14-Sep-2004

Title: My December [Angst 2004]
Author: CleverYoungThief
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Angst (Duh.) Also mention of death.
Pairings: past 1x5x1, 2+1+2
Archive: GWA
Genre: Angst / Heero POV
Timeline: After Endless Waltz
Spoilers: None.
Disclaimer: Don't own 'em. Don't sue. College kids are like L2 kids; we got nothin'.
Note: *points at pairings* Dammit, Mally... (Also, I know this is posted in the Contest forum too, but I initially wasn't going to enter it at all. So here it is in GW Fanfic forum, in case anyone misses it. I find it hard to remember to check the Contest forum myself... )

This is my December
this is my time of the year
This is my December
this is all so clear
This is my December
these are my snow-covered trees
This is me pretending
this is all I need

And I'd give it all away
just to have somewhere to go to
give it all away
To have someone to come home to...
      --- Linkin Park, My December

My December by CleverYoungThief

December 2nd AC 203

Wufei would think this is so... foolish.

I walk up and down the tinseled aisles, trying desperately to keep people from touching me. I hate it when people touch me. At least... people that don't know me. There are people everywhere here, so many that I can't keep track of them and try to shop at the same time. Although why I'm shopping, I have no idea. I guess because it's just what people are supposed to do during Christmas. At least, that's what Duo always told me.

So I look at all the decorations, cheerful and garish and Christian. This is what normal people do, I tell myself. They cook large meals that are entirely too large for their families-

::waste of rations::

-stop it, people don't need to ration things anymore-

::unnecessary::

-they're nice to each other, maybe only for this time of the year, but... they forget the fighting, the violence-

::They don't deserve to forget!::

-and this time of year, no matter what colony you're on, they make it snow-

::like with the girl, the girl and the dog::

-people are staring-

Someone coughs behind me, politely asking me to move aside, but it sounds as loud as a gunshot in my ear. I whirl around on the person, a young woman with two children in tow, one standing next to her cart, the younger one sitting in the top of it. They gawp at me with frightened awe. I don't know what they see, but it scares them.

It scares the mother too, obviously. She mutters something about soldiers and goes to the next aisle. A normal person wouldn't have heard it, but I did.

I hear the child, too. "Mommy, what's wrong with that man's face?"

"I'm don't know, sweetheart. Shhh. It's not polite to talk about people." (Not even soldiers, I could hear in her voice.)

I turn away, fingers reaching up to touch the black eyepatch over my right eye. I hate being blind on one side. But I don't know why I care so much. I've been emotionally blind my entire life. At least the missing eye shows what I had been... and what I've lost.

I glance back at the little girl, who is being taken away by the hand by her mother, somewhat forcefully. She's gaping back at me with a mixture of terror and awe, and I think only children can have expressions that are that openly genuine. I try to smile for her, put her at ease, but I can't.

Then I see the expression on the mother's face as she drags her daughter away from me. Terrified. She's terrified of me. And I feel a hate so sudden and bright it seems to scorch me.

He died for you. He died so you can play "Oh Come All Ye Faithful" on the radio and give out presents and bake your fucking turkey. He died for you!

Swallowing hard, I turn back to the display of Christmas bulbs. I already have lights. I pick out a box of bulbs that are bright green, and then another box that are arterial red. From what I've researched, these are tradition colors for this holiday.

Someone shrieks, and I instinctively lower into a crouch, hand shooting to my hip. No weapon. No Preventer badge, either. Only Preventers are allowed to carry arms now.

Another man further down the aisle from me does the same thing. Eyes narrowed, body a taut quivering line of muscle, hand at the hip where there had once been a holster.

But the shrieking is only a teenage girl. And it isn't shrieks of pain or fear; it's laughter. Something that none of us is quite used to, yet.

It's only been a few years, after all.

She is riding the shoulders of a boy her own age as he jogs down the center aisle. There are fuzzy brown antlers on her head.

"Jacob, let me down! You goof!"

I meet the eyes of the man down the aisle from me, and he gives me a nod. It's a recognition, on his part. I wonder which faction he had fought for, and nod back.

I finish up and push my cart to wait in the long line for the cash register. I hate waiting in line. I always feel like I'm being scrutinized, out in the open, vulnerable. I check to make sure (again) that I know where every exit is, that no one around me is armed, then close my eyes and try not to think about all the people lined up on either side of me, especially the ones I can't see.

The cashier-a young, fairly attractive girl-knows me. She's seen me before. She greets me prefunctorily, knowing I don't like talking that much, but her eyebrows raise slightly when she sees the Christmas decorations. I think she's as surprised as I am over those. She's used to seeing my usual staples of ramen, green tea, and Chinese microwave dinners.

