18-Jun-2001

Title: Lorelei
Author: Dan
Archive: GWA
Pairings: Read and find out
Disclaimer: Gw ain't mine. The song ain't mine. 'The Old Ways' (that'd be the song) belongs to the beautious Loreena McKennitt. Notes: Death is a fact of life. But sometimes dying depends on your perspective. ^_-
Warnings: Weirdness.

Lorelei by Dan

~~ The thundering sea is calling me home, home to you
The pounding sea is calling me home, home to you~~

"Don't you think the ocean looks the best in fall? Look at the way it shines in the light like new steel." She turns to me, making her skirts billow around her and her hair swing out in a perfect arc.

"It looks cold," I say, my tone harder than I intended.

She laughs, and it has the same sharp purity of mountain snow. "But think of how the water would feel as you moved through it..."

She steps behind me and places her hands lightly on my thighs. I let her because I never know what to do with her--never know how to tell her no. She whispers to me as her hands ghost over my hips, "Think of how lovely it would feel, how clean..."

Her hands touch my stomach, lightly tracing the faint muscles. I let my head drop back against her shoulder, and she chuckles. It manages to sound earthy and girlish at the same time. She's always an enigma, and it makes me wonder how hard she tries at it. "Your perfect stomach would tighten just a little at the sharpness, but think how it would make you feel so alive."

Her hands rise higher along my rib cage before I catch them, letting her go no further. She laughs again and rests her head against my back. We only touch each other when we know we're alone. There is nothing comforting in her touch. She kisses the side of my neck, and I shiver. "Think of how pure you would feel."

"Stop it," I say, but I don't pull away from her arms. I like the feeling of being held by her, being held up by her. My enemy, but not my enemy: she may be the only person who is truly loyal to me, and yet I will never be able to trust completely her.

She laughs lightly. It's a joyous sound, but not an easy one. I watch in astonishment as she carefully removes her jacket, and then her shoes and socks. Her pale eyes hold a mocking type of humor. "Don't you want to go for a swim?"

She starts to unbutton her shirt with the same deliberate gestures. I swallow hard and look out at the ocean. "It looks cold."

Her long, slender fingers slide around the waistband of her skirt before it falls to the heavy sand. "That's the point. I thought we went through this already, and you're suppose to be the clever one...."

I watch as she walks into the tumbling surf. The sun turns her body and long hair into liquid gold. The water plays around her ankles, pulling at her, but she doesn't lose her sense of balance. I hear her gasp a little when the water reaches her sensitive upper thighs, but it doesn't stop her. The tips of her long hair float in the water behind her, and she moves as languidly as one in a warm bath. I'm reminded suddenly of the old German stories about mermaids--the ones where they kill the sailor instead of rescuing him. She never looks back to me.

The waves are high and unforgiving. I'm waiting for one to crash over her golden head and pull her away from me forever. The thought makes my chest tight, and I'm suddenly afraid. She doesn't look back.

My heart thunders in my ears more loudly than the waves. I press my hands to my head, my mouth, to keep from crying out. She does not look back, and now the water has reached her high breasts. The scream rises in my throat of its own accord. "Dorothy! STOP!"

She pauses, and I'm kneeling in the sand with my hands clenched against my chest even though I don't remember dropping to them. "DON'T! Please..."

She turns, then. She looks wild and fey, standing in the surf without any fear of being plucked up by the waves and dashed against the rocks. The slate gray of the water moves around her, throwing her hair out and dragging it back in with the ocean's steady motion. She tilts her head to the side, considering me for a long moment. I don't understand the emotions held in those glacier-blue eyes. They are too sharply felt, too pure for me to understand.

"Dorothy, please..." It's not like me to beg, but I'm begging her to please, please stop. Do not tempt whatever trick of fate that has thrown us together. Don't leave me.

She walks out of the ocean as easily as she might leave the classroom. I stare at her through tears that I had not noticed I'd shed. Her hips sway in a motion that echoes the rhythm of the sea. She stops before me, smiling gently: amused, but almost regretful. She cups my face between her hands.

"No, I won't go."

~~In the darkness of a new night
On the west coast of Clare~~

I'm almost afraid to breathe. The memory of her is so overwhelming that I almost expect her to call my name in that half-affectionate, half-mocking tone. I smell the jasmine scent of her hair instead of the sharp brine of the ocean.

The icy chill of the wet sand beneath my fingers and thighs reminds me that I am here without her. The sharp pinpricks of the ocean spray dance across my skin as I sit where we stood so many times before. The ocean rolls in and out without any concern that she is no longer there to play in its waves, to torment me with her nearly suicidal dance.

I draw my knees up and rest my head against them. Inexplicably, I feel that if I wait long enough something will happen. I sit there listening to the waves until my heart echoes their steady beat. It feels like a strange dream has come upon me.

