May 7, 2001
hunger
part five
this is an au; the topic upsets me a great deal.
by bianca
Maybe there were things that I regretted in the end, but that was then, with all the precipices of knowing the outcome. At the time, I was only doing what I felt was right. My mother, a Supreme Court justice, raised me with integrity, and pride. I know what's justice, after all, more than Wufei would ever claim to.
I guess you could say that I'm trying to rationalize irrational human behavior. I wouldln't disagree. Neither would Relena, I think; of everyone, she's the one who should hate me the most, but she doesn't, I think. She's just hurt. She's just scared. I hoped that in time, she'd see that would I chose was right. Now, I don't know, but that has little to do with her and more to do with me...
Noin thinks that what I did was wrong. She and Relena are cut from the same fevered cloth. Sometimes, I'll see her around campus, clinging to Zechs's arm like an old woman that can't stand on her own and needs the support of her equally fragile husband.
I don't know when I came to the breaking point of "enough is enough". Maybe it was the time after that Sunday brunch when I went into the bathroom and the toilet was stained blue from the berries in her waffles. Or maybe it was after dinner on Tuesday when she wandered into our room, her eyes glazed and solvent, and said, "I saw them. I saw them."
It didn't really matter who they were. What mattered was the four layer baked lasagna that came up, rising like bread, spilling out like a mass exodus, like the birth of Cronus's children.
The next time she did it, I was typing an AP Chem lab. My fingers were on automatic - I was processing the thoughts, and then spitting then out, a mere step further than Relena. Through the door, I heard a horrible coughing sound, like someone regurgitating their beating heart, their ripe and bulging stomach with its tender lining.
I slipped downstairs, my palms slick with anxiety, and knocked on our dorm mother's door. Warm and comforting in her flannel pajamas, we talked over tea, and I made my decision. It was like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders, only to make its permanent home on my chest, forming permanent dents in the skin. When I went back upstairs an hour later, she was downloading MP3s onto her computer. The skin around her eyes was blotchy and raised, as if someone had slapped her hard enough to send her head reeling to the side.
I felt as if she should be able to scent something different about me, to know that I had just found my boundary in all of this. Instead, Noin knocked at the door and she was carrying a bag of groceries.
As she and Relena chatted, I saw her looking at me, and our eyes met, sending a prickly claw scraping down my spine. I saw the ambivalence in her eyes, and I knew then that she would have watched her friend shrivel away into nothing with not even a guilty conscience to show for it.
Then Noin was gone, and I felt for sure that Relena would say something, anything to prove my guilt and assert her innocence. But she smiled at me, shutting her laptop, and said, "I'm tired. Let's go to bed, Meiran."
So we did.
I laid awake the entire night, sure she could hear the frantic beating of my heart, the air rushing in and out of my lungs, my pulse that skyrocketed even as hers waned into dust, into ashes.
End Part Five
Bianca
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