They don't taste anything like his cooking, those dinners, but they help me remember. They taste like nuked shit, but I eat them anyway. For him.

She checks me out, and I take my few plastic bags of groceries, heading into the winter chill in nothing but a Preventers windbreaker.

Une hasn't accepted my resignation. She just thinks I need time. I wanted to ask her if she thought she would have been able to function as normal if she had seen the death of Treize, but I did not. She gave me the month of December off, to think on my decision. She expected an answer... a different one than no, by her tone... by January.

You're too young to give up, she told me.

And I was too young for war, I replied. It didn't stop me from becoming a killer.

She didn't know what to say to that.

My December. My last December.

I hope it doesn't snow.

December 14th AC 203

I'll be glad to be gone. It's nice to have a mission again. A place to go. Seventeen more days.

Sometimes, it seems like a blessing, to know that my December is almost half way over. But I've heard it described, when one knows one is going to die, that life becomes vibrant, everything new and wondrous. No life. No death.

I don't feel anything like that. Ever since he died in my arms, the others have tried to form a shielding boundary around me. As if we are a magic circle, the five of us (four, four now) and anything in the circle is sacred. Protected.

But it didn't save him.

Eventually, I found a way to escape them. To slip out of their protective embrace. Because I can't stand to see them anymore. They remind me of him.

Anyway, I might not feel what I'm supposed to be feeling, but I feel something. At least I still feel like myself, most of the time. Even when I'm just sitting around my spacious apartment, stirring miso on the stove-top or drinking tea in the rumpled armchair by the bay window, I still feel like myself, even though he's gone. The bed seems too big for just one person. I sleep on the couch now.

Most of the time, I can still feel.

The rest of the time, I'm just wandering in the snow.

Sometimes, I think it might have been better if we had gone our separate ways, instead of coming together like we did. But then I think about all the evenings I had before the mission that destroyed whatever was left of me in a flurry of bullets, the mission that took both my eye and my lover.

Lover, because that had been what he was. I can't think of him as anything else. Partner, ally, comrade... no. Lover.

They were evenings at home watching sitcom reruns, tangled on the couch. Evenings reading silently, side by side. Having sex in the middle of the living room, every groan and caress like some distant pain we erased from our souls like a flaw in a piece of glass.

Wanting to forget that, the only small pieces of beauty in the bloody darkness that has been my life to this point, makes me feel cheap. Dishonor, he would say. I dishonor his memory by thinking such things. I try not to. I didn't always understand his concepts of justice and honor, but I always tried to uphold them. For him.

I listen to the soft Christmas carols on the radio as I unwrap the boxes I've bought, carefully winding lights around the modest tree I put up in our living room. Then I put on each of the brightly colored glass bulbs, wishing he could see them. I think he would be proud of me for trying, at least. But I could only try for so long.

I couldn't be alone. Not again. Not like before.

We fought the night before it happened. I don't even remember why. But we were both so hardened... so proud. Neither of us would apologize. We went to the mission the next day, barely speaking to each other.

I should have apologized. I know that now. But I never got the chance.

He was crawling towards me, after it happened After they ambushed us. One of my eyes was blinded by blood-I didn't realize until after the med-techs got to us that the eye was gone. I may have been half-blind, even then, but I saw him.

One side of his head-the left side-still looked okay, but the left side was a ruin. One black eye-bewildered but still fierce and unblinking as a hawk's-peered out at me between clumps of bloodied raven hair. Pieces of his skull were flecked across the shoulder of his uniform. I remember that very clearly.

I wish I didn't.

I put my arms around him, holding him still. It was the last time I ever held him.

"Yuy... get out... "

"Don't talk."

"..Get safe... "

"Shhh... .Wufei."

But I don't want to remember that.

The two of us never celebrated Christmas. I only have memories of Christmases that came before, before I met him. I remember Christmas during the Occupation of L1 and the time of rations, when people were lucky to have get canned cranberry sauce with their Christmas dinners and the luxury items that composed most of the gifts had become black market. Colony rebels ran them through the blockades, and they were called heroes. It was the year of the girl and the dog. It was the year of my first snow.

I remember Christmas in training for the Wars, frozen in a foxhole, scared and shivering, sharing the last rumpled pack of cigarettes with a comrade that had a number, not a name. I remember I only smoked the cigarettes to keep warm as I wished for a home and a family I did not have.

I have watched so many people die. People I could have loved, or even hated, if I had been capable. Each year, every time it snowed, I paused and remembered the list of people I have killed. Every year, the list got longer. I never forgot. Not a single year.

I'm glad it's my last December. I can't imagine what kind of future I'll lead, with no family, no friends, just watching the seasons of my colorblind life pass through the window, counting the days with nothing to look forward to.

Now my days pass slowly. Falling snow.

