19 Jan 2001
See prologue for all disclaimers and general warnings.
Additional note: Okay, so it's 2+H time. Sorry, kids. Oh, yeah, and more HeeroAngst!
All previous parts can be found at GW Addiction
AC 198
I keep tabs on everyone as best I can without betraying my location. It's funny how easily I slipped back into the role of Soldier after living as a civilian for so long.
Three years later, it's not so funny anymore. It's just the way it is.
Quatre and Trowa, of course, are living happily together. That's a painful reminder of what I don't have, so I try not to check up on them too often. I know they're taking care of each other, and I'm pretty sure that's what counts.
That's what he taught me all those years ago.
Wufei is still with the Preventers. I wonder sometimes if he managed to find his peace yet.
There was a moment of weakness that I had once, where I found myself actually dialing his link.
And I let it ring.
When it connected, I cut the display and just sort of sat, staring at the dead screen, listening to a confused and half-alert Wufei asking if anyone was there.
"Maxwell?" he said, and my heart squeezed painfully.
There was a long moment of silence, and I was about to cut the connection when I heard a change in his breathing.
"Yuy?"
My mouth worked and I couldn't move.
He sighed heavily, then the line went dead.
It was the last time I ever tried that.
My aimless walking has brought me to a halt in front of a small wooden building with a cross on its apex.
I wonder if he goes to mass, if he still has that collar that he took off after a fit of nightmares one night, after I found him in the kitchen, holding the crumpled white fabric between blood streaked palms and quietly asking if I would go shopping with him in the morning.
I wonder if Hilde holds the same things sacred as he does, like I never did.
He had been looking for me. It kept me on my toes for awhile, and part of me hoped desperately that he would find me.
It was only a month after my "death", and already, I missed him more than I thought I would. But my honor -- that's what I called it then -- wouldn't let me go back on my decision. But if he were to track me down...
When he never found me, after being so close, I thought maybe he had gotten sloppy. Duo was a master of stealth and should have had no trouble finding anyone, especially his lover.
His former lover, my mind sharply adds. It still hurts, but I've resigned myself to it. Duo offered to make me human and I took it. I assume this is what comes with it.
After waiting for days that turned into weeks and then into months, and he still hadn't found me, I started to think that maybe he didn't want to find me. That maybe he had come to accept that he was better off without me, better off thinking I was dead.
It hurt. It hurt so much I couldn't function for a time after I came to that conclusion. I mean, I know it had been my idea to leave, that I thought I could save the world and save him at the same time, but he was so close to finding me -- only days behind me at one point -- that I had started to rethink things. Maybe my judgement hadn't been as sound as I had once thought. Maybe Relena was right.
Maybe it was time to find him, to shuck this pretense of honor and start over.
But he stopped looking.
So instead, I went looking for him.
AC 197
I arrived in the middle of the night and walked through the piles of mech parts, crouching every now and then to run my fingers over a piece or two. This whole place had Duo written all over it, from the random piles of different parts to the faint designs I could see etched into the dirt.
He wasn't hard to find, seemed to take life after the war for granted. His name was attached to a prominent salvage yard on L2, and I had to smile when I saw that -- it was one of the things he had always dreamed of.
A normal life.
I could hardly wait to see him, and a part of me that Duo had found and showed to me two years ago let myself dream up a scenario of our meeting.
There were warm arms and soft lips and shifting muscles under smooth skin and I could almost taste him, the memory of him making my head swim.
Standing outside his bedroom window, I felt a burning need flash through me, a need to touch him, to hold him, to hear his voice in my ear. But I could barely bring myself to look inside and see him.
I took a breath. Steeled myself. Calmed the raging nerves that shouldn't have been rising inside me.
I stepped quietly to the window and looked inside.
Duo was there, bare chest bathed in moonlight, his hair half loose and spread around him. All I could see was him, and I stared at him as though just looking at him could right everything that had ever been wrong.
More of those human emotions I wasn't used to.
