05-Apr-2000
Disclaimer: Gundam Wing and the G-boys are someone else's property. I'm just
renting them.
Hi hi! Here's a fic--but wait! Don't skip past this part and start
reading! READ THIS WARNING FIRST!
Okay. This came to me last night. I wasn't so sure I should post it,
'cause it puts a semi-unhappy ending on the nice little 3x2 I was
writing, the Nanashi Chronicle and untitled fic that followed, which
was *supposed* to be a "happy ever after" for the couple. Well...
Here's the deal. If you liked the ending to that, then you may not
want to read this. It concentrates on Duo's relationship with Hirde,
which develops outside his relationship with Trowa; if you think Duo
and Trowa belong together, you won't like this; if you think Duo and
Hirde belong together, you will (well, ideally) like this.
I'm going to stop there; I'm digging myself into a hole. If you do
decide you want to read the products of my diseased mind, then please
FEED ME! I'm starving! (j/k) Thanks for
reading!
"I'm going to pop the question," I said cheerfully, to the little old lady sitting next to me on the bus. "We've been serious for almost three years. I know it's a long time, but there were-- other things--in the way. You know, on Earth, the average family has 2.5 kids and a dog. I'm not into dogs, but I'd like kids, you know, in round numbers though. Look, here's the ring. What do you think?"
The lady snorted in her sleep and fell against me when we hit a bump.
"That's what I thought, too," I told her, and fell silent.
I was scared shitless.
In a very, horribly, short half-hour, I was going to meet Hirde at a resturant uptown. I'd told her to dress nice. I think she knew what I wanted to ask her; I've been working myself up to it for a while now. It's fair. It's time. More importantly, it's right, because I really do love her, and the best way to show her that is to choose.
Trowa's going to be at the resturant, too.
It's been seven years since he first kissed me. I'd had the regular reaction--if you've seen Trowa, you understand why I let him do it, and why I wanted him to do it again. But he didn't pursue it. Or me. Not for another two years. Then he found me on L2, living with Hirde, and we made love in a tree, and I felt something that was-- hell, call it magical. I'd been waiting to feel it for my entire life.
And he left me.
Oh, he came back. But he had a life on Earth, and however fascinating I was, he didn't leave that life. For every time he came back to me, I bled a little more inside, knowing that eventually he'd start to talk about the price of tickets at the space port or the circus anniversary party--anything, any excuse to pack his bag and walk out of my door. Angel, he'd called me, a painted saint. I felt damn well human. I wanted him, I needed him. He wasn't there. And then... Hirde *was*.
We had a baby. It was a little girl. She was stillborn.
All Trowa had to say was, "You got her pregnant." Her--Hirde. No comment for the tragedy, no condolences for the life that had grown in my lover's womb, and never seen the face of her mother. It was typically Trowa. He said that, those words designed to hurt me, calling me from Heero's home.
I think I made my choice then, but I didn't know it right away. I still loved him too much. The seeds were merely planted. I grieved for my lost child, and I grieved with Hirde, because Trowa seemed disturbed by my suffering and ignored my tormented depressions. At night I went to him, to his passion and the ecstacy I always experienced in his arms, but in the early hours of the grey dawn I rose and left him sleeping as I walked with Hirde, barefoot on the withered L2 grass and holding tightly to her hand in mine, in perfect understanding.
Over a period of three years, I began to number my priorities. Trowa's infrequent visits were not longer so close to the top of the list.
The bus rolled to a stop, and I arranged the little old lady against the seat cushions so she wouldn't fall over when I got up. I disembarked, and began the hike up the block. My step was firm. Now that the choice had been made, I felt in every pore of my body its correctness.
Last year, Trowa actually brought Heero with him when he came to L2. I was completely dumbfounded by that lack of sensitivity. For someone so smart--! It was the worst week I've ever known in my life-- and when you consider who I am, you understand the scope of that statement. They'd stayed in the tiny cellar room of my dingy little shack, politely refraining from intimacy within our thin walls. Trowa kissed me in the kitchen, and Heero saw and said nothing. Clearly, he knew about us--our affair? Our what?--in the same way that Hirde knew, placing no blame, perhaps knowing, as only Trowa and I seemed not to, that whatever had brought us together had passed, and the reunion was only habit.
