30-Jun-2000
Notes: A Broken Shards Fic. Trowa's POV.
This fic was inspired by the song 'Tears of a Clown' by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles. (Motown 1970) When I first heard this song, I immediately thought of Trowa. I also wanted to write a GW fic where one of them managed to live a 'normal' life. So I combined the two with my 'Shadows and Reflections' saga and wrote the following. This is a 1x3. Of all the GW boys, I've had the hardest time getting to know Trowa as a writer. So it's my chance to balance the scales a little and feature him for once.
My sister and I have always been with the circus as far back as I can remember. We lost our parents when Catherine was five and I was three, and somehow, during the turmoil of the war back in the Seventies, we ended up with Ziegfried's Travelling Circus. By the time I was ten, I was already a part of the team, rolling around with the other clowns during breaks and helping to sell popcorn and ice cream. When I turned fifteen, Ziegfried's had gotten big enough to play in front of the Romefellers, that's right, as in the family that owned half the Europe and probably more than a sizeable chunk of the rest of the world. And I was one of the star acts, as in the beautiful knife thrower and her clown. No need to ask who got to throw the knife and who had to stand there like a chump, while sharp shiny steel thudded in centimetres away from all the vital organs. At least Jerry, that's our manager and owner, let me work the wire as well, which helps to ease my wounded pride a little. At fifteen, you worry about everything, and I needed to feel the crowd's admiration, which they gave me in spades whenever I ventured up on the thin wire, where I felt free and filled with grace, then on the ground, where I had to play the bumbling fool in my oversized trousers. Like I said, I was fifteen, I wanted to be the centre of attention, to be respected and admired, not seen as a source of amusement and mockery. Catherine found me a little trying in those days.
I fell in love for the first time when I was fifteen. That was when I found out why I was never very interested in all the pretty girls who worked in the circus. I knew that men could fall in love with other men. It wasn't exactly a secret that Joey, the handsome Trapeze artist was keeping company with Simon, the lion tamer. I'd heard Jerry sulk every time he got grief from some small town that we toured in, over their relationship, he wasn't really upset that they were having an affair, only that they didn't go out of their way to hide it. But by the time it got to be a real problem, we were already long gone. That's one of the advantages of always keeping on the move I suppose. I hadn't been interested in any of the other boys around though, so when I finally fell in love, it came as a bit of a surprise to me too. I had heaps of practice seeing Catherine in love, it always ended in tears with her waving a tearful goodbye to the equally tearful beau, so I always thought that when I did, I'd make sure that the person I fell in love with, would be someone who would always be around. Stupid, right? Funny that, the person I fell in love with was the last person in the world that I would have picked for a lover. We didn't have anything in common or anything else going for us. And I didn't think he was the most wonderful person or suffer the delusion that he thought that about me. But when we were together, for that brief moment, I was happy, so happy that I didn't even realize how happy I really was.
I still think back to that time and wonder if there was anything that I could have done, if things had been different, whether we would still be together. I still have that one photograph of us together, I keep it locked up in my treasure box, the one that Catherine gave me when I was seven, when I was feeling kind of blue about not getting the birthday bicycle I asked for. She handed me this little wooden chest and told me that if I put my wishes in there, then one day, they would all come through. She had me believing in that box till I was eleven. Boy I was sore when I found out that no matter how long I waited, there was no way our parents could come back to us. Catherine was really upset when I refused to talk to her for two whole days after she finally convinced me that they wouldn't be back, she had only been trying to help and she was only a couple of years older than me anyway. Since then, I just got in the habit of dragging this little wooden chest around with me and popping in an odd object here and there, usually when something happened to upset me. Along with the photograph, it had the tuft of hair I had 'liberated' from Ben, the head Clown, while he was sleeping. I was a little cross with him for not letting me ride the fire engine when I was eight, the fact that I was big enough the touch the pedals just wasn't a good enough reason in my opinion. So Ben looked and looked for the culprit who cut a square patch in the middle of his bushy moustache but he never knew that it had been me. I think Catherine suspected though. There a few other things in there as well, important treasures to me, though others might have called them junk. But when I put in the photograph, I locked up the chest and kept the key on a chain on my neck, and never opened it up again. Not till after they left.
