31-Aug-2001
Title: Short
Author: TB
Category: Vignette, POV
Rating: R
Pairing: 2+1
Warnings: Swearing
Feedback: If you really must;
Disclaimer: Til further notice, ^_~ (right) GW belongs to someone else, but I'm not profiting from this illegal use, so keep your knickers on.
Notes: This is an angry bitter bit. It is NOT fluffy or happy, and I don't want to ruin anyone's day, so
that's a warning. :)
I'd always hoped one day I'd grow up a little.
Seriously. Up. Vertical. I mean I can rationalise and say it was really helpful most the time to be short. I can hide easier. I can fit into little holes better. My feet never hang off the edge of the bed. I don't have to duck under doorframes and I'll be the last one in a crowd to get hit by lightning.
But I always wanted to be tall.
All my heroes were tall. Solo was tall, and if he'd lived he might have been a frickin' giant. Father was tall, or at least impressive. Sister was pretty tall too, come to think of it, for a woman. J.R. Ewing on *Dallas* was tall. He was the mack. Money and women and height. Heero grew up tall.
But I'm not tall, and I can live with it. I just feel a little wistful, sometimes. I can remember years ago when I looked at my old partner and realised I was eyeing his chest, not gazing at his chin anymore. I can remember the first time he patted me on the head like a little kid, and how I hated it. I can remember the only time he hugged me, the day before Relena Peacecraft married that English guy, and I ended out crushing my nose in his armpit.
But you know, I was used to those little reality bites. I'd been enduring quite a few popping bubbles over the years. Just little nips on the behind of your delusions, and every time, I felt a little more diminished. The height started to matter when I didn't have anything else to make me feel big.
I've been in love with Heero for what seems all my life. I'm not a subtle person, and so it wasn't very long before even my oblivious friend was uncomfortably aware of it. Not to say I ran around leaving him "notsosecret admirer" flowers and trying to get him into bed with me. I'd never do that and anyway, it would have been too unbearably humiliating to try. He doesn't love me back. There's a lot of affection there, built over the years, but I would never say anything to him about it. He just doesn't love me.
I can remember when I gave up and admitted that I was going to be one of those "unrequited" lovers.
And it's okay to tell yourself that you can be content with the crumbs. The rare moments of one-on-one at a diner on a Tuesday night after a decent day's work. The occasional hand on your shoulder when he leans over to get a doughnut or a Christmas card one year out of five and you get so thrilled he thought of you at all, because you remember every year and every birthday and every everything and you always get disappointed...
If you didn't have the crumbs, you'd be running on nothing and you can't just put all that emotional investment in the garbage and let the anonymous men take it away in the morning. I can't just let it go. I don't want to try and stop loving him, because I love him.
I do that. I need that one person, that one "perfect" person to invest everything in. It's not like obsession, really; just that it's too selfish, maybe, to put it all in me. Or too lonely. I'm terrified of being alone.
I don't really get a lot of satisfaction from the Preventers. I was never a true believer in peace and when the war ended, I'd figured I'd payed my due and I could go-- but I didn't have a home and so when Heero asked, I took that and wrapped my heart around it and that was a mistake. But I never did learn to walk away from my mistakes and so year after year I take my New Year's bonus and go home to a flat and whatever faceless roommate lives there dicking around with his girlfriend and I think about buying a ticket this year and getting out, buying a fast car or a dog or a whore, something. And January 2, I go back to work and somehow slog through.
I'm thirty-four. Thirty-four isn't sexy anymore, isn't young-ish anymore, isn't fun or zippy or easy anymore. It's midlife crisis, midlife depression, midlife, middle, middling, muddled and muggy. It's tired and lonely.
I hate being alone, and I'm not strong enough or smart enough to admit that I am, that I am lonely, and leaving could fix it, if I could just *start* *over*.
Back during the war I'd been the best of the best. An elite, for once, instead of one of those millions of homeless and starving, one of those millions of orphans and one of those millions of helpless clueless numbers on a chart. All my pride had been wrapped up in that. In those years of training, the years of math and simulators and survival and perfect scores at the shooting range. I wasn't a Wufei-- he actually WANTED to be back with the nameless and ignored of life. He was the elite because he'd been born that way and it was something he was expected to do. Quatre did it because he couldn't even imagine, in his innocent and benign fashion, being anything but. Trowa might be more like me, but I'll never know, since he'd never talk to me and I'd never work up the nerve to ask.
Heero was elite because he was just that good, and he couldn't be a number on a chart unless he was dead, deaf and blind.
After the war, suddenly we didn't need elite. Suddenly everyone was equal again and everyone was part of that big happy Peacecraft family and my kind of elite was out-of-fashion. Back in that feeling of pride I had I could be the better person and say good-bye to Shinigami and shake hands with Quatre who was suddenly not my grubby, sweaty and bloody war buddy but a teenager with a fortune and future. I could even talk about the scrap yard and Hirde like it meant something, and maybe it would have, if it hadn't all fallen apart without the glue of the war to hold it together.
No, it makes sense if you think of it the way we thought of it then. In war, there's a... desperation to everything. You pick up a carrot in the grocery store and it's not a funny looking orange vegetable, it's a God-damned *carrot* and what if you never hold one again because a bomb gets into the wrong hands and you're dead tomorrow? You meet someone and they're so much more precious because neither of you will be breathing tomorrow and so you don't notice so much things like compatibility because you have to live in the NOW because the NOW might be gone tomorrow-- you sleep with someone you don't really love because you're both scared and maybe then there's a baby and then there's an abortion because who would bring a child into this horrible world and then when you're older and you haven't called Hirde in longer than you can remember you do remember and you think, she was pretty, she was really pretty and I bet she grew up to be a beautiful woman, you think, Jesus, if I'd known it would all be over in a year, in just a few more months, we never would have gone to the clinic and I'd be a father and I'd be driving my kid to baseball games and birthdays-- God.
