19-Nov-2000
Warning: Angst
Pairing: 2+H, 2+1 (both implied)
POV: Hilde
Disclaimer: I don't own the boys or the girl. The words in between are mine.
Archive: Anyone want to? Be my guest, just warn me before hand.
I let the water beat against my back until I felt like I would melt into a boneless puddle in the bottom of the bath. I knew that my skin would be a lovely shade of lobster but I didn't particularly care. I did my best thinking in the shower. Don't ask me why. I laid my cheek against the shower wall and tried to think of what to say to Heero. I didn't have the words. Duo could talk forever about nothing, but I always had to have a point. My braided lover rarely had a point. For once I wished for Chang, he always seemed to have the perfect words for the situation, even if they weren't very pleasant.
I wanted to tell Heero that I wasn't going to give up Duo without being threatening. I'm not sure if that meant I felt like we could share. I've always been sort of the territorial type, and Heero struck me as being the same. So there was one problem.
I wanted to tell the Perfect Soldier that he couldn't become a civilian over night. The nightmares weren't going to go away just because he willed them too. God knows Duo and I had already tried, separately and together. So there was the other problem.
And then there was Relena and whatever mind trip she had played with his head. At least it looked like a mind trip from this perspective, but how the hell was I to know? I made a small whining noise and shut off the water with more force than necessary.
Ever since Duo had come into my life it had gotten so complicated. Mostly I didn't mind. It had given me Duo and I loved him beyond the reasons that I could name. He turned my life upside down and every time I thought that I had gotten myself set he waked me again. Some days I wanted to strangle him. Some days I wanted to jump his bones. Mostly I just jumped him. But that was not going to help me with Heero.
I walked into the kitchen in shorts and a t-shirt, still idly rubbing my hair with the towel. I watched him watch the clouds, coffee dripping into the clear pot on the white counter. If I could reach into your head, Heero, what would I see as you watch the clouds float by? I shook my head. I had some very strange thoughts as far as Heero Yuy was concerned.
He turned around with an odd expression on his face. I wondered if I had talked out loud.
"I didn't hear you come in." He made it almost a question. Somehow, after everything that Duo had told me I expected Heero to be more self-confident, more sure of himself. But he seemed so... off balance.
I shrugged and stepped into the morning light that pooled across the pale tiled floor. He frowned, but not at me. "You were a soldier." A statement this time.
"I would have thought pulling a gun on you this morning would have proved that." I poured a cup of coffee and watched him. The sunlight lurked in his hair; like it was afraid to dance the way it did in Duo's. His lips quirked for a moment.
"Aa." I wondered if his monosyllabic tendencies drove Duo nuts as well. Maybe Duo talked too much out of sheer defense of his sanity.
"You were the Perfect Soldier." I made the comment light, joking, but he glared into his coffee. Oops, sore point. Time to back up and figure out why. "What are you doing now?"
He shrugged one leanly muscled shoulder. All the other pilots had something to come back to, and Heero had thought that he had something to do after the war, protect Relena. But her highness had different ideas.
"Need a job?" His reaction was almost funny if it hadn't been so sad. His blue eyes came up and raked mine. Almost a defiant glare, for moment I thought I had stepped in male pride until I realized that it was suspicion that made him so angry. I held up my hands as if to ward off a blow. "Hey, I always need good mechanics, and ones who specialize in MS's are damned hard to find. The Preventors have snatched most of them up."
"Hn."
"I don't have Duo's ability to read your mind, Yuy, you have to tell me if that's a yes or a no."
"What is that you do?"
Well, that was a step in the right direction. "I thought Duo would have told you, but I run a salvage operation. We salvage the MS's that the Preventors bring in from the rebels and the uprisings. If you don't want to work for them then you could work for me."
Heero thought about that. "Maybe."
Back to the monosyllabic shit again, great, let me dance with joy. "Don't say much do you?"
Heero gave me a sideways glance. "Duo always did most of the talking."
Well, that brought us to the subject I kept dancing around. It was easier for me to deal with his pain rather than the interesting little geometric figure between the three of us. I was feeling betrayed, but wasn't sure I had a right to it. I was feeling a little jealous, and a lot possessive, and I wasn't sure I had a right to that either. I leaned back against the counter and sighed. "You were lovers."