They came into our lives when I was a bit older, but not really any wiser. We, the circus that is, had just arrived in New York and I was incredibly excited, I found the huge city a bit overwhelming but mostly I was dying to get away on my own so that I could explore. It was our second tour in America but last time, we had kept to the cities on the West Coast and this was my first time in New York. I had just turned eighteen and I thought that I was more than old enough to take care of myself. Boy, life doesn't pull its punches when you screw up, even if you're just young and stupid. I met them when they ran to my rescue just before I got turned to pulp by the street toughs who got annoyed when I dissed them for being picking on this other kid. Since I was too busy spitting blood and moaning to notice their faces, and it was kind of dark, as well as smelly in that alley, I didn't get a good look at them, any of them, till we were out in the open street. I was kind of impressed by how fast they finished the gang off though, since they had been outnumbered at least two to one, and as one of them was busy looking after me, while another one shooed the skinny geek out of the alley, it only took three of them to wipe the floor with these goons. So they helped me stagger back out on the street where the passerbys, eewed and tsked as they got a good eyeful of me, all bloodied and messy, and I managed to lift my eyes finally and came face to face with myself. I think I might have survived the experience without losing too much dignity, if I didn't then turn around and see him, you know, my first love, standing next to this blond guy that I'd never seen before. So, I kind of gasped, then rolled my eyes back and passed out. So much for first impressions.
I finally came to and found myself lying on a nice soft bed, in a small room. I heard a buzz of soft noise around me and after a while, I began to separate them into coherent words, but what they talked about made no sense at all.
'We shouldn't have brought him.'
I figured I was the 'him' they were talking about and kept my eyes firmly squeezed shut while I listened for all I was worth.
'You can't expect us to just leave him there. Not him of all people.'
Whoever that soft voice belonged to was a nice guy in my book. Then, I felt a chill run down my spine when I recognised the next voice.
'We have a problem. From what I can tell, this world's technology hasn't reached the level of ours. They are still playing with Pentium chips and apparently haven't even achieved a viable space Colony yet. There is no such thing as a mobile suits or a beam rifle. And unfortunately, given the stage of their technology, there's no way we can manufacture one, even if we could access sufficient resources without being detected by the powers that be in this world. We may have to face the fact that we may be stuck here. Perhaps even permanently.'
I resisted the temptation to open my eyes and tried to understand what I had just overheard. But it made no sense to me at all.
'Heero, don't be so negative all the time. So far we managed to keep going and we can do it here too. Have you checked if they have access to nuclear energy yet?'
'You know that nuclear energy is inefficient and dangerous. What makes you think this world is stupid enough to use such a risky and unstable source of energy?'
The two speakers then went off and started arguing vociferously while I kept my eyes shut and tried not to attract any attention. I couldn't help wondering what the other three, okay, the two in particular were up to. I knew that they were all still in the room and I could feel movement around me, every now and then but the only voices were the two unfamiliar ones, who kept on tossing ideas back and forwards, insulting each other every now and then. Then I heard him again.
'Duo's right. They are using nuclear power plants. And there's one not too far from here. If we push the core to critical, we should be able to generate about as much energy as a beam rifle. The only question is whether Widget can ingest nuclear energy.'
'I wouldn't worry.'
I could now identify the voice as the one belonging to someone called Duo. He sounded very confident, kind of like how I always wished I sounded.
'If he can ingest magical energy,' I could hear an undercurrent of laughter in Duo's voice, 'then I bet he won't have any trouble with nuclear. Will you, Widget?'
'So have you heard enough now?'