Pop. There go my walls, my illusions, one by one.
You wake up one day in your closet-sized office-- not
the one with the window down the hall like you asked
for a few years ago and someone else always got it--
sitting at a desk with a load of paperwork that
ultimately means nothing and a microwave dinner
dripping cheese sauce on your tie and that damn light
flickering, what the hell is the hold-up on that
work-order can't I have a god-damn working light! and
you cry. You cry over not having a corner office with
a window and the cheese sauce and the electricity but
you're really crying about not calling Hirde in years
and Heero down the hall, he knows you love him still
after all these years and out of kindness because he
does like you, at least, at least he never flaunted
those others at you and are you really this pathetic?
But you are, and you cry and you pray that no one
hears you because you couldn't bear it, you just
can't
bear
it
And when you finally collect what is left of your dignity and your calm and you feel a little better for having gotten that out of you, the tissues are on the top shelf and you're too fucking short to reach them.
I don't sleep very much at night, lumpy mattress and television too much of a distraction. I think about calling Heero, I memorised his number like it was going to be etched on my heart; I think I could say, safely on the other end of a wire somewhere connected to a doodad connected to a man who is still that gorgeous manic boy in my mind-- think I could say, Heero, I love you. I love you and I just need to say it so I can end it.
But I'd make him butcher me. I'd make him say he doesn't love me like that, will never, could never, I would make him say there's someone else, Duo, I would make him say that maybe sometime we should have coffee or something and it would all be okay (translation: I don't think I'll be able to meet your eyes tomorrow), and then when he finally hung up, because I wouldn't hang up first, I'd sit up all night and repeat everything he'd said until I was standing on my balcony wondering if it would hurt to fall all that way.
I can't imagine what I'm living for, but I don't want to die. So I lie in bed and hope for re-runs and rub that sore shoulder I got from sleeping on this incredibly lumpy mattress and forget to think.
I get up in the morning and I shower and I call the barber because the braid is too damn long and anyway I don't remember why it was so important to me (I'll forget to go to the appointment), and I'll brush my teeth which are still white and straight as ever despite all the sugar in my diet. I'll put on the same black socks I've worn for years and the same white briefs and the same white tee shirt and black pants that are starting to get a little tight around the belly and the grey dress shirt that makes me look washed-out and the Preventers jacket I never took pride in.
I go to work and I smile and say hello, good morning, you look great today, cut your hair? how're the boys? is this fresh milk? and end out sitting at my desk and cursing because the system is down again.
Waiting for my spreadsheets to be accessible I'll fool around on the GLOBLWEB and join a gym or buy a three-hundred credit leather arm chair.
Look up and see Zechs Marquise in my door looking at me.
He comes and looks at me sometimes. Oddly, I think he cares. Sometimes we talk a little bit, sometimes he just waits until I see him and then he smiles at me and leaves. He's not in love with me or anything. He's just a man who has probably been where I am, frustrated with the office, with life. He's just-- nice. The kind of guy who will pretend he didn't hear you crying and reach up and take down the tissues for you, as if you only wanted them so you could dust off your printer.
Sometimes I wonder if I was Heero's partner because I was, or if he just let me be because I wanted it so much. He didn't need me. He got along fine without me when I wasn't there. At those times I wish he'd never let me near him. I don't know if I'd be a different man at thirty-four if he'd never allowed me near enough to fall in love, but without knowing, I can still wish for what I don't have.
Don't have my heart. Don't have a lot of heart for anything, really, even the heart to change my attitude.
Don't have a life.
Don't have the inches to make a shot over his head, like I used to be able to, at the company game. He just grabs the ball out of the air and runs off with it without looking back to see me seething, though in all fairness it isn't really anything to do with him minus the lack of sensitivity to my notsosecret misery. Not his fault he's tall. Not his problem. Not even his duty to remember I hate being shown up, because he *doesn't* *love* *me* and he doesn't owe me jack shit.
At the end of the game, Zechs Marquise, the Jolly Green Giant to my David the Gnome, there at the end to smoke a cigarette with me and make small talk about the weather. He's going on a trip with the wife and his teenage money-sucking kids and wonders if I'm interested, they're inviting Noin's cousin and wife too, so it would be a good group of adults while the kids ran around and spent more money.
While I'm wandering around in their picture-perfect cabin on the lake I hear the cousin ask who I am. I don't bother to listen for Zechs' answer; I'm just a man who when I was a kid used to be somebody almost famous.
Merry Christmas, Heero.
I didn't like any of the cards at the store, and in the end, I didn't get him one. It wouldn't have mattered if I did, because he took Christmas off and went on vacation.
After all. We're just two people who used to know each other, back when all that shit was going down. But we're grown up now. And we can't keep holding on to those things that used to matter so much when we were kids, when there was a war, when we were going to die tomorrow.
I might put in another work order, or ask again for the office with a window. I might go to a bar and take the first person who comes, if someone comes-- I'm thirty-four and no prize, but I'm handsome enough and I can pay for a beero or two, or a cab ride around the city. There might be sex and it might be good, like something at the edge of your memory that's a pleasant surprise to be remembered, and there might be breakfast in the morning and suddenly my life might pick up.
Christmas Eve I got a call in the office. Merry Christmas, Duo. See? I didn't forget. Wish you were here, love Heero, PS could you feed my goldfish? You know the address.
Fuck you, Heero Yuy. All my life, falling just those few inches short, my whole life just short of content, of easy, of simple.
Duo Maxwell, and the rest falls
short.
The End
(:./erin/short)
