24 Aug 2000
About the series:
[Category:] Angst/Romance.
[Pairings:] Mostly Rx2/2xR; also 2x1/1x2, eventually 1xRx2 (whew!)
[Disclaimers:] I don't own these delightful people (Sunrise and the
Sotsu Agency do, and Bandai has a license to pass them around), nor
do I intend to infringe upon the rights of their owners. This arc
contains occasional poetry that is not my own, as well; citations
accompany each section.
[Rating:] Varies by section, PG through NC-17 (or perhaps just R--
no worse than a romance novel, but a little much for tv)
[Warnings:] Yaoi, hetero-sex, violence, sap. Some sections contain
greenish-yellow citrus. Truckloads of angst. Others may find this
OOC. Almost certainly AU, since I haven't seen EW. Contains a
semi-minor character of my own (Nina, Relena's secretary), whom I
found very useful.
[Spoilers:] None (Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas any more)
Takes place after the end of the series, though its setting is vague
enough that you could pretend it happens after EW.
[Notes:] This whole arc grew out of my attachment to the idea that
Heero shouldn't have to choose between Duo and Relena--and
"Complicated" grew to its vast size because I really wanted to make
the love affair plausible. I didn't want to toss them together with
some kind of 'bed ex machina' (though I like to read those stories,
too! ^_^), but wanted to explore the emotional implications of their
relationship(s). So it took a long time to drag their stories
together and explain everything, and it got, well, complicated. The
opening sections are rather atmospheric, but set the stage for the
more fast-moving bits that come later. So hang in there!
Please note that sections, while in chronological order, are not
necessarily continuous (sometimes a lot of time passes in between).
[Feedback:] Always welcome!
This one's dedicated to Shih-Hou and Sophia, who put up with this story for two months while it was trying to take shape in my head.
About this section:
Pairings: R+2; references to Rx1, 2x1.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Angst; one seriously messed-up Maxwell.
denotes thoughts
Relena rubbed the back of her neck; when she closed her eyes, she could still see the inverted glow of the monitor on the inside of her eyelids. She had been sitting there for days, getting up to eat or shower only when the computer was downloading. Or crashing, which had happened several times despite the sophistication of her hardware. Heero had simply disappeared. Vanished. One minute he was there, in the celebrating crowd, and the next minute he was gone as if he had never even existed. She ought to be used to this--he had done it many times before--but this time there didn't seem to be any reason for him to erase himself. Unless--unless he was hiding from her.
There was no way she could accuse herself of moving too fast--it had been years, after all--but she knew she had moved too close. That was always the problem. The moment he sensed danger, Heero took appropriate defensive action; this time, that seemed to mean immediate and complete separation.
It was time to turn things over to the professionals, she decided, and was about to switch off the machine for the first time in weeks when a blinking icon appeared in the corner of her screen. Quatre's message was friendly, concerned, and contained some information she wished he had passed on to someone else: Hilde Schbeiker had been in touch with him. Duo Maxwell was in trouble.
Hilde had moved out after the hundredth fight, tired of beating her head against a brick wall. Left to himself, Duo had headed downhill fast--not eating much, not sleeping much, and drinking way too much. When the police contacted Hilde with his neighbors' complaints, she had called Quatre in desperation. The results of his downward spiral were terrible to look at; when Relena (who had insisted Quatre come along, since it was his fault she even knew about this) pushed open the door to the squalid little hole he had been calling home, she closed her eyes in sheer horror. It didn't look like any human habitation she had ever seen outside a refugee camp--which, in a sense, she realized this was. Another casualty of the war, slumped on a broken chair in an alcoholic haze. She recognized the familiar face, even under the bruises of too many bar fights, but his eyes (once he opened them, which took many splashes of icy water) were like empty holes with nothing behind them.