I blinked and started to sit up sheepishly as a light hand landed on my arm. I looked up and saw the blond man smiling at me, sitting at the edge of the bed. The other four didn't look that surprised to see that I had been awake, and they gathered around us. I felt a bit intimidated by them and unconsciously moved closer to Heero, I felt more comfortable with him then the others, especially the one they called Trowa, who looked exactly like me. I don't know what I felt when I looked at him, except I wished that he didn't exist.
'Awww, isn't that cute? He likes you Heero.' Duo grinned impishly, though his cheer sounded a little forced. 'Why don't you ask him how he's feeling?'
Heero just grunted softly and looked me, and when I saw the polite curiosity in his eyes, that was when I first realized that he was someone else as well. I should have known better right? I mean, what would Wolfgang Heero Romefeller be doing roaming the streets of New York City? Somehow it was one thing to see a duplicate of me, I know that I'm me still, but to see a copy of someone that you loved? That really cuts deep into your guts. I felt sick. I think they understood how I felt, they'd been through this before after all, and Heero immediately backed off, allowing the blond man to take charge of me. Quatre was very patient while I cried, it took a while before I managed to calm down and I was still hiccuping a bit as we started to talk. And he told me that they were travellers from another world and that they might need my help in order to leave mine. I don't think I took in everything Quatre said, I still don't fully understand what a Gundam is for example. He asked me about me and my life, to make me feel more comfortable, as well as to get information about this world, even then Quatre was already formulating his plans to leave my world, and I told him that my name was Triton Bloom and that my sister and I were in New York with Ziegfield's. Quatre and Trowa exchanged kind of funny looks when I told them my name and Trowa just shrugged in response to some silent question from Quatre. I never found out why they reacted so strangely to my name. When I got to Heero, my Heero that is, Duo started to laugh hysterically, drawing annoyed looks from the others. He continued to razz Heero, their Heero about his parentage, or rather about my Heero's parentage, geez they made my head spin sometimes, the entire time they stayed in my world. I still don't understand why Heero being the Romefeller heir was such a big deal but then, they didn't really tell me very much about what their world had been like.
Quatre explained to me that he was concerned that if he introduced the wrong kind of technology or information into my world, that the results could be disastrous. I thought he was being overly cautious but now I'm not so sure. They were only in my world for a month and since then there's been a lot of changes, and I'm pretty sure that at least two major world shaking events had been the direct result of what they did. But I'm digressing too much now. Quatre asked me a lot of questions about my Heero, I refused to call him Wolfgang when he suggested that we try using different names to keep track of the two Heeros, after all, I had met both of them as Heero and that was the only name that I had for the boy who spent the summer with me when we were fifteen. Wolfgang Romefeller was the person who left me. I didn't want to call Heero that. I didn't tell them about the personal bits but I knew that they had guessed that Heero had been special to me from the way I kept on looking at their Heero. Since they didn't want to tell me about what their world was like, I asked them to describe some of the worlds they've been to. That sparked a lot of arguments between them. Every now and then, I would get one of them alone and encourage him to tell me about what happened in the fantasy world and the others that they'd been to. The only one who never opened up to me was Trowa. I got this weird feeling when I saw him looking at me. I knew his face so well, but his eyes, they belonged to a stranger. Catherine had always teased me that all she had to do was to look in my eyes, and she'd see what really happened but Trowa's eyes were impenetrable, not only to me I noticed. Even his friends couldn't read what he thought, though Heero always seemed to know somehow. I don't know how he managed that.