I sit down at the kitchen table, and stare silently at my sad little tree crouched in the corner. The songs on the radio all fade together into a white blizzard of audio static in my mind. I stare at the tree, devoid of gifts, and I remember.

I touch the gun sitting on the table, run fingertips over its lethal metallic gleam. I pick it up briefly, testing the weight of it in my hand, then set it down and stare out the window. It's already snowing, even though Christmas is over a week away.

Seventeen more days.

December 25th AC 203

Six more days.

"Merry Christmas, Yuy," I whisper to myself as I slowly wake up, getting off the couch. My joints feel stiff with the cold, as if the marrow had been replaced by lead.

No one suspects what I'm planning, I'm sure of it. The pistol on my kitchen table is a solemn promise. He died in October, but I still feel like I'm walking in some kind of dream. I walk, I talk, I answer the phone, I go to the grocery store, I sleep. But it all feels disconnected from me, as if I'm watching it all from a distance.

I check my email this morning. I hadn't checked it in weeks, and the one message in my inbox is a week old. Duo had written me.

Heero -

- Duo

I delete it. I make a cup of green tea, and sit at the table.

I watch it snow. And I look at my gun.

Six more days.

Somehow, that's the moment it hits me. It isn't a mistake that can be fixed, or some dream, like the ones I sometimes have with the girl, that I can wake up from. He really is dead. And even the gun can't change that. Not in the end.

I remember seeing him lying across the bed, with his hair down. An oiled creature of muscle, onyx, firelight. His chest was broad and bronzed, nipples as hard as small mountains. He was wrapped in shadows, lit only by the beside lamp. I saw him lying there in nothing, eyes beautiful and black and fierce, spread across plain cotton sheets, and he seemed untouchable to me.

But I touched him anyway.

What are you waiting for? he said.

My last December or not, I'll never have another one with him.

I cry then. I lay across the table, cross my arms over my face, and cry.

I'm almost asleep again, caught in the twilight of grief, when someone knocks on the door. I tense instinctively, grabbing the gun. Not for me, not this time. I've never had anyone come to the door, not in the last two months.

I stalk up to it soundlessly. The person there knocks again, harder, and the sound is almost panicky. Carefully, I unchain it and throw the door open, gun still in hand.

It's him. Duo. His hair is short, now, something that comes as a terrible shock to me, and I don't know why. He's cut it off at the chin, feathering it in choppy layers. It's tucked under a forest green toboggan now. There's an almost obscenely cheerful scarf around his neck, covered in snowmen. His arms are full of gifts, covered in metallic paper. They glitter, even under the falling snow.

He takes one look at my tear-streaked face, the gun in my hand, and drops the gifts. Something in one of them shatters as it hits the cement threshold of our apartment. My apartment, I correct myself mercilessly. I live here alone now.

His arms are around me before I can let out a sound. I know how I must feel in his arms, like a bundle of iron and sticks, but I also know, somehow, that he doesn't care.

We stand there, in the pile of crumpled gifts, in the falling snow. Frozen. His face is buried against my bare neck, and I can feel his tears against my skin, slow and warm and wet. He's shaking against me, shoulders shuddering, and I want to hug him back, to comfort him the way he's tried to comfort me, to show him that I'm all right, but I can't.

I'm not all right.

Because Wufei is dead.

I still can't say his name out loud, but finally, now, I can remember him. I can add him to my list of names. But he will never be a name engraved in black memorial marble to me. He will always be green tea on cool autumn afternoons, Sun Tzu and The Art Of War on our worn flea market couch, a red ribbon marking his place.

Duo doesn't speak as he pulls back and takes me by the hand. He takes the gun out of my other hand like it's a poisonous animal, setting it carefully on the kitchen table. He leads me into the apartment, closing the door behind him, leaving the fallen gifts on the doorstep.

We somehow end up in the bedroom. He undresses me like I'm a child, and turns down the cover of a bed I haven't slept in in over two months. He motions for me to lay down, and I do. I watch him, and I don't understand what he's trying to do. Part of me doesn't want to.

His hands are shaking as he shucks off the snow-dusted scarf and hat, his jacket, shirt, jeans, socks. He slides in next to me, skin on skin.

He holds me. I want to pull away from him, to say that I can't sleep in someone's arms like that, but that would be a lie. Because I had always been able to sleep like that in Wufei's arms. And before, during the war, I had slept with Duo in the same way. Like animals in a burrow, huddled for security, warmth. For human touch.

I don't speak. And neither does he.

We hold each other in the dark.

Sometime, in the midst of midday dreams, wrapped in Duo's unescapable embrace, shivering under the whispered lilt of his voice, I am able to sleep. And I begin to forget.

I'll never forget Wufei.

But Duo can help me forget the snow.

The End

(:./cyt/december)