Twilight comes with a whispering sigh of wind. The sun turns the water into the same strange summer blue of her eyes, makes the rocks glow the same pale gold of her hair. The cliffs seem to hide me from the world that I long to escape. There doesn't seem to be any point without her next to me.

The air holds the same hush as the inside of a church. There seems to be the same hesitant expectancy. I went to one once, when the longing for her got to be too much. It hadn't done much good. It was as if I could hear her laughing at me. 'Not here,' she seemed to whisper in my ear. '_Definitely_ not here.'

"Ah, God _damn_ it," I moan softly to my knees. The sound of my mourning is swallowed by the voice of the sea, but I think maybe something heard.

~~I heard your voice singing
Your eyes danced the song
Your hands played the tune
It was a vision before me ~~

I can see the ocean outside my window, and it looks like her eyes, such a strange shade of blue. I can see them perfectly in my memories. A vision so strong that it makes me cry out at night. If I hold myself very still, I can hear the pounding of the waves in time with my heart. For a moment if feels like I'm being pulled out across the water, rushing across its surface like a bird in flight towards something that makes my heart clench in anticipation.

"Minister?" Sylvia waits for a reply to a question I have long since forgotten, if I even heard it to begin with.

"I beg your pardon?"

She gives me a look that clearly expresses her extreme disbelief that one as apparently air-headed as myself could ever become the Minister of Foreign Affairs. I could explain, but I doubt that she would understand. I don't think that she would really believe me even if I told her that it had not been my charisma all those years ago. I had merely been the pale reflection of that burning faith.

Sylvia sighs deeply before going through her long-winded explanation once again. I listen to her, and try not to wonder what the point is.

~~ We left the music behind, and the dance carried on
As we stole away to the sea shore
We smelt the brine, felt the wind in our hair
As sad as your past~~

I shiver slightly as a sneaking gust of wind finds its way beneath my jacket and skirt. We stand on the shore of the slate-gray ocean that looks about as appealing as that invitation from Romefeller that Dorothy had handed me earlier today, with a strange look in her eyes. Yet now she almost dances along the edge of the surf, her feet moving in quick patterns that I can't quite decipher.

"Dorothy." I hear the whine in my voice, and wince slightly. "Why are we out here again?"

Every day it seems that we come down to this lonely stretch of rock, wet sand, and steel colored water. She pauses in her dancing for a moment. One lovely bare foot slightly raised--her shoes discarded long ago--as she considers my complaint with more seriousness than it deserves. Then she turns to me with a dramatic sweep of skirts and hair, hands clasped diligently before her. There's a light in her eyes that I have yet to be able to identify.

"We are waiting, Relena," she says, her grave seriousness mocked by the quirk of her lips. She only calls me by just my name when we are alone on the wet sand. The sound of my name, bare of all honorifics, still jolts me like lightning.

"Waiting for what?" In my tone there is the peevish suggestion that whatever we are waiting for we could wait for inside, out of the cold.

She lays a slender finger against my lips gently, shushing me as you might a cranky child. Her gesture startles me so much that the protest dies in my throat; I hadn't even been aware that she had moved. I blink up into her quicksilver eyes. "Now is not the time for you to ask."

"When will be the time for me to ask?" I reply almost playfully.

"When you know why you are waiting, you'll know to ask what you are waiting for," she says in the same teasing tone, but her eyes are deadly serious.

I frown a little at that. She likes to talk to me in riddles; it's part of her mystery. She laughs, and gently smooths away the small furrow between my eyes. Then she leans to me like a figure in a dream and kisses me.

~~ Suddenly I knew, that you'd have to go
That your world was not mine, your eyes told me so
Yet it was there that I felt the cross roads of time
And I wondered why~~

These crisp autumn months are the worst for me. I dream of her with such intensity, such frequency that sometimes I can't figure out which is reality and which is a dream. Today was one of those days. I awoke with the scent of her hair on my pillow. All I could do was clutch it to me and cry.

"Relena?" Quatre's tone is kindly solicitous, the way you would speak to a old woman who was once wise. I can hear Dorothy's snide comments in the back of my head, and it makes me smile faintly.

"I'm fine, Quatre," I look into his summer-blue eyes and see for a moment hers superimposed over them. I shake my head a little to clear it. "Really, I've just been tired these past days."

He frowns, and the gesture sits oddly upon his still-boyish face. I know why everyone is being so careful with me, as if I'm some fragile piece of china. Dorothy's sudden disappearance caused quite a stir. She would probably be amused beyond words.

'When you get tired of waiting, you can come ask me your question.' It was the only explanation she had left me.

Only I've forgotten what the question was.

~~As we cast our gaze on the tumbling sea
A vision came over me
Of thundering hooves and beating wings in the clouds above~~

I sit huddled on the dark tan sand so long that the tide comes to lick at my feet playfully. It seems suddenly odd to be sitting on the beach in my shoes and socks, so I take them off. I carefully place them to the side, out of the reach of incoming waves. A sudden memory stops my hands and I turn my head slowly towards that slate-gray water.