I miss having them around. I liked them and I know that Catherine liked them too. I got them jobs at the circus, though I got teased a lot by Joey who asked me how I managed to pick up so many hot looking cuties in one day. I didn't know what to do about Trowa and he seemed to understand how awkward it would be for me to explain how I managed to turn up with an identical twin, so he just disappeared, then reappeared with his hair dyed a light blond and cropped very short. The others sort of took it in stride but Duo did get kind of excited about how different Trowa looked with short blond hair. He kept on muttering about how he'd die before cutting his hair and gave Trowa and Heero funny looks. Wufei explained to me later that Heero had started out with short hair at the start of their travels. Since my Heero always had mid waist length hair, I hadn't noticed anything peculiar about his appearance. He also told me that Duo's always been overly attached to his hair and that these travels where they got a look at themselves in all kinds of different situations, not to mention hairstyles, seemed to be aggravating his hair obsession. I had to laugh. Since then, I've met my world's Duo Maxwell, except he's called Richard Darlian and he's got short hair. Richard, who can be a bit of a stuffed shirt, is very vain but he would rather die than grow his hair long and look like a girl, he told me secretly in disgust after he met Heero Romefeller and Quatre Khushrenada. He thought that they looked sissy because they wore lace and velvet and had long hair tied back behind them. He changed his mind after Quatre totalled him in a friendly match of free style boxing. Anyway, I didn't get together with my own world's version of the friends I made, until the Gundam pilots left my world. So I have to thank them for that really.
It was very exciting having them around at the circus. Trowa was even better at the wire than me and soon Jerry figured out that Heero was both very strong and agile and very, very quick at picking up all the physical skills. Within a week, I was eating my heart out while they were sent up to star in the wire act and to work out their own Trapeze routine. It wasn't too bad though, I had a lot of fun with Duo and Wufei, and we got our own act as tumblers and clowns. Duo was totally outrageous, always pushing just a little too far, even going so far as to try to edge in on Trowa and Heero's performance, except he got thrown off the swing by a very annoyed Heero and when he finally stopped bouncing on the net and got down to the ground, he got a earful from Jerry, the likes of which I've never seen before or since. He was a little more subdued after that, at least he checked to make sure that Jerry wasn't looking at him when he played his little tricks. Wufei was hysterical, a huge hit as a clown. It was the way he could be so solemn and totally serious that made the little kids laugh and laugh. I know that it wasn't deliberate, that it was just the way he was but I learned a lot from watching him. Quatre offered to help Jerry with the accounts, I found out later that between him and Heero, the circus more than quadrupled its earnings in just one day. They left Ziegfried's a lot better off then when they first joined us and I'll always be grateful to them for that. I didn't know till afterwards though that they were playing around with a lot of accounts in secret, till a long time afterwards, or that they were using the funds they borrowed from us as seed money, Quatre and Heero were involved in a lot of dealings over the net and in the stock market.
I made pretty good friends with Duo and Wufei in record time. They seemed happy to let me tag along with them, even when they were on their own business and they were never really secretive like the others. It was Duo who told me about Heero and Priest for example. He just opened up one day when we were out in the mall and after ordering a triple chocolate malt and a double decker strawberry sundae, Duo suddenly told me that Heero had fallen in love with one of his versions in another world. I'm not sure if he meant to make me choke on the tira misu but with Duo, you never know. When my eyes stopped watering, I asked him if he wanted to talk about it. Duo smiled at me a bit sadly and I think that was the first time I saw a gleam of tear in his eyes. He shrugged and said very cheerfully, too cheerfully, 'what's to tell? Heero fell in love. It was with someone who looked just like me. Except, mind you,' his voice cracked the tiniest bit, 'not me. Okay? That's what he fell in love with. A person who's nothing like me, except for the surface shell. Shit. You should know. When you look at our Heero, do you feel the same as the way you felt about your Heero?' I looked at him blankly, I wasn't sure what to say. Do I tell him that I didn't? That I wasn't in love with their Heero? Or that when I looked at Heero, I forgot about trying to sort out the difference between their Heero and my Heero and only remembered that I was with Heero? What should I tell him? I hesitated, then I knew that I had waited too long. My silence had been an answer of a kind. Duo laughed a little, though I thought it might have sounded a little more like a sob then just scooped up a big mouthful of the sundae and dropped the subject.