Heero looked sideways at me. "Aa."
"You still are lovers."
"Aa." He seemed a little guilty at that.
I did feel anger then. Heero felt guilt, I felt guilty, and Duo... Duo felt nothing as far as I could see. He enjoyed us both. Perhaps even loved us both. I didn't know. He had never given me the words. And, damn it, the words are important. "Where does that leave us?"
"I don't know." Heero turned to look at me full in the face. "Where do you want it to leave us?"
Whew, a loaded question if I ever heard one, and one I didn't think it was mine to answer. I hadn't taken on two lovers. I had never let, if not encouraged, two people to fall in love with me. "I think that's a question for Duo."
"Would you let him go?"
I looked straight into his startling blue eyes. "Would you?"
We were silent for a long time, the thoughts hung between us like silver threads. The coffee went cold in my hands.
"I would if he asked me. I would."
I nodded. "If asked, or if I knew he didn't love me. I'm not going to live my life loving someone who doesn't love me."
"He hasn't told you."
"No," I frowned at my reflection in the cold black coffee. "Has he told you?"
"No."
"Why is it that two beautiful, sexy, young, desirable things such as ourselves are pining after a baka that can't even say the words?" I was half laughing, half whining. Heero snorted.
"Sexy? Beautiful?"
"Well fine then. I may not be, but you are." Once those words popped out I bit my lips and turned hot around the ears.
Heero had an odd look on his face. "You think I'm beautiful?"
It came out slow, very deliberate, as if he was tasting the words. I'm not sure he had ever heard someone say that. Surely Duo, but maybe that was all. What type of self-image did he have? What did he see when he looked in the mirror? Did he even look? I walked in front of him; so close our knees bumped, and reached up to brush those thick bangs away. His hair was so soft. He watched me, so cautiously it hurt. I smoothed a hand down his cheek and held it flat against his cheek. I cocked my head to the side and really looked at him. Really looked, to see why he struck me as beautiful. Anyone with that body would be sexy, but beauty is more unique. There was something to the length of his neck, the line of his jaw, the depth of the color of his eyes. "You are beautiful. Not like Duo, but you have it."
I dropped my hand and backed away, embarrassed as all hell. I'm not used to touching strange men after only knowing them for a single day. Nor am I used to letting them stay in my home. But with Heero it seemed normal, seemed okay. Duo had talked about Heero so often that he wasn't a stranger to me. I wondered if Duo talked to Heero about me.
Heero did something that made me jump. He brushed a hand through my hair. I caught his hand and twisted before I thought about it, pressing hard on the pressure point at the wrist. He rolled with it to keep from getting his wrist broken and ended up on the ground with his back pressed against my knees. I dropped his hand and clapped both of mine to my mouth when he tapped his free hand against the tiled floor.
"Omigod, omigod, omigod. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Are you all right? Did I hurt you? Shit, I'm sorry." I sort of did a little dance and then dropped to my knees in front of him. "I didn't mean it."
His shoulders were shaking and I started to tense up, getting ready to bolt. I really did not want to deal with the Perfect Soldier during a flash back. Then he looked up at me with big blue eyes that were sparkling at me. Heero was laughing. At me. Oh joy. I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at him.
He sat up and propped one arm on his knee, the grin on his face was far more suited for Duo than his normal impassivity.
"What?" I tried not to be defensive but failed miserably.
"You are more skilled with pressure points than Duo." He was no longer openly chuckling but he did remain amused. The warmth in his eyes crept through my system all the way to my toes. Just because it was so unexpected. Honest.
"I kick Shinigami's butt when if comes to hand to hand combat." Which was the truth. In MS's Duo outclassed me like the sun outclasses the moon, but take him out of the suit and I'll use him to wipe the floor. I'll show you my real training outside of the suit.
Heero was watching me intensely, all humor drained from his face. "You were trained to kill."
I shrugged one shoulder. "We all were, weren't we? That's what war is all about. You go out and kill the assigned enemy."
"Not what I meant."
For some reason it seemed important to him to hear me say it. Maybe just to say he wasn't the only one. None of the Gundam pilots were trained like he was; they were pilots, not murders, not like us. I sighed. "OZ trained me especially for espionage, infiltration, and assassination. Hence the crappy mobile suit piloting and the talent with the hand to hand stuff."
