07-Feb-2003
revised: 04-Mar-2003
Title: After The Snow, Rain
Author: Lys ap Adin
This is the fic that grabbed me by the throat and told me that
it wasn't done with me yet, not by a long shot. Being the
strong-willed, independent author that I am, I meekly bowed my
head and said, "Yes'm," and have been wrapped up in coffee cups
and mountains for the past month or however long it's been.
Many thanks go to my friends' list over on LJ, who served as
unofficial betas for all the rough drafts and rants about coffee
cups.
Notes: Shounen ai, abuse of dishware, and endangered adverbs.
POV Duo, pairing 1+2+1.
He leans against the windowsill, one elbow resting there, the hand curling behind his head, the other hand resting on his cocked hip. He does not speak.
This small cabin, one-roomed, suits him, tucked away in the hinterlands where the shuttles are only the occasional shooting star--real meteor showers are more frequent. The place is primitive, so much so that he chops the wood for his fireplace and to cook. I had to hike for half a day to get up here from the back road where I left my truck.
"You know, I got turned down for a loan because of your hidey-hole out here in the boondocks."
The words plunk out, stones dropping into a pool of stillness.
He does not turn. Does not answer.
"I was pissed. The bank thinks I have a hell of a lot more equity than I really do."
Again, nothing. I'd like to pick up the coffee mug on the table and throw it at him, right against the back of his head.
"Jesus, man, would it have been so hard for you to have created a fake name to buy this place? Did you *have* to use mine?"
He says nothing. I will be mature. I *will* be mature.
I throw the mug--at the wall next to his head.
It shatters, covering the hard-packed dirt floor with fragments of ceramic.
Now he turns, bleeding. Blood trickles from small cuts down the side of his face, from the side of his neck, from his hand.
"Your aim is off."
"I hit exactly what I wanted to hit, thank you very much."
He crouches and begins picking up the larger pieces of the ruined mug.
I lean down to help him. "You could have at least bought a nicer place with my name. Jesus. The banks must think I'm some kind of isolationist lunatic."
"I like this mountain."
He sweeps his hand over the floor, scraping up the small mug bits. Blood wells up from a hundred new cuts.
"Christ, Heero! Whadja do that for?"
He looks at me as I seize his wrist, pulling it forward, palm up. These aren't scratches, they're cuts. Wounds. Dirty, with white ceramic stuck in them. "You asshole. You have a first aid kit, right? Right?"
I drop his hand, and race across the room, but there's nothing resembling a first aid kit in the cabinets. When I turn around, he's picking up pieces again. Blood patters onto the floor like rain.
"Heero!"
I dive at him, and bowl him over. We both pick up scratches now, tussling in the dirt—-fighting, grunting and cussing and doing our damnedest to kill each other until we're exhausted, bruised, bloody messes panting on the floor side by side.
He gets up, retrieves a box from under the bed, and begins dressing my scrapes. When he is done, I do the same for him. Then we sit cross-legged in the bloody mud.
"I looked everywhere for you. Couldn't find you." My voice is quiet with all the unsaid things. "It never occurred to me to look for myself."
He smiles that quiet smile of his. "You would have thought of it. Eventually."
I pick up his hand, wrapped in gauze. His fingers close over mine, and we sit together like that.
My head aches. The snow stretches in every direction around his cabin, reflecting sunlight that stings the eyes. At night, it glows in the moonlight, so bright that it keeps me awake.
I spend hours at the window, next to him. He watches the blue shadows creep down the mountainside when the sun rises over the peak behind us, and the rose shadows as they climb back at sunset.
We share coffee out of the same dented saucepan while we watch.
"Why so grumpy?" he asks, three days in. I have turned from the window and huddled by the stove, where the fire glows in crimsons and oranges that are more forgiving than the brilliance outside.
"How can you stand it up here?" I bunch my shoulders against him.
"I like it. I like the snow."
"Fuck. I'd go crazy. Crazier."