I made a big mistake after that. I saw Heero and tried to talk to him about what happened with Duo. Okay, so I was trying to see if anyone else could have the happy ending I missed out on. Who was it that said the road to hell was paved with good intentions? I told Heero how I had met Lord Wolfgang Heero Romefeller, except that's not who I met. I met Heero Yuy, just your average guy, okay so I thought he'd dropped out of the heaven but that was just teenage hormones. He was looking for work and interested in joining up with the circus. Heero told me, quite truthfully, that his mother had been a Japanese woman called Rei Yuy and that he had been given a Japanese middle name at her insistence and that when he ran away, he decided to use his mother's surname. He just neglected to mention that he was also the only heir to the Romefeller fortune and that his uncle was tearing the countryside apart trying to find him. That louse. Their Heero just got real quiet when I was telling him about my Heero's mom, he never said anything. I had noticed before that none of them ever talked about their families back home, I mean, wouldn't they be part of the reason that they were so determined to return to their own world? He did smile a little when I told him that my Heero had run away from home because he didn't want to marry this girl his family had engaged him to. He seemed to know who I was talking about when I said her name was Relena Peacecraft. My Heero had stayed with the circus for two months before his family finally tracked him down and made him go home. I was still sore at him for not telling anyone about our relationship but now, two years wiser, I knew that he had been, in his own way, trying to protect me. Heaven knows what his lunatic uncle, Treize Khushrenada might have done to me, if he thought that I had seduced his handsome nephew and destroyed his grand schemes of controlling Sanc Kingdom through this farce of a marriage. Not that the marriage ever took place, Heero told me later that Relena never even knew about the proposed engagement or his running away. Thank goodness for small mercies, do you know how scary that Queen can be when she thinks her pride is at stake? I'm still not sure how the Gundam pilots managed to get Quatre, my Quatre that is, control of the Romefeller Foundation in just one month but I have to say I was impressed when I found out from my Quatre who had been responsible for his father's sudden indisposition and his subsequence rise to power, after they had long gone. All I knew at the time was that, I was trying to describe to their Heero how one day I had my Heero at my side, and the next, he was gone, without a word. I think that's why I kept so close to Duo and Wufei, while they were still here, I was afraid that they'd vanish from my life, just as easily as they walked into it, and I didn't want to be left behind again.
So, there I was, just rambling on about how angry I was with my Heero and trying to think about how to broach the subject of Duo and Priest when he did it for me.
'Look, when you fell in love with this Heero, you were both only fifteen. And I'm not too sure that it was anything more than a brief infatuation. I'm not trying to say that it wasn't true love, only that you were probably both too young. You didn't even know who you were, let alone understand each other. And now you're finding it a bit confusing whenever you're near me and I can understand that. But it was different for me. I knew exactly what I was doing when I fell in love with Priest. I love Duo and I always will but he's not Priest and I'm not going to force him to be something that he's not. I respect him too much for that. Does that cover everything?'
I nodded numbly and saw Heero walk off stiffly. I felt like a prize idiot for meddling in something I had no right to. Heero had been right on all counts. I had always clung to this romanticized ideal that I had lost my true love but really what had happened was that a boy named Heero had been a part of my life for one delicious summer and was no longer. Heero and I had never mentioned love when we had been together, we barely got past holding hands and were having a lot of fun messing around with teasing body contact but that was about it. I realized I loved him after he disappeared and I found myself with this gaping Heero sized hole in my life but now I was beginning to think that maybe it had been the same for him too. And when the Gundam pilots had come into my life, I had been mesmerized by them, I wanted to be a part of their group, even more than I wanted to impress their Heero and I wanted to turn cartwheels for him. It was really disheartening the way their Trowa was always so much better at everything than I was, including cartwheels. Heero had been kind to me from the start, tolerating the way I tried to attract his attention and making sure that I didn't make an idiot of myself in front of anyone else but I now knew that I never had a chance with him. He was still caught up with this Priest guy and I decided that Duo was right, I didn't like him either, even if he was supposed to look like my best friend. Now that I've met Richard, I can understand better what it must have been like for them, running into these different people who looked just like themselves and their friends, and they've had to go through this every time they hit a new world. Though, I think that until they left and Heero Romefeller came back into my life, I never fully accepted that their Heero wasn't my Heero.