"I would not term you a deficient pilot. You appeared to be quite effective." I blinked at him; unless I was very much mistaken Heero Yuy had just complimented me. "You have the build for your training."
I arched an eyebrow.
"Slight, agile, and physically unassuming. You do not appear as a threat. Deception in assassination is desirable."
"You sound knowledgeable." I was trying not to sound snide, but the memories of my training with OZ would qualify for horrific.
He looked up at me with ghosts swimming in his cobalt eyes. "I am."
I drew my knees up to my chest. "You were the only one trained for it. For killing face to face."
He nodded. "I was trained the longest."
I wasn't sure how to handle that. From what Duo said Dr. G was a monster from the ninth level of hell. I'm not sure Dr. J would have been much better. "Do you want to talk about it?"
"Do you?" This answering a question with a question was getting old.
"Hell no," I closed my eyes. "I don't want to even think about it, but the memories fester."
"When a wound festers it must be lanced, despite the pain." Well, I guess that was an invitation.
"I can take it if you can." I gave him a lopsided grin, the same way I did when the doctors were getting ready to give my vaccination shots when I was little. He gave me a halfhearted one in return.
He inhaled and told me the straight shit in that mechanical monotone. Every once in a while he would close he eyes or pause when things got really bad, but the monotone kept him going though its own momentum. He pretty much started with the very beginning—learning to kill under Odin Lowe—and continued straight to the beginning of the war. I didn't interrupt. I was half afraid to breath for fear of that if I stopped this outpouring he would bottle it all back up. I don't think that he had ever told anyone this much, and definitely not all at one go. His voice broke when he told me about the little girl with the dog. His personal phantom I guess. It's always worse when it's a child. Always. I didn't always get all the details but I heard the pain, the anger, the fear, the drowning guilt, and that hidden fierce joy.
It's the joy that is horrifying. It's the pleasure, that sick hot joy in the hunt, in the kill, that brings you screaming to the abyss in your soul where you watch yourself lose something essential. And Heero had been alone in that, because it's different when you kill hand to hand. It's different when you can see the face that you kill.
Heero stopped at the start of the war, still a blank for me since Duo hordes his demons, and wouldn't look at me. Thinking I would be horrified and sickened. And I was, but not with him, never with the soldiers. More with the circumstances that had put us there.
"Do you expect me to run screaming? To condemn you, Heero?" He still would not raise his eyes. "Look at me, please?"
Why is it that 'please' always gets him to respond? It never works with Duo.
"Relena couldn't handle it." So that was part of it. The angel he put up on the pedestal to heal him couldn't look at that blank space in his soul.
"I'm not the little princess. My hands are as bloody as yours. My dreams are as bloody as yours." I swallowed hard on the bile rising in my throat. "I've felt the joy in the fight."
He was watching me like I was the center of his universe.
I told him about my training with OZ. How OZ had taught me to hate my enemy and to revel in the hunting. I told him about the beatings and the rapes that they had used to get me to kill without thought and with remorse. I talked about the blank spot in my soul where my conscious ought to be. I told him about meeting Duo and how it felt like waking up from a long nightmare. I told him about how I was afraid I would wake up and find that peace was all a dream. A horrible tease.
He looked at me as if I was salvation. I didn't want that look.
"I know what its like to kill and feel that blankness. I've seen it, Heero. I know what it is to really take life. I know how it's different when you can see the face. How it's harder at first, and then easier. I know how it's more intense when you can see the face you kill. I know how it feels to steal God's power for just a moment. I know the sneaking desire to take someone's life and crush it out just because you can. I know."
I took a long shuddering breath and held my eyes closed. I jerked back when something gentle brushed my left cheekbone. Heero was leaning towards me. Resting his weight on one arm, studying his free hand with an almost frightening intensity. There was a streak of wetness on it. He looked at me, confusion and curiosity warring on his face.
"Your tears... "
I laid my fingertips to my cheeks. They were damp. I put them down and held them in my lap. My hands were white knuckled and shaking.
Strong, rough hands slid over mine, stilling the shaking that had traveled up my arms. My entire body was trembling. Heero laid his forehead against mine and our breath mingled together. We breathed together in the bright morning light and said nothing. We didn't need the words. We knew, God help us both, we knew.
End of Part 3
(:./dan/prices3)
