05-Mar-2001
Title: When This Cruel War Is Over: A Hirde Out-take
Author: TB
Archive: pleases at GW Addiction (hello again)
Category: POV
Pairing: Hx2
Rating: G
Warnings: slightly depressing (tho that may just be my mood and not the fic); prolly contains OOC too
Spoilers: yes
Feedback: feed me at brother_maxwell@yahoo.com or on the lists, thanks in advance ^_^
Disclaimers: I am not stealing the G-boys (and the G-girls) for any purpose other than sheer
entertainment on a chilly, windy evening. Please do not sue?
It's not that Duo can't read. It's that he doesn't like to. I don't think he ever owned a book.
When you think of Wufei, you think of pride, of rejection of weakness. I'm not coming down on him, but maybe it was a sign on immaturity that he blasted his depression around for everyone to hear. Or maybe--- God, I'm confused--- maybe he was the mature one, and it was Duo who should have learned to admit to his shortcomings.
It isn't that Duo pretended to feel, when he was really some kind of emotional wasteland. It's that he always acted as if what he felt was ten times bigger than what the situation warranted, ten times more than what the rest of us were feeling.
When you think of Heero, you think of stoics, of repression. But maybe Heero was just rational, just naturally calmer. Maybe Duo felt like he owed someone all that feeling. Like it would have been disrespectful to try and bury the slightest sliver of response. But it was wearing. Hard to watch.
It isn't that Duo liked to kill. It was that he believed whole-heartedly that street-rats aren't supposed to be good at anything else.
Trowa spoke to me once about killing. Trowa never thought twice about the lives he took over his career as a terrorist, over the course of a lifetime. But he wondered, once or twice, if maybe there was something missing inside him, that he couldn't make himself care about the men and women he'd destroyed. He wondered if he could be human, without respecting life. Duo did that to people. Made them wonder about themselves.
Even little Quatre, the handsome blonde with the big heart, had trouble seeing clearly when it came to Duo. Maybe not quite to the point of inadequacy and self-doubt, but sometimes he'd get a troubled look in his eyes, studying Duo from across the room; and only his extreme loyalty kept his tongue silent.
What about me? I don't have to be quiet. I'm not a part of their brotherhood. They're bonded in a way I'll never understand, not knowing what they've been through, where they came from. And they love each other fiercely, even when a little hate or jealousy sneaks in.
Wufei felt a sneaking kind of pity for Duo, on the moon base, when they believed they were dying from lack of oxygen. He knew that Duo was scared.
Heero can emphasize with Duo, uniquely of the others. He'd held a dead puppy in his arms, felt the world crumbling around him. He said once that he'd imagined multiplying that disaster by three-the number of times Duo has lost something important to him, he says, though I don't know how Heero arrived at that figure--- Heero, the bravest man I know, falls quiet suddenly and can't, or won't, finish that sentence.
Trowa wants to apologise, badly, I think, for reacting the way he did when Duo found him after he'd lost all his memories and wound up back at the circus. Quatre brought me out of it, he says, but I should, he says, have known Duo. I hit him. On the moon base before my suit exploded. I knew he was wounded, and I hit him anyway, and I didn't pull my punch. I could have killed him, and yet I didn't even remember his face.
Quatre wanted to love Duo. Like he loved all the others. But every time they'd start to come close, Duo pulled away. They were close, very close, the day they decided to send the Gundams into the sun. But Duo had saved every expression of tenderness for the partner without a heartbeat--- Deathsycthe. Quatre didn't understand, though he never complained.
And me? What am I to Duo, that I can see him differently?
I'm Hirde. He let me in. He let me see how his gears turn, and then he deliberately left the backdoor open, in case by the grace of God I wanted to come back sometime. Maybe I didn't threaten him. Maybe we had some spark, some connection. Maybe it's some leftover vestige of chivalry, something his beloved Sister Helen taught him once, about protecting women and children. Whatever. It's a close substitute for love, and I fooled myself with it for a long time.
I like to cook for him.
Whatever his other faults, Duo Maxwell has an appetite that any grandmother could love. I don't know where he puts the food, though. There's not an ounce of extra flesh on him, even though he could use some.
He's not one of those intense eaters, or even a dreamy one. He chats and laughs and somehow sucks down everything on his plate in between one joke and the next. I think he's more natural when he eats than any other time. He's warm. I can almost think the light in his eyes is for me.