Wufei told me not to worry too much over the relationships that existed in other worlds. He's the one who told me about how Quatre and Heero had been lovers in a world he described as a dark mirror of their own. I got totally confused and we got into a lot of trouble when Quatre heard about it because Wufei forgot to mention that he had been talking about the Quatre and Heero of the world they visited, and not the two that I knew, so I jumped to the wrong conclusion. After that Quatre banned the others from talking about any other worlds that they'd been to, so I missed out on finding out what happened in the strange world where they found versions of themselves fighting a group called Galactor, talk about ridiculous, that Duo had been teasing me with. Or about what the Shadowlord actually did to Heero when he kidnapped him. When Quatre heard that Wufei had mentioned that to me, he really blew up and told him off, I don't know why. I tried to argue with Quatre but when he makes his mind up, it's made up. The Quatre in my world's just the same actually. Apparently the two had been in contact through email even though they never met and it turns out that Quatre had told Quatre (I hate saying things like that) a lot more than they ever told me, about where the world they came from and other things. Things to convince my Quatre to help the Gundam pilots to leave our world and to assist him to get the resources they needed and more. I just wish he had been as open with me. I guess a simple circus clown just wasn't as useful to their plans, though I may be being a little harsh on Quatre. Wufei never told me about their experiences in the other worlds after that, and none of them ever discussed how they planned to get access to the nuclear plant, though I knew that they had been planning something from the beginning. What I learned from my Quatre later was that part of their timing had been based on the circus and when we were scheduled to leave New York, making sure that there was a three day delay before they embarked on their own departure. I almost ruined everything for all of us, when I unwittingly caused the accident that broke Trowa's leg, four days before they left us.
I wanted to show Heero that I could be a valuable addition to his and Trowa's Trapeze act and had talked Joey into giving me some private lessons so that I could be ready. I invited all the Gundam pilots to watch as I swung into the air, Heero waiting for me at the other end, ready to catch me when I crossed over. That was what it had been about really. I wanted to be the one in his hands when the audience burst out clapping, so I told Jerry and Trowa that I had been practising my somersaults and was able to be a part of their routine, by adding a crossover where I would fly after Trowa and we would exchange our swings in a dramatic finale to the show. Jerry didn't like my idea at all. He told me that I wasn't ready but I argued with him and begged him for a chance and Duo, to his eternal regret, joined in and persuaded Jerry into letting me have a go. What Jerry didn't know was that I intended to go without the net in the act. I know, I know, it was stupid but I was young and arrogant and what made Heero and Trowa's act so special from the start was the they never used the net and I had no intention of letting them put one up just for me, when I joined them at the end. I didn't want to be embarrassed. God. What an idiot. So I talked and talked until Joey finally agreed to 'forget' about putting the net up at the end, I knew that the ground would be too dark for anyone to notice unless they were specifically watching out for it. Heero and Trowa in particular, never had a chance at the top of the tent, with all those headlights on them. So I convinced Jerry to let me have a go in public after he saw the way I flew into Heero's arms during practice, and on the night, I climbed up the rope, bathed in the white light, thinking only of the blue eyes that I'd gaze into when I made my flight. I think that Trowa probably guessed why I had been so determined to be a part of their act but he never said anything about it, not even when my adolescent crush almost got him killed. There were camera crews all around us as I went up the rope and I was sweating, from excitement and nervousness, I hadn't taken in the difference it would make in my ability to judge distance when the tent was darkened and we were only able to see the swings when the harsh light followed us.