I took him all in. His face was sharper, less of a heart-shape; his body was still long and lean, evidenced by the one leg thrown over the covers on one side and the ropy-muscled arm slung over his head. His skin was still so pale and I ached to touch it, to taste it, to wrap my arms around him and speak all those words I always thought were so unnecessary.
In my eagerness to see him, I was sloppy. I overlooked what was right in front of me because I didn't want to see it. I could have lived not seeing it.
The bed next to him rustled, and covers pulled down slightly to expose a tuft of dark hair. I followed the line of the blankets to the edge of a shoulder, down golden skin to a small wrist and hand that splayed across Duo's chest.
Iie.
Not wanting to look, but unable to look away, I picked out small, dark patches on Duo's skin that could only be from lips and teeth.
Onegai.
There was a faint ruddiness in his cheeks. A sheen of sweat covered his body.
And that little hand twitched on him, brushing over a nipple, drawing a slight noise from his throat.
Oh, God...
"Iie!"
Duo stirred and I stepped away from the window. There was a shooting pain through my chest that made it hard to breathe.
"Dou shite, Duo? Wat-watashi..."
He moved again and then I heard a feminine sigh. I went cold, numb, a feeling like pins and needles in my heart.
This was the price of humanity. It almost made me wish I had never found him.
"Iie." I clenched a fist and turned away, swiping an angry hand across my eyes.
I started walking back towards the main road, and then I was running, stumbling over my own feet as my body betrayed me.
I didn't stop shaking for days.
AC 198
I turn from the church. These are not thoughts I'm prepared to deal with right now.
There's an ache in my stomach that I can feel all the way down to the soles of my feet, and I wonder what it would feel like to cry.
"I wish I could cry."
"Why can't you?"
A grim smile on that small face. "It hurts too much."
It does hurt. There are times when I think I may stop breathing, because every draw of air burns painfully in my lungs.
I don't even know why I'm still on this damn colony. When Relena's meeting was rescheduled for L2 after originally having been on Earth, the first thought I had was that Odin was right, that the gods were still watching us.
I wondered what I had done to make Musubi-no-Kami turn on me.
But Odin would have said it wasn't Musubi-no-Kami's doing, rather it was Aizen-Myoo, in an attempt to teach me something about myself, to turn my seemingly boundless need of a certain American into a desire for enlightenment.
I shake my head. I know it's neither of those things, that instead, it's just the backwards way things work out sometimes. I can smell mech parts on the breeze, and I curse myself for my weakness.
I can see his salvage yard from here.
A normal life, I remind myself. Something you could never give him.
Strength was always something I prided myself on, and I suspected it was one of the things that had drawn Duo to me in the first place. Not that he was in need of any extra strength -- just that he sometimes wanted someone to lean on, sometimes needed someone else to be the stoic one, so he could blow off some steam.
I was more than willing to be that person for him.
He was never surprised when I played along with him, grunting out responses when he paused mid-babble, raising an eyebrow at all the right times. He knew when I started to enjoy our rare moments of lightness, even if it shocked me every time.
The thought brings me up short, and I wonder, not for the first time, how he could read me so easily. I really thought Dr. J had trained me better than that.
Ch'.
He just could. Maybe it was because I was ready to let someone in. Maybe it was because the first time I had gotten a good look at him -- peeking out from under a black cap, eyes sparkling with sharp-edged intelligence -- I felt my insides churn with a burning need to be something more than the soldier I was raised as.
Maybe it was because I wasn't as perfect as I had thought.
When did the cracks start showing? When did I first long for a place in someone's life? Why did I long for it? I wasn't taught to. I wasn't taught to enjoy feeling -- I was taught to utilize it like you would any other resource available to you.
But the first contact of his body flush against mine, the split-second of realization in his eyes, the exact moment when the air shifted and my feelings spun out of my grasp, and I stopped caring.
I only knew I wanted more.
The air is colder than usual tonight, in deference to the start of the new year in a few days. I wish it would snow, but I know it won't. The colony's climate controls aren't programmed for random weather.
But I do wish for snow.
End Part 7
(:./sparcck/waltz7)
