13-Nov-2000
Title: Need
Author: TB
Archive: yes please
Catagory: shonen-ai
Pairing: 1+2
Rating: PG
Warnings: swearing and occasional silliness interlaced with dark unhappy thoughts
Spoilers: none
Notes: I should have had someone beta this, but I"m afraid that it sucks and I don't want to be told it sucks, so I just sent it in. ^_^; The poem at the end was written by a friend of mine. Used with permission.
Feedback: brother_maxwell@yahoo.com
Disclaimers: I neither own nor intend to use illegally GW and the boys:
innocent fiction is my limit, I swear!
Heero shut the laptop down, looking around for Duo, who...
Appeared in the bathroom door, a towel wrapped around his head and the rest of his body hidden by the door. "Hee-chan? Could you find my boxers for me?"
"Don't call me Hee-chan," he said coldly. "Find your boxers yourself."
"H*eeee*ro!" Duo's wail was agonised. "Please!"
"Do it on your own. You're not helpless."
"Yeah, but I'm naked!"
Heero blinked. "Ano... " He regained his senses, and hurriedly banished the hentai thoughts that popped into his head. "Where's your towel?"
"On my head."
"Don't you normally have two?"
"I forgot to wash it."
"Then use the one you've got."
"Heero!" Duo glared at him. "And leave my precious hair to the mercies of harsh recycled air?"
He rolled his eyes, and resolutely turned his back. "You want boxers, you get them yourself."
There was a pause, and then the door creaked as Duo opened it fully. "*Fine.*"
He heard the patter of Duo's feat on the tile as he rushed in, no doubt shivering, and began to search the piles of clothing on the floor.
Heero tilted his head up slightly, and caught a glimpse of Duo in the mirror. He flushed.
*Dripping pale skin... slender but strong... God, he has a terrific ass...*
Duo located his boxers, and shimmied into them quickly, teeth chattering. Then he turned to Heero, pulled down his lower eyelid with his pinky, stuck his tongue out, and said, "Beeeeda!"
Heero flipped him the bird.
After that pleasant inter-cultural exchange, they went back to their normal nighttime routine. Duo took down his hair (which beneath the towel had been roped and wrapped several times around his head in a furry crown) and began to brush it; Heero re-booted his laptop and stared at it waiting for mission orders.
Duo fell asleep draped over the bed post, and Heero transferred his gaze to the other pilot.
*Will I ever be able to admit to you that I want-need--you?* he mused, staring at the other boy, who rolled onto his stomach and began to make little "heehee" noises in his sleep. *God help me if I ever do. I'm sure you'd find the whole thing incomprehensible. Sometimes I feel like we're not even on the same plane of existence! You're so--you. And I'm so me, just--dark. Gloomy. When I manage to be that much at all. God, Duo... Hell, paint it like it is. You'd never love someone like me-and I don't even blame you.*
Tomorrow they were leaving the school. Things would get easier when he didn't have to live with Duo anymore. Their closeness had brought about decidedly unwanted feelings which Heero didn't quite know how to handle. *The inner strength I used to love under pressure comes undone.* Was that a line from a poem? Heero shook his head silently. Once he had some time on his own, this raging--whatever it was--would fade. It had to.
Duo choked on his oatmeal. "*Nani?*"
Quatre sympathetically patted him on the back. "I know," he sighed. "It's hard to believe it's really true . . . "
"This--this can't be!"
"I'm very much afraid it is, Duo."
"But--but--but Heero's the perfect soldier! He's Mr Super Hero! I Bend Steel Into Pretzels With My Bare Hands Boy! He can't be--he can't--"
Quatre sighed. "You're going to have to face it, Duo."
"But--" He sank back into his chair, feeling shock washing over him. "He can't be... *modelling for cereal boxes.*"
Quatre nodded, his eyes sorrowful.
Duo burst into laughter. So did Quatre. It was *too* funny.
"What kind of a note is that to leave?" Duo gasped at last.
"The kind that means he's exhibiting a sense of humour, which you've been nagging him about for I don't know how long, and he's doing something he doesn't want us to know about," Wu Fei snarled, fed up with their immature giggling. "So will you forget about it and leave the man alone?"
"Shush up, you. You're just jealous." Duo laughed maniacally. "Poor Heero. Maybe Relena finally got to him, and he doesn't want us to know what a wuss he is."
"Or maybe Dr. J forced him to put on women's clothing and join an all-girls boarding school," Quatre added.
