27 Aug 2002
Title: Chrysalis
Author: Lilias (Liliascrescens@cs.com)
Category: songfic
Rating: G
Pairing: R+1 (with references to 1+2)
What to expect: Mild angst, hetero-ai, references to shounen-ai.
Disclaimer: I don't own the girl, or any of the boys; Sunrise and the Sotsu Agency do, and Bandai gets to pass them around. "As I Lay Me Down" belongs to Sophie B. Hawkins, and can be found on her album Whaler.
Notes: Just my take (one of my takes, anyway) on one of the more familiar fic-subjects. ^_^ This is a part of the Complicated arc, though it will probably still make sense if you haven't read the rest of the stories. It goes right before "Comp" itself, and takes place during that span of time while Relena's alone, before the big story gets off the ground.
And it's a present for my Becky! ::hughugpeanutshugtoo:: Can you believe how long it took me to finish this?
/ denotes lyrics
/It felt like springtime
On this February morning
In the courtyard, birds were singing your praise/
It was warm this morning, much warmer than usual for this northern place, in this chill season. An odd thing--a wonder. Normally there would have been a filigree of ice on my window, and beyond it wan sunlight filtering through high, milky clouds. But this day was a changeling, a little span of April wandering like a lost child into the second month. Warm, bright sun on the flagstones, a sweet-scented breeze over last year's grass. A little spring, complete with robins sitting on the bare branches, surveying the empty fountain with bright, puzzled eyes--for all the world as if storing up complaints for some feathered travel agent. No grass, no worms, nothing much to eat. Not spring yet, then, though it is certainly a passable imitation.
An odd thing. A wonder.
I see entirely too much of myself in this displaced day; I am a changeling, too. Not an especially new role for me, I suppose, and hardly a new tale--the storybooks are full of kings and queens desperate to find their lost children. But I'm not in that story any more, if I ever was. Now I am a different sort of oddity: an untrained amateur in diplomat's clothing, an uncertain soul walled up alive within an archetype. And this false spring is a better counterfeit than I. At least its sunshine and breezes are real;
though tomorrow will probably bring chill wind and grey skies, this fleeting brightness is true while it lasts.
But I don't feel real, even to myself, and I doubt if I can ever be all this world needs me to be. For so long I have felt hollow--as if all the urgency, the terrible life that filled me throughout the years of war has drained away, leaving an empty waiting thing where my heart used to be. I'm not afraid any more, but neither do I dream; both fear and joy walked away from me all those months ago. You took them with you, when you left.
/I'm still recalling
Things you said to make me feel all right
I carried them with me today/
It's only fair, I suppose, since I never knew these things at all until you brought them into my life.
I changed almost at once, as if I had been waiting for the catalyst, listening for the music to shift. One day I was a child, and quite horribly ordinary: ridiculously shy (a serious liability for a diplomat's daughter), bitterly resentful of my mother's attempts to arrange friendships for me, and generally busy with the meaningless details of being young. It's funny, almost--it all felt so desperately meaningful at the time.
And then there was the sound of waves, and the flash of sun on the water, and everything changed--though not exactly in the ways I might have hoped. I thought I was tired of the way things were; so monumentally weary of being the strange one, the new girl, I wanted nothing more than to be just like everyone else. I never would have imagined just how different I was about to become.
But what I began to realize on that lonely sweep of beach was that my importance lay, quite paradoxically, in discovering how unimportant I was. The beginning of the war--from the moment I first saw you, through that ridiculous royal charade--put me through a strange sort of metamorphosis, and there were many mornings when I wished I'd awakened as a cockroach instead. But that painful process of erosion eventually helped me climb out of myself enough to help with the work you had begun, so I suppose it was necessary. Eventually I would come to fulfill that odd destiny of mine, becoming an embodiment of peace only long enough to show the people how to build it for themselves--becoming visible only to ensure my own invisibility.
On that golden afternoon, all I knew was that things were never going to be the same again; the world rose up in front of me, beautifully and terribly real, and I couldn't turn away.
I never quite managed to turn away again. Even through everything that followed, all the loss and horror and pain, I learned to stare evil in the face without flinching.
And how did a hopelessly ill-equipped teenaged girl manage to help change the world? It was quite simple, really; I held on to the memory of your determined face, your tormented eyes. And whenever things seemed impossible, I reminded myself that I had to do whatever I could to keep you alive. It was the least I could do, after all the times you managed not to kill me.
I held on to your words, as well--'believe in me,' you said. And so I did. I still do.
/Now as I lay me down to sleep
This I pray: that you will hold me dear
Though I'm far away
I'll whisper your name into the sky
And I will wake up happy/
For a while, I believed in nothing else. You were my touchstone, my wishing star, the blueprint of all I wished I could be. The exact opposite of the ineffectual creature I thought I was. This was strength, I decided; you seemed so sure that your missions were all that mattered, and that you had everything it would take to carry them out.
I set myself to watching you, trying to figure out the source of that strength--trying to learn you by heart. I only wanted to understand.
I never meant to love you.
But by the time I realized I had begun, it was too late to turn back. So I went forward, reluctantly, letting you stand silently at the back of my heart even while larger matters claimed my conscious attention--while we all went on turning the pages of a war that seemed to have no end.
In spite of everything, I was piecing it together--who you are, what we could be to each other. Learning the limits of your strength, even as I discovered the extent of my own. It was all so confusing, the way I felt. The way I feel. Emotions can be so massive, too huge to comprehend--and before I had time to sort them out, to find a way of expressing them, you had gone.