He makes a noise, one that I can't decipher. Is it laughter?
I can't tell, and so I turn to look at him.
He is touching the window, frost blossoming around his fingertips. "I can see me out there," he says.
I go back to the window, and try to see through his eyes, laying my hand over his and placing my fingers between his. The snow drops away from the cabin, unbroken and smooth to the tree line, save where we have gone outside to fetch wood or to the privy, and, in my case, to initiate a snowball fight.
After a while, I think I begin to see. Just a little. I think.
"The snow doesn't last forever, even up here. Right?"
His hand moves under mine, the gauze scraping against my palm. He warps his fingers around mine, the thumb curving over the back of my hand. He nods. "It doesn't," he says. "Only until the rain comes."
I rest my chin on his shoulder, and we watch the snow.
He sweeps the floor daily, scraping a worn broom over the hard-packed earth. The dust goes outside, what there is of it. The floor is dark and uneven, polished by the months, or years, that he has been walking over it. If he is not careful, the dust collects in the hollows and rises in small clouds whenever one of us steps in it. I sit on the bed and watch him.
He moves through the room, moving the chair to sweep under the table, stooping to reach under the cabinets, and taking care in the corners. This is something he enjoys--the rhythmical movement of the broom, and the soft rustle of bristles against the floor.
Every once in a while he looks up, at me.
He takes time with the task, as he does with every other chore that must go with owning a home of one's own. I think he's proud of it, after the years of flop houses and always moving and never stopping or staying in one place for very long at all.
He stoops with his dust pan, and collects his sweepings. I get up from the bed and open the door for him. He dumps the pan on a snowdrift outside the door as the wind freezes my bare toes and ankles. His pants are too short for me.
He lingers in the door. "It's going to snow again."
"So soon?" It just stopped snowing yesterday morning, after two days straight.
He smiles and closes the door. "Once it begins, it doesn't pause very often." He returns the broom and dustpan to the closet. "Getting into town for supplies gets tricky."
"Town?"
"You thought cans of beef stew grew on trees?" He turns an amused gaze on me. "Even I have renew my stores sometimes."
"Oh." I turn away from him and go to the window. Somewhere below us on the mountain, my rental truck is buried under a couple feet of snow, unless someone's found it by now. Maybe they have. Maybe they're wondering where the hell I am. "I can chip in for groceries. Since I'm devastating your pantry and all."
I think that it's a sigh that I hear next. "Okay," he says. "Sounds good to me."
Of course he has a snow mobile. He likes the fast things too much to completely divorce himself from the world and things technological.
He also has two helmets. I hold mine in my hands, palms flat on either side of my distorted reflection. Of course. When I look up, he is watching me, but I don't say anything. I just wrap my braid around my head and fit my helmet over the whole arrangement. Funny, the things you never forget how to do. It is a perfect fit, this helmet that is oversized compared to his.
Of course.
We push the snow mobile out of the shed and climb on, him in front, me behind, and he starts the motor. I settle in, arms around his middle, and then we're off, winding down the mountain, through the trees, and the noise of the motor is loud in the quiet of the snow.
We fly down the mountain. We are in a town--a small, nameless town--before I expect it, and he is parking on Main Street (the only street).
I have a list and so does he, divided before we left, and we split up in the mom-and-pop general store. I get some of the dry goods, beans and flour and noodles and coffee-—all things that keep--and I pick up other things, knowing that transporting it all back up the mountain will be annoying, but worth it. Chief among these are clothes, as I'm tired of wearing Heero's too-short jeans.
Even with the additions to the wardrobe, I finish and have checked out before he's done. Waiting at the front of the store, I attract the attention of the old lady running the cash register. "You with our hermit?" she asks.
"Hmm?" She jerks her head at the aisle where he's comparing prices. "Oh, yeah."
"Guess he's not a hermit anymore, then." She smiles. "That's good, real good. We worried about him being up there alone all the time." She looks at the bundle of food and clothes at my feet. "Staying a while?"