"Or maybe--"
"Shut up!" Wu Fei grabbed his rice and stalked through the kitchen. Quatre giggled. "What crawled up his ass and died?"
The two boys laughed themselves all the way out of their chairs and onto the floor.
When Wu Fei was gone, Duo glanced around almost furtively, then tugged Quatre close to him under the table. He admired the flushed fair skin of his lover for a long moment, then leaned in and kissed him deeply.
Quatre was quiet enough, though a giggle threatened to escape him every few seconds. "What was that for?" he whispered, pulling back.
Duo affected innocence. "Can't I kiss my boyfriend when I want to?"
Quatre's eyes deepened a shade--a beautiful blazing indigo that Duo privately called his "sexy-momma-shade." "You certainly can," he murmured throatily.
So Duo did.
Then he giggled. "Cereal boxes."
It went downhill from there.
Heero stared up at the stars, then looked back over the edge of the cliff. In his hands he held Duo's crucifix--a forgotten piece of jewellery that had been a gift of tremendous significance to a certain Japanese pilot, and of very little but impulse on the part of a certain American. Heero had taken the cross and wrapped his heart around it, but--
He still remembered how Duo had given it to him, as if it had happened a few hours before, and not almost a year.
///He had faltered . . . he had wept, losing all control, and worst of all, he had lost it in front of a fellow pilot, one of the few people he respected, and the only person he liked... Duo Maxwell.
Duo had found him in the cockpit of Wing Zero, shuddering and crying like a little baby, and the American had climbed down inside and sat beside him, holding him, rocking him, whispering to him. And Heero had felt warmed; comforted; loved. He had laid his head against Duo's chest and listened to that incredible life-loving heartbeat, and fallen.
Duo had reached up, and taken off his crucifix, and pressed the flesh-heated metal into his hand, curling his fingers around it. "Keep your faith, Heero," he had said. "It will end. All the evil will end."
Heero kept his faith. Not, however, in some abstract God--he'd kept his faith in Duo.///
But - *You never know yourself until you're all alone.* However sappy, poetry had it right. It was time to stand alone. He had to, to keep his sanity, to keep his soul. It was time to let go of Duo.
He loosened his grip, and let the crucifix fall.
He had wrapped his heart around a dream. Time and past to wake up. He was a big boy now.
Too proud for tears.
Wu Fei, watching, turned away. He should leave now-in fact, he shouldn't have seen any of that. It had been too... private. Too personal. But he'd had to be sure, for Heero-for himself.
He'd realised, probably a lot sooner than Heero had, that the Japanese pilot was wasting his time and his devotion waiting for Duo to grow up. There would be no magical ending to the feelings Heero vainly tried to deny. It wasn't anyone's fault, but that didn't make it easy.
Wu Fei slithered agilely down the shrub-infested mountain path, silent as night, sure that Heero wasn't following yet. He liked Duo-and he liked Quatre, as well, not that he'd ever admit such generosity to either. He thought they went well together, and it hadn't taken much nudging to get the two children to play together. But that's what they were. Children. Good kids, the best kids, doing more than most grown men to try and end the horrible war that threatened their bright eyed grins with each new death added to the tally. They'd kept what Wu Fei had lost-what Heero had lost-hope. Gods willing, they'd never lose it.
But he and Heero... they were warriors. Warriors are different. They had grown up already, had he and Heero, and innocence was a commodity of short supply for men.
He understood why Heero had fallen in love with Duo. He had too, a little, once. It was the same with the blonde angel, Quatre Winner-even Trowa, in his way. Like a moth to a flame, wanting back the childhood that had been lost to pain, to horrors that were remembered only in nightmares, to elders who made choices without your consent. But it was a futureless love, an adoration doomed from the beginning... they were warriors, and the children... the children were too young, too bright, to understand and assuage the darknesses inside.
Warriors had to stand alone. They had to be strong.
And they would be, him and Heero. Him and Heero.
I watch the moon cross the sky waiting for the sun
There's more to life with little time I've forgotten everyone
You never find your home until it's left behind
You never know yourself until you're all alone
I've felt myself changing I hate what I've become
The inner strength I used to love under pressure comes undoneToo weak to say I love you
Too strong to say I careI wish I could just fade away into the ocean's glare
Burn away what's hopeless I wish I could turn back
I need the sound of silence and the radiance of black
When everything that brings me joy is ripped away so soon
Goodbye comes to everyone I'll try to remember you
And now you're just like everyone, somehow I always knewToo weak to say I miss you
Too proud to leave you there.
The End
(:./erin/need)