It sounds so easy, when I say it: there was a war, and then another war. And then I never saw you again.
That is what happened. But it hasn't been easy.
/I wonder why
I feel so high
Though I am not above the sorrow
Heavy-hearted till you call my name/
I have not been idle all this time, of course. To linger in loneliness would be to betray a peace that was dearly bought. So every day I take a step forward, then another. Long ago I stopped trying to fill the hollow spaces; instead, I hedge them round with purpose, shielding their blankness with bright tapestries woven of important tasks and necessary conversations.
And I have distracted myself with the complexity of my own weaving, another Arachne bent over the loom--until this morning, when I leaned from my window to feel the sunshine on my face, reveling in the unexpected softness of this air. It made me remember late-summer sun on red brick walls, the taste of a salt breeze. It brought back, with startling immediacy, the ring of voices through the halls and across the playing fields of a school I haven't seen in years, except in dreams.
You probably don't remember that school with the same fondness; after all, it was only another mission objective for you, and not the place where your life began. But perhaps you were happy there, if such emotion was permitted you? I think back to the keen pleasure on your face while you fenced, or rode, or simply stood in the sunlight, and then I am more certain that St. Gabriel was good to you, as well.
I hope you are in a place where the sun is warm on green grass; I hope there are horses, maybe, and swift movement across some meadow I have never seen. And if such things can be permitted now, I hope you are free to laugh.
/And it sounds like church bells
Or the whistle of a train on a summer evening
I'll run to meet you barefoot, barely breathing/
But these are all things I would want, and so I revise my list of wishes: I hope that wherever you are, be it a sunny meadow or a shuttle cockpit or a city street somewhere, it is where you most want to be.
I thought you were already there. Everything I heard from your friends was good news, for so long; he is living almost in the country, Quatre said. Sunburned all the time, trying to fix up that tumbledown house. Keeping Duo from turbo-charging the garden tractor.
And I remembered the way he looked at you, as if he would stop the world just to be able to look at you a little longer. I thought about the way you used to look at him, surprised into a smile you always tried to hide. It made me smile, too, knowing you were home at last.
So why did you leave him, Heero? And where have you gone?
In some ways, this is another repetition of your old pattern: mission complete; fall back into the shadows until the soldier is needed again. But it still feels like something larger might be wrong. All the times before, you vanished because you needed to get to something--some mission or other, all part of the plan. But this time, it sounds as if you ran from something, and that's not at all like you. I can think of only a few things that could be counted on to make you go to ground like this--myself included.
I still wonder, sometimes, what it was about me that frightened you so. If I knew that, then maybe I would understand why you're still running away from everyone, even those who only want to offer you love.
I know you don't think of yourself as fully human; I know many others think of you as larger than life. Neither is the truth, I think, though it will take time before those you saved can see past the hero, and it will probably take even longer before you can see the humanity in yourself. Perhaps that's why you always kept your distance, why you avoided contact--with all of us--for so long.
But you didn't step lightly enough while you were here, did you? As careful as you were to hold yourself aloof, you still brushed up against people's lives.
And those of us who knew you, or tried to--we all carry the traces of those meetings and partings, and will carry them until we die. We have been changed, and not one of us could go back to our peaceful pre-war lives, even if we wanted to. Even if they had been peaceful. Even if they could have been called lives.
/It's not too near for me
Like a flower, I need the rain
Though it's not clear to me
Every season has its change/
Would it be so very strange if we changed you, too?
There is a place for you in the world, I know it--if there can be room for me, there must surely be room for you as well. It's just a matter of time and patience, of testing the currents inside you until finally you bring yourself home. If you were here now, that's what I would say to you; you would make that impatient face, and probably frown as if I made no sense, but you would hear me. And you would go back to your tumbledown house and your sunshine, back to the one you love.
Because I know what I'm talking about. I have been waiting in this silence for a long time, and finally I am beginning to understand, or at least I am beginning to put words to something I always knew: I'm not empty, and I never have been. What seemed like a hollow space is really more like furled wings, crumpled and patient until they can dry in the sun.
I can almost feel those wings pulsing inside of me--not beating, yet, but unfolding slowly. Something is pushing to be free, and someday soon it will grow a tooth sharp enough to pierce through the shell around my heart. Someday soon I will find out what all this waiting has been for.
I think it will hurt, at first, as all births do--the pain of remembering, of forgetting, of loss and gain all at once. And then there will be fear, as there always is when a winged thing first tries to fly.
But I won't waste those wings; I suspect that the thrill of flight will be worth the bruises from falling. You never seemed eager to return to earth, anyway, and you fell often enough. No, I will fly with whatever wings I am given, and I will try not to be afraid.
I like to think you would be proud, if you could see.
/And I will see you
When the sun comes out again/
I have a recurring dream that you return, at last. At last.
But in the dream you do not know me at first--or is it that I do not know you? Either way, we meet again as almost-strangers, and we talk together about the coincidences that made our lives to run in parallel. And we laugh together, as people do when they are in the middle of becoming friends.
(This is how I know it for a dream, every time, because I have never heard you laugh--so even in my sleep I recognize it as an oddity. A wonder.)
I wake from this dream full of joy, but with tears burning in my eyes: tears, because I never got to be your friend, not really. Because I never walked beside you except in my dreams. And joy, because some part of me still believes that someday I will.
-end-
(:./lilias/chrysalis)
