06-Jun-2002
Title: Tears Before Bedtime
Author: Hyuy
Disclaimer: Sunrise, Bandai et al own GW, and I own nothing. Suing would be pointless.
Warning: 1x2, lime, slight language, OOC
*=emphasis
Notes: yeah, yeah, i know. where have i been, what have i been doing, why haven't i been WRITING???
well, you know what? i'm just not going to tell you. HA!
just read the story.
(despite the title, this is a happy little story, overall.)
tears before bedtime
there'll be trouble tonight
---Elvis Costello
I was sitting in a café on L2, working on my laptop and waiting for Duo. Who was late, of course, but I had planned for that, thus the work and the laptop. Ever since the... second incident, the second time we'd saved the world, Duo and I had taken to meeting every few months, usually over dinner. Duo always claimed our dinners were the only thing the kept me from defecting from the human race.
He was right, but not for the reasons he thought.
Still, he was almost 45 minutes late now, and I was starting to get the slightest bit annoyed. I decided to pay for the tea I had ordered, and go look for him at his apartment. I had just turned my head, looking for the waiter, when someone sat down at the table next to me.
It was some grinning idiot with spiky hair and a bright red shirt. I leveled my best 'I'm going to kill you now' stare at him, but he just grinned harder, totally unimpressed. I narrowed my eyes and reached for my gun; we'd see if *that* impressed him. I actually had it in my hand and was releasing the safety when I noticed something familiar in his deep blue eyes. Duo. It was Duo, and he'd cut his hair.
He had cut his hair.
I know my mouth had dropped open, but I was unable to close it. It was the oddest sensation. I could actually *feel* my brain splitting into different pieces. One part was cataloguing Duo's reaction -he was laughing at me; one was amazed at how *good*, in a completely different way, Duo looked; one part was mocking me for even caring.
But mostly, inside, I was screaming.
And then, most frightening of all, my eyes suddenly stung and smarted, and then I was crying. Right in public, right in front of Duo, just crying. The grin slid off of Duo's face and he looked as shocked as I felt. "Oh, jeez. Heero. Hey. Hey," he said. He reached out tentatively and patted my arm.
That just made everything worse, somehow. I dropped my head to the table, covered it with my arms, and just sobbed. Huge, gasping cries that sounded like they hurt, like they were being ripped out of me. Vaguely, I could hear Duo asking for the check, telling me to stand up, snapping at someone -"What the hell are *you* looking at, asshole?"--but I couldn't bring myself to care, or to stop crying.
Duo led me down the street, held tight against his shoulder, sheltering me from people's eyes. Half of me was mortified, but the other half was grieving, perhaps for the first time in my life, and I just couldn't stop.
Somehow, Duo got me back to his apartment. I sprawled facedown on his couch and sobbed into the cushions. He sat on the floor and rubbed gentle circles on my back and said things like "Shhh" and "Just let it out" and "It'll be all right" And after a while, it was.
I finally sat up and took the wet towel he passed to me. My eyes felt hot and swollen and the towel was pleasantly cool; I didn't want to remove it from my face. But I did, and looked down at Duo, who was still sitting at my feet. It had gotten dark and the room was lit only by the streetlight outside the window. He face glowed a little in the reflected light.
He looked at me with a question in his eyes. Slowly, I reached out a hand and ran it through his short, short hair. It felt soft and silken and a little bristly against my palm. "So," I said, and I was appalled at how badly my voice trembled, "I see you've cut your hair."
Duo's eyes got so wide it was almost comical. Almost. He reached a hand up and put it over mine, keeping it pressed against his head. "Heero," he said, and his voice was thick with emotion. He had to cough before he could speak again. "All that, that wasn't about, I mean, you couldn't care about, um, but, it was just hair!"
I laughed humorlessly. "I know. But it also wasn't." I put my other hand on his head so that I was cupping his face. I let my thumbs lightly caress his cheekbones, and Duo took a deep breath and sat very still. I continued, "It was *your* hair, but it meant something to me. A symbol, I guess you'd call it. You made it through everything, prison even, with your braid intact. It was just always there, always perfect. And you know I'm not good with abstract concepts. So I began to equate all that we were fighting for, peace, survival, all of it; I equated it with your hair. If you and your braid could make it through everything unscathed, then maybe the rest of us could, too."
Duo raised an eyebrow, and I know what I had just said sounded ridiculous. But I meant it. Duo wrinkled his nose. "So you flew Zero for the honor of my hair?" He said it humorously, but I answered him seriously. "Yes," I said, nodding.
This time, Duo's eyes filled with tears, but he didn't cry. "Oh, Heero," he said, blinking quickly. The tears on his eyelashes looked like diamonds.
My hands tightened their grip on his head. "But even that's only a small reason why I was crying." My chest felt tight; this was not something I had ever planned on telling him. But somehow, the words kept tumbling from my mouth in a hoarse whisper. "I always thought that someday, if I tried hard enough, if I was worthy, someday you'd pull me close, and hold me tightly, and your hair would fall all around me, hiding me from the world, covering my imperfections, and I would be redeemed."
Duo's mouth opened wide, and then with a wordless cry, he gripped my wrists and pulled, tumbling me off the couch against him. And this time he *was* crying, and he held me tight, and covered me with his body; hid me from the world with his body. And he opened to me, my sweet, generous Duo, he splayed himself open to me, and I fell in and in and in until suddenly we were flying, together, a phoenix from the flame, glowing white-hot from the crucible.
And it was there, on a threadbare rug, in the arms of an ex-thief, my friend, the best man I had ever known, that I was reborn.
And then we got up, and Duo showed me how to live.
END END END
well, that's it. what do you think?
hyuy
running scared
(:./hyuy/tears)