Heero comes to the register and begins unloading his groceries into neat stacks for her to scan.
"Yeah," I say. "I'm staying."
As the cashier grins and tells me not to be a stranger, he fumbles with the can in his hand and knocks over the neat pyramid of boxes and cans. Beef stew cans roll across the floor, and I help him recover them. When we bump shoulders reaching for the same can at once, there in front of God, the old lady, and everybody else, the world tilts on its axis and we forget the can and kiss.
Making the phone calls is easy, but more painful than I expected. I would have liked some argument--just a little argument--instead of placid acceptance of my decisions.
My ego has recovered from worse blows. It will recover from this, too.
I leave the comm booth as he drops some money on the table where we ate lunch and slides out of his seat. The sky is clouding over: more snow on the way. He's right; it never stops snowing up here for long.
Packing all our purchases on the snowmobile is a challenge, even with the additional saddlebags he has hanging on either side of the motor and the hidden compartment under my seat. In the end, we purchase a hiking backpack from the amused old lady in the general store, and I tote an assortment of goods on my back as we toil back up the mountain.
I carry the groceries into the cabin as the snow begins falling and he performs maintenance on the snowmobile. The boxes and cans and packages cover the table and most of the counter space as I unpack them. "We have an embarrassment of riches," I tell him, when he comes in, shaking snow off his coat and boots.
"Yes," he agrees. He touches two of the lumpy, brown-paper-wrapped bundles. "What are these?"
"Just something I picked up. Go ahead and open them, if you want." I make a stack of cans and carry them from the table to the cabinets. I stack them in their neat rows, and when I turn around, he's holding the two coffee mugs I bought. "I figured I owed you a mug for the one I broke."
He could tell me that I didn't have to, but doesn't--just sets the two mugs down by the sink to be washed, and helps put away the rest of the groceries, and starts a pot of coffee on the stove. I wash and rinse the mugs, and when the coffee grounds have mostly settled to the bottom of the pan, we decant the coffee into the mugs and gravitate to the window. "So why were you applying for a loan?" he asks, just as if that conversation weren't days ago.
"I was going to buy something. A house. Settle down, you know?" I test my coffee, and find that it is still too hot to drink, and settle for wrapping my fingers around the ceramic and enjoying the heat as it sinks into my fingers.
"And you needed a loan to do that?" He sounds incredulous.
I laugh. "I had a fit of conscience. I wasn't going to use the stuff I stole from OZ. Make a clean start and all."
"Mm. And the Preventers don't pay enough for you to afford a house."
"Didn't," I correct him, and I am not surprised that he knows what I've been doing these past few years.
"Leave of absence?" he asks.
"No. I quit." The ego still stings over the Lady's calm acceptance of my resignation.
There are many things we could say to each other now. I could ask questions that he might answer--why he disappeared for so long, how he could have known that I would find my way here, why he bought the mountain--and he could ask me what the hell's been wrong with me that it took so long to find my way home, and I would spend hours trying to explain.
"They wanted me, too." The admission floats in the air between us. "But I turned them down. I wanted to ask you to come with me then, but you weren't ready."
The coffee has cooled off some, and I take a drink of it. "No, I wasn't. Why did you turn them down?"
He takes a long time answering. "I was tired," he says finally.
Tired. Yes. Tired. There it is, the reason it was so easy to let go and stand at this window watching the snow with him.
He turns worried eyes on me. "Is this selfish?" he asks.
I would like to say no, unequivocal and final. "Maybe. But I'm too tired to care anymore." I drink my coffee. "And maybe we won't be tired forever."
Some tension goes out of him and he leans into me. He looks out into the snow as it piles up around our cabin, sipping at his coffee, while I slip my arm around his waist. We stand like that for a long time, until we are ready for other things.
--end
Criticism welcomed with open arms.
(:./lys/snow)