Duo didn't offer much resistance when they packed him up and brought him home; in fact, he barely seemed to notice that he was being cleaned up, buttoned into the cleanest clothes she and Quatre could find on his floor, and stuffed into a waiting shuttle. It wasn't easy--even unresisting, he was heavy, and the physical effort required to move him turned out to be the easiest part of the whole rescue mission. The bruises on his face were much less disturbing than the long scars on the inside of each wrist. Scars, plural; he had tried more than once, and not all of the lines were old enough to have silvered.
When the trip to Earth was finally over, he looked up uncaringly at a looming white façade: the building that once housed Relena's doomed Institute for the study of peace, now converted into the headquarters of Foreign Minister Peacecraft, Member-at-Large of the World Council.1 One marble wing held offices, another was mainly living quarters for the Minister and her staff, and the central tower still held classrooms that Relena hoped one day to fill again with students.
She got him unpacked and settled into a suite of rooms on the third level of the residential wing, and left him with a team of very patient doctors. Within a few weeks, Duo was much improved--physically, anyway. But his mind stayed away for a long time. He would sit for hours on his balcony, watching the sea. When he was like that, he sometimes failed even to notice when anyone came to talk to him. Those remote eyes were unnerving, and most people gave up trying after a few attempts.
At last, Relena couldn't stand it any longer, and began intruding on his solitude every chance she got. Whether it was an inane question about water rationing on L2, or a totally implausible airspeed calculation only he could supply, she found reason after reason to prod him into activity.
Against all probability, it eventually worked; he started coming to the commissary for meals, returned Quatre's anxious calls, and generally seemed to be rediscovering the rest of the human race. When Relena's aging chief of security serendipitously decided to retire, Duo agreed to take on the job with only a minimum of reluctance.
At first, he was clearly clumsy at even talking to other people--out of practice, he said. Any down time, and he would slip sideways into memory. Back into the dark.
But she was always there, distracting him, drawing him out of himself, and gradually he seemed to shake himself awake. Karaoke night in the security lounge became an event not to be missed, and even the warhorses in the corps learned to look up to this--well, still a boy, really. But so much older than the rest of them, in many ways. He had stories of the war that beat anything they had ever heard from one another, or seen on the vids, and they hung on his every word. He quickly collected a devoted fan club among the rest of the staffers, too, and they peeked hopefully around their cubicle walls every time they heard the familiar voice in the hall. Usually, they were already busy comparing notes on their shared obsession.
"New dress, Kayla? You must be working admin for security again!"
"You're just jealous, Alexander--I'll get him to ask me out yet, just you wait."
"Not if I have anything to say about it!"
"Like you're not going to crash and burn again next time you try!"
Relena smiled at the increasingly typical exchange; she'd definitely opened the chicken coop to the fox, plopping Duo Maxwell among all these impressionable young things. Whatever works, she reminded herself. And this did seem to be working.
Pausing outside security's main conference room, she smiled again as she listened: "No, no, no--you can't deploy the security field in a fixed pattern. Patterns always have gaps, and those gaps might as well have a big 'welcome' sign pasted on them." Leaning over the wide table, braid slung over one shoulder, Duo was sketching bold lines over the pristine blueprints of the new security plan. "Every saboteur and his Uncle Louie will be in here before we can say boo."
"Why would we want to say 'boo,' sir?"
"Augh. Figure of speech, Bradley. Anyway. What we need to do is randomize the phase adjustment and the sentry routes, so there isn't a pattern for them to predict. You guys think you can handle a full-scale revamp?"
She restrained herself from doing a happy bit of dancing in the hallway. He was back. Really back. She didn't have time to work through why that made her so happy.
One evening, as Relena was turning over the last few piles of the day's paperwork, she looked up to see a familiar shape in the doorway.
Eyes carefully guarded, he watched her. "Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why'd you come for me? Do all this? Street-rat rescue your latest hobby or something?"
"I don't know. I couldn't leave you there. I suppose--I suppose I saw myself looking back at me."
He nodded, not replying, but looking somehow relieved as he started to turn from the doorway. "Thanks."
End of Part 1.
(1) I promoted her, figuring that she wouldn't stay Vice-Foreign Minister forever.
(:./lilias/complicated1)