I stand so quickly that I almost fall from the abruptness of my movement. She had been the graceful one. The sand seems to conspire to shift underneath my feet and throw me off-balance. I've been off-balance for the past three years, but now, now there seems to be a tension building around me. Pressing down against me, like water against a diver as she sink farther into the water's cool embrace.

The water rises to my ankles with little eddies as it scoops away the sand from beneath my feet. Once I had tried to drive her from my thoughts in that same manner. Every time a thought about her would come into my head, I would scoop it out until nothing was left. In doing so, I had hollowed out my self as well.

I stare at the water until the last of the light dies without a complaint, and the ocean takes on the quicksilver gleam of her eyes.

~~Turning to go, you called out my name
Like a bird in a cage spreading its wings to fly
The doorways are lost
You sang as you flew
And I wondered why~~

We don't close our eyes as she kissed me, nothing more than a pressure of her lips on mine. I could see the tiny flecks of green in her eyes, like the ocean seen from high above. I place my hands on her arms with the intention to push her way, but my fingers clench around her arms of their own accord.

She pulls away from me, and cocks her head to the side as if curious about something. I can feel a heat in my cheeks that isn't from the slap of the wind. Her eyes hold a deeper depth of emotion than I could ever hope to describe. It seems somehow horribly wrong that someone who so strongly advocated death should hold so much force of life.

"Why?" God, why did you do that? Why do you do this? Why do I feel like this? Why do I suddenly want to cling to you and cry until my breath is drained from me the way my doubts about you are drained away?

"Why not?"

My fists clench in fierce obstinacy. "No. WHY?"

She sighs and her eyes look past me to a place that I can't begin to fathom. Whatever answer she sees there seems beyond my ability to comprehend. Her eyes hold regret, amusement, and an emotion that leaves me weak and humble. She doesn't answer me, but she kisses me again until the answer no longer seems important.

She never answered the question.

~~The thundering waves are calling me home, home to you
The pounding sea is calling me home, home to you~~

I'd run from this place for years, and then run back just as quickly. Like the tide going out and then coming back in with a thundering rush. I stand in the rushing surf barefoot and suddenly freer than I had been in years. As free as I had been when she held me close. I lean back my head and laugh. I am not surprised when my laughter has the same sting as the wind over snow.

I reach one hand up and pull the elastic band from the end of my braid with an almost violent jerk. I shake my head to free my hair until it is sent flying around me by the plucking fingers of the wind. The tide has come farther in, tugging at my knees. It has long since stolen away my shoes and socks.

I strip out of my ruined pastel business suit. I let it drop into the water without a care. The water whisks it way with greater efficiency than the very best of maids. I all but rip the prim camisole away from my body until I stand naked before the thundering waves. They no longer seem to be a wall barring my entry, but boisterous escorts.

I laugh again as the conversation of all those years ago comes rushing back like water freed from a dam.

'When you know why you are waiting, you will know to ask what you are waiting for.'

"I'm waiting for you, Dorothy..."

~~The thundering waves are calling me home, home to you
The pounding sea is calling me home, home to you~~

I walk into the water the way I should have all those years ago.

The water pulls at my feet, at the backs of my knees, but it does not trip me. It feels more like it is urging me impatiently forward, pushing at me as if insulted by my pace. I want to run into the water, but something tells me to stop, to savor the sensation.

The water seems to wash from my skin the exhaustion of four years of running away. It is cold for sure, but that chill caresses my body with more skill than any lover. After living my life in a comfortable cocoon of warmth, the icy touch of the water finally makes me alive.

I walk forward with dignity as great as my delight. I feel like a bride as she walks down that long aisle towards the rest of her life. The waves rise before me, and move around me like the most perfect of bridesmaids. They dance before me, and now I see the pattern made by her feet.

The water reaches the upper part of my thighs, and I do not gasp; I sigh. The water's touch holds the promise of winter and the faint memory of summer. All the emotions that I had never been able to truly allow myself to feel, much less express, are freed by that frigid caress. The water moves past my rib cage to cup my breasts with gentle, but impatient hands. My hair flows about me like a veil. I've walked as far as I can; now it's either sink of swim. The water pulls at me, pushes at me. It seems like it pleads with its demanding caresses.

I peer into the depths of the liquid steel ocean. A lighter color flickers in the midnight depths. I laugh again, high and clear. Dorothy's little games with words.

"What _am_ I waiting for?"

I plunge under the water like a mermaid disappearing from view. I lose myself in the freedom of the dark water of the ocean. I follow the tugging hands into the depths of that silky chill until I find a budding light the same strange color of her eyes.

And in that pale glacier-blue, I see her turn to me with the laughter and love that had been calling me home.

The End

(:./dan/lorelei)