He likes to cook with me, though he isn't very good at it. Things have a tendency to burn under his inexpert touch. But he eats it anyway, cheerfully. He says it gives him greater appreciation for my culinary arts.
We make days of cooking, sometimes. We wake up early, and he scrambles up Spanish omelettes, the only thing he can really cook, or at least cover up the overtly crispy edges with salsa and cheese. We go to the market, holding hands, or with his arm on my shoulder so that his hand can play with the longer hairs at my nape. He says he loves my hair. I might have grown it out, if I'd thought he would like it. Maybe he gets his fill of long hair, fighting with his own when he dares to unbraid it. We buy just what we need for one perfect meal, a box of noodles, two potatoes, a packet of dried cilantro, a bottle of wine and cheese, a pack of cigarettes for after. We cook, slowly, through the afternoon, stopping to munch on celery or to take a walk, sometimes to make love. Then we set up the den, spreading out a quilt on the floor and arguing good-naturedly about paper or ceramic plates, Dixie cups or the good glasses, even if half of them are cracked
I'm not sure when or why he moved in with me. He just kind of gradually came to be a regular presence in my apartment. I remember feeling a kind of triumph one day, a long time ago, when he stood blushing at my door on the way out to work, mentioning that he thought he'd leave his toothbrush, if that was okay. Of course it was okay. It was wonderful. But after that, I didn't track whether his boxers ended out in my laundry more often than not. Eventually, he was just there. I certainly wasn't going to protest.
He has little mementoes, the regular collections that everyone accrues through life. He likes cheesy religious art. For our first Christmas together, the one before Mariemaia's attack on Earth, I gave him a framed picture of the Virgin Mary, which if you pressed a button on the back lit up a string of flashing pink lights around her head like a halo. He laughed and laughed. Said it was better than a photo of the Pope. He spreads his things judiciously around the house, never too much in one corner, just a little splotch of Duo on a shelf or on a window ledge. Sometimes I'll come home and find them all re-arranged, set out to some cosmic order only he understands. But it should be enough that he's here, and making an effort, shouldn't it?
With any other man, maybe. But it's Duo. And I know. I know *him.*
I'll wake up at night and find him standing in front of the window. "Come back to bed," I'll say.
And he'll ask, "Do you ever think about the moon, Hirde?"
He doesn't love as much as he's been loved. He doesn't trust as much as he is trusted. I heard those lines in a movie, once. I wish I didn't understand what they meant.
In idle moments I wonder if he was a virgin the first time he came to my bed. I don't really think so, though it isn't outside the realm of possibility. Sometimes I speculate that it was Heero Yuy who got to him first. I can imagine what it would have been like. Heero would be a tender lover. Something about the experience would move him, I think; he'd find the magic in it and hold the heart-shaped face between his big hands, stroking with his thumbs the full lacy eyelashes. I'd rather believe it was Heero than the other likely options; I know L2, and I know the realities of street life, though thank God I've never had to live it. Most the time, though, I pretend that I was his first. Only. When he kisses my shoulder as we spoon together in bed, and his arms cradle me as if I were a precious and wonderful new thing, I pretend that he's never kissed another bare shoulder, or wrapped his legs around someone else's legs, or pressed his nose into the crook of anyone else's neck. At least I have that.
In idle moments I wonder why he doesn't just wander off and forget to come home to me. Forget that there was a girl, once, who held him back. I'll probably never know. I could ask him to marry me tomorrow, and I know he would; he'd get down on his knees, his face serious and mischievous at once, acting like it was all his own idea, and slide a candy ring on my finger. We'd go to Earth and have a beautiful ceremony on a beach, in rolled-up jeans and sunburns, and we'd lay together by a fire on the sand and make love under the stars, not out there in them, the way all our long-dead ancestors did. Eventually, I'd lie to him, and toss the birth-control pills down the toilet instead of taking them, and I'd get pregnant, and he'd never for a single moment be upset or betrayed. We'd have a baby, and then I'd never have to worry about him leaving me again, not with a baby to keep us together. He'd be a good father, and our baby would grow up handsome and smart and good, and people would look at us walking down the street, and say, "Now that's what a family should be like. Look how perfect they are," and never know how subtly wrong they are.
If it was Heero, I wonder why he let Duo get away. Maybe Heero could even have gotten Duo to love him as much as he'd love Duo.
It's not that I'm unhappy. I have Duo, after all, or at least more of him than anyone else has ever had. He's all I need to be happy.
But I'm tired. And just once, just for forever, I wish I understood him.
The End
(:./erin/cruelwar)