I jumped, feeling my heart ready to burst in my chest, thinking only about how glorious it would feel when I landed in Heero's hands and then, as I made my final leap, I knew that I had made a mistake and left the swing one instant too soon. I saw Trowa go past me and fall as the swing fell short of his grasp, then lost all thought as my hands stretched out frantically, knowing that I would never be able to breach that critical couple of centimeters to Heero's waiting hands and felt my body dropping into the black space below. I remember a loud scream as someone realised that we were both falling and that there was no net waiting to catch us below. Then, in the next instant, the tent was plunged into total darkness as all the lights died. I found out later that it had been thanks to Quatre who had made a run for the leads the minute he assessed our situation. Then, I felt strong arms around me and felt the warm air stroke my cheeks and a soft grunt, even as our bodies slowed miraculously in midair. I couldn't see anything but I recognised the scent of the hair and I grabbed hold of his firm body tightly, not understanding how Heero was next to me or why we had stopped falling but knowing that somehow I was going to survive this. Then I found myself being taken upwards and being gently deposited on the thin wooden shelf of the swing, Heero's body still warm beside me. My heart was hammering like mad. The lights came back on and I saw the headlights pool on a still body on the sand below and felt all the blood rushing out of me. Heero held me tightly as I swayed and whispered, 'it's okay. He's still alive.' I nodded gratefully, tears rushing down my face out of shock and fear as the gathering bodies looked up to the waiting crowd and confirmed Heero's words. I then saw that Trowa had somehow managed to survive the long fall but that his left leg was broken. The rest of the evening was a blur, the camera crew were having fits because someone had destroyed on their cameras as well as managing to sabotage even the van where they were storing the copied tapes. Trowa was taken to a nearby hospital and did not come back until the next day on crutches, wearing a white cast. To my surprise no one seemed to have realised that Heero and I should have fallen as well. Duo explained that the human mind was like that, it just deleted any details that did not fit with what they know happened.
Jerry banned Heero from working without a net from that day on and said that as soon as Trowa recovered, the same would apply to him. He then turned to me and my knees turned to water. To my surprise, he didn't tell me off, he just looked at me, heaved a long sigh then told me that I wasn't going to go back up on the wire until I was twenty one or could show him that I wouldn't jeopardise someone else's life for a silly stunt. I knew that he was being kinder than I deserved. Catherine didn't let me off quite so lightly. She had accompanied Trowa to the hospital. She had always liked him from the first moment they met, and for some reason, he didn't seem to mind her getting all clucky, even when I thought she was being a bit smothering, and he was always very gentle and patient with her. She told me that she thought that he looked enough like me to be a twin. I knew that a different hair style wouldn't be enough to fool her sharp eyes, even though no one else seemed to pick up the resemblance. Catherine thought of Trowa as another younger brother, she tried to look after all the Gundam pilots really, and they all liked her too. She was livid with me over the accident, she knew exactly whose fault it was that the net hadn't been up and she let me know it. I think I would rather have been beaten to death, then to have Catherine pick me apart verbally until I felt like I was about two inches tall. When she finished with me, Quatre took over. I don't want to remember that bit. Suffice it to say that there wasn't enough left of me to wipe the dishes with when he left our caravan. Not even Duo was able to find the heart to console me that night, not when they didn't know how serious Trowa's condition was and though I had no idea, whether they would be able to leave my world in four days as planned. I spent the night crying my eyes out in my bed and wishing that I was dead. Yes I know, it's silly but at least I wouldn't have been yelled at, right?
