that doesn't explain why I can only feel it when I'm by myself, you'd think they'd want info on all the pilots. Besides, some of the places, there's no way they could know in advance that I would be there. Not unless there's a leak somewhere, but that doesn't make any sense either, because if there was it would make much more sense to set up traps that just to watch."

"Did it feel like a camera?" Trowa asked quietly.

Duo thought about it for a while, then shook his head slowly. "No, I don't think so. It was too *there* to be a camera, you know? Though that'd certainly be easier to hide than a person. And that's another thing. If it is OZ, then the cloaking's got to be seriously good for me and Deathscythe not to be able to see it. As in, if they get that kind of shielding for their mobile dolls we're in deep shit."

"I've seen no indication of either a better cloaking device or pilot surveillance within OZ's computers, nor have the doctors said anything about it," Heero put in.

"Maybe a reporter trying to get information on a story?" Quatre suggested.

"That still leaves all those pesky how questions. How would they know where I am, how do they keep from being seen, how do they keep from showing on my instruments?" Duo sighed, gazing despondently off into the distance. For some unknown reason, the side of the distance just happened to look like Wufei's profile.

"Not to mention why you," Wufei added.

A grin crossed Duo's face as he thought of something, and he sat up. "Hey, maybe I have a fan! That'd be cool."

"Hn." The expression on Heero's face made it clear that that was a 'Yeah right' type of 'hn' instead of one of the other hundred definitions of the sound.

Duo stuck out his tongue at him.

"Perhaps you shouldn't go on any missions for a while," Quatre suggested quietly.

"No way!" Duo surged up out of his seat. "I'm not going to let some crazy guy who won't even show his face scare me into being grounded!"

"Then what do you suggest?" Trowa asked placidly.

"I don't know," Duo started pacing again. "I really just wanted to tell you because of the ECM possibility. I don't see what we can really do about him since we don't know who it is."

"Then we need to find out," Wufei suggested. "Maybe we can set up a trap of some type."

"How about if you don't go on any solo missions until we figure something out?" Quatre asked worriedly.

"Guys, maybe we're making too much out of this, I mean, it has been going on for three months, and nothing bad has ever happened. Maybe he just likes to watch." Duo grinned lewdly.

"Or maybe he's just waiting until he has enough information to make sure he can kill you easily. Or worse." Wufei quelled him. "I agree, you should not go on anymore solo missions until we're sure it's safe."

"Why Wu-man, I didn't know you cared," Duo grinned. Inside he was dancing, it sounded like Wufei really did care, at least as a friend. And that was better than what he had, wasn't it?

Wufei snorted. "I just wish to make sure that you're around for missions that require all five of us."

"Do you agree, Duo?" Quatre asked pleadingly.

Duo looked into those soft blue eyes and caved immediately. "All right, all right, no more solo missions for a while, at least not unless absolutely necessary."

"Thanks you Duo! I feel much better now," Quatre grinned. Trowa nodded his agreement as well.

"Yeah, yeah," Duo headed for the door. "I'm going to go work on Deathscythe for a while. See you guys later." When he reached the door, he hesitated for a moment. Without turning around he said softly, "Thanks for believing me, all of you." Not waiting for an answer, he left the house.

/So he noticed I've been watching, hmm? Oh well, I knew he had some degree of empathy, so I shouldn't be surprised. It should be interesting to see what kind of trap they think can capture the God of Death./ He chuckled silently, then his thoughts grew dark. /But what were those looks he was giving *him*? He had better not be interested in someone else. He's mine!/