Lights out is in only seven minutes, and yet outside in the hallway he can hear people rushing by, the talking and giggling sounding oddly far away, muffled despite the fact that the door to the dorm room is actually pathetically thin. (It's enough to be a significant security risk -- it barely even has a proper lock, and certainly wouldn't keep out someone with determination.) He waits until they go by, more from force of habit than anything else, before shutting down his laptop and making his own preparations for rest. He is in bed by two minutes to lights out.

Thirty seconds later the door swings open to admit his roommate. Duo is surprisingly quiet tonight; it's rare that Duo doesn't even say hello, but now he wanders about the room, obviously searching for something, in complete silence. It's oddly disquieting.

Eventually Duo finds what he wanted. It's a faded t-shirt advertising some band or other; Heero thinks Duo told him about them once, something about hammered dulcimers. He can't remember what exactly a hammered dulcimer is, though, and he finds this irrationally irritating.

Then Duo takes his shirt off, and hammered dulcimers are forgotten in favour of staring at him, because there, on the left shoulder, just above where bicep starts and muscles tense under warm, tanned skin, a sequence of numbers and letters is clearly visible.

At first, its significance is lost upon him, and all Heero can do is stare. The tattoo is clearly quite old, the figures are slightly stretched. There's also a discolouration to the immediately surrounding skin that says that someone tried to get rid of it, probably with some kind of bleach.

Then it hits him that it's not a someone, it's Duo, Duo has an Oz tracking code tattooed onto his shoulder, and Heero doesn't know why.

"How did you get that?" The words leave his mouth before he's had chance to think. Duo turns to face him and raises his eyebrows. He doesn't need to ask what Heero's talking about.

"When you're learning by experience, you screw up sometimes, okay? It was a long time ago, and it's nothing for you to be worried about. Not a problem, not a threat. Not... anything. Just leave it alone?"

"Fine."

"Great. What time are we leaving tomorrow?"

"The plan is to be out by 0600."

"Okay, then -- we've got Relena to thank for an early start, huh? Now if you don't mind, I'm going to sleep."

The lights click off, and Heero wonders whether Duo really believes he'd let something like that go so easily. Probably not. It doesn't matter, though. Duo has, at some point, been captured -- by the local authorities, if he's right; he's sure that was the numbering system used on L2 -- and that was more than justification enough for investigating. After all, Duo isn't the normal teenage boy he pretends to be; he's a fighter, a killer, and who knows what else he might be keeping to himself.