That night Quatre decided that since I had ruined their plans that I would have to take Trowa's place in the mission. I wasn't told about this until two days later, when I found myself in New York, waving goodbye to Catherine and the others while the circus train pulled out, leaving the six of us on the platform. At the time I thought that we were staying in New York to have a bit of fun while we waited for Trowa to get better. I had totally forgotten that they have had their own agenda from the first day we met. Quatre also had organized a little surprise, not just for me but all of us, that day. He had tracked down Wufei in my world and had found that he was in New York as an exchange student from China. He talked to my Wufei, for some reason, he was also Wufei Chang, go figure, and he agreed to help Quatre in return for some unexplained assistance that he would receive for his resistance group back home. I had a hard time talking to my Wufei, since he didn't have a lot of patience for someone he considered to be a fool and spared no pains in letting me know his opinion of me. Their Wufei, who I kept on thinking as the real Wufei, looked a bit embarrassed whenever Wufei kept on talking to him in Chinese, deliberately cutting me out of the conversation. I was definitely feeling outclassed when Quatre and Heero showed that they also were fluent in Chinese and to his credit, Duo squeezed my hand and whispered that he couldn't understand a word of that either. I found out later that he was lying because he smacked my Wufei on the head, hard, when he abused me in Chinese during the mission. Trowa stayed in New York when we left for nuclear plant, just saying that he had something to take care of first. I found out that this meant that he organized the transport for Wufei and me to get clear of the city bounds, also managing to get me back together with my Heero at the same time. I never understood why Trowa did that for me. There were other ways he could have gotten us out of there without calling in Heero Romefeller but he did that because he knew I wanted to see Heero. I think I was kind of glad that my Heero never met Trowa. I couldn't have borne it if my Heero had fallen for Trowa.
A long time after the Gundam pilots had gone from my world, I got back in touch with Wufei again and found that he had grown kinder, to me at least, though he was still intolerant of fools. As long as I was off the list, I didn't care how he treated other idiots. He had gotten along quite well with Trowa Barton during the short time we had been together and he told me a bit about what their world was like. It turned out that they had spent all their lives waging war, especially Trowa, who had literally grown up on the battlefield. Wufei said that Trowa could talk to him because his own life in turbulent China had been harsh enough for him to understand what it had been like for Trowa. He said that the reason Trowa hadn't shared this with me is because even if I had lost my parents in war as a child, I had lead a sheltered life and hadn't really experienced what it was like to have to wage war and that Trowa was trying to protect my innocence. He also told me that Trowa had hoped that I could find happiness with the person that I loved and that he had called Heero because he thought that Heero would come if he thought my life was in danger. I felt like kicking myself when I remembered the way I avoided Trowa because he made me feel uncomfortable and got all jealous of him because he was so good at everything.
Wufei had come to see Heero because he was concerned that the Gundam pilots' influence may have changed our world too much. He had heard that the Romefeller Foundation was involved in a secret project to develop space colonies and thought that we should keep our eyes on Quatre Khushrenada. Wufei had brought Richard with him, to tell Heero about the rumours he heard in Washington about a plan to create a military dictatorship under the pretext of forming a Federation of Nations to replace the powerless UN. I just sat there and listened while the three discussed what they should do and thought about the five men who had left my world, a huge mushroom cloud left hanging behind them as they banished without a trace. I wondered if they were still alive in some other world or if they had managed to get home or if, I had to admit at last, they had only succeeded in wiping themselves from all existence in the attempt to get out of my world. Not even Quatre had been certain that their attempt to generate enough energy for Widget would be successful but they were all determined to try. I wondered if what it would have been like if they had stayed with me and the circus and we had just continued travelling. Then I looked at Heero and smiled as I held his hand and knew that no matter what happened from here on, I wouldn't have changed anything that had happened.
I had placed the white feather that I had received from Heero, the Gundam pilot Heero Yuy, in the box where I kept all my treasures. He had given it to me when we said our final goodbye and somehow I knew that it was important. Along with the photograph of the six of us, Duo, Wufei and me in our clown suits, with Trowa and Heero in their tights and Quatre in slacks and a sweater. If you looked closely at the photo, you could almost see the tear dropping from my eye behind the mask where no one could see me. A tear of happiness. I locked up the box and buried it, along with the key, under the tree where I had first seen a dark haired boy smiling at me, before he asked me if I could get him a job at the circus. I knew that this time, I would not be opening the box again.
End Part 2
Katana: It's funny but I'm getting to be fonder of the GW boys from these other worlds in the 'Broken Shards' than of their 'original' counterparts, probably because these fics are all in first person perspective. I liked 'Priest' better than Duo and I adore 'Triton'. Hope you liked him too.
Katana
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