keire_ke | Entirely too much sleep, for a change.

Been sleeping my head off these past two days. Am rather enjoying it too. *grins* I realised along the way that Freecell is a cool game, and so is this: no Kangaroos were harmed in making of this game.

And yay for a 100 icon slots! *enjoys all the icons she can load now*

Heero did not go inside until the sun appeared on the horizon. He stood there, watching, waiting, hoping that somehow, as the day awakens, the time would be reversed and he would find himself back in his apartment, tripping over Duo on his way to the bathroom.

He caught that thought and wondered. How long has it been, since his morning routine included tripping over Duo? No more then several weeks, surely?

Funny that he would wish for those times back.

The spectacular sunrise unfolded before Heero’s eyes, as he worked on schooling his features into a mask of indifference. His brain just worked better when his face did not interfere. He could only hope Duo was still alive and in one piece. The odds were in his favour – he was, quite probably, the only naturally born human on the face of the planet and beyond. These days basic genetic engineering was virtually the only medical service performed, save for reconstructive surgery. Fully refunded too – as the government reasoned, it was cheaper to perform a single, even quite complicated, manipulation for every single child, than be forced to support them throughout life.

The sun split from the horizon eventually and Heero turned on his heel to return inside. Much had to be done; hack the personal computers, find any information about their whereabouts, gather supplies, plan the action…

…plan the aftermath.

“That feels good,” he said to himself with a humourless grin. He was Officer ‘Cut the Crap’ Yuy and the world was his damn playground. And whoever tried messing in his sandbox, had better be ready to eat it along the way. Briskly he walked back underground, his mind running through the possible approaches to hacking the computers’ databases. The security system was his design, for the most part, and the additions were heavily modified (also by him) so that no one could tell were the original code had come from. Jin’s private computers, however, were something totally different. Heero was the best hacker the police force had ever had, but his father was a genius. And their minds weren’t always wired the way other people’s were.

Which was why he found himself completely stupefied when the password jbjin01, conveniently printed out and posted on a message board above the desk, provided him access to all of the data.

“Oh, please. He couldn’t possibly be this stupid,” he muttered, shaking his head. He might not have visited often, but Jin made sure that every time he did he would provide a detailed report on his most recent case, or at least as much of it as was possible. Heero lost count of how many hacking jobs he described in detail.

Still, he couldn’t deny that he was in. He had seen just about everything the digital world had to offer, and there could be no doubt that this was the private computer of J.B. Jin. ‘Genius madness and stupidity are apparently to a scientist like the RGB channels to a colour. You need all three.’

Searching through the computer proved to be a little more problematic than accessing it. The hard discs contained mountains of data, most of which Heero couldn’t understand if his life depended on it. Scientists had a way of talking that left the average people completely baffled.

“Come on, Father,” he said aloud. “A guy who has his password on a post-it note above his monitor must have a ‘went here to conduct mad experiments on a random kid’ file.” And lo and behold, there it was.

Email address book. Not many positions on it either – apparently it was either too much of Gs and Ms and the contempt for Ss that kept people away. There was Yuy Heero, phone, cell, email and home address. There was Gene Gerard A. all of the above, likewise Helix Harold C., same went for Oenzim Olav D. and Sqense Sebastian E. Boy, was the good doctor meticulous.

There was also a position labelled as ‘The Laboratory, Ohio’. Heero shook his head. If it was a ploy, it was stupid. If it was for real, it was even stupider. Still, he knew the system. He knew it inside out. If his diagnostics revealed no hidden discs or partitions, or heavily encrypted files, it had to be because there were none. Unless Jin kept them somewhere else, which Heero doubted. It might have turned out he did not know the man after all, but if for the twenty something years of his life the man used a pen to scribble no more than two words at a time, there was no reason he would start now.

“Enough,” he told himself. Downloading the address to his PDA was a work of a minute. Researching possible routes on the internet took even less. All that was left to him was packing necessary supplies and – more disturbingly – wondering what to do next. Considering the information Une provided, he surmised it was not safe to remain on the planet for both Duo and himself. The government had a way of making people disappear, and he’d be damned if after all this trouble he’d be terminated by some asshole official. Well, his assassins, at least. Most official assholes wheezed after walking up a flight of stairs.

There was also the matter of what to do with Relena. She was, at the moment, locked in his bedroom, but he had no intention of coming back here, and he suspected neither had Jin. He couldn’t just leave her there.

Considering the fact that he was, as a cop, sworn to ‘serve and protect’, he unlocked the door. Considering that the woman really wasn’t in his good graces at the moment, he loosely tied rope to the handle, one whose other end was attached to a fixture on the opposite wall. The knot would come off, given enough tugging. Heero had no plans to be there when it came off, so he settled for adding a message about the hidden elevator passage, in the unlikely event Relena didn’t know about it.

A brief visit to the kitchens provided him with breakfast and enough provisions for the journey to Ohio. Half a creative hour later he had a set of lock picks any criminal would envy, which, coupled with his trusty PDA, should allow him to enter any facility. All that was left now, was commandeering a handy vehicle. If he was lucky enough, it would be one of the handy vehicles his father kept in his underground garage, about a mile from the house.

He was stepping out of the shed, on his way to the garage, when his cell phone rang. Blinking in surprise he delved into his pocket – surely Une wouldn’t risk contacting him. He looked at the small screen and suddenly the practiced indifference melted away, taking a huge part of the worry with it.

“Winner. You have no idea how glad I am to hear from you now.”