I'm not a modest person. I know that there's something about me that makes people, women and men, want to touch me, taste me. Cheaper whores need rouge and fancy clothes to polish that something. I'm not cheap.
Trowa has seven years' interest run up. Today, I'm collecting. The price: the illusion of our shared passion. The idea that his trips to L2 were some kind of escape from reality, a special time out of time which the world couldn't touch--a universe peopled by two. The price is me.
And after I've collected from Trowa, my complex and eery and beautiful Trowa, I'll put all that mess in front of Hirde, my lover and my love, and it will be hers for the asking. I've always believed in making Them pay for what They take.
No charge, Hirde.
I smiled at the both as I sat down at the table. Over the years, we've formed a pattern, a familiarity with each other--we're family. No more, as of today, no matter what happens.
Trowa said, "It's good to see you again. Do you realise this is the first you've ever asked *me* to come to *you*?" He nibbled at a stalk of celery, his eyes laughing as only his can do, light dancing in the flat hard agate irises, just barely reflecting the smile on his face. "Catherine sends her love," he added, "and so does Heero."
That, as the saying goes, was that. I didn't want to wait. I took the small box out of the pocket of my khakis and put it beside Hirde's placemat.
Trowa looked on in confusion as Hirde opened it, glanced inside, and calmly closed it again. She glanced up at me, and smiled; that was all I needed. I kissed her hand and ordered a tuna melt.
Are you suprised by the lack of romance? You shouldn't be. After all, you know me, don't you, whom Trowa calls the Rembrandt child, who once called himself Shinigami, God of Death, who was called by law a prostitute and by all rights an adulterer. Hirde understood the significance of a ring, I'm sure, and the romance would come later, in the warmth of each other's bodies after lovemaking, when we lay on our rickety bed beneath the wide window of our bedroom and watched the rising sun.
My sandwich came. I ate. Trowa watched me, slowly growing angry, smart enough to figure out what had happened and not smart enough to figure out why.
The bill came and I paid, for all of us; then I stood and Hirde joined me, tucking the ring box into her purse and waiting for me to finish what I'd begun with all the patience she'd had since the start, this fiery, lovely, incredible woman who had trusted me and loved me and bided her time for me.
Trowa rose very slowly. "That's it?" he asked, deceptively quiet. I sensed the fury seething in him. "You have nothing to say?"
I took his hand, and I stepped toward him. I kissed him, with all the love I'd ever wanted and tried to give him, with the taste of fish and beer in my mouth and the bitterness of his anger taking all the sweetness of our past and corrupting it. Immeasurably saddened, I stepped away from him, and took Hirde's hand: for a moment I held them both, epitomized seven years in seven seconds...
...and then I let him go.
I put my arm around Hirde's waist, and together we left the resturant. I didn't look back.
As we got on the bus to make the trip back home, Hirde said only, "Thank you, Duo Maxwell."
Trowa didn't think in symbols. Heero, perhaps, would have understood the metaphor of my callous leave-taking; but it wasn't Heero, which might almost have been easier, though of course Heero *was* involved, wasn't he? Like Hirde, he had watched from the sidelines as his lover dicked around with another man. The great fascination, the Impulse, the Urge that was Trowa and I, he'd felt nothing of it--but he'd understood, probably far better than either of us. Heero, like Hirde, would finally have a closure of our-- affair? Whatever. It was over.
Do you see? Do you see why I walked out on Trowa the way I did, without a word?
He never told me he loved me. He never asked before he came, just as he never asked me to come to him. He just showed up at the door, and left when he was ready. He never told me why he wanted me, never explained why he liked the feel of my hair or the colour of my eyes. There were no words for the beginning. Do you see why I had no words for the end?
It would be as if it had never existed--Trowa and I.
I looked at Hirde, my black-eyed, pretty lover, mind and heart matched in strength and her smile tempered with all that had passed us by. I loved the curve of her cheek, the soft white swell of her breasts beneath the pale green of her dress, the rounded muscle of her thigh resting against mine. I loved her forebearance, her courage, her unswerving loyalty. I loved her.
I squeezed her hand, which I had not let go of since the restaurant. "Forgive me," I whispered.
She touched me gently. "Always, my dearest one."
For all intents and purposes--this is the real beginning.
The End
(:./erin/nanashi3)
